23 July 2009

In my archives I have new starts on Dressed In Value’s website design dating back five years. I’ve got something different for just about every season since 2004. There’s always been this desire to start completely from scratch, throw out whatever design I had going and start anew. Evidence of this from just the last couple of years can be seen here, here, here, and here. I have begun to see that this isn’t always such a great approach.

What I’ve been learning is exactly what Cameron Moll was talking about in his surely now-classic article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign. Over the past several months I’ve been tweaking the design of this website — adding things, subtracting things, rewriting things, moving things around — so much so that it looks entirely different from where it started. It’s not a new design, it’s just a lot of tweaking. I did this not because I was particularly inspired by Moll’s article and thus had a great plan to realign my work, but mainly because either I didn’t have time to devote to a whole new design or because all of my attempts at starting over were failures.

Throughout the months of my tweaking, Moll’s advocation has become more clear to me. I see the fruit of laboring in this way. Comparing this website’s current design to the many from-scratch designs I’ve started, what I have now is by far better. I mean that it has grown organically, and become real in a way that could only be by not premeditating on grandiosity. I don’t mean to say that it couldn’t be better. It could always be better, or cooler, or something. But I like it. It works well. And it feels right to me.

Such as starting over in life with those romanticized second chances, starting from scratch hasn’t proven realistic or successful in my design work. (It could, though, simply be that old problem of designing for one’s self.) Each new idea builds on something prior, and each movement meets a new maturity and confidence in stride.

And someday I’ll probably make another attempt at starting completely over.