Tuesday, 29 July 2014

The Perception That Design Is How Something Looks - Vanseo Design

The Perception That Design Is How Something Looks - Vanseo Design

The Perception That Design Is How Something Looks

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Ask any designer and they’ll tell you design is more than how something looks. For many non-designers though, how a thing looks is design. Nothing else, just the look. It’s a common perception designers have tried to change for years and it often feels like a losing battle.

An eye reflecting the world

A couple of articles led me to wonder if that battle will ever be won. The specific articles aren’t important to this discussion, but I will offer a few things I think are true about the writers

  • Each would define themselves as a developer
  • Each has also done plenty of design work
  • Each clearly understands design is more than how something looks
  • Each mentions that design is more than looks in their article

Still a word or two here and there in the articles gave the impression that looks and design were one and the same.

It made me wonder. If people who understand that design is more than aesthetics can give the impression that they’re the same thing, should we be surprised the non-designing public holds that perception. It made me think about why design and aesthetics are so tied together that many can’t see past the connection to understand what design truly is.

We’re Visual Beings

I’m not sure what science says is our strongest sense, but I think it’s safe to say the majority trust their sense of sight above their other senses.

The better the design, the less likely design is perceived to be present.

Our visual attention quickly finds objects in our environment and it engages with our surroundings. Vision dominates as a sense. How anything looks is inextricably connected to it. It becomes difficult to separate the two.

Do you know what’s difficult to see? All the decisions you make when designing a website. The decisions for organizing content. The decisions for constructing navigation to content. The decisions made about typography and grids and color or those made to prioritize content and create hierarchy. Those things can’t be seen. What can be seen is how the site looks.

You can’t smell or taste a website. You can’t really touch it either. Your sense of touch might be engaged while on a site, but it’s not the site your touching. You can see a website and you can hear it.

To make matters worse, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder no matter how well you design a site and design it’s visual layer, some people will think it’s poor design. To them it’s pood design because the look doesn’t match their taste.

You might have spent considerable time harmonizing the visual atmosphere with the main message the site wants to communicate. You might have made aesthetic choices to help the site be more usable. Still, some people will not like the color red and because of that your design is bad to them.

Everything is going to have an aesthetic, whether consciously designed or random. That aesthetic will contribute greatly to the perception of the thing and how well it works. That aesthetic will communicate meaning, impact usability, affect visitor engagement and conversions and on and on.

How a thing looks isn’t all there is its design, but how it looks is a significant part of the design. It’s a part that’s strongly connected to the thing itself. It’s hard for people to separate something with how it looks.

The Inevitability of Design

Good design stays out of the way. It should help you use a product or consume content on a website. It should help people perform tasks and it should help them understand information. A good design will help you get more done.

  • Good design makes things easier to use
  • Good design makes things easier to understand
  • Good design makes things more enjoyable to use

Because it stays out of the way to do these things, good design hides its value from people. Hidden things like the struggles and decisions to create navigation or the insight to provide the right copy at the right time aren’t seen as part of design. If they’re noticed, they’re considered inevitable.

Good design often seems inevitable after the fact. Someone comes up with a good solution. Others copy the solution. Before you realize it, the solution is being used everywhere and other solutions aren’t seen. It appears as though there’s never been another way to have solved the problem.

The inevitability is in someone making good decisions which leads to a result the rest of us wonder how we missed. If it’s only inevitable after it exists, then maybe it wasn’t all that inevitable. Maybe it was good design.

Inevitability results when the design is in harmony with the essence of the object being design. It’s designing form and function as one. Understanding the essence of something is difficult to do. It takes a great deal of time and effort. It requires stripping away surface layer after surface layer and making hard decisions to remove everything that isn’t the essence.

The irony for designers is the more the extraneous details are removed, the better the design, but the less the thing looks designed. The better a designer does his or her job, the more the end product looks inevitable as if no designer was required.

Good design remains mostly hidden and invisible. The better the design, the less likely design is perceived to be present. The exception is the aesthetic layer, which will always be seen.

It’s Hard not to Mention The Visual

I know design is more than aesthetics and yet many of the articles about design that I’ve written focus on the visual aspects of design.

My interest with aesthetics isn’t solely about making a site look pretty. It’s about how to create visuals that enhance communication and usability and so on. The making it pretty part is in there though, and it’s still me talking about design in a way that emphasizes how the finished product looks.

Anyone who talks about graphic design is going to emphasize what’s seen. The word graphic means of or relating to visual art. It’s had to talk about graphic design principles without there being great emphasis on the look of things.

Those interested in a deeper learning about design will get that designers are talking aesthetics as part of the bigger picture of design. Those less interested in a deep understanding of design will only see the connection between design and how the thing design looks.

Will the Perception Ever Change?

I’ve spent far too many hours trying to get across to people that design is more than an aesthetic layer. I’ve tried to convince many that design is far more than how a things looks. I don’t think I’ve ever been successful, though I’ll continue to make the arguments in design’s defense.

I doubt that any time soon the majority of non-designers are going to see past the perception that design and how something looks are one and the same. I don’t expect people to realize that how something works and the experience they get using it are the work of a designer. More likely the aesthetic layer will be seen as the design with the rest being inevitable.

I’m not sure there’s any reason to expect different. I’m sure I hold incorrect perceptions about the true nature of many professions. We all do. There’s only so much any of us can learn about or be interested in. We form quick impressions that we never go back and change.

