Andrew Watson

Freedom of the mind…

Posted on 19. Jun, 2005 by Andrew Watson in Work

Not only do I hope to cover a little of my personality in this blog (see comments to my previous posting)… but I intend to try and explain my role in emart… and how I can use my experience to develop the emart concept… hopefully that will give a mixture of humerous and serious postings… they say variety is the spice of life…

When starting a new project, creating an idea is one thing… to then create a design concept is something else… especially when several people have their input. How long is long enough when throwing ‘ideas into a pot’ ? For how long does one keep refining I(and hopefully improving) a design/concept ?

I think input from many sources is a critical part of the ‘creative process’… certainly when we started thinking about emart and what it would start to become… we had the opinion of 6 males.
Although we tried to be as open to ideas as possible… we were still 6 males…

The first advancement from 6 males… was to look to design agencies for their input… but I have to say (my personal thoughts) that in terms of e-commerce sites and design… the market is surprisingly dissappointing… far too many sites now follow the same tired traditional route of muted colours on a white background… how creative is that… and too be honest many design agencies don’t seem to want to break free from that look ? Why ?

Our second advancement was the recruitment of 5 young ladies to the team… at last some female opinions… and very valuable they are !!! I am sure that as sections of the website evolve the site will appeal to a great cross range of customers…

So with the deliberation of many agencies… 12 members of the team… 8 weeks of mood boards and ruling out ideas and designs that either did not work or that we just did not like… we seem to be nearing a design that I think will be different and inviting to our visitors…

So how do I see my role in this process… I see it as one who has used the above ‘assimilative process’ to take those ideas to that point whereby a website of distinction can be developed… the last 4-5 days have seen us move much closer to that point…