My graphic design teachers would be so damn proud of me. I’m working on the new design for Space Ninja, and I’m finding that it’s a much bigger project than I anticipated. It’s not just a simple new design, I’m making major changes to the way things function, and the flow of the entire website, not just the blog. As a result, my normal methods aren’t working. Usually, I would just open photoshop and start making mockups. I usually only go through one or two mockups before I start coding. Lately, I haven’t even done that, and I’ve instead jumped right into the text editor and let the design come from the CSS.

This time, though, I started out “properly” by doing my research. I’ve been slowly bookmarking dozens of sites over the last few weeks, and today I whittled the list down to the select few that really spoke to me. Then I made printouts of those and scrawled notes in the margins of what I liked and didn’t like. Then, armed with a short list of the features I really wanted to incorporate, I actually sat down with some paper and started making thumbnail sketches of what I’m thinking. Actually, I still haven’t done enough sketches to satisfy my old professors, but it’s already way more than I normally do. Next up, I’ll pull together a few photoshop mockups before I jump into coding.