Started the Wiki redesign for my design homework.
Definitely the hardest thing I've done yet because there are so many things wrong with the website that I have no idea where to start.
But after around an hour, I was able to get some things done. Here are some reminders to myself for next time:
1 - Set yourself time to design.
Unless you are explicitly told what to design, the first steps are usually exploratory. Meaning that you don't have defined next steps. So it's almost impossible to tell yourself that you will "finish design x today" because you can't estimate the amount of work to be done. Instead, tell yourself "I will design for x number of hours today." This will give you the impression that it's "ok to fail" and will allow you to actually start even if the task feels very difficult.
2 - If you are overwhelmed, select just one section and focus on that.
In this case, I chose to start with just the title and intro paragraph. I decided to erase everything else so that I would only focus on that portion of the design.
3 - Try to vomit as many designs as possible. The lower-fidelity, the better.
What's difficult is that I don't have a design process. So I basically just try a bunch of things, usually element by element, until I get something that looks OK and roll with it.
But I feel like it's a really inefficient way to design.
Instead, I tried to visualize the final design and tried to quickly place every required element (in lo-fidelity) so that I can at least have a bigger picture of what the final design would look like. This is similar to when I first start writing as well - I try to vomit as many words as possible and then refine it so that it makes more sense only afterwards.