Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Thoughts For Better Variable Organization In SASS - Vanseo Design

Thoughts For Better Variable Organization In SASS - Vanseo Design

Thoughts For Better Variable Organization In SASS

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

For most of the last year if I’ve written css, it’s been in a preprocessed SASS file, specifically a .scss file. Good for me, but I haven’t been taking advantage of most of what SASS has to offer. My .scss files are often little more than nested css. I’ve used variables here and there and included the occasional mixin, but my SASS use has been simplistic at best.

I’d like to change that and hope you don’t mind if I think out loud a little on how to start creating more modular and maintainable SASS projects.

plastic container organizers

An Example from a Recent Project

Recently I worked on a relatively simple project, a one page site with little content. I had it all designed and developed in an afternoon.

The end game consists of separate style sheets or SASS partials to reap the benefits of modular design.

While waiting on the client to have a look, I thought I’d play around a bit and refactor the css by setting up some variables for color and type in case the client came back wanting changes. As expected my client did want to experiment with color and type choices and having these values in variables made it easier to quickly try different possibilities.

My client, who had some design experience, would suggest a different color scheme and in moments it could be applied across the page. Want to see how different typefaces would look? No problem. Give me a second.

Variables are clearly useful and one of the great reasons to use a preprocessor. However, I don’t think I made the best choices in how I set up the variables. Here are some of the variable names and general organization I created.

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  
/* Background Colors */   $background:  $header-background:  $content-background:    /* Colors */  $heading-color:  $link-color:    /* Typography */  $sans-serif:  $serif:*

It’s not bad at first glance, but it really isn’t the best way to organize even these few variables. The main groupings are probably fine, but the variable names aren’t great. At the very least a naming scheme like:

1  2  3  
$background:  $background-header:  $background-content

would be easier to read. Variables like $serif and $sans-serif might be better as $display-type and $text-type;, which would be more reflective of their purpose instead of describing their values. My choice seems a little like naming a class red and risking you’ll want the color to later be green.

On the good side:

  • I set up variables, which is a major step in the right direction
  • I’m isolating color and type values and preparing both design layers for separate files down the road

On the bad side:

  • The naming convention is poor. Using serif and sans-serif leads to a single css font-stack for each. Better would be to name them based on their function.
  • The variable names are location dependent (header, content, link), which limits where they should be used.

Thoughts for Better SASS Organization

Variables are just the start.

The end game consists of separate style sheets or SASS partials to reap the benefits of modular design. The idea isn’t anything profound as it’s how many are already working with SASS and other preprocessors and it’s how frameworks and the like come into creation.

The obvious advantages are

  • Ease of maintenance — A single set of styles would all be located in a single file
  • Modular system for reuse — Style sheets could be refactored and collected in a library or framework

For example all color related css could be in one location for easy maintenance. All grid and layout related css in could be located in another file, and so on. Each file could be worked on independently so it could be applied to additional projects. Again, nothing others aren’t already doing.

The question I’m thinking through is what’s the best way to get there. I thought I’d start slow (unlike the larger forced changes I sometimes apply) to have fewer moving parts all at once. Before moving groups of selectors into separate files, I thought I’d start by organizing variables into logical groups and go from there.

Off the top of my head here are some possibilities for each of the groups.

  • color
  • typography
  • grid/layout
  • reset
  • base
  • forms
  • tables
  • navigation
  • components

Another thought is to organize around the SMACSS categories of base, layout, module, state, theme, though looking up at the list it pretty much includes the SMACSS categories and expands on them a bit.

Over the years I’ve tried to organize my css around similar design layers, however it hasn’t always gone well due to a certain amount of overlap. For example should the color of links in navigation be included under color or navigation? How about the choice of a typeface for the same navigational links?

Is it more likely the color scheme or type choices for the design will change or is it more likely the navigation will need change? The changes will be easier and quicker to make if everything that needs changing is located together.

Something tells me what I’m after calls for two systems of organization. One to keep all the navigation code together and one to make it easy to quickly change a color scheme across a design. Perhaps the first suggests how files should be organized and the latter suggests how to organize variables.

Now that I’ve thought out loud a bit, I suppose the next step is trying some of the above and seeing what happens and where issues come up.

Here are a few other posts with thoughts about this. As you can see I’m not offering anything revolutionary here. Just thinking out loud before putting these thoughts into greater practice.

Summary

I realize my thoughts here aren’t exactly earth shattering for most, but maybe these ideas will be new for some. It does help me to think through them and see them on the screen.

While I’m happy I’ve taken the step to writing css in SASS, I have a long way to go before I’m using it as well as I could. Thinking through how to best set up variables and variable names is a step for me toward modular .scss files. I hope you don’t mind listening in my thoughts.

