We're in danger of getting smacked on the keyboard hands by the List Mum, but I'll quickly say:
Design is a discipline, as Peter Gifford has said, that benefits from learning, whether (if you are able to teach yourself to "see") by yourself or, usually much better, in a serious learning environment.
Peter has mentioned a number of the elements of design, but to understand what they really mean and how they work you need to learn them. Copying others' designs can't teach you this underlying knowledge, though you can start to get a feel for the way designers do things.
(That said, dirty little secret is that a huge number of designers buy magazines like Communications Arts, bookmark cool websites, and generally follow the trend-setters, then plunder their work.)
But I ask you this: Do you make your own furniture? No. Because there are people out there who know how to do it quicker and better. They've developed their eye for form and structure. They understand texture and balance. They work with it all the time and have years of training, experience and visual memory. They know how to "see" furniture.
It's not magic. It's not simply plucking ideas out of the air, but focusing on the communication problem and solving the presentational issues involved.
I know you said you have clients with no budgets, but it may cost you less than you think to get a halfway good designer to work you up a mockup (to the brief I mentioned in my last idea -- the tighter the better, to avoid misunderstandings) and from there you can web-standardise it into code.
-Hugh Todd
I am trying to see if I
can learn to improve the process somehow to get better results faster (or is
it less slow?)
So I was hoping I'd find out you 'proper' designers have a trick other than
"its all in the talent and creative side of your brain, son!"
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