Archive for July, 2008

I read a great article today by Jeremy Adam David on his blog entitled “What I Hate About Becoming a Designer” and it really had me thinking. Would my life or the life of other designers have been easier if I had selected another profession? In college I debated for some time whether I should go through with being a designer. I even decided to take a sales internship at one point because I though it would be easier and the pay was better. Jeremy points out some things in his article that designers often joke about, such as not being able to enjoy a movie because you hated the opening credits, but is what he playfully references the truth?

As designers we have a unique perspective into the inner workings of companies and products. We are the ones who find the best features of these entities and turn them into visual value propositions. But what happens when you are working for a client who has no value proposition? What about the clients who are anything but innovative and different, those who only hope to maintain rather than evolve. Obviously business eventually replaces these organizations or products with better variants either through competition or obsolescence. But what happens when you must design for these clients?

I recently received a submission from Nancy R. one of Positive Space’s readers. The submission is her first hand experience with sitepoint contests / 99designs. I thought that she had some great wisdom to share with the community based on her experience with the contests. she states that “Artist’s need to wake up and realize that their unique talents are just that, unique.” which I completely agree with. I agreed to share her opinion with the readers because I think it contains some great wisdom about the dangers of spec work. So without further introduction here is the full account of her experience:

One thing that really drives me nuts is the unfair way that non-designers judge our work. I have talked about why you should set expectations for your clients and question them, however I have not touched on how to judge whether a project is successful or not. This is often a hard thing to do because the client may not actually know what it would take for a project to be successful. Unfortunately clients often think that a project is successful when the end result looks the way that they may have imagined it. Usually this result is not one that will actually have an impact on their business objectives. So how do we find out what will have an impact?

I wanted to share with everyone this great conference that is coming to Chicago on October 7th and continues until the 8th. Personally I find it hard to justify attending conferences because of their steep prices, unless they are really niche based offerings that focus on one key area of design. The conference looks to be focused on topics that will actually reach a level of sophistication worth your investment, not to mention that the lineup of speakers is also very impressive. Just the short description on the IDEA 2008 Conference website shows that not only are the presenters aware of the challenges facing designers today, but in the near future as well:

Ever since I first heard about fonstruct a couple of months ago, I have been intrigued by the possibilities of the software. I chose to dabble in designing some typefaces while in college, however I found the complicated software and technical limitations to be rather intimidating so nothing ever materialized from it other than some sketches. By lowering the barriers to entry of typeface design, fonstruct has allowed a large number of individuals to develop some really interesting and creative fonts. Due to the limitations of the software, the site is flooded with a large number of blackletter and bitmap fonts. However, I was surprised to see how detailed fonstructers were able to get despite these limitations. After scouring the site for a number of hours I found the following 15 fonts to be my personal favorite, and deserving of your download.

I recently read the article “Blog and CSS Only Sites” by Art Javid on the American Design Awards website and I was so opposed that I had to write a personal response. In the article Art argues that blog-style websites and CSS-only layouts are cookie cutter and unimaginative. Furthermore I find it very upsetting that the judging committee for the monthly design contest has such a prejudice against blog driven sites. Art states that “I don’t have to tell you how they faired in the grading… not a single one scored higher than a zero, and that was being more than generous.” This is a picture perfect example of how design awards fail to grasp a true understanding web design, and continually award sites that are nothing more than flashy advertisements. My impression of the article is not all bad though, as I will explain later.

It has been quite some time since I have shared some website designs that I find to be amazing. Because it has been a while since I last shared a group of amazing websites, I have decided to share the websites that I have found to be the most interesting over the past couple of months. Typically this series has been more or less restricted towards html/css sites but I have decided to include flash based sites that are creative and well designed. Now that the stereotypical “web 2.0” look has been subsiding somewhat I believe this series will move more in this direction. In the past there had been some negative comments regarding flash based sites, however I no longer believe in restricting sites for technical reasons. This series will instead be about sites that are overall well designed no matter what the medium.

One thing that I truly love about Mad Men season 1 has been the amount of focus given towards pitching clients and maintaining good working relationships. The character Don Draper is portrayed as an insanely creative copywriter but it is in front of clients where he really shines. His no bullshit take it or leave it mentality (see the embedded clip below around 37 seconds in) towards Sterling Cooper’s work is so inspiring that I too want to dismiss clients who are “non-believers.” If still you don’t know what I am talking about I highly suggest you quickly rent the first season, and check out this article on design observer for reference.

The web 2.0 movement may have introduced the idea of user generated content however this content in and of itself is only worth marginally as much as other forms of content. Just as design by committee results with watered down concepts with little impact, crowd sourced content does the same just on a much larger level. In my opinion user submitted content is not the democracy that so many people believe it to be, I would consider it to be more of an anarchy. Without a creative visionary (dictator) to at least foster and lead the environment it is sure to fail.