I assume many of you are already beyond where I am with preprocessors and I’d be happy to hear how you’ve been setting up variables and files for projects. What do you find works well and where you’ve identified some trouble spots?

The post Thoughts For Better Variable Organization In SASS appeared first on Vanseo Design.

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Take A Step Toward Growth By Leaving Your Comfort Zone - Vanseo Design

Take A Step Toward Growth By Leaving Your Comfort Zone - Vanseo Design

Take A Step Toward Growth By Leaving Your Comfort Zone

Posted: 25 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

One of the reasons I moved to Colorado was a need for change. I had fallen into a rut where despite my best intentions I was consistently leaning on old patterns of behavior that had not served me well.

Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio above, Click here to listen.

My plan, if you can call it that, was to live life without a plan. Removing myself from my comfort zone and placing myself in the unknown forced me to find new patterns of behavior to respond to the world.

In shaking up everything I knew I’d force myself to see new possibilities that I hadn’t been allowing myself to see.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

At the end of last week’s post I mentioned making some changes in an effort to make another start at evolving the way I blog. While the changes aren’t as drastic as completely uprooting myself and moving near 2,000 miles away from everyone and everything I know, they’re already helping to shake up old routines.

One thing I’ve begun or begun again is maintaining a journal. Back in the days before the internet I often pulled out a pen and notebook and wrote. I’m doing it again, though I’m now typing into text editors.

It’s a small change, but one that usually impacts my writing. It’s a safe place to collect any thought and get it out of my head clearing the way for new thoughts to enter. It also helps bring more spontaneity to my writing.

In the past I never looked back at anything I’d written in a journal. I saw it more as an exercise to practice writing and especially to lose myself in the flow of writing. It’s serving that purpose again, though this time around and with the magic of search, I hope to be able to pull things directly from my journal at times to either post here or shape into something worth posting.

New Tools For A New Train Of Thought

For a few months now I haven’t been happy with what I’ve been publishing or the approach I’ve been taking to publish. There have certainly been some good posts here, but the whole process has felt forced to me.

I’ve known I could take most any idea, plug it into my process and come out the other side with something I could post. It’s helped to keep me productive, but it hasn’t always kept me inspired.

When I feel a lack of inspiration for what I’m doing I have a tendency to desire a change of some kind. I’m not looking to uproot my entire life again, but I thought I could uproot my workflow with a few new tools.

For the last couple of years my writing process has mainly taken me through two applications, each with its own purpose.

  • MacJournal — for collecting ideas, taking notes and writing drafts
  • MarsEdit — for editing and polishing the drafts in preparation for publishing

They’ve worked well for me, but over time using them has begun to feel more chore than inspiration. That’s not to imply either is a bad app for writing or publishing. Both are great apps, but using them so often in the same way has made them feel stale to me.

It’s a case of doing the same thing the same way over and over again. To remove that stale feeling I purchased some new editors over the last few months.

  • Scrivener — which I’m using to work on an ebook
  • iA Writer — which sat idly until I recently started keeping a journal again
  • Ulysses III — which I recently purchased and what I’m writing in now

Each of the above is quite different from what I’m used to. It’s that forcing myself out of old habits in order to see new ways of doing the same thing.

All offer some level of distraction free writing, which is something I never thought I’d care for, but I’m now finding more useful than expected.

All can also be used with Markdown, another something I never thought I’d care for. However hearing so much praise for it from people who’s writing I enjoy, I thought why not give it a try.

The latter two apps have one additional advantage in they have beautiful interfaces. I’m a sucker for beautiful things and both apps call to me when I’m not using them. Who said aesthetics aren’t important?

I’m sharing all this with you not because I think you need to run out and buy these specific apps or even care what apps I use for writing. I’m sharing because I’m sure you’ve found yourself in a similar rut where you feel a lack of inspiration in your work and the tried and true has become stale.

If and when you encounter those times think about making some changes. Find some way to leave your comfort zone to force yourself into something new. It can be scary giving up the safe and known, but it’s that safe and known that’s leaving you uninspired. Focus instead on the possibility for something better that can come with change.

Beyond Writing

This isn’t all about writing for me. The opportunity to change editors happened to be in front of me and I grabbed the opportunity. There are many more things I’d like to change, each of which will take me further from my zone of comfort.

Just as it will take me some time to completely change my writing workflow, it’ll take some time to incorporate the above.

I know it will be worthwhile though. Forcing myself out of my comfort zone and forcing myself to learn new ways of doing will inevitably help me to see the same old in different ways. I’ll find new patterns to combine with old ones and as a result grow to be something more than I am.

The post Take A Step Toward Growth By Leaving Your Comfort Zone appeared first on Vanseo Design.