There will always be those that do see past the look and understand how much more design involves. Perhaps the design community can fight the perception and help more people understand. For the masses though, design and how a thing looks will continue to be seen as the same thing. While I prefer they didn’t, I think it’s perfectly understandable why they do.

Let me leave you with a thought. If most people will equate design with how something looks, it suggests that they search for designed things in large part based on how they look. That doesn’t mean you have to embellish every website with artistic details and flourishes, but it does suggest that how the thing you design looks is important.

Anything you design should consider the tastes of the people most likely to buy what you’re selling. Your aesthetic choices should align as well as possible with what your customers think looks good. If that’s all some see as design, then that’s all they have to choose you over the next designer.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Friday, 25 July 2014

Write, Code, Design, Every Day - Vanseo Design

Write, Code, Design, Every Day - Vanseo Design

Write, Code, Design, Every Day

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Do you set aside time each day to get better at the things you do? Do you find opportunities to practice and improve your skills in your day-to-day work? You need to do and to practice if you want to get better. That means making it a priority and setting aside time each day and week to practice what you do.


Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio player above, Click here to listen. You can also subscribe in iTunes

The idea for this topic comes from an article I read recently by John Ressig, the creator of jQuery. John was working on side projects and finding time for them only on weekends. He wasn’t making the progress he wanted and realized he needed to write code every day if he wanted to move forward.

John set 4 rules for himself to correct this.

  1. He had to write code every day. He could do other things like write a blog post, but only in addition to coding.
  2. The code had to be useful code. It had to be more than reformatting the style or tweaking a few lines of code.
  3. The code had to be written before midnight.
  4. The code had to be Open Source and on Github.

While John talked specifically about writing code, I think the general idea can be applied to anything. If you buy the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of practice to being an expert rule (and even if you don’t), then you should realize the more you do something, the better you get at it.

You have to do the work to become an expert. No matter what you want to do, at some point you have to do it, if you want to get better. It’s important to practice and practice consistently. I don’t think you have to literally practice every day, but you probably want to come as close as possible.

Set Aside Time for Directed Exercise

One way to practice time is to set aside time each day specifically for practice. Ideally you’d set yourself a course of study and work through exercises designed to help you learn different concepts.

I’ve said on a number of occasions I think both theory and practice are important for learning and that each can give you something the other can’t. However, if you had to choose between the two, you should always choose practice. Practice without theory will get you further than theory without practice. Unless your goal is a career on the theoretical side like teaching or research.

  • If you want to be a designer you have to design
  • If you want to be a developer you have to write code
  • If you want to be a writer you have to write

It’s a Nike commercial. Just do it.

I devote time every week for learning. Some of that time is spent reading and some of it is spent in practice.

In my experience it can be hard to maintain doing something new consistently at first. It needs to become habit and part of your daily routine. In the beginning you also have to deal with your taste outpacing your skills. It can be discouraging, but that’s why you’re practicing.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to show your work to anyone. It’s just for you and if you put in the effort, you’ll be better at what you do than you are now.

Multipurposing

I have another method for finding practice time. I refer to it as multipurposing or doing one thing and having it serve multiple purposes.

For example I can learn a new css technique by writing a blog post about it and working on a demo to go with the post. I learn the technique, get to practice it, and end up with a finished blog post. Three things for the price of one.

Multipurposing is less about making sure to schedule devoted practice time and more about seeing the opportunities to practice, learn, and grow while doing the things you’re already doing.

Instead of sending a quick reply to an email, take a few minutes to edit it. Work on it as a short writing practice session. Take the time to craft your email instead of simply sending it. Is it required for the email? Probably not, but it certainly won’t hurt and doing that enough you’ll become a better writer.

Don’t leave a note on the fridge for your roommate. Design it. Call attention to the note. Make sure it has a clear hierarchy and communicates as effectively as possible. If you need to fix some code for a website or app try to fix it in a few different ways. Improve on your code. Reformat it. Spend a few minutes beyond the first solution you find to improve on the solution or find a better one.

Everything you already do could probably serve as practice for something in addition to its desired goal.

It’s up to you what rules you set for your practice as long as you find a way to practice near daily. John set himself some specific and even arbitrary rules. They help him get what he wants from coding. You don’t have to follow his rules, my rules, or anyone’s rules other than your own.

My way isn’t to make sure I do something like write every day, because I know every day will present opportunities to write. My goal is to make sure I put in a little more than I need to simply finish the writing. I treat most emails like more than just an email. I make an exercise of some and see them as opportunities to practice writing.

This can all be a good way to figure out what you’re passionate about if you haven’t figured it out yet. Find a couple or three things you want to do and schedule time for them or find the daily opportunities to practice Odds are you’ll keep up with one thing more than the others. That thing is probably where your passion awaits.

Oddly enough I don’t do this as much with design and development as I do with writing. It’s a note to myself to seek those practice opportunities or make sure to schedule some time to devote to the practice.

Just Do It

If you want to become a better writer, design, developer, or accountant and you don’t naturally have that work to do in your normal routine then you’ll need to schedule time for it.

If you do write, design, code, or whatever you want to get better at, you can take advantage of the daily opportunity to practice. It’s a different way of scheduling practice time throughout the day instead of having it all confined to a scheduled block of time.

If you don’t know where to start, pick up a book or signup for an online course. Ideally both will provide exercises that give direction to your learning.

Start a personal project. Think of something you want to build and start building it. Let the project direct your course of study.

