If you’re a designer (or any­one in a sim­i­lar busi­ness), what I’m about to tell you is likely not news, but based on my recent hell­ish expe­ri­ence, I thought it would still be per­ti­nent to go over this.

The “this” I am speak­ing of is, of course, why being your own client sucks. It’s a hor­ri­ble, detestable, deplorable task that is an unfor­tu­nate fact of life. Per­haps I am just an awful per­fec­tion­ist, or just have masochis­tic design ten­den­cies, but the path I rode to get to my cur­rent design was a long, painful, ten month ride.

At first, the project I gave to myself seemed easy: just redesign my site, as I was tired of my old design and it needed some def­i­nite fresh­en­ing up. Seems sim­ple enough, right? Just come up with a new design, code it, and get it online – no big deal.

…But oh how wrong I was. Frankly, I should have known bet­ter, as I’ve gone through this trou­ble of design­ing for myself before, but sadly I for­got and “his­tory repeats itself because no one was lis­ten­ing the first time.” (—Anony­mous)

So with­out the slight­est sec­ond thought about the dif­fi­culty of the task in front of me, I began on the first design:

This is from Octo­ber 2007. I believe I stopped work­ing on this design all of 2 min­utes after I began it. As you can prob­a­bly guess, I dove head­long into work­ing on this one, with­out any plan­ning. Bad idea! I know bet­ter than that, but obvi­ously had a lapse of judge­ment or I had hit my head on some­thing hard that day. Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t remem­ber which…

There isn’t much to this design, so I don’t think there is a whole lot I need to explain here. It sucks, and I dropped it like a hot potato right after (barely) begin­ning it.

At this point you’re prob­a­bly think­ing, “Am I going to have to look at 30 half-assed designs?” Well, the answer is no; I’m going to keep this to high­lights only, since I doubt any­one wants to see 40 very, very minor vari­a­tions on a sin­gle design.

After get­ting a faulty start, I went back to the draw­ing board. A month of sketches, thoughts, and con­cepts went onto lit­tle note squares on my desk (more on this in another article).

You should know now (if you don’t already), I love min­i­mal­ism. Less is more, and all that. Prob­lem is, I have a habit of over­think­ing things, hence I tend to over­work a lot of my design.

In early Decem­ber, after some thought and sketch­ing, I came up with the next lit­tle gem:

A basic design, three ver­ti­cal sec­tions (includ­ing the header), with a two-column split on the con­tent sec­tions. I spent a decent amount of time tweak­ing this design, play­ing with this color, that color, this font, that font, etc. I just didn’t work for me, after play­ing with it so much. It was too stiff, felt too com­pact, and the color scheme wasn’t doing a whole lot for me.

Yes, I could have changed the color, and I did…many times. Many, many times. When I start to com­pletely change the color scheme of one of my designs, I know I’m done and have to dump it; at that point, I’ve com­pletely lost what­ever vision I had for that design.

So I gave it some more thought, and came up with this next design later that same Decem­ber. Quite a bit of a dif­fer­ent style, but I wanted to play more with type than anything.

Now, this design is bet­ter than my last one; at least, in my opin­ion (and that’s what mat­ters dur­ing this process). Unfor­tu­nately, though, it just didn’t feeel very cohe­sive. The ele­ments didn’t mesh very well…they each felt like their own lit­tle islands that just hap­pened to be float­ing close to each other.

I dumped this design. Again.

What did I get out of this design? That over­sized, serif type looks really nice when set well and com­bined with smaller type (both serif and sans-serif). Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t get this when I dumped the design, so I began mov­ing in the wrong direction.

Per­son­ally, I hap­pen to like the con­cept of these designs. There was move­ment to them: the light­bulb was intended to slowly bounce up and down like a bal­loon; the angled squares would be links to var­i­ous projects, and when clicked they would glide up and fade off (then load­ing in the bot­tom rectangle/section). My major hangup with these designs? I felt it was going to be too dif­fi­cult to imple­ment nicely cross-browser with­out using Flash (which I do not know), and the mov­ing light­bulb was some­what dis­tract­ing. I actu­ally got as far as imple­ment­ing the header of the first design, and my feel­ings were very much con­firmed – it works great in Fire­fox, Safari, Opera, but not so great in (can you guess?) Inter­net Explorer 6 & 7. While I could, in the­ory, just have accepted the ugly Inter­net Explorer fate and com­pleted this design, I’m just too stub­born and too much of a per­fec­tion­ist to let it slide. I am keep­ing it as an inter­est­ing con­cept though.

After this design, there was a long dry period where I sim­ply came up with sketches, ideas, and con­cepts when I could, but no real design was done. Then in April of this year, I thought I (finally) had come up with some­thing good:

Sadly, I was mis­taken. At the time, I liked this design; even mocked up some of the other pages (work, blog, con­tact). And therein lay the prob­lem: I couldn’t come up with a good way to design the Work page. The most impor­tant page, and I couldn’t make it work! After try­ing to sim­plify and reduce, it still wouldn’t work right.

I dumped it as yet another failed design.

By now, I was frus­trated with my inabil­ity to come up with a design I could really appre­ci­ate, and blased through five more failures.

Two in May:

Two in June (what was I think­ing? Yuck.):

I just want to point some­thing out here: there is a not­i­ca­ble trend from begin­ning to end. I began with less focus on type, and more on graph­ics, and as I moved along, type became a more promi­nent aspect of my designs. This is impor­tant, as it allowed me to come to the real­iza­tion that I was over-working and over-thinking my designs. By focus­ing on type, it forces me to take a step back and think: Is this image nec­es­sary? Is there a bet­ter way I can place this element?

Unfor­tu­nately, my last design before my “epiphany” was a bit of a regression:

It’s funny, though, with this design, I really thought I had come up with my final design. That is, until I real­ized how god-awfully packed in every­thing was. And how dark it was. And how the eye didn’t flow nat­u­rally inside the page. And…well, you get the idea. I hated it.

And then I real­ized: why not just work with type? Let the graph­ics assist the type, not the other way around. That’s why peo­ple visit a site, any­way, right? For the con­tent? And while my site func­tions as a port­fo­lio, which is mainly graphics-based, the con­tent is equally as impor­tant to the visitor.

And then, start­ing from scratch, I came up with this design. It was it…well, as good as it was going to get, con­sid­er­ing I hate every­thing I do.

In the end, what should you take away from this? Design­ing for your­self sucks. It is a long and ardu­ous process that involves lots of time and many dif­fer­ent con­cepts (if you’re a designer, you should have known this before). This fact is also true of design­ing for any­one, clients or otherwise.

But you also come away with many con­cepts than can be used in later projects. While I def­i­nitely will not imple­ment any part of my old designs directly into another project, I now have twelve con­cepts that I’ve learned from. I’ve looked at what did and didn’t work in each, and now can use what did work in future projects.

So I’m my own worst night­mare when it comes to design­ing for myself, but at least I woke up with a new set of views and a final design.

Tags: clients, concept, design, suck, typography, unwieldy

Posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 12:16 pm, under design.

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