Weightshift recently completed a new website for a great client. We started the project with a brief and scope, which we discussed at length before we delved into the design. All normal protocol for our process.
In the initial presentation, we revealed our concepts. Internally, we found our interpretation to be different and perhaps uncharacteristic of our style. It felt bold and a little daring. At least, that’s what we thought.
Let me back up a little. Some years ago, I considered myself an adaptable designer. A person who designs chameleon-like, acclimating to whatever values the client represented. Which, to a degree, is true.
After the first iteration of this recent project, we received very productive and detailed feedback. Essentially, though, it wasn’t positive. We had failed here. We love feedback, though, and we never, ever, ever take it personally. Such assessments should be taken into thoughtful consideration so as to make the thing you’re making better.
After talking through and thinking further about it, it dawned on me: Yes, I do have a style, and therefore, the studio has a style. And that is why clients come to us.
I began on the second round and embraced my natural tendencies: I approached the site in the way I would innately create it. To forget stepping into someone else’s shoes and to do the job we were hired for and the client was attracted to. To apply the kind of details and touches we’ve assembled on past assignments. To let 15 years of honing design craft into a project that we wanted to make great.
This version was the winner.
We do stellar work for our clients, which is exactly the kind of results they expect. That’s why they hire us. We do our job by taking their brand, product or idea and running it through our lens of design and development. I had forgotten, in a momentary lapse, to be so different. I had forgotten that we have instincts and skills that others see from the outside.
As designers, the magnifying lens is none more prevalent than the one we cast on ourselves. We can be our own worst critic.
Trust yourself to do good work. Trust yourself to do great work.
I lost my iPad on a flight and I’m currently stuck in a region of Italy with barely any wireless connectivity (and let’s not even talk about getting 3G reception or even being able to purchase a SIM card to begin with). The wireless hotspots I can connect to are so slow that most websites are unusable, so dealing with reporting lost items and filling out forms is not exactly a quick or simple activity. If you think the size of websites doesn’t matter because everyone has a good connection these days, think again. Even in a modern country like this one, proper internet access is a privilege. Don’t assume otherwise.
The thing about improv is that it isn’t about being funny, it’s about being a creative contributor to a larger whole. Web design is very similar, I like to think of it as a team sport. Every role has a very specific contribution to something much bigger than the people who built it. Live performance has a lot in common with an online experience.
I am currently taking an improv class and here are a few of the things I have learned from it:
Don’t try to be anything; good, funny, or energetic. Just be. The harder you try to be any one thing, the more you miss the opportunity that presents itself at the time. In design, react to your client’s needs, your team’s capabilities, and your user’s goals. Preconceived ideas can limit your possibilities.
Make your partner look good Set the people up around you to make awesome. Whether you are in a scene or on a design team every role is equally important and the better everyone else is doing, the higher they can elevate you to succeed.
Say “Yes, and…” The word “no” can ruin project and scene mojo pretty fast. In both design and improv the sky is the limit, you can keep things positive while still setting realistic expectations. With the ever-changing nature of the industry, flexibility is invaluable.
Know everyone’s name I am horrible with names. The. Worst. (Though I am pretty good at remembering Twitter handles. ;-) ) Learning everyone’s names in my improv class has been a serious challenge for me, but the benefits have been off the chart. No matter who the next person I get thrown into a scene with is, I know their name. Knowing your team will help create a bond and respect for working quickly under pressure.
Taking an improv class has had an impact on my perspective as a designer and my role in the teams that I work with. If you have the chance to take a class I highly recommend it.
We all see inspirational quotes so often that they are nearly cliché. One of my favorites is “Good things come to those who hustle.” So I thought I could share a timely story that helps back that one up.
We’re coming up on our fifth time running the Front-End Design Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. A question that I get asked often is “how did you start your first conference?”.
The most important things to know are “why” and “how”, which are both intermingled from life experiences that my (now) wife Cherrie and I had in the year before the event. We were engaged and wanted a destination wedding: Turks and Caicos and Jamaica lost out to Key West in order to keep it more accessible for friends and family. It was going to be expensive and we didn’t want to go into debt, so Cherrie lived and worked in NYC for about 6 months. (Partly just to see if she could do it, but also to earn more money. As the great philosopher Jay-Z once said “And since I made it here, I can make it anywhere”.) I worked 2 full-time jobs, one of which was my first job as a web designer for a small shop in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.
There were two significant things that happened that led to why we wanted to run a conference: I attended the 2008 Future of Web Design Conference (which was in NYC in November) and Cherrie and I sadly had to fire our wedding planners about 2 months before our wedding, which was to be in February 2009.
FOWD was amazing. Being in a place with so many like-minded people and hearing stories from people that I had been learning from the past year blew my mind. It was my first conference and I came back completely inspired. I started looking for events like that a little closer to home but I didn’t find much besides a BarCamp.
Meanwhile, we were having a really hard time maintaining communication with our planners in Key West and getting anything booked. We made the decision to lose the planners and have Cherrie take over. I really didn’t do much except for agree to most of her awesome ideas. She put together a fantastic four days in Key West to celebrate with our friends and family.
All of a sudden it was all over and we had nothing to do except to live happily ever after.
Around that same time, Chris Coyier tweeted that he had just spoken to a high school class about web design. So, I pitched Cherrie on an idea. I still wanted a day in Florida to celebrate the web industry and the people who share their knowledge. Cherrie wanted to plan another event, even if it was for a bunch of my fellow web geeks. So, we agreed to give it a shot.
Here’s how it went down.
I sent out a couple of awkward “if you’re not doing anything on this day in July, would you kind of maybe want to come to Florida and talk to people on stage” DMs. Chris was the first to reply and the first to say yes. At that point, it was officially “on”. I asked a few others that I had been learning from and also asked what they would want in order to be able to break away from work and travel here to do it. It was pretty consistent amongst everyone so we started planning and promoting.
Twitter was still relatively focused at the time and I had gotten in early with the completely appropriate handle of “webdesignfanboy”. Since I was early enough and it was clear what I was about, I gained some traction in the follower realm. We relied on Twitter and the blog posts that the speakers wrote for about 97.5% of the promotion. (We whipped up 100 promo post cards and sent them to Florida web design shops as well.) One of my favorite things is that I had recently discovered Ricardo Gimenes and I hired him to do characters for the speakers. He rocks and they were so much fun.
Cherrie said yes to running the conf in March and we ran it on July 31st. We had 7 speakers: Fabio Sasso, Grant Friedman, Jonathan Longnecker, Chris Coyier, John Ashenden, Andrew Maier and Kevin Hale. We were fortunate to have some helpful sponsors and 92 people got to see me nearly pass out from stage fright as I stumbled through welcoming everyone and introducing Fabio.
It was stressful, but totally exhilarating. The speakers absolutely rocked and I was awestruck the whole day. When the presentations were over, Eric Azares sealed the deal on us running another one by walking up and asking if he could buy a ticket for the next one.
Running an event for the first time and putting it together in a few months meant that it wasn’t very efficient, so it cost us a good chunk of cash. It was totally worth it, though, as it started me down a path of front-end development and Cherrie as an event planner. I have personally had so many wonderful opportunities come from it and I now work with the rad folks at Envy Labs. I try to pay back the time Cherrie spends on it by helping with her other events throughout the year, but I’m still in debt in that category.
It’s a lot of work each year, but the benefits outweigh the work so much that it’s not even a factor. We have met so many wonderful people and formed awesome friendships. It’s almost starting to feel like a reunion with friends that we may have not gotten to see much throughout the year. We are sharing knowledge and celebrating community and it is absolutely fantastic. My absolute favorite part has been seeing people progress in skill and in their career path.
Running a conference isn’t for everyone, but there is definitely something that you want to do that feels intimidating. Dive in after it. Good things will come. In the meantime, we’ll be celebrating you and our community in a couple of days. Cheers!
Lester Freamon — the “wise old cop” in The Wire — is one of my favorite characters of all time. One of the roles he plays in the structure of the show is to remind the other characters (and the audience) that the job they’re doing is important, and they have a responsibility to do it right.
This is especially clear in the first season, when they’re setting up the wiretap that gives the show its name. Throughout the drawn-out process of getting the administrative and legal clearance to set up the wire and actually monitor the calls, Freamon is the one advocating for doing things by the book.
One of the rules is that they can’t legally monitor the calls unless they know one of their targets is using the phone. So in order to listen to the calls, they need somebody on the roof nearby to confirm who is talking. When Herc, one of the younger cops starts complaining about spending hours on the roof of a building waiting for drug dealers to make phone calls, Freamon cuts him off:
“Detective, this right here, this is the job. Now, when you came downtown, what kind of work were you expecting?”
I love that line. I think about it every time I’m sitting around with a bunch of designers and we end up complaining about everything we have to put up with to do our jobs. Whether it’s implementation issues, software annoyances, client headaches, or just putting in long hours, we all sound like Herc sometimes. “More bullshit,” we complain.
That’s when I hear Lester Freamon’s voice in my head. “This right here, this is the job. What kind of work were you expecting?”
A Quick Follow-up on the Importance of the Language We Choose
In my recent article on The Pastry Box I specifically chose to use the term ‘impostor phenomenon’ instead of ‘impostor syndrome’ throughout the entire article. In most of the peer-reviewed research I read I saw this reflected as ‘impostor phenomenon’, but it has been pointed out to me that ‘imposter syndrome’ is used fairly often to describe the same thing.
In fact, the latter is used colloquially far more often than ‘impostor phenomenon’.
I made the choice to use ‘phenomenon’ because the word ‘syndrome’ carries with it a host of negative stigma that is wholly unproductive. The term ‘phenomenon’ in this case is at worst a fairly neutral term. Whether or not we recognize that ‘syndrome’ is, in fact, a clinical term that could apply here is orthogonal to the impact that using the term has on those experiencing these feelings, emotions, and experiences.
It has negative stigma. Negative stigma is not helpful to anyone.
Whether we like it or not, words take on cultural additives as we use them. A word may begin it’s career as an idea meaning one thing, but eventually evolve to mean multiple things or something else entirely.
We are all very impressionable. Unconsciously so, even those of us who like to think that we have a thick skin. You cannot escape the unconscious processing of subtle meaning, if you think you can you are a fool. If anyone is interested in talking about this particular point — there is a host of cognitive science research waiting for you.
That being said, the words we use are immensely important, and so I implore you to use the term ‘impostor phenomenon’ when describing these experiences. It makes a difference.
Whenever I hear someone complain that advocates of careful language are trying to be ‘too politically correct’, ‘sugar coated’, or ‘too nice’ I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for them because they don’t understand the difference these things make, and worse they don’t understand how vulnerable they are. They lack the self-awareness that will set them free if they’re ever upset about something someone has said about them.
“Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never —”
Wait, wait. I know this one. Sticks and stones will break my bones. Those will heal up, because biology can do wonderful things like that. But words? “Names will never hurt me” is usually how the rest goes. Those words can still be with you months, years, decades later. They can torment you when you’re trying to fall asleep, apply for a job, or make a new friend.
Words have power because they have meaning: treat them with respect, and treat others with respect accordingly.
I was recently diagnosed with a form of depression. It makes me fail to see the good in myself and interrogates the work I produce. The curious, critical and analytical mind that carried me through a PhD and then helped me forge a new career in web design has turned on itself, picking apart my every endeavour and deed.
Depression means many things to many people. It can have a variety of symptoms and a variety of causes. But for all sufferers of depression the same thing is true — the part of your brain controlling perception is broken. Sufferers receive the same information others receive but cannot process that information in the same way; your perception of the world is fundamentally distorted.
Depression is an incredibly hard thing to talk about because talking openly about our frailties can be regarded as a weakness — or worse, a failure (most crucially by ourselves). But the first step in managing depression is knowing it and to do this we must open up to somebody: whether that is a loved one, a medical professional or a complete stranger. So I’m opening up to you.
I want to take this opportunity — this privileged platform — to share with you that depression is not a weakness; we need to be able to talk openly about mental illness and accept that it is a condition which can affect anybody. Mental health problems affect one in four people. One quarter. 25%. You are not alone.
It’s college graduation season, so there’s been a lot of advice circulating for young designers/coders etc. on how to get a first job and how to succeed at it. A lot of this advice is really good. I want to add a few things from a perspective that doesn’t get much direct attention: what it means to come to a professional world from outside, and how that outsiderness can be both difficult and helpful.
“Outside” can mean a lot of things, and many, many of us who work on the web grew up poor or very far away or without a formal design education or one of a million different outsides. The early web attracted weirdos and misfits like you wouldn’t believe, and many now run successful companies. This is a malleable field, and if you’re interested enough, there’s probably a place for you—but it won’t necessarily be easy to find it. But you don’t have to do it alone.
Culture barriers
If you are coming from outside the usual pool of people who work in Field X, you’re going to hit culture barriers. Some of those barriers need to be rattled and eventually demolished, but some are just about a lack of shared context. Open secrets are the hardest ones to crack when you’re coming in from outside, because no one will take you aside and whisper them in your ear. They’re the air everyone else is breathing. If you’re feeling out of place or you don’t know where to begin, don’t freak out. There are ways to pick up the context you need to thrive.
For starters, figure out who your role models are, even if they’re not doing exactly what you want to be doing. Use your role models’ processes and tools in your own experiments, and credit them when you do. Find out what work-related blogs and books they read, what conferences they go to, and how they talk about their work. Read all the things. Watch all the videos. Develop opinions about what you’re reading and hearing—and try to balance negative criticism with generosity, because there are always complexities that are easy to miss. If the stuff you find this way makes you excited to wake up in the morning, you’re heading in the right direction. If it makes you want to barf on your shoes, maybe try a different part of the industry.
You don’t have to try to sound sophisticated or jaded to fit in. People who are paying attention can tell, and it’s better to just be honest and work at gaining the knowledge you need. When stuff comes up that you don’t know, cop to it and then go look it up or ask questions about it during downtime.
And while you’re at it? Build hard skills other people don’t have. There’s a difference between being literate and having a decent editorial eye and knowing how to professionally copyedit and offer kind, helpful, effective editorial feedback to writers. There’s a difference between knowing the basics of a lot of web stuff and being really really good at writing fast, stable applications. Being a generalist is awesome, but you need to work toward clear specializations as well. It’s not either/or.
Do what you say you’ll do. Make yourself as indispensable as possible by actively tying up loose ends and helping with others’ work. Help the people you work with be awesome. Don’t wait for things to come to you—but you probably already know that, or you wouldn’t be here to begin with.
When good jobs go bad
Some companies are amazing places to work. Some are soul-destroying hellmouths. Most are in the middle, but it’s the second I want you to watch out for. At these companies, you will hear that it’s important to be “a team player without an ego,” which is often code for “you will work late nights, weekends, and holidays because that’s how we do it.” You will find that project and product managers don’t have the power to negotiate reasonable deadlines, that contracts go unsigned, and that executive whims regularly derail projects. And sometimes a company is reasonably healthy, but you’ll wind up working with—or for—someone whose workplace behavior would make perfect sense if he or she were five years old.
The hard reality is that you will probably have at least one terrible job, if you haven’t already. And you probably won’t be able to quit immediately, especially if you don’t have financial support from your family, or if you’re reliant on a sponsored visa, or you have kids of your own, or a dozen other things. This is hugely stressful even for people who aren’t particularly vulnerable, and no easy advice helps.
But you won’t be stuck forever. Our industry includes boatloads of kind, generous human beings and plenty of organizations that will support you in having a healthy life. You just have to make a path to get to them. How? Learn all you can where you are. Be good to people. And above all, get outside your company (or regional) bubble, talk to people who are doing amazing things, and ask how you can help. Sometimes you can do it all at the same time. Sometimes you’ll have to take a deep breath and leave a bad situation to get to a better one.
The fact that you’re reading this website suggests that you’re working in one of the few professional sectors that’s actually booming right now, which makes you luckier than most people in the world. You don’t have to settle for misery. Which brings me to your secret advantage.
The dangers of being valuable
There are a lot of open jobs in tech right now that pay a lot of money and offer a lot of perks for people with the right skills. If your background hasn’t prepared you to assume that you’re destined for a high salary job with a prestigious company, this may feel especially surreal. This is good! One of the hidden strengths of being from not-around-here is that some things that seem normal to most people in the field may seem weird to you. And sometimes, sensitivity to weirdness can save you.
You may, for instance, already realize that if you’ve been hired into a prestigious, high-paying job as a junior designer/programmer/whatever, this probably has as much to do with a fluctuating market as with your own skills. If the people you grew up around don’t have access to that kind of job, you probably already know that you can be extremely skilled and work very hard and still barely make a living.
So why is that awareness useful? Leaving aside minor things like empathy and wariness toward entitlement, you’ll be better prepared for inevitable changes in the market value of your own skills. More importantly, you’ll be significantly less vulnerable to one particular flavor of manipulation: When you internalize the idea that you’re precious and irreplaceable in a company or an industry, it’s easy to be wooed into life-altering decisions like handing over years of 80-hour weeks to companies whose work you don’t actually care about. The more you accept this flattery as your due, the easier it is to be hypnotized by interests that conflict with your own.
Keeping the rest of the world—including the part you came from—in your peripheral vision can keep you from getting bewitched.
If you write code, if you participate in the act of programming, then you are a programmer. We can add a clause to this that suggests regularity — someone who programs often is a programmer. That’s all it takes to be a programmer. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started and worked your way through the fundamentals like control structures and taming functions. It doesn’t matter if for some reason you don’t feel like a programmer. It doesn’t matter if someone pays you or not, unless you really find it important to be a professional programmer. If you program and you do it over and over, you become a programmer.
Last week I had the privilege of being amongst the speakers at JSConf 2013. The best part about this particular speaking opportunity was that I was able to give a non-technical talk about programming that I’d wanted to give for a long time. It was a culmination of all the things regarding learning to program that I’ve talked about here on The Pastry Box stitched together with further anecdotes and advice. It talked about cognitive biases and tried to convince people to get their biases out of the way so they could realize their potential. One of the slides in my presentation addressed impostor syndrome (known as impostor phenomenon in peer-reviewed, formal research) as it relates to the craft of programming, but really the point I was trying to make could be applied to anybody in any field.
Impostor phenomenon, explained simply, is the experience of feeling like a fraud (or impostor) while participating in communities of highly skilled participants even when you are of a level of competence to match those around you. Impostor phenomenon is highly correlated with individuals who are successful; arguably success here means success as perceived by others. The important thing to note is that this experience isn’t isolated to people we perceive as experts, only that it is a counterintuitive notion: one might assume that as they develop their skills in a craft further that their confidence should increase and their insecurity about whether they are good and whether they belong would fade away. It turns out that this is not the case for a lot of people.
I found myself wondering if my talk was going to be all that useful to the people I perceived as experts; I questioned whether or not the smart people I admired that I knew would see it were going to find value in this thing that I had made to share with everyone.
I gave the talk, and afterwards several of them thanked me for that slide. Some of them my heroes, they took me aside and confided their thanks. They confided their relief.
In the end I wasn’t shocked that the successful people I admired had experienced impostor phenomenon and talked to me about it — I was shocked that I somehow thought the people I see as heroes were somehow exempt from having it. I did the one thing I didn’t want to do: make that assumption about anyone.
We’re all just doing the best we know how to when it comes to programming, it’s just that some people have more practice coming across as confident than others do. Never mistake confidence for competence, though.
I’m just going to put this out there: to anyone of any skill level who reads this, if you’re ever feeling like you’re a fraud in your field; if you ever feel alone or if you worry that you’re not smart enough or good enough as the next programmer, just come talk to me. I’m a busy person by design because I can’t stand to be idle, but I’ll make time for you because feeling this way is isolating, lonely, and not constructive. I think of all the missed opportunities I let pass by all because I was worried about making mistakes, not being perceived as an equal by my peers, and all the code I never wrote just because I was intimidated by all the great code and smart programmers out there.
I want to listen to what you have to say, to tell you that you’re not alone, and that your heroes are human too just like you.
While my friends hawked video rentals and pulled espresso shots, I spent college working at my county’s rape crisis center. For $7.25 an hour, graciously provided by federal work-study funds, I trained volunteers and answered crisis-line calls. I wrote newsletters and set up card tables at local events.
But mostly, I talked to 11-year-olds.
Armed with laminated poster boards and nametags, a colleague and I would walk into a new sixth-grade classroom each week. For an hour at a time, three days in a row, we’d talk about staying safe, about saying no, and about being assertive. About the way boys and girls are often expected to be, and how that sometimes sets everyone up for trouble. About how abusers will sometimes tell you it’s your fault, but it’s not, no matter what.
At the end of each day, we’d collect “anonymous questions”: little paper scraps on which students could write down anything they were afraid to ask out loud. If they wanted, we always said, they could also ask for help and include their names.
In nearly every class in nearly every school, someone would write about abuse he’d experienced, or that of a friend who’d confided in him. They were often aching to tell someone.
We were just the first ones to ask.
Sometimes it took two hours in a cramped back room behind the principal’s office, sometimes ten rushed minutes in a quiet hallway. But each abuse disclosure unfolded in largely the same way: slowly at first, and then all at once. Stories and feelings and sometimes tears gushing forth, engulfing them. Engulfing me.
And then that was it. We’d pack up our role-playing props and poster boards, never to see those kids again. We couldn’t return to their classrooms or contact them at home, much less find out whether they had gotten help or their abusers had been stopped. We simply filled out the requisite forms and handed them off to the school’s administrators, hopeful—yet far from certain—that things would work out.
But I didn’t want a form. I wanted to make things right for those kids. I wanted to take them in my arms and tell them, unequivocally, that they were safe now, and that it would never happen again.
Instead, I left those sessions angry, sad, and drained. I was angry because they deserved better, and even angrier because I knew how hard it would be for them to escape not just the abuse, but feeling that they’d done something wrong, that it was their own damn fault, that they should be ashamed.
I wanted to wash the guilt away for them.
But life doesn’t work that way. Whether you’re a crisis worker or a web worker, it’s all the same. You can’t fix things for the people you’re there to help. You can only get them started.
In hallways and counselors’ offices, I may have loosened the seal of fear and shame that was bottling up a child’s voice. Yet she was the one who had to speak, and keep speaking, until her life changed. She had to regain her own sense of power, not be saved by mine.
My head knew this, but my heart wasn’t convinced. I’d still spend every drive back to the office the same way: shaking with frustration and wishing I could swoop in to make it all OK.
It wasn’t until much later, years into a consulting career, that I understood how foolish this longing really was. Promising solutions to people in need, even people in crisis, may be immediately comforting, but it’s ultimately dishonest.
At my best, I can ask the questions they’ve been aching to answer. I can light a path between the experience they know and the experience that could be. I can give them the space to find their way, and the confidence that their way is worth finding. But their problems will never be mine to fix.
Soothing CEOs with bon mots and buzzwords or tossing technology around like confetti won’t help. Real change comes from within. There’s no outsourcing it, no papering it over, no substituting someone else’s efforts for internal ones.
The world doesn’t need more solutioneers. It needs more advocates.
Empty. Finished. I drag the pen point over the paper, and it tugs the surface with it. The pen, formerly of no particular importance or consequence, is out of ink. Spent, it no longer translates gesture to paper.
This, an ordinary event, doesn’t ordinarily turn heads. Yet this everyday ballpoint and I have made it, together, for months. Through airport security and droning meetings, through bags and pockets. It’s persisted. And, ultimately, triumphed as it has shown up here today, doing the last bit of what it was intended to do. What it intended to do.
How often do we see empty? Threadbare? Erosion? Patina? We subvert it — when we’re not intentionally designing it — aiming to finish our products’ sentences and anticipate objects’ needs, replacing them before they’re obsolete or worn.
There’s something to be said for showing up to finish what you started. Perhaps it’s a communication of commitment, of consistency, of gratitude. But when two parties show up to start a job and finish, still together, it’s rare. And beautiful. A perfectly dotted i.
All that advice out there on the internet, the how-to checklists that tell you to prepare more thoughtfully and rehearse more and be more attuned to other people’s point of view and maintain more accurate documentation and obsess about the details? Maybe that advice isn’t for you. Maybe the only advice you need is to listen to yourself more.
It’s very easy to announce that you’re going to do something. Be wary of announcing what you will do, and make a point instead of celebrating what you have done. When you’re planning and plotting, that’s not the time for pronouncements or fanfare about the great work you’re going to unveil sometime in the future. Save it for when there’s something to see. It will be all the more impressive if people don’t see it coming.
Four years ago, I was hired by Clearleft as a visual designer. Although it was recognised that I could write good front-end code, the nature of projects at that time meant different roles were segregated. After all, it is easier to manage projects when the component parts—user experience, visual design, and front-end development—can be pieced together like a jigsaw.
Responsive design has seen the boundaries between these disciplines blur; a nightmare for project managers, but a blissful existence for me.
Happiest when exploring the intersection between design and development, I can now take a website from visual concept right through to production-ready code. I can move between graphics application and browser at will, making changes late into production. The whole process feels like a two-way conversation between designer and developer, fluid and fleeting, yet set entirely within my own mind.
Still, there are times when I’m responsible for visual design alone. This inevitably leads to discussions about handover. There is never a good time to hand over a design, be it to a developer or even another designer. No amount of documentation can hope to describe the many rules, nuances and edge-cases that go into designing a website. Not working directly with the medium is anathema to the act of design.
A single-handed approach has its downsides, though. In seeking full ownership of a design and its implementation, a broader perspective can be lost. Critique and code review is essential.
Recently, we have started holding weekly design reviews. Not only can I share my work with others in the company, but I’m forced to articulate the micro-processes that have taken place internally. Anyone in the company can attend, and some of the most interesting discussions have touched on how developers interpret visual design comps. In short, it is easy for both parties to make assumptions, and only closer co-operation can prevent this from happening.
After a decade of self-contained practice, designers and developers are now having to open up to each other. In this new world, is there any room left for solo artists?
Building for the web can be like building on quicksand. Browsers have tended to do mostly the same thing, but have occasional, maddeningly unpredictable differences. For example, browsers all come with “user agent stylesheets” — a default set of CSS styles, so that a heading looks like a heading etc., even before you style the page1. Of course, every browser engine uses a slightly different set of defaults.
One example of this was default list styles, where Internet Explorer and Opera initially2 indented lists with margin-left: 30pt; in their default browser stylesheets, while Firefox and KHTML went with padding-left: 40px;. If you wanted to change the default indent, specifying ul {padding-left: 0;} would lead to very different results across browsers.
To get a little stability, some developers reset all margins and padding using the universal selector:
* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
With this at the start of your stylesheet, when you specified a list indent you got what you expected. However, using * meant the default margin and padding were nuked for all elements, which became painful as soon as you added a <form> element.
Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer started discussing a more targeted way to address user agent style differences in 2004, with the YUI CSS Reset appearing in 2006, and the Meyer Reset in 2007.
The point of a reset is to zero out as much as possible … [and] to serve as a starting point for your own baseline styles — Eric Meyer
This resets several properties on many (but not all) elements back to the equivalent of plain text. Because only appropriate elements are reset, this avoids some of the problems of * {margin: 0; padding: 0;}. We can then define styles for these reset “unstyled” properties, safe in the knowledge we’re building on a stable, cross-browser base. This “unstyled” styling also acts as a reminder to consciously set appropriate styles for these elements.
Problems with CSS resets
CSS resets have been a lifesaver, but especially with the rise of frameworks they are now often used as-is. For example, Eric assumed people would build on the reset styles he proposed, overriding them as appropriate, and version 1 of the Meyer Reset included this rule for a time:
Sadly, not everyone did define focus styles, and Eric has removed this from v2.
Using a reset can also start to feel a little perverse. Resetting browser default styles does force us to deliberate on how each element should appear, helping ensure we use elements for their semantics and not their default styling. But for elements like i and em that’s almost always the browser default style. Other default browser styles, like the text sizes for headings which used to be ridiculously large, have changed to become passable defaults. There’s also the problem of someone wanting to use a reset HTML element after handoff, still with only the “unstyled” reset styles specified.
For me the main issue with resets is inheritance, leading to spam in your browser dev tools. When you’re trying to track down a CSS problem on a deeply nested element in someone else’s code, this does not help:
CSS reset rules repeating due to inheritance
Normalize.css
Nicolas Gallagher and Jonathan Neal have taken a different approach with Normalize.css, “a small CSS file that provides better cross-browser consistency in the default styling of HTML elements”. As with CSS resets it gives us a reliable cross-browser starting point — the main reason for using a reset in the first place — but the two approaches are philosophically different.
CSS resets override user agent styles to return many elements back to an “unstyled” state, a level foundation we can safely build upon. However, we then need to define styles for most elements before we can build with them. Normalize.css instead addresses only the inconsistencies between user agent default styles, choosing the most appropriate default where there are differences. We get a safe cross-browser foundation here too, but one that includes normalized user agent styles as basic building materials ready for use. It’s basically a kind of an idealized, cross-browser version of CSS 2.1’s Default style sheet. For both ways we then need to add our own overriding styles to build the view, but because the browser defaults remain with Normalize.css, in general fewer styles need to be added.
Because the changes in Normalize.css are a lot more targeted, there isn’t an inheritance cascade of overwritten rules in your browser’s developer tools. Here’s a simple <ul>: “unstyled”, with the Meyer Reset, and with Normalize.css versions 1 and 2:
An “unstyled” unordered list elementApplying the Meyer ResetApplying Normalize.css v1Applying Normalize.css v2
You can clearly see the difference in philosophy, with the Meyer Reset example appearing as two lines of plain text with no margins, padding or bullets, while the Normalize.css examples are similar to the default styling. The difference in the styles applied to this <ul> are also easy to see.
However, these are not all the styles being applied to the <ul>. For comparison, here’s the same “unstyled” screenshot, but with the user agent styles visible, in Firefox 21 and Opera Next 15:
Mozilla user agent stylesOpera user agent styles
This is the CSS that we’re resetting or normalizing.
Normalize.css version 2 supports modern browsers plus IE 8, whereas version 1 also contains additional support for legacy browsers like IE 6 and 7. These older browsers need more normalization, and this can have minor disadvantages, for example the added vertical margins for the nested list in the Normalize.css v1 screenshot above. This split into two versions is useful if you no longer need to provide old browsers with Grade A support, and also if you want to learn about old browser quirks.
Normalize.css also helps correct some browser bugs, including “display settings for HTML5 elements, correcting font-size for preformatted text, SVG overflow in IE9, and many form-related bugs across browsers and operating systems”. For example, the following CSS fixes WebKit issues with HTML5’s new <input type="search"> element:
/**
* 1. Address `appearance` set to `searchfield` in Safari 5 and Chrome.
* 2. Address `box-sizing` set to `border-box` in Safari 5 and Chrome
* (include `-moz` to future-proof).
*/
input[type="search"] {
-webkit-appearance: textfield; /* 1 */
-moz-box-sizing: content-box;
-webkit-box-sizing: content-box; /* 2 */
box-sizing: content-box;
}
Without it, WebKit’s default use of -webkit-appearance: searchfield; for type="search" prevents the styling of font, padding, border, and background properties on OS X and iOS, and gives buggy behavior for the border property on Windows.
An added bonus is Normalize.css is heavily commented and well-documented, helping you learn why each rule is there. This does make it noticeably longer than CSS resets, but when minified and Gzipped even the larger Normalize.css v1 is only 1KB.
Conclusion
While philosophically different to CSS resets like the Meyer Reset, Normalize.css is very much carrying on the same tradition, continuing in the footsteps of Tantek and Eric. You might even already be using it — it’s a core part of HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, and YUI’s new Pure.
User agent stylesheets are converging, and hopefully one day we won’t need to reset or normalize. There’s even a valid argument for not worrying about small differences between browsers (although being a Snook-level genius helps with that). But for now if you’re using a CSS reset, or nothing at all, give Normalize.css a try on your next project.
Addenda
[1] You can see the user agent style sheets for Mozilla, WebKit, and IE. CSS2.1 User Agent Style Sheet Defaults highlights the differences across (older) browsers. These styles also include things like style {display: none;} — try adding style {display: block;} to your CSS and see what happens.
[2] Since then, all browsers have migrated to setting list indenting via padding-left or padding-start, with IE7 being the last IE browser to use margin-left for this.
My thanks to Eric Meyer and Nicolas Gallagher for their feedback on this article, and for these wonderful tools.
Postscript: While nuking margins and padding on all elements with * {margin: 0; padding: 0;} is gonna be a bad time, there is one universal selector-based reset you should still consider: * {box-sizing: border-box;}. This changes padding and border to being part of an element’s width, rather than additional to it. For more information, check out Paul Irish’s article “box-sizing: border-box FTW”.
It sure is easy to waste time sitting at a computer. I’d list the ways, but you know the ways. Some of that time is required because we’re decompressing. But some of that time is because we’re being lazy, procrastinating, or worse, lacking the self-awareness to even realize we’re burning hours.
I don’t have a solution, but I have one little idea. Every time you sit down at the computer, do at least one thing of significant lasting value. Think through a problem. Write an email that connects with someone. Design something new or iterate a design that needs it. Help someone. Write something intended for publication. Work on the digital empire that is you.
Prototyping is a fundamental part of our approach. From quick, self-contained one-offs to more complex interactions, we’ve embraced the process, elevating it from what many have considered a nicety to a necessity. A prototype’s value is in communicating the intended idea over code reuse and pixel perfection. Each project is different as are its requirements, and these variances mean we don’t adopt one systematic way to do prototyping. In evaluating the needs of the projects, often we find ourselves prototyping to answer questions that we can’t immediately answer. Can we do this? How would this work? These questions often pop up early in the discussion or creative process – so the need to answer them should be just as timely. Is our basket big enough for all those eggs we want to put in it?
Patents obviously. Unfortunately no attack scenario for those. No attack scenario for increased government interference either.
Mobile maybe. Although mobile more seems like a big opportunity than a problem per se. We need to get offline to work, keep pushing performance, introduce more features to enable applications to work without walled gardens, etc. And of course site developers need to stop being silly about mobile and make sites just work. No endless redirects that lose track of your target page, no “install app” spam, no plugins, you know.
Parallel computing. It seems like we will get ever more cores, yet most of the web platform is a single-threaded operation. Workers exists, but we need to do more.
Would love to learn what other people think the really important problems are.
After dealing with charts, graphs and data visualisations my opinions have softened. There are so many ‘right’ answers to things it becomes hard to see bad work. Even if I personally dislike a design, a good designer can back up their reasoning with sound advice and justifications. So what is left is bad design, built on bad choices. Some of those bad choices are habitual (that’s the way we’ve always done it), inertia (the tool makes it so easy to create these designs) or ignorance (we had no idea the problems with pie charts, everyone else uses them, how bad could they really be?). It takes a lifetime of teaching and training to change all three of these categories, but the designers need to be open to changing. You can never simply walk in and say, ‘this is crap’. That is the last thing people want to hear about their precious design, it is their baby, they did the best they could and you just came in and knocked it over. There needs to be a much better way. Some days I can do it, some days it is hard, but you can never criticise base on your personal opinions.
I’ve been doing this—on a very focused topic—for coming up on two years now, and encountered resistance every step of the way. It has been incredibly frustrating, and for a long time occupied every bit as many hours of my free time as a part-time job would, for myself and a handful of other members of my community group. Despite the efforts of dozens of native and web developers, despite tremendous and highly vocal support from the developer community, and despite the formal publication of our proposed spec, we have made next to no real-world progress. When we engage UA representatives, we’re usually met by something to the tune of “you should involve more browser representatives in these discussions” and a prompt end to the discussion we aimed to start. There has been no implementation progress, apart from a Chromium implementation done by one of our members. There is no incentive to help us. We’re largely regarded as pests.
It sounds like a ton of work because it is. It isn’t pleasant work, and you’ll receive very little help along the way. And after putting enough time and effort into it for—literally—several years, you may not make any progress anyway.
I left this comment on a G+ post about getting more web developers involved in web standards, last month.
I should say up-front that I do stand by it: working in web standards is incredibly frustrating. It involves no small amount of interaction with people who seem to have graduated from the Hacker News Commenter School of Diplomacy. We “authors” don’t hold much weight in standards discussions; at least, nowhere near as much as browser representatives do.
Now, do I think more full-time designers and web developers should get involved in standards, after all this glowing endorsement? Absolutely. The fact is, we don’t have the kind of voice we ought to have because we’re not there. “Author preference” is very often used to argue for or against something in a standards discussion, but very few of us are around to agree or disagree. We’re a talking point more than we’re active participants.
Join a mailing list, start a community group; make yourself heard. When you see someone post “I think developers will prefer X,” speak up. When you’re building something and find yourself cursing out some strange syntax or thinking to yourself “this would have made so much more sense if,” don’t chalk it up to someone in web standards dropping the ball. Don’t assume someone with a louder voice than yours is going to keep it from happening again.
It has now got to the stage where, to access my online bank accounts I need to remember the following:
For my personal account…
User ID
Something given to me that I cannot change. I use my preferred browser to remember this, and as a back-up (as we all know how we cannot rely only on this due to different devices) I keep a scrappy card in my purse that my bank supplied me with when registering for online banking. My User ID is written on it — luckily, I used a biro.
Password
As it says on the tin. Something we expect, which can be easily remembered as we set it ourselves.
Memorable info
Three digits from my memorable info required. See below on how easy it is to forget such a thing you set at sometime in the past.
Security number
Something I discovered when trying to change my memorable info to something more… memorable. After requesting the change online, I then got told to call the bank and quote a
Reference number (something different again, given to me then and there on the screen). I then got told on the phone that I would be sent a
Security number in the post — when I receive it, I should call back.
Four days went by before I received the Security number (as it was over a weekend), meaning I could not access either my personal or business account for that time. I then called — had to give the reference number (I hadn’t written this down so had to request to change my memorable info again, just to get it), and security number, before then being told I could access my online accounts again.
Oh, and I need to ‘memorise my security number and throw it away’.
For my business account (in brief)…
User ID
Password
Pin number to be used via a card reader supplied by the bank
8 digit code given to me from the card reader
Security number (if I wish to edit anything within my account)
This of course is not including what I need to know for someone to be able to pay money into my account. For that I would need:
Account Number
Sort code
Bank name and address
And for my international clients:
BIC / Swift number
IBAN number
Bank name and address
Having fallen victim to fraud in the past, I’m very aware of the dangers of it — in my case it was in the USA where they take your card away from you, you then sign (and tip) after they return it, meaning they have to hold your card details for a period of time. Something I never feel comfortable with.
It had nothing to do with someone accessing my account through online means.
Being able to access, move around, and be fully aware of my own money whether that be in person at the bank or more conveniently (and importantly to me), online — is one of our most important rights, as a human being and as a paying customer.
We line the pockets of the banks by giving them interest on the money we keep with them. In many a scenario we pay them for other services and privileges also, but the point is we pay them for a service, much like we do any other.
I would like (us all) to challenge the banking industry. I would ask them this:
“If you could design a service that allows people to do as they like with their money, that’s safe, simple, and removes all of the archaic nonsense we’re now simply used to — what would it be?”
This of course would be backed up by us giving the industry all the help and expertise they need to make such a thing happen.
I stood there, 18-inches away from Mark Rothko’s work. At 12 years old, I allowed myself to be completely absorbed by it. I allowed it to speak to me—to tell me its story. Like many of Rothko’s paintings, this piece was named “Untitled” so I had no guidance as to what to think or feel as I experienced the painting. I understood it in a way only I could because I brought my own history and my own expectations to the piece. I saw in the painting what I needed to see.
A few years ago, I was in the process of designing new business cards. I decided that I would include my name, my title, my email address, and my Twitter handle. I started to layout the information and realized that I didn’t know what to put as my title. At the time, I was working as a professor at the university level, so I could have put “Professor.” But it seemed limiting—I was doing so much more than just teaching. I was writing, speaking, designing, and more. I struggled with finding a title that would capture who I was and what I did. So I designed my business cards without a title.
In our industry, we see a lot of titles like “Rockstar” or “Ninja.” Heck, I’ve even used the title “Maker of Awesomeness.” Although, some people might actually think they are rock stars, I’m not sure all who wear this label truly believe they are. We are at a time and place in our industry where most of us do a lot of different things. We serve in many different roles. Our roles, like the fields of color in Rothko’s painting have bled together. They now overlap. They have created new shapes. Job titles that once explained our neatly contained roles, no longer do because our roles are no longer neatly contained. It’s no wonder we turn to titles like Rockstar, Ninja, and Maker of Awesomeness. We don’t know how to describe our roles because our responsibilities are so varied.
Designers develop and Developers design. Most everyone is expected to write some sort of copy, but are all of us Writers? How do we encapsulate the vast diversity that each of us do in a title? How do we say “jack of all trades” on a business card without saying “jack of all trades?”
In our industry, we don’t yet have the language that supports the change from specialist and compartmentalist to generalist that has occurred. A specialist is a someone who has more expertise in one area over others. A compartmentalist is someone who has equal expertise in only one area. A generalist is someone who has equal expertise in most areas.
Most hiring companies can’t afford specialists, desire generalists, and will die with compartmentalists. It’s very challenging for teams to function when they are built with specialists and compartmentalists because only specific people can perform specific tasks. This becomes a problem when a team member gets sick, goes on vacation, or leaves the team altogether.
The team is left asking: Who takes on their tasks?
When life events such as these occur, projects get bottlenecked. Sometimes projects completely stall or fail. Also, in a work environment with specialists and compartmentalists, during the lifecycle of a project there are often times when some members of the team sit idle while other team members are pulling intense hours. However, when a team is made of generalists, bottlenecking is less likely to happen because team members are able to perform any and all of the tasks needed to get a project done. Hiring companies need generalists not to survive, but to thrive.
Although it’s easy to create a job title for a specialist or compartmentalist because either type of person really only holds one role at one time, generalists are who companies need. On the other hand, it’s challenging to create a job title for a generalist because they hold many roles at one time. With hiring companies moving towards hiring generalists, it’s easier to find a job as a generalist but more difficult to find a job title.
Until we have the language that supports the change from specialist and compartmentalist to generalist, maybe we go “Untitled.” Maybe, like Rothko’s paintings, we embrace the changing shape of our fields. Maybe we allow them to bleed and to blend. Maybe we allow them to take the shape they need to take in order to create the masterpieces held within our industry.
“Untitled.” What if we allow ourselves to be seen by other people in ways similar to Rothko’s paintings? When people get close to us and engage with us, they bring their own history and expectations to us. They see in us what they need to see. We are to them, what they need us to be. Since we are generalists, we are able to live authentic untitled careers. Careers that allow us to be what each person we engage with need us to be. Careers that allow us to be who we need ourselves to be.
The new forms are what people talk about. They win awards, clients, the praise of your peers, and money. They start to get reused, adapted, and become a shorthand for kinds of storytelling. Our collective attention privileges the thing.
But it’s worth remembering that they’re the substrate of a process. What you see rests on experiments with framing word and image in certain ways, dividing and managing readers’ attention and rhythm and flow, and a whole mess of technological superglue that bonds them together.
More often than not, it’s the form that gets copied, not the process that it came from. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to copy the thing. But to mimic something without understanding why it works is to become a cargo cult, unlikely to reap the benefits you’re hoping for.
The thing doesn’t matter. It — along with the assumptions, gambles, and affordances inherent — is simply a stake in the ground.
This worked here.
It allows the adjacent possible, the next set of forms, to be uncovered.
Maybe it’s also because the thinking behind form-making is hard to decipher, and that we’re rarely comfortable with talking about this stuff. Not in the open, anyway, and not nearly enough.
Three pieces of advice that have stuck with me for many years.
“Do good work and everything else will follow.” Tom Hughes c. 2001
When I was barely out of my teens, I luckily got to know Tom. He’s someone who has done everything... co-founded Idealab, ex-Apple, ex-Lotus, ex-Polaroid etc. etc. He can talk about doing projects with Andy Warhol! The advice he gave us that stuck was that doing good work was the spine on which everything else could be built. A little trite-sounding maybe, but it’s worked out ok so far.
“Politely decline once, then take an offered gift.” Raymond Burka c. 1997
My grandfather (who we called Opa) was kind and generous. Once, during a visit in my high school years, he offered ten dollars each to my brother and I as we headed out the door to the movie theater.
Opa: “Here boys, let me pay for the movie.”
My brother: “No, no, we don’t need it, thank-you so much.”
Opa: “No, really, let me pay for the movie.”
My brother: “It’s ok Opa, we really don’t need it.”
Opa: “Politely decline once, then take an offered gift.”
“Design something like you mean it.” [heavily paraphrased] David Carson at FITC conference Toronto in 2005.
I’ve been to a zillion conference presentations over the past eight years and twenty seconds of David’s talk has still stuck with me. He showed a photograph of two garage doors in an alley. One had a professionally designed No Parking sign bolted to it — big P in a circle with a slash through it and a perfectly typeset warning that ‘violators will be prosecuted.’ The neighboring garage had NO PARKING hastily scrawled across it in blood-colored spray paint. In a pinch, I’d definitely avoid the axe-murdering psycho door.
I was once told an old Chinese proverb that in the West when we are young we use our health to become affluent but then when we are old we use our affluence to buy back our health. I laughed it off, knowingly but without really taking on board what was said.
I’m reminded of this proverb after recently cutting out caffeine. I’ve been over-caffeinated since my student days and coffee is something I love. But I was becoming increasingly cranky. I was finding it difficult to get to sleep, struggling to concentrate on work and — as my wife Peta will gladly testify — mornings were a real challenge.
One thing I quickly noticed after cutting out caffeine was how tired I was. All the time. This wasn’t just down to a lack of the steady stream of stimulant which had been a staple for so long. It was because my mind and body were exhausted and I’d been blocking it out. I couldn’t hear the things my body was trying to tell me because I was drowning it out with noise.
Our industry celebrates industry. We toil at things we love and very often when we’ve done a hard day’s work we toil further at the itches we want to scratch. Many of us — myself included — are incredibly fortunate to be working doing something we regard as a hobby. But our industry also never sleeps. Our curiosity makes it hard to switch off and we can all too easily celebrate burning “the midnight oil”.
I’m not going to tell anyone to give up coffee but I’m going to say that we need to get to know our bodies better. We need to rediscover our natural rhythms — both the peaks and the troughs — and learn how we can work with them rather than against them. Listen to your body and be sure you’re not drowning out what it’s trying to say.
Congratulations, recent graduates, you’ve read Mike’s post and landed yourself one of those design jobs he talked so much about. You start next week…now what? Here are ten tips to help you survive your first year on the job and come across as the earnest young go-getter that you are.
Say “please” and “thank you.” Learn everyone’s name. Talk to everyone in the office. Look people in the eye. Hold the door for others. Shake hands firmly. Be gracious. Smile. The quickest way to gain a reputation as a nice person to work with is to be a nice person to work with. This not only applies to interactions with co-workers, but also with receptionists, restaurant staff, office janitors, etc.
Be proactive and anticipate needs. Look for opportunities to fill gaps. Don’t sit around waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Step up.
Don’t avoid meetings. In fact, ask to sit in on as many as you can. It’s a chance to show your face to people who have no idea who you are. It’s also a chance to receive news first-hand, and to observe how your managers and co-workers communicate with each other and with clients. Don’t avoid happy hours either. Letting loose with your co-workers builds camaraderie. Just don’t get shit-faced. Not yet, anyway.
Keep your ears open to the tides and rumblings of the office. Awareness is your friend.
Never be the last one to arrive in the morning, and never be the first one to leave at night. People notice.
You’re about to make some money, likely more than you’ve ever made in your entire life thus far. Learn how to manage it. If you’re in a place like New York or San Francisco, most of your salary will exit your bank account in the form of rent. Adjust accordingly. Note: for a while, you will likely be earning less than almost everyone else in your office. This is not a grievous injustice.
You just spent four years explaining your work to students and professors—people who know color theory, who know who Paul Rand is, who know exactly what “vertical rhythm” means. Be prepared to explain your work to clients—people who might not even know what a typeface is—because they’ll be paying you from now on.
The ability to communicate effectively is a powerful skill, so stop writing like a student and start writing like a professional adult human being. Poor writing is bad, but “awkward formality” isn’t far behind.
Difficult conversations are better had in person or over the phone, not via email, chat, or text messages. Learn to embrace one-on-one communication with co-workers and clients, particularly when delivering bad news. This is also important when you want something (like a nicer chair or a new monitor), and especially when you want something bigger (like a promotion or a raise).
Be assertive. A lot of people might tell you to keep your mouth shut—and that’s not a bad idea at first—but long-term that will earn you a reputation as a pushover. Voice your thoughts positively and constructively, especially if someone asks for it.
Good luck out there. Your education is just beginning.
It is with great pride that I welcome you to the workforce. I realize many of you are still preparing for finals. Getting your portfolios together. Preparing oral defenses. That sort of thing. But I’m guessing that right below the surface of those immediate and real concerns, the anxiety of what comes next may have started to take hold.
It’s cool. I am here to help you. I am a job creator. And contrary to what you may have been told in school, you are about to enter a market awash in opportunity. Especially if you’re entering the technology and interactive design market. Which doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna have to go out there and nail an interview—because you will. So if you’ll give me a few minutes of your precious time I have a few tips that may help you land the job of your dreams.
Get your house in order
Don’t even think about looking for a job without an online presence. If you’re a designer you better have an online portfolio. If you’re a developer, show me some code samples. And don’t just show me your work is pretty, describe what problems you were solving.
And as much as I hate to say this, get a LinkedIn profile. Otherwise, prospective employers are gonna look at your Facebook page, which should be cleaned up but not to the point where it’s obvious you’ve cleaned it up. Leave a beer bong shot or two.
Buy a decent outfit to interview in. Tights aren’t pants and flip flops aren’t shoes.
Where are these jobs at, fool?
Good question. There are a few excellent job boards you should get familiar with. Start with Authentic Jobs and 37 Signals Job Board. Stay away from Craigslist and stuff like that, they’re shit shows.
Get names
When you finally find a job you want to apply for do some research. Find out the name of the person who’ll be receiving your email. Hint: They’re not called Hiring Manager. (Also, if you assume the hiring manager is a man, you suck.) If it’s a small shop, just address it to the principal by name. Don’t address your letter to the dog, even if the company is stupid enough to list a dog on their website with the rest of the staff.
Even better, network
“Networking” is kind of a gross word. It’s true. But, nepotism is real and making those connections will serve you throughout the duration of your career. Hiring can feel like an exhausting crapshoot. People hire their friends and their friends’ friends before they start picking random strangers from the jobs@company.com inbox. Tell everyone you know what sort of job you are looking for and ask for introductions to anyone they know who works in your desired field. Then, when one of these people is asked “Hey, do you know anyone looking for a job?” your name will come up.
You can go to a “networking mixer” if you like drinking with sad people in uncomfortable clothes, but it won’t be nearly as effective as working your existing friends and relatives. Even your professors. They had dreams once.
No one wants to read your cover letter.
Write a good email. The goal of the email is to get an in-person interview. Explain why you’re qualified. Explain what you’d bring to the job. Sound genuinely excited about this new field you’re entering! Do not apologize for your lack of experience. It’ll be obvious when you tell me you’ve just graduated from college. Don’t be overly familiar, no matter how “wacky” you’ve heard the workplace is. You’re not applying to be anyone’s friend. The fact that you can write a solid, straight-forward email that gets right to the point and maybe shows just a glimmer of personality goes a long way.
Put the email in the body of the email. Plain text formatting. Do not attach your letter to the email. I’m not going to open any of those attachments anyway, and I’m certainly not going to open them when I’ve asked you not to attach anything. I may click the link to your website. If your email was well-written.
Also, I’ve never read a resumé in my life. But if you insist on giving me one, don’t lead with “Photoshop” as a skill. Tell me you know how to combine typefaces and have a solid understanding of color theory. That’s a skill.
Prepare for the interview
You got an interview? Fantastic. Time to prepare. Find out as much about the company you’re applying at as possible. Google them. Read their site. Get familiar with the type of work they do and who they do it for.
Prepare questions for them. At some point during the interview you’ll be asked “Do you have any questions for us?” You should have some.
“What’s it like to work here?” is a dumb question. “I notice a lot of your work is in editorial, do you worry about the economics of that market?” gets you a second interview.
Dress the part, be the part
There is a school of thought that says your brilliance will shine through even if you’re wearing a ratty hoodie and a stained t-shirt. It’s stupid. You’re gonna get some graduation money. Spend it on some decent clothes to wear to your interview. Your Flickr-stalking/research should tell you whether a suit will impress or terrify your prospective employers.
Don’t hug any of your interviewers. Before or after.
Not to be a self-serving douchebag, but…
Read my book. I wrote it just for you. It’s got a ton of good lessons that will guide you through your career. Trust me on this. It’s $18.00.
Don’t apply at Facebook
Seriously, do you think so little of the sacrifice your parents made sending you to college that you’re willing to just throw your life away?
Guidance about design is often situated in other disciplines. In texts about writing, for instance, are wise words about design. By way of example, some of my favorites follow (I’ve replaced “writing” and its forms with “[designing]”):
[Designers] get so fixated on the mechanics of [design] that they forget how much they can learn from the other arts about line and the uses of space. Good [design], like a good watch, should have no unnecessary parts, and that’s what great art shouts at us: Tell the story with no unnecessary parts.
[Designing]—I can really only speak to [designing] here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, [designing] is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.
You’re a [designer] — or an artist — or you’re not. It sounds harsh, but, seriously, not everyone’s wired for this stupid life. If you think you are, then you have to [design] around the block. Anything that takes your fancy. Just get words happening. The rest will follow. Best of luck.
I’m not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or case aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity context, it’s not the moral Olympics, and it’s not church. But it’s [designing], damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else.
I don’t have much advice to give, but if I have any, it’s that little recipe.
Truly great ideas are rare. Jokers like us will probably never have one. That’s OK. We have mediocre ones all the time and they work just fine. I once had an idea to start a blog about CSS. I sucked at writing. I sucked at designing. The vibe at the time was that everything important about CSS had already been written. Nobody told me.
I didn’t just have the idea, I did it. That’s the showing up part. Hands on the keyboard, go. I barely knew what I was doing. I stumbled through even following simple walkthroughs on how to install the software. Executing your ideas is never overly comfortable.
Then never stop. Don’t get distracted by some other idea and prance away to that tomorrow. Keep doing it until you’ve done everything you set out to do and everyone and their mom knows it. I didn’t stop blogging when barely anyone read it for years. I didn’t stop when people told me I was dumb or wrong. I didn’t stop when redesigns were met with vitriol. I didn’t stop when faced with mountainous challenges like inexplicable server failure, legal trouble, and theft of the site itself.
Oh, plus, try not to be a dick. I’m convinced that helps.
Technology in its nature is subject to decay. We haven’t advanced beyond bit rot.
Technology in its nature is subject to instability. We haven’t advanced beyond bugs.
Technology in its nature is subject to failure. We haven’t advanced beyond obsolescence.
All the technology I use and depend on will change and disappear.
These are crass paraphrases of some of the “Five Daily Recollections” from the teachings of Buddhism. Based on my shallow understanding, contemplating these facts is meant to lead us to abandon our “destructive attachments” to our illusions about the way the world should be, and more peacefully exist in the world the way it is.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful by repurposing them here (“Top 5 Ways To Achieve Technological Zen!”), just to point to the obvious but sometimes invisible fact that what is true of our lives is also true of our digital lives.
Recently, a snippet from David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005 has been recirculating in a video called “This is Water”. If you never had a chance to read or hear the original, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the video.
He starts with a story:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
In his singular, electric, messy human way, he digs away at the same “capital-T Truth” that the Five Recollections are getting at. That we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over of what is hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time.
The fifth and final recollection is different from the rest. No adaptation necessary.
“I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, and supported by my actions. Whatever actions I take, good or bad, that is my inheritance.”
We can’t change the nature of technology, but we choose what we do with it. Day in, day out, each action is a choice. Every click, every tap, every line of code is another drop in the water we swim in every day. “This is water.” That is our inheritance.
“Great! Busy. Really good, though.” “Oh, you know. Tired.” “Not so well.” “Fine, fine, how are you?”