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Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Visual Design Systems (Maintaining Consistency Across Devices) - Vanseo Design

Visual Design Systems (Maintaining Consistency Across Devices) - Vanseo Design

Visual Design Systems (Maintaining Consistency Across Devices)

Posted: 22 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

You might think the goal of a responsive design is to present the exact same experience to visitors regardless of what device they use and under what context they visit. The experience is going to be different though, because the device and context are different. What we want to provide is the same level of experience and that means our designs will look different across devices.

We do, however, want people visiting a site on a desktop to know they’re visiting the same site when they come across it on a tablet or smartphone. We’d like them to be able to apply cues they’ve learned interacting through one device when they visit using another device.

How can we make our designs consistent across devices and maintain visual unity in a design that will inevitably look different when viewed on different devices?

unity

Designing Responsive Systems

Last week when asking if dedicated device designs were appropriate, I mentioned that I think the future of responsive and adaptive design is about designing a system that can sense device characteristics and the context of the person visiting in order to present a design assembled on the fly.

Instead of thinking about different designs for different devices, we should be thinking of designing a single visual system

We’ll be storing more and smaller chunks of structured content that can be combined in a variety of ways. Ideally we’ll be presenting optimized versions of a design for each context visitors are in when viewing the site.

The designs will inevitably be different as we better learn to take advantage of devices capabilities. At the same time we want people who visit the site on a phone and then later on their laptop to instantly know they’re on the same site.

One way we can do that is through visual unity. We can make sure each optimized version of the design has enough visual consistency so that visitors know instantly they’re on the same site.

How to Maintain Visual Unity in a Responsive Design?

I recently watched video of a 20 minute presentation by Laura Kalbag on responsive design systems from the Responsive Day Out convention. The video expands on ideas Laura presented in her article for 24 ways on design systems.

At the start of the 24 Ways article she says.

The best responsive designs are those that allow you to go from one optimised display to another, but with the feeling that these experiences are part of a greater product whole.

That greater whole is unity at work. Instead of thinking about different designs for different devices, we should be thinking of designing a single visual system that may not look exactly the same everywhere, but is clearly one unified version of the same overall system.

It’s ok for our designs to be different across different devices as long as we can maintain a certain level of visual consistency to make it clear to our audience that they’re in right place no matter what device they used to get there. We can do that by treating certain aspects of our design in a consistent manner.

  • Typeface choices
  • Type proportions
  • Base unit for grid/layout
  • Color scheme
  • General aesthetic tone

Let’s take a look at each of the above in a bit more detail to better understand how they help maintain visual unity.

Typeface choices — Consistent typefaces are the starting point. Whatever faces you use, you should use across all devices. Your audience (outside of type aficionados) probably won’t realize this consistency on a conscious level, but it will register in their subconscious.

Type proportions — In his post Molten Leading, Tim Brown talks about a fundamental triadic relationship of type consisting of font size, line height, and line length. A change in one requires a change in the others. When moving from one device to another these values have to change.

The change in screen width across devices forces a change on the line length unless we adjust by changing one or both of the other two values. We wouldn’t change all three to maintain the exact same relationship between them. Instead we’d likely keep one of the values consistent and adjust the other.

Base Unit — Hopefully you’re on board with the idea of designing content out as opposed to canvas in. Assuming you are, you realize that when developing a grid it should be be based on something internal to the design, which becomes the base unit. This base unit could arise from a number of things.

  • Dimension of a banner advertisement
  • Dimension of a standard image
  • The line height of the type
  • A line length of the type
  • Modular scale

Wherever it comes from the base unit is a good candidate for consistency. Your grid or general layout is going to be different across devices, but it should still be based on the same fundamental units. Measurements across the layout should be proportional to the base unit.

Color — This should be one of the easier aspects to keep consistent. Whatever color scheme you choose should be used everywhere. How much of each color gets used could vary, though once again I think proportion enters into things.

Your scheme likely has a dominant color, a subdominant color and some additional accent colors. Ideally these should all be present in the same proportion no matter what the device.

General Aesthetics — Here I think there could be more visual variety as your site might conform to what works best on a particular device, but the the general tone of voice behind your aesthetics should remain consistent. If you’re going for a soft weathered look you wouldn’t change to a hard angular and sleek look on one particular device.

A consistent color scheme will contribute greatly here as will the consistent use of key graphics and imagery. Aside from your logo, you might not repeat every image exactly on all devices, but you can pull back and think about what your graphics and images are trying to communicate and make sure any changes in imagery are still communicating the same thing.

The forms you use should also remain consistent. If your aesthetic calls for curves and textures on one device it should call for them on all, even if the specific curves and textures are different.

Proportion

I mentioned proportion a few times above. The flexible nature of responsive design shifts our focus from absolutes to relatives. It’s one of the fundamental changes that’s taking place in this shift to responsive design.

Our print legacy and recent history developing websites has us all thinking in absolutes. We need to change that. The web is inherently fluid and absolutes only exist under a very specific set if conditions that will forever be out of our control.

