As designers we love our work. It’s rare that we work on designs that we do not like, because we all have personal style, that is reflected in our work, regardless of what our clients want.  The trick is to find that common ground with your client between what they think they want, what you know is best, and what works for them, and what looks best to you. Does that make sense to you?

Sometimes though we need to be able to drop what we’re doing, and go in a completely different direction if something is not working out right.  I’m working on a particular project at the moment which is setting up a website (blog format) for a local printing company. The work has primarily consisted of optimizing an already established blog design, and tweaking it to meet the clients expectations.

The beauty of using the blog format is that we can upload and work on the content, and *then* tweak the design bits and pieces, without losing the content if we suddenly go off in a new direction. Which is what I found myself doing just yesterday. I’d been struggling with a blog header for this site for awhile, and getting it to fit properly, and get all the other elements to work together nicely. So I decided to take the plunge and stick in a fresh new template that I found whilst trawling the internet, and go for broke.

Sometime during the day after I installed the new template, and began to optimize it with customized headers and buttons etc, I got an email from the client, saying “I like what I see!”, so even though it was virtually a whole new look and feel, and it had been a leap of faith for me,  it was clearly a step in the right direction, and ultimately a good decision.

Several emails followed with suggestions from the client, and I tweaked and made changes where they were requested, and it turned into a very productive afternoon. I worked from home, the client was at the office, and we had a perfectly do-able collaboration without so much as a phone call to one another.

So, lesson learned. If you hit a brick wall, with a design, take it as a sign to take the plunge let go of your initial work, and go in a totally new design direction, because the chances are that it will be a great decision and work out for the best.

Here is where the header from my last post (with the photo, and the mountain) has gone to. It’s totally different, but it works.

Now, one of the key design brief notes was that the business owners face had to be featured prominantly on the website. So when I went off in a new direction, I could not simply ignore that instruction, but I had to find a way to work around it. So I introduced a profile box on the right hand sidebar. Like so:

The reason for the prominence of the business owners profile is simply because she has been successful in the local printing industry for 20 years and her name is synonymous with integrity and great service in her business. To *not* have it there would have put the website at an immediate disadvantage, so it was imperative to make it a feature.

Beyond the clickable image, in otherwords linked to the profile box, is the story of how she originally came from Zimbabwe, (then known as Rhodesia), and grew her business from scratch, relying on sheer grit and determination to be successful.

I chose the textured paper look, and the ‘American Typewriter’ font type to give the profile box that retro printing look, a bit like an old newspaper. The story of her rise in business is actually taken from an article written about her a few years ago, so it all fits together beautifully.

Lower down the page, I’m using the ad-space slots provided in the template, for a completely different function entirely – to showcase the other members of her team.

This is one of the wonderful things about using the blog format for web design, because there are just SO many possibilities and opportunities to be creative!

Right enough talk, time for action, and it’s back to the grindstone!