The 24-hour redesign

Posted by lee jones on Sep 17, 2013 in Design

My website has gone through a number of revisions and designs in recent years, but more often than a design seeing a production server, the long-drawn out design and development process often meant the redesign project became ‘stale’ as client work and other things took precedent. This week I set about another redesign project, but with a slight twist. I imposed a project constraint that the design must be completed, start-to-finish, within twenty-four hours. This helped a number of ways: Quickly helped identify a MVP (minimal viable product) – expose those features and functions that were critical to any redesign. Essentially the site should offer the same functionality as the current site (gallery, portfolio, about, contact etc. etc.) Prioritise features – when you only have 24 hours to design and develop, it certainly helps establish those features which are essential and those which are nice-to-have. Reduce deliberation – often I’ll sit and stare at a font or colour for silly amounts of time attempting to discern if it’s perfect or not. In reality, those sorts of details can wait and can be updated later as the website iterates. With this mind-set I quickly settled on a design with only a couple of minor alterations. The responsive changes took very little time as the website naturally flows well on multiple devices due to its column-based layout and given the platform shift (to WordPress) I could easily incorporate a blog that would allow me to push content more frequently and document issues and challenges I overcome when developing or designing. All in all I’m really pleased with the initial draft. With the benchmark now set on how quickly I can iterate sites and projects I’ve a lofty goal to meet in future work. So what do you think of the design? Noticed any problems on a particular device? Let me know your...