In addition to the different aspects of design mentioned above, I think we’d all do better to spend more time understanding and working with scale and proportion. Much of the consistency want to bring to different devices will rely on both.

Summary

Our designs will inevitably be experienced in different ways due to the different devices and circumstances present when viewing them. Even were they to look and work exactly the same, they’d be experienced differently because the nature of how one interacts with them will change.

It’s ok for our designs to look and even work differently given they’re going to be experienced differently. What we want to do is maintain the same level of experience. We also want to ensure visitors to our sites know they’re on the same site regardless of how they’re accessing it.

One important consideration in providing the same level of experience is to maintain visual consistency across the whole of our design system. By making sure aspects of our designs like typography and color carry some consistency across devices we can help orient visitors in our sites even as the design changes to reflect the visitor’s context.

The post Visual Design Systems (Maintaining Consistency Across Devices) appeared first on Vanseo Design.

Saturday, 20 April 2013

iCan't Internet

iCan't Internet

Simply Adding Beauty to your WordPress Site

Posted: 19 Apr 2013 07:51 AM PDT

Simple and basic elements can make a website look attractive. The following articles share points on how simple elements make a WordPress website attractive. WordPress websites are always called...

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Thursday, 18 April 2013

The Space Between 140 Characters And 3,000 Words - Vanseo Design

The Space Between 140 Characters And 3,000 Words - Vanseo Design

The Space Between 140 Characters And 3,000 Words

Posted: 18 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

About 15 years ago I moved from my home in New York to the relative unknown in Boulder, Colorado. Without going into details, things weren’t working well for me in New York at the time and I decided a major change was in order.

Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio above, click here to listen.

Go West Young Man

I packed what little would fit into the late 80s Nissan Maxima I called mine at the time and drove west young(ish) man.

Since that Maxima would only hold so much and my family was only willing to store so much of what it wouldn’t hold, I needed to depart with quite a few things before heading on my way.

The majority of what needed to go were the many, many books I’d collected over the years. Not all of them, but a rather large amount. It pained me to toss them all out so I spent a couple of months bouncing back and forth between used books stores to see what I could unload.

The used bookstores didn’t offer a lot of cash for used books. They offered a little bit more in trade so I turned hundreds of books into a dozen or so more expensive ones over those two months.

The prize of my new smaller collection was a complete 3 volume set of Vincent Van Gogh letters during the last 10 years of his life. Most of these were to his brother Theo, but a few went out to other relatives and friends.

Note: The letters are online if $100 is too much to spend on them at Amazon.

For the next year or so I worked my way through Vincent’s letters, reading a few each day. Some of you know I often go by the username vangogh online and now you’ll know the reason has more to do with Vincent’s letters than his paintings, as good as his paintings are.

The Vincent Van Gogh Example for Blogging

Fast forward a few years and a few jobs and I’m starting out on my own designing and developing websites and setting up a blog for various reasons.

At the time Vincent’s letters struck me as exactly what a blog should be.

  • They discuss in detail his work
  • They comment on the works of others
  • They share stories about his personal life
  • They share information about painting techniques
  • They include sketches and drawings to share work in progress

Isn’t that what blogging should be. Shouldn’t it reveal something of the voice of the author while also sharing thoughts and observations, theories, critiques, and examples about a chosen topic. Shouldn’t a blog be an ongoing conversation with any who are interested.

That was my plan when I started. I even titled the very post here, Dear Vincent. Unfortunately I’ve never been good on following through on the plan.

I struggled through the first year or two blogging, not really knowing what to write about or how to write it. Some early posts turned out well, but many more were grasping for something to write about and settling on whatever was easiest for me at the moment.

After a few months hiatus I returned in better form, but since that time I’ve become someone who tries to pack everything into every single post, as though every last thought I could ever have about a topic belonged in each.

Toward the end of last year I talked about wanting to do more audio posts and even managed to record a few before falling back into old habits. A part of the reason for seeking audio was again to seek change in an effort to find my way back to something I haven’t been able to follow through on.

Between 140 and 3,000

At the start of this year Mark Boulton posted Shorter Long Form, encouraging bloggers to get back to something that used to exist, but has mostly fallen away.

I'd like to see more balance again. More short, scrappy blog posts (like this one), written off the cuff and in the moment. Sometimes, I'd like to read the author's actual voice, instead of a homogenised edited one. There has to be a space between 140 characters and 3000 word feature.

I’ve been thinking about Mark’s short, scrappy, off the cuff post ever since he wrote it and it keeps reminding me of Vincent’s letters and that idea I had for how a blog should be.

Consider this post you’re reading a new attempt to get back to that idea, at least in part. Unlike most content you read here, what you’re reading now is the result of a spontaneous burst of prose as opposed to a tirelessly polished feature article.

