Khal Weir

This week I’ve been working on a new design for khalweir.co.uk, not something I’m used to - normally a colleague or friend will do design work for me and I’ll concentrate on development. I’m very much out of my comfort zone, but am learning new skills and will hopefully have something I’m pleased with soon, in the meantime I thought I’d share my story of a developer trying his hand at design.

I set about the task as I would a development project; I thought about what I wanted to achieve, sketched some ideas and broke the into site into elements. After a little while I’d more or less settled on a layout and had a few ideas for potential designs; so then went looking for inspiration and resources.

This is where I hit my first problem, I know I want a killer background and lack the Photoshop skills to make my own, but once I started looking I was overwhelmed by choice and at the same time found it difficult to find exactly what I was seeking; again finding a cool font proved to be difficult.

After gathering a bunch of fonts, graphics and ideas, I started putting them together in Photoshop to create a rough prototype, I was able to dismiss a couple of ideas outright at this stage and now I’m able to concentrate on the strongest. I still have a long way to go, the prototype isn’t built using the Blueprint CSS grid system and is well, still very rough.

So what have I learned so far? Design is very different to development and I still kinda suck at Photoshop

Some of the resources I’ve found useful:
Blueprint CSS Framework
@smashingmag
@gunkdesign
Texture Lovers
Abduzeedo