Date: 05/26/06 (WebDesign)    Keywords: css, html, web

I've taken quite a few classes on web design in school, and just wrapped up a class in XHTML. The classes do a great job of teaching you coding, the planning and design stages, and how to make the website clean, well coded, and not a pile of crap. But what most classes don't teach you is how to make your website look good.

I am not a good graphic designer. I used to fancy myself as being a decent artist, I used to draw a lot of still life, abstract, b&w pattern, and Escher-ish optical illusion pieces, but either I've lost my magic touch, or art on a computer is far different than art on paper, because I just can't work up the creativity to think up good designs for webpages.

Currently I want to make one or more webpages to practice my design skills with xhtml and css, but I can't think of what I want my site to look like, or what theme I want it to have.

My question for all you perfessional designers, those who do this for a living, is how do you figure out a design for a page? How do you determine what colors, what pictures, what borders to use? How do you decide where the pictures go on the site? How do you decide where to put the site navigation? How do you figure out the theme of the site?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/webdesign/1116148.html