Category: Design

The Design Process

Posted on Jul 25, 2008 - 12:21 AM EST

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
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