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Every now and then, as a web or graphic designer, you hit a low point or slump in your creativity. A stage where you start to question yourself and sometimes question your skills.

 

The slump can bring about frustration about a project, and now, with quite a number of years in the web design game, I thought I would share my experiences with slumps and techniques I use to overcome them.

 

remember the good times

I think all designers feel that energy and buzz when we crack that bit of code, get that mark-up to validate or finish a mock-up for a client. It really is a buzz to enjoy your work and get paid for doing this... life is pretty spectacular!

 

sleep on it

It honestly is that simple sometimes. Just go to bed and try and forget about it. Have a good sleep and believe it or not, nine times out of ten the solution will wake up with you. I have done this loads of times, I have also not done this loads of times and sat there until the early hours of the morning sipping coffee and eating to keep myself awake hoping that my worn out mind and tired body can muster a solution.

 

look for inspiration

I guess this is the proactive way of dealing with the web/graphic design slump and probably one of the best ways to find a new idea. I am not talking about website galleries - they have their uses.

 

But I prefer looking away from the web, maybe a magazine or book related to the subject. Photography and art galleries will have you brimming with ideas but I personally find a non-visual inspiration the most effective. Sit down with your eyes closed and listen to a good album. I have done this many a time and found that the music somehow has colors and patterns associated with it.

 

For instance, I make very different websites when I listen to John Mayer then when I listen to Led Zepplin and sometimes I end up going in a completley different direction due to a song I have listened to and will revise my design.

 

plan your time

I think a big part of losing your creativity is often worrying that your not going to meet a deadline or your nerves kick in about the end product not being good enough. I have found that the best way to combat this is to plan your time.

 

Then take this target date and list all the tasks that have to be completed to enable that task to be achieved. Split those tasks up over the days you have until your design target date and presto... you have a plan. Once you have completed your tasks for the day, you must stop. By ticking a task off throughout your day, you will feel like you are making progress.

 

Hope this helps...

One of the hardest parts of graphic design whilst creating a website is the logo design. It is often very hard to create an image that truly represents a company, but if we keep certain factors in mind graphic designers can normally create a suitable design.

 

Symbolism: Is there a symbol that represents the companies core trade? Like a house for real estate agents or a flower for a florists?

 

Abstraction: An abstract shape could represent the companies core trade. Like a real estate agent could use a block shape to signal stability or a florist could use a circular shape that represents a friendlier signal.

 

Colour: Colours can be used to signal emotional responses. For instance, the colour red is associated with fertility, birth, danger, strengh, love and passion. The colour green is asociated with nature, health, cheerfulness, environment, money. Lighter shades of colours can be used to draw the eye away and brighter colours to draw the eye in.

 

Minimalism: Less is most certainly more when designing a logo as the most successful logos are simple and, most importantly, easy to remember. Think of Nike, McDonald's, Coca-Cola.

 

Typography: The fonts used for any lettering should also represent the brand. For instance, serif fonts signal a more traditional feel, whilst san serif fonts have a modern feel. A unique font can also make you stand out from the crowd. For instance, the Coca Cola font or IBM.

 

Texture: Add some dynamism by adding a texture. For instance, a wood grain for a health product or a scratched and rough stone effect for a builder. Adding another dimension to your logo can give it an edge and bring it out of the web page, a 3d edge adds an angle and is often used to infuse a modern connatation.

1. Splash Page

 

I’ve seen this mistake many times, where people put up a big banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage. The worst case — the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the search engine spiders to follow the link.

 

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is most likely your website’s highest ranking page, thus is crawled most frequently by spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow. Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

 

2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus

 

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

 

3. Image and Flash Content

 

Web spiders are like a text-based browser; they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

4. Overuse of Ajax

 

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes). But did you know that this is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, therefore it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

 

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

 

5. Versioning of Theme Design

 

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text

 

You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”.

 

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

7. Common Title Tag Mistakes

 

Same or similar title text:

Every page on your site should have a unique tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

 

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title.

 

Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text "Site Name > Blog Archive >" at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

 

Exceeding the 65 character limit:

Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

 

Keyword stuffing the title:

Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

 

"Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures"

 

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

8. Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

 

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms "abstract" and "dj".

9. Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

 

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title
Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356