Like a lot of things, web design is like riding a bike; once you learn how to do it you just know how. Unlike riding a bike though, not everyone can learn graphical design; in order to at all know where and how to start designing, you need a certain artistic sense to begin with, I guess like the way you need a certain sense of balance to be able to learn how to ride a bike. That's the conventional wisdom anyway, I'm not entirely sure that it's true.

It's been a while since I've grokked with web design, I've been coding exclusively for a good while now, urging to wrap up a product we'll hopefully be marketing in the near future. That, combined with almost exclusively visiting weblogs -- as opposed to the web design community ("design is king and content should be marginalized and barely readable") -- is what I think led me to completely forget how to steer my bicykle-like design skills in the way I remember I used to be able to.

No matter how much I tried, all my design drafts ended up exactly like eachother; blocky, boring, featuring distinct vertical and horizontal lines. Colormatch.dk has been offline for the whole week (or longer, I don't know) so conceiving of a good color scheme was entirely up to my temporarily ineligible right brain. It wasn't pretty.

I almost got up from my desk to see if I still remembered how to ride a bike, but figured I in all likelyhood still did, since I ride it to work every morning. My sense of shape, color, layout and graphic design hadn't quit on me, it was as sharp as it's ever been, it was just that I could no longer create what my mind was envisioning.

That's exactly what snowboarding is like, too. I only go snowboarding like once every other year, at best, and every time I get back up in the slope I'm completely blank. Four to six hours of pain later, I start to get the feel for it back again, at which point the time is up and I won't touch or even see a snowboard for atleast a couple of more years. Last time around, I decided to never affix myself to a board and submit myself to the mercy of an icy slope again.

That wasn't really an option with web design though, besides, even in a worst case scenario, it's not nearly as painful as snowboarding can be.

Fortunately, visiting cwd.dk for a few hours set me back on track again. I'm not totally restored yet but I figure I will be shortly.

Permanent link