So, I’m a teensie bit jealous of designers/artists that get free reign to be as creative and original as they want to be. Me, I’m trapped in a very small box.
I’m redesigning our alumni site, and at best it’s an exercise in limitation; the afore-mentioned Alumni community Web product is rigidly designed with a one-page-only framework. All pages — from the home page to news to profile pages to anything else we might imagine — must fit into this rigid grid. No unique home page. No specialty page for a special event — say, one that has a cosponsor who would like a co-branded design.
Worse, it’s partly editable. As noted in a previous tirade, some page elements can be modified, but not others — with no discernable logic. All pages have the same header, which I cannot easily edit. All pages use the same stylesheet, but not all elements in a page are styled, so the stylesheet is only partly usable. The left-hand navigation (no, it can’t be moved) is limited to text-only — no buttons, mouseovers, etc.
At least we finally have the answer to the question: if a hundred monkeys are in a room banging on typewriters, will they create literature? Nope. They create bad applications.
So instead of throwing the company out on its ear (my enthusiastic vote!), we’re redesigning. Our static Alumni pages, which exist to fill the gaps in services not offered by the fine primates who created the Web Community application, are being regressed to match whatever design I can coax out of the pile.
What a drag — when you get the creative juices flowing, and a good concept emerges, and then you realize: I can’t change the left-hand nav. Durn…. And then a new idea bubbles up, and it’s looking good, and it works with the text-only nav bar, and that’s a good thing, and then — crash! — I can’t make the header flush left. Double durn.
Like I said, an exercise in limitation. The final design will be here: http://alumni.lls.edu/. (Visit in the next few weeks, and you’ll see the current page; then come back to see the coup de grace.) I’ll be as proud of it as any novice is of the Front Page design he plopped in on his Yahoo! Geocities page.
