In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the first of the 4 words: “Design”, and explain exactly what we mean by “Design”. If you’re new to 4word Systems, you might want to check out the post explaining our “4 words” for an overview before delving in.

Design comes in 2 major flavors here, which we refer to as “Graphic Design” and “System Design”.

Graphic Design : Playing to Strengths

Having spent more than a decade building things for scores of customers around the world, we’ve come to some realizations. One of these realizations is that almost all graphic designers are not great at programming, and nearly all programmers are not great at graphic design.

To achieve high-quality visual design, an artist needs to be completely unconcerned with two things they generally hate: HTML/CSS coding and their own technical limitations.  When a graphic artist starts to think about “how” they are going to make their pretty picture into a functional website, they restrict their creativity.  Based on often-limited technical skills in HTML and CSS, they constrain the artwork to what they’re able to code.  This is typically not good for the project, and the design suffers.

In short, we leave the coding to the coders and the art to the artists.  Our developers are able to translate virtually any design into functional code, so the sky’s the limit when it comes to the visuals.

System Design : Starting Off Right

Ever take a long trip down a road only to find out you have been heading in the wrong direction?  What a pain.  Not only do you have to turn around and re-trace every mile, but when you’ve done that, you’re right back where you started.  Frustrating.

Starting off in the right direction, with the right platform is critical to optimizing cost and time-to-market.  We don’t try to fit your project into a box that wasn’t designed for it.  It is critically important to us that every project makes efficient use of technology, so we take the time to plan before we get started.  Research, concept development and the various usage scenarios are explored so we don’t have to do re-work.

Design – The First Word in Web Production

Our approach to design accounts for two of the biggest failings that web projects face:  Analysis paralysis over the graphics and poor selection of technology.  We start with design because the success of  everything we do afterwards is critically dependent on it.