10things#1 - The next thing you do will be better

Maybe it's the fickle artist in me, or maybe it's staring at the same thing for weeks on end, but I'm never happy with the sites I produce in the immediate aftermath of finshing them. As soon as something's live, I tend to look at it in a completely different light, and start wishing I'd done 90% of it differently. Normally, I'd pass this off as my usual narcissistic self, go watch some more TV and forget about it, but with web design it turns into an itch that scratching doesn't releave.

If web design were an infected sore (please don't google that, it'll put you right off your breakfast / lunch / life), this would be a bad thing. Thankfully it's not.

The great thing about web design and development is that there's always something else to build, something else to get your teeth into and take that 10% you were satisfied with from the last project and roll it into The Next Big Thing. It's taken 10 years, but what I take from project to project now is less and less (although cumulatively more) - I'm fairly quick at getting to the point I'm satisfied with - that's only come about from 10's of sites that I'd rather let stab me in the face than put in my portfolio. That's not to say that everything I produce looks the awesome or the same now (although I think I definitely have a style), but it's easier now to recognise which path to go down when designing, and slap myself in the face when I take a wrong turn.

If you can get into the mindset of carrying something over from what you're working on now, improve on it, and merge it in to your next project, you'll get to a point where things are easy, and you won't know how you got there...

ShortURL: http://project14.co.uk/b/14