Behind the scenes: The hidden costs of website design

Cue directors commentary; well there would of been, but Elliot (our Managing Director) didn’t approve of the idea and told me to go away. So instead we’ll have to make do with words.

I thought I’d give you an idea of what we get up to behind the scenes, no not what we do at the weekend, but how we go about creating designs for projects from a designers point of view.

The first port of call is usually a meeting with you to discuss your requirements – so we can get things right from the start. As Elliot has already covered this in a previous blog post, I’ll let him elaborate – meeting notes.

Pre-Project

The next stage involves a project team meeting and is usually the start of all the unseen work. This allows all the people involved in your project to use their expertise and generate ideas. Part of this process involves cracking out the old pen and paper – yep, we still use these – so we can wireframe and sketch out ideas for your project. This really helps set the site in motion as we can quickly prototype new ideas and layouts, plus they’re easy for someone else to edit without the need to get too bogged down in design and fine detail. See some great examples of sketched wireframes.

1) Example of sketched wireframe

Wireframing

Once we have finished ‘doodling’, I mean wireframing (well you’ve got to do a few random sketches haven’t you?), we’ll produce a digital version of our chosen wireframes. This version will usually be the first you see of your site. And this digital version consists of (in our case) grey boxes to signify the layout of your content, enabling you to easily suggest changes. This helps us both save time and money, as we haven’t got involved in the design detail yet – which takes significantly longer to change. By producing these simplistic wireframes we can get the layout right first, saving precious time for the actual design.

2) Image shows an example (right) of a typical wireframe for a client

Logos

Another area of our design work that goes unseen are the ideas behind creating a logo. A designer sending out a set of logo designs often worries me as sometimes the client is unaware of the amount of work behind just one of the concepts. For one logo we may have produced 50 concepts, sometimes before we have even got to the computer. And before that we will have spent time researching your company and competitors so we can create concepts that are relevant to your market. Once we have created a strong design that represents your company we will start to refine the design, colours, structure, positioning, typefaces, and customised typefaces that are all considered to develop the design, along with key requirements such as use at different sizes, black and white versions and simplified versions for social media.

3) Some preliminary sketches of a logo in development

As you can see, from a designers point of view, the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes of a project, even before the actual design starts, is considerable. We hope that this little insight into what goes on in the WDL design department will help you believe we’re not just sitting here playing Angry Birds. Well, not all the time anyway!

See below for a couple of useful links if you feel the urge to wireframe;

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/29/free-printable-sketching-wireframing-and-note-taking-pdf-templates/
https://gomockingbird.com/

Richard

With a degree in Graphic Design and Illustration Richard focuses on initiating original ideas in all of his design projects. Whether it's a logo, a website, print or branding, he provides clean, simple, well thought-out ideas, to improve the usability and effectiveness of whatever the latest project is.

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