Methodology
Creating a website is something like finding a path through the wilderness. It takes a different route every time. There are hills of content. Sometimes there are forests of photographs, and others, deserts of photographs.
A powerful and focused brand can be a guide, but an unfocused brand often yields a more interesting journey. To be sure, there is entropy and confusion along the way, but as it does every time, it gels by launch, infused with the very DNA of the path it took.
In all my projects, I keep the person for whom the project exists front-of-mind and work to help them achieve their goals, without a lot of fuss. Sometimes that person is the user of an application, sometimes it’s a site visitor, sometimes it’s my client, and sometimes it’s just me.
This might be termed user centric design (or empathetic design), but I am not that formal about it.
Whomever it is, I seek to reduce unnecessary friction while keeping the worthy. And where possible, I try to build in opportunities for a little delight or serendipity to keep things lively. Some designers are all about the objective rather than the subjective. That is not me. When I am done, I want the people who interact with my work to love it. Loving it makes them smile and brings them back.