Pallian Creative

The Design Process

A lot of people ask me how I go about designing a website - especially how I come up with all these designs for TIM. To answer your questions and reveal a little bit about how we do stuff here at Pallian, here’s two little things I do before I begin any project. If you’re a web designer yourself, you will hopefully find this post useful when you set off designing for your own clients.

Scour The Net For Good Inspiration
I’m not going to lie - I’ve spent hours and hours, mostly very late at night, searching for inspiration on design sites and web design galleries. Here’s a small list of sites I frequent the most:

FFFFOUND! - I can spend hours on this site and come up with all kinds of color, type and design ideas. And it’s growing by the day - almost 1250 pages of it! It’s like a free design mag that never wants to end.

Smashing Magazine - Once I’m all rouled up with FFFFOUND, my next stop is usually Smashing Mag. These guys have done a great job finding some of the most useful resources a web developer would ever need and neatly categorizing them. If I wanted layout ideas, font ideas, vector images, CSS hacks, Ajax codes - you name it, they have it. Saves me countless Google hours.

Screen Fluent - A little gem of a site hidden away from the mainstream design galleries - this mostly CSS based gallery has a ton of beautiful sites to give you all the inspiration you would need before you start your own.

CSSImport - Another great little CSS gallery I frequent a lot. They always tend have a very neat set of light, clean and fresh sites featured.

Some other sites I usually do a quick overview of:
Core77 / Design is Kinky / Christopher Lee / Web Designer Wall

Draw Draw Draw!
I cannot emphasize this enough - do a mockup of your site either by hand or using photoshop. I think I enjoy this the most - coming up with design layouts, colors schemes, typeface and grids for the new site. A lot of thought goes into this process - what size should the grid be - would standard ads fit in these grids - will the color turn off the readers - if so, what % of readers will be turned off - etc etc etc. I worked with Tim for about a month coming up with the latest site - however, now we both mutually agree that we need yet another re-design to accommodate our growth.

I’m working all weekend designing the new TIM site, so hopefully my next post will give you some insights on how far I’ve reached with the design process. If you’re an avid TIM fan and would like to participate - please add your comments below with sites you personally love and would like to see incorporated in the new TIM sites.