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http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/02/a_new_global_visual_language_f.html

Above is a link to a style guide example and a chronology of a website design process for BBC.

What I love about this post is that it exposes the creative process from the problem to the solution.

Companies nowadays, don’t have as big of a need for a “new” website for their business, but rather a better designed one. A company typically starts out with a modest watered down, basic foundation for what they believe their website should represent. And because the website is a living breathing thing, something you can tweak on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis, the website over time will begin to look disconnected. Especially if you have different teams working on the tweaks both internally or externally.

As a professional website designer I have discovered that knowing what to put in your website is more challenging than how to design it. And in most cases the struggle lies solely on what purpose the website will have and what will be added or showcased to promote that purpose. There seems to be two states of thought when designing a site, one is the design process where you envision how you will maintain the site and how the user will interact with it, then the second is the reality of the site, how the customers really experience the site, and what you do to maintain it. Usually there is no regard to how the design is being applied but more so the need to address the new addition to the site.

While this patchwork is going on I don’t think it is beneficial to beat yourself up over the discovery of what your doing, i say patch on!. The biggest struggle is to find that right combination of elements needed to make your website most effective. Don’t worry to much about the disconnection, keep moving forward, then after a year or two then print everything out and paste it on a “wall of shame” then step back and look at the website from a different angle.

Now you can consider the design and how each of the pieces relate to each other. And can then try and focus on how each of these elements are designed and how they relate to each other. From developing a grid that can be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of layouts, while maintaining a consistent look and feel, through to how the typography, social media connections, and imagery will work with in a new layout.

Then guess what, do the entire process all over again. Launch the site live with it, maintain it, let it evolve do, whatever needs to be done to make the website function even better then at the end of that next year, print everything out and check to see if the design is disconnected and or if you discovered something new that will need to be accommodated for in the future releases.

Remember the website is a living breathing thing that will constantly evolve as technology evolves, and move away from thinking that you can “tame the beast” with a design that will be timeless and never need to be tweaked or redesigned. The only way to tame the beast is to evolve with it and embrace the medium as something constant.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under Inspirada, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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