Oh How I hate Design

Today I am frustrated, which is annoying.

Let me set the scene. It's a beautiful sunny day, I'm sat in the garden on my laptop casually getting some work done (the frickin birds are tweeting - it's lovely). Nice ice cold drink and no one in the house to disturb me.

So why frustrated? Because the work I'm supposedly trying to get done is the worst kind (for me): design and layout. I'm trying to work on a refreshed Web 2.0 style layout for www.tomnrob.com (which is currently still not built 2 years after we launched it). I hate doing this stuff.

The problem is I am a programmer, and applications developer; art and design is pretty much beyond me. Sadly because I (we) can't afford to hire a top notch designer into the team I have to make the best of it - mostly by cutting, pasting and cropping bought stock images.

I've been at this for about 3 or 4 hrs now (on and off) and it's just annoying!

As you can see it's going to be a cross between "hip" web 2.0 and stylish corporate - at least I hope so!

Despite my (temporary) mood all is not lost! I did find a few awesome resources to help people create web 2.0 style sites and designs. Some of the stuff is well worth a read.

This guy in particular has an amazing amount of content and commentary. I especially like his assessment of the future of the Internet, it has really got me thinking too about how I could develop sites in the future.

He even has created a totally open source "developers" CMS: which seems to be able to let you develop amazing sites really really quickly and roll them out to consumers in record time. I'm definitely seriously considering switching from my usual framework and custom CMS (hah!) to using this simple (but effective) approach.

On top of all that I think I have changed my mind about OpenID again (after the initial excitement stage I went through), thinking it through (and reading up) the security implications are insane! That said the idea is nice and I've been toying with possible ways to make a new form of OpenID that DID have a basis in trust and security - more on that later I think.

I did have a half started posts of some links to things I like to read day-to-day on the net: but I think I'll leave that for another time :)