Matthew Smith
Matthew is the Creative Director at Zaarly, the mobile, real-time place to ask for anything and get it nearby. He speaks internationally on design, writes for .net Magazine, and believes in love. Matthew lives in Greenville, South Carolina where he founded CoWork Greenville.
You can follow his tweets @whale.
More thoughts by Matthew Smith:
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What is a designer? Is everyone at Dribbble a designer? Is there a distinction that needs to be made between someone who can massage pixels into place to create a stunning 300x400 view of illustration or interface and the individual who knows how to order chaos and solve problems visually, like an entrepreneur, and with care for human realities like budgets and timelines?
I think there is. I think the former is a stylist and the latter is a designer. Creating or copying styles is an art of itself and the talent shown at a place like Dribbble in this area is stunning, but true designers are few and far between. It's an incredibly difficult thing to aspire to, and I'm hoping that I'm on that path.
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We need a raising of the maturity bar in little web industry. I'd like to see more people asking questions of each other and learning from each other. I don't care if you've been using designing for 10years or 10 days, everyone still has something to learn – and often from the most unlikely places.
I'd like to see more people encouraging each other and spurring one another on. I'd like to see less back patting and more challenging articulate critique executed with a healthy measure of grace.
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SEO and concern for conversion are not the enemies of design. Design has a responsibility to know the business goals and to exceed them through great content, clear hierarchical layout structure, and emotionally compelling visual treatment – and testing. Testing is frustrating because it implies that your intuition as a designer is not enough. That implication is correct. Ernest Hemingway is famous for saying that “The first draft of anything is shit”, and it applies to our designs as well.
I think we've begun to align ourselves around camps of data and relational design. The former places value on pure data conversion and the output often feels spammy and unrefined. The latter relies on emotional engagement with the product to produce a connection with the user and subsequently earn their trust and move them to the primary action, but if it falls short of those hopes the user is often blamed for bad taste or stupidity. Both these camps need maturity, these are not conflicting goals, but they often have conflicting processes and execution.
If we can align the scope, constraints, and budget to accommodate for iterative designs for our products and clients we can improve the impact of our UX and design and win the trust of investors and business clients. The end result is that your design is quantifiably stronger, earning you more cash. This has a direct effect on quality of your fermented beverage intake. Thank me by buying me one.
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For this pastry box, I'm just going to ask some questions. Places where my head is at.
- Do you have a work ethic?
- Do you tell your clients how long something will take?
- If you're running late on that, do you let them know ahead of time?
- Are you willing to bust your ass to get something done when you said it would be done?
- Do you expect your client to be the project manager or will you lead it?
- Can you explain what you've designed or do you expect the client to blindly trust you?
- Do you command enough authority in a project to help keep it on track when a client tries to become the designer?
- Are you willing to comp a client when the time it took to complete a project was grossly under your estimate?
- Are you opinionated about how business should be run? Have you thought about it at all?
- Do you call your clients often, or do you always wait to have them call you?
- Does your client know what's coming next in the project, or are they always a little bewildered by the process? Have you asked them?
- If you asked all your former clients to be honest about your performance as a business, not just as a designer, would you be confident or nervous about their response?
Stuff you should be considering. Our industry will never have the authority we need in the coming era if we remain weak in these areas. Press on!
Here are the dates of Matthew Smith's future thoughts:
- Tuesday, 29 May
- Sunday, 24 June
- Monday, 2 July
- Wednesday, 22 August
- Thursday, 20 September
- Saturday, 20 October
- Saturday, 24 November
- Saturday, 22 December