The hardest project so far...
Seth Godin says that there are numerous benefits to writing something (in a blog-style format) every day. One of them is being able to be more mindful about your intentions, and keeping track of what you’re doing with your life. The other one (which is more his style) is trying to explain things that he doesn’t understand (at least for himself). I don’t yet know what my own flavour of that will be, but I will give it a try.
A reflection that I would like to mention here is a design project that I’ve been struggling with a lot over the past weeks - making very little progress - is the redesign of my own personal portfolio. For weeks I now have been trying to make something new and all I could create was an overdesigned header for my landing page.
Now why has it been so difficult? I think a part of the reason are some macro changes in my design process. Previous process would be pretty simple, and I’ve gone through it a bunch of time:
Goals > Research > Ideas > Sketches > UI > Testing
What’s new now is a different set of goals (to show off my new coding skills) and tools for creating UI (I’m jumping straight to code rather than thoroughly thinking through the designs first).
Creating designs in code first can be thought as a way to prototype ideas that would otherwise be really difficult to do with tools like Figma, for example this zoom-in effect on the elements behind the cursor.
I guess the problem is that it takes a lot of time for me at the moment to do that, and there’s something else that now drives the design decisions - does it look fancy and how hard has it been to make this - which are kind of the goals of my site, and something I want to show off as an aspiring front-end developer.
They say that for a person with a hammer everything looks like a nail. It might be the same situation here, where I am looking to use a hammer where it’s not needed.
I need to read a little bit more about designing for simple vs. complex front-ends. In the end of the day, it’s not about you. It’s about the visitor, and what they want to see, and what they would like. As a designer, I should never forget that, and if I want to keep working on cool front-end projects, I have to setup a Codepen, and pick a new front-end challenge every day.