How to speed up your design process

In your point "Communicate with the client or project leader regularly" it's really necessary that both the customer and the designer talk about the same thing. Everybody knows email loops with explainations "which button should be more blue". Usersnap - http://usersnap.com - offers visual feedback to speed up your design process even further. (Full disclaimer: I'm one of the Co-Founders.)

I was all ready to dismiss this one from the title, but reading it has the smack of hard won experience and intelligent reflection.

The process of setting limits withinnwhich experimentation is expected and allowed and of producing a prototype version of all major components - that can be lifted wholesale into development work.

All round a bookmark to come back to every few months. Have a point

> Style tiles help establish a common visual language before getting started on the mockups. “Can we see what this would look like in purple” will no longer be such a painful question. Style tiles consist of fonts, colors, patterns and other interface elements. Now, when your team needs to add a new screen with various elements, it will be easy to borrow the asset from the style tile that you previously agree upon.

This sounds a lot like using bootstrap, except you have your own custom version. This would help improve the consistency of the design and make it vastly easier to iterate.

Styletiles, bootstrap and other basic web widgeting toolkits will transform the way web apps are built, saving tons of time and producing better results.

"Set limitations for your work" I think this is one of the single most important components of creating anything of value. It is very difficult to innovate on a blank and limitless canvas. Barry Schwartz wrote an excellent book about how increasing choice decreases our satisfaction with our decisions. I think this is the same with design/creation it is so much easier for our brains to process- I have these inputs, these constraints, now what can I do with what I have.

Love the design and agree with most of what you had on there, infact I've been following a few of those in my own process for quite sometime now.

Although, I have to say, any reason why a Button Pressed style is missing?

Visual feedback on actions improves usability and avoids interaction ambiguity.

"The nature of design work is very different from that of development work. The key difference being, developers have a defined end point in which they must solve many problems along the way to reach that point. Designers have one problem with no defined end point."

Ha ha bonk

I found this hugely useful, thanks. Also that is a beautiful blog design.