One of the problems with responsive design are resizable images and by extension icons. When the interface adapts and changes size this can make displaying crisply rendered icons difficult.

Fortunately a few smart people have turned to font-face for the answer. By turning icons into fonts they become styleable with CSS, are infinitely scalable and are a smaller file size than imagery.

If you are interested in adopting this technique there are two options available to you.

You can download and use one of the royalty free font sets out there such as Modern Pictogram or IcoMoon.

Alternatively you can use a hosted service like Pictos. This is similar to Fontdeck and so has an annual fee associated with it.

My preference is to use a royalty free icon set that I can host myself. This will perform better than relying on a third party service.

Either way, I suspect font-face is the future of icons.

Update: As @wez have pointed out on Twitter, this approach is not currently without its problems. In particular the current use of fonts for icons is not accessible. This is a fair comment although not insurmountable. I am sure this will improve over time and as I conclude “I suspect font-face is the future of icons.

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But what do you do when you run out of ideas? How do you keep going?

Start by trying to wireframe the template for different audiences. What would your template look like if it only had to appeal to one user group? Now repeat the process for a second user group and so on. You will quickly build up a picture of each users unique requirements.

You might also try wireframing with an emphasis on different calls to action. You could wireframes for different use cases (e.g. “what if the homepage was primarily focused on its shop” or “what would the homepage look like if the emphasis was placed on the blog?”)

You will end up with a large number of wireframes for a particular template. These can be gradually refined until you have a clear vision for the page.

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Colour is an amazingly controversial subjects and the causes many design projects to be delayed. The reason for this is that colour is so subjective. Our opinions about colour can be influenced by things such as:

• Childhood experiences.
• Cultural influences.
• How we physically perceive colour.
• The medium through which we are viewing colour.

In this audio tip I share some ways to deal with colour. I mention subjects like:

• Colour theory.
• Colour testing.
• Books on colour including the superb Colour image scale.
• Colour palette creators.

Making decisions about colour needs to be more than a personal opinion. Good colour choices are based on solid theory or/and tested thoroughly with the chosen target audience.

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Before you call a user to action, first clearly describe what they will receive in return.

Take Skype for example. Skype has a very clear call to action on its homepage (download). However, that action is associated with a strong reason to do so.

Look at your own website and ask yourself whether the benefits of completing a call to action are obvious.

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We have been looking for a while and despite loads of applicants, we are yet to find the perfect fit for our team. I therefore want to encourage you to take another look.

One thing we have changed is that we are accepting applicants from anywhere in the south of England, even if that means they cannot commute to our offices everyday. It is more important to find the right person than for them to be office bound.

Also, don’t be put off if you lack .NET experience. That can be learnt. What cannot be learnt is the right personality for our culture or a passion for your work. These are the things we value the most.

Who we are looking for

You will be a server-side developer that loves finding innovative solutions to problems, enjoys working as part of a creative team and excels under pressure.

You will probably be a graduate with a computer science or similar background, preferably with a first or upper second degree.

The majority of Headscape’s projects are based on .NET so our ideal candidate would have .NET / C# expertise. However, in recent projects we have used PHP-based technologies such as WordPress, Expression Engine and Magento so if you have PHP experience and would like to acquire .NET skills we would also be interested in hearing from you.

What we can offer

Headscape has a lot to offer employees. Benefits include…

• A great working environment at our offices in a converted barn in the Hampshire countryside
• The chance to attend industry conferences
• A holiday allowance that increases with length of employment at Headscape
• The opportunity to work with an amazingly talented team
• Challenging work that will stretch your skills
• Some great client work to add to your CV
• Our development team uses tools including Visual Studio 2010 Pro, GIT, CruiseControl and CodeBase.
• The ability to build your reputation within the sector through Headscape’s active engagement with the broader web community.

As for salary – our approach is to pay competitively. We also share the benefits of success in the form of discretionary bonuses.

Interested?

So are you interested? If so (and you are not a recruitment agency) then email your CV to chris.scott@headscape.co.uk.

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Thanks for subscribing to Boagworld; a web design blog, forum and podcast run by Paul Boag and friends.

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In this audioboo I share some of the techniques I have included in my upcoming book “Client Centric Design”. Ideas include:

• Avoiding personal opinion by asking for specific feedback.
• Focusing the stakeholder on user needs and business objectives.
• Using video as a presentation tool.
• Alternatives to design by committee.

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Get used to it. We, the content designers, have to be just as responsive as the interfaces we create, adapting to change as it happens. To do this we need to learn to think differently.

