Letting Go of the Past

#1

I don't see anything wrong with reusing certain elements from past designs. I mean sometimes you find something that works well, so there is no reason to not use that element in another design. But maybe I am not understanding what you're saying. If you're talking about redesigning a site, I also think it isn't bad for it to look similar to the first one. You don't want to completely alienate your users with a completely new image and layout every couple of months. That's one thing that annoys me about some of the artsy design sites, they redesign so often that you are lost almost every time you go there.

Derek Rose (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#3

Oh I see, yes that could end you up in a bit of a rut... http://www.2advanced.com is a good example of this in my opinion. Every single one of their sites is almost exactly the same. They never do anything different than their standard formula. If you hire 2advanced, you already know what your site is going to look like. But again I think you can have some elements that you have found to be particularly good that can go from site to site. For instance maybe a 1px border around images with a little white padding looks especially nice I think, and frames up images nicely, so I use that on quite a few different sites because it is a nice element that matches with just about any layout. But taking almost an entire design and repurposing it is certainly something to avoid.

Derek Rose (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#5

Scrivs, in that last paragraph "throwth" should be "growth" (this is the kind of thing I meant in my earlier comment).

Excellent example with the 2advanced crew. I agree. I think an example of a certain style that carries through designs but does not overwhelm is 37signals' stuff. They seem to use a lot of Trebuchet MS and simple 1px solid borders in pastels. They adapt that style to each client very well, though, making their sites instantly recognizable but not copies of each other.

sergio (http://overcaffeinated.net)

#7

I don't see any issues with reusing elements of a design over and over. As long as you're still putting the site's goals above and beyond your own. Clients may feel ripped off if they're getting a re-hash of something you've already done.

However, if (as part of the design process), you decide that the client needs a 2/3-column layout, variable font-sizes, a login form, etc, I see no reason why you can't re-appropriate snippets of past successful designs.

There's only so many ways you can re-code a useable 3-column grid.

However, if you're taking something that worked for client A and trying to cram client B into the same box, then you're not really designing at all, and certainly not putting the client's needs first.

Justin French

#9

Greetings from New Zealand!

Take a look around. How often do people in any profession go right back to square one and reinvent what they do?

Certainly not in the arts - not that I'd know much, but it's pretty easy to tell a Picasso from a Monet from a Jackson Pollock ... each has their own individual style, which I presume wasn't reinvented from scratch for each work, at least as far as I can see - each developed a style and built on it.

What about print design from the 1950's or 1960's? How much of that was "unique" design, how much the fashion of the day? Constrained by the medium and technology currently available? Not to mention the client's budget ...

So why the angst?

OK, I'm a not even going to pretend to be a graphic designer/artist or whatever, so maybe (probably) I'm missing the point. I'm in the process of constructing a website generator based on Java, XML documents and XSLT, which I intend to use initially to target low-end static website development. Templates, stock layouts and graphics will be the name of the game. I don't feel any need to apologize for this to anybody - the objective will be to provide customers who currently don't have a website with a well constructed, standards-compliant and maintainable site, built to a price that they can justify paying. And for larger, corporate sites, the concept of consistency provided by a template system would probably be a feature, not a bug.

I'm more familiar with application development (around twenty years on IBM midrange - read S/34, S/38, AS/400 aka iSeries). In that environment, I found that after a few years (it didn't happen overnight) I developed a general pattern that I could apply to certain types of program, and eventually ended up with something approaching a template. I tweaked it over the years, as I learned more, and to take advantage of advances in the platform I was working on. Often minor adjustments were necessary to accommodate the requirements of the particular application I was working on. But the overall formula was there.

Most of the developers whose code I encountered had developed some general style that I could recognize. Some worked better than others, but once I had it figured out I could work with it to a greater or lesser extent.

The biggest problems were caused by those who reinvented themselves with every new program they wrote. In some cases, they had no clue what they were doing, and what resulted were haphazard accidents. Others were bored and liked to try out new stuff (it provided some new acronyms to add to their CV if nothing else). In any case, what resulted was usually an inconsistent mess, which did not have the benefit of a well proven pattern that had had the most obvious quirks ironed out.

I guess what I'm getting at is, if you're not carrying something you've learned and/or developed on previous projects into the new one, are you really doing your customer a service? Or are they going to be a guinea pig for a new experiment, or at best paying for a complete new creation? How many people are capable of producing something creative and totally new on a regular basis without eventually getting jaded? Perhaps you're aiming for an unrealistic ideal?

Ian