Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Woosh!
Douglas Adams famously said “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” While I am a huge DNA fan, I am also a sincere fan of the deadline. I usually work well under pressure, and there’s a kind of runner’s high you can replicate only at 3 AM after 27 cups of coffee and 300 fags and four hours of sleep.
Plus, let me tell you how much I’d rather get that buzz sitting on my arse than running it off.
For the past five days, I’ve been working on the kind of project that has a tendency to blow up in your face, and perversely, is the kind of project I really like. It was supposed to be a fairly benign but urgent redesign for a new client. The goal was to roll out something that looked better than the existing site as a stop-gap measure until everyone could get their heads around the forward planning required for a new content management system (CMS) implementation.
You know the kind of thing: Design new site. Create new template. Copy old text. Publish. Yawn.
But this was one of those projects where budgets, specs and limitations just went out the window, and everyone was happy to see them go because we were so excited by what we were producing. I got to do the things I’m actually really good, like overhauling copy, re-branding products, and saying things like
Having to type out web-enabled enterprise convergence solution is making me vomit.
The client got to exercise his sartorial aesthetic, and – oh the unmitigated joy! – kept asking me to take things out rather than put things in. You have no idea how rare that is – a ton of projects are characterised by well-meaning but misguided people saying things like “Can you make that bigger? And can you make that flash? And can we have menus that drop down and change color and maybe make sounds?” while I rock back and forth in a corner, trying to explain that 1998 has rung and wants its website back.
This was so much better than my worst nightmare, even if I did have to cram twice as many hours into the same number of days. It’s done, anyway, and should be out this week.
I can haz sleep, plz?
PS: You can totally tell my brain is fried when I make with the kitteh talk for two posts in a row. SRSLY.
26 Feb 2008
| In: Design + Domesticities |
“Can you make that bigger?”
Sounds like you need some Make my logo bigger cream!
27.02.2008, 8:26 amI love projects like that. Can you post a link when it goes live?
27.02.2008, 10:02 amPS Where do you get the wonderful images for each post?
John, I so wish I had tubes of that to pass out.
Alan, I will, absolutely post it when I add it to my portfolio.
I license images from LuckyOliver.com :)
Cool, and speaking of LuckyOliver, how can we get that type of love?
27.02.2008, 5:54 pm