It feels good.

I’ll proof it and may decide to give it a read to practice that audio thing again, but otherwise it’ll remain true to the spontaneous burst.

It’s a new start at an old and consistently calling goal; one I’ve failed to reach a number of times already, but I must think worthwhile to keep trying to attain.

I’ve been making a few other changes in an effort to make this restart, but I’ll save those for another time.

The post The Space Between 140 Characters And 3,000 Words appeared first on Vanseo Design.

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

Is A Dedicated Mobile Design Ever Appropriate? - Vanseo Design

Is A Dedicated Mobile Design Ever Appropriate? - Vanseo Design

Is A Dedicated Mobile Design Ever Appropriate?

Posted: 15 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

A few weeks ago I offered some thoughts about why responsive design is always appropriate. Jon Michael Christensen followed up on my post and offered some interesting thoughts of his own. I’d like to continue the conversation.

First I want to clarify something about my post in regards to the word necessary and then ask and answer the question of whether or not a dedicated device design is ever appropriate. I’ll close with some thoughts about where I see responsive design heading.

The word 'Dedicated' carved into the stone wall of a building

Dedicated Designs Aren’t Necessary

John generally agreed with what I said, but something about my post didn’t sit well with him. I’ll let John explain with a couple of quotes from his post.

if we are really doing our job designing responsively in a responsible way, we really shouldn't need any dedicated solution for any platform.

a dedicated solution seems somewhat redundant and unnecessary. You already have something that should work on everything.

The list of things I think necessary includes very few items. Oxygen, food and water, and shelter from the elements. That’s the list. If we’re talking about survival of the species we can add procreation.

I hope my previous post didn’t imply that I think a dedicated design is ever necessary. I don’t think that. Since moving to responsive design, I’ve yet to design a dedicated version for any device. A responsive design has proved to be enough for my needs and the needs of my clients. However, I do leave open the possibility that at times a dedicated device design may be worthwhile.

Is a Dedicated Design Ever Appropriate?

I’ve said on a number of occasions that the move to responsive design is mainly a change in the way we think about designing websites. It’s part of a larger philosophy of adaptive design. We’re still working our way through both and trying to solve problems new to this new way of thinking.

In time we’ll have more ability to design systems that can better sense their environment and act on what they sense.

Some of the technical solutions we’d like aren’t in place yet and so we fall back on older solutions that may or may not be necessary, but do work.

Responsive design is something of a one size fits all solution. It means coding for all what might be useful only for some. Much of the time this isn’t a problem. Sometimes it can be.

Take the case of images. The large images we include in a design meant for a wide screen monitor are often too much for a small screen. We could reduce the dimensions of the image programmatically while maintaining its file size or we can provide images of different dimensions and decide which is best to display.

It’s much easier to describe the solution than to implement it. We don’t have great ways at the moment to ensure only the image we want to use is downloaded. For the most part we’re downloading more image than we need, which can potentially lead to a significant performance hit.

Here’s one developer explaining why his company went with a dedicated mobile site for this very reason. It’s an understandable explanation for choosing a dedicated design, though it misses the point that there are more than 2 types of devices. Better would have been a responsive design and then one optimized for a phone.

A dedicated site can be appropriate when the responsive design isn’t optimized as well as you’d like for a particular device or circumstance. Responsive designs should work across all, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimized for all.

It’s Ok to be Different

John closed his post with the following thought.

I know if I were a user and my buddy and I visited the same site on two different platforms and got two differing experiences, whoever got the short end of that stick wouldn't be a happy camper. It certainly wouldn't endear me to the company knowing that I wasn't as important to get some extra content or feature.”

I wonder how we define differing experiences. Imagine the exact same design appeared on a desktop and a phone. It would still lead to different experiences, simply because of the way we interact with the site through different devices. I realize John is talking about a bigger picture kind of experience here, but what do we consider acceptable difference.

I’m sure John would agree that we don’t need to provide identical experiences on every device, but rather we want to provide the same level of experience across all devices. A certain amount of difference is inevitable, but we don’t want to shortchange some visitors because of their device.

The experience is going to be different no matter what we do. Our goal is to minimize the difference in quality between those different experiences. We want to make it clear that a visitor has found the right site and can do everything they want to do, no matter how they access it.

We can do that through either a responsive design or a dedicated device design. A dedicated version of a site doesn’t mean a completely different experience. If anything when people decide on a dedicated design it’s because they want to remove performance barriers to providing the same level of experience.

Adaptive Content and Responsive Design

If we can look ahead a little bit, I think where we’re going with responsive design and where we’re going with adaptive content will come together better.

In time we’ll have more ability to design systems that can better sense their environment and act on what they sense. Ideally we’ll be able to differentiate a person checking something on a site while running to catch a bus and another sitting comfortably on their couch surfing on a small tablet while watching the news on tv.