Copy from someone else for inspiration. See their result and try to get to a similar result, but in your own way. Don’t literally copy what the other person did. Use their result as a goal for your practice. See if you can arrive in the same place.

There’s only so much time in a day, but practicing what you do is important. Finding the time comes down to priority and discipline. You have to see the importance in practice and then you have to practice.

If you want to get something done, make time for it. The main thing is to consistently be working at what you do to get better doing it. Slow and steady is the best way to win this race.

Figure out how you can schedule time each day or most days to practice what you do. See the opportunities to practice in the things you already do. Ideally do both.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday, 22 July 2014

The Art To Becoming A Better Designer — Learning To Trust Your Judgement - Vanseo Design

The Art To Becoming A Better Designer — Learning To Trust Your Judgement - Vanseo Design

The Art To Becoming A Better Designer — Learning To Trust Your Judgement

Posted: 21 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Like many disciplines, there’s a science and art to design. On the science side we rely on foundational principles, use logic to make rational decisions, and study sciences like psychology and neuroscience to better understand an audience.

On the art side consider that most design principles are more guideline than rule and with all the decisions you have to make during a design, there’s hardly time to apply the scientific method to all of them. For most of the decisions you make, you have to use your subjective judgement and trust in yourself.

The anatomy of type

The Art of Design

The larger object is noticed before the smaller one. The red element grabs your attention before the blue one. Something moving draws your eye. These things can be tested and measured scientifically. The problem is designers need this information in reverse.

We don’t need a red object, a large object, or a moving object. We need to design something so it attracts attention. The previous paragraph offers three possible ways. Which one should you use? Therein lies some of the art.

You have to make decisions without knowing if they’re right and you have to trust they are right once you’ve made the decision

It’s an art to chose the best of many workable solutions. It’s an art to balance the many possible best solutions that work together to form a big picture best solution. It’s an art because there are few, if any, absolute rules to tell us which option is better. You have to use your own judgement to decide.

There are so many decisions to make on even a simple site that there comes a point where you have to go with your gut and trust in what it tells you.

You develop this trust by learning the guidelines and observing designs. You develop confidence in your decisions through critical thinking about design in general and your own designs in particular. You rely on things from the science side of design to build your confidence for working on the art side.

The Art of Choosing a Typeface

Type fundamentals aren’t too hard to understand. You can learn the anatomy of type and the anatomy of a typographic grid quickly. You can pick up the most important guidelines in a relatively short amount of time. There’s body and display type and different ways to categorize every typeface such as serif and sans-serif or humanist and old style.

You can learn to harmonize the relationship between font-size, line-length, and line-heght. You can lean on design principles like scale, proportion, and hierarchy to help determine these relationships.

What I find more difficult is deciding which type expresses calm and which exudes energy. What’s difficult is choosing a typeface that expresses the same things you want your design to express. While you can lean on guidelines and the advice of others, in the end all you have is your eye to guide you.

The art of choosing a typeface requires you to develop your eye to make your choice. You need to develop trust and confidence in your eye and judgement so you’re not be second guessing yourself all the time. Trust your decision and move on to the next one. It’s about putting in the time and effort to observe, think, and decide to the point where you trust yourself to make a good choice.

How do you know if a typeface is legible and readable at a certain size? Build a web page using that typeface at that size and as close as possible to how you might use the type in your project. Take a look at it. Is it readable? Legible? That’s how you know. You decide.

It’s ok to seek opinions more expert than your own, but try to use those opinions as a fallback after you’ve first sought your own opinion. In time you’ll learn to trust in your opinion more.

How I Make Type Decisions

Typographic decisions are some of the first decisions I make about any website. However, before I even start looking at typefaces, I’ve talked to the client and defined the problem. I’ll have a concept to work from and usually have a short list of descriptive words the design should communicate.

For example say a client wants to communicate they’re both friendly and attentive. How might you choose a typeface that communicates those two things?

Friendly suggests to me something softer and rounder as opposed to harder and sharper. Attentive suggests something that stands straight up and down, ready and alert. A typeface may not instantly grab you as friendly and attentive, but you can make comparative judgements by asking yourself if one typeface is rounder or more straight up and down than another.

To choose I’ll look through collections of different fonts and those commonly installed on computers. I’ll look to services like TypeKit or FontShop and I’ll look to free fonts like Google fonts and Font Squirrel. I might make a decision like serif or sans-serif for the body type just to add a constraint and then spend time looking through fonts, collecting a few I think are friendly and attentive or whatever qualities I’m seeking.

I’ll take a second pass at the fonts I’ve collected as possibilities and narrow the choices down to two or three. With a manageable list, I’ll build a simple web page using the most realistic copy I have and start experimenting with font-size, line-length, and line-height.

From there I’ll look for a display font to pair with each of the few options I’m considering for the main copy. Once again I’ll think about the descriptive words and do my best to seek a font I think communicates what I’m after.

I’ve yet to find a site that lets me search the word “friendly” and have it return a list of ideal fonts to use. Instead I use my eye to decide if the characteristics of the typeface communicate what I want the type to communicate.

I’d like to tell you that I’m 100% certain in my type choices, but I can’t. I can tell you that the more I look at fonts and the more I think about them and the more effort I put into making each choice, the closer I get to that 100% certainty with each new decision.

Because it’s unlikely I’ll ever be 100% sure of every choice I make, I have no problem leaning on those who know more than me at times.

