creative briefing

I met with a local distinguished graphic and web designer this past week and came out of a two and a half hour enlightened, thought-filled, and inspired. It was great to get the perspective of a formal designer (by formal I mean someone who has gotten formal education in design - whether it helped them or not) on the industry and how businesses operate in the marketplace. For the past 4 years, I’ve been running a design agency as a business professional (it may or may not come as a shock to you that I have no formal design training - just a business degree and a passion for creative work), so comparing my outlook and heuristics to that of an actual designer running a design agency was refreshing, to say the least. I’d like to think that my twist in perspective was also helpful to him, so all in all it was a enjoyable chat for both of us.

We left the Starbucks with a few takeaways and potential areas of collaboration to think about. One thing that excited me the most and made me want to rush home and get straight to work was his expertise on using WordPress as a full-fledged CMS. That’s right, the same platform that runs this simple blog used as the backbone editor for an entire website. If you haven’t already labelled me as being slow to jump on this bandwagon, then you may be skeptical about the concept like I had been prior to this conversation. I’ve read about it, but always doubted its potential to be flexible and adaptive enough for sites that require more than just the blog functionality. I stand corrected!

Eager to add a new skillset to my arsenal, I dove into the WP infrastructure the next night and came out sometime between 3 and 4 am feeling on top of the world. I’ve learned a lot in this short amount of time, and I plan on sharing a lot of these lessons soon. In the mean time, I’m happy to say that there is hope for those who’d like to believe that WordPress can be used as a CMS, and I’ve possibly figured out a way to finally advance the development process of our new agency site. Score!

Stay tuned to see what I’ve been playing with in my sandbox. :)