With over five and a half thousand submissions, the results of the Web Page Design Survey make very interesting reading. In the last two editorials, I discussed the personality of a Web page and how that personality can be made even more powerful through clarity, conviction and consistency. Many designers already do all these things instinctively. If they have worked in the design industry for a while, certain sets of rules are adopted or developed that mean that even on a bad day, their work will be of a high professional standard. Any designer will identify with these.
Creative people are moody by nature and their work and ideas vary from day to day.
It might be the weather, the biological clock, or whatever, but in every month there will be a couple of really good days when ideas pop up out of nowhere like magic and a few when they have to be dragged out kicking and screaming. A professional designer knows how to cope with this. Very often, it needs the ground-rush effect of a fast approaching deadline that gets the adrenaline and the ideas moving. So, we have a set of rules or techniques that we can fall back on when original ideas are in short supply. Today, these techniques are usually created with filters in Photoshop at the click of a mouse.