We ask each other how we are, how we’re doing, sometimes how we’re “holding up.” When someone asks it in a formal, professional context, it means little more than “hello.” When our friends ask, they usually want to know a bit more, if not every single detail of recent lives. Weirdly, I suspect most of us aren’t in the habit of asking it of ourselves. We question extreme emotions, maybe—“why did that garden-variety comment troll make me so angry?”—but we mostly don’t have a culture of monitoring our well-being in any disciplined way.
This despite the fact that we know, thanks to scads of well-designed and -documented behavioral studies, that the many little, boring ways in which we’re “good” or “great” or “tired” or “fine” affect everything else we do: our judgment, our situational intelligence, our creative ability to synthesize, our emotional resilience.
I developed habits of checking in—of trying to regularly, honestly assess how I am—as a way to deal with being naturally twitchy. My hunger signals don’t keep up with my metabolism, and if I don’t have set reminders to eat every few hours, I get spacier and spacier till I’m useless. Sometime in my 20s, I finally figured out that I could work around the problem by adding checkpoints to my day: Do I have a headache or feel dizzy? Am I having trouble concentrating? Am I writing overlong emails?
That simple idea has gradually evolved into something more central as I’ve observed the differences in my interactions with colleagues who were “inexplicably” cross after a night of insomnia or “mysteriously” unable to make decisions when they skipped lunch. It’s not just me, it turns out—we all have bodies and they mess with us constantly. And it’s not just the physical stuff. Everything we experience affects our ability to focus, do our work, and react reasonably, whether we’ve been arguing with a family member or just refreshing Twitter too much.
So before starting a work session or going into a meeting or making a complex decision, I’ve been trying to check in. What’s going on in there, physically and mentally and emotionally? Is any of it something I can improve by eating a banana, or spending ten minutes reading, or taking a walk? It’s basic stuff, but helps—and it forces me to admit that just as I’m sometimes irritable only because allergies are making my head feel like a bag of bees, the same thing is true of everyone else, too.
We all know that it is important to find a good balance between life and work. What doesn’t get shared as often is how important it is to balance work that inspires you and work that does not. My all-time favorite quote is from Howard Thurman and he says “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
If you have been watching the activity in the design and dev community over the past couple of years, you will see countless examples of people who did this. It had never been more apparent to me than a couple of weeks ago at Converge SE in Columbia, SC. Every speaker that shared their story on the main day had a common theme. They worked on something that made them come alive (in addition to their daily job or work). Doing this led to some big opportunity or career change and ultimately led them to the stage to inspire us.
On an individual level we see people doing this kind of work (and sharing it) earn new positions or the type of clients that they really enjoy. At the company level, we see teams that build their own product get picked up by bigger companies to work on products with more impact. I can’t say how much longer it will last, but be sure to strike while the iron is hot.
Our industry is spoiled right now. The demand for what we do significantly outweighs the supply of people who can do it well. The things that we build are creating new industries with new opportunities and shaking up existing ones. There is work out there that would make you happily get out of the bed in the morning or work late at night. You just have to show the world that you want it.
I’m not much of a ranter—probably because I’m rarely so opinionated about a given topic. But, every now and then, something happens that ruffles my feathers and drives me up the wall. Most designers tend to be irritated by bad kerning or Comic Sans abuse, but honestly, I’ve gotten over those long ago. So, what’s my pet peeve, you ask?
Simple—the double-space after a period (or full stop, for my British friends).
I get a lot of eye-roll reactions from people who think it isn’t a big deal, but as a designer who’s had to deal with laying out client-supplied copy riddled with the silly things, it definitely does matter. Double spaces in large bodies of text can create unintentional gaps called rivers which are distracting to the eye, especially when reading for an extended period of time.
I once did a job for a client where the supplied copy I needed to paste into the layout was full of not only double spaces, but also triple and even quadruple spaces. Yes, that’s right—four spaces after a period. Not even a find-and-replace could catch everything. What’s worse is that after I stripped them out and sent it back for approval, a second round of revised copy would come back with every double, triple, and quadruple space added back in. A disaster.
Before you say that websites strip them out, that’s not true. Plenty of content management systems preserve the double space when publishing content, and even Twitter’s website now preserves them in tweets. (I like the line break support, though.)
Some people say the double-space is a relic from the days of the typewriter where it was often required to tap the space key twice to make sentence spacing more legible. Eventually the habit was adopted by computer users, too, even though modern fonts support sentence spacing not supported by the typewriter. It’s still taught in many typing classes today, resulting in a rather large number of people who are convinced that it’s the right thing to do.
A person once tried to defend the double-space by presenting me with information of what some publishers used to do back in the 1800s. That’s cool, except that this is the 21st century, and the single-space convention was adopted by publishers many years ago. I challenge you to open any modern book, newspaper, or magazine, and observe what you see.
Are you typesetting a book that emulates the look of the original Sherlock Holmes novels? Sure, go ahead and use the double-space. Are you designing a poster that’s meant to look like Peggy Olson’s copy for “The Rejuvenator”? Fill your boots, I say! In these cases, designing with the double-space can be used as an extra detail to bring more authenticity and reflect the period in which it would have appeared.
But guys, I’m begging you. It’s 2013. Why would you waste valuable Twitter characters on such a useless thing? Try to break the bad habit, okay?
I made a website the other day. You might say “but don’t you make websites every day?” Not so much, actually. I work on websites every day, yes, in a manner of speaking, but only insofar as the end product of my effort is consumed via a web browser by visiting a URL. It’s so rarely, though, that I actually make websites that I had to rely on my editor to give me the basics of an HTML page. I just about stopped breathing, hours later, when I pulled my work up in IE and saw that everything was utterly broken, until I realized my editor had left out the oh-so-magical <!doctype html> incantation. Oops.
It’s been so long since I’ve made a website that I sort of lost track of how much better life has gotten in the last few years. Do you remember what we used to do to get rounded corners and fancy fonts? Do you remember what it used to mean to decide to change the width of a layout or to globally tweak a particular shade of green?
Things were terrible and wonderful back then. In some ways I feel bad for people who have arrived at this amazing profession in the last few years. They’ll never know what it was like to read about CSS sliding doors for the first time — a concept so transformative back in 2003 that it makes me a little wistful to see the gentle reminder at the top of the article now that this “no longer reflects best practices.” We spent our days hacking our way to pixel perfection back then, and it was inexcusable and intoxicating all at the same time.
Around this time of year back in 2011 I was working with Jeff Eaton, preparing to speak at Duo Consulting’s WebContent conference, the theme of which was “Going Mobile.” I recall Eaton saying to me “This would be a lot easier if either of us knew anything about mobile.”
Truth was, mobile intimidated me. I liked the desktop web. I understood the desktop web. I’d made a career out of being an expert on how the desktop web should work, and I didn’t want to learn a whole new way of doing business. “Leave that for the next generation,” I thought to myself. “Mobile’s not for me.”
Eaton was valiantly trying to explain to me how a CMS could support multi-channel publishing via an API, and I just wasn’t getting it. He used metaphors (“imagine the API is a straw sucking out the content”) and probably even resorted to hand puppets acting out a short play. I felt dumb, frustrated, out of my league.
And I had a flash of insight, one that transformed how I approach my work:
If I feel so clueless talking about content on mobile, think how everyone else must feel.
See, I get this stuff. I have never done anything else! I’ve been a practicing information architect and content strategist for going on 20 years. I have a graduate degree in technical communication and HCI. I’ve worked with every major CMS out there, led projects for dozens of publishers. I grok how content works online at an almost cellular level.
I don’t say that to talk myself up—just the opposite. I was struggling to understand something that intimidated me, something I knew was important to my work, and I was scared.
And I felt compassion. Compassion for everyone out there, struggling with the same challenges on mobile. That flash of insight connected me with genuine empathy for all the people, all the businesses that have to understand and adapt and make decisions about how to move onto this new platform.
They’re scared. They’re afraid of making a wrong decision. They’re worried that they’ll waste money and time, developing a solution that customers don’t want. They’re overwhelmed by too much information, too many competing perspectives. How is mobile different from the desktop? Are apps the answer? Is responsive design just a fad? Back the wrong horse, and risk an embarrassing, public failure.
Our clients, our co-workers, our bosses and stakeholders: they are sick of the internet. The pace of change doesn’t stop. They don’t know who to trust to help them make the right decision. There are so many ways to get it wrong, and so few obvious right answers.
Have a little compassion. Be nice to them. They have a hard job.
As a result of this flash of compassion, I am doing the best work of my life. My motivation to write and speak and consult on content strategy for mobile comes from a deeper place, inspired by a genuine desire to make a hard problem easier for other people to understand. I know what it feels like to be scared and to be afraid of getting it wrong, and that empathy informs how I engage with my clients and the community.
I’ve been lucky enough to get a lot of feedback recently: book reviews, conference talk evaluations, post-workshop surveys. Reams of paper and multi-column spreadsheets and emails and blog posts all dedicated to evaluating little ol’ me.
I don’t always feel lucky, though. More often than not, reading a review of my own work (or, worse, dozens of them all at once) feels excruciating, overwhelming, and exhausting—even if it’s positive. It always seems to find the spots where I have the least armor and jab itself right in.
But I am lucky. I’m lucky people bothered to take the time to tell me how I did. I’m lucky people cared enough about what I said to tell me the ways in which I can do better next time.
Most of the notes I’ve gotten have been positive, but of course I have plenty of things to work on: Slow down. Get more specific. Make more obvious ties between the little things and the larger narrative. Calm down. Slow down.
No, really, slow down.
I’m working on those things, of course. (I think I’m speaking about 25 percent slower than I used to—which is only 25 percent faster than I ought to be.) But even more than that, I’m working on how I relate to the feedback itself.
For a long time, these waves of feedback would bowl me over. I’d get knocked into a state of panic, obsessing over all the things I could have done better. I’d end up tumbling, reeling, scrambling to regain my footing. This felt crummy, sure. But the real problem was that it also left me unable to do anything with the information—because getting back up off the ground had already sapped all my energy.
It’s hard to take change to heart while you’re coughing up saltwater.
These days I’m trying to let the wave wash over me without it kicking my legs out from under me. Either way I’ll end up getting wet—immersed in the criticism, soaked in my own imperfection. But if I want to get better, I can’t afford to get swallowed by it anymore.
It’s not just about me, though. It’s about our entire industry, as my friend Jonathan Kahn pointed out recently:
If we’re going to change culture, we need to give and receive feedback more, and we need to do it with kindness and respect. Which is HARD.
If you agree that culture change is critical to the web—that businesses need to adapt to constant change, that organizations need to get back to being human, and that becoming flexible and iterative is the only way to keep up—then embracing and employing feedback isn’t just a means to being better liked. It’s actually the foundation of a better web.
Within the standards world every now and then modularization comes up. “Standards should be modular!” One could imagine Jeff Jaffe (W3C’s CEO) going on stage at one of W3C’s conferences and yelling “modularity! modularity! modularity!” and one would not be too far from the truth. The standards created however are often not modular, but rather bolt-on solutions on top of the existing stack (often bolt-on solutions themselves). So rather than modules that evolve over time, we have an ever increasing set of standards that patch each other, often in non-obvious ways.
One way this is evident is that the software that uses these standards often uses a different architecture. In software CSP is not a single module, but rather would be part of e.g. HTTP (header processing), fetching (protocol for retrieving bits out of URL used by HTML’s img element and every other piece of content that can be used to initiate a request), and some mediation part that enforces the policy. In part it makes sense to design new features separately initially. This helps implementors to grasp the work that needs be done and developers how they can make use of this new feature. But long-term it harms the understanding of the platform. Say we introduce a new feature that performs a fetching operation. What will its effect be on CSP? What will its effect be on other specifications bolted on top of fetching? You do not just need to use the fetching protocol in the right way, you also need to patch CSP and potentially other places. In other words, the modularity has left the building.
The standards process needs to become more flexible so the documents that describe the web platform can evolve over time and change shape to meet new demands and constraints. The WHATWG has been pioneering this model for close to a decade now and given the superior class of documents that have been developed it seems about time to take note.
What began in a state of grace soon reveals itself to be a jumble. The human mind, as it turns out, is messy. — Ellen Ullman
A couple of weeks ago, Adam Michela and I were talking about the design process. He said something that was revelatory for me, and I’m still working through it.
We were talking about systems and how we try to make them extensible. When it’s finally time to ship a product, things start getting weird. All those hours and conversations start to unravel. Every last-minute change feels like a punch in the gut. I said, “I hate it when people do things without thinking about their implications.”
“But that’s why we are designers,” Adam said. “Because we can see those implications and think through them.”
It was a Friday afternoon. I was tired. I went home and rested. But Adam got me thinking, how do we embrace the mess? Or should we?
If we notice things most people don’t, what kind of responsibility does that give us?
Along with Alastair Lockie, I run a Code Club at Queens Park Primary School, Brighton. Every Wednesday after school, the kids learn how to make games and more recently, how to make websites. It’s great to see them having fun and being creative on computers.
I originally decided to get involved with Code Club due to the lack of education in creative computing. Kids are taught how to use Microsoft Office products, but are not encouraged to explore and create within a digital space. That’s all changing now.
The UK Government have noticed that they aren’t doing enough to teach kids how to code in schools. In 2014, the new National Curriculum will come into play, and it makes one major change. A new course called “Computing” will replace “ICT”. Kids will begin learning how to program and create things on computers. What’s more, schools will make gifted and talented kids “Digital Leaders”, who will help teachers and pupils with computing within lessons. This makes me very happy!
So now I ask myself, will we still need Code Clubs, when kids have so many other opportunities to learn how to code? And my answer is yes, we still need them. Here’s why:
No matter where you get your stats from, the ratio of men to women in the digital industries is far from equal. According to the A List Apart Survey, 2011, just 18% of people in the web industry are women. There’s no reason why women can’t do just as well as men in these industries, and I believe our work suffers from this gross imbalance as diversity is important. It both brings out the best in people and better reflects the society we are designing for.
I haven’t personally noticed any considerable discrimination against women in our industry, and since women are just as fit for jobs as men in this line of work, I can only attribute this imbalance to stereotyping and self-perpetuation; many women don’t apply for these jobs because they don’t think it to be a job for women.
My Code Club has 26 kids who show up each week. 13 of them are boys, and 13 are girls. One of these girls says she will run a web development company when she grows up, and she’s very talented. Besides making Code Club seem exciting in an assembly I gave to the kids, I did nothing to encourage any demographic to join the club. The fact that we have a 50:50 split is testament to the unjust bias in our industry.
I hope that by showing kids coding is exciting, creative and engaging, we can slowly address this imbalance. These kids will grow up with the knowledge that you don’t have to be a geek to be a digital creative, and that the industry isn’t just for men. It might take a couple of generations before we see any meaningful change, but I’m prepared to wait.
When thinking about the future of OAuth it’s helpful to remember why OAuth was created.
I was lucky enough to be part of the original group of API providers who created OAuth so I know that OAuth was (mostly) intended to solve two common problems with API authentication:
SSL/TLS was expensive and complicated.
Websites shouldn’t be storing passwords of other websites.
Of course #1 is past-tense for a reason. SSL is now commonplace for web applications. APIs can simply do all their authentication over SSL, which is a really good thing. There’s no need to be swapping tokens around over SSL!
Password storage, #2, is still an issue. Websites shouldn’t be storing plaintext passwords for other websites. However… mobile! It’s kind of okay to store a user’s credentials on a mobile device.
There’s a third major purpose of OAuth which arose as an unintended consequence: one-click login.
One-click login has been OAuth’s greatest success. Users can log in to a new website using their Twitter or Facebook credentials. It’s much faster than having to enter a bunch of signup information.
So what’s the future of OAuth? I really love the one-click login feature but the other two issues seem much less relevant today.
For the future we need to consider the problems that plague API developers today.
What are best practices for mobile devices? How can we make OAuth as simple as possible for client developers now that SSL is commonplace? Can we make one-click login even faster and more trustworthy?
These are all questions we need to be talking about for OAuth 3.0.
Says the designer as he rips open a mustard packet too forcefully and it spatters on his sleeve.
If only these idiot mustard packet designers took pride in their craft, like I the web designer do. They shouldn’t be packets at all, but little syringes that excrete mustard in perfect lines. We could add a rate-limiter so it’s impossible the mustard comes out too fast. And pneumatics to help excretion once it has begun as to not exert ourselves or limit mustard consumption to only the strong-handed. If only these packet-designing fools had one ounce of common sense.
Never mind that lady over there in the white shirt who opened three in a row without incident. Never mind that I was able to open the second packet with no trouble. You only get one chance to make a first impression, Big Mustard, and now I’ll never think of you as anything but a careless, greedy corporation that cares more about profit than product.
Hold on, I need to tweet this picture of my sleeve. My designer friends are going to get a real snicker out of your incompetence. My day is ruined over here and now I’m out to ruin yours, you yellow bastards.
If you hired my firm to design these packets, as you obviously should have, we would have considered the user right from the start. Each packet would come with a full body plastic suit that auto-deploys around the person opening the packet to prevent incidents like this. We would mix mercury into the mustard to weigh it down and arrowroot to thicken it up so it’s impossible to splatter. And what’s with yellow? That’s a stain waiting to happen. Mustard should be as clear as water. Didn’t think of that, did you?
What is really embarrassing though is your lack of presentation. What mustard really needs is more thoughtful packaging. I’m thinking a little nested box made from shredded tires and bent road signs. Inside the packet lies on a bed of dried hemp. The logo is letterpressed into the box top and then it’s all tied together with twine. WAIT. And the packet is wearing a lucha libre mask. There are 15 different ones you can collect. Ever hear of “gamification”? Of course you haven’t you bourgeoisie rodent.
“I screwed it up, chasing after perfection, chasing after what was right in front of me.” — Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy
I have always had a problem with perfection. Not so much in trying to achieve it but as an aspiration, as an idea, as something to strive towards. A destination to reach, to step back from, to survey and think “this is it, I’ve reached perfection”.
Perfection is a double-edged sword. We all want our work to be the best it can be: we want our clients to like what we produce, we want our peers to appreciate our work and above all we want ourselves to be satisfied by the fruits of our endeavours. But the pursuit of excellence can also be destructive — when we design we must continually challenge our direction. But how often have you kept your work back from a client because “it’s not quite ready”, because it doesn’t quite match your expectations, because it’s not as good as you want it to be.
Such feelings are important when we build — it is important to have pride in what we do. But they can also massively undermine our work and our confidence. The “release early, release often” culture of web application development has made great advances in how we code for the web. But our front-end is still largely driven by the pursuit of “pixel-perfection”. As if somehow across the range of people who visit our websites — and the range of devices which they use — there can be something called perfection.
So let’s embrace the idea that perfection — whether in work or in life — is an artifice. Let’s turn our attention towards the journey rather than the destination and towards doing just enough rather than doing things just right.
Before the sun came up on Saturday, I was at my table with a mug of coffee, notebooks open, and laptop at arm’s length. Earlier in the week, my pocket guide was published. My talk was evolving steadily. I was mostly caught up on day-to-day work. So, it was time to figure out what to work on next. I wrote down every exciting project that was on my mind, and soon had a list of a dozen or so potential goals.
“Now what?” I thought.
Said good morning to Eileen and the girls. Drove my truck to the dealership to have it serviced. In the waiting area at the car dealership, I grouped my goals by their underlying purpose and labeled the groups: concepts, practice, tools, teaching. Seemed like a nice mix of stuff. Two of my 13 goals were not in groups, so I stopped paying attention to them. If they’re important, they’ll come up again.
Looked at my calendar — three commitments in the next few months. Those will require preparation and interrupt my work and home routines, so I should plan on getting less done overall. On a piece of paper, I listed May, June, and July, with some space in between. Jotted down my commitments in their approximate time slots. Added tasks related to those commitments. Finished the complimentary dealership coffee (hurk).
Next to my timeline of months and tasks, I listed some of the goals. Seeing them next to the timeline helps me figure out whether its realistic to get them done in that span of time, given my other commitments. I chose to pursue only five goals, representing three of my four purposeful groups. Can’t do everything.
Drove back home. Listened to Back to Work while I did some yard work. Spent the day with my family.
Up early again on Sunday with that familiar what-should-I-work-on feeling, except now I have answers. I’ve already thought about what’s exciting, whether different projects have a purpose, and what my available time looks like. I stick to the goals I chose yesterday. If I see something on Twitter that I want to read or research, or someone emails me with a new opportunity, I measure the value of that new thing against the value of sticking to my goals; If now’s not the time for the new thing, I think about it the next time I’m setting goals.
Graphic design is an odd bird. It’s part art and part science, and often treated as mostly decorative. But armed with your favorite tools of the trade, it’s also very satisfying.
Teaching myself graphic design as a student, I created layouts based on what felt good. I was into that edgy, “creative” stuff. If you’ve got a great eye that may be enough, but now I also use this design golden rule: have a reason. Typography, grid-based layout, and basic design principles (balance, hierarchy, scale…) are essential foundations of great graphic design. Instead of throwing elements at a canvas and seeing what sticks, use these fundamentals to place them deliberately. Have a reason for every design decision. By doing so, you’ll increase resonance in a design.
In contrast, small differences (such as almost identical font sizes, or slightly unaligned objects) detract from this, often appearing as mistakes even if intentional. This gives me another rule: make differences obvious. If you’re going to break the rules (of your grid etc.), do so deliberately and make it count. Luckily, building a strong chorus of resonance in your design causes deliberate differences to stand out even more sharply.
Having a reason behind everything you do gives your work depth and subtlety. It shows you’ve thought carefully about each aspect, and lets you explain each decision.
Last month I baked a strudel about how to know you’re not a beginner anymore. I found this exceptionally useful as a kind of lower-bound I could put on my skills and knowledge; I could say that there were topics I could move forward from and thus move towards more advanced material with confidence. This month, I’m baking a cookie about how I know that I’m not a master at programming. In fact, I’d even go as far to say that there are no masters.
There is no such thing as a grand ultimate master of programming because the goalposts will always keep moving. If we were to take the top ten percent of programmers, we could say that those programmers are probably experts. We would still have the problem of defining what criteria includes people in that ten percent, which is an altogether different matter. But a master? The term ‘master’ in the context of ability is usually reserved for someone who has studied an art or science so thoroughly that they have complete knowledge and skill over said art or science. When it comes to programming, there are no masters because the landscape of programming changes dramatically as new technology is forged.
There are always new tools. There will be new languages. The hardware will change. The software will have to adapt. You will have to change. You will have to adapt.
Sign of Programmer Expertise #1: The programmer understands that the learning will never stop and is at peace with how quickly the tools and landscape change.
The expert who you look up to — you know the one, they’ve written that sweet library you use so much, and you’ve read all of their books — cannot and should never halt on the notion that they have achieved mastery. Programming will move on without them. Maybe they’ll have mastered programming circa the year 2013, but the rest of us will go on without them if they stop there.
So what about that top ten percent? We know it is unrealistic to say we will be masters of this domain. We made peace with that at the end of the last paragraph. How do we approach criteria that describes someone as an expert programmer? The dialogue is ongoing, and I hope that through it we’ll eventually be able to convey to those who want to learn programming the kind of expectations they have to meet to be the best of the best.
Sign of Programmer Expertise #2: If you are an expert at programming, in at least one language you must be able to code as though you have a gun to your head, without a language reference.*
I know what you’re thinking, that most programmers always have a browser tab open with an API or language reference. Nobody actually codes without at least some of that stuff in their day-to-day job. I know I do. This makes sense for when you are trying to make something for someone else and you are on a budget of time, money, or both. Often it makes sense for you personally too, when you’re on your own time making your own wonderful thing. Because you value your time, you want to have all the resources you need so that you don’t have to remember the name of a function that you’ve forgotten while you remember the essence of what that function is supposed to do. You want to accomplish building something for yourself in a reasonable amount of time.
This is good for building things and shipping them, but what it’s not good for is your mastery of programming.
This may seem in direct contradiction to what I said last month. In my last pastry, I explained that you have to be able to program in different languages than the one you are most comfortable with to say that you really know programming and not just the language. This is true. However, this is like saying that if you are learning to swing a sword, you should be able to use almost any sword. There are differences between a broadsword and a rapier, but by understanding the basics you can probably figure out how to use each reasonably well. Despite this, a swordsperson probably has a preferred type of sword, and since there are all subtle differences between them the swordsperson will probably only be able to become an expert with one or two. The same is true with programming languages. While you can broadly apply your skills to any language to create something, it is the concise practice of a few languages that will yield you the most satisfying results.
Sign of Programmer Expertise #3: The programmer is not merely satisfied with solving the problem, they insist upon solving it in an efficient and robust manner.
I’ve had so many people ask me, ‘how do I know if my software design patterns are good, and how do I measure that? ’. Write tests. Measure execution time, function complexity, memory usage, and whatever else you can think of. Benchmark your code against other code. If you can balance your optimizations with code readability, then your design pattern is probably pretty good. The numbers won’t lie, so stick to those and don’t worry about much else.
Sign of Programmer Expertise #4: The programmer knows how their parser/compiler/interpreter works. Intimately.
The programmer who wants to get better at designing software will inevitably get to a point where they can only optimize so far without an understanding of how their language is parsed, processed, compiled, etc. To know the nuances of how the machines speak your language is as big an endeavour as learning the language itself. It will require you to think about your language by picking it apart instruction by instruction to see how it was designed. At some point, you should aim to write a programming language or compiler/interpreter just to understand what the designers of a language or compiler/interpreter had to consider when making the ones you work with every day. You’ll understand the concessions and caveats that cause the quirks of your language that you never had reason to understand before. This will help you learn your language inside and out — I mean you will literally know it’s insides.
Sign of Programmer Expertise #5: ???
As I’ve mentioned before, this is an ongoing dialogue. I’m hoping that the few ideas I’ve exposed here are enough to get you thinking about where you want to go next with your programming skill, and that someone out there will tell me what the #5, or #6, or #7… in this list should be. I have no idea. I’m just doing the same thing that the rest of you are doing; I’m trying to navigate my way through the ridiculous amount of information available to pick and choose the most reasonable course for success. So, if you know what comes next — tell me. I’m all ears.
*Baker’s note: Please don’t ever, ever put a gun to your head even as a joke.
You spend most of your time at work, so we think you have to make it a fun place to be. It’s easy for people to burn out in this type of field, so we think creating a great atmosphere around here is really, really important. We decided to organize people in teams rather than by discipline, and the difference has been night and day. Each team has its own bank of desks and chooses its own team name and logo, and creates a sense of identity.
In the US, last week was pretty horrible—a bombing, a major industrial explosion, a serious flood, and a stack of bad legislation. On my slice of the internet, the sum of our reactions to a string of awful, nervewracking events was a deafening howl of anger, dramatic opinion, blame, defensiveness, and so on.
But there were also essential things. Friends in Boston sent reassuring messages while a manhunt went on in their neighborhoods. Verified reports from journalists in Massachusetts and Texas arrived to clarify confusions and replace speculation with fact. When things are rough, it’s certainly possible to turn the computer off and walk away, but with so many of my people online, it’s also where I go for comfort and connection.
So in the last week, I’ve thought a lot about what I might do as a listener and a speaker on the internet to try to preserve the good while saving my head and heart from the worst of the shouting.
This is a very sketchy first draft, but it’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Edit the outgoing channel The only thing I can directly control is what I say. My instincts aren’t always trustworthy in moments of intense anxiety, so I’ve tried to make myself a little list of what to do: ampify emergency relief information, pass along ways to volunteer; send brief words of comfort; do very little else.
Filter the incoming channel I don’t like what anger and fear—mine and others’—do to my brain and my body, so I filter like crazy:
Twitter muting: I use clients that allow keyword and user muting, ideally for set durations. I mute specific keywords, hashtags, and people, especially when something crazy happens in the world. It’s a private, non-judgy way for me to keep following people I like but whose responses to crisis events is too loud for my addled brain to handle. (I use TweetBot on iOS and YoruFukurou on the Mac, and I hear good things about Janetter for Windows and Android.)
Twitter blocking: I’m fine with opinion that sharply differs from mine, but only when it’s civil. I block strangers who appear in my stream yelling at me. I block people who regularly enjoy trolling, and I mute their usernames as keywords so I don’t see hate-retweets. (And I turn off retweets for people who do a lot of hate-retweeting.) I even block people who abuse my friends online. I block a lot. It helps.
Editorial trolling: On the web, I use host files to prevent blind links from directing me to sites that exist to troll us. If someone links to a piece on Gawker or Slate, my computer hits a nice blank page instead of the article, giving me a chance to realize that I’d really rather not. This is how I edit my Hosts file on the Mac. Windows users can do a version of the same thing, and there are also plug-ins for FireFox and Chrome that block sites, if you don’t feel like messing around with the command line.
Comments: It’s easy to say “don’t read the comments,” but it’s a lot of work for the brain to ignore words that appear at the bottom of an article. On news sites and magazines I read frequently, I use user styles and content-blocking plug-ins to remove comment sections, lurid “Elsewhere On the Web” sections at the bottom of articles, and even “Recommended for you” navigation that tries to lure me into reading more articles. I think of it as moving processor-intensive work from the client side (my brain) to the server side (my technology).
Facebook: I don’t use Facebook. That’s not the right choice for everyone, but the political extremes in my immediate family alone make it a source of high-volume quarreling and invective for me, so it’s an easy decision.
By using rules to guide my participation and tech to block the interactions that stress me out the most, I open up time and energy for longer, better conversations with people I love and respect, and I preserve my focus for the projects I choose to spend my attention on.
Most of all, I try to remember this: publishing my worries might let off a bit of emotional steam for me, but if it worsens the anxiety of those in my community, it’s a net loss. I get this wrong more than right, but it’s something I think about a lot.
I looked down and in that moment it hit me—I was the only person wearing different shoes. Every other person sitting in the circle was wearing the exact same type of shoes. The shoes were the same brand and even the same color. My shoes did not match the mold. I didn’t get the memo.
That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks falling onto my toes—I was not in my tribe. These people were not my people. They were nice enough, but nice enough wasn’t what I needed. I needed to find my people.
After this shocking shoe incident, you might assume I went to search for people who wore the same types of shoes as I did. Those people would be my people, my tribe. But I didn’t. Instead, I knew that in order to be with my people, I needed to look down and see none of us wearing the same shoes. That my tribe would be wearing a mix of cowgirl boots, Converse, platform heels, flipflops, sneakers, flats, boots, and work shoes (any shoes except for those sporty toe shoes, those sort of freak me out).
When I was a kid and throughout my entire stint of being in K12, I never belonged to one clique—to one tribe. I was the kid that didn’t quite fit in anywhere and I wasn’t really interested in rounding my corners to make the fit easier either. I wasn’t interested in entire cliques of people. Instead, I enjoyed spending time with specific people from a variety of cliques. This worked out pretty well until it came time for my birthday parties.
My friends would arrive for my birthday parties and the only thing they really had in common, was me. This meant that most of them didn’t know each other. I became the kid that had name tags at her birthday parties. Okay, maybe I was a total organizational nerd even then, but I promise you, “hello my name is…” was an absolutely necessary birthday party accessory for all of my guests.
My friends had fun at my parties. I had fun at them, too. And we experienced this fun while none of us wore the same shoes.
If we really want to make sure that we’re in a strong, great, creative, tribe, we need to find people who are different than us, but who complement us. And no, not compliment us but complement us. People who might like our style of shoes and let us know, but people who go way beyond that and help to balance our strengths and weaknesses.
Apps are greedy. They demand to be constantly played with, refreshed, updated — and buzz at you with glaring red eyes when ignored.
Just as a thought experiment: what would an app without any interactions be like? Something you put on the wall, or on your desk. You glance at it a couple times a day. Its face isn’t bright, and doesn’t flash with bright colors and sound.
Ever since smartphones have become the new normal, it’s a common sight to see people engrossed in them. You know the stance: head down, eyes mesmerized by a four-inch screen of a world that exists intangibly. It is a world that connects the threads of our lives while it simultaneously disregards the immediate environment and context.
Paying attention — I mean, really paying attention — requires more meticulous effort than it used to. Because now, our superficial interest is diverted to distractions that we want to direct it to, rather than allowing simple happenstance to dictate where our true attention should go.
A few losses come to mind as a result. There are likely more, but these three are at the forefront of my mind.
Serendipity and chance
Respect
Safety
Serendipity and chance
Before we had smartphones to sneak away into, people were present in their environments. Sure, we’ve been immersed in various portable music players and books for a while now, but smartphones are multifaceted attention hogs.
Allowing yourself to be open gifts small, quiet moments that may brighten your day. There is a tangible feeling when you’re involved in your community, at the local level. You could very well meet your next partner in crime. You may engage spontaneously in conversation during a flight with your seat neighbor. Or, what often happens with me and my wife, we find money on the street. True story.
Respect
I don’t mind seeing your smartphone or device sitting on a table — I don’t like the bulkiness in my pocket either. However, I do mind if it is face up and silly notifications are turned on. That feature was disabled the first day I purchased my smartphone, and I question why people need it. Is the fear of missing out such a compelling reason to not give thoughtful consideration to the wonderful person in front of you?
I see your eyes, they’re glancing at that screen.
Notifications should be nonintrusive and passive rather than the other name we give them: alerts. Your friend posting a photo of their coffee or updating their existential state of being is, nine times out of ten, not earth-shattering news.
Safety
This is a practical and an important point. Smartphones are expensive. Smartphones are easy targets for thieves. I’ve seen phones snatched from submerged owners or even casual tourists walking around the city looking at Google Maps. It’s a shame that we live in a time when private property isn’t respected and that thievery exists, but it does. Don’t be the person who’s shouting, “Hey! That’s my phone!” while chasing someone rapidly through the streets of the city.
Or that person with their head down and BAM! Hello, tree/light pole/other pedestrian.
Then there’s the ridiculous looking-at-your-phone-while-crossing-the-street individuals. Fancy being hit by a car? I certainly don’t. As my dad is fond of saying when people seem reckless with their lives, “So fatalistic!”
When I was a teenager and then in my early 20s, the only way to get in touch with someone was by picking up a phone and purposely calling them. It made the connection deeper in comparison — hearing the quality of their voice and tone. And before three-way calling or call waiting, you were locking the phone down for just one person at a time. I recall scrambling for coins or phone cards to call friends at pay phones when I wanted to hear their voice or bug them or just catch up.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Fondness is all I seek.
I’m not advocating to go back to those times, believe me. I am advocating for basic norms of respect for the people around you.
Let’s respect each other, engage and be in the moment. Let us enjoy the presence of each other’s company and use the absence of technology to get into a conversation. Practice your speaking skills. Enjoy the moment — your moments. The quiet, the people watching, taking in your surroundings and letting things happen to you rather than turning your brain to the ON position all the time. OFF isn’t an idle matter — it’s a state of being.
I don’t really know shit about Quakers. I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia, where Pennsylvania Founder and Quaker William Penn’s statue sits atop City Hall. And I know that from the right angle it looks like he’s got his dick in his hand. And I know that William Penn gave Philadelphia its nickname, The City of Brotherly Love, which is a Quaker thing. I know a ton of people who went to Quaker schools in Philadelphia, and by and large they all turned out pretty good people. I also know a few Quaker adults. And out of respect for them, I want to make sure I’m not trying to pass myself off as an expert on all things Quaker. I am not.
I am also not a big fan of religion. I don’t do God. But I’ve got a thing for Quakers. They do God, but it’s more about how you treat those around you. And they don’t do the church thing, they have Quaker Meetings. And the incredibly great thing about Quaker meetings is that everyone just sits there. Silently. And they talk only if the spirit moves them to talk. They only open their mouths if it improves on the silence.
I’m gonna repeat that phrase because I love it so fucking much: “if it improves on the silence.”
This is a phrase that I’ve been holding near and dear to my heart recently. As the world seems to be falling apart, and social media introduces a new level of cacophony of misinformation, speculation, and downright venomous bile — we should ask ourselves, is what I am about to say better than silence? Am I adding anything to what’s already being said? And possibly most importantly, is my desire to say it keeping me from listening to what is already being said. Because waiting for your turn to talk is not the same as listening.
Have I actually improved the silence?
And the best part is that everyone gets to make this decision for themselves. Do you think your dick joke improves the silence? Awesome, post it. Do you think picking a fight with some racist cracker on Twitter improves the silence? Do you really? Think twice about it. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. It’s your call. But I can tell you that in the last week I’ve probably deleted more tweets, after asking myself that question, than I’ve spiked in the entire preceding year.
So, yes, there will be dick jokes. But only when I decide they’re better than the absence of a dick joke.
Nine years ago, I sent a tentatively worded email to Doug Bowman asking if he’d meet up for a coffee when I visited San Francisco for work. At the time, Doug had just launched the new Hotwired site, which was the most incredible, amazing, mind-blowing achievement in web standards at the time. No way did I think that Doug would agree to get coffee with a handful of nobodies from Eastern Canada.
And then he responded. And said yes! And even knew some of the work we’d done (or was generous enough to look us up on the way to the café). And he didn’t talk down to us. And he treated us like COLLEAGUES, not like disciples. And he was just a human.
I’m not exaggerating when I describe this as a seminal moment in my design career. The fact that Doug Bowman treated me like I belonged in the same league allowed me to believe that maybe I really did play in the same league. What a wonderful boost of confidence!
I learned two things that day:
Go out of your way to make time for people and treat them as your peers – it can make a huge difference.
Doug Bowman is a thoughtful, kind person. Thanks again Doug.
As I write this, I’m on lockdown. “Shelter-in-place.”
It’s the first day that really feels like Spring—the first day that doesn’t just feel like a reprieve from Winter, but the honest-to-God start of Springtime. It would be a beautiful day today.
One town over, the police are chasing down one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. I woke up to sirens on Mass Ave. and they haven’t stopped yet—not that I’ve noticed, anyway, and I’ve been listening.
There hasn’t been any news in a while. People were tweeting out information on the Police scanner, giving away locations and plans. The scanner has gone silent.
It’s quiet save for the bells of St. John’s church down the street, and the sirens. It’s quiet and I don’t know what to do.
I hate gamification. Gamification is unethical, exploitative and counter-productive. Alfie Kohn has written a great book called Punished by Rewards which outlines why extrinsic rewards can ruin the values you are trying to promote by devaluing them to points, stars, coins or credits. If you are thinking about adding gamification to your product, you should really, really consider the consequences. You might get a short-term boost, but any long-term value is lost. These are very important aspects to consider as you are either trying to extract the most money or work out of a player before they quit or trying to build up a community of dedicated fans for a lifetime. Slapping badges on things seems to be what everyone is doing, with detrimental affects. I implore you to think about how this will affect your community and fans.
A few years ago a friend asked me what I was doing differently; my design work had “just gotten better”. She had worked with me in a previous environment and was collaborating with me on a project at different agency. It was clear that something had changed, but it was hard for me to articulate what it was; not only that, I felt noticeably happier. Without realizing it, I had found a way for me to maintain my “flow” at work.
Flow meaning my actual mental state: I was in my zone, designing like time didn’t exist, food didn’t need to be eaten, and all the puzzle pieces were snapping into place. It was a luxury that I tried to ration to myself for fear of becoming an unsocial hermit. It was a state fostered by a complex web of factors, all contributing to my ability to find my optimal state: being highly challenged and having the skills to meet those challenges without interference. It wasn’t entirely obvious to me at the time, but things like having a solid organizational infrastructure, working with a supportive team and reporting to management who championed my need to succeed all helped contribute to my happiness. Overall it was a cultural system that empowered me to seek my own challenges and face them uninterrupted.
I didn’t know this was an actual recognized psychological state until I watched a documentary called Happy, where I was introduced to the positive psychology concepts of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Csíkszentmihályi doesn’t just recognize my flow, he says it contributes to happiness. This perfect storm of factors actually contributed to me feeling very content.
While flow had previously been an achievable mental state while working on personal projects, painting, or gardening, I am not sure I truly had found a sustainable state at work. Contrary to popular belief there is no recipe for the perfect environment for a designer. I have had conversations with friends who swear that exposed brick and hip furniture make them feel more creative. Others feel inspired when they can dress however they want.
Both process and culture are the two most underrated topics in the design industry. They form the infrastructure that can make or break a project; it dictates how teams work together, how communication is performed, and how a designer finds their flow against all challenges that face them in creating a solution. We talk about innovation, but how do we build the systems that breed it?
Failure is the new success. Hardly a day goes by without me stumbling across a blog post or quote that embraces a “failures are important” attitude. Sometimes I hear people talk about their professional failures as if they are talking about a list of achievements. Of course, being constructive and supportive are values I highly appreciate about the web community. However, there are a few things that I can’t stop thinking about whenever I read yet another “fail often” post.
Back in the day — before easy venture capital and 4-hour work days — real failure often had a much more disastrous meaning. For instance, my uncle tells me about how he “wasted” eight years of his life trying to make a self-funded business idea work that eventually left his family relying on social welfare payments. During that time, more often than he wants to admit he went to bed hungry or had to deny his kids even the most basic wish. I’d love to know what he would say about us putting up posters that proclaim “Fail often. Fail early.”
When your app doesn’t make Apple’s Editor’s Choice; when your side project never sees the light of day because you are too busy working at a well-paying job; when your startup blows through five million dollars of venture capital within a mere three months, have you really failed or did you just get carried away enviously measuring yourself with rich entrepreneurs featured on Techcrunch?
Instead of talking about how to deal with failure, why aren’t we talking more about how to recognise success? How can we measure success in an industry with billion-dollar exits and overnight celebrity status?
I’m often congratulated on the success I’m having with Offscreen Magazine. The surprising thing about this is that it took me a pretty long time to agree and realise that I am, in fact, successful.
It wasn’t a feature article in the New York Times (although that would be nice), it wasn’t venture capital firms that came knocking (why would they?) and it most certainly wasn’t enormous profits flooding my bank account (welcome to publishing!).
It’s the acknowledgment that success is not a final destination, but the journey itself. Are you doing something you truly enjoy? Do you have friends and colleagues telling you that you’re doing great work? Are you being compensated in a fair way that allows for a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle? Yes? Congratulations, you’re being successful! Now, who said failure?
I have a really bad habit or anti-habit that I am trying to break. Documentation and specs are often the last place that I look when I’m trying to figure things out. (I know, I know. I’m so glad I can’t see the look of horror and disdain on your face.)
When I’m messing with something new, I tend towards “just figuring it out” or Googling in order to find related blog posts and Stack Overflow questions. I’ve tweeted questions and even reached out specifically to people involved with the project to ask a question before reading documentation. Super bad. (I’m on Twitter a lot so I also know I'm not the only one with this habit.)
I’m not sure why I’m so documentation averse. Maybe it’s growing up in the 80s and 90s where novels were shipped with electronic devices to explain them. Anyhow, something clicked a while back and I’ve been slowly changing my evil ways. I realized that the people I look up to in front-end development all learn by reading specs and documentation, then experimenting. I could tell from their blog posts or their in-office explanations that they dive into these mysterious collections of information and learn useful information that makes them better.
I’ve been playful about explaining this, but here is my real point. Documentation is seriously underrated in our community and the people who write it tend to be unsung heroes. A ton of work goes into writing supporting docs. If you make the time to really read them you will learn so much more. The more that we focus on consuming docs, the better they will become.
If you’re like me, let’s dive into the docs a little more and use Twitter to thank people for writing them.
When I was 16, I worked for a designer who gave me this advice: “If you don’t A-S-K, you won’t G-E-T.” Yeah, it’s goofy how he spelled it out like that, but it stuck with me.
He was talking about asking for money, getting paid for my work. The idea that I was doing work that had any value to anybody even though I was 16 years old and had almost no experience was hard to get my head around. But it was 1996, and I was building web pages for some of his local clients. I had as much experience as anybody else they could hire to do it.
Later on in my career I started to think about that advice in a different way. Sure, it’s about taking responsibility for valuing your own work, but it’s also about taking responsibility for the kind of work you want to be valued for.
One piece of advice I’ve given designers starting out is don’t put work in your portfolio that you don’t want to do again. It’s easy to feel pressure to “round out” your book, and make your skills look as broad as possible. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — the work you show is the kind of work people will ask you for. Typecasting is just human nature.
Recognizing that actually gives you a kind of power. By shaping the image you put out there, you can shape the work you do in the future. Tired of people coming to you as the “illustration guy”? Take the illustrations out of your book. Want to do more UI work? Put some spec UI work in. Pull out all the stops, write a case study, build your own app, push the details, make it thoughtful. If the work leaves an impression, it doesn’t matter who the client was, or if there even was one. As a designer, you always have the power to (re)invent yourself.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
When I first started out in web design everyone was a jack-of-all-trades. I learned through experimentation, viewing source, building things and then breaking them. When I decided I wanted to start a blog I bought a book about PHP & MySQL and built my own. Sure there were plenty of blogging solutions around but it was scratching that itch which got me my first job in web design.
However it was only after stubbornly building a bilingual Content Management System in that first job (“English and Welsh? Sure, no problem!”) I realised that there were far better uses of my time than building my own CMS. Not that I was particularly bad at it (by some weird quirk of fate that bilingual site is still running) but because 1) there are other people who are far better than me at building CMSs, and 2) my time is a valuable commodity.
Since this epiphany I moved first from mostly rolling my own CMS to using open source solutions like Textpattern and MODx. However in the last few years I have moved almost exclusively to using paid-for systems like ExpressionEngine and Perch and since making this change I’ve often been struck by how unwilling people seem to be at using paid-for solutions. To offer one example, I was recently gauging interest in Statamic and Kirby and got the following reply: “Yeah, I was looking at these and think it might be fun to play around for a little while. But $29 and $39 — um, no.”
How much is your time worth? How much of your time does $29 or $39 buy? How much does $29 or $39 save you from building or hacking something yourself? I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quote when people quickly dismiss paying for something without first considering the value of something.
Personally I’m happy with the idea of paying for something I use. It gives me a degree of comfort that what I am using is well-supported and also gives something back to the developers who are building and contributing to it. But above all I like paying for something because I believe that paying for the tools I use says something about the value I place on my time.
As we continue moving towards a future even more saturated with media, the way we package and promote our content becomes even more important. Content curation, either from algorithms or from brands we trust, is going to play an even larger role. Consuming content will be more and more about finding the best filters.
Here’s a semi-exhaustive list of the things we’ve tried as a company over the past four years that failed (or never got off the ground):
An iPad app that aids in drawing and illustrating
An online community where professionals teach clients the basics of the web design and development process
A better kind of fantasy football
A better sports score app
No fewer than three separate iOS game concepts
A restaurant partnership
Here’s a semi-exhaustive list of the things we’ve tried as a company over the past four years where the jury’s still out on whether they’ll ever succeed:
A podcast
A job board
A spinoff t-shirt brand
Taken together, that’s a lot of failure. I’d go so far as to say that we’ve gotten used to failing.
By most measures, my company is successful. We design and build nice websites, we have a side business selling t-shirts, and we earn enough money to comfortably support three people full-time. But we’ve clearly screwed up. A lot. The lists above represent an overwhelming majority of our non-client services efforts over the past four years. And the precious few efforts that have succeeded have only done so after significant time and modifications.
The thing is, failure gets a bad rap. If you’re an individual or a small group like us—and most of the web design industry is—failure is rarely catastrophic. You try something in your spare time, it doesn’t work, you move on. It’s not an all-or-nothing, “bet the farm” proposition. Our industry is so successful because it’s comprised of people who aren’t afraid to take chances. We encourage and reward experimentation, and with experimentation comes failure. Almost everyone we consider successful is only afloat because they’re standing atop a raft built from their own failures. Here’s someone we’ve always considered a model for our business, Jim Coudal, talking about failure in a Design Glut interview:
We’ve had a lot of things not work, and that’s OK too. If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!
We launched a new internal project not too long ago. It’s big, it’s ambitious, and it’s taken months of planning and sketching and designing and building to get to this point. Who knows if it’ll work. If it does, it has the potential to fundamentally change what we are as a business. If it doesn’t, we’ll shed a tear and throw it on the junk pile. And then we’ll try again later with something else.
Skills Canada is a not-for-profit organisation which I’ve been a part of for many years as a competitor, coach, and technical committee member. It’s all part of the larger organisation, World Skills, which brings students who excel in their field together for four intensive days of competition. There are competitions in web design, graphic design, video production, cooking, baking, hairstyling, carpentry, bricklaying, and many more—I kind of like to refer to it as the “Nerd Olympics.” The ultimate goal, of course, is to represent your country at the biannual World Skills Competition (the next one is hosted in Leipzig, Germany this July).
I competed in Skills Canada throughout high school and college, in both web design and graphic design, and after college I stayed with the organisation as a technical committee member for graphic design. After seeing a greater need to help students get involved in web design, I switched committees and I now run annual workshops for students under the age of sixteen. This Friday, I’ll get to help run the provincial competition, judge the projects, and decide who’ll be sent to the nationals to represent this province.
I’m sure you’re thinking that this all sounds great—so why do I feel guilty?
I feel guilty because I don't spend enough time volunteering as I should, could, and want to.
Granted, it isn’t easy. Since college, I’ve been trying to balance a full-time day job with freelance on the side and still make time to teach myself new things, work on my own projects, keep in shape, spend time with friends, and not get burned out in the process. Now, I’ve got a full-time freelance life to sort out on top of even more exciting opportunities. There are people out there who seem to be able to do all of this and much more—what’s their secret? Who knows.
I guess the most important thing is that I’m doing something, no matter how small or infrequent it might be. I’ll definitely try to do more than I have been doing, even if it just means increasing the number of workshops that I hold. These kids are our future, and without mentors, we might lose them before they even realise the opportunities that they have. And I’d feel much more guilty about that.
Designer.“What do you design?” Designer & Illustrator.And repeat. Maker of designery things.A nervous giggle, followed by “What kind of…” Web designer.Their head floods with preconceptions, coupled with “Oh, I know someone who does a bit of that”. UI designer.“What’s UI?” Digital designer.See two above, minus the reply. Brand designer.*Insert vacant stare here*. Designer of Brands.They may as well not have asked. They’re none the wiser. Creator.No chance. Design consultant.A little bit of sick just appeared in my mouth. Never again. Consultant on all things design.“Yes, I really do think of myself as the next Steve Jobs, or Dieter Rams”. Ninja?No. Just no.
F*?! it.
Hi I’m Naomi. I’m stupidly passionate about designing and creating things — for myself and others.
One thing that really bugs me about iPhone apps is that users need to be constantly updating to get the latest version. By updating, I mean going to the App Store and clicking the “Update” or “Update All” button.
Users have a bunch of reasons not to update apps—they forget, too busy, don’t want to wait for the download, have an older phone or OS so that updates won’t work, or they just don’t know that they need to at all.
Of course web applications don’t have this problem. Every time you visit a site or refresh a page you’re getting the latest version. Some desktop applications are fairly forceful about upgrading as well. Chrome updates every time you open the app (by default). Many other desktop applications are aware that there’s a newer version and will prompt you to upgrade.
It seems like it’s still super rare to see any sort of upgrade messaging within iPhone apps. I only recall being forced to upgrade once and it was a Zynga game.
I think ideally your iPhone would download the latest versions of your apps (and iOS) in the background, maybe at times when you’re connected to wifi. However, I don’t see this happening any time soon.
In the meantime I’ve started to integrate upgrade messaging into the apps that I work on and would love to see more open source projects addressing this issue. iPhone app releases contain lots of bug fixes and new features and it would be great to get these out to users as soon as possible.
I had the great pleasure of organising the Responsive Day Out here in Brighton last month. It was a lovely gathering of front-end developers and designers getting together to swap stories and cry on one another’s shoulders about the challenges involved in responsive design.
There were some well-known names on the roster: people who speak at international conferences and whose work you’d be familiar with. But there were also some first-timers: people who had never spoken at a conference before.
So why would I, as a conference organiser, ask someone who has never spoken before to get up on stage and share their thoughts?
The answer is simple: their writing. Reading the intelligent and cogent blog posts and articles that they had published made me want to hear what they had to say ...and I wanted to introduce their smarts to an audience. These people took the time to write down and publish their thoughts, and that led directly to their appearance at a web conference.
I really encourage you to publish on your own site. If you don’t have your own site, I think you should. In the meantime, there are plenty of other wonderful online publications: 24 Ways, Smashing Magazine, A List Apart. Why not get in touch with them if you’ve got an idea for an article?
To say that communication is a valuable skill when you’re working on the web would be quite an understatement. In a very real sense, the web was made to allow us all to share and communicate. Anybody can do it. That’s one of the great things about the web. You don’t need to ask anybody for permission. If you have an idea or a technique or a question that you want to share, all you need to do is publish it ...as long as you take the time to write your thoughts down.
“Do the thing I’m excited to do, or do what needs to get done? Answer: get excited about what needs to get done.”
I wrote that a few weeks ago, and I thought I’d write a few more words about how I change gears mentally to focus on something that requires my attention.
Several years ago, when I worked at Vassar College, I was having lunch with a guy from IT — Phil. He was telling me about some tedious database queries he was working on. Phil was looking forward to getting the job done so he could move on to something else. It didn’t seem like he was having much fun.
Earlier that day, I happened to overhear a colleague in the communications department describe the project she was working on: a feat of content strategy that involved getting faculty bio information into one editable place and publishing the same bio to many different Vassar sites. It was going to make maintenance easier, keep bios consistent across sites, and allow faculty members to edit their own bio content. But to pull it off, she needed IT to run some database queries.
So I told Phil why he was doing those database queries. Turns out he got the assignment from his boss, who hadn’t explained the reasoning behind the task. Phil’s face lit up. He thought the project was awesome, and felt proud to be a part of it. Our five-minute chat totally changed how he felt about doing his work.
I think about that whenever my work feels like a chore. Sometimes all you need is to remember that your efforts are part of something bigger, and that getting your job done matters to someone.
I just went to Confab London, a conference where people from 28+ countries come to shake hands, sip cocktails, and listen to each other’s experiences in the web industry.
While Confab is made for people who work on content and communications, everyone’s welcome. The environment is so welcoming that it kind of makes Twitter feel like a mosh pit or an overcrowded shopping mall. We shove and shout, and every now and again things get so ugly we need a professional timeout. This kind of aggression leaves me with questions:
How can we show empathy for other people in the field? What assumptions can we make about our peers?
When something new launches, what kinds of responses are appropriate? Is it always the best or worst thing ever?
If something is broken or needs work, how can we tell someone that can do something about it?
If we dislike a design in 140 characters, are we teaching clients to judge based on personal taste?
If we’re unhappy with a customer service representative, should we shout about it to friends on Twitter?
I’m not sure where the lines are here, and we’re all figuring it out as we go. I mess up a lot. But if we give strangers the same kind of respect that we give clients, we might learn more from each other along the way.
I’m a thousand feet above Burlington, North Carolina, and out the left window I can see the airport that I intend to land at approximately two minutes from now. My left wingtip points directly at the giant “24” at the end of the runway; the windsock beside the runway says I’ll have a headwind and a slight crosswind from the left when I’m landing.
Power to 1,800 RPM. Spin the trim wheel three times, and start descending as my airspeed bleeds off to about 80 knots. Flaps 10 degrees. Soon the end of the runway is over my left shoulder. There’s no control tower here; it’s up to me to tell other planes what I’m up to, and it’s up to them to listen.
Burlington traffic, Skyhawk 6026 Sierra, left base runway 24.
I ease the plane into a gentle left-hand turn—not too steep, or things could end quickly and badly—and the nose of the plane moves through 90 degrees. Flaps 20, 70 knots, descending steadily.
Burlington traffic, Skyhawk 6026 Sierra, turning final runway 24.
Another shallow turn, even more careful this time because I’m moving even more slowly through the air and the flaps angled down from the wings make the airplane feel sloppy and sluggish. I roll out of the turn with my nose pointed slightly left of the runway to make up for the crosswind I’m expecting, but a peek at the windsock beside the runway says the breeze has died, and the picture I see out the front window isn’t right; I’m too high.
Power idle, flaps 30, 65 knots, but not only am I too high, the missing breeze means I’m also moving over the ground faster than I expected and the end of the runway is rapidly approaching, and you might think I could point the nose of the plane down to fix all of this but you’d be wrong because the plane would start moving over the ground even faster while simultaneously descending more slowly.
Well, shit.
Burlington traffic, Skyhawk 6026 Sierra, short final runway 24, going around.
