12 Mar 2018
Always get specs. It can be hard to know for sure when a design is done if there isn’t a list of requirements to check against.
There is a relatively small project I was working on this week. I assumed I was finished yesterday, having comped all the views which would contain the content I was given. Today, a lead on the project looked at my work and asked about other types of content I didn’t know were a part of the plan.
As a professional designer, I can’t drop the blame fully on the project manager. I didn’t ask for the specs, which meant my assumptions ended up biting me in the ass. I assumed what I was given, was everything needed to be designed for, which wasn’t true. This particular situation was small stakes, but it’s a good reminder why specs are so important. Having written requirements protects everyone.
07 Mar 2018
Web design isn’t much more than an arrangment of words and pictures. It’s important to regularly remind yourself of this. We can add as much animation and artsy flourishes to our work as we want, but the beginning, end, and center of it all are the words and pictures.
People go to websites for the content. They read books and magazines for the content. Content content content. It’s a buzzy word, but it is repeated for a reason. It’s absolutely imperative that designers have deep respect for photography, illustration, and writing. That’s a given, right? Why else would you be in this business? For the money? Go home.
I came to design through content. Maybe this is why I stress it so much. My first chosen profession was illustration. I spent two years in college focusing on a studio art degree in drawing. At the end of my sophmore year, I had a love affair with literature and changed my degree. After graduating, my first job was as a photographer. It was only a matter of time before I stumbled into a career making the presentation containers for all these things.
I’m not exactly sure where else to take this thought right now, except to say again words and pictures are the be all and end all of web design. Not all design. But most design. And most definitely all of web design.
06 Mar 2018
Agile planning is labor unionizing under a different name.
It’s an agreement between management and product team members that expectations are realistic and conducive to acceptable working conditions.
06 Mar 2018
We were talking about one of those recent project which came in sideways. During a meeting, a major stakeholder stumbled across the germ of an idea and decided to task the design team with some “big idea thinking” around it, requesting to be wowed by some ideas. While open exploration of big design ideas is great and necessary, it can be problematic if stakeholders have pre-conceived expectations of what’s possible, or view the presentations of these requested big ideas as promises that can be fulfilled.
This isn’t how design, as a department in an organization, is usually supposed to work. This is R&D. Of course, design exploration is an important part of product design — one of the major early steps in any project — but it’s not something that should be requested on a whim. This is especially true when you’re already deep into a product’s roadmap, as we currently are.