Responsive thinking

We now have to design and think responsively.  Our layouts and our pages need to gracefully fit the device they are being viewed on. Whilst they don’t necessarily have to be perfect in all browsers across all devices, they do have to look good and present a better user experience when compared to pinching and zooming a mobile browser rendering our pages at desktop size. With statistics on mobile browsing indicating that more people will soon be accessing the web from mobile than from desktop, we have to think carefully right from the beginning of any new site we design.

This presents a new challenge.  If we are going to wireframe our site designs, then we need to think and therefore wireframe them polymorphically, i.e. they will change shape in different situations. As we consider and add elements to what is basically the blueprint for our design, we have to ensure that everything can morph gracefully to higher and lower resolutions. Changing layout as necessary, making use of wider resolutions more effectively and possibly omitting some of the content altogether at lower resolutions (a last resort of course).

Therefore, if we wireframe this…

then we really need to also show this in our wireframes for a portrait 768pixel wide table view:

down to this on a mobile phone portrait width:

We can’t just make assumptions about how the site will adapt and leave clients in the dark about these decisions as we continue development regardless.

Mobile first

We can’t continue to think through the wire framing process from a blinkered desktop perspective.  It’s not going to be easy though. Many of us spent years advocating fixing width or maximum 960px width designs. The thought of our previously rigid designs suddenly being unbuckled and able to jump around and change layout can be unsettling.

Really, we need to start our wireframing from narrow widths outwards, or ‘mobile first’ ensuring that we can serve our content to the lowest common denominator and expand on this progressively as more resolution becomes available to work with on wider screens.

From now on we need to mentally deconstruct our site as we create our wireframes, mentally breaking it down into columns and elements that can not only exist side by side, but also above and below each other. There is no fixed interelationship any more. By starting with narrow screen devices we can ensure we solve narrow width problems first rather than running into them later on when time may be short.

Design constraints

Try as we might, there is no getting away from the fact that responsive thinking challenges our design options and certain approaches will not be as easy to implement as easily as others. Strong grid designs morph more readily as we down-sample the grid to single columns more easily than a more organic design. Also, even numbers of columns provide easier wrapping options than odd numbers of columns. For example, expanding a single column narrow site to a wide design with 5 columns could present more of a challenge than a design which expands to 6 columns. A 6 column design allows column steps of 1 X 6, 2 X 3, 3X2, then 6 X 1 columns… whereas a 5 columns would be uneven – 1 X 5, 5 X 1 with no even steps in between. Of course, we have every opportunity to switch our grid at different breakpoints, but this inflicts a further development overhead.

Wireframing compromises

If our desktop layout has a major call to action in the right hand column, where the middle column isn’t actually as important as either column 1 or the call to action:

is it necessarily right that we mechanically do this?

This may be the natural response of stacking columns left to right and this may be the result if there is little thought applied to how things transpire in a narrow resolution. This may be a more appropriate solution:

In addition to considering it ourselves and any html consequences of moving content around at different breakpoints, we also need to demonstrate to our clients that this has been thought through during the architectural process of the site design and not just arisen as a consequence of changing the layout. Thinking through the best way of presenting a site is more important than the practical considerations of swapping content with media queries.

Compromises are inevitable

In the example above, what if the call to action element was an advert? Will advertisers consider that it’s position at the bottom of the page content be as prominent as it was before? Again, we need to decide in collaboration with the client and demonstrate on the wireframe how everything will appear and agree on the inevitable compromises that must occur. Advertisers will undoubtedly be much happier with this situation:

Conclusion

There is no getting away from it, to show a complex website on a narrow screen device such as a mobile, there will have to be compromises. If comprises aren’t made in the content (i.e. we are still giving the whole site without removing content), then compromises will inevitably occur in positioning of the content. On a mobile page there are really only 2 hot areas, the header and the footer, both of which will need to carry important navigation options for our site. Everything in between is fairly equally weighted. Let’s hope noone ever starts referring to the ‘fold’ when it comes to mobile, or things are going to get very complicated indeed.

Whatever our solutions, we need to quickly wireframe our intentions to demonstrate both to our clients and to ourselves that we are thinking mobile first, ensuring that width problems are all solvable from the outset and that as we scale our wireframing upwards content can neatly and evenly adapt to fit desktop widths.

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http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0064/4612/products/responsive-blueprint_grande.png?100729

I can imagine how this could benefit the design thinking process, helping designers to remember and consider that site design should be working at many widths.

Want.

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The problem is that pen and paper wireframing takes a lot of redrawing. You find yourself constantly drawing and redrawing screen elements, which proves time consuming. This is not a problem on a computer where you can copy and paste.