I’ve practiced this plenty of times, but still. Full power, use all my strength to push the control yoke forward as the plane starts climbing or else I’ll stall the plane and crash into the runway, step on the right rudder pedal to compensate for the sudden change in torque, retract the flaps, but slowly or else I’ll also crash into the runway, edge the plane to the right so if I do crash I won’t crash into the runway or a plane that wasn’t listening and decided to take off even though I was landing.
And start over.
Which, as it happens, is the point of this story: sometimes, you do your best to get everything right, and yet you have to start over, and starting over can be damn scary at first. But, as my instructors endlessly impressed upon me during the 60 hours of training that earned me a plastic card that says I am allowed to fly an airplane, there should never be any shame in it—indeed, perhaps the worst thing one could do is to stick with it, and find oneself standing on the brakes as the plane skids off the end of the runway.
Everyone has been hurt by a loved one or close colleague, sometimes badly wounded. Callousness, lies, back-stabbings, betrayals—these knives pierce deep. The most damaging cuts come from the people we thought we could trust.
Truth is, none of us are saints. We’ve all hurt other people. How do you live with yourself, knowing you’ve damaged—even devastated—someone you care about?
Asking implies a simpler and yet more damning question: Do you have a conscience or not?
Most of us have a conscience. Conscience sits someplace closer than morals, more intimate to your self than external religious or legal dictums. It’s the still, small voice that speaks loudest in the middle of the night. It’s empathy and compassion, an inability to behave cruelly towards the people closest to you because you can imagine how you’d feel in their shoes. You strive to act honorably towards other people because you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t. Go against your conscience, and your feelings of regret, remorse, guilt, and shame remind you to act differently next time. The pain you feel when you violate your conscience ensures that you consider and respect other people.
Not everyone has a conscience. Like a small but vital subroutine absent from their operating system, some people simply don’t feel empathy, aren’t troubled by guilt. Remorse doesn’t wake them up at 3am. They know right from wrong—they just don’t care. Research shows that 3–4% of the population operates without a conscience:
About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. —Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“Sociopath” makes you imagine a cold-blooded murderer, a serial killer who wears his victim’s skin as a hat. The reality of not having a conscience can be more mundane and more insidious. It’s the investor who buys a business by promising to help it grow and then shuts it down, destroying a life’s work. It’s the girlfriend who gives you a hug and tells you how much she cares about you while she stabs you in the back. It’s the husband who carries out multiple affairs, lying to his wife’s face and making her feel like she’s crazy for being suspicious. It’s the boss who takes credit for her employees’ accomplishments when they’re useful and fires them without a second thought when they’re not. It’s the freeloading boyfriend who gets his comfortable lifestyle provided by a string of girlfriends.
It’s someone who repeatedly and callously uses people as pawns, manipulating and deceiving and betraying them, who then walks away without so much as a backwards glance when she gets what she wants—what she believes she’s entitled to.
People without a conscience are usually quite charming, glowing with charisma. People who behave horribly don’t wear a sign around their necks to warn you. Just the opposite. Their social skills are like prosthetic devices, learned behaviors to help ingratiate themselves with the rest of us. They teach themselves how to build a false sense of intimacy; they learn how to play off your pity.
With one in twenty-five odds, chances are you’ve met a few sociopaths in your life. Even if you think this phenomenon must be more rare—say, one in a hundred? One in a thousand? They’re still out there. If you’ve met someone whose behavior left you gasping “how can you live with yourself?” the answer might very well be that they just don’t have the inner sensibility that keeps them in check. They run roughshod over the rest of us, because they simply don’t feel pangs of remorse.
This difference between normal emotional functioning and sociopathy is almost too fantastic for those of us with conscience to grasp, and so for the most part, we refuse to believe such a hollowness of emotion can exist. And unfortunately, our difficulty in crediting the magnitude of this difference places us in peril. —The Sociopath Next Door
There is no reasoning with a sociopath. He’s not going to grow a conscience because you explain his behavior was wrong; she’s not going to feel compassion when you tell her how much she hurt you. The only answer is to walk—no, run—away. Cut your losses, and don’t look back.
Everyone knows the words “introvert” and “extrovert”. But I’m surprised at how widespread the misunderstanding of terms. Many people I talk to, when this subject comes up, still essentially have this understanding:
introvert = shy nerd = bad extrovert = cool jock = good
This is untrue and a bit harmful if you ask me. I’m highly introverted. But I’m not particularly shy, or a shut-in, or whatever other negative stereotypes we could lump on.
The truth about the difference between introverts and extroverts lies in how personal energy is used and gained. Introverts need a lot of recharging time to gain energy. Being out-and-about, especially in social situations, is draining. Alone time is the only way to get that energy back. For me, it’s a lot of alone time. Not sitting in a dark cave staring at the wall, but somewhere comfortable where I can do other activities I enjoy. Laying on a hotel bed catching up on the internet totally counts. At home cooking dinner totally counts. Even reading a book at a coffee shop counts.
Extroverts are the opposite in that they gain energy from social interactions. They thrive on the excitement of meeting people and doing new things. Being cooped up alone would be more like torture than quality downtime. Maybe. It’s harder for me to write about what extroverts are like because I’ve only read about them.
25% introverts is the number typically quoted for the public at large. That number feels about correct to me for the general public, especially in the United States where I live and grew up, where extroversion is the “ideal” and my little formula up top holds especially true. I suspect a much higher percentage for the web worker crowd.
The reason I’m writing about this is because knowing the true nature of introverts was incredibly liberating for me. Most of my life I thought there was something a little bit broken about me. That I wasn’t quite right. That if I could just snuff out this part of myself everything would be a lot better. It certainly didn’t ruin my life but it didn’t make it very comfortable either. Just understanding what being an introvert means and that it’s highly common is a relief. I can read up on it now. Find out how other people handle it. Talk about it with friends. Explain it to people who don’t get it yet.
I grew up in a house with my stepdad, who is about as full-tilt of an extrovert as there ever was. He’s a great guy and we get along well. But he never understood why my face was always buried in a computer. Why I’d go straight for my room after coming home. Why small talk was difficult for me. He probably still doesn’t, but hey, at least I do. I feel like us introverts should make business cards we could leave behind at parties when we duck out the back door without saying goodbye that just say “Google ‘Introvert’” on them.
At the risk of a #humblebrag—a question I get fairly often is: “how do you do it all?” Referring to blogging fairly often, having a podcast, building a startup, etc. I usually referred them to my favorite quote, but a big part of the truth of that is that I gain energy from the quiet time when I’m doing those things, which makes “just sit and do it” easy and enjoyable.
If you had these same type of feelings as me, require quite a bit of recharging time, or otherwise suspect yourself an introvert, I’d suggest some reading:
TV manufacturers are digging their own grave. I just moved to London and am trying to acquire a TV. In the stores I noticed they are promoting features once again, rather than ease of use. TVs come with processors these days. Some better than others as the sales guy made clear. A better processor gives you better streaming 3D on your connected TV. Most have a browser and offer a YouTube “app”. I used YouTube once via a remote control — it was a hilarious demonstration of a user interface disaster.
The complexity increase stands in stark contrast with added end-user value. Pretty much exactly as we were used to with music players, phones, and computers. Drawing the parallels is easy. What users care about is battery life, usability, aesthetics… Not the amount of CPUs a device carries. All I want is a display to which I can stream content, that looks somewhat nice, and is somewhat big. I do not care about connectedness, 3D, 3D glasses, processors, and the myriad of other options.
It seems to me that in their haste to make money out of large monitors they forget that this opens a door. Someone will offer a way cheaper largish display that is integrated with AirPlay (or equivalent) and lets me control it from whatever device I happen to be holding at the moment. No remote control, no features, just “display this”.
Linguistic relativity is the idea that language influences the way people think — the names we use can have a powerful effect on how we perceive things.
If we’re thinking of [designing] a lunchbox we’d be really careful about not having the word “box” already give you a bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow. Because you think of a box as being square and like a cube. And so we’re quite careful with the words we use, because those can determine the path you go down.
I wonder what my kids will be calling these devices in ten years. For me “computer” already seems a term from an earlier time: the time before everything was a computer.
The labels we use in web design can also subtly affect our perception. For example, talking about web pages can lead us to perceive and design them as static comps with fixed dimensions, no different from print design.
Creating layouts on the web has to be different because there are no edges. There are no ‘pages’. We’ve made them up.
What other names come to us with the mental baggage of past association? By considering their connotations, we can at least be more aware of their influence on us, and avoid the narrow, predetermined path of the obvious.
There is a wealth of data locked up because existing government organisations are too scared to give it away or their previous business model revolved around the scarcity of the data. Mapping and GPS are prefect examples of information that once set free, multi-billion dollar business have sprung-up. The US is pretty liberal in what they give away after it has been created with tax payers’ money. Other countries are not as lucky. If you look at software to compute travel distances, route planning, address to lat/lon look-ups, these work much better in the US than in Europe and other countries. It isn’t for lack to talent or skills, but for the lack of open data.
Style is the most distinguishably unique aspect of a designer’s identity. While style can be defined as a visual execution in a design, it can also be how a designer decides to execute. It is the most personal attribute of being a designer, and while a style may differ depending on the context of the problem being solved for, it is an essential quality that contributes to the evolution of a designer’s career. It is as personal and unique as a singer’s voice.
I can truthfully say, out loud, that “Gangnam Style” is one of my favorite fucking songs of the past decade. It is! Is it any better or worse than the latest Atoms for Peace album? Hmmmm… If only we had a celebrity panel of judges to determine that for us! What would J-Lo do? Paging Pitchfork, come in, come in! Pitchfork, we need you to help us determine the value of a song! Who fucking cares! I fucking LOVE IT! Who is to say what’s a good voice and what’s not a good voice. The Voice? Imagine Bob Dylan standing there singing “Blowin in the Wind” in front of Christina Aguilera. “Mmmmm… I think you sound a little nasally and sharp. Next…” It’s YOUR VOICE. Cherish it. Respect it. Nurture it. Challenge it. Stretch it and scream until it’s fucking gone. Because everyone is blessed with at least that, and who knows how long it will last…
—Dave Grohl SXSW Keynote 2013
While one could measure the success of a design, when it comes to emotion and innovation there is a lot to be learned from Grohl’s statements about taste. As an industry the more we push agendas around style and taste the more creativity we stunt. Find your own style as a designer and not only will you be happy, but you will do your best work.
Once, at a conference, someone bragged to me that they were really pleased that their entire development stack was implemented in one language. I can see how this would be a good thing in certain circumstances. What it’s not good for is your breadth as a programmer. It’s good for your core competency of the syntax of a particular language, but it’s not good for your problem-solving brain because it only teaches it one philosophy or methodology. When it comes to JavaScript, for example, a big revelation as to how I thought about solving problems came when I realized how much JavaScript really is a functional language in disguise. I wouldn’t have noticed this as early as I did, though, if I hadn’t exposed myself to LISP before.
In the last year I’ve written code in C, Objective C, Ruby, MUSHCode, JavaScript, Lua, and Java, and so I tell myself that I can say I am not a beginner at programming because I can demonstrate a core set of fundamental skills that transcend language. This was a really satisfying moment because I’ve been trying to think of better ways to represent achievement to people who are learning to program. Sure, success is getting your program to run but eventually that’s not enough and you start asking yourself how you can make it better. That means knowing how to write good code which is really, really non-obvious to someone who’s just come from their first steps as a beginner. Similarly, I wondered to myself by what criteria I could say I’d mastered ‘beginner’ programming topics so that I could define them and the goalposts for someone else. I think that we can say that someone is no longer a beginner at programming if they are not afraid of programming in another language, and maybe on their way to being a more sophisticated programmer for not being averse to it.
I did Pixelworkers’ Origin Story podcast a few days ago, and it has me thinking. I get uneasy when I think back on how I got here. A smirking kind of uneasy, like telling a bar story about a near-miss and changing the subject before you have time to consider how it might have gone instead. I go over the “if”s once in a while just to reassure myself that they didn’t happen, like touching a wall to help me keep my balance.
If entire generations didn’t live and die to give me a shot at a better life than a framing hammer and a ruined spine.
If the friends I made at Wellesley hadn’t taken in some ratty kid sleeping in his car and taught him how to put together a halfway-convincing “responsible adult” costume.
If not for friends handing me a couple of particularly fortunate gigs.
If I’d wavered; if I’d given up.
If I weren’t so goddamned lucky.
That one echoes. “If I weren’t so lucky.” Not as veiled self-congratulation for whatever successes or a smug celebration of any particularly fortunate standing, but to keep me honest. I worked hard, sure, but where would I be if my luck had been just a little worse at the wrong times? Not here. If I weren’t so goddamned lucky, I don’t know where I’d be right now.
I get into a lot of fights on Twitter. Usually with right-wing freaks, the morally uptight, some form of Christian fundamentalist, etc. I’ve picked fights with the Susan Komen Foundation, the Romney campaign, and assorted Tea Partiers. I probably enjoy it more than I should.
But let me tell you about one fight I regret. I was on a cross-country flight. Bored out of my mind. Checking twitter. Saw a tweet from some random guy linking to a post he’d written about unfollowing me. Now, I could give a rat’s ass about someone unfollowing me, but the fact that he felt inclined to write a post about it, coupled with the fact that I was stuck in coach for six hours unleashed the asshole within.
I started a fight with the guy, he engaged, and before I knew it I’d worked up a scheme where I was trying to get him to 1000 followers by the end of my flight, (He had maybe 100 to start with.) with the sole purpose of getting all those new followers to unfollow him the next day at the same time.
The next day I looked over this guy’s reply stream and it was full of hate and vitriol and name calling. I felt sick. I was responsible for that. I worked people into a frenzy and urged them to pick on this guy.
I did something stupid and behaved like a bully. I punched down.
Why am I bringing this up now? Because it was probably the shittiest thing I’ve ever done online. And people let me know it. I was called names. I was told I did a terrible thing. And I deserved it. And it was fair.
It was a measured response.
I want to be a better person. For the sake of the people around me. For the sake of my son. For my own well-being and happiness. I want to treat others the way I hope they would treat me. Sadly, I know myself too well. I’m going to fall short of that goal on a lot of days. And to varying degrees, we all will. And when I do I’ll deserve to be called out. I’ll deserve to be called names. I’ll deserve to be insulted.
But we all deserve a measured response.
Because when your response is worse than the action that elicits it, then who’s the asshole?
It’s March and this is the month I turn a year older. This year I turn thirty-five. With that, comes a certain perspective—a softening of opinion and a clarity of thought.
I went bouldering over the weekend with Josh Brewer and a mutual friend, Ian Kesterson. We were at a public preview for a new bouldering gym opening up here in San Francisco. We were early, but as more and more people piled in as the hour went on, there was a trend of sorts happening.
Josh said it perfectly to Ian, “I think we’re five tattoos short to fit in here.”
It made me laugh. Here I was, bare-chested, with a full tattooed sleeve on my arm, with a haircut that could decidedly be described as manly-heritage-50s-hipster and I realized that despite our age bracket’s crotchety ramblings about all those hipsters on our lawns, we were them. Or at least, I had a similarity to everyone else in the room. And despite our own internal individualities, it dawned on me that for a change, I did belong. These—everyone—were my people.
Later in the week I was at SightGlass Coffee here in San Francisco. It’s a veritable mecca of coffee, in a clean, warm interior with lots of steel, reclaimed and exposed wood and concrete with lots of natural light. Everyone in the room, especially the men, had uniforms on.
I don’t mean that they had some special SightGlass uniform, but that all the men, including myself had some familiar variant of dark denim and a plaid or chambray shirt on. It is our generation’s daily uniform. In the past, there were suits and ties and tucked-in formalities and politeness. Today, our suit is more colourful and comfortable. We can be who we are.
Sometimes that means we’re more alike than we think or know.
But perhaps it just means that the barriers are down, that we’re seeking a family or a tribe. That we are becoming one and the same, barriers and cultures blending healthily.
When I was a child, I really liked Mister Rogers. Okay, I was a little obsessed.
I wasn’t so into Mr. R’s cardigans or the fact that he took off his shoes in front of me, in front of all of us (ew!). Instead, I was fascinated by the fact that we didn’t just hang out with Mr. R, we visited his entire neighborhood. We traveled beyond the land with the little puppet people to go on field trips to learn how things were made.
The field trip I remember most fondly was the trip to a crayon factory. Through the magic of moving images I was able to join him—we all were. We were able to see how crayons were made. And, it was awesome—truly spectacular. I couldn’t get enough.
I was hooked on these fields trips. Hooked, because I was curious. I wanted to learn how things were made. Mr. R took us into the factories we couldn’t go to as kids. Through these field trips, I learned how pieces fit into a whole. I learned that it took people, machines, design, and technology all working together to make the everyday items, like crayons, that I used.
I earned a respect for the people who worked on the manufacturing line. Their jobs looked challenging. Even though they repeated the same task, over and over again, they approached their work with a sense of mastery and professionalism that I could understand—even as a kid.
The workers were making—they were makers. Watching these makers turn hot liquid wax, hardening powder, and pigment into one of my favorite things—crayons—taught me the importance of standards. I learned the importance of professional standards and the importance of product standards. If something wasn’t made up to a specific set of standards then it was pulled from the assembly line.
These field trips, this idea of searching for the answers of how things are made, have stayed with me my entire life.
My first job out of college was at a design studio that had multiple printing presses on site. The studio had a team of designers and a team of pressmen. I didn’t have lunch with the designers—I spent most of my days with them already. Instead, I ate with the pressmen. They had all been working on printing presses for at least 25 years and had a wealth of knowledge to share with a young designer. Because I was curious, they were willing to share their knowledge with me.
I learned how to make my design work better by listening to them talk about the presses. After lunch, they would bring me into the press room and show me how to take the blankets and plates off the press. They showed me how the machines, that brought my designs to life, worked.
The pressmen showed me why hiccups and orange peeling—two things you really don’t want to happen to your printed pieces—happened. And they showed me how to design in a way that helped avoid common printing problems. They shared with me design decisions designers made that really ticked them off—things that made the pressmen’s jobs harder and sometimes impossible. In essence, the pressmen showed me how to make my work stronger. They showed me how to think beyond just being a designer and they helped me to design as a maker.
They did this by encouraging my curiosity. They did this by sharing their experiences and their knowledge.
Sometimes, as designers, we forget that it often takes teams of people working together to help make our products come to life. It takes people, machines, design, and technology all working together to make the items we and other folks use. We all need to encourage the curiosity of learners. Learners of any age. If someone is curious about learning how to make something, let’s take a little time and show them our process. Let’s all be a little more like the pressmen and Mister Rogers. Let’s share the world of making—cardigans optional.
The Product Is Almost More Important Than The Process: A Cautionary Tale About Client Expectations, Communication Gaps, And What Happens When Things Slip Through The Cracks.
I’m buying a new car (a 2013 Mini Countryman S, thanks for asking). Actually, it’s more accurate to say that I’m trying to buy a new car. You see, I went to my local Mini dealership with a very clear idea of what I wanted and what I had to spend, and came to an agreement on a new car…and yet here I am more than two weeks later, still driving my 6-year-old Volkswagen with no clear timeframe of when that’ll change. So what happened?
Not so fast. First, let’s look at the process of buying a car. Buying a car follows a relatively predictable arc. You do your research, you find a model you like, you go to the dealership, you test drive a car or two, you decide on features, you work out financing. Hopefully they have your car on the lot, and you drive it home. If not, they find one at another dealer and get it there in a few days. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Worst case scenario, this takes a week. At least this was my expectation.
Got it? OK. Now let’s look at the process of selling a car. Selling a car is a lot like fishing. A fisherman casts his bait, waits for a nibble, sets the hook, and reels the fish in. Quickly. Once the fisherman senses a hint of commitment, there’s tremendous urgency to the process. The point is, once a buyer is ready to buy, the salesperson needs to close the deal. There are tens of thousands of dollars at stake in a car purchase and fierce competition for those dollars. It’s not much of a stretch to say that sales people need to sell cars to stay alive. At least this was my expectation.
Now that we’re all on the same page, here’s what actually happened (the names have been changed to protect the innocent):
Monday, March 4: I enter Mini of Pittsburgh at approximately 9:30am with a mission: I am going to buy a 2013 Mini Countryman S. I know what colors I like. I know what features I care about. I know what I can afford. I know what my trade-in is worth. I know what other cars I’m considering. I am ready to swallow the bait. I am ready to be reeled in.
I am greeted by Justin, my salesman. Justin is a bald, spectacled, stubbly fellow, not unlike myself. Justin compliments my jacket. I like Justin. Justin and I sit down to discuss features. Justin and I test drive a few models. Justin and I return to the dealership to talk business. Justin introduces me to Carl, the sales manager. Carl and I come to an agreement on payments. Carl has me fill out a credit application. Justin and Carl and I shake hands. I leave the dealership, confident I’ll soon be driving a new 2013 Mini Countryman S.
Tuesday, March 5: Good news! My credit has been approved. Bad news! My desired vehicle is not in the dealership’s inventory, so they’ll need to locate one. A “locate,” that’s what they call it. I am led to believe that a locate takes a few hours, maybe a day, and from that point it’s another 10–14 days before the car actually arrives. Hmm.
Wednesday, March 6: Justin emails me to say that they’ve found a few vehicles that match my desired car. They’re “moving forward with the locate.”
Thursday, March 7: I call Justin, inquiring on the status of my locate. “I’m pretty sure we got one,” he says. “Pretty sure?” I ask. “Pretty sure,” he says. I am not so sure. Justin says he’ll call me the next day.
Friday, March 8: Justin does not call me.
Saturday, March 9: My wife and I visit the dealership unannounced. Justin is busy with other customers, so we pass the time by taking another test drive. Upon our return, we bump into Carl. Carl barely recognizes me. I jog his memory. Carl asks if they ever located my car. “You tell me,” I say. (SPOILER ALERT: they never located my car.) We sit down in Carl’s office to properly locate my car. He gives me three options; I choose one at a Mini dealership in Louisville, Kentucky. “You’re in luck. I know the sales manager in Louisville,” Carl says. Carl is confident he’ll have news for me by the end of the day. The end of the day passes. I hear nothing from Carl.
Monday, March 11: It’s midday. I have still heard nothing from Carl. I email him. Carl replies that he has no news, but a few hours later, he emails again. “I got it!!” he writes, with double exclamation points. “Great!!” I reply, with double exclamation points, “do you need anything from me to make it official?” Carl does not respond.
Tuesday, March 12: Justin calls to confirm that yes, the locate has been completed, and no, they don’t need anything further from me. I ask if he knows when my car will be picked up. He does not. I ask if he knows the route of the truck picking up my car. He does not. I ask if he’s in contact with the truck driver. He is not. (SIDENOTE: it’s 20-goddamn-13. This truck should be a real-time dot on a map, but I digress.) All Justin knows is that my 2013 Mini Countryman S will be here in 10–14 days and that once it arrives I will be “the second person to know.” He’ll be the first, you see.
[Eight days pass]
Wednesday, March 20: The phone rings early in the morning. I recognize the number; it’s Mini of Pittsburgh. I answer, breathlessly anticipating what is no doubt news of my car’s arrival. Instead, it’s Justin “just checking in,” telling me the same thing he told me eight days ago: yes, my car’s still definitely on the way, and no, he still doesn’t know when, and no, he still doesn’t know if it’s been picked up yet, and no, he still doesn’t know where the truck is. But as soon as it arrives, I’ll be the second to know.
So now you’re all caught up. One of these days—who knows when, certainly not Justin—I’ll receive a call that my car has arrived. And when that day finally comes, I’ll drop what I’m doing and drive to the dealership and shake everyone’s hand and sign a stack of papers and write someone a check and give them the keys to my Volkswagen and get my new keys and drive my new car home. I’ll be elated. Three months from that day, I’ll probably still be elated, and all that elation for my new car will almost be enough to make me forget about the runaround and lack of communication and dropped balls and interminable wait that I had to endure to get it. Almost.
What’s the difference between buying a car, or enjoying the process of buying a car? “Almost” is the difference. “Almost” means that I might not recommend my Mini dealership to a friend. “Almost” means that if I had a stronger constitution, I’d tell Justin and Carl to go pound sand while I bought a competitor’s car. “Almost” means that I might not go back a few years from now and buy another Mini. “Almost” is the difference between a customer and a customer-for-life.
But we’ll see about all that. For now, I wait. My new car is “almost” here.
Recently, I was working on a project with the wonderful team at Blue Bottle Coffee. One member of their crew was talking about their (notably wonderful) in-café experience and likened it to a swimming swan: a swan presents a self-controlled elegant appearance above the surface even as her flippers are paddling like mad underwater propelling her forward.
I love how directly applicable the swan metaphor is to product development. Great product designers and engineers go to great lengths to make their products appear effortless. It’s truly incredible that my wife is nonplussed that a Google search with only the four letters “ZAZI” will give her directions, opening times, and a reliable rating of a restaurant a mile away… even though she mistyped its name… in 300ms… across the entire corpus of the internet! No big deal. It just took hundreds (thousands?) of engineers a decade to make this miraculous achievement possible. This is the quintessential swan. All of that effort underwater to make something appear eminently easy.
Look for ways in your own products to do the extra legwork on the design and engineering front to give people that effortless experience.
* Note that this swan metaphor isn’t a new concept. In fact, I feel like I might be the last person on earth to hear it, especially since it seems so obvious after little explanation. For instance, Danny Meyer, a well-known New York restaurateur behind Shake Shack, invokes it in his book Setting the Table. ** The swan metaphor has also been used to describe the negative behavior of masking one’s panic—see the Stanford Duck Syndrome. This is also very useful in the designer’s workplace, but probably another topic entirely.
I always keep two books on my nightstand. Right now, I’m trundling through Anna Karenina (my first Tolstoy!) and rereading a 2011 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly titled The Future. It’s a way to make accidental juxtapositions and see connections that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.
Timo Arnall recently wrote about the problems with ‘invisible design’. It not only questions the myth of the intuitive, but also argues eloquently for the legible. (It doesn’t hurt that it draws upon lots of prior design literature, which we could all stand to do more of.) The piece got shared widely online and was met with surprise and controversy.
Now, here’s some juxtaposition (emphasis mine):
It turns out that changing behaviour is a way to subsequently change attitudes; this is entirely counter the thinking behind many smart systems, which are predicated on feedback loops delivering information to people, whose attitudes then change, and who then choose to change their behaviour accordingly. Instead, behaviour change happens through changing behaviour, and then attitudes.
It is not enough to simply “make the invisible, visible”, to use the already well-worn phrase in urban informatics. But change might happen through creating convenient, accessible ways to try something different, and then multiplying that through social proof and network effects, reinforcing through feedback. (This means all those smart meters are a complete waste of time and money, and will eventually have to be uninstalled.)
That was from Dan Hill’s piece about ‘smart cities’ and active citizenship. It takes Timo’s arguments for legibility and extrapolates it to more smartness—but guess what? Dan posted it before Timo’s piece. I was lucky to make the connection between them only because I’d read Dan’s entry a week prior.
This particular kind of serendipity—remembering and seeing connections between unrelated works—ignores many distinctions. It doesn’t matter whether something is new or old, whether it was published in the New Yorker or on a blog, whether it was written by a designer or scientist or urban planner. Your act of reading—jumping from point A to point B—creates a wormhole between the two. It lets you time travel.
So this weekend, my wife and I went to Five Horses Tavern in Davis Square, which is where we go to either try out a new Whiskey or eat the most super-amazing Brussels Sprouts appetizer known to cuisine. Or both. This time, it was both.
Based on a friend’s recommendation, we ordered the Whistlepig rye. Well, she ordered the Whistlepig. I ordered the Sazerac rye, because I’ve been meaning to try that—the previous time I ordered a Sazerac, the waitress brought me a mixed drink, apparently it’s both a rye and a cocktail, whoops—but they didn’t have it (!) so I went with my fall-back, Bulleit bourbon. Neat (of course).
You can’t go wrong with the Bulleit. It’s good tasting, fairly inexpensive and most places I’ve been to have it. I took a sip. Tried-and-true delivers, yet again.
Then I cleansed my palate with a sip of water and tried the Whistlepig.
Wow, that’s some good stuff. Flavorful, complex, and so smooth. Let me tell you that after trying the Whistlepig, it was pretty difficult to go back to the Bulleit. I mean, the Bulleit is good, but the Whistlepig is great. In some ways, it reminded me of my personal favorite, the Macallan 17 year scotch, but with a bit more bourbon “burn” up front.
At this point, after having realized that my drink had been hopelessly outclassed, the only option remaining was to slam my Bulleit, drink an entire glass of water, and try to sneak some more of my wife’s Whistlepig. Like, “Hey, is that so-and-so over there?” (sneak a sip while she turns around) “Oh, I guess not, it’s really dim in here, sorry.”
That was Friday night, we bought a bottle of Whistlepig on Saturday.
You often hear about people learning a trade from an elder, choosing it for their path and working their entire career in that trade. Given the amount of change that web design and development has created in the world, it amazes me that it is not yet old enough for anyone to have done that. We’re really just getting started.
As far back as trade work goes, there has always been someone who excels at the craft teaching others. In 2011, Kevin Hale gave a fantastic keynote at Converge SE, that led me to dive into research into craftsmanship and guilds. The history is so wonderful and I highly recommend reading The Craftsman. In the pursuit of mastery, people have learned directly from a master in their area. Many even lived in their master’s home and helped with other household chores in exchange for the teachings.
As communities grew, people formed guilds and established guildhalls for meetings and information sharing. These were formed for many reasons, my favorite of which is the good-hearted sharing of knowledge. However, there were plenty of examples where they were created in order to “influence” the flow of trade or in secret as a response to political happenings. Either way, there were now groups of people getting together to share that had learned from various masters (or journeymen at that point).
The very nature of the web made it so that people could instantly share their information with people all over the world. This is is a huge reason for the amount of impact that we have made. However, we’re missing out on something.
Blog posts, tutorials, online code challenges, magazine articles, books, etc. all inspire people to learn, but there is so much nuance lost in getting them into the medium. Watching someone perform their tasks is so important.
There are a few people beginning to do this and I hope for much more of it. The Sparkbox team are running an apprenticeship program and Chris Coyier is running The Lodge. I share them both because one is in-office training and the other is video training. I understand that not everyone can allow people in their office (or homes for that matter) to watch them in action. Screen recording and talking through processes is a really close example and can capture much more of the nuance involved with creating something for the web. (It’s much more powerful when done over the course of an entire project.)
But empathy isn’t easy. As much as I want to have it, as much as I believe in it, I fall down on the job a lot. I dole out advice better than I listen. I get frustrated with people who just can’t figure things out. I’m quick to be an editor when I ought to simply be a friend.
I think I might have found the real problem, though. We can’t begin being empathetic when another person arrives. We have to already have made a space in our lives where empathy can thrive. And that means being open—truly open—to feeling emotions we may not want to feel. It means allowing another’s experiences to gut us. It means ceding control.
Empathy begins with vulnerability. And being vulnerable, especially in our work, is fucking terrifying.
Fronting
I’ve spent most of my life putting up one front or another: against middle-school taunts, against familial drama, against injustices both petty and profound. I suppose we all have. How else would we get through adolescence, through job rejections, through breakups and bad news and disappointments of all sorts?
Fronting isn’t bad; it’s human. It’s a shield—a way to cope, to keep others at a safe distance, to tell them the story we want them to see. But it’s also what’s keeping us from greatness, as Karen McGrane wrote last month in a column for A List Apart:
I’m comfortable when I can tell myself I’m in control, when I can attend to all the small details and various checklists that add up to “doing a good job.” I had to be forced into a place where I simply did not give a fuck in order to find out what I was really capable of.
Greatness, in other words, demands rawness.
I’ve probably read that piece a dozen times by now (and only two of those were in my official capacity as editor). I keep returning to it because I’ve never before had so many good things happening at once, and yet simultaneously felt so far from great.
This might surprise you if you know what I’ve been doing recently: taking over A List Apart, speaking at conferences, publishing a book. I am, as they say, doing well. Yet that book nearly did me in—and not because of the writing, either. I was simply scared of being exposed.
I was terrified that the things I’d been working on—mostly alone, mostly in a little agency in Arizona that was far from perfect and that didn’t really reflect what I wanted to be doing—were going to get called out as minuscule and silly. That I didn’t deserve to be doing this. That I’d let people down.
I did it anyway. I felt nauseous the whole time.
My fears were unfounded, of course. I’ve received inspiring emails from strangers. I’ve had mostly good reviews. I hear it might even make money someday.
I should feel relieved. I should feel ecstatic. But vulnerability doesn’t work that way. I still feel this intense desire to hide, to deflect, to cover back up all those parts I exposed to the world.
I’ve distanced myself from past projects; I’ve avoided pushing for the sort of work I really want; I’ve glossed over details to avoid admitting how little I actually know. I’ve worked hard, terribly hard, to make my checklist add up to a good job.
But I am not great. Not yet.
Professionally vulnerable
There’s a safety in creating distance—in carefully managing perceptions and avoiding the things that make you feel unprepared and unworthy. It’s easier to get by when you have a buffer.
But that distance not only keeps you from greatness; it also numbs you. It protects you from your own emotions, sure. But it also makes it impossible to feel anyone else’s.
I can’t afford to be numb. I have users to help. I have problems to solve. I have got to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Empathy starts with vulnerability. And I’m still working on it.
In a world where the physical is replicated in a digital format so frequently, you would think that our processes would have evolved — some time ago — to support this.
It would seem not.
I’d like to bring attention specifically to publishing — where a publisher has a physical magazine, for example, which they are also offering as a digital download (whether that be hosted online, or offered within their own app).
Many of the publishers I have created artwork for will use the same artwork that is sent to print to create their digital version.
This is a huge bug-bear for designers and brands alike, as the artwork created for print is set in CMYK colour. When this is used on-screen, which uses the RGB colour spectrum, the artwork is simply wrong.
This is not the only issue caused by using the same artwork (another is opacity fringing which only appears in digital versions), however it is certainly the most poignant.
We’re all very aware of what a huge role colour plays in representing a brand. And this is a simple case of the publisher’s process prohibiting us from representing a brand’s colour palette correctly — whether our own, or a client’s.
So, I challenge all print publications out there to allow us to supply two versions of artwork. Please let us offer the high level of service we strive for, throughout all of our communications.
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. —Gilbert Keith Chesterton
They were right. As they’d predicted two decades ago in 2013, half of humanity now lives in cities with nearly 60 percent of our world’s population as urban dwellers. Cities have not only grown in size and population, their very interface has changed.
Back then, citizens were enthusiastic about the layered effect of our data so we could search, sort, friend, follow, retrieve, and archive it in the interest of exactitude. Google, Twitter, Foursquare were changing technology—which is to say, culture. These, and more, increased the opportunity for specificity as they decreased the chance for serendipity.
But humans grew uncomfortable. Things got smarter. Time sped up and time compressed as people became more informed, more efficient, more connected, faster. While the rise of the slow (at first, slow food, then slow web, slow cities) began as rhetoric, it took as a movement.
With more inhabitants than ever before, cities had become not a place for human interaction, but for precise location and retrieval. Entering addresses and finding exact points on the map (with recommended walk/drive/transit directions!) left little up to chance. As humans found more, they had less. Media inventors of any notoriety launched apps and services that provided shortcuts: shortcuts to getting lost, shorthand for privacy, short forms of disconnecting.
Meantime, undigital became luxury. Spas, once islands of tranquility and beauty, became islands of undigital luxury goods. Free “off the grid service” services sold out. This pastoral new concord has had an effect. Humans choose longer lines, the slow lane, practice inexact query formation. Because without the slow, the good was not recognizable.
The divide between the connected and unconnected continues to demonstrate an economic discord: those living comfortably are also living un-connectedly. Unubiquitious computing demands have inspired developers to rush to build unconnected communities. The new connected is to be disconnected. Deadspots are the new hotspots.
Moving toward is moving away, and hence, the notion of density and progress has changed. It’s our job to pause, coordinate, and design opportunities for chance.
As much of the industry has continued to talk about change and developing product incubators, we’re doing it, and we’re growing doing it. In 2012, we grew both our team and our revenue, and we did it with a 50/50 split between communications projects and product work. We’ve kept our non-siloed and autonomous culture thriving, and this year we’re more certain than ever that the best brands are useful and have purpose, and the most effective products must tell stories.
—Joshua Teixeira, VP Product and Platform Strategy
It is fascinating the varying ways in which we describe our industry. As a juvenile discipline that is nebulous in its boundaries we struggle to create words to define ourselves. So we are inevitably forced to search for analogues.
Lately we have seen a rise in the use of the word ‘craftsmanship’ to describe our work. This term evokes various positive adjectives—hand-crafted, quality, unique, personal, bespoke—and can be seen as part of a broader appreciation of the art of making. I’m as guilty as the next person for appropriating this word but I am increasingly feeling that ‘craftsmanship’ has become an unhelpful term for describing what we do.
The first problem is that if we choose to see the web designer as artisan then we begin to see the website as artefact. This objectification of websites leads to fetishism—where we come to value a 400 x 300 pixel screenshot* more than a moment of interaction, a subtle change in navigation, an engaging feedback message, a beautifully executed form submission. We lust after representations rather than relishing the substances that they are composed from and the processes that inform them. And we come to see ourselves as the peddlers of goods rather than services.
Secondly, the word craftsmanship is bound up with a particular practice of working and, more importantly a particular practice of learning: a practice that emphasises repetition and mastery and the passing of knowledge from one (the master) to another (the apprentice). Of course we refine our technique with doing; practice makes perfect. But is it not the ultimate beauty of working on the web that we can never be its master? There will always be something new to learn, always tools and technologies that change, new devices to support, new audiences to accommodate.
The world wild web has always been a fluid medium. It is time to stop objectifying it and accept that mastery is a fool’s errand. We work in the digital space: we don’t make things by hand, most of us teach ourselves and we don’t need to borrow labels from other disciplines to evoke pride and quality in what we do.
You said hi as I made my way up the stairs at Brighton’s Duke of York Picture House. You were looking forward to my talk, you said, especially the part about Grunt, and I nodded and smiled and hoped that you couldn’t see on my face the fact that, with an hour or so to go, I hadn’t actually written that part yet.
I made my way upstairs again after my talk and bumped into you again. You said you’d enjoyed my talk, and we headed to the balcony and chatted and you told me your name, which I’ve since misplaced because I was busy basking in that feeling of being done with a talk that had been occupying my brain for weeks.
And then you asked if you could ask me a question and you seemed very careful about it and I said sure of course you can, and you said:
“Are you ever intimidated?”
Yes. Oh god, yes. A thousand times yes, I am intimidated every day by everything I don’t know and everything I need to learn and all of the people I am so lucky to know who are so much smarter than me. Anyone who was up on that stage or any other stage who tells you they’re never intimidated is either lying or broken. I don’t know how it is that I get to fly to faraway cities, get a microphone clipped to my shirt, and talk for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes and then when I’m done talking, people clap. I know for certain it’s not because I have all the answers, or even more than a few of them.
And you seem relieved to hear this, and even though my foot is broken and I have laryngitis and I’m kind of ready to be back home, I am so damn grateful right then that I get to do what I do, because every now and then I get to let someone like you in on the secret that there’s not all that much that stands between the people on the stage and the people in the audience, we’re all just normal people with normal-people insecurities, glad when someone says hello on the stairs.
It’s mid-February as I write this thought. Two weeks ago, I made one of the most difficult decisions of my life, but one I’d been thinking about for a long time—I quit my job.
I quit my job at a small advertising agency where I was an Art Director and Designer for nearly five years. I’m leaving a steady paycheck behind and learning how to fend for myself. Truthfully, it’s taken me nearly two years to build up enough confidence to hand in my notice—I’ve never really considered myself much of a risk taker.
It’s now time to focus on me for a while. I’ll be spending the month of March writing a small book and working on my new portfolio.
It’s my turn to call the shots around here, and I can’t wait to see what happens.
My favorite part of any new video game is the tutorial. Let me explain.
One of the magic tricks that good games have to pull off is how to pace complexity. The amount of time a player spends with any one game is usually pretty long. The low end of gameplay time for big commercial games is about 8–10 hours, and it’s not hard to spend hundreds of hours with certain games. To keep you interested for that long, a game has to be relatively complex. But if a game dumps all that complexity on you in the beginning, you’ll never make it. They have to introduce it gradually.
Games used to do this with separate tutorial levels. Before starting the real game, you’d be strongly admonished to play the tutorial first, which usually took the form of separate levels with guided steps along the way to introduce the interface and the core mechanics.
Modern games have started working the tutorials into the first few levels of the real game, sometimes so deftly that you hardly know you’re playing a tutorial.
Weaving the tutorial into the first few moments of the game makes for another balancing act. Not only does the game want to teach you how to play it, it wants you to get a feel for what playing the game is going to be like for many more hours. It wants you to say: “whoa, this is going to be good.”
In this way, game tutorials have started to behave more like pilot episodes in television. Pilots have a similar magic trick to pull off. In the first episode they have to introduce the characters and the rules of their world while at the same time convincing you that this is a place you want to come back to for many more hours. A pilot is a promise to the viewer: “this is going to be good.”
Some shows are better at fulfilling this promise than others. If you go back and watch the first episodes of your favorite shows (as I have done more times than I’d like to admit), you can see which ones stuck to the rules they set out in the beginning and which ones wandered from the path.
In the first episode of one of my favorite shows, The West Wing, there’s a sequence of vignettes that visits each of the main characters in a moment of their lives. Each one establishes some essential aspect of that character’s personality and gives you a sense for the role they play in the world of the show. The remarkable thing about these scenes is that, watching them after spending more than a hundred hours with these characters, they still ring true. These first sketches of these characters, presented so confidently and economically in the beginning—each one lasts just a few minutes—was a promise kept for the rest of the show.
It’s that same confidence and economy that makes a great tutorial for a great game. There are no wrong choices during the tutorial, and each step forward introduces a core mechanic that you’ll hopefully spend the rest of the game using. Is this fun? Do I want to get to know these characters? Do I want to spend time in this world? By the end of a good tutorial or a good pilot episode, you should have your answers.
When we design digital products, for the most part, we’re still building tacked on tutorial modes. Step by step introductions, a few popups to show you where the important buttons are. Did you get all that? Good, because now you’re on your own.
But beyond just instructions, what are the promises we want our products to make? And how do we present them confidently and economically in the first few moments? How do we get people to say: “whoa, this is going to be good”?
Today, I asked myself the question “Why do we often form extreme opinions on things, when in reality our opinion often lies in the midground”. I have little knowledge of psychology, but it seems that humans find it difficult to make reasoned decisions to complex problems (problems with many possible outcomes) and so often rely on intuition to solve them. But when a binary alternative offers itself, we will often take the shortcut and assume there are no alternative solutions. It is also far more easy to communicate the simple binary answer than the complex one.
A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option. The options may be a position that is between two extremes (such as when there are shades of grey) or may be completely different alternatives.
For example, if you ask someone whether they like cats or dogs, they will very often answer with one or the other. The reality is never so simple. All people somewhat like/dislike cats and somewhat like/dislike dogs. Nobody likes all cats and nobody likes all dogs. This is an example of false dilemma, as there are more than two answers. Very few things are black and white, and yet we find it hard to acknowledge this.
Take the digital industry for example, I see false dilemma everywhere. We all make quick decisions on how to do things and then forget why we made that decision. One rule rarely fits all, and yet people often shoehorn a process, technology, framework or mindset into every project they work on. Some of the best craftspeople out there will make very few assumptions, as few as possible. Every decision will be reasoned, and based on the specific needs of the product they are creating. The design will flourish out of a multitude of nuanced decisions, bespoke to this one set of constraints.
We must also be ready to evolve, and I think we are much better at this. Generally, people in the digital industry embrace new technology and adopt it into their workflow. But perhaps we could still do better, especially when it comes to an evolving understanding in the nature of digital and what it means to people. Look around you, and see what everyone else is learning. Be ready to reassess your assumptions and move forwards. It doesn’t necessarily mean you were wrong, but that your understanding of how digital products are used can always be improved. Besides, we’re all designing for a world which is constantly in a state of flux. What was true yesterday need not be true today.
But perhaps the most important thing I want to highlight here, is that the answer to most questions is it depends, and very often in the grey area between black and white. Try not to take extreme views on things, and perhaps see that there is always another level of complexity to be discovered in any decision you make.
The best career advice I’ve ever gotten came from JP Maheu, who at the time was the CEO of Razorfish. We sat down to do my performance review and he gave me this gem:
“Figure out what it is that makes you really enjoy your work, and then make sure you get to do it.”
Many people, as they advance in their careers, move away from doing the thing that got them into the field. Designers stop designing, and start managing people. Developers stop coding, and start managing resources and budgets. One day, you look up from your computer monitor and ask yourself “Is this really what I want to be doing?”
For me, that moment happened when I realized that my whole job was resource management spreadsheets, staffing calls, hiring, and putting out fires. I got into this business because I wanted to design products, not manage operations.
I know I’m not alone in struggling to balance “making” with “managing.” I’ve talked with dozens of people who question how they can find the right split, particularly as their seniority grows and they’re asked to take on more responsibility. Some people alternate between the two, focusing for months or years on project and people management, and then make a deliberate choice to spend time designing or building. Others control their daily calendar to ensure a mix of the two.
What’s clear from everyone I’ve talked to is that striking your right balance won’t happen on its own. The demands of work will always pull you away from doing the activities that give you the most joy. You’re the only one who will make sure you get to do the things you really love. So be intentional about building those into your work life—each day, each month, each quarter, each year.
I like change, which means I switch up how I write once in a while. I move furniture first or go for a photo walk. I draw boxes on a whiteboard or type directly into text fields. I think out loud to hear my own voice. I ask questions and listen to other people’s feelings and ideas.
These patterns come from different things around me, like my environment, friends, and how I’ve been feeling. Writing is a personal and subjective practice. As we change, our styles and interests do too. With that in mind, here are three patterns I’ve noticed in myself lately:
Wait until the end of the day to write something personal. When you’re completely exhausted, it’s easier to speak from the heart.
Don’t worry if your work isn’t perfect. Focus on the feelings you want to convey, even if they’re fuzzy at first. Cover what you care about. Then, fill in the facts, reread what you wrote, and edit for details.
Talk with people a lot more than you think you can. You’ll be a better human for it and your work will improve too.
So what about you? What kinds of patterns do you find yourself following these days? I’d love to hear about them, whether about writing or anything else.
Developers hate interruptions. Of course everyone dislikes being interrupted, but being interrupted while writing code is particularly tough. Coding requires a lot of concentrated mental energy. We mentally untangle logical problems, seek to simply solutions, and cover all edge cases. Often we’re trying to mentally calculate several things at once.
Interruptions are frustrating because we may lose our train of thought or forget an edge case. It’s also really difficult to focus on a new task while our brain may still be working on the previous problem.
I recently returned to working in an office full-time after working from home for several years. By far what I miss most about working from home is that my home is relatively free of interruptions and therefore perfect for coding work.
However, I’ve realized that writing great code isn’t the only part of my job. Communicating with co-workers, planning and coordinating tasks, and exchanging feedback are also an important part of my job as a developer.
Currently I’m working on becoming more productive in an environment with interruptions. For example, I try to put aside my current task and really listen when someone needs my attention. I also try to carve out some time dedicated to responding to email, planning upcoming projects, and collaborating with co-workers.
In a perfect world we would all be working together and thinking about the same things at the same time and there would be no interruptions. Of course this is impossible (unless we become the Borg… but that’s a whole different blog post). So, (for now?!) I’m okay with learning to manage interruptions and figuring out how to become a better co-worker.
Everyone keeps raving about interfaces where you wave your hands around all Minority Report style. I wonder if we go down the road where that is the only way to interact with the system, we’ll have a limiting factor of who can actually use the system. If you don’t have 2 arms, 2 legs and 10 fingers and toes, the system might not work for you. At the moment, accessibility can be achieved through other devices. If a mouse is too hard to use, then keyboard support would suffice, or aural input and output. How come you never seen someone in the future in a wheelchair using these crazy new kinaesthetic interfaces?
“The best tasting tea is the tea you drink when you are in a good mood.”1
That’s how I remember the quote from Uncle Iroh from the fantastic cartoon epic Avatar: The Last Airbender. He was full of little nuggets of wisdom like this. Relevant to the moment while hinting at a larger metaphor. I particularly like this one.
It’s a reminder that everything is better when you are in a good mood. Stop lights don’t seem so long. The 40%-on-Rotten-Tomatoes comedy movie you watch is hilarious. You respond with grace to a snarky email.
That’s because your mind is busy smiling. You ignore the bad parts for the good. You choose to stop the cycle of anger with a dash of cheer.
You can’t force a good mood, but if you’ve got one, use it well and hang on.
1That’s how I remembered it, anyway. I just re-watched the entire series to find it but the closest I could find was: “The best tea tastes delicious whether it comes in a porcelain pot or a tin cup.” which is also awesome.
As the sad news broke that my former employer will stop developing its own browser rendering engine, John Lilly wrote the following:
What we do know is that in technology, we’ve never been served well by monocultures — we know this for sure. I worry that in our desire for clearer definition, easier standards, faster progress, we’re forgetting that we know this.
When my son Henry told me he was performing in his high school talent show my knuckles turned white as I recalled my own horrible high school experiences. There’s nothing that brings out a teenager’s cruelty like another teenager expressing an interest in something. Anything. The idea of a my kid exposing himself to the vicious cruelty of his peers, and the years of therapy he would need to rediscover this exact moment where everything changed triggered every overprotective instinct I had.
And yet, I knew the right thing was to support him. The kid was taking a risk. And parenting is more about patching up skinned knees than keeping them from climbing too high.
A few weeks later I sat in the audience of his high school auditorium as he took the stage and belted out an a capella version of the Mountain Goats “No Children”. And totally won the audience over. And as he walks off stage he does this little kick that says he knows he nailed it.
There’s no way I would have had the courage to do what he did at fifteen. Heck, I don’t have the courage to do it now.
I recently moved, from Osaka to Tokyo. Packing your life into boxes is exhausting, but I found the “deciding what to keep” part reflective. I rediscovered some great books I’d bought and read years ago, but had not opened since. Revisiting Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems in Graphic Design again, I had fresh insights on how I could apply it to web design. Part of this was refreshing my memory, but there was more — I realised I’m a different person compared to when I read it the first time. At that stage I hadn’t designed to a baseline measure, and everything I’ve done since then (work, discussions, learning about Flexbox and CSS Grid Layout…) has affected my viewpoint.
I feel the same as the young me of 15 years ago, but my perspective has been continually changing. Realising this self-delusion is useful for judging my memories, and considering the viewpoints of others. Now I’m re-reading other “design thinking” books, to see what extra things the “now” me will perceive.
Just like great movies, the best books and articles reveal more nuance the second or third time around. If you haven’t recently, re-read the best article of our profession — John Allsopp’s A Dao of Web Design, and reconsider this near-13 year old wisdom through the lens of Responsive Web Design and the zombie apocalypse of devices.
When you are not programming, you are still a programmer too
When you are not programming, you are a programmer still. It doesn’t leave you.
When you walk down the street after work and you leave your computer behind, your analytical mind stays with you. If you really want to get better at programming, start finding ways to solve the same kinds of problems you see in your code everywhere else in your life. Probably you are solving many of them already every day and you don’t even notice it. The last time you travelled to complete errands, did you try to take the route that you thought would take the shortest amount of time? Do you try to do your dishes while you have a load of laundry in to parallelize your household tasks? Have you ever followed an algorithm of pictographs to assemble IKEA furniture? Have you ever played a video game and tried to find ways to get the highest score? If we are aware of our penchant for problem solving, then we can embrace it. Good problem solving is at the core of good programming practices.
Always ask why about everything in front of you. I think this is something we are told to do as kids, but as adults many of us become a little arrogant and pretend we are beyond needing this skill. We become smart adults doing adult jobs and we pretend that we know enough and get lazy and we stop asking why to the little things we take for granted. Why do the doors on our office building push inward instead of pull out? Why is the elevator slow — how does it make its decisions about what floors to stop on? Why did the designer of that poster use that particular typeface to convey their message? Always ask why, why, why in and out of your domain. Ask why in some of the most unfamiliar situations and then try to use your reasoning and other programmer skills to come up with a solution. It doesn’t matter if you ever know what the right answer is, only that you’re making an effort to try and solve the problem for yourself. Have fun with it and be creative, and find friends who take pleasure in this pastime as well. You’ll end up having interesting conversations that lead you back to working on your problem solving skills.
Strive, with consistency, toward self-awareness. I mean this in a very practical and pragmatic way, not in a new age fluff kind of way. This is basically a different application of the previous point of asking why. In the previous paragraph, I explained that it is important to ask why about the world around you. Perhaps more important than that is asking why about yourself. Why do I like to play the piano? Why do I procrastinate the things I love sometimes? Why did I write an email I sent in the tone that I did? Even the act of selecting what to wear in a given day is a design problem waiting to be solved depending on who you expect to see and what role they play in relationship to you. Pretend you are an anthropologist specializing in the study of you, and ask why, why, why. You will understand your own patterns of decision-making, and eventually your own cognitive biases. You will understand why you do the things that you do and that will include why you program the way that you program.
When you question everything, you find the places in structures and organizations around you and within you that can be improved, and from that comes meaning and purpose when you are rewarded by that awesome feeling of solving a problem. When you come back to the computer you will have better questions to ask that will make you a better programmer.
This pastry box cupcake is dedicated to Natalie Goldberg, the inspiration of which is taken from the first two sentences of her piece “Be an Animal” in Writing Down the Bones — the best book on writing that I have yet to read.
This hurts to write. I mean, it literally hurts—my hands are killing me lately. This New England weather, man.
I don’t like to talk about it much, but my skeleton is basically held together with the organic equivalent of kite string and “wishing super hard.” I’ve got a condition called “Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome,” one of the “hypermobility” types. It’s a one-in-tens-of-thousands genetic mutation that more or less makes me Bizarro Wolverine, if you’ll pardon my mixing of comic universes.
It hits everyone a little differently, and I’m fortunate enough not to have any of the particularly nasty kinds—the ones where blood vessels and/or organs are made of stretchy tissue paper, for example. I have a type where the only thing holding my joints in place are the joints themselves, more or less. I’ll partially dislocate things—fingers, wrists, shoulders, ankles—a couple of times a day, just by way of using them normally. The upshot is that it isn’t really painful popping something out of joint, the way it would be if I were put together right—most times I don’t notice. For example, I realized a few days ago that I hold my iPad with my left wrist partially out of joint, and I didn’t even notice. The downside is that my joints hurt, every day, for as long as I’ve known me. I take a lot of Motrin, and I carry a roll of hockey tape with me.
When I was a kid—real young—I had to sleep with metal bars binding my feet together so my hips wouldn’t be out of their sockets all night. My parents were told I’d likely never walk—not normally, anyway—but I lucked out there. A handful of years and a few bad decisions ago, it led to me wrenching up my back bad enough that a partially-herniated disc clamped off my right sciatic nerve. I walked with a limp for a couple of years. The nerve damage wasn’t bad enough that it was permanent, thankfully, but it still aches some days.
I’m not the “degenerative” type, for which I am tremendously thankful—the condition won’t get worse in and of itself. I’m not gonna wake up some morning with one arm over on the other side of the room, knock on wood. It’s gonna cause my joints to wear out a lot faster than they should. When I was twenty or so, a doctor told me I had the joints of a sixty year old. I’m thirty now.
That part scares me; my hands in particular. I need these things to get work done. It wouldn’t be abrupt, but at some point they’ll hurt too much to be useful—someday those joints will be so “old” that they’ll stop working altogether. I mean, they sure as hell aren’t gonna get any better. Every time I hear something “pop” as I reach for a key—even as we speak—it sounds an awful lot like a ticking clock.
Been colder than usual, though, this winter. That’s probably all it is, for now.
You know, it’s a lot of work to prepare forty projects and a website for simultaneous release.
I’m not exactly sure how I got myself into this situation. Ok, I know exactly how I got myself into this situation. A few years ago, I was trying to maintain dozens of very similar little projects that were all developed in very similar ways. Not just very similar ways—the exact same ways.