Our systems will have all sorts of content in various forms and we’ll use what we sense to serve the best possible combination of content to different devices and contexts. Perhaps knowing person A is in a rush, we’ll be able to have our site interact through voice alone.

We’ll also have technology in place to refrain from serving code and media that won’t be necessary under the sensed conditions. If the device in question can’t handle gestures, we won’t serve that code. If the device has a small screen we’ll leave the large images on the server.

We aren’t there yet. The technology hasn’t caught up to the idea. We’re moving in that direction, but it’ll take some time to reach our destination.

Summary

John makes some really good points in his follow up to my article and I admit that I may not have expressed myself as well as I could have. If you haven’t yet, do give his post a read. Part of my thinking in my previous post was to express things in a way to help convince the unconvinced and part was to leave open possibilities I haven’t encountered, but accept as possible.

Responsive is a one size fits all solution. It works well and because so much already fits under that “all” label, a responsive design should be in place to catch as much of that “all” as possible. However, you might want to optimize for a subgroup of “all” and you may choose a dedicated design to do that.

Long term I see us designing and developing larger systems that have greater abilities to sense their environment and choose to present an optimized version of itself based on what it senses.

At the moment we’re not there technically. Our best solution right now is to start with the responsive design as the minimum viable solution for all and then progressively enhance that minimum for different devices and contexts if we feel it’s appropriate.

Sometimes it might make sense to present an optimized version as a dedicated design. Most sites will never need to go dedicated. The responsive solution will be optimized enough. When it isn’t a dedicated design can be added as another layer on top of the responsive layer.

The post Is A Dedicated Mobile Design Ever Appropriate? appeared first on Vanseo Design.

Thursday, 11 April 2013

Book Review — Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior - Vanseo Design

Book Review — Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior - Vanseo Design

Book Review — Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

Posted: 11 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

A couple of months ago I was offered a review copy of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinow. I don’t know that I’ve ever turned down a free book and based on the title I thought I would enjoy this one. I finally had a chance to read it and wanted to share some thoughts.

The short version is I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone with interest in how the mind works and how our unconscious influences our lives. You can find the book at Random House, Amazon, and
Barnes & Noble. For the longer version of the review, read on.

The Book: An Overview

This isn’t a book about design, though it is a book about something I think most designers would be better for knowing. The general idea is right there in the title. It’s a look at how people experience the world and how perceptions, behaviors, memory, and social judgements are driven more by our unconscious minds than our conscious minds.

Book cover for Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinow

Much of what we communicate as designers happens on the unconscious level. Other than fellow designers it’s highly unlikely anyone is going to show up on your site and think “Oh look, there’s an 8 column grid in place. Clearly this site is telling me how organized it is.” Instead it’s their unconscious that takes in the grid and the person feels a sense of organization.

Similarly people don’t see a blue background and then consciously acknowledge they can trust the site or see a red button and make the conscious decision to impulsively click it. Much of what we communicate as web designers talks directly to the unconscious mind so it makes sense for us to understand a little about how this part of the brain works.

The book is divided into 2 main sections

  • The Two-Tiered Brain — distinguishes the conscious from the unconscious and explores how the latter contributes to perception, memory, and the important role being social plays in the survival of humanity.
  • The Social Unconscious — looks at how much we communicate though non-verbal cues and then judge others based on those cues. It considers the importance of categorization and how we favor some categories over others. Finally it looks at how physical reactions lead emotional responses and how all of this affects our view of ourselves.

In walking through each of these subjects the book offers a number of case studies and experiments in psychology and some interesting stories illustrating the points it attempts to make.

To offer you a little more allow me to provide an expanded table of contents with a few highlights from each chapter.

The Two-Tiered Brain

This first section of the book has 4 chapters, which focus on how our brain works.

a lot of what we do as designers will go unnoticed, but will be communicated subliminally to the unconscious.

The New Unconscious — distinguishes the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain and shows how much we’re controlled by the unconscious part. Most significantly it shows how little we realize the role our unconscious plays.

Two experiments in this chapter should be of special interest to designers. One involved more readable and legible typography as enough to rate recipes better. Another involved packaging and copy leading to an improved taste of beer and wine.

Senses Plus Mind Equals Reality — investigates visual perception. It looks at how much we see without realizing we see it. One of the more interesting stories was about a stroke victim who’s eyes were physically fine, but his brain couldn’t process the signal they were sending. He was blind.

Yet this blind man could walk down the hallway of his hospital and despite the fact that his conscious mind couldn’t see, his unconscious mind could. This blind man was able to move out of the way of objects in his path without ever being aware he was seeing them.

Remembering and Forgetting — examines how we fill in the gaps of our memory and how the made up details eventually become the memory. In one of the more surprising experiments, an interviewer was switched in the middle of an interview and still most of the subjects couldn’t remember that this had occurred.

