Archive for January, 2008

How many times have you attended a meeting and realized that by the time left you have actually moved backwards in your progress on a project. Because of this and other reasons, I have come to the conclusion that meetings are just utterly pointless. I have come up with a few reasons that hopefully may help you see my side of the situation.

What can I say, the event was just spectacular. Each presenter had their own memorable and interesting points however to me the overall underlying theme was taking control of your business. Carlos Segura persuaded us to take control by setting precedence up-front with our clients. He suggested that we as designers inform our clients about how we function, and give them a take-it-or-leave-it mentality. Jason Fried gave us ten tips of starting a business and how having a small business can be more productive. He also stressed simplicity in everything we do, from our business models, to the products we develop. Finally, Jim Coudal presented the idea that a short attention span can be a good thing, leading you to new and interesting ideas. He also urged everyone to take greater control of our own crafts or means of production to create new business opportunities.

Jason Fried has been giving a great presentation regarding project management, and productivity which I will be posting a summary of later tonight. However I wanted to step away from the presentation to let you know that he just announced that Campfire is now available on the iphone. So point your mobile safari browsers to the site to see.

update:
Well the SEED Conference was just amazing, however it has left me just utterly exhausted and with soo much information that I could never make any sense of it tonight. However I guarantee that I will be posting some of my thoughts on the event tomorrow (All of them extremely positive). As a side note, I was randomly drawn to receive a free tshirt designed by Segura Inc. and a free blank DVD from 5inch.com, you gotta love free swag!

I don’t know how I have not run across this before today, but I just found the website for the book Crowdsourcing a book written by WIRED editor Jeff Howe. The winner of the contest of course is rewarded with 500 pounds, and has their work used as the cover of the book. I am not overly opposed to this contest due to the fact that they do not attempt to steal the rights of the entrants, or under compensate the winner (500 pounds is arguably an adequate rate).

At least in this circumstance, the idea of a design contest helps support the concept of the book. Because of this I partially find the contest to be a great case study. I feel that Mr. Howe and Random House should have every entry judged by a panel of design experts. They could then use the results to see what percentage of the submissions met the goals listed in the creative brief, which they considered professionally sound, and what percentage were not acceptable submissions.

This could serve to help discuss the ramifications of choosing the “crowdsourcing” route rather than traditional methods of content creation.

*Article image courtesy of crowdsourcing applicant yonialter

Every designer I know has a list of self marketing plans that they hope to accomplish, however for numerous reasons these projects always find themselves on bottom of the stack of priorities. We as designers create marketing materials all day long for our clients, however we find creating these same materials for ourselves to be some of the hardest tasks to tackle. There are a number of reasons why this is the case…

I have just received an email from 37signals that gives the schedule for the SEED Conference, so I thought that I would share…

8:00 - 9:15 Registration and continental breakfast
9:15 - 10:00 Carlos Segura presentation
10:00 - 10:30 Audience Q&A for Carlos
10:30 - 10:45 Break
10:45 - 11:30 Jason Fried presentation
11:30 - Noon Audience Q&A for Jason
Noon - 1:15 Working lunch with Edward Lifson
1:15 - 2:00 Jim Coudal presentation
2:00 - 2:30 Audience Q&A for Jim
2:30 - 3:00 Break
3:00 - 4:30 Panel

I will be reporting on the conference, immediately following. If anyone else is going to be attending feel free to post in the comments below, maybe we can meet up!

Something I learned very quickly through freelancing is that being faster than the competition, cheaper, or more direct are not selling points for your services. While in theory these may seem like service benefits for customers, they do not work as a business model. I have taken the opportunity to translate what each of these statements really say to the client.

I recently revisited the NO-SPEC page about sitepoint Contests, and stumbled upon this great first hand account, by user Leahzero, of what participating in a sitepoint contest is like.

It seems like all the articles I ever read are about how to “trick” certain websites or services. It seems like the web as a whole has become obsessed with this idea. How to get to get every article dugg, how to trick your users into clicking you ads, how to trick Google into giving you better search engine placement, the list goes on and on. Maybe I am playing devil’s advocate here but has anyone ever thought that if you take the time to create worthwhile content, and fully develop your site that it may pay off on its own respect? So in the most satirical way possible, here is my list of ways to “trick” your way to a successful website.

I recently read the article “Solutioneering, or putting solutions before problems” on the Blue Flavor Blog. The article is a great read, it explains the need for designers, (or anyone for that matter) to solve a problem, rather than be stuck upon any one solution. It also explains how the alternative option of “putting solutions before problems” rarely yields the best result. I completely agree with this article when it states that “In order for anything to be designed well, we must first identify the problems we are trying to solve and the goals we are trying to reach.” However in the web world, this is not always the case, as anyone who has ever worked on a larger web project with a team surely knows. To get the full gist and for an extremely good read, I highly suggest that you visit the article at the link above.