And I was getting sick of maintaining that handful of cobbled-together scripts and tools and who knows what else that I had accumulated to do all that stuff. So I said to myself, “self, you should build a single thing to do all this stuff—because wouldn’t it be awesome if something out there did all that stuff, but absolutely nothing does, at least not the way you want it done—and it’s time to actually get some work done already etc etc etc.”
So I started to do that. And I kept on doing that. And after more than six months of experimentation, it was actually working wonderfully. But then I made the mistake of admitting my relative success to someone, who convinced me to release that then-current version to the general public. And I reluctantly said, “ok, I’ll release it, but only if we can call this version SUPER DUPER BETA because I have a ton more experimentation to do, and don’t want anyone to think that this is a finished product, or anything.”
So I released it. And people seemed to like it.
As soon as I released that version, I started right into the next version. It’s not like I was thinking about these versions as “versions” though, this was more of a “continuous evolution” through careful (and also, maybe, not-so-careful) experimentation. So I experimented and continuously evolved my ideas for nearly a year. And somewhere during that year I realized that I was no longer the “guy who wrote all those little projects,” but I had become the “guy who wrote that thing that does all that stuff.”
And I wasn’t doing it all by myself anymore, either. There were other people helping me. I mean, REALLY helping me. Writing documentation and code, answering users’ questions, submitting and closing issues, you name it. It was like a big open source community group hug, and I was in the middle. It was pretty cool. It still is pretty cool. I mean, hugs are awesome. AWESOME. That’s all I’m saying.
So yeah, there were more people. And just like the number of people involved had increased, the number of related projects had increased as well. There were dozens of related projects. And a wiki. And a website. It wasn’t just this thing that does all that stuff anymore, it was all these things that do all that stuff. And for this new version, everything had to be published at the same time. Home pages, plugin listings, documentation, the works. It all had to get done all at once.
So we worked pretty hard, and we got it all done. Well, we got most of it done. After a while, you learn that “done enough” means “done.” Well, either that or you go crazy.
But we released it. And people still seemed to like it.
It’s still evolving, we’re still experimenting, and we’re making progress. And all that stuff? It’s getting done.
People ask me all the time how they can get started in content strategy: How do I convince my boss to let me do more? How do I go beyond being a writer or a content manager? How do I wrap my head around content as systems and sites get massive and messy?
Usually I end up tossing something out about asking tough questions and poking your nose where you don’t belong until people start incorporating you in their projects.
That’s not a lie, but it is a bit of a cop-out. Because I believe the real answer starts not in what you do, but in how you think.
The people who are best at strategic work—actually, scratch that, the people who are the best at practically anything —share a common trait: the ability to hold big ideas and minute details together in their heads at the same time—and to constantly, naturally, be vetting one against the other.
They can come up with a concept, then immediately find its weaknesses and figure out its feasibility. They can look at a bevy of tiny details and see which of them are actually important to the big picture—and which aren’t worth sweating. They understand that minutia like microcopy and QA matter, but they don’t get stuck on them so long the rest of the project suffers. They’ll dream up a cool way to personalize an experience, then immediately ask whether they have the data and logic to actually deliver it.
I’ve seen too many projects fail because the people with the “big ideas” didn’t see it as their job to care about the small stuff, too. And, just as detrimental, I’ve seen too many people waste their time and skill sets by getting so hung up on formatting a laundry list of content recommendations that they can’t see the bigger themes and opportunities.
Vision is lovely, but vision alone doesn’t ship. It’s the people who can carry vision through—and not just by handing off a plan or drawing a diagram, but by actually working through the challenges of execution—who are most valuable.
A product designer looks at a reasonably complex problem. A family living in San Francisco wants to visit their grandmother in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is about 400 miles away, there are some high hills along the route, and traffic is quite unpredictable at several choke points.
The product designer anticipates all of the variables, maps them out, and comes up with the ideal solution. I know! We’ll build an F35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The F35 is the most technologically advanced aircraft to date. It can take off from the family’s driveway using vertical thrust and land just outside grandma’s in LA on a short stretch of road. It can traverse the distance in twenty-five minutes with the afterburners on full. It has the most advanced navigational system, so the family can’t get lost en route. And, I know it’s a little harder to fly, but we’ll put extra fuel tanks under the wings — if the mom changes her mind and chooses to go to Ecuador, the family could do that too.
Even if the product designer is able to get a great F35 built on time and on schedule, unfortunately it’s going to take two years to teach mom and dad to get the plane to Los Angeles in twenty-five minutes. No matter how hard the interface designer designs or a user researcher researches, the inherent complexity can only be relatively reduced.
The obvious alternative is to build a station wagon. It’s a reliable, tried-and-true vehicle. Many station wagons have traversed from SF to LA quite successfully. Plus, there’s certainly room to improve upon the station wagon and build a wonderful variation. A few years ago Lamborghini even manufactured a station wagon with an impressive V12 engine that could cut an hour off the commute (provided the family could afford the speeding tickets). It would be a great accomplishment to build the world's best station wagon.
But! A truly inspired product designer will make a teleporter. With no training whatsoever, the family steps through a portal and appears on grandma’s stoop moments later.
I’ve always been supportive of charities, caring enough about the good work they do to give a one-off donation, sign up for a monthly payment, or offer fundraising to those taking up challenges. I’ve also been lucky to have worked with many charities over the years.
That said, I still find myself awkwardly trying to avoid, or talk myself out of being stopped on the street by the people in a particularly colourful jacket or bib.
My awkwardness was squashed a couple of months ago by a colourful jacket informing me that all I had to do was send an SMS. That was it. Nothing to fill in, and no catch. He showed me a card with the number to text, as well as three suggested donations: £2, £3, or £5.
Within 30 seconds I had donated £5 which would simply be added to my next phone bill. I went on my way. Brilliant.
Or so I thought. I have since received calls to my mobile every few days. I prefer not to answer calls from unknown numbers, due to the sheer amount of cold-calls I seem to receive (people wanting money in some manner, like this charity who obviously wanted more of it). These unanswered calls continue to this day, almost 3 months on from the original donation.
What promised to be a quick, easy, ‘no strings’ way to donate, quickly morphed into the typical guilt-ridden process of avoidance. This is the opposite of how one should feel when giving anything to charity.
If Apple were to share our contact details (a phone number, postal address, or even just an email) with the developers of every app we download — well, it goes without saying that we would simply cease to download anything.
I suggest that charities might look at examples like Apple’s App Store as a great example of how to earn people’s pennies painlessly, and more frequently, as well as how to make the process as positive as possible.
Now, if my text message donation had been the end of my conversation with this charity (and others took up the same offering) my reaction to being stopped in the street would have changed based on that one experience, which would be a vast improvement from the norm.
However, the App Store model could be taken on in a more direct sense — where one charity takes the lead in setting up a secure system that they use themselves (e.g. Apple’s own apps), and make available for other charities to use. The SMS number could stay the same, with each charity given a unique label, and donors choosing how much to donate.
An example call to action could then be:
Text ‘Macmillan £10’ to 88811
No phone number (or other info) would be saved from your donation — this protection of privacy would quickly become public knowledge, and the method trusted. With only one number for everyone to remember, and thus one number for all charities to promote, the frequency of donations would be more likely to increase (if you’re feeling good on payday, why not text an extra £5 to your three favourite charities this week?).
Of course, we’re seeing some great modern solutions to fundraising start to emerge — especially in the social arena with services such as the following:
Givey.com — born in the North East, recently receiving $960,000 in funding, Givey encourages fundraising between friends and allows donations via the site, text message, or tweet.
Believe.in — a small group of London-based designers and developers, Beleive.in offers people and charities a better way to connect with one another. They want to hire the best people there are, to tackle an industry that has seen little innovation over the last few decades.
Pledgeit.org.uk — ran by the team at Leukeamia & Lymphoma Research, Pledegit calls to our mischievous side, by encouraging us to challenge our friends. If enough people sponsor the said challenge, then just how can we say no?
So, there is certainly positive momentum in the world of social, which is truly great to see.
I’d simply love to see how this kind of thinking transfers to the charities themselves when communicating on the street, the TV, or through our letterboxes.
I have a rule about watching live music, particularly seeing specific artists more than once: I don’t.
I developed this policy about five years ago after seeing a band I’d seen previously and realized that it just wasn’t the same anymore. Maybe they had a bad night, or maybe they weren’t as vital to me as they were before, but it was possible — very possible — that, more importantly, I had changed. I had lost a connection with the artist. I had moved forward somehow.
This is similar to a philosophy taken from the culinary world and even from my own cooking. In his book The French Laundry, celebrated chef Thomas Keller explains it as the “law of diminishing returns” — that after the first bite and beyond the second, the taste is known, less surprising and less amazing. Keller goes on to say: “What I want is that initial shock, that jolt, that surprise to be the only thing you experience. So I serve five to ten small courses, each meant to satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. I want you to say ‘God, I wish I had just one more bite of that.’” This is why tasting menus have become quite popular and why small plates that are shared (originating from the Spanish tapas style of eating) are an increasingly common way of eating Stateside.
Comparatively, this is my new attitude toward conferences: If I’ve been before, I’m less enthused by subsequent appearances. Meaning, I no longer feel compelled to attend again.
Let me explain: I feel as though the conference circuit is getting a bit stale. There are those conferences that have been around for a long, long time. And then there are those pop-up–style events that materialize, slay it and finally disappear into the night, to be remembered fondly, fully impacting all its attendees. Both types of engagement can be the stuff of legend.
My recommendation? Think twice before registering for an event you’ve already attended, and perhaps stretch your legs and thinking by exploring something new, small and unproven. Find symposiums that bring a more varied range of speakers — both experienced and new, a good mix of gender and, because I have a slant toward it, a racially diverse one too.
It’s like that band you saw for the first time or that initial bite of a new dish: stunning, impeccable and memorable.
For the last couple of years, I’ve traveled too much. Granted, I was on the road much less than many of my colleagues, who live mostly in airports and hotels and on intercontinental flights. But for me? Too much. I got to too much by saying yes to a ton of interesting things—client work, conferences, unconferences—that made my work life richer and more interesting. But the cost was a sense of constant fragmentation: the feeling that I was always preparing for a trip, or on a trip, or scrambling to catch up after returning. I love exploration, but my ability to think clearly and stay healthy depends on long stretches at home, where I can browse my own bookcases and cook my own food and enjoy my cat and neighborhood and local friends.
Just because I can squash 20 work trips into a calendar year or work full-time plus three crunchy side-gigs doesn’t mean I can do it endlessly or without damaging my capacity for creative work, synthesis, and other things that require a rested, resilient brain. So when I can, I’m going to try to build a schedule that works less like a merry-go-round and more like a vivarium: something quieter and a bit more protective of my energy, my time, and the projects I’m already committed to. And that will mean saying no to even the most enticing new opportunities when I know they’ll send me off course in ways that take days or weeks to repair. It’s not an easy thing for me to do—I’ve been an overscheduler since grade school—but the rewards of doing a bit less are too important to ignore.
I was five years old and I was going to a special doctor.
I was in a really cold, medical office where I disrobed down to my undergarments and put on a child-size medical gown that opened in the back. I waited in the office with my mom until the doctor arrived. He was there with two or three residents. They all wore white medical robes.
The doctor had me stand, look at him, turn around to face away from him, bend over to touch my toes, stand up, and turn around to face him again. He pointed out specific areas of my back to the residents who stood around him. They asked questions. He answered. I stood there.
The doctor, an ever-changing group of residents, and I repeated this examination dance for the next thirteen years.
I was five years old when I discovered that I have scoliosis—basically my back curves in very interesting ways. There have been many times that I’ve wished my back was less interesting. One of these times was when I was about twelve years old and in eighth grade, the last year of middle school.
Middle school was a challenging time, filled with lots of preteen angst. For social reasons, it wasn’t the ideal time to find out that I was about to endure a treatment that would make me visibly different from my classmates. But in eighth grade, I realized there was no escaping it—my scoliosis had become significantly worse—I was about to enter a world of being discernibly distinct.
To be fitted for my hardshell back brace I had to go to a different specialist. This specialist was a rather creepy guy who had scraggily long, white hair and an untidy, long beard to match. He wore a white (were it not stained) ribbed sleeveless undershirt (as his only shirt). I disrobed to my undergarments and then I was wrapped in elastic bandage material. Then, this specialist rubbed plaster of Paris material from my neck down past my hips. I waited uncomfortably while the chalky, gloopy material hardened.
This was the first time I really realized how uncomfortable my life was about to become.
After the material set, the specialist marked the hardened form so he would know where he needed to leave a cutaway to accommodate a developing young lady’s body. Then he cut away the form and popped it away from my body.
I waited a week or two and returned to see the specialist who had crafted my back brace. He made slight adjustments and I started to wear the device.
For the next two years, I wore the contraption for 23 hours each and every day. I wore it at school, at home, and even in bed. I wore four layers of tops every day: an undergarment, a men’s sleeved undershirt, the back brace, and an oversized shirt to try to disguise the other three layers.
I was not allowed to take gym class, which also meant no more extracurricular activities like basketball or cheerleading. I understood that wearing the back brace could prevent me from having surgery but at 13 years old, the entire experience seemed devastating.
One day, I was sitting in the bleachers watching my classmates participating in gym class. They were trying to climb the ropes. It dawned on me, I really disliked trying to climb the ropes in gym class. Because of my back brace, I wasn’t being faced with the humiliation of not having the upper body strength to do it. In that moment, I began to see the benefits and opportunities that not having to take gym afforded.
Eighth grade ended and it was time to move on to high school. I was very fortunate to have gone to a good high school—a high school that had a graphic design teacher and a graphic design/photo lab filled with: photo equipment, a printing plate machine, a one-color printing press, and Mac computers.
I still couldn’t take gym, so for my entire four years of high school I took independent courses in graphic design.
My life would be different if I didn’t have a back filled with interesting curves. I might not have witnessed a doctor immersed in experiential learning where he helped residents by having them experience various types of patients and cases first-hand. This helped me to understand the importance of immersive, experiential learning.
I might not have learned empathy for people who have to approach situations differently because of a physical challenge. This helped me to understand the importance of accessibility.
I might not have developed my passion for design at such an important time in my life. This helped me to understand the world in a design-centric manner.
And I might not have learned that everything happens for a reason. This helped me to understand that sometimes only distance and time will help me to see the reasons why I am faced with the challenges that appear in my life.
So that contraption—my back brace—helped shape more than my back. It helped shape my entire career and life.
Sometimes you have to step away from your work to see what’s not there.
This video is most-probably-definitely-maybe staged, but I don’t love it any less for that. It takes an everyday situation and flips it into absurdity. It’s hilarious and a little painful to watch, as it builds and builds up to…well, keep watching to the end.
There’s so much there you can laugh at. You don’t need to have lived in Italy, you don’t need to drive or park — I showed this to a 7-year-old and she laughed as hard as I did. I wish more of our work could be like this. To have low barriers. To be liked by people of all kinds. To have a bit more range.
If you’re holding yourself accountable for avoiding jargon, you might want to do the same with the people you are working with. Don’t be afraid to ask what things mean rather than secretly looking them up on Wikipedia later. When a meeting is going around in circles, it might be time to stop and ask the room to define what exactly “a big idea” or “responsive design” means to them. While there may technically be a correct definition for terms like this, many times it’s unclear or subjective.
Lately I’ve been wondering what is next for web conferences and events. More specifically: what events will get created that engage the talented people in the intermediate to advanced range?
Since attending my first FOWD in 2009, I’ve noticed serious growth in the number of available events. In the U.S. and the U.K., you can attend a high-quality event every month.
There are many events that are a mix of beginner-to-intermediate topics and some events where topics lean towards the thought leaders. While everyone can benefit from the camaraderie and inspiration that comes from attending any of these, many reach a level where only a couple of presentations at an event teach them something new.
During this growth period in skill development, the bulk of learning is done hands-on (preferably working with people who have more advanced and varied skills). I’d love to see some events pop up that are focused on this group.
I’m thinking that they would take pieces from conferences, workshops, hackathons and competitions like the Rails Rumble. There would need to be discussion, coordination and a goal for creating something. Let’s figure out a way to get groups of people together to share knowledge and create awesome.
In the summer of 2002 I worked a few blocks from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I would often eat lunch there and it wasn’t long before I discovered the one work of art that has lived with me ever since.
Crowd Scene by Sidney Goodman is a realistic panorama that barely reveals the back of a group of people looking at something. The subjects are juxtaposed against an evening sky, basking in the warm glow of a low hanging sun. The scene is cropped in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they are looking up, while subtle hints of retro clothing and classic cars transport you to a time long passed.
What are they looking at? Where are they? Who are they? Wait, what on earth are they looking at?
It was hypnotic: first the feeling and then the questions, spinning out of control in my mind.
Goodman painted a mesmerizing atmosphere rather than a mere landscape. It was as though he’d started a sentence that I couldn’t help but to jump in to finish. Like Alice being thrown down a rabbit hole, I was delightfully lost inside of the Crowd.
I often think of this experience and the mood that Goodman created in that painting when I am designing. Setting a mood so that users can fill in the blanks is of paramount importance. Sometimes we are designing for content and other times we are designing for the content yet to be created. Wherever possible, I strive to make that place people go to for the journeys still to be discovered. A place like Goodman’s Crowd Scene.
Crowd Scene was rotated into storage years ago, much like some of my favorite web experiences. I check the museum on trips back to Virginia, but the painting remains tucked away somewhere. According to the VMFA website, the Lewis Gallery of Realist Art is scheduled to open March 2, 2013 with work from Sidney Goodman. My fingers are crossed that Crowd Scene will be housed in this gallery.
We can be fickle on the Web. We jump from thing to thing. We give up on things quickly, or write them off as failures because their timing was wrong. We pin our hopes on the next unproven thing before our last great hope even gets off the ground.
The window of opportunity for something new to succeed can seem so small. But we can’t understand the capacity of new materials — or new circumstances — without experimenting with them. And that takes time.
Technology is like a language that’s always changing. We’re always new speakers, always resetting and relearning. It’s hard to say something profound with a limited vocabulary.
This is a reminder to myself: It’s OK to revisit things. It’s OK to compete with established players, and to try again where we — and others — have failed. It’s OK to build “yet another” solution to the same problem. If we’re lucky enough to find a few questions that matter to us, we should follow them ruthlessly.
The real treasures aren’t shiny and new. They're ancient, crusty and deeply buried. To uncover them, we have to pick a spot, and keep digging.
In the future, you have access to all your data. Memory, or the lack thereof, is no longer discussed. It is only assumed, a feature of modern life, since you can now relive all your past data as experiences. But because of “technical constraints,” all of your experiences are taxonomized and merged for ease of efficiency/retrieval. To access your past, then, is to relive each experience—in real time, all at once. You begin:
You spend seven weeks holding your iPhone to your ear on hold. You pull and pull to refresh for seven months, click to refresh for nine. You miss 30 Thanksgiving dinners restarting your laptop. 12 Valentine’s Days restarting your iPhone. You swipe past iPad ads for 48 hours before ever seeing content.
You deliberate for two hours clicking the back button. You waste four hours feeling guilty about not accepting invitations. You go nine whole months accepting LinkedIn recommendations. Six months seeing who’s followed you on Twitter. One hour clicking away from ads you clicked accidentally. For two months you stare at your browser default page. You power through eight years of anxiety trying to unfriend people on Facebook. You hunch over your desk for seven months downloading unregistered software. Three straight weeks stealing someone else’s WiFi.
You tell friends you’re “off the grid” for 48 hours. You scroll through Twitter for one year without clicking a single link. There are 16 days you missed the point when your calls are dropped through AT&T. And 14 hours of confusion as you try to work Skype video. Three years of watching YouTube videos. Sixty-five minutes liking. Forty hours tapping. Ninety-seven whole days right clicking.
You spend fourteen whole days without contact as you stare at the fail whale. Three days confused as you update your WordPress install. Two years behind updating your iPhone apps. Seventeen months with strained eyes while you debug code. Two years cursing Adobe Creative Suite. You spend six months with slumped shoulders as you click “forgot password?”.
You reflect on older times. Passwords were forgotten once, and forgotten again—the next day, the next week, the next month. The thought seems idyllic. A life where small errors are experienced in lovely, small scales—one at a time.
This essay and its form taken from and inspired by David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
We programmers like our if/else statements: If this is true, then do this; otherwise, do this. Indeed, I think part of what I like about programming is that it makes it seem possible to express complex processes as a set of rules.
This tidy approach fails us, though, when we can’t express a decision in terms of a series of booleans that, when ANDed and ORed appropriately, lead us to the Right Decision. Backbone or Ember? SASS or plain CSS? Rails or Node? Progressively enhance or HTML that’s nothing but some scripts and an empty <body> tag? False dichotomies, every one of them, and plenty more that you’ll see argued to death with facts and figures and passion.
Rarely are real-world decisions as straightforward as a simple if/else statement. Details, nuances, constraints… they all matter. The ability to see the big picture, to understand that there is no One True Way, and to use the judgment that comes with experience — that’s what makes for a truly good developer.
In the summer of 1996 I had just finished my first year at university studying for a degree in archaeology. I was travelling round Europe by train and on a brief stop in Zurich I visited a temporary exhibition at the Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum. The exhibition was on craftsmanship in prehistory and one of the exhibits featured a series of beautifully polished stone axes made from the Neolithic period, over 5000 years ago.
To polish a stone axe is a laborious and time-consuming process. A ‘rough-out’ is initially shaped from carefully selected material and is gradually refined through chipping until you get an approximate shape. It is then rubbed against a soft stone—sometimes known as a polissoir—until it is sufficiently refined into a suitable form and texture.
What stood out about these artefacts was that they were all broken, shattered into fragments by the attempts to perforate them. We can never know whether the drilling of these axes was intended from the outset, or whether they were attempts to adapt earlier forms. But we can be certain that they were destroyed by this act. And we can marvel with curiosity at the effort and time invested in them only to be shattered by the blunt trauma of execution.
I hadn’t thought about these axes for seventeen years. That was, until hearing Jason Santa Maria in Nottingham last month. Jason talked about his design process and how this has changed over time. He talked about a fundamental shift in his methodology from ‘canvas-in’ to ‘content-out’, from a linear process to an iterative, nimble and reflexive process. From a process that started with Photoshop designs—passed over to others to be built—to one that starts rough and is refined with time.
Jason’s talk reminded me of these broken polished axes in Zurich. This is how we have built websites since our industry began. We take a rough idea, we work on it, we refine it, we chip away at it and we polish it, for it then to be shattered by the blunt trauma of execution. As designers for the web we need to remember this harsh lesson of millennia ago: know your materials, know your tools, know the subtleties of your medium and always, always leave your polish to last. Lest the spoils of our efforts be shattered.
Here’s my recipe for garlic bread: I make a thick, pungent paste out of minced garlic, softened unsalted butter, extra virgin olive oil, red pepper flakes, grated parmesan cheese, coarse black pepper, and kosher salt, and spread it liberally onto a split loaf of local ciabatta. Then I place it into a 450°F oven for about 10 minutes, until it’s just browned around the edges and studded with roasted garlic bits. It’s delicious.
I first started making garlic bread when I was a kid, maybe 10 years old. In fact, it’s one of the first things I remember cooking by myself. Here was my method back then: I took whatever ancient jar of garlic powder my mom had stashed in the spice cabinet, mixed it with some microwave-melted butter, poured it onto white bread (cut into triangles with the crusts removed for presentation; I wasn’t a savage), put it into an indiscriminately hot oven, and made sure it didn’t burn. Back then, I thought that was delicious too.
Comparing the two, they’re barely the same food, and I can’t imagine eating (or forcing someone else to eat) my childhood garlic bread today. But what’s strange is, it feels to me like I’ve been making garlic bread the same way for the last 20 years. Why? I guess it’s because I never really made any major leaps in technique; every change I made over the years was small. At some point I replaced the garlic powder with garlic from a jar, then started mincing my own. I swapped the white bread with Italian bread, then a baguette, then ciabatta. I introduced the olive oil. I added complementary flavors one by one, and removed ingredients that didn’t quite work (looking at you, rosemary). I may have even gone backward a time or two, reverting to previously abandoned methods. It was a constant, iterative path from my immature proto-garlic bread to my modern, sophisticated garlic bread.
Enough about garlic bread; let’s talk about web design. We work in an industry where change happens at a breakneck pace. What’s true today may not have been true six months ago or even six weeks ago. The internet is a juggernaut, and we’re all powerless to stop it. But design is different. It progresses at its own pace, and it’s not always fast. Sometimes design happens deliberately, glacially, almost imperceptibly. Sometimes, you might not even know you’re designing.
Changing someone’s opinion often seems like a futile endeavour.
While I’ve been designing websites for years, I only began to get involved in the community and attend conferences just under three years ago. When I first saw folks arguing on Twitter about the low number of women speaking at events, I was pretty quick to pipe up and say something I’ve heard so many others say — that I didn’t care about the gender of the speaker so long as they were qualified.
As time went on, though, I started to question my opinion. What exactly does being “qualified” mean, anyway? Who gets to decide that Designer A is more “qualified” to speak than Designer B, especially if both are considered successful in their field?
Having diversity in your conference lineup does not mean you are sacrificing the quality of the speakers, for I now believe that every hard-working person in this industry can bring something to the table that someone else can learn from.
Open your mind and listen to what others say without immediately dismissing them, no matter how passionate you feel about a topic — you just might find yourself with some changed opinions of your own. Mine certainly changed, and I’m glad it did.
Not all the time, of course. But some of the time. You’re going to do things you don’t like, sometimes. You’re going to do things you don’t love, most of the time.
Imagine your dream job. Let’s say you want to be a rock star. A rock star! You love music, you love performing, you love fans, you love groupies. How much of your time do you spend actually doing what you love? Ten percent? Let’s be generous and say you spend twenty-five percent of your time actually being a rock star. A quarter of the time you spend working is spent actually performing music for your adoring fans, and reaping the other associated benefits.
What happens the rest of the time? Long lonely bus rides or plane rides to dreary towns, where you stay in faceless hotels. Frustrating arguments with bandmates. Interminable hours spent trying to write new music, questioning whether your next album will be as good as the last one. Soul-deadening meetings with corporate A&R types, the vampires of your industry. Self-doubt, magnified by the sharp words of music critics. Your job, it sucks.
And that’s if you’re a rock star. But the same is true (in varying proportions) whether you’re a waiter or a designer or a teacher or a developer.
Many of us are deeply committed to the work that we do, passionate about having found employment that so naturally maps to our skills, focused on making the world a better place by making better products for people to use. I’ve conducted hundreds of job interviews in my life, and I’ve developed an eye for the true believers. I joke that I can spot the naturals by the chip implanted in their brain that convinces them they were programmed from birth to think UX design is the perfect job for them.
And it’s not. It sucks. Some of the time.
If you’re doing work you like to do more than twenty-five percent of the time, you’re doing great. But I’m convinced the secret to real job satisfaction isn’t trying to maximize your time spent doing what you love. It’s learning to tolerate and accept the downsides. It’s being able to look the parts of the job you don’t like squarely in the eye and say “I can deal with you.”
Note that I didn’t say “love” the downsides. Or “embrace.” Or “transform into something you truly enjoy.” The parts of your job that suck are just that: sucky. You can’t wish them into something better. You are never going to like them.
Whatever it is about your job that you hate—whether it’s content inventories or detailed functional specifications or recruiting for usability tests or monthly invoicing or schmoozing potential clients at conferences—it doesn’t take away from the parts of your job that you truly love. Being frustrated that you sometimes have to do work that you hate shouldn’t make you question whether this is really the right job for you. If you’ve found work you enjoy (at least some of the time) then savor those times.
And quit bitching about the parts you hate. Everyone has them.
(This also holds true for your personal relationships, for the record.)
When I think about what it means to be a craftsman, I think about my friend Jon; he builds houses. He’ll probably do that the same way for the rest of his life.
Thinking about his craft led me to a question about our industry: have humans ever had to change up what they do as fast and often as we do? Our craft exists in a never-ending state of flux. It won’t settle down for a while, if ever.
If you work on the web, and you’re not changing it up constantly, you’re probably not doing it right. This can put a barrier between us and others we work with. Who’s not encountered a client who’s uncomfortable with <insert latest web trend>? Who’s not had a colleague who just can’t see how something will change their work?
It’s not that I think we’re superior; far from it. Sometimes I dream about being able to master something without the ground constantly shifting under my feet. The status quo feels like a warm blanket sometimes; who wouldn’t want their world to act more or less predictably?
With this thought in mind, I’d like to propose a new attitude to our clients and colleagues who struggle to keep up; they need us to keep them going sometimes. Thinking about them empathically, as we would our users, offers us a more collaborative mindset.
What are they feeling? Fear. Uncertainty.
What are they needing? Knowledge. Reassurance. Safety.
Give them these things, unconditionally. Walk into those meetings with no expectations that people should ‘just know’. That is the price of being comfortable with a never-ending headwind of change, rushing into your face.
Sometimes it’s difficult to get things done, and no book or software or advice or alarm or sticky note or anything can make it easier. Even when you have a system in place for remembering things at the right time, in the right place. Even when you eat and sleep right, have enough energy, love the work you’re doing, and look forward to the outcome. Even when everyone is rooting for you.
For me, there are two reasons for that difficulty: curiosity and laziness.
Curiosity distracts me from doing things I have promised myself and others that I would do. On the other hand, succumbing to curiosity almost always energizes me and makes me happy; it is often the spark I need to get other things done, and occasionally produces life-changing results. The constant evaluation of each pursuit’s potential worth and cost is maddening, and at the same time invigorating.
Laziness is hitting the snooze button — an active unwillingness to overcome inertia and throw myself into the mental battle of curiosity and promises. But it’s also a kind of self-deception, a tide of my own making that ebbs and flows while things I care about — goals, trust — lay scattered on the shore, ready to be lifted and lost. Overcoming laziness can feel like moving the moon.
So I kiss my wife, hug my children, joke with my family and friends. I listen to music and stories. I read and exercise. I remind myself why I care. I think about people whose lives are much harder than mine, I imagine what real difficulty is like, and I try to withstand the inevitable oppressive guilt that comes with empathy. Then I try to get things done.
On some special days that live in the lore of my family, friends, and notebooks, it all works out. I move the moon, curiosity and promises align, and a life-changing spark stirs a fire inside me that warms every single aspect of my life. The real difficulty of getting things done is that I want every day to be one of those days, and the only thing in the way is me.
Hard stuff. Like standing up for myself in bad situations. Getting specific and elaborating when I’m comfortable with the opposite. Or starting conversations that need to happen.
The times when I need to apologize immediately or not be such an ass. The times when I have to retrain my brain to think positively and make something great.
Messy stuff. Like selling ideas or teaching people how to give feedback, instead of giving up when we don’t speak the same language.
This year’s for taking steps toward understanding.
I work a lot with data, data mining, network diagrams and visualisations. One day it struck me as I watched someone in Central London get onto a bus with their luggage, this is a massive network of loosely joined pieces. The bus company runs what is best for them, the airport runs what works for them, taxi services fill holes where it is too far to walk. All these tiny services all pieced together create a vast network which covers just about ever square meter of this globe. Those London busses are on a constant move, looping around like little ants following a trail, sometimes one right after the other. To see a person get on a bus with a suitcase would seem like a strange event by itself, but in my head I knew that bus would get her one step closer to her destination. It might be 2-3 more busses, trains, tubes or taxis to get to that airport, but society has created a massive, unstructured, organic transport network that any citizen can take advantage of. What does our future hold as we make the jump from loosely joined physical transportation networks, to more loosely joined digital ones?
I don’t believe in talent. I believe that passion combined with hard work produces results. But how does one find what they’re passionate about?
Some people are lucky to find what they love to do when they’re young. I tried all kinds of activities when I was a teenager. I took piano lessons. I learned to sew and knit. I played soccer, softball, lacrosse, and ran track. I studied French and wrote short stories. However, none of these felt like my true passion.
I went to college to study design. I had always loved making things and I was excited to find the medium I would like best. Painting? Pottery? Photography?
I would have never guessed programming.
I took my first Computer Science class my freshman year. It quickly became my favorite class and I spent many hours building a game for my final project. I was hooked.
I’ve been writing code for eleven years now and I’ve probably long passed the 10,000 hours for mastery according to Malcolm Gladwell. By all accounts I’m a good programmer now.
Yet today I woke up early to work on a juicy programming problem. I still get excited to make things with code. I’ve found what I love to do.
I hope you don’t buy into the idea that people are naturally good at something or are born talented. Instead, I hope you will find what you love to do. I hope you find your passion.
The Andy Griffith Show ran from 1960-1968. Quite a bit “before my time,” but plentiful reruns allowed me to become a big fan.
I don’t like the show for its humor. It has some, but it’s pretty hokey and outdated. I don’t like the show for its stories. It’s just a sitcom with contrived little occurrences that always resolve themselves like any other sitcom. I like the show because it’s a masterclass in How To Be A Man.
Andy always treats people with respect, whether they deserve it or not. Even the town drunk, Otis, isn’t reviled and is given a chance when he needs one. And not just respect, but concern and fairness.
Andy almost never carries a gun. He doesn’t need one to control situations. He could defuse problems with a firm voice and presence.
Andy rarely loses his temper. And when he does he always apologizes for it.
Andy was smart. He often got to the bottom of things before anyone else.
Andy knew how to have fun and relax. He was the sheriff and a serious man, but he went camping, fishing, out on dates, and often played the guitar.
Yep, he’s a fictional character. Shouldn’t we have real people as role models? Sure, and I do. But just as a schoolyard kid might think of Batman to summon courage to stand up to a bully on the playground, I too sometimes think of ol’ Andy Taylor when I’m trying to figure out how to react to something. At the risk of beating an overused phrase into the ground even more, I often think to myself: What Would Andy Taylor Do? I think if I did it even more I’d be a better person.
Just for fun: did you know the theme song had words?
Having written about my departure from the W3C last month, it seems only fitting to write about my return now. I was elected to its Technical Architecture Group, as part of a reform campaign driven by Alex Russell. Alex has great ideas on improving modern day web development and I share his passion for figuring out how the web is layered and how we can expose those layers for the world to do something wonderful with them.
In the beginning I had some misgivings about Alex, in particular the Web IDL bashing[1]. I understand now that his concerns are with developers coming from a C/C++ background designing horrific JavaScript APIs. And that DOM for someone from TC39 (designers of JavaScript) means Web-IDL-designed API, rather than DOM.
I was also pessimistic about this TAG adventure, and since five reform candidates were running for four slots I was hoping I would not make the cut. But now I look forward to it. Taking a more high-level perspective with a different set of people than I usually hang out with will be a great learning experience. And ideally that leads to better standards writing down the road.
[1]To me Web IDL was the first real attempt to make it easier to define JavaScript-friendly APIs with some enforced consistency with respect to argument handling. Its predecessor, aptly named OMG IDL, was terrible in that respect.
When I first started watching Seinfeld religiously in my early twenties, I was fascinated by how wonderfully the show’s humour fits into our day-to-day lives, offering somewhat less serious solutions to somewhat serious problems. One line that really struck me was during the episode “The Revenge” in which George Costanza plots to exact revenge on his boss. Jerry sums up George’s struggle by saying: “The best revenge is living well*.”
It’s almost too simple a solution to take seriously, but give it a second thought. The only way we can be happy with our own lives and the decisions we make along the way is to go about it in a content, unregretful way. Nothing teaches cynical or envious people a better lesson than seeing you not give a damn about their actions. Being successful in your own life is the best way of getting back at them, and in turn, inspire others to do the same.
* I later learned that Jerry borrowed this quote from the English poet George Herbert.
2012 was a weird year. I wrote a book, moved 2,400 miles, started editing a magazine, and gave talks on four continents. I even pet a cheetah.
But it was also the first year in memory where I didn’t read novels.
Oh, I read all right. I downed blog posts and skimmed technical titles. Scoured web-professional articles and tried to keep up with the news. But for most of the year, the closest I got to a work of fiction was hurrying through a short story at the airport.
Sure, I’d started Ada or Ardor—a sprawling Nabokov tome that reads like a Tolstoy family drama, if old Leo were high on modernity, absurdity, and possibly mescaline—in January. And I was falling in love with it, too, in all its illicit eroticism and decadent allusion. Yet I put it down a third of the way through and never managed to pick it back up.
This isn’t like me at all.
At first, I thought the problem was a lack of work-life balance—that I was spending too much time slaving over projects and paydays, and not enough giving in to curiosity and culture. But the problem wasn’t just that I was working too much (though I probably was). It was that I’d cut off my nose to spite my face: In order to make more time for work, I was removing the very things that allowed me to get any good at my work in the first place.
You see, the truth about the web is that there’s no inherent there there. The only substance it has is the substance we give it—which means that if we’re not substantial people—people who’ve read far and wide, thought long and hard, and discovered what it is that matters—then the web work we’re capable of will always be shallow.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my work. I love thinking about users, helping organizations get more realistic about publishing, and making content memorable. I love my clients. I love writing about and working on the web. Most of all, I love the array of super-smart people I’ve had the chance to meet, work with, and learn from along the way. But if we don’t explore the rest of the world—if we don’t get outside our work and wander into whatever weird corners we fancy—we’ll never be able to give our work life. We’ll have a slew of “best practices,” but nothing worth practicing.
It’s not just about reading novels, of course. It’s about living fully—about experiencing the world in all its complexity and exposing yourself to ideas that are foreign and challenging. It’s about getting constant practice at thinking critically and connecting disparate concepts. It’s about building interesting things because you’re an interesting person.
So this year, I’m not giving all my attention to the endless novelty of web work. I’m making space for a Nabokov novel.
I ♡ our industry. Thanks to the blessing of View Source, the web has been egalitarian from the start — all we need are a computer, an internet connection, and the determination to learn. The lack of accreditation means we’re hired on the strength of our portfolio or GitHub account, and in general our industry feels like a meritocracy — do great work and you’ll be recognised for it.
I also feel despite the stereotypes that we’re on the whole a sociable and easy-going bunch, both online and In Real Life. We like attending the many conferences and meetups, and the leaders of our industry are amazingly approachable. Meeting others at events I feel a shared love for technology and making the world a better place, a wonderful “these are my people” feeling. I’d even go so far as to say that as a group we’re caring, of above average intelligence and attractiveness, and of course empathetic.
Well, I certainly considered myself to be empathetic. That is, until I discovered I’m not.
A fish in water
I realised this talking to my daughter about her teddy (bear with me…). She replied to “Come get him” with “You mean her”. I’d subconsciously perceived teddy bears as masculine, as if English words were gendered (like “L’ours en peluche”), but for my daughter the gender was naturally feminine. To think about this, it’s obvious. But for me this conversation was the difference between thinking and empathising. I use gender-neutral words with her now, like waiting for the “green person” to cross the road, and referring to toys as “they”, not “he” or “she”.
Coming to Japan was also an eye-opening experience for me. Along with the amazing experiences and wonderful people, many things I’d taken for granted or never even thought about are … different here. One that surprised me was how I reacted to being treated differently because I looked Western. Generally this attention has been positive — people making a fuss of me. But sometimes I just don’t feel like answering “Are you American?” again, or being complimented on my ability to use chopsticks. Sometimes I just want to be treated like everyone else. I soon learned those questions are just easy conversation starters for Japanese people not used to talking with foreigners. But even knowing that I still find this peculiar feeling of being “the other” can be unsettling, even when the attention is positive.
Empathy and us
Seeing things from someone else’s perspective is easy to intellectualise, but actually doing it is completely different, and considerably harder. People talk about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, but few ever tie up the laces and do it. However, empathy is a core competency for us — we make things for people to use. If we don’t help the people using what we’ve made, we’ve failed, no matter how beautiful the design or elegant the code. This is incredibly obvious, but because we naturally assume other people are like us, it’s easy to think empathy without feeling it. We all have a self-image of being empathetic, and nobody says empathy is hard. But it is.
Luckily many of our best practices are exercises in empathy: user testing, personas, site visits, stakeholder interviews and even client meetings all provide valuable chances to see a project through other people’s eyes.
Level up in empathy
The easiest thing we can do to become more empathetic is to improve communication with clients, colleagues, and the people who will use our projects. It’s easy to assume motivations and guess at intentions — much of what we perceive is actually internally constructed, so listening to what is said (rather than hearing what we expect) can be surprisingly difficult. Frequent face-to-face communication helps, and building these relationships naturally makes us more empathetic.
When someone disagrees, try to avoid the temptation to “win the debate”, and instead focus on understanding what they believe, and why. A good test is how you react to criticism — treating it as potentially valuable feedback from a different perspective, and empathising with the person, helps to avoid taking it as an attack.
When you’re starting a new project, try to arrange time with someone who will use what you’re making, and if applicable consider volunteering to help them do that task for an hour or two. People are inventive and unpredictable, so you’ll probably discover some novel workflow, a feature that isn’t in the brief, or just a different perspective. Meeting people who’ll actually use what you produce is also a great help for frequent informal user testing and feedback later on.
More generally, try to get out of your comfort zone — learn new things unrelated to web development, talk to people from different walks of life, volunteer, travel somewhere you don’t speak the language. Although having kids might be a little extreme, using the web while holding a baby is a great insight into why usability is so important. Trying to use the web in a different language is also eye-opening, and has helped me realise the importance of copywriting, and consider how a non-native speaker might use what I make. Try ordering something on the Japanese Apple store, and see how far you can get!
Luckily, knowledge is half the battle — just knowing that empathy is hard helps. As the year kicks off, let’s go beyond just “keeping the user in mind”, and aim for a more fundamental empathy with everyone involved. In addition to better working relationships, it’ll make our work noticeably better too.
One of my favourite things about programming is that the code doesn’t care who I am or what I do with it.
The code is inert until I give it purpose. When I’m writing code, I’m in charge. What goes on is between me, my compiler, and nobody else.
Whatever you create in your development environment on your computer is private and yours alone until you make it otherwise. Nobody else knows what you’re writing; this is between you and your compiler*, and all the compiler cares about is whether or not the program runs. This is a tremendous sort of freedom.
Beyond that, the only accountability you have is to yourself in the early stages of writing a feature or program. The only person there to judge what you write is you. Forget about what anybody else might think; know that the code itself has no opinion of the matter and experiment to your heart’s content. Treat your development environment as a playground when you’re just beginning something new.
I have a lot of people asking me how to tell if their code is good when they’re just starting out with programming for the first time. If you worry too early about whether or not your code is ‘good’ before you even have something working, you’ll be wasting your time and sometimes you won’t even get to programming. You’ll spin your wheels and doubt every line you write or don’t write and eventually you are beating yourself up about code you haven’t even written yet. You’ll procrastinate while you worry about details that don’t matter, and then you’ll wonder why programming is so hard. It’s not hard, but you’re doing things in the wrong order. Your desire for goodness is healthy but the satisfaction of it must be delayed.
Get it up, then get it right.
When you’re just starting out—whether you’re learning to program for the first time, or maybe learning a new trick for your trade—you should measure your success by only one criteria:
Does the program do what I want it to for the end-user? (If you’re a beginner, then this is probably yourself.)
And that’s all. If you can answer this question with ‘yes’, then what you are making is good. Don’t worry about what anyone else might think about your code. Don’t even worry about what you think of your code yet.
You don’t have to show what you’re making to anyone until you’re ready, if at all. Get it out dirty and fast and messy if you need to, with passion and without remorse. Nobody has to see your first draft. A novel is not written from beginning to end and then shipped to the publisher without being edited or revised. Code is not written once and then deployed to the users without testing and iteration. Write something, anything, and then come back to it; put your ego aside so that it’s just you and your creativity and your fingertips.
* Note that for all intents and purposes in this piece, ‘interpreter’ can be substituted for ‘compiler’ to reflect your language of craft accordingly.
The web is awesome. I don’t mean “awesome” in the Ninja-Turtle-parlance sense, either—I mean that the web is something deserving of our awe; like the ocean, like space. Almost all of us are carrying—in our pockets—a tiny sheet of glass that can access thousands of years’ worth of information on an unimaginable range of subjects. Within a matter of minutes, any of us can know damn near anything. I hope that never stops blowing my mind.
I’m constantly amazed by this thing we’re building together, and I consider it a genuine privilege to be able to make a living doing something I care about. If I should ever become jaded about this stuff, I hope that’ll be the same day I find myself a new career. Slowly, I assume, by way of newspaper ads and a red Sharpie.
Can we truly reflect a product or service’s brand if we only create one small part of it?
In my personal experience, I can easily say that the projects where I’ve had complete control or continuous input into all design and communication decisions have been by far (and continue to be) the most successful for client and studio alike.
We all know that a brand is so much more than a logo, typeface, and colour palette. So why is it that we accept projects where these may be the only things supplied to us?
I’ve found myself challenging this over and over again since starting my own studio, especially coming from my previous role at a respected London branding agency. Every time I work with a new client who has an existing identity, I educate them to understand the importance of a cohesive brand experience — usually through sharing improvements to, and further applications of, their current brand language1 rather than trying to find the right words.
These clients have very quickly come to appreciate the importance of us taking their whole brand into consideration, before jumping straight into “what they need”.
This is, interestingly, the way it always goes too. Never have I had a new client approach me who already had a brand that spoke volumes, always with a consistent style, tone, and message. If they did, I would have to challenge them on why they are only now turning to me, when they are quite obviously in complete control. Why would they want to jeopardise the strength of their brand by involving someone outside of the thinking to date? With the correct answer, I might choose to take them on as a client — but if they didn’t know why, I’d advise them to continue using whoever they had been using all along.
Whether it’s a brand’s main website, a private customer area, an app, a digital or physical banner, an exhibition space, business card, door sign, a sub-brand, a customer email, how staff converse, what is sent out in the post, or how the brand attracts new business, there always needs to be someone thinking at this elevated level. Even if it is not you who creates all of these elements, you should always make the effort to be aware of all of them, advise on them if you can, and offer your expertise while wearing their brand cap.
To sum up — as designers, we need to take on the responsibility of a client’s entire brand when accepting work. If you simply “do your bit” without thought into how it fits into the bigger picture, you’re doing yourself and your client an injustice.
1 Brand language is a term I use to encapsulate all…
I don’t believe that creativity is a department. In most of the industry, they talk about the “creatives” and creative directors. I think that’s a really detrimental thing. I won’t put “creative” in anybody’s title. If you’re not creative, regardless of what your role is, you can’t work here, period. It’s cost of entry. And I think in general it should be the cost of entry. If we’re in an idea economy, if we’re in an information economy, then it seems like everybody needs to be creative.
The other day, my mom handed me a stack of papers. I shuffled through them and stopped at a piece of folded yellow paper. I opened it. The paper contained the results from my third grade Iowa standardized test. I don’t remember taking an Iowa standardized test when I was eight years old—I grew up in New Jersey, not Iowa—but I must have because the results were there in front of me. I looked closer at the information. To my surprise, the area I scored the highest in was math.
I thought about this and realized that the last time I remember feeling smart in math was when I was ten years old and I was in the fifth grade. I’ve always learned best when I can do the something that I’m supposed to learn. Mrs. McCarthy, my fifth grade teacher, was pretty amazing because she understood this and she helped me to not only feel smart in math, but she also helped me to love math. I don’t remember working on specific math problems or having a math workbook while I was in the fifth grade. What I do remember is playing the stock market. I remember learning math through doing, through playing. In fifth grade, I learned math through projects set in real-world contexts and I loved math because of this.
When I think back to the stock market projects, I remember opening up the newspaper. I recall the smell and the touch of the newsprint. I remember the feeling of excitement at discovering whether or not my predictions about a specific stock came true. They often did because Mrs. McCarthy taught us about math, language, business, and culture through the experience of playing the stock market. All of this information lead to solid predictions. It felt incredible to learn about math this way and it all made sense. I was learning more than just math. I was learning about many aspects of life—in a holistic way—and I was having fun doing it.
Then, fifth grade was over. It was time to say goodbye to Mrs. McCarthy and hello to my sixth grade math teacher, Mrs. Chaney.
As I held the yellow paper of the Iowa standardized test in my hands, my mom and I talked about Mrs. McCarthy and the fun of learning. My mom and I have both been educators. She was a physical education teacher. I’ve come to understand that physical education is the epitome of learning through doing, learning through playing. My mom and I talked about the importance of learning through doing. Then my mom said, “Mrs. Chaney stole math from you.” I looked at my mom. Her face had a mix of anger, frustration, and sadness.
I vividly remember being eleven years old, in my sixth grade math class, sitting in straight rows, instead of small groups like we sat in fifth grade. In Mrs. Chaney’s class, I sat in the middle of the classroom. My last name started with a “J” and we were seated alphabetically—middle letter of the alphabet meant middle of the classroom. I remember raising my hand over and over again to participate in the class. I had answers and I had questions. I was in the middle of the classroom and I knew my teacher could see me raise my hand. I don’t ever remember being called on but I do remember the boys in the class being called on. Mrs. Chaney only called on the boys. After some time, I realized that raising my hand was an exercise in futility and I stopped raising my hand. I stopped engaging in the class, I stopped feeling smart in math, and I stopped loving math. I started to realize that gender had meaning far beyond “pink is for girls” and “blue is for boys.” I understood the lesson Mrs. Chaney was teaching—only boys could do math.
Sixth grade is the year math was taken from me. Although I use numbers on a daily basis, I’ve never felt the love that I once had for them. I’ve decided to change this. I’ve decided that twenty+ years after math was taken from me that I’m taking it back.
I’ve also decided to be more aware about myself and the people in my life. I will not allow anyone to take the things I love away from me. I will not let the things I love go easily and I will do my best not to take the things other people love away from them. I will fight for what I am passionate about but I will remind myself that my own words affect others.
Maybe I’m noticing it more with the end-of-the-year roundups, but time is such a slippery thing on the web. In fact, it’s often little more than a timestamp.
Stacking a list of things by reverse-chronology is easy for computers, but my squishy human brain misses having more discrete units of time. Printed publications can be categorized by how they bracket time — dailys, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, annuals — and are as much tied to their pace of production as to their worldview of what is the most interesting span of time?
We haven’t yet formed good answers to this online. Streams reflect our ability to instantly put things out there, but what is the right amount of time to talk about an idea? To deep-dive into a subject? To have an argument? To celebrate, or to mourn?
What unit of time will distill this piece of information to its most potent?
Lynn Hill is a legendary female rock climber. In the 1980s she helped define sport climbing in the United States, most notably by being the first person to make a free ascent up the Nose Route on El Capitan in Yosemite. Like any experienced, well-seasoned person whose passion speaks all the words they need not say, Hill’s climbing is fluid, graceful and timeless.
See Hill in action here:
As a cyclist, a skateboarder and, in recent years, a boulderer, I always seek out finesse over tactlessness, fluidity over rigidness and a strong line over a technical zigzag. In cycling, it’s called souplesse — the rhythm of one’s legs and spin. In skateboarding, it’s the smoothness of a line of tricks and how you piece them together to be cohesive and explosive, like a song that builds to a climax.
There’s a parallel in my mind between these aspects of the physical things I like to do and the craft that I spend doing on a screen. The similarity is narrative. Telling a story in your output. In that video, Lynn Hill spins together a solid structure of a story that shows you her journey — you can actually see her thinking, figuring it out in her mind as she goes along the route. In bouldering, routes are called problems. And the act of topping out (reaching the summit) is called solving a problem.
Sounds like design or development, right?
The work we do — identities, websites, applications and bridging the gap from desktop to web to mobile — is a story we need to tell cohesively and with the utmost consideration.
It shouldn’t be janky. It shouldn’t be abrupt. It shouldn’t be awkward. It shouldn’t be over the top. It shouldn’t be x for x’s sake.
It should be measured. It should be cognizant. It should be aware. It should be respectful. It should be everything that needs to be there and nothing more.
Restraint is more impactful than showing power.
The tendency in our industry is to flex muscle from the outset when truly we should adopt a quiet, internal strength that simmers and stews, building momentum over the course of a narrative.
At Bocoup, we recently conducted an internal survey about working remotely and methods for communicating with people who aren’t working from the Boston office. We used a Google Docs form to gather responses, and when all of the answers were in, I had a spreadsheet with about 300 data points.
It probably surprises no one here that I exported the data as a CSV and then wrote a small program to tell me what everyone had said. I used Ruby because there are still times when the asynchronicity of JavaScript makes a solution perfectly absurd, but certainly I could have written it in JS, or Python, or Perl, or probably even Java if I was a special kind of masochist. There wasn’t much to it: key concepts included iteration over lists of things, turning strings into lists of things, and using hashes to accumulate the totals. If I didn’t know about hashes I still could have made it work, though it would have been a wee bit less flexible. It was about 40 lines of terrible but working code.
Where my partner works, there are grown-ups who make a very good living who can barely use Excel, even though they work with data every day. Their processes are as inefficient as you might expect as a result. These colleagues of hers aren’t fresh out of college, but they’re young enough that they have decades ahead of them where they will need to make money. I know my partner could readily learn how to write little programs like the one I wrote, but she is reluctant to invest the time because she knows that no one else at her job could understand them, and she’s already an order of magnitude better at the technology side of things than most of her colleagues.
I wonder often what will happen in fields like this. It is sobering to remember how far behind they are: still crunching data by hand, still versioning documents using filenames, still emailing documents around and around and around because it’s the most reliable solution that everyone involved can understand. On the one hand, it makes me feel like my comfort with technology means I will probably always be employable; on the other hand, I have to remind myself that I could probably never bear to work there.
No one is all that bright when it comes to product design.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with a lot of smart people at small startups — a bevy of PhDs, a horde of successful entrepreneurs, a gaggle of elite designers. Together, we spent many hours debating how users would react to new ideas, product improvements, and design changes. As often as not, we were pretty far off-base.
At one startup in particular, we spent an inordinate amount of time discussing which of several paths was the ideal one to pursue. We whiteboarded, we whittled down feature sets, we discussed potential pitfalls, and we endlessly, passionately argued over possible outcomes. After two or three weeks of this mind-numbing debate, we finally tried one of the ideas and invested a few weeks engineering and fine tuning. Then, a month after we conceived the idea, we’d run a user study, multivariate test, or just go for it and release the idea into the wild. Sometimes things worked out great and sometimes we fell on our faces.
It eventually became clear that none of the preamble had much impact on whether our release was successful. When we were coming up with ideas, we generally knew that among three options ‘A’ was likely a terrible idea, ‘B’ was pretty good, and ‘C’ was decent too. Instead of rat-holing on which of ‘B’ or ‘C’ was superior we should have just picked ‘B’ by default, prototyped it, and validated it. If ‘B’ failed, fine, move onto ‘C.’ We could have easily built and tested two options in the time we took just to choose a direction.
This advice might sound trite and ‘fail fast’ is starting to become doctrine among product designers. But, remain vigilent. At times we all sucumb to feeling very clever sitting around with our peers pondering optimal outcomes. The next time you’re caught in a room full of smart people doing something dumb (like trying to anticipate what your users will do), tune them out, flip open your laptop, and start prototyping.
Everyone, if they are lucky, gets that one teacher in their life that stands out above the rest. I was luckier than most. My high school art teacher, Bernard Harmon, was ten times the teacher I deserved and absolutely the teacher I needed.
My junior year of high school he called me into his office. He notified me that I had been chosen as a semi-finalist for a merit scholarship and would be flying to Miami for the finals competition. Our school had sent someone to the finals for the last ten years or so, which was a testament to his skills as a teacher. A large chunk of our year was spent preparing for the competition, working on our portfolio, answering essay questions. For most of us, this was our way to college. And everyone from our school who’d been selected to finals had come back a winner.
He sits me down and says, “I don’t want you to be disappointed. Of all the kids I’ve sent down there you’re the one I’ve been more unsure about. I don’t think you’re going to win, so just try to have fun.”
Mr. Harmon was like a father to me at a time when my relationship with my own father was not the greatest. He made me feel like I was capable of doing things I was afraid to, and had no problem taking me down a notch when I deserved it. I did not like disappointing him. And now he was giving up on me. I was angry. I was so angry I cried the whole way home that day.
I was still angry when I arrived in Miami. I was angry as I went through all the exercises of the competition. I was still angry when they told me I’d won. And I was still angry when I went back to school and walked into his office. His back was to me.
“I won.”
He didn’t even turn around.
“Of course you did. I never doubted it.”
