The Obligatory Blog

Design by Error

When I was at art school we'd regularly be given drawing exercises where the main intention was to disrupt our regular drawing methods. There's a danger as an artist (and for designers too) that you settle into a comfort zone and your work becomes illustrative rather than investigative, questioning, and exploratory, which is what good art should be pursuing.

Early in your career as an artist you are faced with the struggle of mastering different mediums, different techniques and different routes of expressing your artistic directions. Over time however, you slowly master techniques and refine a personal artistic language of iconography, style, technique, colour, subject and whatever elements become important to the production of your artwork. And while this is good - it must still develop.

Something I think most students I was at University with felt frustrated with was an apparent lack of credit for producing 'technically' great work. If you talk to someone who has never studied art, they generally make the assumption that you would go to university to study art to 'learn to paint'. By 'learning to paint' they're thinking you turn up on day one with some basic painting skills and come out 3 years later with a mastery of oil paints and the ability to churn out a landscape on demand. This isn't really the case. You study art to learn to be an artist. In contemporary art this doesn't really have a direct relationship with being able to actually paint (or draw, sculpt, photograph ... ).

The exercises we got given were intended to break down any established technical habits before they got too engrained - to take us out of our comfort zone, maybe turn out some crap in the process, but also to look for new processes and effects that we'd stumble on by accident. Such effects could then be fed back into our artwork adding extra layers of richness and giving us a more diverse library of techniques at our disposal.

So what's this got to do with web design?

Well when it comes to the actual coding of a website, this isn't going to be appropriate, it needs to be clearly structured and adhere to web standards guidelines. But in the process of initially designing the site in (say) Photoshop - it's way to easy to open up a new 1200 x 1500px document, drop in a 12 column grid, reach for a few favourite fonts, download a handful of images from iStock and a few favourite icons from somewhere else.

You might well tweak and re-tweak elements and even spend days labouring over the real fine details, but you're also working in a very structured environment (both Photoshop and in a chair at your desk) - it's very easy to churn out work that while on face value is beautiful and seductive, is also somewhat stagnant. More gradients, more rounded corners, more box shadows, nice fonts, big background images and all the other elements we pack in to develop excellent site templates.

To be the best designers we can be and to continually develop, I believe it's important to go through similar exercises I did as a student. Get a design, work it and rework it, add textures, effects, patterns and a load of crazy stuff that you'd never normally do - take a design that was looking pretty much OK and totally screw it up. Then export it to your iPhone and try to recover it from a drawing app. Give yourself a time limit of 2 minutes to make it better. Or allow unlimited time, but refuse to give up until it's back on track.

To be fair, you might never get your design back to a state you want to use in a production site, but it will almost certainly have brought out a few areas with a use of line, texture of colour combination that you'd never have reached before.

A really basic trick I use is being quite cavalier with my original artwork files. I don't keep many original photoshop files, so when a client requests a small change to a site layout or banner image, it's not necessarily as simple as going back to the original artwork and making a tweak. Quite often I have to completely rework the artwork from a flattened jpeg. It sounds like bad practice, but many times I've found myself coming up with more creative solutions than I would have if working from the original photoshop artwork with all the layers. Very often the change requests are minor and I know full well that if I had the photoshop file it would be a 30 minute job. I don't feel it's fair for me to charge for 1 hour just because I've deleted the artwork, so to make sure I'm not losing money - I have to get really creative and find a way to make the changes with a jpeg in 30 minutes. That time pressure forces me to get creative and try things almost out of desperation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I'm working for free, but I'm at least pushing my boundaries and picking up tricks that will feed into other projects.

Similarly, organisation has it's benefits. Lots of designers have folders full of textures, photoshop brushes, vector packages and design touches. I wouldn't altogether knock that - there are many times I wish I could find a certain background texture that I remember seeing a few weeks back and didn't bookmark. On the other hand however, if that particular effect isn't available and I have to get creative to design a decent alternative - often my alternative ends up working better for me. It's unique to the site I'm designing and tailored to any particular design traits it might have.

The quote from Esther Dyson sums up very nicely:

Always make new mistakes

Mistakes are subjective. It might not be what you were trying to achieve, but viewed from a different perspective can be an experiment that leads to results more innovative and productive than you ever hoped.

From John Cowen @ Mekonta web design. If you liked this article, subscribe.