Gifts for the designer in your life

I thought I’d do a slightly different gift list for the web designer in your life and rather than focusing on the techie side look at some different things you can get. Of course, one of the best gifts could be some software or hardware but working in the web industry it’s sometimes nice to get something that isn’t ‘for work’. So, what can you get the web designer in your life?

As a designer you are all too aware that if you stop inputting inspiration into your brain mix there soon comes stagnation. Inspiration is the fuel that keeps you going as a designer. For me, this comes in 2 forms ‘design’ in sense of things I see and websites I view and colour. Colour to me can be just inspiring as seeing a complete design. I’m a hoarder of screen-shots and links for inspiration and with that comes 2 new sites announcements.

This web world can be a hard one to work in, you as a designer can easily loose inspiration after the 10th blue website or 20th drop shadow rounded box and lets not get started on how demoralising the 30th gradient can be. When I started out it was all about personal projects, yes I studied software engineering and art but back then there were no web courses. The only way to learn these new languages was to work on personal projects and experiment - it was a great time when possibilities were explored and inspiration flowed.

In an ideal world as a designer you’d only ever have one client, in reality you probably have more. Design by committee can be a hellish situation for any designer, but there are various things you can do to make sure the process is easier.

October is here and it can mean only one thing … the web is about to turn pink again. Pink for October is an event started a few years ago aimed at turning sites pink to raise awareness of breast cancer. This year Matthew Oliphant asked me to do the theme for the event’s site again and I’ve also turned Diary of a website pink as you can see.

You may have noticed a little break taken during the summer. It started as a temporary one and spread quickly to a turning off from online world as offline things took over a little. Not to delve too deep into the personal, but there were a lot of factors along with work and health that lead to a need to switch off from the community for a bit. I’ve been blessed with a lot of work recently which is not a bad thing at all but also meant this had to take priority while I gave myself some time to sort other things when not working. However, I’m getting back and the urge to do something again online is back with full gusto. I really hate having to write a sorry back now post but I guess that’s what this is really.