Throughout your life you will deal with a multitude of different people, and while “Don’t be a dick.” is a pretty good baseline, ultimately those people will be driven by different things. Some of them will be driven by a need to be liked. Some of them will be driven by a need to prove others wrong.
Only twelve thoughts. That’s all that will have been required of me.
As I will look back on 2013, the year that, then, will soon be coming to a close, I will recall seeing the list titled “Here are the dates of Ben Alman’s future thoughts” and thinking, at the time, that the dates listed therein seemed rather arbitrary. “What will be so special about the 18th of the month? Why are there three exceptions? What if I will want to have thoughts on other dates?”
If this year will have been like any other year, I will have spent innumerable minutes weighing actions, reactions and consequences; I will have tried to be fair, honest and witty through careful observation, analysis and introspection. But this year won’t have been like any other year, and I will have spent numerable minutes weighing actions, reactions and consequences.
Why? Because the Pastry Box Project will have given me a reason—no, a mandate— to have only twelve thoughts. Ever again.
Despite my natural proclivity toward not only thinking but also voicing every single one of my thoughts, much to the ongoing chagrin of those around me, I will have succeeded in suppressing unscheduled or otherwise proscribed thoughts until my monthly “thought day,” much to the unexpected joy of those around me.
It won’t have been easy, however. I’m sure that I will have had to have had moments when I wrestled with the knowledge that I must learn to embrace the anticipation of thought in lieu of relying on the familiar comfort of the predictably unpredictable. While avoiding this internal debate will undoubtedly have been alluring, it is unlikely that it will have been easily dismissed, considering the appeal of never again having to think improvisationally or spontaneously.
All but twelve days of this year will have been filled with blissful emptiness, each day relatively free of thought but full of free time—time that I will have spent breathing, sleeping or perhaps even staring blankly at things I will most likely be unlikely to be able to recall.
And then I will realize that it’s all over. My twelve thoughts will all be in the past. There won’t be any new thoughts.
How will I feel? What will I do?
I won’t know, because I won’t have thought about that.
I was going to post something else here, about time and travel. But all I really want to say now is that our world is less bright without Aaron Swartz in it. He helped make RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, OpenLibrary, and Reddit. He did critical work in the open access world. He was extraordinarily generous with his time, which turned out to be heartbreakingly short.
Rick Perlstein explains a few of the ways in which Aaron strung together our web:
smart, dedicated people like him worked very hard, often with no thought of personal profit or gain, making ours a world of useful data, making data useful, making it possible to have a record of the world as it goes by, making the world more meaningful by making data more human and shapable and direction-ful
There’s so much more, but this isn’t a list. I have no personal remembrances; we never met. The world was better with him in it. There is so much left to be done.
Marketing websites: we have all made them. They’re the online version of a brochure, better than a PDF download but not quite something that supports a dynamic flow of content. An easy win from the perspective of a design agency or freelancer; there isn’t a ton of backend tech, they are predictable in scope, and produce understandable metrics. Not only can we create a known set of deliverables, we are nearly guaranteed that they will need a new redesign in 2-3 years (bonus, more business!).
But, who the hell makes decisions about what they buy solely based on a marketing website? How much time do you spend browsing product marketing sites each week? Whether it’s choosing a restaurant or buying a car, I rarely observe influences in behavior based only on static marketing lingo on a website. Instead, I believe people spend their time online where they connect with other people or find transparent data.
Frequently I see people making decisions based on word of mouth, too. Whether it be from a trusted friend or an anonymous rating, people tend to value the sentiment of a third-party far above that of manicured communications. In the project discovery process I have heard some refer to this as a “social media component” or making a site “sharable”, but I loathe that terminology. Rather than getting inventive in how we facilitate this conversation we just sell our clients the same sites that we have sold them before.
Are we being as creative as we can be when it comes to connecting people online?
The W3C is keeping a copy of the first website ever made online. If they weren’t, though, it could just be gone forever. This makes me wonder what we should be doing to preserve things from this digital world that we are creating.
Originally, my concern was about whether the story of how the internet was created will be preserved as we progress. There are important things like the introduction of images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. For example, I would love to be able to see the “Batman Forever” site that got Jeffrey Zeldman started with web building. Preserving examples of the internet’s growth is tiny compared to the bigger impact that this could have, though.
As we move more parts of our daily life to bits instead of materials, are we risking their total loss? We have learned so much about human life by archeologists piecing together drawings, writings, tools and personal items found from people that lived long before us. As we do less of that on materials that don’t require power, I believe that we have to be more adamant about ensuring that there is a way to protect them.
It seems like we need a plan for preserving things both digitally and physically. Like we do with national parks or historic zoning, maybe we should protect significant properties. Showing an archived progress of sites like dictionary.com and Wikipedia (amongst others) would say a lot about the internet and human life. There also needs to be protection against the biggest enemy of our digital world: lack of power. We have always lost important artifacts to fire, natural disasters and human destruction. Digital items are significantly more fragile in that they require specific technology and power in order to access them.
It’s important to keep moving and growing the internet at this fast pace because it is changing the world. I just think that some of us might need to make sure there’s a way for people to know how we did it.
There it was as persistent as it had always been. A stubborn, short, quiet hair on the arm of my jacket this afternoon. My hand went up to brush it away, and then it stopped. Routine interrupted.
There it was, although several weeks before, my beloved red dog had peacefully passed away. My closest companion of 12 years had once shed — generously and unadulteratedly — across the things of my life. And while she was gone, here: her trademark hair still stood.
How lucky I had been for the red hair. How lucky I had been for the loyalty two companion animals provide: commingled, intertwined, co-habitated. Shedding upon one another our lives such that when we went back into the world, we had these small red badges of courage.
In our dozen years together, this animal taught me more about being a person than any person I’ve known. Importantly:
Learn at least one impressive trick.
Shake when wet.
Wag.
When off the leash, it is best to run to a loved one.
Accept treats from strangers energetically yet cautiously.
Roll in grass whenever possible.
Wonderful things can sometimes be found in the trash.
Barking is a last resort.
Know when the right time is to let go of what you love.
True life partners do exist.
Lucy passed away November 15, 2012. The loss devastated me so deeply and personally that I couldn’t speak of it at all. Now, I think back on what I have been known to say, “When in doubt, trust the one covered in dog hair.” Trust them, and know they’re carrying badges of much more.
Our tools and practices refine daily. The inspiration pixel-deluge is unrelenting. Online tuition is a multi-million dollar enterprise. Everybody has an opinion.
As Geri commented, ours is a big and sometimes steep learning curve. From webmaster to web designer to front-end developer our roles have become more fragmented and more specialised with time, whilst what we are expected to know to accomplish these roles has grown exponentially.
It is so easy to feel out of touch with trends and discussions. I remember a time when there were five or six interesting blog posts to read a week. Now there are more than that a minute. My ‘to-read’ pile of books is nearing double figures. It has never been easier to feel like you know so little.
In 2012 I started doing two new things, neither planned: teaching and public speaking. What both these things did was made me realise that there were people out there who knew less than me. I don’t mean this arrogantly — I had always looked at what others knew and focussed on the gaps in my knowledge. Doing both these things made me stop to focus on what I did know.
I know we’ve only just met but in 2013 I want you to promise me something. Write more, help others more, be confident that you know more than you think because I guarantee there will be people who can learn from your experiences and knowledge. I bet you know more than you think.
First, we guess. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see: if this is right, what would it imply? Then we compare the results to nature. If it disagrees with experiments, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiments, it’s wrong.
Every product is a hypothesis. We start with a guess: I think this will work, I think this will be better, I think this is true. And we build something to test that guess. Then we learn something, and we try again. This formula doesn’t preclude art or creative choice or instinct or boldness at any point along the way. But it’s a place to start, and it’s a method to return to, to ground what we’re doing.
“Why would anyone put this button in the upper-right?” “That blue is hideous.” “Whoever designed this animation should be fired.”
If being a part of this industry has taught me anything, it’s that small decisions aren’t made by entire companies. It’s easy to shake our collective fists at the foibles of monoliths like Google or Twitter or Instagram, but the reality is that none of them are monolithic. That new feature you’re trashing was likely designed and developed by a small handful of people sitting together at a table trying to make the best decision they’re capable of…and those people are listening (and so is everyone else). Remember that the next time you take to the Internet to let off a little steam. You may think you’re standing outside the building, harmlessly yelling at the front door, but you’re really standing next to someone’s desk embarrassing them in front of their colleagues.
It’s strange to think that I might not make another web app. I’ve been working on iPhone apps for the past year and have done very little web development.
If I were to make a new app today, it would be an iPhone app. It’s difficult for me to see a scenario where I would choose to build a website, or even a mobile website, over a native app. I use my iPhone for everything these days.
I feel nostalgic for the web as it was in 2007. It was great to be able to share links, follow blogs, and generally have websites that play nicely with each other.
I don’t think the web as it was then is coming back though. I think there will be something new. Something that encompasses the ideas of the interconnected web but exists on mobile.
I’m just a little sad that it might be a younger generation that gets to define this new paradigm instead of us, generation Web 2.0.
“My job shouldn’t be trying to convince you that I should get to do my job!” It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard from when interviewing a design professional, someone toiling in obscurity in an organization that didn’t appreciate her work. Sure, they told her all the right things when they hired her. We know user experience is important. We need someone to help develop this practice. We value your perspective.
Except hiring someone to “do UX” never solves the bigger problem, which is always rooted in organizational culture and politics. Processes that are “the way we’ve always done it.” Values and business practices that aren’t aligned around the customer experience. And always, always, no support from the executives with the power to make change happen.
I told the students in my Design Management class this year that I hoped one day they’d be offered this job. Not in five years—they wouldn’t be ready. Maybe in fifteen years. See, some of the interesting problems in the world that need solving happen in organizations that don’t yet know how to value what we do. The smart ones will figure it out—with the help of the right change agents. I told my students that I hoped when they were offered that job, they’d know themselves well enough to assess whether they were the person to do it.
We live in a world of instant gratification, so is it any wonder that clients expect their projects to start yesterday and ship tomorrow, irrespective of how long the work actually takes? Clients usually don’t know—and often don’t care—about the intricacies of our business, and why should they? Instead they rely on our feedback to assess their schedules.
Unfortunately we’re in a market economy so there’s always somebody willing to work harder, work faster or cut more corners. It’s hard to sell a considered solution when everybody is saying it’ll take half that time, so projects inevitably skew faster than we’re comfortable with. It’s not a race to the bottom but it’s definitely against the clock.
I remember reading about an artist who would get paid for commissions but only do the work when the mood struck. The paintings took as long as they needed and some patrons waited years. Sometimes I daydream about this level of freedom, but in truth it would be a curse.
Good design takes time—more time than most of us are allowed. In fact I’m often shocked in interviews by how little time people are given to do their work. Sometimes as little as 5 or 10% of what we’d allocate. This allows you to keep costs down and win the work, but at what price?
Sadly we see too many potentially amazing designers stuck by the glass ceiling of time. So they settle on the first solution that looks viable and are never allowed to sweat the details. They are forced to rely on 1% of inspiration without the benefit of perspiration.
So this is the dirty little secret in our industry. The best designers and developers rarely have more talent. They simply have more time.
When I was fourteen I got a job as a terrible waiter, at a pizza place near my house.
Saturdays were the best. Before early shifts I ate two fresh, warm Sicilian slices from the big brick oven. I'd spend the day helping to make dough, chop vegetables, and fold boxes. Late shifts began in the lazy afternoon hours. I had time to get the dining room ready, and I even learned a few things in the kitchen while we waited for customers.
One Saturday afternoon, two old ladies came in and asked for tea. They were my first customers that day, but I was ready. I poured water into two glass mugs and microwaved them. Put a Lipton tea bag on each saucer. Brought out the tea, milk, and sugar. Having tea at a pizza place is pretty weird, but we were officially a "ristorante". So.
A few minutes later, from the kitchen, I heard the old ladies calling for me.
"Waiter! This tea tastes like poison."
I didn't know what to say. What was it supposed to taste like? I didn't have much experience. So I apologized and consulted my boss, Nick.
Nick was a football player in college. He moved around the kitchen like a bowling ball. He could put his arm in the oven to move stuff around, and he washed his hands with scalding water. When he cooked, he looked like bombs had hit him and failed to do any damage.
"They said the tea tastes like poison," I said, not an hour after I had dropped a crate of portobello mushrooms in the back room and made Nick furious.
He smelled the tea. I mentally retraced my steps and wished I had thought to do so before talking to Nick. I did everything the way he'd shown me. The tea bags were new. The milk was fresh. The water was from a pitcher we kept at the coffee station.
"Did you rinse out the pitcher?" he asked.
"It was full already." I said.
"That was vinegar." he said. "You served them straight vinegar."
The rest is a blur. I think Nick and I laughed about it. Of course I gave the old ladies new tea, with water, and we didn't charge them.
I guess there's a lesson in there about being prepared, not making assumptions. Verifying the quality and condition of materials before starting a project. But every so often I just laugh out loud at those poor old ladies I poisoned.
When I was consulting, I measured my work in hours. I’d guess how long something would take, add a small amount of slack, do the work, and then measure against my estimates. Did I charge fairly? Am I good at guessing how long something takes? Am I profitable?
But now, back in the world of salaries, I find this model to be a bit unfair to myself and what I want out of life. More and more, I’m measuring my work from the energy I have at the end of the day. Do I have enough energy to explore new ideas, learn something everyday, and keep my motivation going? Do the people I work with bring me up or wear me out? Will this project ship—and if it does, will it help people?
Energy is hard to measure. It’s a gut feeling. An end-of-the-day question: was that the best use of my time?
Will big data eat itself? Big data has been the buzz word for a while now. I wonder at what point the term will become so overloaded it will collapse on itself? Maybe that process has started already. Big is relative, both in the size of the data, the size of your operations and the size of your tools. I’ll know the term is empty the day I go through the line at the grocery store and the checkout person swipes my loyalty card and mentions big data. “The Cloud” was so 2012, I fear for what the term of 2013 will be.
I received my very first computer in 1998 at the age of 15. When I got bored of playing the MechWarrior and Pitfall games that came with it, I began scouring the web to learn how I could create my own website.
I struggled, a lot. I found basic how-to guides online, but I often had questions that went unanswered. I didn’t have any friends who I could ask for advice, and back then there were no classes in school that taught web design, so I couldn’t ask my teachers. I didn’t understand the concept of mailing lists. I didn’t know how IRC worked, but that didn’t matter since I didn’t know there were chat rooms out there, anyway.
There was definitely one good thing, though, about learning on a younger web. When I finally did figure it out, I was surprised at how easy it actually was. Armed with a text editor, all I really needed to learn was some basic HTML.
The learning curve was nowhere near as steep as it is today. Think about how simple browser testing was. Slapping a “Best Viewed In X” button on a splash page pretty much meant that, hey, you weren’t responsible if the site looked bad for another user. And let’s face it—expectations for design on the web were pretty rock-bottom back then. As long as your site had a few GIFs and a Webring graphic, you were pretty much good to go.
Fast-forward fifteen years. I’ve often thought about how it must feel to be a complete newbie these days who’d like to get started in web design and make really cool stuff from scratch. Today’s bar is set much, much higher.
Recently, a friend of mine decided that he wanted to learn how to make his own website. He’d heard of basic things like HTML and CSS, but a little bit of digging unearthed a whole other pile of terms he didn’t understand—wireframing, content management systems, frameworks, responsive design—the list went on. He was overwhelmed, and I certainly couldn’t blame him—even seasoned pros can’t possibly stay on top of every new thing.
As overwhelming as the web has become today, though, we’re lucky to have more resources than ever, and more importantly, we have a much stronger community. My friend was able to ask numerous people for opinions and advice, pick up a magazine, choose from a wealth of easy-to-read books, and try some basic online training courses. With some helpful guidance, he was able to get his own site up and running and learned a lot in the process.
I certainly hope that web design doesn’t become so complicated that it will discourage new talent from getting involved. Experienced designers should make the time and effort to help each other and pass their skills along to the next generation so that ten years from now, the web will be even better than we can dream of.
Clay Shirky wrote Napster, Udacity, and the Academy the other day. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but let me selectively quote a part that struck me:
Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
It succinctly captures what I am involved with and see happening in the web standards world. Now for the second time in fact. First we had the decision in 2004 at a W3C Workshop around Web Applications (now referred to as “The Workshop”) to no longer work on HTML and JavaScript, but instead focus on XML. To counter that decision the WHATWG was formed and proved the W3C wrong. The W3C now heralds HTML5 as one of its success stories.
Now the WHATWG is our new story and it has ably demonstrated that the bureaucracy of the standards process can be circumvented. More became possible, if you will. The second time came when the W3C reaffirmed its stance on a restrictive license for specifications. Specifications belong to anyone. They prove themselves by being in wide use. That combined with the fact that the W3C Process requires editors to do a lot of make work, of which complaints during my seven years there went unaddressed, made me feel my time would be better spent elsewhere.
My last Pastry Box thought is due to be published on December 29th. It’s already the 28th and I’m way past my deadline. I’m sitting in a hospital room, next to my mother who was admitted ten days ago. Even before that, my life had already taken a pretty tumultuous turn and started to resemble a fully-fledged soap opera. It had everything a good TV series does: Drama, disappointment, plot twists, even villains. With all the craziness that’s been going on, don’t expect this to be another tech-related post. Instead, I decided to write a coping mechanism that helped me get over many disappointments over the years: forgiveness. It even fits with the theme of these days.
It all started a little over 20 years ago. My mother had a very old unabridged edition of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”, which she read to me every night as I was growing up. She had inherited it from her own mother who also read it at her bedside when she was little. Eventually I grew more confident of my own reading skills and finished it by myself. That novel is how I learned my very first lessons on morals, justice and love. I’ve read many other books since then, but that one always holds a very special place in my heart, as it practically shaped my character.
It taught me to strive to see the good in others, even when they are doing everything in their power to hide it. Our mistrust is our armor and we’re terrified that giving it up will lead to more pain and disappointment. However, I’ve found that expecting good often brings out the best in others too. People are rarely evil, most are just weak, misguided or both.
It taught me to do my best to understand before I judge, because no matter how reprehensible someone’s actions look, we’re usually not as far from doing the same as we think.
Most importantly, it taught me to opt for forgiveness over vengeance, because responding to wrongdoings with kindness can change people. Love and compassion are infectious, whereas revenge will only make everyone poorer. After all, when you understand someone’s motivations and weaknesses, it becomes impossible to hold a grudge.
Contrary to popular belief, forgiveness is not primarily altruistic, which is why I called it a coping mechanism. Resentment builds up inside you and makes you bitter. Instead, holding no grudges leads to peace of mind, a prerequisite of happiness. Being able to forgive and move on does way more good to yourself than to anyone else.
Forgiveness and self-preservation aren’t mutually exclusive. It would certainly be masochistic to have people around you that constantly disappoint and hurt you, wouldn’t it? Forgiving doesn’t mean you have to be a martyr and allow toxic people to continue poisoning your life. You can both forgive someone and distance yourself from them.
Naïve as it may sound, this way of thinking has always helped me get over disappointments more quickly and prevented many more. Let this new year bring more happiness and less resentment. You won’t regret it.
After a year of reading small gems of opinion from the bakers, the main point that sticks for me is how much of the advice on here is timeless. It’s good to feel that we’re in a phase where we’re collectively able to look beyond our current limits and products and start to see the long term story.
Technologies and capabilities will change, the devices we build for are as of yet unimagined, but the desire and need to make products and services for people that make their lives easier, better or more fun will always stick around and should be at the heart of what we’re doing as makers.
We’re approaching the end of another year, and I suspect even the most cynical of us will invariably (even if just quietly within the confinements of our mind) look back at the year behind and decide we can do one or two things better in 2013.
Last December, I made one resolution: to sleep more. Throughout 2012 I don’t think I’ve slept less than I had in 2011, although I do notice a significant decrease in the number of naps I’ve taken — perhaps a product of me now sharing my home with two kids and of travelling more. Still, I am sleeping more, albeit still not enough.
This year, I want to sleep even more, I want to work less, I want to have more time to do nothing productive, I want to spend less and waste less, I want to eat more vegetables and fruit, I want to drink more water and less tea, and I want to be proud of the good work that I hope I’ll do and accept responsibility for the bad work that I’ll do too. I know it’s a tall order, but that’s the beauty of this time of year: we believe we can do it all.
Don’t give up. Don’t let yourself be convinced that this is just the way it has to be. Don’t stop asking questions. Do ask for what you need to do the job well. Do trust your instincts and your experience.
Pay attention to red flags. Work with people who care. Conduct experiments. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Remember that confidence and competence are not always related. Always be learning.
Ask dumb questions. Maintain naivety. Be able to explain what you’re doing to a five year old. Make sure you know why you’re doing it.
Your life is a design project. There are many possible solutions. Don’t just accept the default settings, be creative, imagine alternatives.
Be disruptive. Refuse to accept the status quo. Get away from your desk. Take every opportunity to travel. Reflect on the things you say and do. Question others. Question yourself. And, in all things, be nice.
I recently saw the band Swans live for the second time. They were promoting a stellar new album (The Seer) which essentially encompasses all of the varied and challenging music that bandleader Michael Gira has made under a few different monikers over the last thirty years. In the two years since I saw them last, I had gotten to know their oeuvre better, and coming to this show with a more educated ear paid off. Swans’ allure can be difficult to explain since their output is generally pretty ugly by conventional standards, but their live show has helped me fill in a piece of that allure’s puzzle: their music is intensely physical.
Part of it has to do with the sound being produced organically, from musical instruments and non-instruments alike, and the ability of that sound to embody the physical act — from delicate precision to chaotic, flailing abandon — with which it was derived. Modern production techniques have a way of making music sound like it just happens, but one never doubts that a Swans record is the result of manual labor, and that labor is made manifest in the band’s apocalyptic live show.
But there is another not-so-secret physical ingredient that pushes a Swans show into transcendent territory: extremely high volume. How loud is it? Well, it occurred to me that a deaf person might get nearly as much out of the show as I did. It is loud enough to make your insides rumble, effectively forcing you to listen with your entire body. And this makes the experience that much more immersive: if you’re already attuned to the emotional and intellectual qualities of the music, the volume will penetrate you physically as well. A Swans show can and will overtake the whole of one’s being.
Later, I wondered if the experience was made more acute by physicality’s diminished relevance in a modern life dominated by abstract interactions with pixels behind glass.
A wide range of experiences that used to be physically distinct from each other now share the homogenous tactility of our digital devices. Not so long ago, I couldn’t possibly mistake my copy of Slaughterhouse Five for my telephone’s handset, but now, when I reach for one, I am inescapably reaching for both. Granted, these experiences do have a fundamental thing in common — the movement of ideas — and the paper and plastic that accompanied them in the past were artifacts of less efficient means of distribution than what we have now. Consolidating the material components of these experiences was the right thing to do.
But that doesn’t mean our senses of touch, taste, and smell aren’t every bit as important as their siblings. We may be living in the Information Age, but our organic matter doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Weight, shape, texture, and so many other physical properties are valuable experiential devices and information transmitters. So I’m looking forward to the day when information technology can replicate and manipulate more than just sight and sound.
As this is my final thought of the year, I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Alex and Katy for providing me with the opportunity to write for The Pastry Box Project. From my experience with HTML5 Doctor and Gallery I’m fully aware of how difficult managing side projects is, particularly where others are involved and there are deadlines to hit.
Sitting down and formalising my thoughts, ideas and feelings by writing them isn’t something I do often so I’m grateful that being part of The Pastry Box has given me a platform to do just that.
Looking back over the year, I now see real value in penning these observations in a way that I didn’t before. It’s opened my eyes to the benefits of writing. I can’t say for sure that I’m going to start writing and publishing regularly about topics other than HTML & CSS tutorials, but you never know.
I wish Alex, Katy and The Pastry Box Project the fondest of farewells and all the best for the coming years along with the exciting things they have planned. I think they’ve hit on a really interesting format for publishing and involved some of the best minds in the industry. It’s been a pleasure to be part of it. I’ll be sure to follow their progress and so should you. Happy New Year.
This last year of Pastry Box thoughts started with a story of a letter written by a 10-year-old girl. A letter that was discovered by her son over a hundred years later when he was an old man. It was about the intimacy across time between them, and how seeing the shape of her writing somehow gave me a sense of knowing her a little, too.
I think intimacy is something we strive for, and as designers we facilitate with our work. From projecting a simple message about a product into the minds of our audience, to helping people reach across time and distance to share an experience, intimacy is our business. To do it, we work on our own capacity for empathy. We design for other people, and in trying to do so put ourselves behind their eyes, under their fingertips, and project ourselves into their experiences. Maybe that’s why many designers seem so liberal to me. Liberal in the literal sense of generous and open, for the most part.
This month is the festive season, the season of goodwill; a celebration. I’m not religious. I’m a secular humanist if anything. For me the festive season is a celebration of our human capacity to be inherently ethical and moral without religion. Part of that is recognising my own good fortune, and celebrating the inherent goodness in all of us. It’s the season where I try to refresh my own empathy and compassion, and try to hold on to that for the coming year, as a human, father, husband, and designer. I hope you feel somewhat similar. Thank you for giving me your time when you read my thoughts this year.
May the best of your past be the worst of your future!
Change happens in our industry when enough folks embrace something new. This can be seen in the past few years as many of us have embraced HTML5, responsive design, web fonts, etc. The next shift we need to bring about isn’t a new technology or technique, it is embracing diversity in our industry. We need to actively become more inclusive in our workplaces, our conferences and our professional organizations. Gender and ethnic diversity should be our resolution for 2013 and beyond.
Looking back on the 11 months of Pastry Box posts, around 5,000 words, I’ve been trying to find some sort of pattern to what were short essays on typically whatever idea was formost in my mind as that month’s deadline loomed.
A lot of the ideas I’d been thinking about for a long time. A number I’d presented on, while one or two, particularly August’s thoughts on digital artefacts, more or less popped into my head, but is obviously influenced by “The New Aesthetic” (which has been something of an obsession of mine since James Bridle’s “Waving at the Machines” presentation at Web Directions in 2011). Curiously just the other day I found reference to an essay by Brian Eno from 1996 that discussed this same idea. So, I’m only 14 years behind the times on that one.
So, is there a pattern? I think almost all of these pieces are about the future, and what it might look like. Even my piece from October “Ancient History” is really about the future. And how, in the famous formulation by George Satayana, we are doomed to a future that is essentially like our past, unless we learn from that past. Which prompts me to ask why I seem so concerned with the future?
Well, for one, who isn’t?
But what I think makes the future more pressing for me, who in previous generations (and I’m sure by at least some of you out there) would be considered “middle aged” is that I have a young family, and a daughter due to be born within a few weeks of this being written. This daughter, if she lives the average life expectancy for a child born now, will live to be 100. When her grandparents were born, that expectancy was much closer to 70 years.
So, my daughters, and their generation, have a lot of the future in front of them.
When I was growing up, the future looked like colonies on Mars, and holidays in space, and flying cars, and jetpacks, and video phones. We kind of got video phones, and no one really cares all that much about those.
The future we didn’t know about, or didn’t think much about was AIDS, and massive population growth, and global climate change, and the fall of the Soviet Union (many of you won’t have even known a time when the Soviet Union existed, let alone posed (supposedly) the greatest existential threat to humanity).
The future I talk about in these Pastry Box pieces is pretty trivial by comparison. If there’s anything among them that aspires to be more than just a few thoughts about the next few years, it’s the idea that the technologies of the web provide us with the opportunity to be more honest with ourselves, as individuals, about our actions (what we eat, drink, buy, how we act, where we travel) and their consequences, for ourselves, and for the billions of others on our planet, and as a civilisation, as a planet as a whole.
We face monumental challenges to our very existence as a species. So far we’ve been pretty good at sticking our heads in the sand. That time is over.
If we want a future at all, let alone one with jetpacks and holidays in space, we need to start accepting reality, then talking about how to fix the problems that are essentially of our own making.
And thank goodness we have the web, and the ability to communicate across borders, and language and cultural barriers at this time. Because without that I honestly believe we’d have no hope at all.
When I was initially asked to contribute to this project, I played with the idea of writing up all of my thoughts in one fell swoop so I didn’t have to think about what to write every month. However, somewhere around the mid-point of the year, I decided I would much rather have my thoughts be a true accounting of what was going on with me at the point in time that I compose my thought instead.
So, here I am at the close of the year. Like many people, I take this time to look back at the last 12 months to assess where I have been to get a better handle on where I want to go moving forward. This year has been great in so many respects, but I feel I could have done so much more if I had been in a different mode. This year, and for several years, I’ve been in what I like to think of as “ret-vance” mode.
What is being in ret-vance? It’s being in-between “retreat” and “advance”.
Advance mode is when you feel like everything is “on and poppin’ ” — everything you initiate seems to work, situations fall into place, you meet exactly the right people at the right time. You get the job you want, you get the big promotion, you meet the person of your dreams, you launch the new project…you get the idea. You’re moving forward, pursuing what you want, and you have not only the drive, but also the energy and resources for it all.
Retreat mode is when you’re pooped, burnt out, stressed, tired. When you can only half-heartedly make efforts towards your goals if you can make any effort at all. When small motions seem like monumental effort. Sometimes when all of that is happening, what you really need is to just give yourself permission to take a break.
Ret-vance is somewhere between the two — a volley back and forth between bursts of moving forward and pursuing with gusto, only to fairly quickly feel stymied by fatigue, lack of focus, and resultant setbacks.
When looking at the past 3-4 years, I see that I have been caught more and more frequently in “ret-vance” mode. I see it with all of the projects that I have initiated and not been fully able to launch; with the ideas for blog posts, articles, and books I have planned to write and have not started on; updated websites for myself, my portfolio and so many other things; collaborations that I haven’t been able to make tangible. That which I have been able to accomplish, like contributing a chapter to Smashing Book #3, developing and delivering new presentations, and completing several client projects has countered the aforementioned stymied efforts. But I feel that I probably could have produced so, so much more.
Being in ret-vance is frustrating — especially when you don’t realize it’s happening.
The cure for ret-vance mode? I think it’s to choose. Make a choice: if you need to fully retreat, then fully retreat. Give yourself permission to not do those projects, to not go after stuff, to rest — completely. Maybe that’s why stuff isn’t clicking — because it isn’t supposed to and you need downtime to rejuvenate yourself.
Or, maybe you need to choose to advance: to really go for whatever it is you are focused on. Maybe you’ve been spreading yourself too thin and you need to take your hands out of a few pies to be able to just focus on one or two things and give them your all.
So, my goal for next year is to get out of ret-vance and to advance (as I feel I have retreated long enough): get rid of the areas in which I formerly believed I “should” be focusing my energy, but am no longer interested in; release that which no longer fits with me; and to fully focus on the things that I love, am passionate about and that excite me.
My daughter’s got a smartphone, because, well, everyone has. It has GPS on it, because, well, every one does. What this means is that she will never understand the concept of being lost.
Think about that for a second. She won’t ever even know what it means to be lost.
Every argument I have in the pub now goes for about ten minutes before someone says, right, we’ve spent long enough arguing now, someone look up the correct answer on Wikipedia. My daughter won’t ever understand the concept of not having a bit of information available, of being confused about a matter of fact.
A while back, it was decreed that telephone directories are not subject to copyright, that a list of phone numbers is “information alone without a minimum of original creativity” and therefore held no right of ownership.
What instant access to information has provided us is a world where all the simple matters of fact are now yours; free for the asking. Putting data on the internet is not a skill; it is drudgery, a mechanical task for robots. Ask yourself: why do you buy technical books? It’s not for the information inside: there is no tech book anywhere which actually reveals something which isn’t on the web already. It’s about the voice; about the way it’s written; about how interesting it is. And that is a skill. Matters of fact are not interesting — they’re useful, right enough, but not interesting. Making those facts available to everyone frees up authors, creators, makers to do authorial creative things. You don’t have to spend all your time collating stuff any more: now you can be Leonardo da Vinci all the time. Be beautiful. Appreciate the people who do things well, rather than just those who manage to do things at all. Prefer those people who make you laugh, or make you think, or make you throw your laptop out of a window with annoyance: who give you a strong reaction to their writing, or their speaking, or their work. Because information wanting to be free is what creates a world of creators. Next time someone wants to build a wall around their little garden, ask yourself: is what you’re paying for, with your time or your money or your personal information, something creative and wonderful? Or are they just mechanically collating information? I hope to spend 2013 enjoying the work of people who do something more than that.
When I was in fourth grade, I was given an assignment to interview a family member and then to write their biography. I chose my great-grandfather, who was born in 1900. Interviewing him in the early 1980s, his life story was fascinating: he remembered the first time he’d seen an automobile, the first moving picture he saw, the first time he saw something man-made in the air, the first time he’d heard a radio, the first he saw a television. In his lifetime, humanity went from horse-drawn buggy to walking on the moon. Everything I take for granted was once new to him.
I’m reminded of this because my generation will have a parallel story, though likely less dramatic, to tell. My children cannot remember a day without the internet.
My first encounter with a web browser was in the early nineties. I had entered the computer lab in order to print out a term paper, and a friend of mine waved me over. “You’ve got to see this!” He had this window open, and typed something in and suddenly we were seeing a news report about the spread of the Ebola virus, accompanied by pictures. It was grotesque and fascinating.
A few years later, I was working at an engineering research center, and tasked with putting together an online glossary, and finally got to see how such pages were put together. HTML reminded me of working in WordPerfect documents, which, back then, had a mode that allowed you to work directly with the declarative codes used to alter the appearance of text.
Fast forward to the year 2000. I was working at a small publisher and book catalog. We’d recently moved our online catalog in-house, thanks to the fact that our catalog software had a module for IIS. I was asked to give the site a new look, since I’d done some HTML before. I quickly discovered that the HTML was not hard-coded, but being generated by this language called “Active Server Pages”. I figured out what needed to be done.
A few months later, my boss noticed that this up and coming company, and competitor, really, “Amazon,” was now allowing people to review books on their site. He asked me to add that feature to the site.
The software we had used FoxPro, and while I could get things out of it, I couldn’t quite figure out how to put things into it, particularly not in a way that would allow us to upgrade easily. So I did some research, and decided to use Perl to accomplish the task. I got some books, studied hard for a few weeks, added Perl and MySQL to our IIS installation, and banged out the functionality.
And at that point, I was hooked by the web, and specifically creating content for the web.
Today, I have two kids. Neither of them knows a world without the web. They’ve never seen a regular modem, much less a phone that connects to the wall, or with an actual dial. How foreign will my life be to their children, and their children’s children? And will the internet as I first saw it be only the first in a pioneering step towards bigger and better technology? Or one of history’s failures?
Either way, I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
Rejoice, for ▊ is dead! Inefficient, unsustainable, made obsolete and worthless. It is obscene that anyone wasted their time with ▊, and it’s inconceivable that anyone could ever build success on it again.
It is not enough to reject ▊ in our lives alone, it must be burned from others, too. We must dedicate ourselves to the total eradication and discredit of ▊. Its value an illusion; devils tricks for inferior minds. Our new way is the true model, that is our way now, and that way will be the way of others.
Punish those who advocate for ▊. Strike down anyone who would indoctrinate youth with tales of ▊’s past glories. Ridicule those who succeed in spite of ▊. Cry havoc from the clock towers at how much greater we could be without ▊. Any success with ▊ is our failure.
Our world is constantly reinvented, rethought, tweaked, embraced, rejected, and iterated upon at pace. Made better, routed around failure, democratised, stabilised, and commoditised. That you are reading this invocation at all is testament to a polyculture. Therefore you, as a soldier to this cause, must ignore all of that as you step to the pulpit, transpose consonants for exes, and proclaim to your flock that “▊ sucks!”
Reject all context, culture, and nuance. It is only by cleansing yourself of these today that you may learn new contexts, cultures, and nuances to reject again tomorrow.
A few years ago, I started adding a rather odd section to my proposals. In addition to the usual stuff (who I am, their problem, what I’m proposing, pricing, and so on), I added a section entitled:
“Questions I’m Curious to Explore (Why this is personally exciting!)”
I did this for two reasons:
One, it doesn’t hurt to demonstrate that your interest in working with them is about more than the money. Letting potential clients know that you’re really excited about the problem space, and why, is a great way to set yourself apart from other proposals they may be entertaining.
Two, this was a good filter for me, personally. Answering the question “why do I want this project?” forces you to look beyond financial compensation. I’m keenly aware of how the projects I choose to invest my time in, in turn either advance, hinder, or alter my own learning trajectory. I’d like to be intentional about the work I choose — not just for what it is, but how it affects me: Emotionally. Financially. Timewise. What will I learn and who will I meet? What will I bring into the world? How will this affect people? And how does this play into my personal narrative? Put into perspective, a six month project is a good chunk of my life. I want to live my life with intention. I’ve turned down work — good work — because it didn’t pass the “Questions I’m Curious to Explore” test.
For the projects I do work on, once I’m a few weeks or months deep, it’s a nice reminder — especially when things are tense — of what I (personally) hoped to get out of this investment of my time. I can re-evaluate: Is what I wrote down still important? Are we on track? Am I learning new things that I didn’t anticipate?
Of course, being able to complete a “Questions I’m Curious to Explore” section means there’s already a bank of things you want to learn more about, whether it’s new skills, something you’d like to test, or something else.
One theme that’s emerged for me over the last year is just how import learning, discovery, play — being curious — is for me. This is a theme I’ve seen show up again in again each post I wrote and each presentation I gave. I value curiosity, a lot. Not just for me, but for everyone. As a species, we are born curious. We are hardwired to grow and discover the world around us.
So I’d like to ask you a question:
“What are you curious about? What do you want to know more about by this time next year?”
Whether it’s related to your work, or some personal interest, write down something (or a bunch of somethings!) you’re curious about. And then, pursue that topic to the point of exhaustion. Make something based on what you’re learning. Share what you’re learning with others. Engage in conversations about what you’re learning. You’ll discover a quiet kind of satisfaction that comes from a challenge faced, and mastered.
Do you ever hear a song that takes you back to a particular moment in time? Opening notes or chords so deeply ingrained in your subconscious that you can almost ‘become’ a past version of yourself in an instant? I can think of a few songs that have that effect on me and most are seasonal. This time of year, December specifically, there’s a song that’s been playing in my head since I was 15. That song is ‘Thirty-Three’ by The Smashing Pumpkins (Spotify/ Rdio / YouTube).
So I’m 15 again. Christmas 1996 is approaching. On my Christmas list is ‘Melon Collie and The Infinite Sadness’, the Pumpkins’ epic landmark two-disc album. ‘Thirty-Three’ is a song on disc two, but at this point I’ve yet to hear it — I have to wait until Christmas Day for that. But here I am on a cold Saturday morning, thumbing through CDs in a small independent (and ultimately doomed) record store in my hometown of Orpington, Kent, about to hear the song for the first time. In the ‘singles’ section, ‘Thirty-Three’ is a new release. There are two versions available, each with different b-sides. I buy the version that includes ‘The Last Song’ — an absolutely beautiful track that features a guitar solo from Billy Corgan’s father — ‘The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)’, and ‘Transformer’.
Of the days that followed that purchase, I have no specific memory. I assume I played the single a lot — especially the first two songs — in the run-up to Christmas, and I know that I did indeed receive the full album on Christmas Day. But the specifics are irrelevant: the residual feeling is what mattered (to me, at least).
At that time in my life, I’d recently broken up with my first girlfriend and, being a rather emotional and — let’s face it — somewhat pathetic fifteen year-old (long before the term ‘emo’ was coined, of course), life was filled with a sense of bittersweet melancholy, fueled by the discovery of music that remains poignant to this day. Life also had an air of innocence: I lived at home with my parents, I was mid-way through high school, and I’d yet to start my first job. The web had just started to turn into ‘a thing’, but I wasn’t aware of it.
This little bout of reminiscing has no point. There’s no deeper meaning hidden behind the story of me buying ‘Thirty-Three’ just over half my life ago. The number is not even relevant to my age (I won’t be thirty-three for another couple of years yet). It’s simply that I’ve been asked to provide a thought for December, and this is what’s in my head. ‘Thirty-Three’ is playing on perpetual internal repeat because it’s cold and it’s December and Christmas is approaching. And all of those factors combined offer me a gateway back to 1996.
That’s been the case every year since I first heard that song. I wonder if that’ll always be the case?
Many people e-mail me asking about freelancing directly after finishing school. If there is one thing that I would highly recommend, it’s getting some experience first. When I look back, it was a mistake to start freelancing so early, because I had no idea what I got myself into. I struggled for about 4 years to get on the right track, because the people who promised me work didn’t deliver. That’s why I would recommend working a few years in a few agencies to see how things are done, so you get a feel for how projects are run, what’s involved etc. Experience is very important. Once you feel you have reached that level of knowledge, you could start freelancing after-hours. Start smaller and gradually grow until it reaches a level of maturity that could sustain a daily income. Before you start freelancing completely set aside some savings, because the first few years will be difficult.
At our recent Insites: Xmas Special I spoke about the three things that signify 2012 for me. They are:
Collaboration — I am a firm believer that the sum of the parts are nearly always greater than the individuals. Finding and choosing good collaborators isn’t easy but it’s very worthwhile. They spur you on, make you raise the bar and bring skills to your projects you don’t have. Here’s to more collaborations in 2013.
Shipping — 2012 was a year of a lot of talk but also a lot of action. There’s no better feeling than getting a project or product out of the door. I hope the trend continues in 2013.
Community — We live in a digital age but increasingly feel isolated. 2012 was full of great events, meet-ups and spur-of-the-moment coffees with like minded people. It’s a great opportunity to share issues, problems and generally add the personal side to our digital industry. 2013 kicks off with a trip to Nottingham for NA Conf, see you there?
Project delays. They are simply a reality. Sometimes the client changes requirements. Sometimes a server problem becomes a time-suck. Sometimes a bug gets the better of a developer.
What isn’t a reality is that a project delay equals an angry or lost client … as long as you honestly communicate with that client.
When a client wants to make changes that will affect the project scope, it is my responsibility to tell them that. It isn’t always about saying “no,” it’s about saying “yes, but this will affect the timeline and budget.” When a client is delayed on their tasks, it is my responsibility to remind them how it will affect the timeline. When these things happen, I’m not doing my job if I pretend that the project will still launch when we originally planned.
It isn’t easy to say “no,” or “yes, but …”. It isn’t easy to inform a client a project will be delayed. Sometimes clients get (initially) upset. But I guarantee they will be really angry when they find out, a week before launch date, that the project is going to be delayed, just because no one wanted to tell them about the realities.
Honest communication is part of my job. It not only shows respect for the client and project, but respect for my own business. I want my clients to trust me, even if what I have to tell them isn’t the best news. Trust and honesty build goodwill, even amidst a project delay. And goodwill, combined with delivering a great final product (of course), means referrals and repeat business.
I keep talking about making it easier to do certain things I used to love making time for. Writing, reading, designing—whatever. I’ve gotten very good at identifying a problem—it’s far too difficult to write blog entries on my phone! I don’t have enough free time to read! I’m hurting for decent ideas!—and focusing on solving it before I can, well, do the thing I’ve been missing. So I’ll schedule time to convert my blog to some more phone-friendly platform, or plan for the books I’ll read once my projects wrap up, or scribble down ideas for sites, for projects I’ll work on in the future.
The real problem is, of course, me. There is, as they say, no time like the present; maybe it’s worth remembering that, and starting to do the things I love in the moment. I miss them.
Pure and genuine religion…means caring for orphans and widows in distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.
James 1:27, New Living Translation.
Regardless of religious affiliation—or not—please take time out to help those in need, without agenda or selfishness, but because that can make all the difference for someone.
Some time around the start of The Pastry Box Project, my life changed quite drastically. This was down to a few things: the realisation that everything is designed. The freeing up of a lot of my “free time.” Most significantly, the idea that I could do anything I wanted, provided I was motivated enough. I could change my sleeping pattern so I was more productive. I could read more books. I could learn something new every day. I could create a product I previously thought to be impossible. I could impress my peers and heroes, get a job I was passionate about, and move to a place I love with a person I love. I could do all that, and the first step was waking up earlier.
So I did. Not out of choice, at first. I had a job to go to. So I’d get up at 6am and go to work and get back home about 6pm. Then those 12 other hours were for resting. But I could squeeze more life out of those hours. So I worked some more. I worked on Brills and Animate.css. I learned more about PHP and CSS and other things that in X years time will be obsolete. Thinking about the temporary nature of my craft motivated me to learn more about something less temporary — its roots. The foundations of design. Typography, grid systems, color theory. So I bought books. And I learned more. I hated reading, but it was easy to read about something I was genuinely passionate about. The “why,” not the “how,” was teaching me to be better at my craft.
As I sit and wonder how best to sustain my latest product, I find it hard to care about its profitability. I was never in this for the money. It’s completely bewildering to me to think that there are people out there who will genuinely work their entire lives just to make a living. Or even worse, people who put a minimal amount of effort into a product they simply don’t care about just so they can flip a profit. I’m incredibly lucky that from a young age, I’ve found something I’m passionate about that just so happens to be an ever-growing industry that pays pretty well, too. Others might not have that chance. They may have to work to live. But the only way they’ll find that passion for something is by looking for it. Not by saying “maybe next year.” I’ve said it before. Happiness and success isn’t a measure of how much money you have, or the clients you managed to work with.
Passion is the best motivator. Working on something you love — something that you need — is incredibly fulfilling. If you’re passionate about something, you’ll stay up late working on it because you want to. You’ll never stop making it better. All you need for your idea to be successful is a genuine need and a genuine passion. Success relies on your use of the product, no one else’s. This was your idea. Make it. Use it. If you don’t use it, it’s not good enough. If you don’t know how to build it, learn how. Ship early and ship often. Keep it simple. Never say “finished.” Make mistakes. Be honest. Don’t try to be the next big thing. Be the better thing.
I am more productive. I do read more books. I do learn something new every day. I have created a product I previously thought to be impossible. I will impress my peers and heroes, get a job I’m passionate about, and move to a place I love with a person I love. I’m not finished. I’m just getting started.
The old maxims were gradually replaced, and new leaders appointed through the democracy of retweets. No books were burned, although a few were traded in on Amazon.
Our industry has undergone a genteel revolution. But listen closely and you may notice a more aggressive tone. The designers led us astray! The web has become bloated, and it’s only pure luck that mobile arrived to save us, deus ex machina, from our past excesses.
I prefer to recognise complexity than assume incompetence. No designer wants to add unnecessary elements, or another column of pageview-sucking linkbait. These designers knew what’s good for users and the web. However, design is more complex than the slogans suggest.
Real design is political. It’s making the case for fluidity when the client isn’t confident enough to yield control of pixels. It’s persuasion, reciprocity, and benign skullduggery. It’s a constant negotiation between what the consultant sees as harmful, but the client sees as essential.
If the planets are aligned, it might just produce something the community deems worthy. But far more often, good design produces a modest improvement, a compromise, or a disaster narrowly averted.
So let me speak on behalf of the designers who are accused of causing this apparent mess:
I was at dinner with some fellow nerds the other night, and someone brought up the idea of coming across something on the interwebs that was “tl;dr”. As a lover of acronyms and an owner of an occasional short attention span, I can totally relate.
This way we choose what we deem worthy of our time to read and watch has also extended to our interfaces. Think about the plethora of one page sites out there. TMPTL? Too many pages to load? Perhaps the more clicks we save our users, the more we show we respect their time. I’m not sure if it’s an all or nothing pattern, but I do know I’d prefer an inline slideshow to a lightbox popup most days.
Coda follows this pattern nicely with their product video on the home page for the release of Coda 2. Their headline states “What’s new in two minutes. See the Coda Tour.” I love this because they let me know how long this video is and because this video is short, I’ll totes watch it. The other bonus of their implementation is that the video plays right inline with the page. They thought about the time of the audience. No clicks, no lightbox, no new window, just instant gratification. And isn’t instant gratification one of the things that makes the internet so great?
Find your singularity. Find the non-work thing that demands so much of your attention that all other attentions walk away — tail between their legs. Find it, and do it as often as you find yourself believing you’re able to multi-task and be a craftsman.
I began drafting my final Pastry Box piece, about companies locking in developers and consumers by restricting their choice in a process known euphemistically as “being part of their ecosystem”. This isn’t new; for centuries, royal families and backwoods communities only mated with close blood relatives, because restricting the gene pool is a proven way to promote strength and robustness.
But as I was faffing around drafting, Terence Eden wrote about it, expressing it much better than I did, so I leave him to express my final thought of the year:
I just want us all to get along. I want my disparate equipment to talk to each other. I don’t want to live in a house where ever component has to be made by the same company otherwise nothing works correctly. I don’t want to be stuck using a crappy product because they’re the only ones offering service X.
I don’t want toys that only run on your flavour of batteries.
I don’t want to be part of your fucking ecosystem.
When I was about fifteen, a little younger than my teenage daughter, two men in suits came to my school. They spoke to us in a careers lesson; told us how important computers would be to all of our futures. I had my hand up quickly, to tell them that I was going to have nothing to do with computers. What use were computers to a dancer? The men couldn’t think of a response to that, and agreed that perhaps dancers wouldn’t need to know about computers.
Fifteen year old me could not have imagined the world we now live in. The phone I carry with me is far more powerful than the 486 I ultimately taught myself HTML on. My daughter, a dance student herself, uses computers every day. I wish I’d had access to my entire music library on an iPod, her ability to research ideas online rather than sitting in libraries, and the chance to stay in touch with people she has performed with so easily.
Nothing of what I do professionally existed when I was the age my daughter is now. I am grateful that my teenage angst was recorded in temporary form in diaries and not all over an Internet that never forgets. However I am envious of the photos and video she will have to look back on. What will exist by the time she is my age? That thought is both terrifying and exciting.
At this time of year I often get asked for predictions. What do I think will happen next year, or in five years time? I don’t know, and I’m happy with that. Fifteen year old me thought that what I was doing then, was what I would always be doing. Almost forty year old me is pretty sure there are some amazing things just round the corner. I can’t wait to see what they will help us to create.
Get a jsFiddle account, seriously. Since getting that ability to try things out instantly I have tinkered way, way more and built so many more cool things. If you want to get better, always tinker; if you want to tinker, make it easy to do. jsfiddle is to a front-end developer what a sketchbook is to an artist.
My favorite question to ask in an interview is “what have you built recently just for fun?”. I don’t really care what it is they built. I’m just looking for people, like me, that live and breathe frontend so much that even when the work day is done, their brain is still working and coming up with ideas. It’s clichéd but true that you should love what you do and do what you love. You might not have the job you want right now, but the real question is do you have the passion to do the work that will get you to your dream job one day?
Working with truly talented people is something I’ve always wanted in my career. Like playing tennis with someone who is better than me, working with someone who knows more and can do more raises my game. And few things are more inspirational to me than witnessing (and being able to contribute to) great work.
But talent doesn’t trump a bad attitude or inconsistent work ethic.
No matter how skilled someone is… no matter how incredible their final work is… no matter how great their technical reputation is… If that person is an ass, I don’t want to work with them. If that person can’t follow through, I won’t work with them.
True talent may be rare, and it is unquestionably an asset to any endeavor. But someone I can count on, who works well with others, is invaluable.
I’m one day away from the very last of my speaking engagements for the year. I love speaking — I’m passionate about it and adore sharing my knowledge with an interested audience. So, when I am on the verge of a moment of wallowing in the fatigue that comes from sleeping in foreign beds, handling a bunch of different currencies, switching between languages, working to perfect my talks in limited time frames, and breathing the canned air of airplanes, I stop and look back at where I was 4 years ago.
Four years ago in 2008, I was working at a local company doing my least favorite work in the world: Project Management. The office was small, and the “cool kids” social circle even smaller. The AC was always at a temperature far lower than was comfortable for me, so I took frequent breaks to warm myself in the sun outside. My projects were big and unwieldy, and I got to exercise practically none of my natural visual and writing creativity. In short, I was miserable. I consoled myself with dreams of writing a book and becoming a speaker who travels to conferences all around the world presenting on subjects that were my passion.
Fast forward to March 2009 at SXSW. On that Saturday, I lamented to my friend Jen that what I really wanted to do was write and speak. She suggested that the quickest path to that end was to write a book. “I could write a book about HTML,” I said, “but does there really need to be another one of those?” Two days later on Monday, I find myself at the Great British Booze Up. Mysterious promptings to talk to a guy who was upstairs put me squarely in the path of my friend Robert and his editor Wendy. That conversation lead to a book deal with PeachPit, and my writing The CSS Detective Guide.
Fast forward to April 2010. My book has been released, and I was feeling euphoric with the accomplishment of one of my life’s dreams of being an author. Curiosity led me to check the Future of Web Design’s website for their upcoming event in May. My stomach flipped when I saw that the speaker for the presentation “The Graceful Degradation of CSS3” was TBD. I contacted them and offered myself as a speaker, and they said yes! Thus, my defacto speaking career was born.
Fast forward to today, November 2012. I know I certainly don’t speak or travel as much as a lot of people, but I am still proud that this life is something that I deliberately created. When I look at it in this light, I feel enormously empowered and powerful. I look back at the past several years of ways that I have changed my life dramatically for the better, and almost exactly the way in which I’d hoped, and I realize that I really do have the power to create whatever it is in my life that I wish for. This gives me an immense amount of hope about what I’m currently focused on bringing into my life in the near future!
So, be honest with yourself about your wishes and hopes and start making them happen. If I can do it, then anyone can.
I bet that many years from now, the memories that will make us smile won’t be those of us being cowards. Neither will they be the hours of debugging pesky code or bikeshedding in meetings. It will be the transgressions, the passion, the risks, all those times we stepped out of our comfort zones and took a leap in the dark. Those times when our life was turned upside down and we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. Sometimes it leads us to fall on our face, but the regret is only temporary. Deep down we knew it from the very beginning: We’re proud about ourselves, because we dared, and boy, did we enjoy the ride! I’m always wary of complacency. Comfort is not what we’ll remember if we get too old to make new leaps. Those who call you foolish today are the ones who will regret not having lived tomorrow. It’s never too late to switch sides.
I was reading a book recently and came across a passage in which a man was returning to the place where he grew up as a child. The author summed up the character’s feelings perfectly —
“he felt like a ghost haunting his own past”
It instantly struck a chord with me because it’s exactly how I feel when I look back at code I wrote last year, 6 months ago or even last week. We’re always learning, always improving and being our own worst critiques. In my opinion that’s the way it should be.
I fear the loss of the web. I fear that in the stampede toward mobile platforms and the incredible interactivity therein, the next generation of information, personal expression, and publishing is being locked away, kept by individuals, and that much of it will never escape.
I fear that in the desperate rush to ‘save’ the web platform from mobile natives, through rapid advances in JavaScript and client-side capability, we’ll lose the openly interlinked fundamentals of the web, that information will disappear, obscured behind custom browser code nested in a diverse array of content delivery networks, gone the moment some intermediary stops paying the bills.
I fear the people who regard this new fragility as a feature that protects their investment in network infrastructure.
I fear that those who fight for the deregulation of the industries they disrupt will later fight to deregulate the internet itself of network neutrality just as soon as they are powerful enough to entrench their commercial advantage.
I fear that for all the work we still have to do to improve the diversity of participants in our industry, we’re just a few short selfish steps from throwing it all to the same media juggernauts that ruined television and radio.
I fear that it is inevitable someone will be successful in dismantling the BBC.
I fear that while I do a job building someone else’s vision, I might be missing the opportunity to build my thing.
I fear not knowing what my thing is.
I fear that I might never know.
I fear that when I do figure it out, it will fail.
I fear the consequences of being too comfortable, whilst day-to-day I am immensely comfortable.
I fear because none of my professional skills interface with the natural world. Everything that I can build is atop a dozen lower level human inventions. Programming languages atop APIs and frameworks ad infinitum, atop processor instructions, atop electrons, atop the refined generation of electricity.
I fear that I’d be useless in a natural disaster, because no-one is going to need a website.
I fear that I’m over-thinking this stuff.
I fear that I’m not thinking about it enough.
I fear that I’m not alone in my fears, and that others might have already given up, and moved to take advantage of their fears being realized.