If you think you remember your life, read this chapter. You may discover much of your memory might be less real and more imagined than you think.

The Importance of Being Social — suggests that social action is the driving force behind human intelligence. It further suggests that social cooperation was most vital for survival of our species and so our brains have evolved for this purpose.

The chapter tells us that many species on the planet are self aware to some degree. However only human beings can go beyond believing something about themselves is true. We can also hold beliefs about the state of mind of others and reason about what one person thinks of another.

The Social Unconscious

The 6 chapters in this second section of the book look more at how we get along in the world. After seeing how much our unconscious rules our lives, how does it affect our interactions with each other, ourselves, and the world around us.

Reading People — looks at the non-verbal cues we all use when communicating and how we reveal much more than we say. Even more it suggests we’re seldom aware of how much we communicate through these non-verbal cues.

Judging People by Their Covers — discusses how the sound of someone’s voice or a light touch during conversation can influence how we perceive the message being delivered. One of the case studies in the chapter is the Kennedy/Nixon debates leading up to the 1960 Presidential election. Viewers who watched the debate thought Kennedy won, while those who only listened thought Nixon won.

Sorting People and Things — tells us that to process information more efficiently our brains rely on categorization strategies. It also suggests that without this ability to categorize we have difficulty making sense our our world.

In-Groups and Out-Groups — shows how after categorizing things and people into in-groups and out-groups we favor those groups we feel we’re a part of over groups we don’t feel a part of. The marketing lesson is to make your products part of your customer’s in-group.

Feelings — deals with things like the placebo effect. It shows how our physical well-being often leads emotional responses instead of the other way around. We don’t tremble because we’re angry. Rather we’re aware of feeling angry because we tremble. Or are we? Do we sometimes mistake feeling an emotion because of how we’re feeling physically?

The chapter suggests we can sometimes think we’re feeling something we aren’t due to some physiological change inside us and how we understand our feelings less than we think. In fact we sometimes rationalize our feelings in order to understand them.

Self — suggests that we believe in enhanced versions of ourselves instead of our true selves. In an interesting questionnaire 25% of people believe themselves to be in the top 1%, 60% believe themselves in the top 10%, and 100% of people believe themselves to be at least average.

We believe in facts that back our beliefs more than because the facts are true and we do this in order to improve our happiness. This chapter considers two ways i which we attempt to get at the truth.

  • scientists — gather evidence, look for patterns, form theories to explain observations, and then test those theories.
  • lawyers — begin with conclusions they want to convince others about and then seek evidence to support those conclusions, while discrediting evidence that doesn’t support them.

The chapter shows we’re better at being lawyers than scientists and favor things that support our preconceived beliefs.

Summary

Again this book won’t offer direct principles to follow, however, all designers should understand how the mind works. Knowledge of psychology, perception, and the unconscious are topics we should be aware of.

The unconscious rules much of what we take in and much of what we do. This suggests that a lot of what we do as designers will go unnoticed consciously, but will still be communicated subliminally to the unconscious parts of our brains.

It suggests that context and atmosphere play a more important role in how our designs are experienced than might seem on the surface and that what people say about our designs is less important than what they ultimately do with them.

I thought I would enjoy this book and I did. It isn’t going to teach you where to place elements on the page or how to create hierarchy for your information. It will help you understand how our conscious and unconscious minds work and what really influences people to take action or like something.

The post Book Review — Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior appeared first on Vanseo Design.

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Become A Better Designer Through Critical Thinking - Vanseo Design

Become A Better Designer Through Critical Thinking - Vanseo Design

Become A Better Designer Through Critical Thinking

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 05:30 AM PDT

Last week I offered some general thoughts on how become a better designer when you’re feeling overwhelmed with all there is to learn. I briefly mentioned critical thinking about design as an important part of the process. I’d like to expand on that brief mention.

Being able to think critically about design is an important part of becoming a better designer. It will help you better understand things you’ve learned and it will help you see solutions to design problems.

Wassily Kandinsky's Composition 8.
Composition VIII: Wassily Kandinsky (1923) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Learning to Think Critically

As I mentioned last week and have several times in the past, both theory and practice are important aspects of learning.

Nothing can replace actually doing something, which is why practice is so important. It doesn’t matter how well you understand the theory behind a grid if you’ve never built one.

However, theory provides context for why those grids are important and understanding the theory behind them helps you know why you’re using a grid, which type of grid to choose, when not to use one, and so on. Theory generally helps you to avoid wasted effort.

  • Practice is learning from your own experience
  • Theory is learning from the experience of others

Critical thinking helps connect the two by looking at actual practice and observing how well it works with theory. It helps you take theoretical knowledge and think how you could apply it practically to your own work, the work of others, and even ordinary things you see around you.

