Sittin’ Pretty (or… I Suck at Design)
For the most part, I’ve always been an ‘if it works’ kinda guy; I never really paid that much attention to how pretty anything I ever made looked.
When I was a kid, my family taught me all the crafty basics… how to knit (and french-knit), to sew, papercraft & papier-maché, to carve wood, to do a whole bunch of that type of thing.
My LEGO and Meccano builds were more making, from crazy train stations, car ports, models, and other random builds all the way to ‘functioning’ helicopters (they didn’t fly, but everything else worked).
Then later in school I carried that on, At A-level I studied design & technology, and electronics (didn’t score that great, but I enjoyed it). My main hobby then was CB-Radio and I made various bits of gear for that, rig-holders, antenna stands/fixings and did my own repairs (I’m pretty handy with a soldering iron for an amateur).
And of course I’ve programmed since a very young age, from ‘peeking’ and ‘poking’ my way to a BASIC USS Enterprise flying around my C64 blue-screen to puzzles, adventure games, dictionaries and the like. Right through to my university dissertation project (a 3D file management UI) which worked really well, but looked rubbish.
The Revelation
It never really occurred to me that any of these things needed to actually ‘look nice’; if they worked, I was happy. If that meant my CB lived in a grey-metal box or my pencil-case had 2 zips because I sewed the first one to itself, than that was fine :)
Now I’m playing a different game of it. I’ve been building picWorkflow for almost a year now (and picNiche for just over 3) and I have been getting the same comment, more-or-less, for much of that time: “It works fine, but it looks so [bland/plain/boring/crap/etc]”. Well, I’m trying something new and spending some time making it look great.
I’ve already improved on my initial picNiche design by trading my professional coding skills with a professional designer for a nice logo and basic site layout which has me going in the right direction, and there’s a whole bunch of new design elements coming soon (planned by the end of august) in the site to start bringing it upto the expectations people have of the modern web.
The weird thing is, that after weeks or even months of focussing more on the ‘looks’ I’m finally starting to understand… Things that ‘look better’ may not actually ‘work better’, but it’s much easier to get others to try out the working parts if it really looks like it will work when they try it.
It’s really not enough to say “It works well… trust me” :)
