Fatbusinessman asks “how do people go about their designs?”, so here’s my attempt at an answer. This is not a definitive answer to how I come up with anything. This is frequently not the process I end up using… best laid plans and all that.

I start with an idea - either in my head or something I’ve seen somewhere - a businesscard, a sunset, a circuitboard, a smell, a texture - whatever gets me thinking. I then translate this into a set of images, colour swatches, font swatches etc. I then piss about in Photoshop to come up with some basic building blocks.

I’ll do a rough sketch of what I want and where I want things to end up on the finished site - I find the back on an envelope is perfect for this. Any ‘clever’ things you want to try are worth sketching too (if only as an aide memoir for later) Bearing in mind, at this point, how your structural markup is going to work too. It is crucial that your page makes sense both with and without styling. I also find that a complete Photoshop mockup doesn’t always help. Squeezing yourself into an early corner is not particularly helpful.

And then I code, with the aid of syn Text editor, the edit styles bookmarklet, the web developer toolbar, the w3c validator service and frequent reference to Cascading Stylesheets: The Definitive Guide (btw. I’m still working off the first edition if anyone wants to get me an new one ;) ), Eric Meyer on CSS, The Zen of CSS Design and the CSS Specifications. I also lurk on the css-d and WSG mailing lists, both of which I find invaluable.