It starts by observing. Don’t just look at someone’s work. Learn to really see it. Observe not only the whole, but the individual parts and think about what each part is doing, is trying to do, and how it contributes to the whole.

The process is a simple one.

  • Observe — Give the work more than a quick glance. Look at the whole. See the parts. Look at it again and again and again.
  • Question — Keep asking yourself questions based on your observations. Why does the design work? Why doesn’t it work? What are the different parts doing? Are they contributing to the whole? Detracting from it?
  • Answer — Think about the answers to all the questions you’re raising. Being right isn’t important. What is important is you thinking about the answers.

Let me give you an example using the image above of Kandinsky’s Composition #8. It’s an image I’ve referred to in the past to illustrate a variety of different principles of composition.

The first time I looked at the painting I liked it. I didn’t instantly know why, but something about the composition felt right to me. I could have left it there and simply enjoyed it from to time, but instead I spent time really looking at the painting and asking myself questions about it and then trying to answer the questions I raised.

One of the first things I notice about the painting is the large circular object in the upper left. Why did I notice that first and why is my eye constantly drawn back to it? It’s one of the largest objects in the composition. It’s also the darkest. The colors (black, red, and purple) mostly contrast with the colors from the rest of the composition. It’s connected to a smaller red circle and I realize I’m not just drawn to the larger circle, but the combined object of both circles. This combined object has a bit of space around it, separating it from the mass of the composition.

All of these observations are teaching me how to draw attention to something in a design. I don’t necessarily know if any of these observations is more important than the others or whether it’s the combination of all of them that makes the object stand out, but I’ve given myself a number of things to try the next time I want something in a design to stand out and attract attention.

Observing other compositions and experimenting in my own work will further help me understand what is happening and why.

Thinking about this one aspect of the composition has taught me about the principle of dominance. Had I been previously aware of the principle, I now have a working example that proves the principle. Had I not been aware of it, I’ve now discovered it, even if I don’t yet know it’s name or that it’s even a principle.

In either case I’ve learned a lot about how design works and given myself a number of ways to implement something in a future design. And all it took was a couple of minutes observing, questioning, and answering. Perhaps some of my analysis about why the object pulls my eye is incorrect. It doesn’t matter. I certainly have a better understanding of dominance and how to attract the eye than I did before those few minutes.

I can similarly look at the composition and think about why my eye moves through it as it does and why it feels right to me. I can ask myself how I feel looking at it and then thinking about why. By continuing to look at the composition and thinking critically about it, I can continue to learn.

Over time I have continued to apply critical thinking to this single composition and through that thinking, I’ve gained a deeper of understanding of concepts like:

That deeper understanding helps me work with all of the above more effectively in my own designs. One painting doesn’t make me an expert using any of them, but critically thinking about a number of paintings and designs has helped to improve my skills.

Don’t just look at a design and decide you like it or don’t like it. Learn to really see the design and how it works. Keep asking yourself questions about why and how it works. Do your best to answer those questions. It’s not important to be right in your answers. The important part is to think about them.

Offering Critiques

One way you can put critical thinking to use and help out others in the process is though design critiques. People ask for feedback all the time on forums and design communities. Unfortunately much of the feedback given has little value. It’s of the form I like this or I don’t like that.

When you see someone asking for a critique see it as an opportunity for you to learn more about design. See it as an opportunity to think critically and gain a deeper understanding of something about design.

Many years ago I was presented a way to critique in a writing course. I’ve adapted it slightly to design critiques over the years and have shared the method here on several occasions.

  • Write down observations as they come to you without any explanation.
  • Choose 3 things you like and explain why you think they work in the design.
  • Share 3 things you think need improvement and how you would improve them.

The first item is simply to help you get into an observational state and ease you in to the other two parts. Explaining why things work is similar to what I did above with Kandinsky’s painting.

Thinking through how you would improve something in a design is more of a challenge. It asks you to not only understand why something doesn’t work, but gets you to think through how you might make it work. It’s one step closer to applying theory in practice.

Summary

There’s a great amount of value in thinking critically about design. Take the time to observe different designs and learn to really see them. Think about why they do and don’t work. Think about what each part of the design contributes to the whole and how it contributes. Observe, ask, and answer.

When giving feedback to another designer give more than a few quick likes and dislikes. The effort you put into the feedback determines how much value both of you get out of it. This is one of those true win-win situations. Trust me when I say, done well, you’ll get the most value from the exercise.

You don’t have to wait for someone to ask for feedback in order to perform a critique. Critique whatever you see. Critique works of art and designs you come across on the web, in magazines, on posters, and business cards. Critique your own work. You can even critique mother nature’s work, though don’t tell her about it. I hear she has a mean streak.

The post Become A Better Designer Through Critical Thinking appeared first on Vanseo Design.
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