A lot of the times a designer has one “style” they gravitate towards in the world of design, this isn’t to say you can’t have a well rounded designer but I have noticed especially from personal experiences that sometimes while designing say a website your creative view you have may take some….hassle to achieve the look you want. Web design isn’t simply a quick, “click-n-go” type of application it often takes lots of visual effort and pre-flighting before even laying down your code. Even still when you get in there you often find that one browser (ahem IE6) usually doesnt want to cooperate with your code so your left having to find,search,scour the internet for a patch from other designers who have had the same problems. This can get very redundant and tiring but none the less is necessary- sort of a necessary evil I suppose.
When I first started shifting back into web design I found myself a bit lost because software had changed so much, I mean I found myself saying: ” What the heck is JQuery?Joomla?Wordpress?”. It took me weeks of reading, learning, and working with a programming friend of mine but I slowly started picking it up. I don’t know about the majority of people but I am not a “reading” type of learning, I am purely visual meaning – If I can’t see it done or some sort of example performed via tutorial, instructor, friend then I take 3 times as long to learn it and implement it into my own designs.
The main issue I ran into was my creative designs simply we a little too graphic intensive, or my ideas were a bit too heavy on the stylized effects so when I would transition them into web work it would bog down the page or wouldn’t quite portray how I wanted it to. Web design is simplified…Not to say you can’t have very intricate detailed sites because there are some very clean, well designed sites out there but in order to design a webpage you have to not think like a creative designer but more like a programmer. At least that is my opinion on the matter which I urge you to take with a grain of salt because everyone is different.
In any sort through all of my rambling I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though creative and web design are meant to go hand in hand they don’t always co-exist peacefully so get your concepts down, visualize your idea, sketch out a concept, and work from that. It will keep you on point and you won’t get distracted by other elements of the design and you will have a organized plan of attack aiding you in the long run.