I’ve searched for lists of fonts other designers think are designed well. I’ll seek advice on which fonts work well as pairs to fonts I’m considering. In between projects I learn what I can from those who know more, so the next time around I can be more confident in trusting my own opinion.

In the end you only have your judgement when choosing typefaces for a project. Over time you can improve that judgement by learning what you can and applying what you learn in combination with any observations you make.

If you want a friendly font, think about the characteristics of type or the ways to classify type and ask yourself which characteristics or classifications are friendlier than the others. You don’t need anyone else to tell you. Make your own judgement. Practice the art of design.

Closing Thoughts

When first learning design, I looked for objective and absolute rules everywhere. I didn’t find them. I’ve since learned much of design comes down to trial and error. Not necessarily for each design decision you’ll make on a project, but rather in training yourself for the art of design.

There are plenty of guidelines in design. Some are easy to understand and put to use. Others require more context to understand and more subtlety to use. The few rules we have that can be scientifically backed still require an art to decide when the rule applies and should be used.

Choosing a typeface and determining proportions for size, measure, and leading are part of the art of design. You have to make observations and use your judgement to decide what a typeface communicates. You have to relate proportions to the goals of the design and perhaps use trial and error to find the right proportions to use.

It’s the same when working with color or choosing what grid should hold your content. There are no recipes to follow that automatically lead to good design. You have to make decisions without knowing if they’re right and you have to trust they are right once you’ve made the decision.

Design isn’t art, but there’s an art to becoming a good designer. You have to experience design, think about it critically, and ultimately learn to trust in your judgement and decision-making abilities.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Friday, 18 July 2014

Creativity Is In The Journey - Vanseo Design

Creativity Is In The Journey - Vanseo Design

Creativity Is In The Journey

Posted: 17 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Do you think the end justifies the means? Or is it the other way around? Is it the means that justify the end? I’m of the latter opinion, but like everything else, it depends. It depends on your means of choice and what results await you. It depends on your goals for taking the journey and emerging at the other end.


Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio player above, Click here to listen. You can also subscribe in iTunes

Not long ago I was listening to an episode of Shawn Blanc’s podcast, The Weekly Briefly. The episode in questions was, Delight in the Journey. Shawn talked about defining success for yourself, particularly creative success, but other forms, like monetary success, were part of the discussion.

To define success you need to identify what’s most important to you and which version of success you’re after. Is the main goal money? Or like Shawn are you more interested in creating work you can be proud of and that contributes something back to the world.

Shawn recalled the following quote a few times.

We don’t make movies so we can make more money. we make more money so we can make more movies
mdash; Walt Disney

The idea is that for Disney the work isn’t for the sake of making money. It’s the other way around and money exists as the means to an end goal of producing work. The business model supports the creative work.

The Journey and the Results

I want to pick up the topic and talk about the means and the end, the journey and the result. I think if you can enjoy the journey, regardless of how the end turns out, you’ll be happy. The ideal is to enjoy the journey and achieve the results you want, but the journey brings more happiness than the results.

There’s a single point of success or failure in the results. You either succeed or you don’t. The journey contains many more ways to succeed or fail. The journey provides more opportunities for many things.

Enjoying the journey doesn’t mean you have to give up the result. Again the idea is to experience the journey and have a successful result in the end. The journey though, is where you acquire experience and knowledge. It’s where you meet people both good and bad, and where you grow as a person. You can only get these things in the journey. They aren’t waiting at the end.

I think this is true for everyone, but it’s especially true when your work is creative work. Creativity thrives in the journey and not in the result. Creative results can only be found in the journey.

You’re creative. Maybe you design or you develop. Maybe you write front end code. Maybe you’re a writer or photographer. You have to exercise your creative muscles. The exercise is in the doing. It’s along the journey.

It’s not just about being creative. All you have is this moment. This very one. The past is gone and the future isn’t here. All you have is this very moment. You have to be present in the moment to enjoy the moment and learn from it.

I used to spend many moments thinking about why things in the past caused me not to enjoy moments in the present. I used to spend many moments thinking about the best way to live for future moments. You can’t really do either in the present. You can only be there to experience it.

The Journey Shapes My Business and Me

I continue to evolve my business based on the interests I pick up on the journey. I’ve shifted gears a few times. I became a freelancer because it felt right where the corporate world didn’t. I mean that for me and not in general. I didn’t go into business because I already knew how to run a business. I learned along the way. I learn to run a business during the ongoing journey of running a business

I chose web design because I was spending my free time after work learning to develop sites and practicing building them. I marketed myself mainly through writing because I like to write. I’ve evolved my service, my clients, and most every other aspect of my business based on things not specifically about money. Mostly it’s been what allows me to do the work I want to do.

As a company, Apple believes you focus on designing great products and the rest will follow. I believe we’re all good at some things and following a path toward them lets you experience many related things that can help you do it better. Being interested helps you follow the path when following becomes difficult. Create truly great products and they will sell.

Where is Your Focus?

You grow during the journey. Not at the start or the end, but during the journey itself. It’s where you acquire new skills, knowledge, and experiences.

If you focus on the result, one goal becomes getting to that result as quickly as possible and in as straight a line as possible. Creativity needs to explore. It needs the journey, because only the journey lets you discover the quality to be found in the exploration.

Are you in it for the money or for the work? It’s up to you and there’s nothing wrong with either choice. Your monetary result could be the starting point for something that contributes greatly to the world. It’s a rational end result and you may delight in the journey of making money.