When I see someone advocating their way as the one right way, here’s the framework I use for critique.
The first lens:
Does your one right way emphasises a skill that you are particularly strong in? Do I need to be clever and experienced in the same way that you are in order for your methodology to work for me?
It’s very easy to advocate that everyone do things the way that you do, after all, it works for you, right?
Graphic designers are appalled by projects that aren’t led by people with the appropriate level of ‘taste’, developers are appalled by designers who don’t write CSS. Yet, all different approaches seem to work for different people.
I’m glad you’ve got a method that works for you but if your particular talent and experience are a prerequisite for making it work, I’m going to be cautious about recommending your approach to the rest of the world.
The second lens:
Does your one right way allow everyone in your team* to contribute to their full ability and feel as though they are a worthy and valued member of the team?
If you are the only person in the team who gets to do the really fun, interesting work and everyone else is busy documenting, or colouring in, or coding up your amazing work, you’re advocating waste of the worst kind — waste of talent and passion.
If your methodology isn’t multidisciplinary early on — early enough for people other than you to be really involved in making really interesting and important decisions, you’re not getting the best from your team. (Also, no, a meeting to show them your wireframes and ask for feedback doesn’t count).
The way we choose to work has a huge impact on the kind of work we turn out. Take some time to think about the alternatives, to be brave and (if you need to) fight for a better way.
* Sadly, not everyone has a team to work with. Working with a great team is the best way to get better at what you do, and lots of other things you didn’t do before. Don’t let yourself be team-less for too long.
I have an information retention problem. I absorb a lot of it, all of which is presumably stored somewhere, but not nearly as much of it remains available for unassisted recall as I would like. Not surprisingly, the stuff that is best remembered has been reinforced, usually through some kind of repeated application or extensive immersion. In other words, if something is retained in my long-term memory, I probably had to work for it. Fair enough. Accordingly, my long-term memory is full of stuff that has been experienced with regularity, has spoken directly to my natural curiosity, and/or has given me a meaningful challenge that I’ve managed to meet.
Many of those meaningful challenges have come from various forms of art, and a recent visit to a Quay Brothers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art offered a good reminder of why that is. One of my favorite films from the Quays is a short documentary called Anamorphosis (or De Artificiali Perspective). It explores the artistic application of anamorphosis, a technique for producing distorted imagery that can only be comprehended by viewing it from a particular angle. While this technique could easily be dismissed as a gimmick, the Quay Brothers make a point of discussing its value:
Anamorphosis is a most powerful device for controlling understanding. It may be used whimsically to amuse, or else it can provoke and instruct. An image grasped too quickly might not leave a lasting impression. To lead the eye slowly through incomprehension and then to offer a resolution – that is insight.
My interest in design grew out of my interest in art, and I’ve spent my share of time pondering the distinctions between the two. Most would agree that an artistic technique like anamorphosis, which intends to (at least initially) obfuscate information, has no place in any form of communication design, which intends to make information as clear and easily accessible as possible. And that seems like a reasonable boundary: the amount of work required of the audience for comprehension is determined by the content creator, and the designer’s job is to find the best way to present that content appropriately for the audience. Indeed, the mantra designers project on the audience is, “Don’t make me think.”
But should design always be an invisible liaison between content creator and audience? Can its focus on ease of use do a disservice to an audience who would benefit from a challenge? If we retain information better when we work for it, are there occasions when design should obstruct rather than elucidate?
I’ve got a pretty simple ritual when I sign up for a new service, or install a new application:
If it’s a web service:
Check to see if it sends me any email.
If it does, disable it.
If it’s a new application:
Check to see if it publishes any activity alerts.
If it does, disable them.
Others have written about this more eloquently than I, but I wish more companies defaulted to a level of respect for a user’s inbox—and, by extension, their time. If it’s something I find genuinely valuable, I’ll find a way to turn on that notification. Trust me.
But until we reach some sort of understanding, I’d love to keep a few glaring red badges off my phone’s desktop, and a few more emails out of my inbox.
A PSD/PNG should be nothing more than an idea of a website. It should give clues and a direction to the build, but ultimately should not be treated as a final design. Following PSDs to the pixel will lead to ill-considered code, and code is your final product, not an image. For example, if your PSD uses three shades of very similar blue, the build should pick and honour just one. There is no point repeating similar declarations in your CSS when a happy middle-ground is more efficient, easier and quicker. A PSD is a clue, not a contract.
Like many who have come into this thing known as “UX,” I’ve never had any formal training. Except for a few art and design classes at my University (back when graphic design meant cutting ruby sheets by hand!), I’ve never been trained in web design, information architecture, usability, psychology, data visualization, product strategy… Everything I know I’ve picked up on projects, through a lot of reading and experimentation, and by working with lots of varied and talented people. At times, I’ve struggled with this lack of training, asking myself “Am I a fraud?” or “Am I going about things in the right way?” And I’ve certainly been jealous of those younger than me who’ve been able to take brilliant and inspiring courses from MIT, Stanford, or Carnegie Mellon. But… I’ve come to realize that it is precisely this lack of formal training, combined with a natural curiosity, that has led me to invent my own ways of doing things and form my own opinions about things. A reliance on a perceived “authority” can actually create blind spots in our thinking. We don’t see opportunities, or worse— we dismiss them before they have a chance to introduce themselves.
Creative ideas happen through unexpected combinations: someone formally trained in film becomes a certified chef so he can create a new kind of cooking show. Someone else decides to chart his health patterns not with charts and graphs, but with a data visualization he designs based on patterns in nature. We tend to think in particular ways and in a particular direction — often the one taught to us. But, history shows us that both incremental and giant leaps forward happen at the intersection of different — seemingly unrelated — ideas.
I’m finally coming to realize the upside to not having been formally trained in anything I do; I might even say I’m proud of the fact that I’ve had no formal training or certifications. It’s the discovery mindset that allows us to combine and create new things, things that in many cases go on to become “how things are done.” But hear me on this: How things are done is we listen, observe, draw on our experiences (and those around us) to identify and solve real problems. How things are done is not about the resulting processes and tools that we see coming out of the very real process of inquiry. How things are done starts with curiosity.
By coming at things sideways, without the safe rails of training, I’ve been forced to explore uncharted spaces, creating along the way my own map of the landscape. I’ve never known to not combine things in a certain way or that a particular tool is the “right” one for the job. I get to make stuff up as I go along! And since I’m always learning, I guess I’m always making stuff up. In truth, we all are, or all should be.
At this point, rather than envy, I pity those who are trained in the “right way” to do things. It’s difficult to see things from different perspectives when you’ve decided–consciously or unconsciously–to follow a particular path through and around a problem space. For a field as nascent as ours, there is no right way to do things. We’re all stumbling into the future.
These are exciting times at the moment as far as developing for the web goes, but do you get the feeling that sometimes things move at too fast a pace to catch up and you are getting left behind? I certainly do.
There’s a lot to keep an eye on with CSS3, HTML5, jQuery, media queries and mobile devices all surging forward almost every day. It’s easy to take your eye off the ball and lose sight of what’s going on in the world of web design. I often get buried in a project and the next time I look up something else new has come along. We can’t all be experts in every discipline but we do need to keep track of what’s going on and then reflect best practices in our coding/design. There’s no point in trying to learn or remember everything but you should at least know where to look. As Einstein was reported to have said “I never remember anything that I can easily look up” — or words to that effect.
It wasn’t that long ago that properties like border-radius were seldom used but now most everyone uses them and even clients aren’t worried that older browsers such as IE8 get square corners. It seems that even some clients can be educated. Who would have thought?
So don’t be frightened of change.
It’s a fact of life that things change, so don’t forget to look up from time to time and keep abreast of what else is going on around you and how you could improve what you are doing. It’ll soon be time for a new year’s resolution so why not set aside some time each week to brush up on your skills, maybe learn some new CSS3 properties, experiment with a few new features, or just see what’s hot and what’s not. Just stay informed — it’ll pay dividends in the end I’m sure.
After the launch of www.gov.uk, the coverage we were most excited about was that in the printed press, particularly those found in glossy design magazines. This is not to say that we didn’t have any other kind of press online, just that this was a particular type that seemed to garner the most respect, despite our remit being “digital by default”.
Be it an article in a magazine or a complete, published, book, many of us are still swayed to believe that the printed medium is somehow better, more tangible and respectable. That an author has more of value to say if it’s printed on paper rather than accessible purely digitally. Why is this? Is it not part of our remit as digital citizens to encourage less wasteful and informationally accurate consumerism?
Printing digitally comes with so many benefits: you can update information with corrections, annotations, further information. Digital can be interactive, more easily shared and produced in a wider number of languages more easily. It can take unusual forms, and it can be more accessible. Yet still, many of us are excited or prefer a physical book, fixed in time and would consider the printed version superior.
Is it the additional effort associated with physical print that gives it its significance? Something that cost more money to produce, could last longer, can be touched and shared, and is not necessarily “of web”. How or will we recreate these properties of value in digital medium, or will the special place that paper holds for many of us eventually disappear naturally?
Drew and I were chatting over breakfast one Thursday about a significant feature addition for our product, Perch. We decided that the idea was good, fulfilled some customer requests and that we should build it. By the end of the day on Friday we shipped the feature. Less than 48 hours after our conversation.
Such is the joy of a small team, a team in touch with those who use and love our product. We frequently have a discussion with a customer in the forum, like their idea for a feature and immediately implement it. There is great satisfaction in posting back to let a customer know that the feature they needed has been shipped.
Being in touch with our customers helps us to quickly react to their requirements. Understanding and caring about changes in trends and best practice in our industry helps us to create features that support the latest ways of working. As a bootstrapped product we have no investors to keep happy. The Perch roadmap is decided in the discussions between me, Drew and our customers. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
I was a late-comer to Macs. Until 2008 most of my design and development was done on a Windows machine. For the first time in a long while I recently did some web fonts testing on an entry-level Windows 7 laptop. Ignoring the culture shock of the OS, and seeing the Web through the filter of Windows on a lesser-quality display, I re-learnt something: To design and develop on Windows machines is to work in the most adverse environment first, and that is a good thing.
It was emphatically demonstrated when I visited some sites I like. They worked for the most part on Windows, but they inevitably didn’t feel the same. In some extreme cases, the design was significantly degraded in terms of type and contrast. Some work that I thought looked beautiful on my Mac lost its beauty on Windows. It made me wonder if there isn’t too much disdain for Windows in many designers’ mindsets, causing them to dismiss how their work looks on Windows. I know I’ve been tempted by that fallacy in the past.
A decade ago with Windows as my primary operating system it was very different. I started to get pretty good at defensive development. I automatically wrote CSS that worked in alternative browsers, but would not create IE layout issues, leaving very few problems to fix. I set type for the adverse Windows environment first, making sure it was acceptable to me there. My attempts to understand the nuances of screen fonts prompted me to learn what was going on with rendering engines, and try to explain it to fellow designers. It was similar to testing type at the smallest size first, because, like writing CSS for IE, if it renders well there, it will almost certainly render well at larger sizes — in more advanced environments. Inevitably, when I tested sites on Macs they worked. The type worked. The layouts worked.
My recent experience with Windows made me wonder if I shouldn’t switch back. I’d be working in the most adverse environment first. Designing around the problems first. I can’t though. I can’t live with the operating system anymore. I don’t like seeing the Web that way. I don’t like how type renders. And yet, that’s how most of the world sees my work. It’s a conundrum.
I won’t be switching back. I spend my days using my machine, and although I know I’d adapt, I just don’t want to spend it looking at Windows. I will be looking at Windows a lot more, though. On a Windows machine, and not just through VMs. It’s a purely self-indulgent choice, but perhaps by acknowledging how using Macs has skewed my perspective, I can make sure I serve Windows just as well as I once did when I used it every day.
If you work for yourself, either as a freelancer or as part of a small business, it’s easy to forget that you “run” a business. It’s easy to spend all your time “in” the business, i.e. doing the work, and not enough time “on” the business, i.e. maintaining client relationships, lining up work or doing the accounts.
It’s not easy but to save your sanity at your end of year try spending a bit of time each week “on” your business. Take it from someone who learnt the hard way! Above all your accountant will love you for it.
Are you taking time to design your family? This is the question I’ve been asking myself.
I wake up some nights with an interface problem spinning in my brain – unable to figure out where to put the series of actions for an unsolvable UX. It’s terrible, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it dawned on me that I’m not waking up thinking about how to solve education for my sons. I’m never white-boarding solutions to help my daughter feel dearly loved in the face of a culture that will objectify her.
One of the most impactful things I can do in my life may be the least worthy of publicity or even retweeting.
Last week Keir and I spoke at HD Live in Hull, England. After the event, the film crew asked us, ‘what do you hope the audience takes away from your talk?’ We’d spoken about the logistics of turning a side project into a legitimate business — a subject very close to my heart — and I replied by saying that I hoped at least one person in the theatre felt motivated enough to go out and try it; to take an idea that they’d previously thought of as a pipe dream and make moves to give it more prominence in their lives — to do more of it, to have more fun, and to make money from doing it.
We all have ideas. Many of us — in our industry, at least — have side projects. But so few of us actually take those ideas beyond the conceptual realm and try them out in the real world. Perhaps it’s a fear of failure or a lack of security, but I truly believe that the risks are far smaller than commonly perceived. It’s not all-or-nothing. You can build up your side projects slowly, you can approach the right people for a bit of financial backing, and selling products — rather than building countless revenue-less start-ups — is one of the oldest, most successful — still successful! — tricks in the book.
I hope that one person reading this decides to take the same plunge.
Time is a limited resource. As web developers, we’re busy people, and I know I often wish I had more hours in a day to get things done. However, no matter how busy you are, how many tasks you have, you also need to save time to replenish your energy. Sure, you could stay in front of the computer another hour or two or four, but you may find you’ll accomplish more by stepping away, and returning refreshed the next day.
Now, if only I’d remember this more often and practice it…
With all the attention on mobile devices lately, have we forgotten our desktop experience?
Did that get your attention? While I’m not about to tell you to throw all your tablets and phones in a river, I do think it’s interesting to think about the range of effects that the last year of additions to CSS has had on our workflow. Responsive design has really rejuvenated the front-end landscape. This, of course, is awesome.
Surely though when we transition static designs to fluid, add breakpoints to target column stacking, and drop in JavaScript-powered navigation fixes for smaller screens, we’re also certainly adding to our scope. When adding multiple design states to our sites and including more devices that demand quality assurance testing, do we have to change some of our traditional approach? Here are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself lately:
Do we keep the same level of standards and allow our timelines to expand? Will this mean our projects will last 3 years?
Do we cut hours in other areas, like testing in Internet Explorer 6 or making our sites work without JavaScript?
Does anyone even test for text size increasing/decreasing anymore or are we all now used to text zoom?
How about accessibility and source ordering with screen readers? How will that effect our mobile to desktop content reflow?
Are we using frameworks and skinning our designs in a browser? Are we stretching our imaginations in Photoshop? Is there a mix of both?
Are we choosing web fonts that will still look good on PCs without font smoothing?
Are blurry images ruining our designs? Are retina images worth the download time?
Are we focused on smaller screens? Are we focused on huge resolutions? Did we remember the middle guys?
There’s no shortage of things to discuss with your team. Lots of times I find it’s not a one size fits all answer. Looking at questions like these on a project-by-project basis, examining analytics, factoring which CMS will power a site; these are all things that influence decisions on what serves the time spent on a project best.
By this time next year, I’m sure there will be a completely different set of questions we’re asking. It’s been fun to embrace this unpredictability.
The imaginatively titled Mr. Benn followed the adventures of, err, Mr. Benn, a bowler hat wearing businessman (whose occupation still remains a mystery) who over just thirteen short episodes from 1971 had amazing adventures.
From Wikipedia:
Mr Benn, a man wearing a black suit and bowler hat, leaves his house at 52 Festive Road and visits a fancy-dress costume shop where he is invited by the moustachioed, fez-wearing shopkeeper to try on a particular outfit. He leaves the shop through a magic door at the back of the changing room and enters a world appropriate to his costume, where he has an adventure (which usually contains a moral) before the shopkeeper reappears to lead him back to the changing room, and the story comes to an end.
Don’t bother trying Google Maps, Festive Road ain’t in London.
With a fond smile I can remember watching Mr. Benn. The work of his writer and illustrator David McKee was sublime in its charm and naivity and the minimal animation rarely consisted of more than a panning camera across McKee’s wonderful drawings. His adventures all centered around helping the people he met after walking through the other door.
But even today there are some unanswered questions: Where did Mr. Benn keep all the stuff he nicked souvenirs from his adventures? Why didn’t he tell the shopkeeper to @%&@*% off! every time he interrupted an adventure? I suppose we’ll never know, but Mr. Benn remains one of my classic cartoon memories.
But, my principal concern with apps was actually best expressed last year by Scott Jensen, legendary HCI expert at Apple, Symbian, Google and now Frog Design, in his provocatively titled “Native Apps Must Die”.
Native apps are a remnant of the Jurassic period of computer history, a local maximum that is holding us back. The combination of a discovery service and just-in-time interaction is a powerful interaction model that native apps can’t begin to offer.
Apps are a model of functionality that has shaped both what developers and designers do, and how users conceive of what’s possible more or less for the entire history of computing. But I think they are a dead end.
One interesting detour from the app-centric model of computing was the Lisa operating system, the not quite fore-runner to the Macintosh from Apple. Lisa differed markedly from the Macintosh, and other graphical operating systems, in that it was document centric. You didn’t open applications to edit documents, you opened documents to work on them. Users focussed on the task at hand, not the tool.
Changing this conception of what a user experience might be is very difficult, so ingrained is the app-centric model with users, and among ourselves as designers and developers. But what might a more user-centric model look like?
Let’s take a very popular consumer application/service right now. Photo hosting. Well, it’s been popular for quite some time, with services like Flickr now several years old, and then Instagram and numerous similar services emerging particularly with the rise of smart phones.
But all of these services are monolithic—indeed are becoming more so. Most if not all of what a user can do with them takes place inside one application (this is particularly true of services like Instagram). You shoot, apply effects, crop, tag, annotate and upload all within the application. In the case of Instagram you also sign up, search, follow people, in short, access the entire Instagram experience from inside the Instagram app.
While we think of apps and services like these as photo-sharing services, they aren’t really. Instagram is an Instagram app. Facebook is a Facebook app. Twitter increasingly is a Twitter app (as soon as they can get rid of all those other pesky client apps). The application, the service, is an end in itself.
So, what might a user focussed, post-app photo sharing service (experience? thing?) (let’s call it phUto) look like.
At its core, it would be a place to upload photos which people could view. Some users might want to apply filters and effects to their photos. Now, if I were building phUto, I might build that functionality into it. Or, I might make it possible for other developers to provide the user this functionality, ideally in a way that felt seamlessly part of phUto.
Users might want to search the photos stored at phUto. I could build a search engine, and results experience. Or, I could make it easy for developers to provide this functionality, and a way for my users to easily discover these search services, and use them in a way that feels like it’s a seamless experience.
You get the idea.
There have been complex attempts to enable this in the past. OpenDoc, an enormous undertaking by Apple in the mid 1990s was among the most sophisticated of such attempts. Microsoft’s ActiveX similarly was designed to enable unrelated pieces of functionality work together. But recently, more lightweight approaches among them Android Intents and Web Intents.
But as much as the technology for enabling this is important, the underlying concept is crucial.
The app model essentially creates silos of functionality, carefully created for the user. It gives rise to feature creep, and rewards large teams with lots of engineering resources over smaller teams and individuals who focus on one thing they can do really well.
Perhaps in a decade, or a century, we’ll still be working with monolithic apps. But I suspect (and certainly hope) not.
Summer is long over and fall arrives with a flurry of new activity: you recommit to old projects as new projects surface. There’s yard work, taking the boys to hockey, organizing family events, cooking, cleaning, and readying for winter. I find the days of my life seem to fly by like fence pickets as you drive down the highway. Once a month, I sit down and take stock. Are my life goals still the same? How much closer am I to achieving them? Do I need to push myself more? What do I need to adjust? How’s the balance? I find that this short, but necessary reflection is the difference between mere existence and an examined life.
A few years ago I read an article about those people you see in the street, walking about, shopping, having a coffee, in the middle of a weekday, when everyone else is at work. It caught my eye because I always wondered what those people were up to: are they millionaires that don’t have to work, are they just on holiday, what’s up with them?
I’m not going to tell you what they were up to, but it’s not mind blowing (as one might expect). Sadly I lost the link to the article. It’s somewhere on the Internet, but I can’t seem to find it anymore. So, if anyone knows what I’m talking about, I’d be delighted to find that article again.
“User” is a funny word. When we hear it, we remember watching Tron for the first time and thinking how unnatural it felt to have humans described as “users”. At least, I do. You might imagine an “average” person. Blue jeans and a t-shirt. But a person nonetheless.
The problem with describing our customers as “users” is that it generalises too much. We can’t afford to generalise in this business. Generalising is the opposite of “user”-friendly. The opposite of responsive design. The opposite of design. People have different needs. Every single person on Earth will take away a different experience from your website. Successful design is a different experience, but similar knowledge takeaway. And you don’t achieve that through generalising, but through a larger scope of delivery.
We can’t afford to think about just one device, or one browser, or even one target audience. As soon as you do, you present the possibility of failure to your website.
Never do something more than twice that you can automate. Our jobs necessarily involve a lot of repetitive actions and tedium, but don’t put up with any that you don’t have to. One of my favorites is a little Python script I wrote called “makeproj”. It sets up a new folder structure for a project, creates skeleton CSS and JavaScript files, makes a new project on Github and pushes the project there. Every time I run it I save myself at least 15-30 minutes.
Not everyone who works with technology loves technology. No, really, it’s true! Most of the people out there building stuff with web tech don’t attend conferences, don’t talk about WebGL in the pub, don’t write a blog with CSS3 “experiments” in it, don’t like what they do. It’s a job: come in at 9, go home at 5, don’t think about HTML outside those hours. Apparently 90% of the stuff in the universe is “dark matter”: undetectable, doesn’t interact with other matter, can’t be seen even with a really big telescope. Our “dark matter developers”, who aren’t part of the community, who barely even know that the community exists… how are we to help them? You can write all the A List Apart articles you like but dark matter developers don’t read it. And so everyone’s intranet is horrid and Internet-Explorer-specific and so the IE team have to maintain backwards compatibility with that and that hurts the web. What can we do to reach this huge group of people? Everyone’s written a book about web technologies, and books help, but books are dying. We want to get the word out about all the amazing things that are now possible to everyone: do we know how? Do we even have to care? The theory is that this stuff will “trickle down”, but that doesn’t work for economics: I’m not sure it works for@-moz-keyframes either.
These days, we almost all unequivocally embrace graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. It’s the extent that people disagree on, since everyone has a different definition of what is “graceful” and what is “enhancement”. Is a solid color an acceptable fallback for a pattern? What if your lightbox has no overlay? What if your stripes become a solid color? What if your transitions are not there? What if your code has no syntax highlighting? That’s the true challenge: How different can they look? Is it sufficient if the content is accessible in IE8 or does it also have to be pretty? How pretty? Those are the questions you need to agree on with your team to ensure you’re all on the same page. An agreement on the basic premise that websites don’t have to look the same in every browser is far from enough. Graceful degradation is not black & white, it’s a spectrum. You need to find where you lie on that spectrum and where your colleagues lie on it too, otherwise expect a lot of tension every time decisions need to be made.
We had some family over to visit for the weekend recently. Over aglass or two of wine we were discussing kids, the news, health, work, the usual stuff. The couple both happen to be police officers. My wife’s cousin told us about a particular incident she’d attended in which a teenage boy had hanged himself. It was her and her fellow officers duty to inform the boy’s parents of this terrible, tragic news.
They arrived at the house to let the parents know what had happened and offer support. When the door opened the parents were clearly distraught and in floods of tears. They already knew what had happened to their darling boy.
Later it transpired that the parents had found out the news not only of their son’s death but also the circumstances via their neighbour, who had in-turn found out on Facebook.
Sometimes I think the Internet is the most wonderful of things. Other times I think it’s the most terrible of things.
When you’re designing your latest greatest website please don’t account for every pixel in the page as though your life depended on it. Too often I see elements that stretch the full with of a page and have no breathing space should the content be one character wider than the author imagined.
Browsers render text at various widths anyway and ultimately you have no control over what size the user may have set so bear this in mind when creating menus and similar elements that you want to exactly fill the horizontal space.
Use techniques that allow breathing space or indeed will allow text to wrap nicely should the text be resized by the user (or should a certain browser decide that words will be wider than other browsers might make them). The easiest solution is simply to allow extra room by default and not fill every pixel on the page. A more robust solution is to build the element so that it can grow and wrap if necessary without breaking the structure. Too often I see the last menu item on a menu missing because the browser couldn’t fit it all on the same line and the last item has wrapped and been hidden because the overflow was hidden.
Some techniques you may want to try are using display:table and table-cell properties (IE8+) instead of floats and allowing the menus to automatically spread without the need for horizontal padding. If you want to use floats then often you can “not float” the last menu item and let it just fill the remaining available space automatically.
Always plan ahead and expect that what you are seeing on your desktop may not be the same as what someone else may see.
I was drawn to the web inspired by the potential that open information sharing offered the world. That was the enticing lure. No matter what I work on in my lifetime, I hope to leave positive contributions toward furthering that potential. Sometimes it might be work dedicated entirely to the cause, other times it may be byproducts of another system. Regardless, by and large I’m happy knowing when the work I do is good work.
The achievements of our connected technology are almost always expressed and preached in terms of global effect. Bringing everyone closer together. The websites we build, the applications and services, are accessible to all, and success (when not measured in terms of raw financial return) is measured in reach and broad social impact. Even niche successes will attract users the world over.
In traditional industry, the growth of new business will have a dramatic physical impact on the local economy and culture. The growth in goods manufacture will profoundly affect local employment, local wealth, all manner of supporting industries and suppliers, and influence the focus of local education. It may bring immigration and diversity, it may also affect the local environment negatively with the introduction of pollutants and waste. Either way, it is an active, physical effect. Furthermore, a physical product itself will initially target local consumption.
With development for the web, there are similarities, but the immediate, global nature of the internet causes me to struggle with a disconnect from my local contribution. What do we provide to our community itself? How do we offer our work to the benefit of the people most closely surrounding us? Is it even possible to do so when also appealing to the entire world?
I think that it is a natural desire to contribute positively to our local community, and to do so through our work. We want to build things that make a difference to people whose faces we see; those whom we interact with in the course of our daily life. The web can seem like a difficult medium through which to do that, everything is so broad and so big intrinsically.
Although local people may make up just a small drop of everyone who can see your work, they are there. It’s just that sometimes you need to adjust your mindset a bit to recognise where you fit in. It’s a lot smaller on the ground, but it’s your direct contribution to society, and it’s important to be engaged with it.
This month, our team did the first non-beta release of our new site,www.gov.uk.
We’ve been very careful to refer to it as a release, rather than alaunch. Launching insinuates a thing is done—that we’ve set our boat off to sail and don’t intend to think about it again. A launch succeeds or fails, with not a lot in between. However, it’s not until after a launch that our real users get to be onboard and find all the snags and pitfalls. Those are the people we’ve been spending so much time thinking about—it’s short-sighted of us to imagine that we’d be able to guess how they’ll inevitably be using the site in anger.
User testing can only get so far and now we’re excited to learn how the rest of the world reacts to our release so we can improve in the next one.
You only live once. Remember that. Don’t let your days, hours, and minutes slip through like grains of sand through the hourglass. Build the site, make that pet project that’s been bouncing around in your head. Write the article. Write the book. Learn that skill. Share it with others. Be intentional. Set goals. Push yourself. If the thought of making or doing something fills you with fear, you must do it. Trepidation signals an opportunity for growth and learning. And, if you don’t shoot, you don’t score, right?
Ever work on an open source project? If so, and for long enough, you’ve likely encountered users who feel entitled and become abusive when the code does not work the way they expect, or contributors who belittle the contributions of others.
If these same people worked face to face, would they act the same way? And if they did, would we tolerate it?
We would not. Disagreements can happen and still be conducted in a civil fashion. We should not tolerate abusive behavior online.
You’re making, not documenting. You can feel the thing you’re making.
You’ve got a thing you can start testing, in all kinds of ways, almost immediately. Prototyping is more like experimenting than describing your grand design.
It doesn’t have to look good to be effective. It’s easier to keep it rough which helps people give better feedback early on.
You start out with the barest structure of an idea and gradually build in the detail as you play with and test out the thing you have made.
You’re learning useful things (like how to better translate your ideas into code).
Stakeholders and clients get excited about prototypes in a way they never do about wireframes.
Prototypes are concrete where wireframes are abstract.
Prototypes create the impression of real progress—of something actually happening—in a way that wire framing never does.
Prototyping is addictive—you have to pull yourself away from it (rather than forcing yourself to stay in your chair and finish annotating your wireframes).
Prototyping encourages cross-disciplinary teams from the earliest stages of design. You get to work with smart people who can make your work better.
If you’re on a project where you feel like you have to wireframe extensively, there’s probably a better way to be doing that project.
I grew up in the middle of the UK in the 70s and 80s reading authors like Tolkien, Asimov, and Dumas. Dumas’s adventure via adversity stories were a band-aid for the almost-daily racial slights of school life at the time. Asimov’s grandeur distracted me from feeling dislocated at the irrelevant fact of me being mixed race. Tolkien’s nobility sustained me as I helped my Mum run a one-parent family.
When I was the age my eldest son is now, my father would cane me for staying up late reading after bedtime. Granted, I pretty much ignored his more polite requests, and used to hide under the covers with a torch, trying to listen out for the creak of his step on the stairs. It was impossible to simultaneously be immersed in the world on the page, and have the sensory keenness of a sentry in an observation post. My Dad always managed to catch me. I would grin in embarrassment, and almost admiration at his silent skill. Later, I would tightly coil up inside with trepidation when I was caught. A caning was my father’s perverse expression of love, demonstrated by his determination that I should get some sleep so I could concentrate in school. I needed to concentrate because I needed to do well in school. I needed to do well in school to have a good life. Education lead to wealth, and that would insulate me from suffering. At least, so he believed. Books were just too good to resist, though. I was addicted. I took the canings yet still read. My father left soon after. Books became an escape as well as an addiction.
When I got older I discovered authors like Kim Stanley Robinson. His optimism for the near future was overwhelming. Visions like Pacific Edge may be utopic, but they are seductive and emblematic. I wanted to live in a world like that of Blue Mars. I read Neal Stephenson and marvelled at the erudition of Cryptonomicon, and the raw power of Snow Crash. I wanted to know the things he and his characters knew.
I started to realise that I was an optimist, too. I had to be, because my disquiet at the world around me gave me scant choice. I had to believe in our innate humanity and potential for empathy, compassion, and goodness. I started to believe that if you remove the suffering and stress from people’s lives, the vast majority of people would do right by their fellow humans. I believed in Kim Stanley Robinson’s vision for a future where a revolution by law and evolution in technology would remove suffering. I believed that characters like Hiro Protagonist, even if they were outside conventional power structures, could help bring that about. I think I know and work with some of his real-world avatars today.
The faith and optimism of my core beliefs are one of the reasons why I do what I do. I never did stop reading. I left university early, and didn’t stop reading. I wandered around the world, and never stopped reading. I ended up here, now, and still keep reading, but now I read more widely and variously than ever before, because of the Web. I believe what my friend Chris Shiflett believes, that ‘The Internet is the opportunity of our generation.’ I believe that our work building the Web can contribute. I believe human beings are fundamentally good. I’m not sure how that will manifest itself, but I believe that if we remove the stress we may find out. I believe we can do it, and I always will.
This last week I attended Brooklyn Beta, one of two conferences that are must-attend for me. During a late night whisky-thon with Cameron we were talking to several of the web’s most talented and discussing the idea that we should be designing to the best of people instead of the worst. We talked about feeds. The endless stream of new content. Feeds are an over-saturated flow of thoughts, ideas, pictures, quotes, drivel, and opinion—all published to the web.
This can produce franticness, a need to keep up. I heard one of my favorite designers recently suggest, “it’s like Twitter has turned me into a personal PR machine”. We are influenced to constantly keep up with our personal public representation. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, News Feeds, Tumblr, Instagram, and others like them all pulse with activity, building confidence with stakeholders and investors. This is sold to us as a place to connect with people, they are “social” networks. Undoubtably much good has come through these mediums, but at its core are these mediums for community truly good for us?
How do we design for communication that has natural and human boundaries? Boundaries like sleep, life-span and death, hunger and thirst, triumph and failure, knowledge and wisdom, immaturity and playfulness. This summer I re-learned to exercise and diet. I had to take care of my 34-year-old body so that it might last another 40. It’s not good for me to gorge on pizza and beer, though I crave it fortnightly. It’s good for me to enjoy pizza and beer but I must weigh that it has an economic and physiological cost that I have to be prepared to pay.
The cost of digital content is much more subtle. I’m able to rack up immeasurable, fractional, digital debt in the form of tweets, responses, comments, photos, inspiration, reaction, access, passwords, usernames, opinions, ideas, and the list goes on until I find that I have changed. I am becoming what I must be to balance and interact with the content around me or I risk being lost below the waves. I’m enslaved to a system.
But as a designer, this isn’t just a personal question of whether or not I should go on a digital diet. The question is whether I’m serving good to those who use and receive my design. If you’re building products, or making things for the web, I think it’s your question too.
There is a popular myth in geek circles which claims that the QWERTY layout standard for Latin keyboards was actually designed to slow down typing, since early typewriters were prone to jam. While this is a misunderstanding (jams were caused by the mechanical proximity of common letter pairs, not the speed of typing), it has occasionally made me wonder: could technological shortcomings that ostensibly get in the way of the user experience actually, ultimately, be good for the user?
Over the years, I’ve used several different content management systems for sites I designed for clients or for myself. But lately, I don’t seem to have the curiosity or patience to learn new CMSs or even to integrate my designs with ones I’ve used in the past. So when I was redesigning my personal site last year in the hopes of getting back to writing regularly, I decided I would launch without a CMS and make updates to the site the old-fashioned way by hand-editing text files. For me, the long-term inconvenience of this relatively archaic method was preferable to the short-term inconvenience of dealing with CMS integration.
As a result, when I post a new piece of writing on the site, I usually need to update about five to seven text files with varying degrees of hassle and redundancy. This probably sounds like a nightmare to anyone who has ever had to manage a web site in any capacity; this kind of inefficiency is antithetical to the goals of modern computing. But the year I’ve spent publishing with this system has been my most prolific one yet, even more than those halcyon days when the site was running on a robust CMS and the blogging zeitgeist was in full force.
There are two specific, external factors that have had a substantial impact on my site’s recent fecundity:
The Pastry Box Project, a blog that collects the wisdom of thirty-one influential web professionals, which asks that I submit something once a month, and which you’re visiting right now.
Letterboxd, a social site for film buffs whose thoughtful design has encouraged me to write frequent short-form film reviews.
In the last year, 83% of the posts (and 73% of the word count) on my site were republished content I created for The Pastry Box Project, Letterboxd, and a few other external sites, so I clearly have publishing systems other than my own to thank for the lion’s share of the writing I’ve done. Still, I’ve grown to enjoy using my site’s laborious non-CMS, and I think it’s encouraged my writing in its own way.
For one thing, there’s a hand-crafted element to working in static text files that’s very satisfying. Marking up the semantics of my writing in its native HTML environment feels like a more personal endeavor than typing into a WYSIWYG interface meant to shield me from the complexity hiding beneath it. For another thing, the sizable inconvenience of editing several files for every site update makes each post feel more consequential, which has paradoxically made my approach to writing both more and less precious: I take extra time to make sure everything is just right before publishing and I rarely get bogged down in minutia-driven revisions after. So once something is done, it’s done, and I can move on to the next thing.
Creating a system that increases the work necessary to complete a task is understandably rare. But in this case, I’ve found the extra work to be more rewarding than the sensibly efficient alternative. Whether or not my non-CMS is comparable to the differences between manual and automatic transmissions or artisanal and manufactured products, there can be benefits to adding complexity to our relationships with the things we create and consume. So I’ll be on the lookout for other areas where inefficiency is my friend.
Last month, I was checking out the #eecms Twitter feed for updates about ExpressionEngine, and I saw an update from Amy Witty who was trying EE for the first time:
Just bought my #EECMS Freelance Version! Let the fun begin...
Learning EE is challenging. Learning anything new is challenging. It’s a frustrating process and it can be hard to ask for help, especially as a newbie. Which was why it was so gratifying to see the EE community show it’s true colors in response to Amy’s #eecms updates.
After her first “frustrated” tweet, several folks chimed in to offer support:
@amywitty having a hard time with your first go at it? Any way the community can help? What’s the trouble?
And it just continued from there. It’s still continuing as I write this. From issues with her initial install to her ongoing development, the #eecms community has offered Amy support, resources and advice. And Amy has her first EE site up and running:
If you follow me on social networks, you know that ExpressionEngine is a major focus for me these days. The reasons: 1) I’m co-host of EE Podcast, so I have to be focused on EE and 2) it’s my CMS of choice now that I’m working for myself.
But this isn’t why I highlight this story. I share this story because it reminds me of the best of the web industry.
I learned how to be the web professional I am from my colleagues; my community. Sure, I got the “piece of paper” certifying for the uninformed human resources recruiter that I’m “qualified” for my job. But what I do every single day is a result of people sharing information, and me taking the time to test that information.
This cycle of sharing and learning is one of my favorite things about being a web professional. When I started on the web, I learned by reading blog posts and tutorials. 13 years later, I’m growing by reading blog posts and tutorials and Twitter and Facebook. We’re still sharing, and we’re still learning.
I love the story of EE and Amy. It shows how a community can help an individual learn and grow. And it shows how individuals of that community can be reminded of the importance of being an active part of an community.
Years ago, I discovered a nifty little social hack: Get people talking about themselves and they’ll like you more. Weird, I know. But as human beings, we tend to like others who are interested in what we have to say.
Of course, I escalated this into a game where, when confronted with someone I’ve just met or with whom I suppose I’ll have nothing in common, I see how long I can keep this conversation going without once ever talking about myself. The beauty of this is all the interesting stuff I’ve learned, stuff that I didn’t know before. Like when I learned (from a Bioengineering PhD) how living in the weightless conditions of space leads to bone loss, a big problem for astronauts who spend extended periods of time in space. Fascinating — I had no idea! Or my friend who was assigned to Presidential Guard duties while in the Marines — imagine the stories he has shared (at least those stories he can share!). Oh, the stuff you can learn about people and the world.
But, something else happens along the way. In my case, I’ve begun to see things differently.
In most conversations, around a subject in which we all share an interest, the conversation is much like a game of tennis: ideas and statements get volleyed back and forth. We’re looking for keywords and ideas that we can respond with. And if we’re diligent, we may even try to work their ideas into our own world view. This is assimilation. New ideas get layered into our existing world view.
But this is limited. We can only see things through our own perspective.
We hear all about “building bridges” with people who have different perspectives than our own. But, if all we’re doing is assimilating information, we don’t really grok perspectives other than our own.
So what’s the alternative?
My little social game, where I get people to talk about themselves, has a nifty little side effect. By listening intently, especially concerning subjects for which I have no knowledge or vested interest, I’ve become better at listening. And learning. Then, when it comes to a topic I do have some interest in, I’m learning how to suspend my own judgement. Conversations are no longer about the volley. The only “volley” on my part is a relentless questioning, born of curiosity. And in the process, I am no longer concerned with assimilating information. Rather, my goal is to see things the way that person sees things.
And here’s the magical thing that happens next…
By truly understanding a perspective other than your own, you’ll end up with ideas that don’t fit into your worldview--ideas you can’t simply assimilate. At this point, real change happens; you begin to accommodate these new ideas. Your internal world has to adapt itself to contrary ideas. Or, where there is disagreement, you can articulate the flaw, whether it’s in your understanding or theirs.
We’ve all heard that disagreements are born out of misunderstandings. But, it took learning about assimilation and accommodation for me to really understand — truly understand — how to get around these misunderstandings. Now when someone disagrees with, say… a design decision I’ve made, rather than jump to defend that decision, I jump to inquisitiveness. I want to first see things the way they do, to be able to hold in my head two different perspectives, so the way forward can become obvious. Then, we can reconcile the differences. Most resistance, whether to a new design or a foreign idea, is born out of ambiguity.
In research, we're told to listen. But it’s far too easy to filter what we observe through our own mental model — we do this without being aware that we are doing so. Thinking about accommodation has helped me to suspend not only judgement, but assumptions. I approach each research conversation with a blank slate, anxious to learn what I don’t know.
So, here’s my challenge: This week, as you engage in normal conversation, practice some meta-cognition. Stop and think about your responses. Are you seeking to assimilate or accommodate new information?
If technology doesn’t go the way we want it to (conjure up any techno-dystopia you like) history will blame us. Instead of making technology easy, accessible, and pervasive, why didn’t we sabotage it at every turn? If only we’d destroyed the data stores! Smashed the search engines!
If the future historians are generous, they’ll put our mistakes down to mere naiveté. Or perhaps they’ll deem us traitors who collaborated with the enemy, our work an indictment of what happens when egos trump ethics.
If technology goes the way we want it to, the vast majority of people won’t ever understand what we did. As it should be.
I’ve spent the last 4 weeks in Europe: one in Bologna, Italy for a conference, and the remaining three in Zurich to visit my oldest friend in the world and her two daughters.
These past couple of weeks in Zurich I’ve been holed up in my friend’s comfortable digs making the most of the free wifi. Why? My time has been spent between 3 major tasks: preparing a completely new presentation for my next speaking engagement in Paris next week, working on my current client project, and plotting out what my next professional move will be.
Consulting has fantastic benefits, such as time autonomy, interesting projects, and learning new things. However, for me the advantages are outweighed by the minuses of uneven cash flow, feeling isolated, and doing work that no longer interests me. In short, I am weary of consulting. I am ready to have a job again.
So, this week, I’ve polished up my resume. Throwing caution to the wind, via Twitter, have asked for
I believe my efforts have tipped off the serendipity police, so to speak. I made the decision to really start pouring energy and focus into my “new position manifestation” process on Tuesday evening. That same evening, I got an email from my only other buddy in Zurich inviting me to an InterNations networker the next day. Having spent most of my time working from home, I happily signed up to attend.
I arrived at the venue, and did not even get into the door when I met another attendee who looked/felt as if I had met her before. I racked my brain, suggesting a litany of places where we could have known each other, but nothing matched. She asked me what I do, and I told her “I speak and write on creativity, the creative process, productivity and innovation,” which usually gets a polite response of “oh, that’s interesting…”. In stark contrast, this woman perks up: it turns out that she is taking a 5-day course on innovation management. She immediately suggests that I come by the course the next day to meet the professor, learn about both him and his innovation consulting firm called Brain Connection, and meet the other students in the class.
Seriously?! Yes, seriously. Excitedly, I send her an email and text the next morning to confirm that I can come by. I meet the group for lunch and have a nice conversation with the professor. On the way to the classroom from lunch, I chat with another person from the group, whom I thought was a student. It turns out that he works for a company here in Zurich called DenkMotor who is the other contributor to the event. What does this company do? They teach workshops and lead trainings on creativity, the creative process, design thinking and innovation.
Seriously??! Yes, seriously! Today, in just a few hours, I will be having brunch with the woman I met, the guy who leads the creativity workshops, and a couple other people from the networker. What’s going to happen? You’ve got me—the outcome could just be a nice meal with new friends.
But this situation makes me feel as if there is a sort of barely detectable force, a sort of magic even, shimmering right underneath the surface of our everyday existence, waiting for us to take notice. Clearly, serendipity is a part of that force, and I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m in hopeful expectation of the next “happy accident” and my new awesome job, whatever it may be.
I had a discussion recently with an old friend over dinner about the whole concept of “luck.” Me, I’ve always felt incredibly lucky. I’ve been given many opportunities over my career: getting a good job; working with rather fantastic clients; speaking at conferences; writing an article and, eventually, a book I’m especially excited about. I like to think I’m a hard worker, sure, but I’ve been handed some remarkable opportunities by even more remarkable individuals. I’m really fortunate.
My friend had a slightly different take. She doesn’t believe in luck, or at least, not as such. Instead, she felt it’s a matter of working hard, of earning the work you’re given, and—this is the important bit—of agreeing to projects that leave you open to other, new opportunities.
I don’t know who’s right; hell, it was just an idle dinner conversation. (And an enjoyable one at that.) But my gut says we’re both right, or at least half-right. Maybe it’s not just about stumbling into new opportunities, but working hard enough so that you’re recognized for your efforts. And conversely, it’s not just about preserving your work ethic, but acknowledging, and being thankful to, the people who extend a helping hand your way.
I’m not sure. But I do think it’s worth taking a moment here and there to extend a little luck toward those that haven’t found any yet.
About two years ago I started a little experiment with my personal inbox that has been working surprisingly well.
I have a personal inbox, through which I handle all my freelance work, writing gigs, family and friends, banking communications, etc., and a separate company inbox, which is provided by my employer.
For a few weeks, I decided to try to only reply to email from new contacts in my personal inbox once a week: Sunday evenings, when things are quiet, and people don’t reply back as quickly as mid-week. These emails include prospective design and writing gigs, recruitment agencies, admin stuff like bills, requests for help or interviews, and other non-urgent requests. They do not include current clients, (genuinely) urgent requests and my family.
I use Gmail for my private account. When I get an email, I star it and archive it. As much as I can, I try not to read the details, or I know I’ll be thinking about it all the time, which will distract me until it’s actually time to focus on a response. On Sunday evenings, I’ll sit down and reply to all emails at once. Some weeks this takes longer than others, but most weeks, because I’m completely focused on this task, it can take between 15 to 45 minutes (unless there’s a particularly lengthy email that needs a lot of planning and thinking).
This has been working really well, and since I decided to give this a try I’ve never looked back. Not only does it save me time because I don’t get distracted from my work throughout the week, but it also makes sure that everyone that sent me a genuine contact request gets a reply within a reasonable timescale.
Due to spending a lot of time at conferences this year, I’ve been thinking about how the advice we give from the stage, or in our writing, scales up and down to the various contexts in which people are developing for the web.
The company I founded in 2001 has a long history of working as an outsourced development agency, working for small design companies. We spent years being thrown Photoshop documents, pictures of websites, and being expected to develop them. In 2011 we started to move away from the model as we couldn’t deliver the sort of sites we wanted to deliver, do the standard of work we wanted to do, when the people we worked for just wanted to draw a website and then not play any further part in the process.
All that said, this model of tightly scoped roles is reality for many small agencies and individual freelancers. We can preach from a conference stage all we like about the ideal way to develop a site, about best practice, about developers sitting alongside designers. From experience however, and from hallway conversations I know that many of those we talk to essentially work alone. When they get a project that is outside their expertise they have to either turn it down, or outsource bits of it.
I have been that outsourced developer. I still work in that world through our product Perch. Many, probably most, of our customers are individuals or tiny design agencies. Many of them rely on products like Perch not just as a content management system, but also to deliver the site itself. The CMS provides functionality that they would otherwise have to outsource to a developer.
This is for everyone, the web is for everyone. Creating good websites is possible on a tiny budget just as much as on a grand scale. However speaking from personal experience it can be easy to write advice off as not for people or companies like us.
While we are exploring best practice for the web of today and tomorrow, I am keen to ensure that we don’t stop looking for ways to create tools and processes that help the lone designer or developer collaborate well with others. How do we distill the lessons learned in big teams, where people can work alongside each other, into tools and working practices that function when these people can never physically meet? How do we take the essence of best practices from large budget sites — and allow the creators of sites with tiny budgets to benefit from them?
Last month, I fractured the tibia bone in my leg. Being on crutches and in a wheelchair has really changed the way I view getting around. I’ve begun to notice things like which street corners have curb ramps and which ones don't. When trying to ride the subway, I’ve been baffled by who put in the lift that leads to a staircase. I’ve been amazed at the way strangers will ask you “what happened” with dropped jaws. In general, it’s been eye-opening.
While I think I am empathetic toward situations that necessitate accessibility requirements, until we are in one, there’s only so much assuming we can do. I wonder if we took a few weeks and browsed websites using only a keyboard or only looked at sites on a PC, how/if that would change the way we design and code websites.
If not now, then likely at some point in your career, you’ll be in a position to hire people. When you do, try to hire people who are smarter than you. If you don’t find anybody that is, then look for people who are eager to learn. There’s nothing worse than working for someone who needs to be the only one that can actually get the job done except for working with people who think they’ve learned everything there is to learn.
The web moves really fast. How many times have you googled for a tutorial on or an example of something and found that the results, written six months or a year or two years ago, no longer work? The syntax has changed, or there’s a better way now, or it never worked right to begin with. You’ll hear people bemoaning this: trying to stop the web moving so quickly in order that knowledge about it doesn’t go out of date. But that ship’s sailed. This is the world we’ve built: it moves fast, and we have to just hat up and deal with it. So, how? How can we make sure that old and wrong advice doesn’t get found? It’s a difficult question, and I don’t think anyone’s seriously trying to answer it. We should try and think of a way.
I’ve been lucky enough to experience a fair few product launches and there is absolutely nothing like the adrenaline rush that comes with the occasion: pouring over something for months on end to finally unveil it to the world, nervously wondering if anyone will like what you’ve created. And then, when they do, and the orders start coming in, the adrenaline rush begins anew. Oh my god! People are actually buying it! This is what happened to us on Wednesday 19th September at 4pm when we finally released Insites: The Book.
With that second rush of adrenaline, though, comes a rush of a different kind: gratitude. Humbled, honoured gratitude. Because suddenly people are parting with their hard-earned cash to buy something you’ve made, and that is just an incredible feeling. This book is not an essential item. No-one needs this book. But here they are, paying for something they believe in. And that’s really why it’s so humbling: each and every purchase is a person saying: I believe in what you’re doing and I want to support it.
And, wow, we are so, so grateful for that. Thank you.
Like any of the other bakers here on this site, I receive quite a few e-mails from people presenting their work or project to me, hoping I will share it with my readers, or Twitter or Facebook etc. Some of them get shared, others do not. My decision is of course based on whether I like it or not, and also if it’s valuable. But even before I get to this point, some basic criteria has already been taken into account which influences my judgement. There are a few basic guidelines that you can keep in mind to have the best chance your message will be heard. Always write in a personal way, and make sure your message also sounds personal, but keep it brief and to the point. So always address people by their name, not with a simple “Hi” or “Hello there”, because to me this means the person doesn’t really know me, and the message is part of some list that gets sent out. The follow-up of these kinds of e-mails will most likely be unsuccessful. Make sure if the message links to photos or other kinds of images that they are big enough, so that no extra communication is needed on where bigger images can be found. And most importantly don’t forget the URL, and make sure it’s correct.
Working in the web industry we often read about million dollar investments in the latest and greatest startup.
Startups come in all shapes and sizes. We are accustomed to reading about the latest hot startup securing a huge sum of cash for their latest idea.
If you read one book on startups may I recommend that you part with a few pounds and grab a copy of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau.
Whilst not focusing exclusively on the web/tech industries it’s full of inspirational stories of people earning a living running their own, often solo, businesses. None of them are making millions but all are paying their bills, enjoying their work and are in control of their own destinies. It’s my non-fiction book of the year so far.
In an industry like this, it’s often difficult not to get bogged down by our tools. It’s easy to forget how we started out — viewing the source of web pages and stringing bits of knowledge together to create something sub-par, before scratching our heads and posting on forums for help. It’s the way we all start. But somewhere along the way, we develop a dependence on certain tools.
As someone who moves around a lot, I can’t guarantee that the computer I’ll end up on has the tools I need. I’ve adopted my workflow time and time again to better fit this circumstance, but one thing has remained the same — always carrying a pen and paper with me. Those are the primary tools. With them you can design an entire website or write the pseudo code for an entire application. And it requires no preprocessors, no software updates, and no Internet connectivity.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
One of the advantages of being (relatively) old in a relatively young field is you’ve witnessed firsthand important milestones, the emergence of ideas, significant debates and other formative aspects of that field. In many other fields, these events are ancient history, their protagonists long gone, their importance fading.
Recently, I’ve been taking something of a walk down memory lane, looking at some of the history of the web (things like browser releases, publication dates for specifications and so on).
What it has emphasised for me is not so much how far we have come, but in many ways how little. Here’s a simple example:
That’s ViolaWWW, one of the earliest graphical web browsers, originally released March 9, 1992, so over 20 years ago. At first glance it looks so primitive. But take a closer look. There’s the home, back and forward buttons. There’s a url field. And inside the window, a page full of text with links to click.
And how about this:
Google’s home page from 1998. While visually quite different, again, essentially the same user experience as Google today. And it doesn’t stop there. Think about search engine results. In essence, a list of around a dozen potential matches, with a short description and a link for users to follow. This really hasn’t changed at all since the very beginning of the web. (Results have become more relevant, but when was the last time you went beyond the first page of results? Beyond the first two or three results? Surely with billions of documents, for any search there’s likely to be more than a handful of relevant results?)
So what’s the point?
To some extent we live in an ever-present now, of exciting cool new stuff. To put it harshly, we live in George Santayana’s perpetual infancy. We should step back once in a while, from the sense of excitement mixed with panic, that we are missing out, that it will all pass us by, and get a sense of perspective, of where we have come from, and maybe even think a little about where we are going.
Web site performance is in the news. There are conferences, guidelines, even a W3C Working Group. These are valuable, but we need to keep a sense of proportion. Of course, reduce the number of HTTP requests your site makes and crush your images, but work out where the biggest bang for your buck is likely to come from.
I’m on the Web 10 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week, and the problems I have with web sites are seldom attributable to a developer failing to minify a stylesheet or neglecting to shave a few vimtoseconds off a JavaScript loop — they’re to do with lack of accessibility, bad information architecture, or usability catastrophes like requiring me to sign up for endless spam before I can give my credit card details to buy the product.
In situations where networks are really slow, or devices under-powered, spending time testing sites across mobile browsers, and focussing on the user’s needs rather than bloating sites with organisational vanity publishing should be your priority.
Each day we run across interesting articles and blog posts that we send to read-later apps and post to Pinboard. How do you keep track of all these items? Do you keep track of these bits of knowledge, amusement, and ephemera? Do they reside in the apps, or do you control them? All these internet curiosities are important to me; they mark time in a too busy life, and deserve to be catalogued. While I love reading apps, read-later apps, and Pinboard, I’ve come to post snippets, quotes, and things I want to remember in a WordPress blog so that I can keep track of what I find, reflect on what I’ve read and what these shiny bits mean to me and to my work. Do you collect shiny bits, too? If so, how?
I’m not an “early adopter.” I don’t get excited about gadgets, phones, computers or even new software. It takes me forever to make a decision about what to buy if I need a new tool, and even longer to actually make the purchase. New techniques are interesting, but I always take (probably too much) time to experiment before I’m “convinced.”
But damn if I don’t grab my username immediately upon hearing of any new service.
We are obsessed with the idea that technology is too complicated. We aggressively push an ethos of simplicity and mono-interface, and we cheer for benevolent, tasteful gatekeepers as the one-true-way to bring the benefits of connected computation to all. We are obsessed because the problem is so hard. Because we are obsessive personalities. Because distilling the real complexity of computing for the masses is a worthy and vital goal.
But it is not the only goal. And while many of us know it, and I believe it, and no matter how much I might hold it dear to my core, sometimes it takes a little push to really feel it, and remember: Underneath all of the interfaces we made is an open architecture more powerful than any one service, that remains open and available, inexpensively, to anyone who’ll learn it.
If you’re feeling like you’re having a down day at work — everything seems mundane, ordinary, unexciting, or you don’t know why you’re there — explain what you do to someone. Tell them about what you’re building, why it matters and what makes it a challenge. Why did you join up and what are the big-picture outcomes?
If explaining what you do doesn’t instantly lift your mood and make you excited about creating things, maybe it is time to dust off the CV.
I’ve felt honored and somewhat amused to be a part of the Pastry Box Project. As I look around at my fellow bakers, I find that the majority are designers and usability gurus. I sit at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to user interactions — the work I do is on the server side, handling the incoming requests and providing responses; only the side effects of my work are seen by the end user, and often those are filtered through visual design I never touch.
