Design Thoughts
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on the design of my professional website www.swuxlxd.com and that’s led to me thinking a lot about design more generally. I’m not a graphic designer by trade but graphic design does mean a lot to me and I’ve always had an eye for, and appreciation of, great design. Much in the words of that brilliant Ira Glass aphorism, I’ve got good taste in graphic design but my own skills… well, they’re not quite so developed yet.
As part of all this thinking, I’ve been gathering up a bunch of design inspiration - designers or designs that I particularly like - just as a touchstone to help give me some direction and some ideas for which direction to take the design of my own company.
I would love, one day, to sit down with someone who really knows what they’re doing in the design space and put together a full brand identity, colour set, typography set, logotype, and everything else graphic and design-y that a brand can use to develop its identity. In the meantime, I’m having a lot of fun having a go myself and seeing where it takes me.
What is particularly fun is seeing where my own tastes and inclinations take me. Noting the things I keep returning to, the styles, and the sources of inspiration I always land back on. I’ve definitely got some particular proclivities for industrial, simple, high contrast, and slightly mid-century meets hipster leanings. There’s plenty of that in the design I enjoy and spend time engaging with and, hopefully(?) some of it in the design of SWUX.
I’m sure this is something I will keep playing around with for quite a while yet, and it’s such a pleasingly iterative and evolving sort of thing that it really lends itself to experimentation, tweaks, and trials. My skills are improving through all of this, no doubt, though I don’t think I’m ever going to put any pro designers out of business. It’s great to have a chance to indulge in a very different kind of design work to the learning design I’m used to whilst still seeing how much those fields have in common. Wherever this ends up, I’m really enjoying the journey.