FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

I’ll start with a confession: I attended dConstruct and I am not a designer.  I don’t create brand identities, or create beautiful graphics, or build amazing experiences.  I manage projects.

What was I doing at dConstruct?  Thanks to an inspirational opening talk from Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company, I felt like this design conference is a place for people like me.

So having folks such as INI help raise the profile of design can only be good for Northern Irish business. The agenda included an interesting lineup of local and national design advocates who took an appropriately high-level look at their experience of design effectiveness.

Wayne Hemingway, Founder of Red or Dead and Hemingway Design

Wayne’s conversational story telling goes some way to proving that some speakers don’t need a lot of structure to their presentations. Tangents, rambling and the occasional snipe only make Wayne more interesting and endearing.

There are some widely different but equally successful approaches to design (compare Apple and Nintendo), and some who argue that most design processes are all much the same.

I think that this discussion about creative process presents a tough question about the role design can play in creating exceptional experiences online: is design simply about making a site visually appealing, or does it play a more central role? Even more importantly, how does design matter to the work that we do?

To shed some light on the matter, I asked this question on Twitter “Putting together an article and wanted to ask you all: what do you think the role of design is / should be in web projects?”

At Front we regularly work with clients who are re-starting projects; in many cases because an agency couldn’t grasp, or didn’t care about the fundamentals of the client’s business - they basically got off to a bad start.

We believe that there are a few key pieces of information worth thinking about before you get started on any project. If you can communicate this information to your web agency early on, you’ll speed up your procurement process and will help them respond in a way that meets your needs. Great! Where do we begin though?