What Is the Design Process?
Every designer has a “design process,” or a series of steps from idea to completion for creating a design. Knowing exactly what the design process consists of will help you to form your own.
The process of design can be broken into four steps: brief, inspiration, compilation, review. Though there are many variations on this process from many designers, every designer goes through these essential steps.
Brief
The “brief” refers to a set of instructions or information given by the prospective client. This could be anything from color ideas to company policies, to photographs of the team. You want to have as complete of a design brief as possible. The tools in your brief will allow you to move on to generating possible solutions.
Inspiration
Inspiration, research, information gathering, etc, is the next step to completing your design process. This involves looking at examples of sites you like, asking your client to come up with examples, getting inspiration from other places, and so on and so forth. Once you’ve gathered all of your resource material, you can move on to creating the actual design.
Compilation
Compilation is the process of putting all of your materials together into a product. This is the actual designing part of the design process. Throughout the compiling stage, you’ll be communicating with your client, making changes, seeing what does and doesn’t work, and sometimes making compromises. This is the most difficult step.
Review
The review stage is when you decide whether or not the design is good enough, and then send it to the client. This could mean celebrating success, or going back and making more changes. The review is the final process of the design process.
What is your design process? How do you go from concept to completion?
I love your design
, especially the RSS section.
I’m not really a designer, and I can’t get anything good out of photoshop either but gathering information/art is the most easy part as I’ve experienced. Like you said the actual designing is were talent comes to shine, and if it is really what you want to do in the future.
Keep up the great work!
The image here is quite fitting with the material explained. I would relate this process with what I have occasionally done to slightly modify some pictures in PhotoShop. I start with something in mind about the change I want to make, at times based on some points from others, and then I search for a PhotoShop tutorial that might have a guide about it. Then, I try to make the change and compare with the guide, and then see if it looks alright in the regular image. Although I rarely modify pictures, I certainly do follow this process to do so.
@Armen Shirvanian
It’s good to have a process for any kind of design work you have. Not only does it make you more productive, it also builds good design habits.