We decided to start process of training our designers to create nice and fancy design mock-ups. Since our guys are working mostly on creating and fixing XHTML, we kind of  lost the pulse of art-design and need to catch up.

I assumed that the most efficient way of training would be to copy and re-creating somebody’s designs. We will be re-drawing some of nice popular web-sites to learn the technics, styles, colors, software tools and other stuff.

Internal plan of such training course looked like this:

• 1-st week: 2-3 hours a day - copying already existing design of working and popular web-site. It’s prohibited to take any graphics, everything should be re-drawn from scratch.
• 2-nd week: 2-3 hours a day - changing PSD we’ve created on the 1-st week of training (having in mind that we’re creating design for the real estate company, for example). Designers need to choose:
  • New color scheme (prepared two color schemes for designers to choose from)
  • New logo (can be just a place-keeper)
  • New textures and backgrounds
  • New graphics (can be photo)
  • New menu - changing it to be tab-styled, for example

Here are the details that I will be paying attention to while checking the results:

After the first week of course:

• Similarity with the original design
• Colors
• Textures, main grid
• Choice of fonts
• Shadows
• Overall quality

After the second week of course:

• Quality of choosing new colors
• Ability to built a new logo in the design
• Choice of new textures
• Skills of creating or choosing suitable graphics
• Choice of new menu solution and quality of it’s preparing

As a result each designer has to prepare two mock-ups:

1. copy of original design
2. changed mock-up for the abstract real-estate company

Of course this training plan got a lowest priority among other projects, however I hope we will have some results in a couple of weeks.