Visualize History

For the last few days I’ve been working o the site design for Visualize History.  I think I’m done, but only because I have no more ideas.  I am horrible at design.  By design I mean graphic design, including fonts, colors, background images, and layout, and how all those things interact with each other.  I don’t know why and I’m usually frustrated to no end but the way my brain is wired does not compute design well at all.

It usually frustrates me even more because I have an intuitive feel for user interface design.  I can picture how a user will interact with my programs but not how they will look at the site.

For example, I just added a feature which shows the events for different topics in different colors.  The event was difficult to add but trivial in concept and blatantly obvious to me.  It required adding a new library and some code changes across 3 files.  It took me about 25 minutes including testing for bugs.  I spent the last two days trying to redesign the layout of the site.  The same 25 minutes got me nowhere, and in the 2 days I spent on it, I managed to add two images and change the font of my header.

I suppose that is why a programmer is not a programmer but a UI designer or a artist or a software engineer.