jkwiens.com has finally undergone another facelift. I was starting to get really sick of the old design. The site was starting to get really cluttered and messy. The new design is very loosely based on Warped Visions’ design. Warped Vision’s design is simple… but professional. This is exactly what I wanted in the new design. I was able to maintain the essence of the old design while drastically simplifying the layout. I still have a lot of work to do on the site, but it is a significant improvement (I think).
It seems a bit counter-intuitive that a simple professional design would be so difficult to design. Simple professional design is all in the subtleties. When your site is more complex, you have more opportunities to distinguish yourself when compared to a novice designer. A novice designer would make a complex site unusable. The reason for this is because of the sheer number of “design decisions” that go into a complex site. When you compound all the non-optimal design decisions a novice designer makes, you end up with a messy and unusable design. Since a professional designer would make fewer non-optimal design decisions (and certainly wouldn’t allow the problems to compound), the differences in the sites would be obvious. However, when you reduce the amount of design decisions in a site, what distinguishes you from a novice? The answer is “not very much”.
The key to simple designs is in making subtle design decisions. This is the difference between a simple site designed by a professional and a novice. A novice wouldn’t waste his time making subtle decisions. However, these subtle decisions compound. When a professional makes his font color #222222, a novice would leave it as black. When a professional plays with the spacing pixel by pixel, a novice would set it to an arbitrary value. This is why simple designs are so hard. You have to be absolutely annal about your design. In a complex site, you can afford to overlook subtle design decisions. However, you don’t get that luxury with simple designs.
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Made Thursday, 20 of August , 2009 at 10:37 pm
[...] jkwiens.com has under-gone a complete re-design. Although the over-all site is a huge improvement, there is still a lot of fine-tuning to be done. [...]