Apparently I am not alone in my desire to combine the best of computer based wireframing and good old pen and paper. Nat from Lanyrd feels the same and has solved the problem in a simple, yet elegant way.

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As you can imagine working in an organisation the size of the European Commission has some unique challenges. With over 400 websites, tens of thousands of pages and 23 languages to accommodate, it is hard to get things done.

Amazingly, despite being faced with such overwhelming challenges the web community there is very proactive, positive and forward thinking. They come together regularly to share ideas and find ways to work collaboratively. They also run a series of masterclasses (hence my visit).

They asked me to give a talk based on my Fight The System presentation, although to be honest things moved a long way from that starting point.

The guys at the European Parliament attended and have written up a comprehensive post of the discussion. If you work for a large organisation then check it out. It has some useful discussion points for any internal web team.

I also think there is a lot to be learnt from the European Commissions web team. The community they have built is inspiring. Many of the web teams I encounter in large organisations are beaten down and overwhelmed. However, the guys at the European Commission have maintained an incredibly positive and proactive attitude despite an overwhelming task. I found them inspirational.

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Lets imagine an 18 year old visiting a University website. In the navigation they encounter a label marked Alumni. They don’t understand that the term refers to former students and that the content is therefore not relevant to them.

One might expect that when faced with a term they do not understand they would simply choose to ignore it. However, the reality is very different.

When faced with an unfamiliar term users feel a sense of doubt. This creates one of two reactions…

• The sense of doubt leads to uncertainty and inaction.
• They feel a need to understand the unfamiliar term and so waste time investigating the section in case it contains relevant content to them.

In either case their experience is damaged.

The lesson we take away from this is that all labels need to be understandable by all users even if the content contained is not relevant to them.

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As people who work with the web all the time, I think we have a somewhat coloured view of e-mail. We consider it a necessary evil and the last thing we ever want is more of it.

Our attitude towards e-mail gives many of us a negative perception of e-mail newsletters. However, our view of e-mail is not representative of the general populace.

In this audioboo I share a recent experience showing just how out of kilter our perception is. I also discussed some of the ways you can integrate e-mail into your online communications using tools like Mailchimp.

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Its so important to present users with a consistently branded and quality experience across all the channels they encounter online. To do anything else smacks of a “I don’t care attitude” and is unprofessional.

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That said I might have got a bit carried away over the next few months.

This is what I have coming up:

Internet Retailing Expo

21st and 22nd March: London

I am introducing a crowd of marketeers to the idea of responsive design and hopefully breaking their obsession with native apps. Don’t get me wrong; I love native apps, but they are not always the right solution.

DIBI Conference

16th and 17th April: Newcastle

After London it is off to Newcastle to talk at DIBI. I practically begged these guys to let me speak, as this conference has a great lineup. My subject here is client centric web design, the topic of season 3 of Boagworld which will kickoff around the same time and include my next ebook.

Future Insights Live

30th April to the 4th May: Vegas

I am barely back from Newcastle when it is off to Vegas to present the same topic to the US audience. This one sounds like it is going to be a really exciting new conference. With 8 workshops and over 100 speakers this conference looks like it is going to become what SXSW used to be in it’s early years (when it was good). If you can make it to Vegas this is going to be the big conference of the year.

Future of Web Design

14th to the 16th May: London

Its back from Vegas and off to London to once again join the guys at Carsonified. The details of this one are still to be confirmed but it looks like I will be both speaking and giving my full day workshop on running a successful web design business. Marcus is threatening to join me for that one which will make it a really fun day.

Interlink

6th and 7th June: Vancouver

Finally the insanity ends with yet another trip across the Atlantic for Interlink in Canada. They have asked me to give my favourite talk ever, ‘unbelievable ecommerce,’ and so I cannot wait for this one.

Its going to be an exciting and exhausting few months, but I have one objective – meet new people. Therefore if you are intending to attend any of these conferences let me know in the comments below. I would love to hook up.

I wonder what the second half of the year will contain.

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By the time the end finally came the 3 of us were ready for something new. We were ready to form Headscape.

Not that running Headscape has been any less of a roller coaster. There have been some incredibly exciting times, but some tough decisions too. We founded Headscape in an economic downturn and 10 years on we once again find ourselves in the same position.

Yet so much is changed over the intervening time. In those early days we still built websites using tables and had little in the way of methodology or design process.

So what exactly have I learnt from running Headscape over the last 10 years? It seemed only appropriate that I share with you 10 of the most poignant lessons, beginning with the realisation we are not just hired to build websites.

