Design Processes & Why Every Designer Needs One

Every day I read a new article about dealing with clients or how to best present your work, however the underlying principal of all of these articles is the creation of a process. This is one of a few things that long established firms have that freelancers and new business ventures most likely do not. I personally have been struggling with the creation and refinement of my personal process over the last year and have refined it to a point that I think is relatively successful.

Every design process varies greatly, however they all share some common ground. A good design process should start by learning about the project and defining its goals. But why create a process, what are the benefits?

I was reading wired.com today when I stumbled upon this article featured on the new webmonkey about how starting today dynamic flash documents would start showing up in Google’s index. Apparently Adobe has supplied Google with a special searchable SWF library that will allow it to do so. According to the original press release, Yahoo! is also working with Adobe to achieve similar results. For the most part I have decided that this is a generally positive move for the technology, however I wonder what impact this improved search functionality will have?

On one side of the spectrum this advancement in technology could have little to no effect (which I will explain below) or it could be a major disruptor in terms of established “rules” of web design. Most likely it will fall somewhere near the middle, however I believe skewed towards the no effect column.

Well after the initial scare I received that internships may be considered unethical, I have come to the conclusion that this may be the concerns of a vocal few. For the most part I have received some rather positive responses to the question “were your internship experiences valuable to you?” In additional pretty much every person that I asked said that they would do it again if afforded the chance. However the main reason I am writing another article on the subject is to share the information I received about how to have a great internship experience. In fact the information I received along with my personal experiences have helped to create a list not only for the employer but the student as well.

Well it took me a lot longer than I had originally expected but I was able to track down the original links to more than thirty PDF documents that I have collected over the past couple of years. I have personally archived every one of these files due to the high quality of content. No matter what you call them; ebook, white paper, or resource they all contain information that no designer should go without. (In actuality there are more than 30 files however it was a good round number for the title…)