I’m learning all these neat skills, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Ajax, CSS but then when I come to actually put them into practice I can’t make a website look good because I don’t have an artistic or designistic* bone in my brain.
I am also too stubbourn to do what many people seem to do - copy a well known design or structure of a design and mold it to their needs/liking. I feel like if I do this I will end up with something boring and un-individualistic. If I wanted to do that I’d just use a ready-made tool (such as wordpress for blogs, or coppermine for galleries)
[moan]moan[/moan]
[sub]* It’s a word because I just invented it.[/sub]
I’m not a big computer user at my job but I do on occasion use GIS for making maps. I always hated my maps, something was always off. I resolved this by copying the colors from someone else’s map that I really liked, copied the layout from another map, the symbols from another, and so on. I ended up with an original map that I liked and it looked good. From there I was able to personalize small things to my taste.
My advice would be to break the site down into pieces, find and copy examples of those pieces that you like from different sources, then put them all together and see what you get.
Designing is yet another intrinsic talent that is honed over years, if not decades, just like becoming good at playing music, painting, or even coding. If ya don’t got it, you don’t got it. No sense beating yourself up over it.
But, never stop trying. You might surprise yourself.
Just because YOU don’t like what you do doesn’t mean it isn’t good.
I would suggest visiting the site Dynamic Drive, then look around and then look at the forums.
OK let’s take it for granted you are hopless in design. So what? You can either moan about it or you can DO SOMETHING about it.
So you can’t design, there are a lot of people who can design but can’t implement the designs correctly. How about finding one of them and teaming up and then you two will be an unstoppable web design/creating team.
I don’t think you’re as bad as you do, but even if you are, don’t worry about what you can’t do, focus on what you can do.
I’m not sure you can learn to be good without copying the other people first, and then tweaking. And, anyways, by the time you’re done tweaking, it can look completely different.
Eventually you’ll get to the stage where you have your own eye.
I mean, isn’t that what design students do? They are given rules that are derived from other people’s successful designs. Aren’t they in a sense copying their designs?
I’m an amateur myself, but I am pretty sure that, though there are some who are good at it instantly and naturally, many designers are just like me; they play around with ideas randomly until they get to the point where it finally looks good.
A subtle colour adjustment here, a position change there, and for some reason it looks better than it used to. And then you file that information away to use again the next time. Subconsciously you’re following the established rules of design by imitating the familiar, without realising you’re doing it.
Seriously, just start by copying other designs. This is, after all, the way that design skills have been taught for the past few thousand years.
That being said, others have already noted that design and implementation tend to be different skillsets. It’s very rare to find people who have both (I’m certainly not one of them). If your aptitudes are more on the implementation side, just go ahead and embrace your strengths. That being said, there’s more to design than visuals; you should also think about user-centered workflows etc., and that side of things may be more approachable.