Customer service is vital

I once read a tweet written by a prominent web designer that complained about a client who wanted constant updating. He argued that it was more important to build the website than communicate with the client.

10 years of running my own web design company has taught me that this could not be further from the truth. As web designers we do not run manufacturing companies churning out websites. We are a service-based business and customer service is a core component.

Too many of us resent clients and wish we could design websites without them. However, successful web designers works with rather than against the client.

Work with clients, not against them

As I look back over 10 years worth of projects there is a single factor more than any other that dictates the success or otherwise of a project. That is the working relationship between ourselves and our clients.

The client is a fundamental part of the web design process. I hear many web designers claim they could produce better sites if the client didn’t keep interfering. That is absolute bollocks!

Successful websites are those where the client and web designer work together, respecting each others expertise and opinions.

By excluding the client from the process you lose their knowledge of business, objectives and target audience. They will understand their business, target audience and products better than you ever will.

Communicating with clients may sometimes seem an effort but it is crucial to the success of their website. This is just one of the reasons why project management is such a crucial component of web development.

Project management matters

When you work for a web design agency, rather than run one, it is easy to be critical of project managers. What do they actually produce and what value do they bring? However, as soon as you start running your own business, you suddenly realise how valuable they are.

We are web designers and not artists. We work within certain constraints. These constraints are both budgetary and time related. In the world of business, if a website does not launch on time and within budget it has failed. Project management ensures this does not happen.

People are surprised at how many project managers we have at Headscape considering the size of our team. However these guys ensure our reputation for delivering complex websites on time and within budget, remains in-tacked.

As you may have gathered by now the last 10 years has convinced me that web design is not primarily about HTML, CSS and Photoshop designs. It is about solving business problems.

Web design is about solving business problems

Building a website is relatively easy. HTML and CSS were always designed to be accessible languages. If you have a good eye for design and basic computer skills is easy to set yourself up as a web designer.

What then distinguishes these enthusiastic amateurs from professional web designers? Put another way, how has Headscape been able to justify charging reasonably high rates that have progressively increased over 10 years in business?

How can you increase the amount you charge for your services?

The answer is to stop building websites and start solving business problems. Increasingly I’ve come to realise that if you just look at the website in isolation you will only have a minor impact on the business.

This is especially true when working with larger clients. For the website to be truly effective it often requires changes in organisational thinking to make it happen. Too often such organisations are not adequately equipped to effectively run their website. This is not just in regards to staffing but also in mentality. They think in terms of departments rather than looking at the organisation holistically.

It is only once you have become experienced in Web governance that he can start charging higher rates. This is because the work you do brings a higher return.

Of course to prove that the work brings a higher return you need to be able to measure the site successes.

Success has to be measurable

The belief that effective web design is about careful measurement and testing is probably the biggest shift in my perception over the last 10 years.

I used to rely heavily on my own expertise and previous experience to inform my approach to website design. Interestingly, as I have accumulated more experience over the years I have come to rely less on my personal intuition and more on rigourous testing.

There are 4 reasons for this:

• Careful testing and measurement of key performance indicators helps to establish whether the work you are doing is proving successful or not.
• This analytical approach avoids conflict born out of different personal opinions. This is particularly important in large organisations where there are many stakeholders.
• It prevents you from making assumptions about user behaviour. After 16 years as a web designer I’m still amazed at how users interact with websites. The longer I work as a web designer the more I realise that the only way to be sure about user behaviour is to test and measure it.
• A process of continual measurement and testing encourages ongoing development of a website.

This last point is particularly important.

Websites are an ongoing commitment

When we started Headscape in 2002 most websites were seen as little more than brochures which only required occasional updating.

10 years on things are radically different. The vast majority of our work is for existing clients with whom we have an ongoing relationship. This is good for our business and also leads to far more effective websites.

We now live in a world where websites are continually evolving and require an ongoing commitment from both the web design agency and the website owner. Making it clear to the client that they will need to dedicate time and resources to their website on an ongoing basis has become the linchpin of our approach.

Not that every client wants to hear that message. However, another lesson I’ve learned is that radical honesty is always the best approach.

Radical honesty pays

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make clients happy. This is certainly a somewhat obsessive characteristic that I have. If my client is unhappy (even if for completely unjustified reasons) then I am devastated.

However, I have learnt that this desire to please can lead down a dangerous road. We can end up telling a client what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear.

I have learnt that it is more important to be honest with a client than it is to make them happy. If a client suggests an idea that will damage their site, I will tell them. If they need to do something that they will not like, it would be a disservice to keep quiet.