If your focus is on the work and your passion for the work and the experiences you gain doing the work, then your focus is on the journey. This is the better focus if you want to produce truly great and meaningful creative work.

I think if you do good work, the money will follow. It’s why I always suggest following your passion into business. If your goal is the money, the work can only follow so far. You’ll never get as good as the work if your focus is the end result. You’ll miss too many chances to experience and explore along the way.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Why Do So Many Responsive Sites Look The Same? - Vanseo Design

Why Do So Many Responsive Sites Look The Same? - Vanseo Design

Why Do So Many Responsive Sites Look The Same?

Posted: 14 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Do you think too many responsive sites look the same? It seems to be a very common perception. If you do think they look alike, have you thought about why? Is it something inherent in responsive web design or are there other reasons?

I think there are a handful of reasons, though none specific to RWD. They might be specific in their details, but the details arise from a more general rule that extends far beyond responsive design.

One glowing blue sphere in a sea of dull gray spheres

This isn’t the first time this topic’s come up or the first time I’ve written about it. I suspect it won’t be the last. I want to offer six reasons why responsive sites might look alike and why it doesn’t really matter. It’s just us humans being human. Here are the reasons.

  • People copy success
  • People copy to learn
  • Designers need to be productive
  • The industry is still learning responsive design
  • Originality doesn’t stand out as responsive design
  • Change can be difficult

Let’s consider each in a bit more detail.

People Copy Success

Success isn’t easy and many people seek shortcuts to it. If something works for someone else they copy it in the hopes it’ll bring them the same success. It’s hardly limited to design. It exists in every industry.

Responsive design hasn't matured to the point where we can shift focus away from the underlying structure and back to aesthetics and originality

Anything that’s been proven to work will be copied. It happens in business, in art, in the auto industry, in fashion, in sports. It happens everywhere. Self-help books are built on the idea of copying what worked for someone else.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Copying each other is part of who we are as a species. It’s one reason trends emerge. It’s so ingrained in all of us, it’s hard to think otherwise.

It’s not as though websites looked very different from each other before there was responsive design. In the dozen or so years since I’ve been paying attention to the design of websites I’ve seen the same familiar pattern.

  • Someone does something different that people like
  • Most everyone else rushes to copy it
  • Someone does something different that people like
  • Most everyone else rushes to copy it

The internet makes it more acceptable to copy. It’s too easy to copy digital goods wholesale with small probability of repercussion. People across the internet live under different copyright laws making it impossible in many cases to prevent. Right or wrong as copying becomes more common, it becomes more accepted.

One reason responsive sites look like other responsive sites is simply because copying occurs everywhere. If anything it would be strange if responsive sites didn’t share a significant amount in common.

People Copy to Learn

Copying the work of others is often a starting point for learning. One way we learn is through the example of others. We see how someone else did something, copy their work as exact as possible.

As we gain experience and confidence we adapt what we learned from imitation. We mix in something of ourselves and others who’s work we’ve also copied. It all combines to form something new and uniquely us, but it often begins by copying those who inspire us.

Many designers learn to design by imitating designs they like or specific parts of those designs. Maybe they peek at the source code to understand how something was built or they attempt to recreate a color scheme they enjoy.

Copying others is part of how we learn. Responsive design is still relatively new. The industry is still learning how to best apply responsive techniques and we’re mainly learning from a handful of original sources.

If we’re learning from and copying the ideas of a few people, is it any wonder the sites we build look similar?

Designers Need to be Productive

Design is a business. You might do a lot of design work on personal projects, but the odds are the majority of work you or any designer does is for someone else and you do it to earn a living. Businesses strive to be more productive to make them more successful.

By its very nature, productivity will lead to sameness. We’re more productive when we do the same things in the same way over and over. It allows us to reuse work, saving on future time and costs.

In the name of productivity designers rely on frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation and grid systems like Skeleton or Gumby. If enough people are starting with the same few popular frameworks and system should we be surprised the resulting sites look similar?

Awhile ago I suggested that responsive design is easier than you think. I meant that the bare minimum you need to do to create a responsive site is relatively easy and doing only that minimum is still better than developing a fixed-width site.

To do responsive as well as you can requires far more work, which increases your costs and subsequent price to your client. Not every client is willing to pay that increase. Many just want a site that’s good enough.

Even those clients willing to pay might keep you from exploring more original solutions. There have been many things I’ve wanted to try on a client’s site that I thought would work well, but the final decision wasn’t mine to make. If the client wants something that looks like something else, you usually have to make it look a little like that something else to get paid.

Most clients don’t need/want a truly unique and custom site. They just want a site that works and doesn’t cost much. Responsive or not many of those sites will end up looking the same all in the name of productivity.

The Industry is Still Learning Responsive Design

I think this is a big reason for the sameness in responsive sites. Like I said above we copy to learn and where RWD is concerned, most of us are still learning. We’re learning the techniques of RWD and a we’re learning a host of other recent changes to html and css. Most of all responsive design is pushing us think in a new way about web design.

The last change close in magnitude was the move from table-based to css-based layouts. It was a few years before the change reached the majority of the industry and the same critiques of RWD now were present with css-based design then.

Like css-based design, the techniques of responsive design are mainly about layout. RWD is about developing layouts that work across different devices and under different circumstances. The focus is on layout. We’re figuring out how to build new html and css structures. Those structures will only differ so much. For the most part they’re going to look the same.

