Blog 4

After reading the design blogs, I picked up on a couple tips. The first tip I picked up on was that when designing, you should learn from your mistakes. As students posted before me said, mistakes are the greatest way we can learn. As the article is Smashing Magazine said, "mistakes are made everyday in the design and development world. It's nothing to be ashamed of; it happens. In fact, mistakes are one of the most powerful learning tools at our disposal." I find this to be true. Whenever I make mistakes, I learn from them. When you make mistakes, you always remember what you did wrong, and you know not to do it again. This is the same with design. If you make a design and it gets highly criticized, you will know to stop making designs that look like that.

I also learned on Smashing Magazine about what to do when designing interactive websites. In the article, "Showcase of Interesting Navigation Designs" I learned that when creating interactive sites, there is a fine line between unexpected and unusable. To me, this basically means that should make websites fun, but don't make them so fun and crazy that people don't know what what they're looking at or where to go. The article says three points to consider in navigation scheme are consistency, user expectations and contextual clues. You should make things simple for the user, or they will get frustrated. ALWAYS keep the user in mind. Just because you know how to use the website, it doesn't mean they will know how to use it. There's not point in having a complicated, messy design (even if it is really cool.) The article says, "forcing users to use certain keystrokes to navigate, rather than what they're used to, might be novel, but is that effective if you have to explain instructions prominently on your homepage?" So note to self, don't make your website too complicated, you'll make users angry.

Another important thing I learned from these sources is that when designing websites, you can't just keep up with everyone else. The article, written by Jeremy Carlson, says, "As web developers, it is paramount that we educate ourselves on the latest techniques, trends, software and coding. If you don't, you will not achieve being an in demand developer/designer." This has taught me that as a designer, you need to know the new things that are happening, otherwise, you will be way behind. The design world is always changing, and designers must keep up with the latest trends.

To keep up with their craft, designers have to do a number of things. For one, they have to get ahead of the game. They can't just be on at the same pace as all other designers. They have to know all the latest trends and be innovative. To do this, they first need to learn from their mistakes. They need to look at what worked and what didn't work in past designs, and apply that knowledge to their new designs. Next, they need to collaborate with and learn from other designers. They can do this through blogs like these, Facebook groups, Twitter groups, and other online groups. They can also stay up-to-date by reading magazines and newspapers. By looking at the design world around them and learning what is changing, they can make their designs better. They should constantly be looking at new web designs to see what is good and bad about them. Also, designers should explore how to use new design tools. Just as we are learning how to use photoshop, flash, dreamweaver, etc. in our class, designers should keep up with how to use new design tools, whether they be computer tools or hand tools. Learning how to use these tools will help them create fun, innovative and unique designs.