Web design and development companies (good ones) are technical geniuses and visual artists. Their team is composed of artisans and craftsman that specialize in creating effective pieces that work and function. It may sound silly to start off a blog with that statement, but it’s true.
If we adopt the above paragraph as a foundation, then we see that a skilled artisan must thoroughly know his own materials. Any good craftsman must know what materials, tools and mediums can be used when he goes to put the proverbial “paint brush to the canvas”.
A consumer (customer) contracts an artisan instead of a manufacturer to take his ideas and turn them into a reality. That means the consumer relies on the good judgment and recommendations of said artisan. The artisan then looks over his tools and materials to see which should be used for the job at hand.
I would say this is one of the defining difference between a craftsman and a consumer. One can have all sorts of creative ideas that just won’t cut it when it comes designing and building something.
Let’s make an example with this concept:
A bakery chef has been commissioned to make a cake for a carpenter’s company party. The carpenter decides to make a scale model of what he wants with wood, glue, finishing nails, and popsicle sticks.
A good bakery chef knows which ingredients can be substituted for one another and which should be paired together. So, he will use the scale model as a reference to make the cake. He knows good and well that cake, cake batter, and the idea that one ingests the end product internally, are the guidelines for the cakes creation. Whereas the Carpenter need not worry about this, or even really take these factors into account when he creates the scale model. His product would only be eaten by beavers and termites (hopefully not).
The bakery chef will create a cake that is similar but not identical. We can clearly see that creativity without the mold of guidelines might as well be chaos and disorder (and taste terrible).
Believe it or not the same thing can happen in the sphere of web design and development. A client can put together a “design” in something like MS Powerpoint, MS Paint or even Adobe Photoshop (the correct tool for designing a website) and it still doesn’t work. This is simply because there are rules, guidelines, and factors that must be thought with when building a website.
Some of the things web designers keep in mind are:
- Responsive Design and page layout
- Redundancy of information
- Call to action points
- The browser viewing area
- User interface
- Imagery
- Fonts
So in closing, make sure you commission an artisan to do your project so you know that your ideas will be masterfully created. You can focus on what you do best and know like the back of your hand, with peace of mind.