And yet, I’d argue there’s another level of design that happens in this arena. The code written must be readable and maintainable, both by myself in the future as well as others. The interactions between different code responsibilities must be clear and concise, and readily understood. The class names and methods should communicate their purpose.
It’s tremendously easy and seductive to be able to write a few, quick lines of code that get the job done. It’s a more interesting and rewarding job to make functional code self-documenting and maintainable.
People often think it’s hard to change my mind, that I’m too fixated on my own opinions. The reason I give this impression is that I will fiercely defend them. However, I will only do so until I see compelling arguments for the other side. I always try to keep an open mind to being wrong, and it has only made me better.
In the past few months I’ve been witnessing myself slowly change my views regarding yet another major life issue: The place I want to live in. Moving to the US has been a life goal for me ever since I first visited, almost fifteen years ago. However, as I spend more time there and get closer to moving, I’ve started noticing things that I don’t like so much. I’ve tried to ignore them, but they keep being there, giving me the finger like dead pixels on a brand new screen. I might go forward with it anyway, or I might pick another country, but this is yet another experience that has taught me to avoid being dogmatic.
We are all, and should be, subject to change. Whoever insists in their rigid convictions reminds me of software whose bugs never get fixed. You are the only maintainer of that software. Be vigilant enough to discover and fix your own bugs. Be open-minded enough to listen to other people’s bug reports about it. Most people forget to do this after a certain age. They become so arrogant that they think they don’t have any more bugs to fix, or so insecure that they believe they can’t fix any more. That’s the turning point where the years that pass by start to become “aging”, instead of “growing up”. Aging doesn’t have to do with how long you’re on this planet, it has to do with giving up on yourself. To stop being subject to change is to start being stagnant.
I tend to bug fix solely in Firebug and then port any changes over to my actual CSS file once I deem a bug fixed. Quite often, however, I get so far into the work that I totally forget I actually need to move the Firebug code over. I’ve actually marked bugs as complete and committed code without realising my ‘fixes’ were not actually in there. Firebug is a gift and a curse for me…`</muppet>`
Look up said the father — there in the sky! And the little boy did, and saw the Endeavour, a craft that brought humankind ever closer to the heavens. The little boy, though quite young, knew his life would forever be changed. His growing imagination, emerging intelligence, endless joy and wide-open wonder are part of the foundation of the next generation of innovators — taking us ever beyond what we thought we knew today. Imagine what the Web will be when this little boy is agrown man.
It’s taken me a while, but my RSS reader is starting to gather dust. I’ll admit it was a solution to at best an edge case – ‘show me everything these people ever write’ – but I liked having a mechanism that prioritised recall over precision.
But now I need filters; and my personal networks provide them. Networks encourage a kind of contextual meritocracy: strong, relevant ideas tend to bubble to the surface. This is, of course, why even the most technically-minded companies around are pursuing the social agenda. It’s heartening to know that humans can still outperform the machines from time to time.
There’s a rust topped hummingbird rolling his nickel sized head back and forth about 12 feet in front of me. This is as still as hummingbirds get unless they’re asleep or dead. He’s on the lookout for rival hummers who would love a sip from his prized sweet-water feeder. There’s a white shield of feathers just under his gullet that frames his pride and strength. It adds presence that adds volume beyond his size. He’s truly wonderful.
Are all his characteristics necessary? Is his plume or his color a trait developed for safety or reproductivity? What can explain the utility of the whir of his wings or their ghosted shape fanning the air? Has explanation become our first instinct of observation?
This morning, I am content to remember to simply enjoy him buzzing and humming. Fascinated by his efforts to protect his territory. There is a full circus of wonder packed into this miniature creature.
This short experience this morning makes me think I’ve forgotten to seek awe. I literally mean that I have not properly budgeted time for it. It is not hard to find. A simple blade of grass breaking ground is more than enough to shut me up and remind me to stand silent and small before the vast sum of all creation. It’s only when I am placed firmly in that sum – as a handful of dust made living by the magic of a loving designer, standing alongside grass, and bugs, and birds, and oxygen, and bacteria – that I can be the designer I wish to be. It’s then that I am most able to create with a tenuous marriage of wonder and utility.
I need to return to some kind of discipline, a daily reminder to seek wonder. It’s a more natural part of being a “fine artist”, but since becoming a designer I’ve neglected the practice. This little hummingbird has me thinking about how I might effect a small moment of enjoyable awe in the web and mobile experiences I create as a designer. How can the businesses I imagine and bring to life draw out wonder in those it serves or in those who are employed by it?
When everything in our work is pushing us toward convenience, through speed perhaps, we ought to stand still in the moving stream and reflect whether those efficiencies are making life for people truly richer, better, or fuller? I suspect we have lost some things that the analog taught us as we trudge up this digital path. I’m going to see if I can re-find some of them.
A bout of insomnia last summer led me to sign up for a free trial of Hulu Plus, which would let me use my iPad to catch up on episodes of Bob’s Burgers I had missed earlier in the season. When I inevitably failed to kill the subscription before the negative option billing kicked in, I decided to make the most of the month I accidentally paid for by devouring the entire combined run of the classic Canadian series Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. Hulu Plus’s subscription model offers more content and access on more devices (such as mobile devices and set-top boxes), but the same amount of advertising as experienced by those with free accounts, which varies from about three to five minutes for a standard twenty-one- to twenty-two-minute episode of a TV show. This might be bearable with a wide assortment of ads, but Hulu’s ad model is not about variety. So for each of Degrassi’s seventy episodes, I was treated to multiple pleas to buy car insurance from Geico. If you haven’t had the experience yourself, just imagine a litany of thirty-second visits from the least funny standup comedian in existence (to put it very, very kindly).
By Hulu’s own count, I have used it to watch nearly 1,100 videos of various shapes and sizes in the last four and a half years. I’m pretty sure each and every one of them came with at least one Geico commercial. Which means that in this age of unavoidably intrusive and sophisticated audience targeting (including an “Is this ad relevant to you?” option whose “No” button gets a lot of love from me), Hulu is still somehow unaware that I don’t even own a car. This is not only a missed opportunity for Hulu’s advertisers hawking goods that actually interest me (if there are any), but it’s a stark portrait of the not-so-fine line between brand awareness and overexposure. If I am one day in the market for car insurance again, I promise you Geico won’t get one thin dime from me, even if the value of its service is exponentially greater than all of its competitors combined. Thanks to the deadly combination of its advertising’s timbre and saturation, my contempt for Geico is unspeakable. And yet, Geico is in no apparent danger of going bankrupt, and I imagine most advertisers crave the kind of exposure it gets from Hulu.
Nowadays, most of our media universe exists online, and most of that universe runs on advertising. It is a testament to the level of compelling content being created that we’re willing to endure being bombarded by these kinds of sales pitches just to access that content. It is also an indictment of a consumer culture eager to offer up mindshare as currency to whomever stands between us and our media. Must the future of our digital economy really be this obnoxious?
Software isn’t always a solution to problems. If you’re a developer, everything generally looks like a nail: a nail which is solved by making a new bit of code. I’ve got half-finished mobile apps done for tracking my running with GPS, for telling me when to switch between running and walking, and… I’m still fat, because I’m writing software instead of going running. One of the big ideas behind computers was to automate repetitive and boring tasks, certainly, which means that it should work like this: identify a thing that needs doing, do it for a while, think “hm, a computer could do this more easily”, write a bit of software to do it. However, there’s too much premature optimisation going on, so it actually looks like this: identify a thing that needs doing, think “hm, I’m sure a computer would be able to do this more easily”, write a bit of software to do it. See the difference? If the software never gets finished, then in the first approach the thing still gets done. Don’t always reach for the keyboard: sometimes it’s better to reach for Post-It notes, or your running shoes.
At this very moment, I’m sitting in the hospital with my 94 year old grandmother, who, a mere 4 days ago, suffered from a massive stroke. Most of her brain function is lost. Before the stroke, she was already blind from adult onset diabetes. At present, not only can she not see, but she can no longer move, eat or drink. She has been moved to the in-hospital hospice. Both husband and her progeny are waiting. While we wait, looking at her slack face and now snow white hair thinly covering her scalp, I am compelled to muse upon the expanse of life that we are given. I feel compelled to try to devise ways to improve upon my own life and make my grandmother’s contribution in giving me an opportunity to be born into this world worth it.
One practice that I can now see has led me astray is operating from a long list of “should”s. Some of my major choices in my life have been embarked upon based on thoughts such as these:
“I should play it safe and not let him know how I really feel”
“I should get a sensible degree instead of doing art”
“I should go help my sister with her business after I graduate”
“I should go into project management because it pays well”
“I should go ahead and get involved with him because he seems really into me”
“I should just work all of the time and not take time for myself — then I will be able to get more done”
You may have guessed that the outcome of many of these decisions ended up being…ummm, interesting. The parts of my life directed by shoulds were not enjoyable — indeed, many ended up being some of the worst periods of my life.
Watching my grandmother’s breathing progress from strong snoring to apneatic gasps, it is becoming increasingly clear that our time, energy, and attention on this planet are far too precious for “should”. This brings to mind two pieces of wisdom that inspire me: Derek Siver’s “Hell yeah!” and Frank Chimero’s Proposed Creative Workflow. I’m ready to embrace the simplicity, self-respect, and courage of “Hell Yeah”. I’m moving to embodying the trust and honesty necessary to choose only that which truly has heart.
If your previous life decisions have been governed by shoulds like so many of mine have, and you are consequently harboring a latent dissatisfaction with your life in certain areas, then join me in starting to question every single last “should” on your list. My idea for my new Life Decision Workflow is to replace all “should”s with “I can’t wait to…!” to test the strength of the idea. If this new version of the phrase rings true, then you know that not only does it have heart, but that you have a hell yeah situation on your hands. If not, then cross it off the list. I know it sounds trite, but life really is too short to waste.
My grandmother, Robbie Mae Lowe, passed away in her sleep in the hospital hospice on Sunday, 23 September 2012.
Easy to forget during our busy days, writing for me has to be one of the most important things we as designers do. Writing makes you pause to consider what you’ve done. It gives you time to understand problems and organise your thoughts. It’s a way to practice your so important communication skills and your capability to synthesise your ideas and express yourself.
Just like buses, which arrive all at once when you’ve been waiting for ages, this last month or so has seen the launch of several apps / networks offering a new take on web-based discourse: App.Net, an open, user-funded alternative to Twitter; Branch, an attempt to engage users in real-life-like, long-form discussion; and Medium, Obvious Corporation’s bold — very bold — re-imagining of online publishing.
The August sun was fierce, the water cold, and I was sitting under a tree cooling down next to the Lac du Salagou. My boys were throwing themselves around in the water on giant blow-up crocodiles, and my wife and mother-in-law were quietly talking and sunbathing next to me. It was supremely peaceful. My mind wandered to all the times I’ve been away and all the moments I wished my family were with me. Fireworks in Montreal. Walking between 1300 year old trees in Vancouver. The view from the Space Needle in Seattle.
I reminded myself how lucky I am, but I also reminded myself who I’m working for, and why. Sure, I work for my own satisfaction as well as my family, but fundamentally they have to come first. As the industry we work in accelerates, I try to keep learning, attending and talking at events, and working on what I love, but I know I love my family more. Fireworks, ancient walks, and awesome views are a joy, but lessened by their absence. So, later that day, I managed to get a data signal on my phone, and cancelled a few talks and trips I had coming up. I put off some other things that would take me away from my family. I said no to work, and yes to them, and by doing so, felt better about the work I will do, and what I’ll achieve by doing it, in their name.
If your jobby job doesn’t have you producing work that’s meaningful to you, find somewhere to volunteer your skills. The most fulfilling and fun work I’ve done‚ outside of my current job‚ wasn’t for money. It was for good causes. You can have a real impact on your community and the non-profit, school, etc. you choose will be grateful and have more funds to use elsewhere.
Something that puzzles us in technical support for Perch: The number of web designers and capable front-end developers who are unable to diagnose something as simple as a 404, file not found. Or have little understanding of what any server-side solution might be doing. We read some very strange theories as to what our users believe is happening when they encounter a problem due to this lack of understanding of what happens prior to html being delivered to the browser.
Perhaps those of us who began working on the web in the early days have an advantage here. When I wanted to start doing server-side development, I bought a tatty old Compaq desktop from a chap who sold old technology that businesses wanted to recycle. I then had to work out how to install Linux, compile Apache and configure Perl to work with the web server. This took days. This was before I even started to learn Perl. However, this somewhat torturous process taught me how web pages are served. I read a seemingly endless string of error messages; I learned how to search the web and Usenet for answers; I learned how to formulate a post asking for help in a way that wouldn't get me flamed and might get me an answer.
In 2012 many people who are working with server-side development seem barely aware that is what they are doing. One-click installs of WordPress and similar on their hosting causes the process of getting set up to be hidden. They work, quite terrifyingly, directly on their live server. Even if you want to go one step beyond that and run a local development environment that is now incredibly trivial to set up due to packages such as XAMPP and Mamp. We can easily find ourselves protected from the technology that we are relying on to serve our sites.
All this ease and convenience is great. I don't think that everyone building a website should be forced to compile Apache from scratch. However I do believe that if you are developing for the web, you need to have enough understanding to be able to take a holistic view of the entire process. If you do not understand how a script serves up your HTML, then it will appear baffling when something goes wrong. It will be very hard for you to start to diagnose problems, even enough to be able to raise a support request that will get you help.
If you are working with any kind of CMS, blogging software or other server-side solution and are treating it as a black box, you will be amazed at how a little bit of time invested in understanding how this stuff works can save you hours in the long run.
I think the rise of code education sites on the web is super radical. Even Kahn Academy has just added a Computer Science section. I’ve recently been reading a lot about Problem Based Learning and I think incorporating some of the techniques used in PBL and providing real use cases for learning code would make these code education sites appeal to an even wider audience.
A lot of experimentation goes into each design I create. I believe it’s the most vital, but also the most fun part of the creative process. Trying things out and seeing where you get, then comparing with other options you’ve tried etc. It’s one way to ensure the final design is created at your best potential. The process of my creations is usually very chaotic, due to all the things I try out along the way: looking for the perfect colors, perfect composition, perfect texture etc. A lot of undoing and deleting is part of this process, and maybe 90% of the things I create along the way gets trashed. I almost never have my exact final result in my head. It’s more like a basic concept, or sometimes just a vague idea of the direction I want to take. While trying all kinds of things out, I sometimes end up with a surprising result, and these results sometimes lead to new ideas. Sometimes the end result is way better than my initial idea. That’s why I think experimenting is so vital in each design process.
The name on this page is Andy Clarke, but Andrew Doyle’s the name on my birth certificate.
My parents’ marriage didn’t last long. My Dad, John Doyle, was, according to those who knew him, a sweet but difficult man who suffered terribly from what would today be treated as a clinical depression.
By the time I was four, Mum moved us away from Lancashire, south to start again with Alan, her husband number three. Alan Clarke.
I saw my Dad only a handful of times after that.
My brother was born when I was six. He was Clarke and so my being the only Doyle in the house felt awkward. It was, at the same time a reminder of a Dad that I dearly loved and missed and a side of the family I didn’t see — “they’re not ‘our kind of people,’” Mum would tell me later. As if we were somehow better. — and the new family that, as a small child, I desperately wanted to fit into. It symbolised a disconnect and a great deal of sadness.
Dad’s depression took him in 1978. He took his own life at the age of 38. I was twelve when my Mum told me he’d died. “I didn’t really know him,” I remember saying coldly. When she closed the door, I cried alone.
Being called Andrew reminded me of what I’d lost, so I slowly changed Andrew to Andy. Then it was time for a bigger change.
In 1981, changing a name cost 50p and a signature. On the twelfth of December I became Andrew (Andy) Clarke, but even though our names were the same, I still felt separate. Being Clarke meant living a lie and deep down I knew it.
In the end, Alan Clarke was as false as the name I’d adopted from him. After a sixteen-year relationship, Mum discovered his bigamy and asked him to leave. She, my brother and I never saw him again. Mum married within a year, so now only my brother and I remained Clarke’s. He, at least, has a claim to it.
Shortly before we were married, my wife and I talked about becoming Doyle’s again. But the complications of changing bank accounts, driving licences and all manner of other official paperwork seemed like too much trouble at the time. That was a terrible mistake. One that we’re not the only ones living with now.
Becoming a Doyle again would make me very happy, but I know that changing back is not my decision anymore. My wife’s been a Clarke for almost twenty-five years and my son has been nothing but. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, change my name without them. I know what having a name that’s different from your family feels like, and I wouldn’t want that again, for me or them.
At the very least, I’ve come to realise that, through living under a false name for all these years, a name is just something other people call you. The name on my website, on my books and on my drivers licence might be Andy Clarke, but:
I’m Andrew Doyle.
And I’ll be very proud when someone calls me that.
29 Things I, as a designer, wish more tech startups knew:
Learn the difference between a UX Designer and a Visual Designer. They are not the same. And while there is (and should be) a lot of overlap in skills—it’s good to know what the designer you’re hiring thinks is priority.
Recognizing these differences, know that a pretty coat of paint will not make your very real usability problems magically disappear. I’ve said as much in conversations: “So, to be clear, you’re just looking for a shiny coat of paint right now, and you’re not interested in fixing the problems that are going to stop people in their tracks…?!”
Form labels, microcopy, instructional text—this is core to an application. In fact, the best UIs often start as written conversations between the user and the system. Be wary of designers who layer copy into their lovely layouts, or worse, use “lorem ipsum” as a stand-in for functional copy; these are signs you’ve hired a stylist and not a designer. (The same is true of visualizations—good designers start with the data, not the pretty pictures!)
Don’t look at a design or prototype as an approximation for what should be implemented. A good designer will sweat every detail. A 20px size difference, a change in the typeface, the timing of an animation—these kinds of things make the difference between confusion and delight.
Bring in the UX designer before you’ve attempted any UI work. I can’t tell you how many times my clients have said “I wish I’d brought you in earlier!” The UI changes are often enough to necessitate technical re-architecture. Starting with a good designer from day one will save you a lot of headaches later on…
Of course, starting with an existing alpha version means requirements have been defined. In these cases a good designer can spend her time redefining how things get done in the UI (however, be wary of “functional fixedness;” I spend a lot of my time just getting everyone on the team—designers included—to see the problem in a different way, not the way it has been implemented).
Listen for what your customer needs, not what they ask for. Good design (or UX) isn’t about giving customers everything they request—it’s about listening to these needs and then showing the thing they can’t articulate (unless they also have a good design sense!).
Iterate on a weekly or bi-weekly basis with real customers and users. Do not skip or marginalize this critical feedback loop. If you do, you risk building a product that no one else really cares about using.
Iterate with 5–7 different customers who have very different needs. If you design for a homogenous group of folks, you’ll end up with the perfect system for a small minority; your system likely won’t scale to accommodate the needs of a market. By testing with a diverse group of customers, you rise above specifics to see the patterns and common challenges. You create a product that addresses a market need.
Make sure your problem space is well researched and that you’re beginning with customer input, not waiting for it later on (when it’s too late to make significant changes).
Hire a dedicated front-end developer. Don’t let your UI be the afterthought of back-end programming. There’s too much going on in the UI to rely on libraries and frameworks. If you’re doing anything at all unconventional, you’ll need a good front-end dev to build these out. Better yet, pair this front-end dev with the designer so they can create and iterate together on functional prototypes. Then, once these designs have been vetted with customers, there’s no documentation needed for styles or behaviors, or miscommunication in the dreaded “handoff”—that stuff is already taken care of. The UI is ready to be hooked up to the back-end systems.
Good designers will care about your technology stack, to the extent that it affects the UI.
Design from the “bottom up” (vs “top down”). What do I mean by this? In web apps, the structure of your app (IA) will emerge over time—don’t start with structure or navigation. Think about flows, scenarios, and activities. The structure of the site will emerge from specific page level designs. Start with a laser focus on a specific activity, then follow that thread into other areas of the app. Starting with a top down focus on structure and consistent UI elements often glosses over the details and minutiae that set apart a stellar product. And don’t get hung up on inconsistent interaction and visual details that come about from this bottom up focus—these details will be ironed out as time goes on. That said, if you start with a comprehensive UI framework such as Bootstrap or Foundation, this will help a designer be intentional about introducing inconsistencies. Not that I’m admitting a personal flaw of mine or anything.
Don’t force web site patterns on a web app. For example, don’t waste your time thinking about “what should go in a home page?” (of the app!) or what goes into the tabbed navigation. If you’re designing around a defined flow or set of common functions, your app will more closely resemble a mobile app than a web site, with a focus on content and functionality over chrome and navigation.
Design for mobile first (even if a mobile app is not in your roadmap). The constraints of a mobile context will force you to focus on what’s essential, and help you cut what’s not needed. The question “How would I design this as a mobile app?” always clears my head and helps me find the simpler, elegant solution.
Don’t over design. Less is better in the early stages. Launch with too much going on and you won’t know which pieces are broken and which are working.
Focus on the experience, not the product. Assume people won’t want to use your product—in fact, they don’t! Except for the early adopter/beta-junkie, most people have existing habits; you’re competing against the inertia of existing behaviors.
Design for the existing ecosystem. People already have apps they know and use. Rather than try to displace those, can you work with these other systems?
Reject any design candidate who is overly focused on process. UXers accustomed to corporate environments may want to “do it the right way” (there is no right way). Aside from initial research, most startups can’t afford (or shouldn’t be spending money on) too many deliverables or things that don’t directly translate into product improvements. Iterate early and often. Don’t focus too much on documentation.
You get what you pay for. I charge a lot. But, I guarantee you’ll save money in the long run. Most visual designers at 1/4 my rate will take much longer and still not get you where a seasoned veteran will. Note: veteran doesn’t necessarily mean years experience—2 years at a dot com startup taught me more than most people learn in 5–7 years at a big company.
As a corollary to the above comment: experience and naïveté are good things. You get a fresh perspective not indoctrinated with jargon or groupthink.
Designs are never handed off. Design isn’t a stage—it’s always happening with every new release. Think long term.
Hire “experts” initially. Transition to mid or jr. level folks over time, as the problems get more defined. Keep the expert around to offer guidance and mentor these less experienced folks. This, by the way, is the approach I use with my startup clients.
Work together! Don’t think about handoffs, think about collaboration. Where there are too many meetings or an abundance of documentation, I’ve also seen a proportionate lack of communication and lack of clear alignment amongst the team.
Frame the problems to be to be solved, then evaluate accordingly. Set aside your subjective opinions. Evaluate the design based on how well is satisfies (or delights) the end user.
Good designers will question assumptions—and will very likely ask you to undo stuff that’s already been done. This is a good thing. Mostly.
Good design doesn’t happen magically: there needs to be: (1) a well articulated–and shared–vision, and (2) autonomy. Making sense of a really, really hard problem requires uninterrupted time where you can “go deep” with a problem (8 1-hour blocks of time do not equal 1 8-hour block of time!).
If possible, build your API, then build your app on top of this. This leaves room for a lot more flexibility, both in terms of what you can do in the UI and portability to other devices.
Please, please, please spend time hanging out in the latest and greatest apps, regardless of their personal relevance or interest to you. If you do, your expectations of a “good experience” will be raised. Archaic team communication tools are often a good indication of what the decision makers believe qualifies as “good.” (Hint: it’s often a very low bar relative to what’s possible!)
Unless you’re doing something entirely new or different, think about the Minimum Viable Experience. MVP tends to focus on features and functionality. In a crowded, mature space, HOW you implement something is equally—or more—important than WHAT you implement.
What should you look for most of all in a designer? Curiosity, Empathy, and Grit. I’d care far more about these traits than any artifacts or prior “design” experience.
Get to know each other outside of the work environment—as friends. It’ll make the day-to-day collaboration so much easier!
At the beginning of, and indeed well into the 19th century, only a small percentage of even people in the then-developed world were in any modern sense literate.
And yet, the percentage of people in Western Europe and North America at that time who could read and write probably exceeds the percentage in those places now who can program in any non-trivial sense.
The rise of literacy in the 19th Century was largely a side effect of the need for clerical skills in a rapidly industrialising world, but gave rise to the modern world of medicine, science, and literature as a critical mass of the population gained the capacity to improve themselves.
I believe, and hope the next great wave of literacy, with a similarly unpredictable but extraordinary impact on civilisation for the better, will be programmatic literacy, the near ubiquitous ability to program computers.
This doesn’t mean everyone in the world using JavaScript. In fact, part of the challenge is for us to find ways to lower the barriers to programming that tend to hold people back from something which humans are actually typically quite good at.
The web is an enormous step toward this possibility, but not until we start seeing these core skills in primary schools, taught alongside reading, writing, and mathematics, will we start seeing what sort of revolution an explosion of programming literacy might bring.
The videos from the recent WordCamp San Francisco are now available over at WordPress TV. All talks were 15 minutes long which makes them very accessible. Of particular interest to me was Chris Coyier’s session “10 Things to make your site faster”. If you deal with WordPress as part of your work it’s well worth 15 minutes of your time. As a bonus you’ll also learn how to blow up you Apache server!
Like a lot of people I know, my first job was delivering newspapers. I wonder what future generations will do as an equivalent when dead tree newspapers are no longer around?
I’ve been designing primarily in the browser for the past year. Responsive design has brought with it a new way of thinking—we simply can’t rely on the idea that every user is viewing a website on a certain width of screen. Whether it’s mobile, tablet, desktop, or television, the site’s content is paramount. Designing in Photoshop simply doesn’t make sense any more. Photoshop comps don’t scale. Sure, you could create several layer groups or documents for different break points, but there’s no way to actually tell how it’ll perform in the browser without building it in the browser in the first place.
Design in the browser. Of course, still use Photoshop for asset building, but work in markup as soon as you can.
I’ve just realised it’s been a while since someone argued that “tables (for layout)” were better than CSS so are we finally turning the corner?
“Tables v CSS” was the stable fodder for many heated forum discussions but I don’t remember seeing a similar discussion recently. Did CSS win or did the opponents become extinct?
Or did they move onto html4 v html5 battles instead?
Photographs make for very big image files. Luckily, they can also compress significantly, with very little noticeable decrease in image quality (well, at least on lower resolution screens, we’ll see what impact higher resolution screens have on just how much we can compress images in future).
But compress too far, and suddenly artefacts appear, the unavoidable fingerprint of a particular technology. We see (and hear) this elsewhere, with 3D rendering engines, audio formats, everywhere we emulate the organic world, the analogue world with digital technology.
I sometimes wonder though whether these artefacts are bugs, or should we treat them as features? Why do we see the organic as the ideal, and the synthetic, the digital as less pure, less real?
Increasingly, our lives are lived through digital experiences, film (often not simply a compression of the real world, but a purely digital emulation of it), and music (which often is digitally generated and reproduced).
Years ago, Hip Hop DJs embraced the scratch, an artefact of mixing using turntables and vinyl, and created an entirely new sound.
I wonder ultimately what artefacts of the digital age will transcend their status as bugs, and become features of digital media? If any?
We all teach from time to time, whether it’s explaining something to a colleague, writing a blog post about the cool CSS technique we discovered, or giving a technical talk. If you are serious about becoming better at it, I’d strongly recommend reading up on psychology and neuroscience. If you don’t have the time to, here’s one fact that I’ve found most useful: Humans have incredibly impressive pattern recognition skills. We use them in pretty much everything we do, from learning our native language as kids, to escaping predators in the wild.
How does that help you teach more effectively? In one word: Examples, examples, examples. No matter how good you are at explaining the rules, nothing beats a few good examples of their application in practice. Our abstract thinking is not nearly as good as our pattern recognition skills.
However, don’t be fooled into thinking that theory is useless. Often, multiple explanations fit a given example. The theory helps us pick the one that fits, which might not be the one we initially recognized.
I’ve found that this principle applies to pretty much everything I’ve taught or have been taught, from mathematics to natural and programming languages. You can forget the theory, but you should never forget the examples.
I’m terrible at accepting money for my work. Well, put another way—I’m terrible at accepting money for the work I enjoy. Most of the websites I’ve worked on have been for friends, family, or respected peers, and when it comes to invoicing, I tend to ‘forget’ or apply heavy discounts. That needs to stop. It makes me value my work less. It makes the client value the work less. It makes it easily replaceable. And it doesn’t pay the bills.
Don’t chicken out of asking for money. Your client knows the worth of your work. And you should too. (Not working with friends & family helps here.)
Last month, I expressed some concerns about remix culture and the questionable value of much of its output. Shortly thereafter, as if in response, the juggernaut of skewed pop music known as Beck revealed that his next album, Song Reader, will be released exclusively as sheet music.
The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear 'Do We? We Do', or 'Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard', bringing them to life depends on you.
Beck is no stranger to user-generated content. In 2006, the CD version of The Information came with sticker sheets that encouraged listeners to create their own cover for the album (which, curiously, made it ineligible for entry into the UK Albums Chart). But Song Reader is considerably more intrepid, and may well be the boldest experiment in user-generated content yet. Making pop songs available to the public as sheet music is not a novel concept, but doing so in the absence of a canonical recording of that music is. Beck himself doesn’t yet know quite how these songs will sound; he has written them and left the rest up to us. Cynics might call that lazy, but I think it’s incredibly generous. Artists aspire to have their work be a dialogue with their audience, and this project allows him to be a part of the audience himself, to make the work not his but ours.
Doing this even a few years ago would have yielded very different results. There would have been no shortage of participants, but the fruits of their labor would have remained localized and isolated. However, when Song Reader is released in December, the flood of audience-generated recordings that follows will be made available globally online, on publicly accessible distribution channels that didn’t even exist at the beginning of Beck’s relatively short career.
Musicians are starting to understand that the internet is more than just a marketing tool. That’s kind of a big deal.
I love project management. It is a huge part of my freelance business. In fact, it’s probably more important than any other thing I do for my clients and projects (and sanity).
At any given point, I usually have at least two client projects I’m working on. Combine that with my “personal” projects and just running a business, there seem to be a million details I need to keep track of every day. While I’m a naturally organized person (with a freakish passion for to-do lists), strategic project management is the only way I’ve found to ensure that everything gets done on time and to the best of my ability.
I think that at least 50% of effective project management is tied to the person, and their internal ability to organize, collaborate and communicate. Some folks just inherently make great project managers, and some don’t. But that other half of project management, depends on tools. During my almost–two–years of being self-employed, I’ve found some great ones that I simply could not live without to manage the projects in my life.
Basecamp
I use Basecamp for all of my client projects, as well as for running my business. The standard features of messages, to-do lists, calendar and files are great. My clients appreciate having the big picture view of a project, while I couldn’t live without the small picture view Basecamp provides.
But what I really love about Basecamp are templates for to-do lists and projects. Each client project has many of the same tasks and milestones as other projects. Rather than creating a project from scratch each time, I have a handful of project templates that I use to get started. One, for example, is setup with milestones, messages and to-dos relevant to an ExpressionEngine build.
When I start a new EE project, I use that project template and in less than a minute, I have all of the core to-dos and milestones in place. The project template also includes the introductory messages I send to the client. It only takes about 10-15 additional minutes to add to-dos and milestones that are unique to the project.
For repetitive tasks that involve several steps to complete, I rely on to-do list templates. For example, when I ran Webquerque, every month we had an event. There was a ton of work involved to bring an event to life, but it was always the same tasks every time: pre-event promotion, venue coordination, A/V equipment prep, etc., etc. So each time I began work on a new event, I would use to do list templates to get my lists for that event ready … in about five minutes.
Aside from all the time I save, these templates are invaluable for me to keep track of details and nuances. Whenever I realize I’m missing a step in a process, or even if I find areas I can trim, I update the templates and they are ready for my next project. I don’t have to think. I know the templates represent my current process with all of the detail necessary.
FreshBooks
For time tracking, billing and expense management, I use FreshBooks. It’s not too much different than some of the other online billing management tools like FreeAgent and Harvest. But it has just the right features for me.
The dashboard is solid, giving me high-level views of paid/unpaid invoices, expenses and hours. The time tracking is simple, and I love that my clients can see hours logged on their project whenever they want. FreshBooks also handles invoices in a way that allows me to selectively charge Gross Receipts Tax for my in-state clients (thank you New Mexico Taxation & Revenue), but not my out–of–state clients.
In addition to managing my time and money, FreshBooks has been invaluable in helping me assess my project budgets for hours, which has led to much more accurate estimating.
And my last favorite thing about FreshBooks is the ability to set up recurring expenses, such as rent, internet and the monthly fees for services like Basecamp and FreshBooks.
Shoeboxed
I use Shoeboxed for expenses that have paper receipts. It is a unique service: You mail in receipts, Shoeboxed scans them, enters the amount and payee, and even categorizes the receipt using tax categories. Prior to Shoeboxed, I did all of this manually and it took forever. Just scanning my receipts so that I could keep digital copies is hours upon hours of work. But I also had a (bad) habit of leaving my receipts and expenses until the end of the year, so getting my tax information ready took me days. It was miserable.
Now, I’ve totally got my expense management under control. I mail my paper receipts in to Shoeboxed each month. Once they are posted, I review and make sure everything is correct. Then I export the expenses for the month from Shoeboxed, and import them into FreshBooks which gives me the big picture view of my expenses in relation to income.
That’s it. Takes about 30 minutes a month, probably less. And I’m 100% ready come tax time.
Gmail
The last service I couldn’t live without is Gmail. It is my one and only email client, and I manage all of my various email addresses and inboxes with it. One of my favorite features of Gmail is labels. Every email that hits my inbox is automatically assigned a label (via filters), so I never have to worry whether a communication has been properly labeled for my organization purposes.
I also use fairly detailed labels, as well as nesting, to keep communications organized for easy retrieval and reference. For example, I have a label for “Freelance,” and nested within that are labels for each prospect or client I engage with. Similarly, I have a label for “Writing,” with nested labels for each publication I write for.
The other Gmail feature I love and, frankly, owe much of my productivity to is the Priority Inbox. This setting divides my inbox view into three sections: Important, Starred and Everything Else. With just a few hours of use, Gmail starts "learning" which of my communications are important to me, and those land in the Important section.
For me, Gmail is trained to treat all milestone notifications from Basecamp as priority, as well as event reminders from my calendar. These are the emails that are time sensitive and, this way, I never miss them.
The Starred section, meanwhile, is used for emails of purchase receipts, such as from Amazon. So, when I do my once–a–month expense management, I check the Starred section of my inbox for any business expenses that should be entered into FreshBooks. And when I balance my personal checkbook each week, I also refer to this section of my inbox for any personal expenses that need to be tracked.
Then, when I’ve processed all of the email receipts in the Starred section, they each get a label (Personal/Finance/Receipts) and archived in case I need to reference them in the future.
After that, all that is left is Everything Else. I reference this portion of my inbox for personal communications and emails that don’t need to be addressed immediately.
It seems that these days if you receive an e-mail with “Let me know if you would be interested…” that people expect you to answer if you’re not interested as well, because a day or 2 later I get a “we didn’t hear back from you…” e-mail. I’m talking about the e-mails where certain services are presented to you (SEO, IT companies, and the likes). I get too many of these kind of e-mails, on top of my pile that actually matter to me. I’ll be honest. If I get such e-mail, and they also start with “Hello” I simply delete them. People who send e-mails like that should realize that if they don’t get an e-mail back from you, it means the person isn’t interested. After all, they ask you to e-mail back only “in case you are interested”. Sending an e-mail with “we didn't hear back from you…” sounds very pushy and will only result in the opposite of what you’ve hoped for.
Arbitrary design changes lead to arbitrary code changes; this is how code, notably CSS, becomes heavily sprawled and messy. Make sure everything is designed for a reason and in a structured, non-arbitrary manner to ensure your code follows suit.
My dad emailed me over the weekend, to ask if I’d seen lingscars.com. He wasn’t sure what to make of it—should he laugh or despair? I, of course, had seen it before. Phil Hawksworthuses it in his talks where he discusses over-using bells and whistles, and being careful using piles of JavaScript.
I emailed my dad back, and told him that yes, it’s done the rounds, and yes it’s still successful. It struck me that it didn’t actually matter what I thought past that though—it’s awful in an aesthetic sense, but so what? It clearly gets them business. In the same week, I’d come across something I hadn’t seen in a while—because I have Flash disabled—a website with music! It was using <audio>. Infuriating, because that’s exactly the sort of feature I disliked about the “old” web and was blocking for, and it was back using modern, better, technologies—but what did I really expect would happen? That website creators across the internet would simultaneously stop wanting jingles on their website just because we’d switched the technology on them?
We might be pushing out proprietary technologies like Flash, replacing them with the open web-friendly options like video, audio and WebGL, but we’re not changing expectations from users about how websites should actually look and behave—what’s annoying, what teaches users to be fooled, what puts them off, what’s fun. The question for me is really will this class of website, like Ling’s Cars, always exist and will we always just write them off without learning about why they still work for a large set of our audiences?
Great designers should be asking questions of each other and of those who receive our designs and use our designs or we run the great risk of designing from within the structure and limit of our own thinking. We are translators. We seek to make simple and obvious what once felt obscure and abstract. We do this by listening and then synthesizing what we hear into a coherent picture.
In 2010 I attended a workshop in San Francisco entitled ‘starter care.’ It was about the art of bread making; specifically sourdough, which is the staple variety of bread in West Coast America. The starter is a simple flour and water mix, nurtured over time to cultivate natural yeasts. You feed the starter regularly with fresh flour and water, maintaining a certain consistency to your preference; some bakers keep a very dry, dough-like starter, others abhor viscosity. When it comes to bake a loaf, you feed the starter once more, extract a sample, and use that as the base of your bread dough.
Over time—years, even—each unique starter takes on its own unique flavours and the loaves you bake from it will be unique in their way.
There’s one other aspect of bread making culture that’s noteworthy here, and that’s sharing. The same starter, constantly fed and replenished, can be maintained for decades; forever, really. Often, when someone begins a new starter they will take a sample of another, and use those cultures as the basis for their own rather than work from nothing. Furthermore, it’s a heartfelt kindness to give someone a sample of your starter as a gift (the starter I have at present came to me this way.) Over time there will be variance from the original. The flour and water ratio may change, and the air and water in the different environment will introduce new bacteria, changing the flavours of the yeasts growing within.
I’m leading up to a glaring software development analogy, but I want to focus on something specific. In open source we mostly celebrate singular projects: Centralised entities run in the open, accepting patches from far and wide to strengthen a core. Your JQueries, Bootstraps, and so forth. I want to draw attention to the starters of software; the code that people share not with the intention of getting patches back, but code that provides for someone the superior basis for their own work.
A number of years ago, my friend and colleague Mark Norman Francis put his unix home directory on GitHub. Within that repository is a katamari of scripts that Norm uses on a day-to-day basis to operate his computer. This is not code that you would necessarily run as-is on your machine; the purpose of sharing was for people to use it as a starter; a successful structure from which to learn and reuse and go your own way. The network graph shows a dozen others forking the work and tailoring this open code to do whatever they need to do with their machines, all making something unique of their own, all the better for the starter Norm gave them.
Likewise, Jekyll bloggers share the source for site structures to help others start their own blogs from scratch, and projects like HTML5 Boilerplate carry a similar spirit of being the starting point for new, unique things.
The most wonderful success of open source is not in its behemoth projects, but in the establishment of an institutional, cultural normality wherein which people share what they have with anyone who wants it. It is a heartfelt kindness to give someone a sample of your starter.
The best thing about freelancing for me was having my commute be 10 steps down a hallway. The worst thing was how often I never made the commute back from the office. Working from home is a great thing in many ways, but it takes discipline. A trick I learned a few years back was to put shoes on while I was working and take them off when I wasn’t. Simple mental hacks like that make all the difference. A bigger tip is to trade in your laptop for a desktop. Don’t take your work out of the office.
Reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, I came upon (amongst many others) an interesting topic: collaboration between scientists, how sharing is such an important part of their careers and their success. How even though each scientist pursues individual recognition, that can’t be achieved alone. How papers are signed by 400 scientists, and how the most prominent scientists are also the ones who work with others more frequently. I wonder if there’s something about this way of sharing knowledge and working together that we could learn from and extrapolate for our own disciplines.
If you go around and talk to normal people, it becomes clear that, weirdly, they don’t ever imagine how to get ten million dollars. They don’t think about new ways to redesign a saucepan or the buttons in their car. They don’t contemplate why sending a parcel is slow and how it could be a slicker process. They don’t think about ways to change the world.
I find it hard to talk to someone who doesn’t think like that.
To an engineer, the world is a toy box full of sub-optimized and feature-poor toys, as Scott Adams once put it. To a designer, the world is full of bad design. And to both, it is not only possible but at a high level obvious how to (a) fix it (b) for everyone (c) and make a few million out of doing so.
At first, this seems a blessing: you can see how the world could be better! And make it happen!
Then it’s a curse. Those normal people I mentioned? Short of winning the lottery or Great Uncle Brewster dying, there’s no possibility of becoming a multi-millionaire, and so they’re not thinking about it. Doors that have a handle on them but say “Push” are not a source of distress. Wrong kerning in signs is not like sandpaper on their nerves.
The curse of being able to change the world is… the frustration that you have so far failed to do so.
Perhaps there is a Zen thing here. Some people have managed it. Maybe you have. So the world is better, and that’s a good thing all by itself, right?
It must be borne in mind that the object being worked on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually or en masse. If the point of contact between the product and people becomes a point of friction, then the designer has failed. If, on the other hand, people are made safer, more comfortable, more desirous of purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.
—Henry Dreyfuss, Harvard Business Review, November 1950
Those are exciting times, and we’re tackling new and different challenges. Yet Dreyfuss wrote this homage to user experience 62 years ago.
We have a heritage of great designers trying to make great user experiences in the face of rapidly changing technology. User Experience may be a new(ish) term, but Human Factors is a well-established profession. Apple may be our current commercial successful design-focused poster company but Dreyfuss demonstrated for decades that good design was commercially rewarding.
Our technology and buzzwords might be new but the challenges we face are, at least, decades old.
Let’s seek out this legacy and draw inspiration from it more deeply. Let’s learn from history rather than endlessly learn things anew. Let’s stop thinking we’re so clever for thinking thoughts that others have thought decades before us and knuckle down the real challenge of creating environments where good design can thrive. A challenge that hasn’t, and probably won’t soon, go away.
If I had to hire someone based on one trait, it’d be curiosity. Curious people ask the “How…” “Why?” and (most importantly!) “Why not…?” questions. This desire to learn and make sense of the world is what leads someone to see what others haven’t— whether it’s seeing the unseen things that are broken or new opportunities yet to be shown. Sure, once a subject is understood, these individuals get bored easily and move on to the Next Big Thing. But while they’re learning, they are the passionate student that every teacher desires, devouring every bit of information and giving themselves over to this new endeavor. Add to this the wealth of experiences the curious mind has accumulated, and you have a candidate who stands out from the rest.
Know the tools available to you, their strengths, weaknesses, and what they are designed for. Do not reject a tool because it’s not hip, or popular (or, too popular). If it fits the task at hand, use it, and spend the time you save developing something awesome.
My thought this month is not mine, but it belongs to Satwant Singh Kaleka, one of the six victims of the tragedy at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin on the 5th August, who tried to stop the gunman. His son remembers his father saying:
‘You make a living by what you make, but you make a life by what you give.’
Don’t compromise professionally because something feels “safe”—for example, by taking a job that doesn’t fit or doing work that you don’t particularly like to do. If the fit isn’t there, trust that something even better is coming, and probably sooner rather than later. Stay true to yourself and your vision for yourself.
Also, trust that what may seem like a “missed” opportunity is probably just a different opportunity in disguise. You never know what is happening in the grand scheme of things in your life—what may feel like a huge disappointment you’ll probably realize is a blessing later. A seemingly promising path that looks like it stops at a dead end can be the foundation for pointing you in a direction that you hadn’t considered before.
In essence: Trust and follow your vision—it wants you as much as you want it. Listen to your gut. Stay positive and stay open.
We’ve been coming to this part of the south of France for a decade now. We stay in the same cottage every year, eat in the same restaurants, do the same things. It’s less like coming on holiday and more like coming to live in France for three weeks.
Some things are bound to change over ten years. We’ve seen cheap flights to local airports like Carcassonne and Perpignan come and go. We’ve seen the number of British license plates and English voices increase. Getting online has gotten easier too.
There’s no phone or TV and no broadband here, so for the first few years, getting online meant driving to an ‘internet cafe’ in a city twenty miles away. It was inconvenient, so it made disconnecting from life easy. That made our place even more of a sanctuary.
When McDonald’s opened up on the outskirts of Narbonne, it became tempting to ‘nip in’ after stocking up at the supermarket. Then, the cafe in our nearest town, just ten minutes away, installed free wi-fi. (It’s where I am now, writing this for you.) Now I have to resist the temptation to log on, check email, update feeds, and read tweets when I buy my morning bread.
We’d been coming here for years before the iPhone and for years after that, data roaming connectivity was expensive. This year, my carrier made logging on affordable, and I’ve now got the added temptation of connecting from my garden.
I’ve found resisting hard, but I’m determined not to let the ubiquity of connectivity invade my peaceful place in the sun.
Everything is designed. Every single thing. Once you get that idea in your head, it’s a hard one to get out. We see the world differently once we make that connection. We think about the decisions that led to the object we’re admiring or scrutinising. Who was it who decided the width of a mug handle? The diameter of the mug itself? Who decided on the material used to produce the mug? Was it cheaper than a superior alternative? All these questions and more apply to everything we see around us. The depth of a plank of wood. The particular shade of yellow on a PostIt. The length of a descender on a lowercase ‘p’.
Even things out of our hands. The veins in the leaves on a tree. The color of our skies. The molecular structure of oxygen. I’m not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but I find the idea that those things happened by chance quite an uncomfortable one. There’s some comfort in the thought that a person made the decisions about these things. We live in a man-made world. A designed world. Nature—it would appear—designed itself, mostly. I digress.
Every choice we make—or more importantly, don’t actively make—is reflected in our work in a big way, for potentially years to come. People will see the work you produce and spend hours pondering over why you chose to use a particular color. I know because I am that person. You probably are as well. This reminds me of some very wise words from the Eames’ office—The details are not the details. They are the design.
We must remain mindful of our decisions. We must question our decisions, and the decisions of others, in order to innovate, reinvent, and make better. We must encourage others to do the same—not just fellow designers but those we encounter every day—friends and family. The old and young, blind and deaf, and everyone in between. You work for them. They are your audience. Delight them. Impress them. Above all, make their lives better. That’s what we do. We make better. We design.
Last time we met, I talked about the question, “What’s your favorite website”. I suppose it’s only fair if I share mine.
For a long time running it was Flickr. The interface is easy to understand. Subtle interactions let you edit a photo without interrupting the work flow. The copy was friendly and inviting. I still love Flickr, but recently I’ve become in total like with Tumblr.
I first tried Tumblr in 2008. And then again in 2009. And then, why not, in 2011. As you can see: http://jennlukas.tumblr.com/archive, I wasn’t too sold.
Recently though, two things happened. The first, I witnessed the customization possibilities when my buds and I over at the The Nerdary moved our site over to Tumblr.
Secondly, I like many of us lovers of the internet, occasionally come up with a smart (or really dumb) idea for a site that seems really funny and/or clever at the moment, but I’m always road blocked by the task of developing a full site. I decided that mocking the show Game of Thrones was more important than custom design and code. So using Tumblr, I had a site that made my coworkers laugh up in 5 minutes.
Giving people the ability to create and publish quickly while also allowing them to customize that content to the depths they wish with ease is not an easy feat. Tumblr allows computer users of all varying skill levels to be authors of the web and that really, really rules.
It is summer. We get about a week of actual summer here in the UK, a brief glimpse of what it must be like to live somewhere hot and sunny and then the clouds roll in again, and the rain starts.
This year we also have the Olympics. The rowing events happen just down the road from where I live and work, at Eton Dorney. I don’t have tickets, as they are like gold dust, but the coverage on TV is impressive—we cycled up there a week before the event started to see the huge towers they have erected for the world’s longest ever Sky Cam system.
Even if it rains I still enjoy the longer summer days as I like to be able to run before or after work while it is still daylight. I’m a fairly recent convert to participating in sport. I’m an ex-dancer so I didn’t really do much sport at school, however in the last few years I have discovered running and now run half marathons. I started by doing the Couch 2 5K Program, and once I could run 5K joined a running group, the ladies there encouraging me to work up to the half marathon distance. This year I decided to join the local athletics club. There they have runners who frequently come in first in local races—to me these were the serious, “proper” runners. I was pretty nervous going along to my first ever track session.
I didn’t need to worry. As someone who has come to running fairly late, and with a stack of injuries working against me, I’m never going to be anywhere near the fastest person there. It doesn’t matter. They met me where I was. My starting point was my level of fitness and ability when I walked through the door, my achievements at chipping a little bit off my times are noted. I don’t feel like a second class member, or compared negatively to those who actually win races.
Back to the day job. I spend quite a lot of time supporting users of our CMS product, Perch. Our customers range from our peers in the industry, to people who are just starting in web design. Including those who can’t even really write HTML as they have been using some software to generate their HTML pages. Many of the support tickets we see raised have little to do with our product and everything to do with a lack of knowledge of HTML, or the fundamentals of how the web works.
I’m sometimes asked whether it is really frustrating dealing with customers who don’t understand HTML and CSS, and yes, sometimes it is. It would be a lot easier if everyone had 10+ years of experience and cared deeply about web standards, but they don’t. We have to meet people where they are. We have to understand what they are trying to achieve and try and steer them towards the best solution for them. Should we demand that every person building a site as a hobby understands the finer points of best practice? I suggest not, the web has always enabled people to create, and I would hate that to change. Should we pour scorn on the student who has been taught outdated practice at their college and now is having to unlearn all of that to progress in their web career? I don’t think so, but have seen it happen.
Many people will be inspired by the Olympics to get active. I hope they all find local clubs and gyms full of people willing to meet them where they are and help them to achieve their goals. Even if they will always be in the back half of the field come race day. Achievement in sport for most of us is not about being better than everyone else, it is about being a bit better than we were last time.
Likewise I hope we, the community of experienced web designers and developers, remember that some people are beginners, some have been taught incorrectly, and others are just having fun building sites as a hobby. That those things that seem obvious to us can be baffling to someone who hasn’t had the benefit of years in the industry, or great people to work closely with. When we meet people where they are, helping them is far less frustrating, and we can support and encourage them as they go on to achieve more than they realised they could.
You know that thing where you’ve carefully crafted your markup, the content is well written, etc. Then the day before go live you hear “I don’t like x, change it.” It’s from the chief exec of said large corporation that you have no access to to explain the user journeys or rationale and nor does your client. Yeah that.
In any industry, standards are vital, and the Web industry is no different.
After the dark days of the browser Wars, in which Microsoft and Netscape competed on adding ever more proprietary whizz-bangs to lock developers in – ahem, more deeply engage developers into their eco-systems, I mean – we’re in an age when all browser and tool vendors compete to tell you how great their standards support is. And this is A Good Thing™.
As Bismarck never said “Laws are like sausages. You should never see them being made” and the same is true of standards. There are many ways to make a standard – some more palatable than others.
Some things are defacto standards – GIF, JPG, webM, h264. Others, like JavaScript (more accurately, ECMAscript) are made by a committee in a smoky room – in the case of ECMAscript, a group with the sinister name of TC39.
Others are retrospectively standardised at the end of their evolution from proprietary whizzbang to defacto standard to real standard. Examples of this are some of Microsoft’s best gifts to the Web: XMLHttpRequest (XHR) which powers almost all Ajax-driven sites, innerHTML and contentEditable.
Another example, this time from Apple, is <canvas> – invented for Apple’s dashboard widgets, liked by everyone and so reverse-engineered and improved by Mozilla, reverse-engineered and implemented by Opera, reverse-engineered and specified by Ian Hickson as part of the HTML5 effort. When Microsoft wanted to implement it, they didn’t have to waste hundreds or thousands of man-hours reverse engineering, with its stupid waste of time and potential to introduce interoperability-damaging bugs: they just picked up the spec and implemented what it said.
But as the editor of HTML5, Ian Hickson, said of <canvas>, “The real solution is to bring these proposals to the table, get some consensus between the relevant vendors and other interested parties, and then use that.”
The best kind of standards process involves as many competitor stakeholders as possible going completely crazy:
sharing ideas
trying out ideas in their own labs and sharing results
discussing openly
compromising where necessary to achieve concensus
implementing what has been specified.
This is how the HTML5 effort has worked. Anne van Kesteren described it:
We developed HTML in the open, taking input from anyone, and pretty much from anywhere (mostly tracking blogs back in the day). Until that point HTML was by and large developed by a committee in private meetings.
But the collegiate, co-operative, productive working environment that bloomed so encouragingly seems to be withering.
More and more, we see different companies seeking to solve similar problems secretly, and without discussion. This is why we have many formats for packaged/installable Web applications. Of course, each company promises that it will eventually standardise its solution to the problem, leading to a proliferation of “standards”.
Trying stuff out (perhaps with vendor prefixes) and reporting back is a vital part if standardisation. But presenting whole new features as a fait accompli, and encouraging their use by developers on the open Web loses discussion, the sharing of ideas and results from the process. The end-result loses ease for developers and, ultimately, interoperability for consumers – you know, the great unwashed that we actually make Websites for.
Tossing a specification that you’ve written in-house, in secret and already implemented onto a table at W3C, saying “here, standardise this” as you saunter past isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card for proprietary misdemeanours. And it isn’t standardisation.
Having just signed off the biggest print run I have ever commissioned I realised how lucky we are in the web world—unlike other mediums we can constantly tweak, update and improve based upon new standards, ideas and our own learning. Right—back to checking that proof for typos (again).
The cult of busyness consumes many of us. To get better at what you do, or to create anything meaningful, you need to build in time away from the computer. No email, no texting, no Twitter, no Facebook. Decompress. Read. Walk. Run. Do anything but look at a screen. Allow yourself to experience boredom, if only for a little while. Opening up mental space is what allows new ideas to creep in and take root.
For the past few years, my office has consisted of a laptop, a cat, and not a few cups of coffee. As a dyed-in-the-wool hermit, this works remarkably well for me: I can use IM, Twitter, my phone, and text messages to bring other people into my tiny little room of a world, and I’m continually thankful (and not a little amazed) at how virtual I’m allowed to be in my work.
At the moment, however, I’m sitting in a studio looking out over a beautiful river, visiting another city for some meetings. I’m reminded that there’s no substitute for working side-by-side with talented people, turning your work around to get a quick reaction. At the end of the day, I’ll always yearn for that quiet, tiny little office, but sometimes breaking out of your routine—even if only a little—can be pretty powerful.
Each new app kickstarts the race to state an opinion. By the end of the day, the app has been hailed as the dizzying future or decried as a #fail-hashtagged folly. Entire industries have been deemed moribund or reinvigorated, and life will never be the same again.
First impressions are valuable, but they’re unreliable, too easily seduced by visceral tricks: appearances, implications, promises. Products should be experienced over time, with context, sobriety, and occasional tipsiness. Only once a product has started to wear a groove in our lives can we genuinely claim to understand what it means.
I get writer’s block fairly often. In fact, as I’m writing this, I have writer’s block. I’ve been thinking about this pastry box contribution for over a month and … nothing.
I’ve tried all the tips for overcoming writer’s block, from doing writing exercises to keeping self-imposed deadlines. They don’t typically work for me. I’ve tried shifting focus to something else, listening to music, reading, pretty much anything. Nope, that usually doesn’t work either.
To be honest, I don’t know what “works” other than time and, for me, playing the mental game of figuring out the source of my block. And sometimes, when the deadline is looming, the only thing to do is write something, anything, and move on. Thanks for reading my something ;)
I’m feeling reflective this morning and no it’s not the silver jump suit I just happen to be wearing.
I’ve been wondering how I’ve arrived at where I am at this point in my life. In part, I have to attribute some of my success to the people that went before as there are some very clever people around involved in this “web design business”. Where would we be without them?
A number of them give their time, energy and commitment for free or often for little reward.
