How many times have you looked at your website and wanted to do an complete redesign? And how many times you said, ok I do it next month when I’m less busier. The truth is, that we just keep postponing the redesign and don’t do anything. But maybe just a little evolution and some small tweaking would do the job and would improve the website. How to decide if you need a complete new design or just some improvement? Here some questions to ask yourself and if you answer the majority with yes you need a complete overhaul.
Is your webdesign “trendy”?
Design is like fashion, there are trends. And the bigger trends of the last couple of years have been grunge, comics, <insert other trend here>. The beauty of the internet is, that it’s evolving fast. But just like in fashion, your site can look old fashioned in a blast. So if you don’t plan to renew the site design every year or so don’t get too trendy on your next design. And if your design is trendy now, get on to the next trend – sustainable web design.
Are you changing (or need to change) your website technology?
You are on a self hosted wordpress installation and want to switch over to a tumblr blog or get over to squarespace to not have to deal with updates and servers any more? It’s a good time for a redesign. You spend as much time to recreate your website on the new services as redoing the whole design. It can be evolutionary at large but take this opportunity.
Is your website just in Flash?
While I’m not a Flash hater and I see many uses of Flash in the real world that make sense, I cannot see the point of having a complete site in Flash anymore. It’s not even ok for “business card” sites with no content and who don’t want to get found in the search engine except for your local pizzeria which name you know but not the telephone number. Many of this businesses want something “flashy” and don’t mind the technology. It’s easier for a designer to please them with a nice Flash animation – and often it’s also quicker to do a Flash site, but you will get in trouble when mobile gets more important and the sites won’t work correctly. So I hope that with the advent of HTML 5 we will get rid of these problems – but if you want to prepare yourself now, get rid of Flash.
Evolution is better
I just picked three questions for the revolution section because there are not many reasons to do complete redesigns. Many times small improvements can have a big impact and help your site. Big sites like Amazon and Wikipedia have gone a radical redesign if you compare them to 5 years ago, but the steps where small. One by one. Testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Is learning from nature – making a lot of small variations to experiment what works best costs less “energy” that redoing everything from scratch. The are some instances where your have to revolutionize – but more often than not, evolution beats revolution.
I’ve got an email from a reader of this blog with a common problem… how to get creativity started:
I am into graphic design, working as a finalizer for the last 10 years. I’m working in an Advertising Agency, I want to become an art director. I look at the ads on Ads of the world and get inspired. I found them very easy but when I’m trying to do something my mind doesn’t open. Is there any exercise where i can learn and fullfull my dream of becoming an art director.
Being creative is one part of being an art director – and for sure the most fun part. As you can see from the blog there are other activities (organizing, planning, guidance to people) involved in real art direction. But as for creativity there are now really good resources and tools.
1) The word Creativity is a misconception
In advertising and design you mostly don’t “create” but you “combine in a new and interesting way” – Don’t get fooled by the word creativity – you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just use the wheel in a new way. To read more about this – here is an extensive lesson about “Creativity on demand”
For example: A friend of mine “stitched” his book on fabric instead of printing it on paper.
2) Use the tools the right way
So many people think that they know how to brain storm – but they don’t. There are many creativity tools like leathering, brain storming, fishing etc. – but if you don’t use them correctly you will not get results. I covered brain storming in this blog post – so read this and storm on.
3) Creativity comes from having many interests
One of the best ways to “open” your mind to creative ideas ist by having a “open” mind all the time. Don’t just be interested in graphic design. I’m interested practically in everything (except passive sports = watching someone else doing sport). I want to know how the people lived 100 years ago in Siberia. I cook, hike, bike, run, go to museums about just everything. I listen to podcasts during work about the most desperate themes and from around the world. You don’t have to remember everything but sometimes there are things that remain in your mind. And by taking this things from around the world into a new context you are really creative.
An example: It’s quite usual here to collect stickers of soccer player for kids in Europe… everyone did this – I used the same principle for a firm. They made stickers from their employees and an album. Who finished the collection has received a price. And the benefit for the firm? All employees have finished the album and in the end everyone knew anyone in every department.
4) Creativity is Teamwork
The image of the lonely creative mind is still present in the minds of everyone. But actually the best creative ideas come from teams – small teams to be exact. Only by interacting and discussing your ideas you have the possibility to expand them and to iterate on them. A modern system for creative temawork is featured in my blog post on this site here.
5) Books and Cards that help
Here is a collection of books and Cards that can help you
Secrecy is important to any firm who wants to launch a new product. By surprising the competitors with a product the firm can increase its market share, reputation and have generally an advantage. If another firm knows about the new product he can potentially launch a competing product earlier. Especially in the B2B world this can be disrupting. As an Art Director you are often directing also the overall communication of your client – so even this topic is of your business. After the break I talk about how I discovered a secret product line through crowd sourcing and how we can prevent such an event. …click here to continue…
There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:
Quite out of date
Not very compelling any more
The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do. …click here to continue…
Sometimes things just won’t work. You made a nice communication concept, build a campaign and everything the execution was impeccable. But when you and your client look at the results they don’t meet the expectations. Now what should you do? Normally we would think that we would try harder – but you shouldn’t. …click here to continue…
Why more and more companies choose to publish their own magazine is a wider topic I will cover in a future post. I will start my new series about corporate publishing by demystifying a myth – corporate publishing is boring. I will show you in this lesson how you can make a graphically stunning article about the introduction of a new window hardware product line by telling a story.
Trainees or intern as they are called are part of the responsibilities an art director has. I’m not talking about the bad habit of using trainees as regular workers, sometimes referred to as “precarity” or “underclass”, but about the trainees coming from schools doing a few weeks of internship to learn about the real work in an agency.
I had in the past problems finding the right jobs for the trainees as I was caught up in my daily routine and when they actually showed up at my desk I wondered what would fit. I therefore setup a routine for finding jobs around the year to have them ready. Find out how I did it and the 3 rules for successfully managing a graphic design trainee. …click here to continue…
You ever wondered why some magazines appeal you more than others? One thing you rarely been teached is how to do appealing covers. Even when you are in corporate publishing and layout the corporate news magazine having a nice cover is good. Besides the text layout having an appealing foto is key. But not every photo does the same good job. Here a few examples and why they work. …click here to continue…
How many times have you heard your client say: “You can fix this later in Photoshop.” or “We don’t need a photo shooting, we just combine the photos we have.” As an art director one of your jobs is to ensure that the quality of the final product lives up to the standard you set. To ensure this quality you have to look at all aspects. We already discussed the copywriting part, now let’s look at the photography. …click here to continue…
Most of us designers and art director use systems based on DAM every day without noticing it. If you search for images on a website like Getty Images or Corbis you use the web frontend of a DAM. Actually every website has it’s own DAM where it stores the images. But what are the new capabilities of modern DAMs and how can they help you in your daily work. Here some ideas. …click here to continue…
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
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