Give the industry more time. We’ll figure out the structure well enough and move toward the aesthetic layer where more originality will be introduced. Give it time. A lot has changed and is currently changing. As an industry we need to sort some of the new out. We will and when we do, we’ll be able to move on to other things.

This more than anything is why so many responsive websites look alike. RWD is about the underlying structure and while we’re all focusing on that structure, it’s inevitable much of our output will look similar.

Originality Doesn’t Stand Out as Responsive Design

I suspect that because we see some responsive designs looking very much like other responsive designs, we start to think of that look as responsive design and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Any site that looks like a Bootstrap or Foundation site must be responsive and everything that doesn’t must be something else. Unless you’re resizing every site you come across or checking them all on different devices, how do you really know which site is and isn’t responsive?

I think we sometimes make assumptions we shouldn’t make and put conclusions before investigation. Something tells me a certain amount of the talk about RWD sites looking the same arises from having already drawn that conclusion. I saw the same thing with the switch to css-driven sites.

Change Can be Difficult

It’s also possible some of this is about people dealing with change. Most of us don’t care for change that’s forced on us. When an industry shifts as dramatically as web design has been shifting, changes will feel forced to some.

Those people who aren’t yet ready to embrace the new, but feel pressured into changing now, will often criticize the new in an effort to hang on to the old. It’s a rather human thing to do.

I don’t think there are many designers consciously trying hard to belittle RWD for the sake of belittling it, but it’s not too difficult to see how not being ready change could push people toward disliking something that’s pushing them to change.

Closing Thoughts

I do think it’s fair to say a lot of responsive sites lack creativity and look alike. However, websites have always looked like each other. From trend to trend and paradigm to paradigm designers copy each other. Keep in mind while the industry is shifting to responsive design, it’s also following a flat design trend, which focuses on fundamental principles over originality for the sake of originality.

Responsive design hasn’t matured to the point where we can shift focus away from the underlying structure and back to aesthetics and originality. This more than anything explains the similar looks across responsive sites. Remember we’re all fundamentally building the same thing with the same limited set of rectangular building blocks.

Give it more time. If a few years from now every responsive site still looks like every other responsive site, then maybe we have a problem. At the moment I don’t think we’re seeing anything we haven’t seen before or anything unexpected of human beings.

One last thought is to not to get too caught up in what others say. Before people were criticizing RWD sites as looking the same, they were criticizing sites for being too focused on style and aesthetics over functionality. Whatever it is, if it gains enough traction you’ll find people railing against it. Today it’s responsive websites look too much alike. Tomorrow it’ll be something else.

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Friday, 11 July 2014

Working From Home - Vanseo Design

Working From Home - Vanseo Design

Working From Home

Posted: 10 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

How do you manage to be productive working from home when there are so many things to distract you? How do you motivate yourself to work hard when the tv is a room away or the phone is ringing? How do you stay on schedule with projects when the kitchen needs cleaning and there seems to be an endless amount of things to pull your focus away from your work?


Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio player above, Click here to listen. You can also subscribe in iTunes

Note 2: My apologies for the small bit of static in the audio. I re-recorded the worst of it, but there’s still about 15 seconds worth of static between 10:45 and 11:00 into the recording.

Today I’d like to talk a little about how you can stay focused when working from home about. If you work at home, how to you manage to be productive with all the distractions of home life and the need to motivate yourself.

The idea for this post comes from an article Matt Gemmel published about working at home a couple months ago. To give you an idea what Matt’s article is about here are the main headings.

  • Discipline
  • Eliminating distractions
  • Be a professional
  • Separating work from home life
  • Preserving sanity
  • Enjoy the flexibility
  • It’s what you make it

I’ll touch on some of the above, though not all. Matt and I are different people with different things to distract us and different needs for working successfully at home. I will start in the same place though, and talk a little about discipline.

Maintain Discipline by Doing More of What Interests You

Discipline has never really been a problem for me under one condition. I don’t find it hard to focus on the things I’m interested in. Of course, the reverse is also true.

For example many writing apps promote distraction free writing as a feature. They help you block out other things to the point where everything, but the sentence your writing is hidden from you. I’ve never understood why that’s useful.

I realize for many people it is, but it’s never been for me. My writing app is currently open to about 55–60% of the screen and I can see a browser behind it. Still it’s not a problem to focus solely on the writing app and get work done. I enjoy writing and the enjoyment is enough to maintain my focus.

That doesn’t mean I’m perfectly disciplined at every moment of every day. I’m not. Many days I wake up wishing I could do anything besides work.

I can generally stay focused though, and I think a large part of the reason is I’ve chosen a career I enjoy which involves things I feel passionate about. It’s one reason I always recommend people follow their passion in business. It makes it much easier to remain focused and disciplined because you want to do the work. It doesn’t even feel like work most of the time.

Discipline is something you have complete control over. The more you work at it, the better you get. If you’re having trouble staying focused on the work remind yourself of the importance of staying disciplined. If you are working from home think about how losing focus could easily have you back working in an office again. That’s enough to keep me focused.

Ideally you’ve followed your passion, but if not you can move your career from wherever it is now to someplace that inspires you more. You don’t have to suddenly quit and start over, but you could make small changes that bring you a step or two closer to something you feel more passionate about.

