Yes it’s Melbourne Cup day!

Yes it’s Melbourne Cup day! Yay! My company sweep allocated horsies are Tumeric and Schumpeter. I have absolutely no fucking idea how to pronounce either of them, but they’d better do very well indeed.

On another note, a major-ish web site redesign I spent countless hours designing and coding with clients, project “managers”, programmers and QA people, went live yesterday. I have some very mixed feelings towards it. A lot of my judgments regarding the design were overuled by the powers that be. Countless revisions and changes were made, from small text changes, colour, useability issues, interface design, icons etc. I spent a hell of alot of time working on these but in the end apparently all that mattered was what the client wanted, whether there were more efficient, appropriate approaches, techniques and conventions or not. And what the client wanted, was a rip off of their competitor(s) with their corporate colours slapped in place and rounded edges everywhere.

The aspect of the redesign that I am the happiest with, (but by no means imply that there isn’t room for improvement), are the icons. This project afforded me with a chance to create/illustrate/stylise a small set of icons which are now happily finding their way across this companys’ other sub-sites. Illustration is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I can remember. It’s this interest/passion that got me into design in the first place and is what I want to do.

No the client didn’t go with my preferred design, colour scheme or header and footer treatments, but the icons were the part of this design that both myself, (and my company entourage) and the client, (plus their many, many, many, many layers of red tape and stakeholders) could agree upon. This was the part of the design process that I enjoyed the most, and that kept me going despite the internal politics.

Go Schumpeter and Tumeric!