Creative Insight - Paul Randall

Lets get the ball rolling once more and get these Creative Insights back up and running! This week we have something a little different for you. Let me introduce you to Paul Randall, a web designer from my neck of the woods! South West of England. Over to you Paul:

I am a Web Designer from the South-West of England and have been creating websites full time since 2006. I currently work at Screwfix as a Designer, and have been featured by Smashing Magazine, Channel 4, and .net magazine.

This is my desk at my workplace. I have a Mac for the majority of my design work as well as a PC for testing, as well as a few iPads and iPhones to hand whilst I am developing sites.

The journey of my typical process for designing a website always start by doodling and sketching. It's quicker than going straight into Photoshop and allows me to focus on the content.

Once I have decided on the content, and have an idea for a layout only recently I have introduced a step of producing basic wireframes of the site showing what it will look like on different devices. There has been a massive increase in mobile browsing and so it is worth optimising your site to accomodate these devices if possible. For this example, I have shown how the layout will adapt on a mobile, tablet and regular desktop view.

Then I will open Photoshop and begin work on the composition, colour palette and typography. This is typically a very quick phase so that I can go straight into the coding, although for client sites these designs will be sent to a client for approval at this stage.

During the hand-coding process I will use a simple code editor like Notepad++ or Dreamweaver. This is where the HTML and CSS files will be created, and for more complicated sites these will then be developed further into a Content Management System (CMS) such as Wordpress.

The final phase of development is seeing the files in the browser. I have found it useful to view these on iPhones and iPads at the same time, so that tweaks can be made to optimise the readability. Usually this phase goes back and forward between design, coding and testing throughout the whole process. On larger projects, these prototypes will be demoed to colleagues or clients at all times before the site is complete.

So that is just a little creative insight into the design of a website. I hope it's been interesting!

I regularly tweet about design at @paulrandall and occasionally blog on my website.

Thanks Paul! I have very little clue when it comes to web design so its always interesting to have a little sneak peek into how it is done! :)