Notes Design

When designing for the Web, how important is it to begin with a brilliant idea for a web-site? Can a quality site be built if the underlying concept is weak? And what happens to a brilliant idea if its execution is less-than amazing?

Many hold that execution is a secondory factor to the concept. I believe the opposite argument can be made – it's not a great idea that counts most, but great execution.

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Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them. Being busy with our own projects, we sometimes try to grasp the intuition behind (probably) complex and cluttered code of other designers to understand how they manage to implement particular design ideas. In fact, by just observing the code of other developers we can learn a lot from them; we can find interesting ideas and improve the quality of our work.

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From working with wide range of projects, I have learned one thing: designers are lazy (sometimes myself included). Most often it comes from our desire to get a quick signoff and move on with the next project. While several posts could have been written on this, I offer here a few suggestions guaranteed to make things at least a little bit easier in the end:

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Designers are independent. In work, mindset and lifestyle. Yet in this Web age aren't we losing independence? For most designers the first tool to start designing from is the Adobe suite, a quite impressive set of tools that help us to make our work easier. But don't we rely too much on Adobe? For years people have been watching how Microsoft dominated the market. We lament that its applications are bloated and criticize its efforts to wipe away competitors. But instead of taking a stand, we continue to buy its products and we continue to moan.

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By using vivid images designers can draw user's attention, communicate a message quickly and effectively and leave a memorable first impression. Practically all websites use images in their design, but few use vivid images to achieve maximum results. What is a vivid image? A simple definition is an image or photo that is striking, shocking, intriguing, interesting, beautiful or sexy (we'll be looking at plenty of examples below). It causes a reaction from the senses of visitors that an average image would not.

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