Good designers need to continually search out places which will encourage the percolation of new ideas.

Do you ever look at a brief and think 'i don't know what to do'?

If you find yourself churning out one design after another with no other visual stimuli than your computer screen and office walls then it's time to get out there.

Of course design is everywhere. In the 21st century we are saturated by images. They whirl towards us in a storm of images as we walk down the street, stand at the bus stop, contemplate whether it's a normal latte, a skinny latte or a frothy caramel topped seasonal cappuccino day.

You don't even need to leave the house to find them as they pour through our letter boxes, shout at us from our zillions of tv channels or swoosh down our broadband connections.

The advantage of this immersion by image in our culture is that we are getting better and better at thinking visually. Practising mental visual gymnastics everyday by looking, seeing, and thinking means our responses to signs and advertisements and promotions is getting faster. So the designer can in turn develop their own ideas to create work which is more subtle, more thoughtful and more interesting as they know that there ideas will be met by an audience with a strong visual insight.

However there is also the danger of a complete visual shut down. Image fatigue.

It is a battle in this climate to create new innovative work which will stand out in all the good and the bad.

Vivienne Westwood's methods are an inspiration to me as her work is kept fresh and provocative because she feeds her mind with art - cycling around london visiting art galleries and museums finding influence from pictures in the National art library and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

As designers we can't stand still expecting our inspiration to rest solely on what passes infront of our eyes on the way to and back from work, taking whatever happens to fall into our laps.

We need to work at finding new and interesting sources for inspiration to keep our work fresh and innovative; to think about new ways of cutting through the visual clutter that surrounds us.

Clare

Content Management is a fantastic tool for adding menu items, news, and other content to your website.  But is it always helpful?

One problem with coming to content management from the traditional perpective of word processing and desktop publishing tools is that not everything translates.

There are some great tools for entering WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type text into browser-based content management tools - FCK being the most prominent and most advanced (http://www.fckeditor.net/).  However, HTML is not the same as the print formatting you get in word processing and desktop publishing tools, so users can get frustrated with even simple things like spacing and bullet points.

The ideal way to manage website content is to keep it very simple - and if items do need formatting in a particular way, or you need tables or unusual diagrams to be inserted - then use a web designer/developer to build a web page for you.  They'll know how it's going to look on different web browsers, and how to keep it standardised and in keeping with the rest of the website.

What is Web 2.0?

The answer, if you look at wikipedia, is mostly about the increased function you see in this generation of websites (i.e. websites in the 2000's) - particularly functions to do with collaboration.

Many of our customers, however, see design as an integral part of web 2.0, citing the bbc's new look and feel (http://www.bbc.co.uk)

Web 2.0 for them means shading, rounded corners, and panels which slide up and down.

What does Web 2.0 mean to you?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  Put simply, CSS is about saving you work and making your web pages consistent.

Once you start learning about HTML, you'll quickly find that you need a way to make your website consistent without having to write lots of attributes all over the place.

For example:

instead of <p><font face="Arial" color="blue" size="3">

you can write <p class="bigblue"> and write a stylesheet that defines the class "bigblue":

<style>
p.bigblue
{   font-family:Arial; color:blue; font-size:12pt }
</style>

Your stylesheet can go inside your HTML page or it can be referenced as an external file.

Here's a great guide to stylesheets: http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss

Designers have often find it difficult to move from the comparatively free discipline of print design to the more straight-jacketed discipline of web design.

Consider:

• With web design, your pixel area is constrained, but you may need to cater for movement.
• You need to concentrate heavily on the top of the design, which is the only part guaranteed to be visible.
• Typically users spend short amounts of time trying to understand the web page, so you need to fit in with many conventions (logo top left, identity, strapline, housekeeping menu, main menu, etc.) if you are serious about serving them.

Of course, there are graphically innovative websites out there, but they are not making money, because users can't find the "buy now" buttons on those kinds of websites.  So if you are designing commercially, you need to get conventional!

Don't miss out on "firebug" - a plug-in for firefox that lets you debug your HTML/CSS/JS in all sorts of ways, including

• viewing all css declarations linked to an element
• stepping through javascript

This is a must-have tool for web developers.  At time of writing you can get it here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

Accessibility is about including everyone in the set of people who can access your website - making sure it can be read by anyone, including blind or partially-sighted users.

You would probably make a lot of effort to make your business premises accessible if you were having visitors, and your website should be too.

The good news is that whe web can be very good at including these users – much better than TV or books, for example, because users can employ devices such as screen readers to give them an appropriate output using the same material.
The problem lies in that some of the material is not suitable for output in this way, and so it is essential that you check that what is being developed is appropriate.
The first step is to get to know the “Web Accessibility Initiative” (WAI) guidelines, which are available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/.