They’ve spent hours squashing bugs, fixing layouts, documenting problems, raising standards or just helping out lesser mortals when they can. It’s this selfless but driven approach that makes this “web community” an interesting community to be a part of and helps us all to raise the barriers that we set for ourselves.
We can all be taller if we stand on the shoulders of giants, and I just wanted to say thanks to all of you that have taught me so much.
One of my favourite books is a tiny slender volume called ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ by James Webb Young. The book is actually targeted towards people in advertising, but has a lot of relevance for anyone who is involved in creative problem solving.
I think it’s a particularly good summertime read for anyone who is looking for a good excuse to get out of the office and enjoy some good weather or the good things that people tend to do when the weather is fine.
In the book the author tells us that ideas are made up of a combination of old elements—usually an element which is specific to our problem area and another idea which is general.
We’re usually pretty good at gathering specific ideas as we sit glued to Twitter, reading each other’s blogs, our ears finely attuned to the industry echo chamber.
What we’re often not so good at is the ideas that are more general. But this is what summer is great for. General ideas come from the rest of life. From being out and in that life, engaging with it, being interested in it, exploring things that have absolutely no relevance to our work or the problem space we’re exploring.
The author says:
Every good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested—from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow, no browsing, no milk.
Make it your mission this summer (and beyond) to get out into the world and to browse widely and interestedly in things that you’ve never paid attention to before. That have nothing to do with the internet, with your profession. Fill your mind with diverse experiences and engage with them fully.
And don’t try to turn these new experiences into solutions or creative ideas on the fly. Let them settle. When describing the ‘mental digestive process’ James Webb Young also confirms that time not thinking about the problem is essential. He advises that we ‘drop the entire subject and put the idea out of your mind as completely as possible’, to ‘turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.’
Almost always the best solutions to complicated problems come to us when we’re away from our desk. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the shower, sometimes midway through a run.
We need to be more disciplined about giving problems a proper diet of new and diverse experience, and then giving them space to roll over in our mind, to find new combinations and for interesting ideas to emerge.
We need to be more disciplined about giving ourselves a break.
So, get started this summer—step away from your desk, go out and indulge in the rest of life and know that, as you do it, you’re also making yourself better at your work. And enjoy yourself while you let your unconscious mind do its thing.
(With apologies to Southern Hemisphere readers and those in the UK assuming the weather will have turned bad again by the time this is published)
The best systems are built by people who can accept that no-one will ever know how hard it was to do, and who therefore don’t seek validation by explaining to everyone how hard it was to do.
Music has been an important part of my life since my teenage years; first as a listener, then as a creator (a hobby I still entertain for a few weeks a year), and then as an insider within the music industry: my first ‘proper’ job was Junior Designer for EMI Records and after two years with the company I moved to indie label Sanctuary Records, again as an in-house web designer. So I like to think that I’m able to watch the industry develop from virtually every standpoint without too much bias for any one side: listener, creator, publisher.
Given the developments in digital music distribution in recent years, my interest in the industry also blends with my appreciation for the web and cloud-based apps. I was an early user of Spotify and jumped onto Rdio when it finally found its way to the UK a couple of months ago. However, my eagerness to embrace this new method of consumption is somehow at odds with my more traditional desire to ‘own’ music. That desire most definitely comes from my designer’s mind: the part of me that loves elaborately packaged box-sets, well-designed inlay booklets, and the simple pleasure of looking at music on a shelf and thinking, ‘this is my music. This is who I am.’ That’s what caused me to convert to digital pretty late in the game and it’s why I still hang on to a relatively large collection of unplayed CDs in a box under my desk.
This ownership conundrum — and it is very much a conundrum when you appreciate digital’s negative effects for artists and labels — is something that’s plagued many music fans, but it is of course something that can be overcome. Just as we became accustomed to playing digital files through iTunes, we can now come round to the idea that renting — rather then owning — music actually makes a lot more sense in the vast majority of scenarios. Finally, I’m listening to most of my new finds via Spotify or Rdio, rather than downloading them to keep.
But there’s still a problem in this equation. Still something that doesn’t quite sit right. Because although our habits might move towards streaming media as we decide that renting isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the concept of ownership isn’t just about desire; sometimes it’s about need.
There are two scenarios that brought me to this conclusion.
The first is my own taste: I like a lot of obscure electronic music on small labels that simply don’t have a presence on streaming services like Spotify or Rdio, whether that’s by choice (because they see such meagre revenue from those models) or by exclusion (for operating in such a niche market). So for the majority of the stuff that gets pushed by the excellent Boomkat in their weekly newsletter, I’ll buy it directly from them and own the downloadable files (as much as anyone can own anything digital, of course). As a consumer I don’t particularly mind where my money goes — ownership or rental — but the key thing is that in many cases, there’s simply no choice. I buy it because it’s the only way I can hear it. (Note, even illegal acquisition of these files would result in ownership.)
The second scenario is the ‘personal’ music I have in my collection. Some of my friends are signed to small labels that aren’t on the streaming services (see above), but more importantly I own digital files of their music that will never be on those services. Some are old recordings taken from self-released CDRs; some are songs from bands who have long since disbanded to get proper jobs; some are my own songs. So if I want to throw some demos for my new EP on my iPod to see how they sound in a different environment, I need an app such as iTunes to handle those files — the streaming services will never, ever enter into that scenario.
And this, I realised the other day, is why we can never completely move over to Spotify or Rdio or Pandora or whatever. Perhaps iTunes Match is a step towards something more unified — because at least I can upload my obscure MP3s to the cloud — but the whole service is still based around the concept of ownership, and that seems like having one foot in the past.
What we need is something in between.
Quite some time ago, Spotify tried to kill off our iTunes dependency by integrating ‘local files’ into the app. In my opinion, the implementation was poor, but the idea itself was solid: use the UI to merge the user’s ‘owned’ local files the service’s ‘rented’ streaming files. Having already experimented with the idea once, they’re well placed to make a more refined attempt; perhaps better placed than Rdio, who have yet to touch on local files. But the company with the most potential to do something in this arena is Apple. Rumours have bubbled up — and then fizzed away — about a potential streaming service from Apple, and although it’s widely regarded to seem unlikely, it would make perfect sense: Apple’s relationships with the labels are tight; iTunes Match is already an attempt (although buggy) to represent local files in the cloud; and iTunes itself — in desperate need of a makeover — is the familiar face users trust. That trust is waning as the app shows its age and the likes of Spotify and Rdio gain users, but if Apple acts soon, a new iTunes — or more specifically, a new model — could very well change the way we simultaneously own and rent music.
[These are thoughts I’ve spewed out over half an hour. I expect I’ll refine them and re-publish on my blog soon.]
For the last several decades, we’ve created varieties of the same CRUD tool. Whether it’s writing a Word doc, posting to Facebook, or checking in with FourSquare, these are all tools for Creating (and Reading, Updating, Deleting) information. Add to this all the ways to passively collect data—your mobile phone alone collects more than 700 points of data per day—and we’ve got a curious situation: Too much information and no good way to make sense of it all. We need new tools for understanding this information. Tools that let us explore, evaluate, and synthesize information. Tools that support cognitively complex activities.
When people ask me about “what’s next in design?” I think about this problem of too much information. New planets are discovered nearly every week, it seems, while back on Earth companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do with all their customer data. We have scientists looking for patterns in strands of DNA. From cinematography to medicine, we’re getting sharper details—what used to be a few x-rays on a lightbox is now a terrabyte of data mapping your entire body. Add to this the growing number of people monitoring their own health patterns, social interactions, and all sort of minutia, and we’ve got some thrilling challenges waiting for us! How are we going to help turn information into understanding?
I favor visualizations as a way to make sense of it all, if only for the reason that our sense of vision is the most highly evolved sensory organ, capable of picking out minute differences in detail. Much has been written about the power images and pictures to aid in understanding. But there’s more to come than infographics and data visualizations displayed on a screen. Consider how coupled interaction is with thinking. We don’t necessarily think and then do. We also think through doing. When you hold a chess piece in mid-air, considering possible moves, the board has become part of your thinking space. You are using the chess board to extend beyond the limitations of your short-term, working memory. In this way, the environment outside of our bodies helps us to think and understand. Karl Fast says it best: “the problem space is now partly in the head and partly in the world, with interaction linking and blending these two spaces together.” By interacting with this external representation we have the potential to learn more deeply and to see more options, as with the chess player evaluating possible outcomes. This is partly why I favor interactive visualization. But what happens when interactions involve far more than a simple mouse click or tap of the finger? What happens when communication, movement, motion, position and other forms of interaction become part of the designers toolbox? That, for me, is a thrilling future. New forms of interaction helping us make sense of the world around us… CRUD tools, and to be fair, tools for sorting, filtering and searching content, are going to seem crude when compared to whatever comes next!
Many times, I’ve encountered individuals with fantastic ideas. However, when pressed for code or more detail, I’ll get the answer, “I don’t have time right now.” And yet, the expectation is that somebody will take that idea and run with it.
A few times, I’ve taken up such challenges—and in almost all cases I’ve regretted it, because once implemented, the person with the original idea will come back and say it doesn’t match their expectations. In the world of open source, such criticism is often very public, and generally damaging to the projects and people behind them.
So now, my mantra is: an idea does not have merit unless there is effort behind it: effort to provide a detailed explanation of how you envision it, effort to provide a prototype detailing the idea, effort to test the work others have done to implement your idea. Anybody can spit out ideas, but it takes effort to make those ideas a reality, and that effort should be valuable enough to warrant effort on your part as well.
For a while I’ve been thinking conferences should start introducing shorter talks, so I was quite pleased when Christian Heilmann posted his most recent article “A Call For Shorter Talks”. Christian lists all the reasons I think less is more, including the audience’s short attention span and the need for the speaker to focus his or her talk into a more consise topic. Being someone who is often sitting amongst the audience and some times speaking, I would certainly welcome more 20-minute talks to the detriment of the common 1-hour ones.
Before you start complaining about what you don’t like in CSS, HTML or JavaScript, ask yourself: How would I do it better? Sometimes, the things that bother us are just unavoidably subpar solutions to very hard problems. It sounds obvious, but many people I’ve spoken with get a completely new perspective when they ask themselves this question. Also, there are many other factors affecting design choices, beyond syntactical elegance and ease of understanding. For example, making implementations easier, maintaining backwards compatibility or matching what browsers already do. Sometimes that “obvious better solution” is just not possible in practice.
I spoke earlier about managing information overload to encourage self-referral and breaking the cycle of delayed gratification. The two factors of being other-referential and never allowing yourself to get what you want often add up to create a pernicious compulsion to constantly and relentlessly produce. Sometimes we’re just built this way, but sometimes…well, we may unconsciously be so driven because that seems to be what all of our peers are doing and we want to fit in and keep up with the Jones. One of the results from this cycle? Once we achieve something, we don’t celebrate it, always focusing on the next thing.
What’s the big deal? For me, when I don’t acknowledge an accomplishment, it feels like I didn’t even do it. Like all of that time and hard work I put into it didn’t even happen. And that’s a crappy feeling. And why would I want to keep going after big goals and put tons of time, energy and effort towards them where instead of feeling like “teh awesomesauce” afterwards, I feel like a loser? In contrast, when I’ve made a bigger deal of giving myself credit for achieving a goal, it feels great and I want to tackle even more.
Here’s an example from my own life: when my book came out in April 2010, the silence was deafening. I’m not talking about from external sources, but from myself. I threw no party, I made no big post on Facebook. I think I tweeted a few times, but other than that, NOTHING. Oh, I told folks that I would have a reading of some sort, I said I would have people over for a party with a book signing. But I didn’t – at all. I was already so busy running after the next big goal of preparing for my first international speaking gig at FOWD London, that the fact that there were actual physical copies of a book that I had spent 8 months of my life pouring my heart and soul into out in the world was swept under the rug. My celebration of having accomplished one of my life’s Big Goals of being a published author consisted of a few clicks of a digital camera, a couple of tweets, and a buried blog post.
Clearly, I need to work on celebrating my own successes, whatever I determine a success to be. I have a habit of constantly raising the bar for myself, setting my sights ever farther, and changing the set of criteria of when I can finally call myself successful. But I’m looking to change that for myself, and this is how I intend to do it:
I’m starting to plan how I will acknowledge the success of a goal in advance of finishing it and make a pact with myself that I will truly celebrate it. This means putting it in the calendar and everything.
Lately, I’ve been gathering up all of my accomplishments in one place (part of the process of revamping my website, actually), which has been a great reminder of all of the things I have done over the course of my career. I’m contemplating also making a collage poster out of the items I am proudest of to have a physical reminder I can look at regularly.
I’m also considering having one or several success buddies to share successes with. Part of the setup will be that we remind each other of any successes forgotten or overlooked.
I’m also practicing more mindfulness and being present and reminding myself that the accomplishment is happening NOW. The stuff that I want/need to do for the next thing is in the future. I’ll get to it when it is time.
Ours is an age of cultural cannibalism. We have rather suddenly gained very convenient access to nearly the whole of human history’s significant creative output, and we are remixing it with careless abandon. We have introduced The Beatles to Jay-Z, Jane Austen to George Romero, and Abraham Lincoln to Bram Stoker. If something gets a modicum of attention online, it can count on being Photoshopped, captioned, auto-tuned, GIF’ed, pickled, bronzed, or arranged for ukulele and woodwinds a thousand times over before its originator has even had breakfast.
I don’t mean to dismiss this phenomenon out of hand. Every creative genius who ever lived was part of a continuum, standing on the shoulders of those who came before. And for every ten thousand tired Tumblogs devoted to recontextualizing Nicolas Cage film stills, there is one transcendent, visionary work like Paul’s Boutique. But regardless of remix culture’s inventive potential, I worry a little about the day the remixers noticeably outnumber the mixers. And it’s hard not to wonder if that day is coming.
Here in the UK, summer has been cancelled and we’re awaiting the hoards for the Olympics in a couple of weeks. It struck me that it’s the perfect time to take a break—and I mean a real one—and escape the slightly disappointing condition of the climate here. Which is exactly what I did, and just got back from my first trip to a foreign land in a long while that didn’t involve also intending a conference. And it was great—I feel refreshed, focussed and significantly more enthused about the work I was doing before I left.
I think those of us who are enthusiastic about our jobs, and consider ourselves “lifestyle nerds” rarely stop and do something unrelated to our work, often spending free time reading on-topic, at conferences, or working on side projects. We tend to consider just “not being in the office” as enough, and consider that alone to be the same as taking abreak.
So, other than gloating about being away, my recommendation is to go outside and forget about the internet. It’ll still be here when you get back.
When I was a kid we had a Sega Mega Drive (or, Genesis as it’s known in the US). I recall how a lot of the games I played, and a lot of the games I remember most affectionately, were acquired with some degree of fluke.
Sensible Soccer (originally on the Amiga) was probably the single best game I owned on that console. It was supremely fun, and no game since has captured football in quite the same way. The simple graphics left so much of the game to your imagination, whilst responding subtly to inputs that let you realise pretty much everything you wanted to imagine. Tiny, cute little sprites performed their crude movements at just the right pace to inspire an imagination running free.
Sensible Soccer remains the game that I’m desperate to acquire for the Genesis at Twitter HQ (if you have a copy, we should talk,) but the point is that a 20 year love affair with a video game started by chance, by seeing this game on a shelf, with well-designed box art, with only an inkling of reputation, without knowing for sure what it was all about. Then buying it anyway and living happily ever after.
When we first got Internet access at home and I started using Instant Messaging networks, I used Microsoft’s MSN Messenger. Actually, I used ICQ first, but since I’m not that old, and I tagged on off the back on the Quake 2 gaming scene, I was in only just before the service fell out of favour. MSNM seemed worse in so many ways, and I hated the cutesy emoticons, but I used it because my friends did. No other reason. There was no assessment of function verses ICQ or AIM, it was use MSN or don’t talk to friends online at all.
Some choices we make based on informed quality. When we can, we choose an Apple computer over a Windows OEM because it’s a better made tool on which to run better designed software. We choose furniture made from solid wood rather than veneered chipboard. We research and assess our options, weigh costs, and concluded that one product will last longer and prove better value that another, along with whatever other criteria we hold.
Other times we make inevitable choices based on local ubiquity. We have Facebook accounts because a terminal number of people now expect you to access their up-to-date contact information from a profile they keep updated, rather than sending you an explicit notification every time. Also, because we’ve hit our late twenties and the friends you left behind in England have started having babies and stuff.
Finally there are the choices that we barely make at all. There are the accidents. There are the times you discover some place, or website, or service, or game and for whatever reason you go with it. You want to play chess against your Dad and you just search for it and you pick the third result. Some subtle combination of aesthetics and emotion takes you over the top and now you’re using a service that you knew nothing about, but it’s working for you, and might even grow into a very important piece of your life.
Now we’re all grown up. The things that we build have the chance to be beloved, cherished discoveries for someone new. No matter the scale of your success, it’s going to matter to someone. Make it count.
We talk a lot about work-life balance, but I wonder how many of us truly achieve it? I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, desperate to figure out how I have over-extended myself work-wise to the point that I’m constantly disappointing editors by being late, not getting tasks done on time, and basically just losing my once-powerful grip over the thing I always did well: Work.
Is it aging that has made me this way? Discouragement with the dramas of our industry—the technology wars, the fragmentation of aonce-clear vision of what The Web was meant to and could become—could these things be in my way? Or is it that I just haven’t stopped to give myself a chance to have a life and life is calling to me now—but I have yet to reconcile the relationship and remain stuck, or moving toward that desired balance at a snail's pace?
Here’s some advice from the heart: There is nothing wrong with giving your life to an ideal. I have done it, and the rewards are rich— friends from all over the world, respect from my peers, to have traveled much of the earth and been made welcome upon it—that is the miraculous part of giving your work your all, it comes back. Just don’t let what happened to me happen to you—the work, the ideal takes over too young and for too long, and you could easily end up childless or without family, with little or no life structure or real measure of how to reconcile this elusive balance.
I know eventually I will reconcile what work/life balance really means for me. This pastry has been baked with love for you—work hard, do beautiful and important work, and make a rich life for yourself in all ways—for that will sustain you through your entire life.
When I decided to work for myself, a part of me envisioned all the extra free time I would have. Two years into it, I definitely don’t have more free time. I’m working harder than I ever have, and I’m involved in more projects than ever before.
I often work long hours. I don’t typically take a traditional weekend off. I sometimes even work holidays. It isn’t exactly what I expected. It’s actually better.
I’m more productive than I’ve ever been with work. I never responded well to a Monday–Friday, 9–5 week. So much of what I do is creative in nature, and sometimes I just can’t force it. Rather than sitting behind a desk, wasting hours feeling frustrated and stagnant, I now get chores done, read a book or go for a walk. And because I work from home, my office is there when the productivity bug strikes.
Not only can I work when I want, I work where I want. Sometimes it’s the local coffee shop. Sometimes it’s the hotel room when I’m at a conference. Sometimes it’s my sister’s house in Charlottesville or my best friend’s condo in Seattle. I have freedom to go where I want and still be responsible for my business.
My days feel more balanced. I wake when I want (or, rather, when the cats want to be fed). I have time to exercise and get outside before I even turn on the computer. I have weekly appointments that I don’t have to book months in advance, because I’m available the middle of the day. I bypass crowded grocery stores because I can hit Trader Joe’s when no one else is there.
No, working for myself, I don’t have more free time. I have more quality of time.
My wife is a dietitian. We were talking about work one evening and she was explaining about how she felt ok upsetting the family of a patient over a course of action because it was for the good of the patient.
It got me thinking about the parallels that can be drawn with our line of work. Consider the family to be our clients and the users, our patients. We have to make decisions for the good of users that might upset the client. The slight difference in our case is that we have to balance business objectives with user needs. Perhaps next time you’re drawn into this kind of discussion with a client you can find similar examples that they can relate to (perhaps in their line of work) to help make your point.
Not sure about you, but I don’t really like emails from people asking if you can Skype or “chat” with them to discuss “a project”, without properly introducing themselves or the project. I try to figure out the company from the domain name of their email address… but usually it’s a Gmail address. I wonder if they really think they’ll get a “yes sure” answer to that. :) It’s pretty basic advice to always properly present yourself so we know who you are. Secondly, give a short description of the project you’d like to discuss. Even better, if you are in the discussion phase, make sure you have well-prepared documents that you can share.
I often get emails from people who would love to “work together” with me or my company, which is great, but some of these emails are really vague. They often end with “let me know if you are interested” without actually offering or presenting anything concrete. They always expect you to “present something”. I don’t want to sound pedantic, but if people approach you like that, than they should not expect you to do their homework, right? It’s like they think you’re doing nothing, just waiting for their email… I believe it’s just a matter of being polite, and efficient. This kind of vague email communication is equal to a pure waste of time since you have to send emails back and forth a couple of times, asking questions etc. just until you might receive the email that you should have had in the first place. So it’s important to be clear and to the point, while introducing yourself and your project via email. Don’t expect people to answer positively if you don’t properly tell who you are or don’t make the effort to properly describe the project, or idea of working together.
I once gave a talk on developing web standards-based mobile apps. A native coder in the audience asked me “How can I protect my source code? ”
“You can’t”, I replied. He was horrified. I don’t know who was more surprised: him, because of my answer, or me because of his reaction to it.
Every desktop browser has included a view-source option, which is odd when you think about it: you cannot view the source of a PDF or a Word document.
The Web has thrived on people viewing source, copying and pasting, then tweaking until they get the page they want. Any number of free scripts (of varying quality) can be found to make Tinkerbell fairies follow your mouse pointer. Freely available shivs and polyfills abound. Great people (like many of those who write for Pastry Box) spend hours of their own time blogging tips and tricks that in other communities might remain jealously guarded competitive advantages.
So the next time you hit upon a clever technique, blog about it. Or if you write some code that could be useful to someone else, put it on Github. Put something back into the community.
It can take less than a decade for a prescient, profound, clever observation to become hackneyed (well worth considering in itself), as it must be said has William Gibson’s observation in just 2003, that “future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”.
I think we as early adopters, tinkerers, hackers, too often recite this with a kind of smugness—yes, the future has a arrived, and I’m living it—you plebs just haven’t grokked it yet.
But just because the future is not evenly distributed, indeed precisely because it is not evenly distributed, it’s not just ours to have and to hold.
Take the “future of money”. We geeks with our squares and stripes and NFCs might think we are living in the future of money. But these are just incremental improvements, making it easy to use government issued currency, backed by banks and credit card companies and the entire traditional economic edifice. It’s not the future, it’s just a slightly more convenient present.
But when we pull our head out of our developed backside, we’ll see systems like M-Pesa, a truly transformative payment system with profound, often unforseen consequences from sub-Saharan Africa to the subcontinent.
M-Pesa reminded me of the story of Keralan fisherman, and the profound and positive transformation in their lives wrought by the introduction of the mobile phone, first brought to my attention by the fantastic Mark Pesce some years ago, and covered at the Economist.
While we too often use the extraordinary capabilities of the technologies that are emerging around us all the time for trivial purposes, elsewhere, these are transforming lives, countries, whole regions.
So maybe instead of focussing on what is happening in the Valley, or the Bay Area, we should be focussing on what is happening in Kenya, Cambodia, and the other places where the future has also unevenly arrived?
Of all the things I’ve learnt over the 12 months I’ve been in my work placement for University, dealing with criticism has been the most valuable.
When I first started, I was producing mediocre designs and mediocre code; very much still finding my feet in design & development. The only thing that has changed in that time is the thickness of my skin. I’ll never forget the day my boss turned to me and told me a mockup I’d done was—in her words—crap. I grinned like an idiot that day.
Similarly, I recently posted a shot on dribbble for a mini-project I was pretty happy with. Out of the blue, a friend told me I could do a lot better. I needed to hear that. All I’d had for a long time was the encouragement of strangers—it was refreshing to have someone (specifically, someone whose opinion I trust) tell me I can do better.
So encourage your colleagues and friends to criticise you. Do it yourself, too. Be honest. You can do better.
Do yourself and the internet a favor: make copies of your data. Platforms and services are born every day. Some die. Some get bought by a company who may or may not care about the quotes you’ve lovingly collected, the check-ins you’ve made, or the photos you’ve taken. Be aware. The web is ephemeral. Things change. Links break. If you care about your data, back it up.
Sustainable design matters even in the digital world. Our raw materials—information, effort, money—may not be mined from the earth, but they’re still in scarce supply. We have a duty to conserve them.
Responsive web design is essentially a sustainable design manifesto, reducing the need for clients to retreat to the drawing board with every new trend, every new device. RWD isn’t about designing for today’s technology: it’s about designing for tomorrow’s.
Predicting the future sounds daunting, but if you scan the horizon you can spot the silhouettes: pervasive high-density displays, increased use of touch and voice, users bouncing between multiple devices. We shouldn’t wait until these issues burst into the mainstream before considering their impact.
So are you making something that will live into the future? Or will your work just contribute to the digital landfill?
With the exception of STDs, things are better when shared. Get making, sharing and contributing to things; it’s the best way to learn and the best way to get yourself out there!
(The simple life in Walnut Grove, skipping home along the lane from school.)
I would never have admitted that at the time, for fear of the kids in school calling me a poof. But, on a Sunday morning I watched Little House on the Prairie week after week after week.
Then something terrible happened.
We went away on a family holiday and when we got back, Mary Ingalls (the pretty, older daughter) had gone blind!
Years went by and while I was at art school, Channel 4 repeated Little House on the Prairie on Sunday mornings. Now in my own rented flat I needn’t worry about being ridiculed, so I watched it again from the beginning, week after week after week.
Then something terrible happened.
I went home for a weekend for a family birthday and when I got back, Mary Ingalls (the pretty, older daughter) had gone blind!
Again!
To this day, despite Wikipedia, despite YouTube, I’ve never discovered how this calamity happened.
We have directed you here because your browser does not support accepted web standards. Or you may have followed a link to this page in order to learn more about upgrading your browser.
What “web standards?”
The ones created by the World Wide Web Consortium – the people who invented the Web itself. The W3C created these standards so the Web would work better for everyone. New browsers, in general, support these standards; old browsers, in general, don’t.
What can I do?
Your choice of software may be out of your hands. However, if you do have control over what software you are using you should consider upgrading your browser. Doing so will improve your web experience, enabling you to use and view sites as their creators intended.
The above text is from the Web Standards Project “Browser Upgrade Campaign” launched in early 2001. Web designers and developers were frustrated that people were not upgrading away from the buggy Netscape 4. To fix this problem, and encouraged by WaSP, designers started putting a message on their sites exhorting people to upgrade or even redirecting them to a page blocking access to the site. A search on Google for some of the above text finds many of these upgrade pages still in existence.
As time has passed most of us have realised that locking people out of sites because we don’t like their browser is not appropriate. However, ever since 2001, our frustrations repeat. Internet Explorer 6 becomes the enemy. An online retailer runs a PR stunt announcing that they would apply a tax to anyone using their store with IE7 due to the cost of supporting these older browsers. 37 Signals announce that people using Internet Explorer in the latest versions of their product will require IE9 or greater.
The better our browsers become the more this frustration looks like the whining of people who forget that not everyone is on a shiny Mac, on a fast net connection with easy access to the latest browsers; who forget that many regular folk do not even know what a browser is. If you are a professional web developer then your job is to deal with legacy browsers, operating systems and devices. That was the case in 2001 and it is still the case now. The faster the pace of new additions to HTML and CSS, then the quicker perfectly capable browsers look out of date due to their lack of support. However as anyone who developed for Netscape 4 will tell you, lack of support is very different from buggy support. We have never had it so good.
Of course supporting and testing in older browsers adds time and effort to our projects. Doing a professional job does take time, effort and thought. I will continue to be led by the real browser stats I check before starting work on a project. The decision as to which browsers I support and the level of support I give them is not an arbitrary one that I make, it is led by data, and is different from project to project.
If you believe that your job is to show off how clever you are with the latest technologies then you will always be frustrated by older browsers. However the web I care about is the web that is for everyone, that enables people to participate, learn and communicate with each other across many different divides. My job is developing for that web, and sometimes that means I have to make technology choices that aren’t quite as fun or interesting to me. That’s a shame, but ultimately I’m not developing these sites for me. By keeping my user in mind I know that the work I do to give them an appropriate level of support is worthwhile.
A little advice for those that freelance or run a design studio. When someone asks you if you’re interested in a project, the answer is “yes” 99% of the time. Don’t decide based on the referrer’s understanding of timeframe, budget, or any of the project requirements. Take the opportunity to talk to the prospective client; give yourself the chance to sell your own terms. After all, if those clients really want to work with you, you never know how flexible they’re willing to be.
“Mobile broke everything,” is how the saying goes. Of course, the old saying was “the web broke everything.” Before that, I’m sure someone was grousing about internal combustion engines, steam power, and/or the wheel.
Nothing ever really breaks, of course.
I mean, really: the web’s still here. But maybe we broke. Or at least, we’re left to rediscover a new way to work. Or maybe an older, better way we’d forgotten. Because, really, I think that’s what mobile truly broke: we’re realizing megabyte-heavy pages don’t cut it on poor connections; busy pages make for poor experiences on smaller screens; progressive enhancement can help us design across an impressively broad spectrum of devices. We’re rediscovering focus. How to do more with a little bit less. Faster frameworks, leaner pages, less cruft.
Which, when you think about it, doesn’t sound broken at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Recently, we've been going through the hiring process at Happy Cog. My fantastic co-worker Chris wrote a bit about some job tips to get in the door. Once in said door, our interview process goes something like: you come in and sit in a room with 8-14 of us and we hang out and yell questions at you while you juggle a tennis ball, a bowling pin and a chain saw.
Okay, so the juggling and yelling part isn't true, but we do love group interviews. During these interviews, we let questions and discussion flow, but some of us have go-to questions that we always ask potential candidates. These range from "why are you looking for a new job?" to "what's your karaoke song?". My go-to:
What's your favorite website?
I absolutely love this question. There is only one answer that I consider a "bad answer" and that is "I don't have one". As people in the web field, how could we not have one? Sure, our definition of "favorite" doesn't have to be the same. Favorite for me could be based on a site with accessible code and favorite for you could be based on the content of a site that makes you laugh.
Either or any way, I think we should be all be able to answer this question and defend our answer. When I ask this, I'm not judging people if they say a social network site or high-fiving them for picking a development tutorial site. I'm looking for someone to be able to feel confident when speaking about the web and what makes a good experience. And if you can keep a straight face while saying http://procatinator.com/ is the greatest site on the Internet because you think their loading interface is easy to understand, then my vote's for a second interview.
In order for you to know your real potential as a designer or a business-person, you need to know your limitations. Constraints are a natural part of everything, technology and personality alike. By choosing to honor your limitations you’ll find that the time you offer to your work, or your family, or your relationships is substantially more potent.
Turn off your phone when you get home. Off. Don't just put it on the counter. Turn it off for a few hours at least each day. Why? So that you’re not always available to others. Be available to yourself. Be available to your family. Then at 8am when you turn your phone back on, you can be fully available and totally present.
Do something analog. I throw pottery, or take long walks. Do something the digital space has no hold on and give your binary brain a break. Play music loud. Drink with your friends and talk about space travel. Do anything but be digital dorks for a few minutes.
The best career move I've ever made, and one of the best decisions of my life overall, was when I stopped designing. I'd never heard of a "frontend developer" (I don't think the term was around yet) but that's what I decided to focus on. Why? I'm a bad, seriously horrible, designer. In the six years since I made that decision I've come to the conclusion that frontend and design come from opposite sides of the brain. You might be able to technically do both, but you won't be great at both.
If we design for humans, then we need to know humans. Good design decisions are helped by research, and access to the latest research of others, like that from the academic world. What we might call intuition is the effervescence of hours of absorbing information, experimenting, and applied curiosity. That’s why it galls me that some of the best research into how humans process information is locked into academic journals. Yes, professional peer review is necessary and useful. Yes, it costs money to review, edit, and publish papers. However, who exactly benefits from the current practice of locking research data and results into walled gardens on the Web behind a paywall?
If our community of Web professionals has demonstrated anything it’s that amateurs can become professionals by participating diligently in the informal peer review system of the empirical Web. By testing ideas and solutions, publishing results openly, and providing review and feedback, we have grown into a profession. The crucial ingredients are the free sharing of knowledge, and our own curiosity. Paywalls retard sharing, and inhibit curiosity. The €208 for the three ‘online only’ issues of the 2012 Information Design Journal are one example of many. If the academic publishing industry had been the de facto route to sharing our experiments I would not be a web designer today. I would simply not have been qualified enough to be published, and would have struggled to find the money to buy the journals holding your research.
So, I urge you to support campaigns like that of Cambridge mathematician, Tim Gowers — documented in an excellent article in The Guardian in April this year — that want to free research from the paywalls of journals.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Their thoughts and work make us better. Set it free!
Contrary to popular belief, the defining characteristic of a good professional, in any discipline, is not the ability to blurt out good ideas off the top of their head. It’s perseverance and not being easily satisfied. Where the others would stop, they keep going. For example, when writing CSS, they won’t stop after they’ve achieved a certain style. They will also try to make it more flexible, more maintainable, simpler. Next week, try this: When you’re about to give up and proclaim that something is “done”, try to spend five more minutes on the task, thinking how you can improve it further, how to make it more elegant. I think it will help you be much more satisfied and proud of your work.
A conversation I had with Dan recently left some thoughts in my head regarding the consumption of web content. Whilst we have the ability to offer our content in text, image, audio, video or other interactive mediums, are we doing our best to exploit that opportunity and why do we not offer users more choice?
Let me illustrate this for you taking a common four device approach. Imagine I want to ‘consume’ a news article. I might want to listen to that article on my phone, read it on my tablet or Kindle, read, watch, listen or interact on my desktop and finally, watch it on my TV.
It seems natural then that sites should learn and store my preferences for content consumption, according to my contexts (time, date, location, device, mood, activity, etc). That’s not to say I wouldn’t be able to consume it in any other way if I chose to, but I would be receiving personalised service that learned with me and my habits and served me content appropriate to the device that I wish to consume it on.
What if there was a way we could collect disparate pieces of information: blog posts, news articles, videos, tweets, comments, etc. and collectively annotate them? We have blogs now, but the concept of annotation hasn’t been widely realized. There has got to be a better, more visual, semantic way to display this kind of information, reflection, and conversation. I’m most interested in how we document and collect our thoughts publicly and collaboratively. Imagine the learning that could take place.
As information is torn free of its moorings, and people expect services to straddle countless devices, we'll see a rise in the value of good, old-fashioned information architecture. Context, structure, content, and metadata have become key issues for every designer. Information architects, much maligned over the last five years, can surely allow themselves a wry smile.
I don’t always have the pleasure of working on projects where I get a chance to learn something new. This isn’t tied to freelancing. I remember it was like that with every single one of my previous employers. It’s just a simple truth that not every project is innovative or challenging.
That doesn’t diminish my desire to learn. In fact, it probably makes me more inclined to try a new technique or software, if only to stimulate my creativity. But if the project doesn’t require it, I find it hard to justify a higher project cost or longer timeline just so I can learn something new.
This is why I write. This is why I co-host EE Podcast. This is why I give presentations.
Whether it was writing for my blog, a publication or even a book, I never started with all the knowledge I ultimately shared. The process of writing is how I learned (and even mastered) subjects. Researching, creating examples, finding ways to convey information simply … this process of teaching someone else teaches me first.
It’s even more true with the EE Podcast. The subjects we cover are frequently those I have little to no experience with, and the guests we interview are far more experienced with ExpressionEngine than I am. And I like it that way. It’s like playing a sport with someone better than you: it makes you better. All the research and prep we do for each episode, combined with the actual interviews, give me at least four dedicated hours a month of focused EE education.
Giving a presentation, too, is a learning experience. Of course assembling the deck and talking points reinforces my knowledge, but it’s the attendees who teach me the most. After presentations, I always get great questions from attendees, and I particularly love the ones I can't answer. These give me a broader perspective of my topic, as well as a reason to learn more about the subject for next time.
All of this, plus my client work, means I’m ridiculously busy most of the time. Yet, for me, it is worth it on so many levels. Writing, podcasting and presenting has helped me build my reputation and are, basically, my main avenues for marketing myself. Sometimes I even get paid for it (woo!). But most of all, I pursue these endeavors as a means to satisfy my personal desire to learn and to do my job better and faster.
I recently was able to see Douglas Crockford speak. He had a fantastic premise: we are flawed beings attempting to create perfect programs for machines. What struck me during the talk was how few developers acknowledge this. We all make mistakes—we may have missed a keystroke because we were distracted by music we were listening to, hunger, or the phone ringing. And yet we all too often relish pointing out flaws in other people’s code, as if we could never be guilty of the same. Perhaps more humility and acceptance are in order in our industry.
Writing on the trip home from TXJStoday, I realise I just gave my first talk in over 18 months and that for the first time I wasn’t scared. I wonder what’s changed? I’d been putting off doing any more speaking mostly through a lack of confidence and a few sub-par panels at SxSW I’d participated in.
Recent conversations with friend, and fellow baker, Rachel Andrew inspired me with her tales of being afraid of speaking, and flying, and just telling herself to not be anymore. Her blog post Public Speaking for the (Formerly) Terrified is a sure read for anyone who has been put off speaking in the past.
The experience this last week was a blast, and I suppose I just want to encourage anyone who has thought of speaking, or tried it and found it uncomfortable, that maybe you should give it another go. I might not have been brilliant, but it turns out that it can actually be enjoyable to share a story about something you care about, which is ultimately the point of getting up on stage in the first place.
We notice the sort of design that demands to be noticed, and make the mistake of proclaiming it to be some kind of “game changer”, glossing over its functional failings in favor of its unique approach to a problem. But the truth is that the game is much more likely to be changed incrementally, by design that doesn’t call attention to itself. When we wake up tomorrow, we won’t be greeted by a new and grand spectacle of human ingenuity. Instead, we’ll fit another tiny, seemingly mundane piece into a puzzle that will never be completed. The people who move things forward are the ones who can see spectacle in slow motion.
Always be explicit in your code. Don’t use margin:0 if you really mean margin-bottom:0. Every time you use shorthand you need to check that it’s not inadvertently setting (or unsetting) another value at the same time.
If you’re a designer and want to endear yourself to a front-end developer, work on a grid. A real grid. Not just some guides you threw together in Photoshop. It doesn’t have to be one of the popular ones, just put your design on an actual grid. It makes our lives, and I’d have to assume yours as well, much easier.
I’ve been thinking about the intersection of ownership, responsibility, and infrastructure in the development of businesses on the web. Users and potential businesses are involved in a difficult balancing act of ownership, obligation, and expectation. Every new service on the web seems to rub up against this at some point, regardless of the funding model. What’s more, I think that if the lessons of this generation of start-ups are clearly understood, start-ups and applications should be able to take a more fearless footing as they grow.
So, here’s the basis of most web applications: You store data, which other people own. Other people create things and combine them with your service, either at point of creation or distribution. What you own is infrastructure; the machines, the principal applications that connect it all together, the interfaces through which people interact with their creations on your service. This infrastructure belong to you. At a basic level you have an obligation to your user to provide them with access to what’s theirs, but it’s all on infrastructure, which you own.
Now, although the data does not belong to you, the operations that aggregate that data, through it being entrusted to your network en mass, do. This is your product. You are entitled to profit from features built on these aggregations, insights and infrastructure.
Consider Rdio, MOG, or Spotify, and consider Last.FM. All are music companies, and all stream music. The first three—at least initially—have core businesses built around streaming alone and have developed infrastructure to that end. But, the product users pay for—the music—belongs to a third party. This makes them vulnerable, since changes from their supplier could cause a sudden imbalance to the entire business.
Last.FM—although also having a streaming component—has a product of its own, in the form of the aggregated, processed, and presented Audioscrobbler listening data of its users, that it serves back to them as a service. The user owns their listening data, the music labels own the music files, and Last.FM owns the entire infrastructure of data analysis, aggregation and presentation (and the iterative uses, such as music recommendations). There is a balance between the service and the user. If the streaming music licenses were pulled tomorrow, there remains a business in the data the user owns and the services Last.FM has built on it.
(Of course, online music is far from the simplest example, since there are so many licensing factors and contracts muddled into it. Rdio and Spotify surely have contractual assurances from labels for some period of time, and are working hard to build out unique aspects of their services as they grow—reviews, libraries, web playback APIs, and nested applications, for example—so please don’t mistake this example as writing them off.)
A well-balanced application doesn’t have to lock data away, and has an understanding with their users about what they give and what they get. In the applications we build, in the businesses we try to found on the web, this balance—or understanding thereof—is what we must strive for from the outset.
But what of APIs? APIs are interesting things. Beyond the raw basics—providing high fidelity data to your users—they enable a specific group of users to grow usage and personal investment in your service, and even define whole new usage patterns. With time, the influence of third-party designs can become de facto, and the core service may be shaped by them.
However, the idea that your service is obligated to third parties is muddied. It’s a relationship, because although ideas developed in the wild can prove essential, they could not succeed in isolation without your infrastructure, collective user-base, and even the adoption of those popular ideas themselves into features that other users come to understand. Everyone needs to understand that; you, as the provider of an API, and any user who chooses to build on top of your infrastructure.
The value of a business on the web comes from broad infrastructure. It’s the things you build that allow people to do more than what they might do in isolation. You provide and support the platforms on which people build new ways to perceive their creations and others. If successful, your business supports your work and yourself because as a whole—you, your users, your backers and advertisers, those who build around your infrastructure—you create a healthy, balanced relationship.
I have worked for myself, either as a freelancer or as part of a small company, as is now the case, for 6 of the last 9 years. Many of us talk about the great advantages of “being your own boss”. How many times have you been in a conversation with someone who says something like “It’s alright for you, you can do what you want when you want!”
For the most part they are right, it’s great working from your favourite coffee shop or on a train whilst you are travelling in the middle of the day to see a friend. However I have to say it’s not without it’s problems.
One of my aims for 2012 was to try and improve the line between work and home, or work and “not work”. My commute is literally seconds so I have put things in place to help. For example every day I get out of the house to take my children to school. It’s a great start to the day, unless it’s raining, and an opportunity to get some time to think. Additionally I decided to take all public holidays as holidays (something I haven’t always done).
So what’s the point of me telling you all this? Well it struck me the other day that I really don’t know how to take a “day off”—remember those? A day to yourself, not a public holiday or a weekend, a day that you mark off in your calendar just for you. I had hoped to book in one or two a quarter but so far it hasn’t happened. The problem is that I love what I do. Work pays the bills, but the web and design fascinate me. Taking a “day off” would likely turn into me checking emails in a coffee shop, reading a blog post or worse, fixing a bug.
I’ve decided that the next day off will be completely un web related. There’s plenty left to discover in and around the area I now live in. Museums, steam railways, great restaurants, river rides and independent cinemas to name but a few.
The funny thing is when you do make the time and do something different you normally come away with a new perspective, an idea for a design influcenced by a coffee shop menu, the solution to that problem that has been annoying you for days. Deep down we know all this but do little about it, I speak from experience. Let’s try it, after all that email will still be there when you get back!
Do you know, specifically, the kind of work you want to be doing? The kind of people you want to be working with? The kind of customers you want to be looking after?
I’m amazed how many people reach out to me when they’re looking for work but, when I ask them, what kind of work are you looking for, I get a blank stare.
Sure, sometimes you might need to take work you’d rather not be doing, but you should always know clearly what you want (even if this changes from time to time).
Same thing goes for my clients. They are often so busy trying to make a sale, or raise some money, they’ve lost their vision. They’ve forgotten the real reason their organisation exists.
Once you have a clear view of what you want to be doing, two things happen:
You see opportunities more quickly and clearly and can pursue them with more focus.
Other people find opportunities for you and create connections for you because they know you’re the person who does that thing.
It’s harder than it sounds, making that decision and communicating it, but it’s well worth the effort.
When someone says “it can’t be done with CSS alone” my first instinct is to try and prove them wrong. I don’t know why I feel like that or indeed why I have to prove myself but that approach has often taught me more about how things really work and even 10 years into CSS I still find new ways of doing things. Many times over the years impossible seeming tasks have been beaten into submission with a little bit of lateral thinking.
I remember when I started in CSS and would read all the tips, tricks and hacks that I could find and then take that advice as gospel. For a couple of years I didn’t question the things I had learned but as I became more proficient I started to realise that some of the things I had learned weren’t quite true and that with a little extra effort and a bit of head scratching many things could be achieved that were previously thought impossible.
Now, when I am confronted with a tricky question or problem I make a point of saying “I can’t do that” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Not everything is possible of course but don’t accept that something isn’t possible until you have tried it for yourself.
Let’s say that you, in fact, liked jam, and that’s exactly what you wanted. Some of us (myself a primary culprit) have lived or are living in the world of “jam every other day” with “today not being any OTHER day”. That is to say, we’ve lived or are living with extreme delayed gratification, to the point where there is no gratification at all, or if it is, it is extremely short-lived and difficult to appreciate.
What are you putting off until it’s “the right time”, such as the project (an article or book to write, app to develop; site, program or company to launch), that you really want to do, something new that you really want to learn, a fun new activity that you really want to try, a new exercise habit, a vacation or trip that you really want to take, the person (or people) that you would like to get to know better/spend more time with or become friends with? What piece or pieces of self-care are you pushing off because “you don’t have time”? In my own life, I can see so many times where “jam to-morrow” just didn’t happen—largely due to my own devices. In contrast, during the instances where I did get, achieve, or manifest what I truly desired, I was in-love with life and all of the possibilities that it had to offer.
So, if it’s “jam every other day” for you like it has been for me so often in my life, here is my recommendation based on what I’m currently learning and putting into practice: start looking at where you can make it “jam today” instead. Right now, I am making an effort to set aside small amounts of time to do the hard work (only because I am out of practice) of feeding my soul, and am trusting that it becomes increasingly easier the more I do it. I’ve already seen that when you give to yourself first, you then are able to give more to the world. And isn’t that what we all came here for anyway?
I'm seeing an increasing rise in people blogging and tweeting in opposition to responsive web design. Some are intelligent discussions about the challenges it poses, but sadly most are simply knee-jerk reactions from frustrated designers and developers who don't get the concept and are angered at the extra time required to work in this new way.
Fixed-widths were always a hack; always a temporary measure. As Andy Clarke said, responsive web design is web design. Attempting to remain in a world of fixed-width layouts is futile, so — please — let's stop trying to come up with half-baked arguments against it.
Originality is a myth. Not one of us can create anything ex nihilo – out of nothing. We all have to be acutely aware of how easy it is to be a stylist rather than a designer, following the latest hot trends or display techniques. But it’s equally important that we are careful not to choose a new design technique because we’re afraid of using a method or design pattern that is tried and true or just simply really well thought out. A great example is rounded corners. Rounded corners can be a style, but before they are a style they are a philosophy. Corners are rounded on physical products so that they are comfortable to hold and handle. An interface can emulate that and make a design easy on the eyes, creating a suspended disbelief in the realism of a digital interface. Don’t round your corners or not round your corners because of a style choice, make a decision based on how you can best serve your audience the content they want.
Service
When we are designing anything we should be asking ourselves how we can best serve the customer or the audience and then use the standard principles of design to execute on that service. Use a grid. Use clear hierarchy. Use color, line, form, and texture. Use space. Use movement. Whatever you use, use it with the intention of serving the people who will use and benefit from the content your design is serving up. If you’re struggling to make a decision with your client or with your team, simply ask each other which decision best provides quality for the customer.
Bourbon
I suggest discussing these topics over the following:
The most poisonous idea in the world is when you’re told that something which achieved success through lots of hard work actually got there just because it was excellent.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend this meeting.
As someone who is paid to create value for this organization, I feel it is my ethical obligation to decline participating in meetings that have neither (a) a stated purpose, nor (b) a clear agenda, as it is well documented and agreed upon by most leadership teams that the absence of this intentional thinking costs companies upwards of billions of dollars every year [insert link to most recent source]. If you wish for me to attend, please send a second invitation with this information clearly stated so I can accurately estimate the value of my attendance.
There's something about how other designers' work can be brashly evaluated in under 140 characters that has been bothering me for a while now. Anyone who knows me agrees I'm not the warmest person; yet, the lack of empathy and the lack of basic politeness leaves me uneasy.
I had the overwhelming honor of speaking at Webshaped in Helsinki this year. I had a fantastic time in a beautiful city, and I was sad to leave. As I waited in the airport, I noticed these huge stickers on the floor:
FINNISH DESIGN
DESIGN GALLERY
I followed them, and sure enough I was led to a big, open room filled with chairs designed by various Finns. Weird, wonderful inventions. “SIT DOWN; SEIZE THE MOMENT” is plastered on the wall. I’m too afraid to actually sit on account of the security guards, so I continue to admire from a safe distance.
At the back of the room is a board filled with the profiles of the designers, as well as headphones dangling from the ceiling. But they weren't headphones at all—they were ear protectors. The idea was to take these ear protectors, go and sit down and just enjoy the deafening silence. It’s wonderful that something like this exists in an airport, or anywhere at all.
I turn around and notice one last thing—hundreds of sticky notes on a far wall. I walk up. They’re from the people who sat and listened to the silence. Tales of their experience. I looked over all the strange messages on the wall, and one in particular stood out to me.
Life is just beautiful.
I told this to a friend and she put it into the words I was struggling to find:
Life has such an awesome way of reminding us of these things. Like it’s rewarding us for paying attention. The most beautiful user-experience.
Put down your phone every once in a while. Always look up. Follow suspicious signs.
Today, I’m taking my nephew to the zoo. We’re going to feed the soulful, friendly giraffes and there are some young lion pups too. My favorite creatures are the anteaters and the huge tortoises. Then we’ll go sit in the aviary and listen to the shrieks of the beautiful, diverse birds in all their colorful glory.
What does this have to do with doing great design work? Getting off the computer and into the world—interacting with the happiness of achild among animals, sounds, smells and rich environments are all part of refreshing ourselves as well as inspiring us through the sensory joy of simply being.
So do yourself a favor this week. Get offline and go do something that’s colorful, smelly, silly and joyous!
My kids are sometimes confused when using the Web to do their homework, as sometimes (often!) two sites will disagree or have conflicting “facts”. It’s a good lesson for them that what we used to call the Information Superhighway is really a communication superhighway.
It’s good for us to remember that, too, as we finesse our design or finesse our APIs: all the design, all the tech is merely a vehicle for communication. That’s what we’re building.
The web makes being a creator easier than ever before. Creators of digital things need no raw materials and no expensive machinery to get started. A computer, an idea, some talent and hard work can turn out a product that makes the lives and businesses of thousands of people better.
Many of the products, services and websites I use in the course of my work are created by individuals and small teams. I didn’t give this a lot of thought until we became a small software vendor with the launch of our product Perch in 2009. When you make a thing that other people use; you really care about your product and the experience people have with it. I can’t stress enough how happy a positive bit of feedback can make you. Equally, a harsh review from a frustrated user can feel devastating.
Armed with this knowledge I try to remember to tell makers when I love their product, rather than just assuming my continued use shows that I am happy. I also try to phrase criticism in a way that is constructive, kind and helpful. We often find that our greatest fans are our toughest critics. They love the product and want us to continue improving it and their suggestions often go into the product. Makers want your feedback as well as your praise.
Have a look at the products and services you use. Which are made by individuals or small teams? Which of them would you really miss if they disappeared? Have you ever dropped the maker a note via email or Twitter to say how much you love using their work? If not, why not do that today?
Remember how cool it was when you first learned how to tween objects in Flash? That’s how I feel about using CSS transitions with hovers. It’s my favorite thing about the web right now, which is why this isn’t the first time I’ve written about it or talked about it . I just can’t seem to get enough of the awesomeness that we are applying to our links. From subtle color changes as seen on the links of Owltastic to more apparent size changes, such as the ones I recently worked on for the Online Music Awards, there are a plethora of enhancements we can add to our styles. When done with the audience in mind, they can add just the right amount of fun and class to your interactions. And don’t we all know if there’s anything the internet needs more of (besides kittens), it’s class.
As might be apparent by now, I try to think a lot about where the web is now, but also where it is going (which really boils down to the question “what is the web anyway?” in a lot of ways).
So I'm always interested in exploring new devices, ways of interacting, both in practice and in theory.
What’s interesting in these conversations is often very experienced technologists think of the web and the browser more or less interchangeably. Which constrains the possibilities of the web as a medium tremendously.
In a similar vein, just as it has been for the last decade or more, indeed since the web transitioned from an academic tool to a more popular medium in the mid 1990s, our focus on what the web is, and might be, is typically almost entirely visual.
Of course this is a fundamental aspect of the web, but the web is not exclusively a visual medium. Nor is it exclusively a human-driven medium. Increasingly our interactions with the web are, and will be, passive (as I discussed in my first Pastrybox entry back in January). Indeed, increasingly it won’t be humans, but our built environment, our buildings and vehicles, the environment itself, that drives the web.
So when you think of the web, when you talk about the web, train yourself to go beyond fonts and colors and responsiveness.
I always find it hard to explain in a practical way how I choose and apply colors in a design. To me it has a lot to do with intuition; a feeling that certain colors go well together and others don’t. It’s a very subjective matter, and who am I to say that, for example, a certain type of soft brown in combo with a flashy red doesn’t work well.
There isn’t a magical formula that explains how to choose the right colors. I’m not a believer in strict rules when it comes down to design, because there is always a lot of grey area in this matter. I think it’s mostly about seeing what works and what doesn’t. Tools like Adobe Kuler, or the colors in my Inspiration Gallery can help in seeing what works together and what doesn’t. It’s something that comes with trial & error. I never know upfront if the colors I have in my mind will work well together. I usually do the test by looking at it from a distance. I enlarge the design, making it as big as possible on my screen, and I step away to look at it from a distance of 3 meters. A lot of times I feel I need to change certain colors, because it didn’t seem to work very well in combination with the other colors. Sometimes it’s just lack of contrast, or it feels as if it’s out of sync with the others. It basically comes down to feeling what looks good, and what doesn’t. Studying how others apply color also helps in becoming better at it.
There’s no reason why anyone should have to wait more than 24 hours for the money you owe them, especially people you work with. So the next time you receive an invoice from a contractor or supplier, pay it right away. Don’t wait a month, a week, a day or even an hour longer than you have to. Better still, find out how to pay them before they start any work. That way you can pay them immediately when you receive their invoice. They’ll feel good and so will you.
Let’s design a car that has square wheels and no windows because it will look really cool. Then let’s put the steering wheel on one side of the car and the foot pedals on the other side of the car. While we’re at it let’s forget to put a door on it so that you can’t actually get in to drive.
Now let’s give the design to the mechanic and tell him to build it.
It’s a sure bet he will tell you where to put your designs in no uncertain terms. Why is it then that designers/clients feel they can take the same approach to building a website? Mysterious unfathomable menus, text too small for the human eye to read and graphics the size of a bus.
I should stick to my guns and tell them to change the design, and although I complain about it at the start, I usually end up coding it much like the client wanted from the start. So the next time you visit a site and can’t work out how to navigate and where the text is too small to read then that will be my fault!
Recently, the internet delighted in petty squabbles between developers over what I’ll generically refer to as ‘technical style.’ I’m going to skip the sideshow of specifics, but they each involved punctuation, to a greater or lesser degree. Wound up inside these arguments over technical style are preferences over tooling, education, expected competence, different interpretations and experiences of interoperability.
It’s not a generational divide based on age (although there’s possibly some correlation), and it’s not defined by total accrued experience (although there’s possibly some correlation.) It’s just trends. Where a technology permits flexibility, people will rightly explore and experiment, looking for variations that are somehow better than the status quo. We iterate on performance, clarity, and aesthetics all the time in the products we build, and so we do with the tools we use to build them too. It comes in waves, and sometimes cultivates a scene along the way. People have been doing this with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a very long time. This industry as we know it grew up on the back of trends, perhaps most influentially the post–2000 adherence to XHTML: Although at its core XML is a bad idea for web publishing (unrecoverable rendering errors for content, brilliant!), the trend carried with it a revolutionary education in separated concerns, cross-browser design, and graceful degradation that lynchpins web professionalism today. Each successive wave of web developers can be expected to experiment in their own way, because this technology stack allows us to, and because it’s a powerful way of learn in and of itself.