Stay on Schedule

Ultimately it’s on you to be disciplined and you have to find a way to remain disciplined. One thing that helps me is maintaining a routine or schedule. Having a flexible schedule is great. It’s one of my favorite aspects of working for myself, but you can’t let it lead to a loss of discipline. You have to get your work done.

When I first started working from home I knew I was responsive for getting work done if I wanted to get paid, but I thought I could be very flexible about when I got it done. The dream was I could wake up when I wanted and work when I felt like it. As long as I put in my 40–50 hours a week I’d be fine.

Unfortunately it’s easy to lose focus that way. For example I can’t recall ever waking up on a Monday and wanting to work. I usually wake up Monday morning wishing it was still Sunday or even Saturday. As much as I would have liked to take every Monday off, that wasn’t going to work well for business.

I found it was best to get into a routine and work a schedule that was roughly 9–5 Monday through Friday.

It’s when my clients are typically working. They’re mainly in the U.S. and Canada. There’s a 3 hour window from first to last so 9–5 for them is anywhere from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM local time for me. 7:00 AM is a bit too early for me to be working, but by 8:00 I can be available if need be.

I tend not to schedule phone calls and meetings at that time, but I can make myself available when necessary. I typically end up working until sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 and so have a schedule that aligns well enough with my client’s hours.

I also find friends have the usual 9–5 Monday through Friday and if I want to spend time with them, it makes sense to work similar hours.

My schedule isn’t rigid. I’m aware I won’t feel up to working my best every day. I account for this by varying my daily schedule. 8–6 is a 10 hour day, but I don’t usually work all 10 hours. More likely I’ll work 8 hours over those 10.

Sometimes I will work those extra hours which buys me time later in the week or the following one to take some time off. It also means I can take time away from working at a moment’s notice most of the time. That’s flexible enough for me.

My schedule is more a routine that can be broken most any time and with little notice. Sometimes I have to get some particular work done on a specific day. More often I don’t. More likely any deadline is some time off in the future and so I can switch tasks to keep me more interested.

Even Better, Get Ahead of Your Schedule

Even better than maintaining a schedule is to get ahead of it. It’s rare for me to have a project with an absolute deadline that comes in a few days. Usually there will be more time in advance to prepare for deadline day.

It’s possible I start a project on Monday that needs to be finished on Thursday, but more’s the case where the deadline is weeks or months done the road. My work is less about getting something done today and more about getting it down within a week or month.

Many days I do work all 10 hours in my 10 hour day. I might even put in a few hours over the weekend at times. If you can get more done each week than you need to, you build in more flexibility for time off later.

I do my best to stay a few weeks ahead on this blog. As I’m writing this I’m 2 weeks ahead. I’ve been about 3 weeks ahead for most of the last 6 months and I’ve been 4 weeks ahead at times. I could take a week or two off and you wouldn’t notice, because I already have posts scheduled to cover the time away.

Where clients are concerned, I try to be conservative with time estimates. It’s still a challenge for me as I tend to be a little too optimistic about how quickly I can get something done.

I maintain two estimates. An internal one for me and an external one for clients. I work to my internal time projections and try to stay ahead of them. At the very least I try to stay ahead of the estimate I give to clients. This way I can take a day or two away for another project or because something unexpected comes up, or even because it’s a low energy day.

Eliminate Distractions

I grew up just outside of New York City. If you’ve been to New York and its immediate surroundings, you know it’s not a quiet place. Most cities aren’t. You can find pockets of quiet at times, but more often there are sounds and other things to distract you.

My childhood serves me well working from home as I’m used to ignoring distractions. It doesn’t mean I don’t get distracted, but I am used to it.

I don’t like working in silence so I create some background noise to work to. Usually it’s music played at a moderate to higher volume and I have go to songs and albums that I find easy to work to. Sometimes it’s the tv, at a moderate volume. In fact the tv is usually on when I’ve chosen music for the day. It serves as visual background noise.

The tv was my babysitter at points in my childhood and while I’ve grown to be able to live without one, I typically turn it on for the background noise. I do find music less distracting so it’s typically what’s on when I’m working.

Both help drown out other noises that are more likely to distract. The idea is I’m setting up my own distractions that aren’t as distracting to me and more likely to fade into the background. The music might cover up a lawn mower outside or my neighbor who enjoys working with a chainsaw.

You have to know yourself and understand what in particular distracts you. For me social media and instant messenger are distracting. I don’t work with a Twitter client open. I don’t check Facebook or LinkedIn or Pinterest or whatever all day. They distract me so I ignore them most of the time.

I find it hard to ignore a conversation on IM so I don’t have that open either. I don’t check email constantly. Once in the morning, once around lunch time, and once at the end of the work day. I might pay more attention if I’m waiting for some specific information to help me work, but otherwise email is closed until I’m between major tasks.

I don’t have family to distract me, but I do have friends that possibly could. I usually don’t answer my phone (though oddly I forget to turn the ringer off). When I have a moment, I’ll listen to messages and decide when to return calls.

Closing Thoughts

Staying disciplined and removing distractions is about knowing yourself and understanding when you do and don’t need absolute focus. It’s about knowing what does and doesn’t distract you and finding ways to reduce those distractions.

I wouldn’t expect you to do exactly what I do. The trick is to understand yourself and work with yourself instead of against yourself.

These are all questions you have to answer for yourself. Once you’ve answered, set up a work environment that minimizes what distracts you and maximizes what doesn’t. Set things up to keep you focused on what you need to do. If distractions are ever present then set up your own distractions that don’t prevent you from working and help block out those that do.

