Archive for September, 2008

Well, this week has been a busy one for me filled with project proposals and new business meetings. However, I did find the time today to step across the street from our offices to visit the Wired NEXTFEST at Millennium Park that is taking place from now until October 12th. I only had a few moments to visit the event but I wanted to share an exhibit that really caught my eye today.

Lately I have been writing a number of articles that I would consider to be more critical thinking based, so I thought that it may be interesting to do more of an opinion piece. In the past the article I wrote about bad blog design was successful, so I felt covering web design in general could be helpful as well. It is important to note that in this article I am referring to “web design” as the whole process of creating a site, not just the visual aspect.

Freelancers and designers are obsessed with productivity, and rightly so. When your earnings are based upon time, being more productive means more profit. Anyone who runs a business wants to be profitable, but at what cost? I have realized something as of late, slowing down has its benefits. Productivity software such as Basecamp has helped me shave down some of the things like project management that I don’t really like to do, but that doesn’t mean that I should be extremely productive in everything I do. Not if productivity implies a loss in creativity that is.

There has been a debate circulating the internet for a while now about standard compliance and creativity. While standards compliance is a good thing, it alone cannot be used as a measure for success. While it is a large determinant of the quality of a site’s construction, it has almost nothing to do with the effectiveness of a design. For example there are a number of websites that do validate and are utterly horrible, and on the other side of the spectrum there are insanely effectively designed sites that have hundreds of errors. Why is this? The short answer is that it is much easier to tout the effectiveness of something measurable such as validation, where effective design is not.

Today I received an email from one of the readers asking what would be the correct path to pursue a job in web development (including back-end programming). I originally started out on this track taking a number of computer science course, however I ultimately decided that I enjoyed design more and switched fields of study. Since I never completed this program, and I am not officially a developer I am hoping that the community can help answer this question:

This months collection of insanely creative portfolios is an eclectic group of works, spanning both mediums and size of company. As always I am glad to feature these impressive individuals and organization’s work.

User interface design is plagued by conventions and for obvious reason, familiarity and usability. The conventions are obvious, which is why they have been successful, a house for the “homepage” or a piece of chain to represent “links.” Arguments about creativity of these conventions aside, there is one such convention that needs to be abandoned. The particular convention that I am talking about is the floppy disk as “save” icon.

One of the most frustrating things for me within design is my seemingly misplaced sense of job title. What I just don’t get is why a web designer is different than a graphic designer? Other than the mediums being used, what is the real difference and what do multi-discipline designers like me refer to themselves as? The only solution that I have come up with so far is the title of Art Director, which while true in my case but is really just a way to avoid the problem. The title is also very vague towards those who know nothing about our industry. In the past I have even been asked if I work at a museum when I tell people what I do.

A little over a month ago I wrote a response article entitled “Sorry Art Javid Blogs Are Not the Problem.” This article was my response to the article “Blog and CSS Only Sites” which Art had posted on the American Design Awards website. Since then Art has addressed the concerns I raised in my response and posted a revised version of the article as “Cookie Cutter Creations.” My original response to the article created some very strong options from Positive Space’s readers, so I wanted to follow up and post my impressions of Art’s revised article.

At the time I originally wrote my response I was slightly upset by the way the article was written, but I did see the point Art was trying to make. On August 3rd Art did post a response to my article in the comments, but unfortunately I did not see it at the time. Because many of the readers of this site may have also missed his comment, I have reposted it here at the bottom of this article.