Freedom of the mind...

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...