If you can work at things you truly enjoy and find interesting this should all be easier, but if that’s not realistic, it’s your responsibility to set up a working environment that keeps you working.

Know that at some point it’s on you to remain disciplined. No one else is going to do the work for you or keep you focused. Working from home can be a great thing. Remind yourself that if you don’t get the work done, you probably won’t have the option to continue working at home.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Why Developers Should Learn More About Design - Vanseo Design

Why Developers Should Learn More About Design - Vanseo Design

Why Developers Should Learn More About Design

Posted: 07 Jul 2014 05:30 AM PDT

One of the topics that comes up often in web design circles is whether or not designers should code. What about the reverse? What about developers? Should developers learn more about design?

A couple of articles I came across recently have me thinking about this topic from the developer side. First was the article Why Developers Need to Learn Design by Stephen Carver for A List Apart. The second was an article by Mark Wilson for Fast Company discussing 4 myths about Apple design.

Programming code

Why Developers Should Learn Design

I think the reasons why developers should learn something about design are fundamentally the same reasons why designers should learn something about development. In his article, Stephen Carver offers several reasons of his own. Below are what I considered the article’s main arguments for why developers should learn design.

  • To gain empathy for the designers on their team
  • To understand the issues designers face and work to solve
  • To better adapt to responsive design processes and workflows
  • To help understand the people who will use the system being built
  • To enjoy their work more

The general idea is that developers who understand something about design gain a view of the bigger picture and where their work fits into it. The understanding encourages teamwork and helps developers anticipate the needs of others on the team. It also puts them closer to the end user. Ultimately a greater understanding of the project’s context helps make the work more enjoyable and the end result more satisfying.

Myths About Design at Apple

Mark Wilson’s article is an interview with ex-Apple designer, Mark Kawano. The first myth discussed is that people think Apple’s strength in design comes from having the best designers. While the designers at Apple are certainly talented, the real advantage at Apple is that everyone in the organization thinks about design.

It's not always easy to know where development begins and design ends

It’s not just designers who think design at Apple. It’s the engineers and the marketers and the human resources department. Everyone at Apple has an understanding about design’s role in the process and considers design when making decisions about their particular work.

Once again it’s about seeing the bigger picture and how an understanding of the whole helps the parts turn out better.

Fuzzy Edges

Like most industries, the project to build a website divides the work into areas of specialization. Designers design and developers develop. Sounds like a nice clean edge between the two, but the truth is the specialities overlap and the boundary between them is a fuzzy one.

It’s not always easy to tell where development begins and design ends. Both influence the larger context and that larger context influences each in return.

If anything, responsive design is making the boundaries between design and development even fuzzier. We’re moving deliverables from a graphic editor to a browser. That means developers are likely involved much sooner in the process than they might have been a few years ago. In general, designers and developers have to work in closer collaboration throughout the process now.

Seeing the Bigger Picture Improves the Parts

One of the more important design principles is the principle of unity, that everything should work together toward a common goal. The principle of unity isn’t only about design.

Unity includes development (as well as copywriting and marketing, and everything else that goes into a business). How something works is both a design and development decision. Both need to be unified under a larger set of decisions about the business behind the site.

Every aspect of a website works together toward some common goals. The color of an interface element could alter the perception of how well it functions. The code used to create it could alter how the visuals are perceived. Both designers and developers contribute to the overall experience someone feels when using the site.

No matter what part of a website you work on, the more you understand the other parts and how all those parts are related and connected, the better you can understand and work on your own part.

A developer might be considering three potential solutions to a problem. Only one might complement the design. Understanding design will help the developer choose that one solution.

A designer might want to explore ideas, while a developer will understand that one of those ideas requires significantly more work, time, and money and can recommend a simpler idea still accomplishes 99% of the more complicated idea. Understanding development helps the designer explore more feasible options.

Designers and developers have different sets of skills that get applied to achieving the same goal. It only makes sense that we should understand something of what the other does to end up with a better result.

Understanding Design Kept Me in Business

My path toward becoming a freelance web designer began as a front end developer. My partner designed and I developed her designs. I was never far from the design part of the process, though.

Both of us met and talked with clients. Together we identified problems and discussed solutions. Even though we then worked on separate aspects of the site, we both communicated with each other, offering feedback and listening to each other’s suggestions.

I considered how things looked and how they were organized while writing code. She thought about how something would work and how reasonable it was to develop within the client’s budget.

I’m fortunate we worked this way. In time she moved on to other things and I took on design as well as development. By no means was I a great designer at the time, but I had gained enough understanding of design to have confidence I could get there. It helped me trust that my eye for design was good and that I could improve my skills to match my eye if I was willing to put in the work.

Improve Your Skills to Gain an Edge

Whenever I talk about this topic from the side of designers learning to code, I always suggest the same thing. It’s no different here.

Developers don’t need to learn design. There are and will continue to be amazing developers who know little to nothing about design, just as there are amazing designers who can’t write a line of code.

However, understanding more about the other can only make you a better developer or a better designer. It simply helps you see how what you’re doing fits into the greater whole and it helps you understand how to do what you do in a way that works better within that greater whole.

I would hope that whatever your job you would want to do it better. If not, you might want to rethink some of the career decisions you’ve made. If understanding design helps developers become better developers, shouldn’t every developer want to learn more about design?

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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