Notes from a Messy Desk

When I'm creating a new web application, I often use a basic visual design which will allow me the visual *features* I'm looking for and which is vaguely pleasing to my eye. It's just a temporary thing; when the site is more or less complete, I'll then call in a designer to make the application look good and to help me lay out all the information on the pages in a more approachable manner. I don't have any particular design skills, though I can generally wrangle HTML/CSS into a particular shape if I'm given a design by somebody else.

So early on in the development, I pick a template that has the basic features I'm looking for -- two or three column, header and footer. More often than not, two column is good enough and I wind up cargo-culting the design from [Bulletproof Web Design](http://www.simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/), a book that taught me a lot about building flexible pages that cope with people's weird browsing habits.

The trouble is that, when I demonstrate these applications to clients while we're building them, and they think the design looks really, really good. They don't want to then hire a designer to produce a custom look -- the one I've come up with is perfectly good. It's difficult to explain that actually I borrowed it from elsewhere and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Wouldn't you rather have your own unique branding?

So if you see me launch a number of sites over the next couple of months that look remarkably like they should be selling bagels, you'll know why...