Aside from this website, I’ve not designed a website for close to two years. I made a decision back then to concentrate on just building the buggers which I think has paid off. It gave me focus, a goal if you will and still does.
I remember getting a freelance gig whilst working in Chester full time. My god, the excitement I got. This was my first job that I’d got off my own bat. I worked hour after hour perfecting this design. It was going to win awards and people would rank me alongside top names and I’d be invited to cool parties and so on and on.
I sent the client the design.
They loved it, they praised the work I had done and then said the words that haunt me to this day.
“Can we make it all Arial and lose the bold colours.”
Well you can imagine my reaction?
I replied..“Fuck you!”… in my head and then actually wrote, “Sure, I’ll get on to it later on.”
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe the further changes sent through later that week either but we did them.
The site went live and has been taken down after they gave up drumming up business but a lesson remains. Don’t get too excited until it’s all signed off.
Anyway this process kind of carried on for a good year, job after job just turning into a design nightmare, some rightly so but some not so (everyone’s a designer right?) until I decided “you know what, someone else can dick about in Photoshop”.
I was wasting time and losing money on small enough budgets as it was. I started to turn jobs down as quite frankly I couldn’t be bothered with the whole design thing.
So fast forward to 2012 and here I am designing a website in Photoshop. I’m calm, I have no time limit and I’m enjoying it. The client is me, it’s an unlimited budget and I won’t be changing all the content to fucking Arial.
And I’m using bold colours to the max!
But I won’t be designing anyone elses