Drawar

In about half a year, I did 5 redesigns. It's just experimenting though. I like doing it.

I have rebooted a few hours too early because Im travelling to Germany in a few hours. Feel free to take a look at my new design.

@davidair: I have been thinking about this sometime aswell but when I contact a company with the question whether they need design work done or not. I find it hard to believe the company will admit they do.

Do you have any experience with this. I would be pleased to hear from you.

I should try to remember this. Everytime that I'm bored, I just do nothing. I guess I could use my time better this way. Going to try it.

Yes there is a system behind the placement of all my stuff. I can find what I am lookin for.

I prefer scroll as fixed backgrounds tend to flicker a bit. But sometimes a fixed background looks better.

Thanks for all the comments. It's really nice to hear that it's a common problem designers have to deal with. Not that it's good. Well, maybe it is, it actually drives you to make the design better.

I am going to put the design away for some time, and take a breath. Maybe work on some other projects and then come back to it.

@Andrew: Great work on your site. It's also really cool to see how you went through the design process.

There are some techniques in there I might be able to find a use for. Nice list. Goes into my bookmarks.

wow, I really like how they thought this out.

mostly Jazz and instrumental music. Lyrics are distracting me in a really really bad way. Most of the time its turned on but really soft.

Usualy I make my designs between 10pm and 2am. During the day I'm at school so I can't make any designs. So that makes me doing it at night.

I believe I started by just doing some tutorials. Just making shiny orbs and flaming/icy text. But soon I found out that all the tutorials do the same and as a designer, it's no fun creating something that's allready been created. Then I went to some sites with some high end tutorials to learn the pen tool and others. And after that I just went on expirimenting. And five years later, I'm still experimenting every day.

I believe tutorials are very useful for just getting to know your way around PS. But these won't make you a pro. To become a pro you need to experiment. Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Just throw the graphic away and try it again.

I recently wrote an article about this topic on my (Dutch) weblog because my study searches every solution in Flash. This is one of the reasons I might even quit my study. Every project is all about Flash and I try to convince them to look further and expand our horizons.

I can work with flash, but I hate the program. This, of course, is just a personal argument. I also find myself much more creative when not creating all these flashy flash things. But my main reason for not using flash is I think it’s overrated and although it’s an amazing program which is capable of creating amazing animations, I think that using it too much flash on the web will make it just too much.

I think that when Flash first came around, and when all the cool bands and designers started making their sites in flash it became a little bit overrated. That’s why people who don't know a lot about all of this, like people who hire you, want you to make them a flash application.

I really like to hear this. I have been struggling for a while about being creative or not. I am one of the only people in my class who is even interested in design but I allways thought I was copying when I looked at work from others, just to learn from it. But as you say it, I thought about it. Just learning from it, is not exactly copying it. It made me feel that way though.

When normally making titles I just make the first letter of the phrase a capital. But it really depends on the context. I have made some designs and layouts of magazines in which it was just a part of the style to NOT capitalize any letter. If its just a post title I would stick to 'the rules' but I often find myself not doing this, just because I'm such a design freak.