This is particularly important in the sales process. This is the time when we feel the most need to make our clients happy and yet this is when radical honesty is required. If we cannot meet a deadline imposed by the client, we must say so. If their budget is inadequate we must be honest. Most importantly if we disagree with their approach, we must tell them.

Yes, this has led to Headscape losing work. However, the consequences of not being honest with the client is worse. These projects inevitably lead to poor websites and lose money both for you and the client.

For us, radical honesty is apart of our ongoing desire to educate our clients.

Always educate

I started Boagworld.com as a personal site to document the things I learnt as a web designer. Over time it turned into a marketing tool for Headscape. However, it also plays a role that I rarely talk about. It is an educational tool.

If the client is going to be a partner in the web design process and be responsible for the ongoing direction of the site, they need to be well informed.

It falls to us as their web designer to bring them up to speed. This is done throughout your ongoing relationship with the client. At each stage of the build we are educating our clients about the web design process. We are also preparing them for what will happen after launch, where the day to day running will fall to them. I do this through conversations with the client but also through posts on Boagworld.

Where boagworld really becomes important is educating clients before we work with them. We have found that those who have read Boagworld before coming to us are considerably better prepared. This has been a valuable lesson and led to much easier projects.

Of course it can sound patronising to talk of educating our clients. Its important to remember that we need to keep learning too.

You must always keep learning

My 10 years in Headscape have taught me that you need an insatiable appetite for learning to be a successful web designer. Before my time at Headscape the web changed at a phenomenal rate and it has continued to do so over the last 10 years.

As time passes new technologies emerge, new techniques develop and we become ever more refined in our processes. This means that we need to deliver evermore sophisticated solutions in order to compete in a fast-moving market.

However, it is not just a matter of learning about new web design techniques and technologies. With each new client we need to learn about their business, sector, products and target audience.

Over the last 10 years I have learnt about such diverse sectors as higher education, law, food and nutrition, pharmaceuticals and even sex toys! To suggest that we have nothing to learn from our clients is incredibly arrogant and naive. We need to approach each new project with a hunger and excitement to learn.

Not everybody has that desire and so it is important to surround yourself with the right people.

The right team matters

If one thing has made Headscape successful over the last 10 years it is the people. This extends from the 3 founders all the way to my wife who does 12 hours a week office admin. Every person in a company the size of Headscape is crucial.

If one thing has made Headscape successful over the last 10 years it is the people.

I was incredibly lucky to form Headscape with two amazing cofounders. Both Marcus and Chris beautifully balance my own strengths.

Marcus has an incredible intuitive understanding of people which proves invaluable both in sales but also when it comes to running stakeholder interviews and user testing.

Chris has an amazingly analytical brain that enables him to work with complex business and technical problems. His astute management of the company and his attention to detail in client work has proved a key differentiator from our competition.

We have also been incredibly privileged to have worked with some of the brightest minds on the UK web design scene. We have designers who can not only produce engaging and beautiful interfaces, but also have an intuitive understanding of user interaction.

We have developers unlike any I have met elsewhere. As well as having the analytical and technical skills you would expect, they are also amazing creative thinkers able to solve even the most complex problem in an innovative an elegant way.

Finally, we have project managers that are totally unflappable. Yes, they are amazingly organised and yes they deliver projects on time and within budget. However, for me their standout feature is the total confidence they exude, which proves massively reassuring to our clients.

Looking forward

I’m aware that this post could give the impression that Headscape is some kind of Utopia. It is not. We make mistakes and at times things have been very tough for our business. I have learnt some amazing lessons but many of those have been learnt through making gargantuan mistakes.

As I look forward to the next 10 years I have no doubt that we will continue to make mistakes and probably even repeat some we have already made. Running a web design agency is not always easy, but as Winston Churchill put it:

Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

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There is something incredibly useful about stepping back from everyday work and doing something completely different. You will learn more in those few days than you will in months of normal work.

Admittedly we cannot all just give up our normal work for a week, but we can have personal projects on the go. This is certainly something I do and it improves my skill set while also helping inform my day job.

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Looking back at 2011

In a post for web design tuts+ that asked experts for their assessment of 2011, I wrote:

2011 has to be the year of mobile. We have seen a continued explosion in mobile web usage and the emergence of responsive design as a solution to the challenges this presents.

It is now possible to adapt any website to work better on mobile devices without excessive expenditure. Best of all, new builds can be constructed from the ground up to function across almost all devices (both present and future). This can be done at a fraction of the cost of previous solutions.

From my perspective this is a huge step forward.

Looking forward to 2012

.net magazine ran a similar post but instead looking forward to 2012 and asking web designers to predict what developments we will see emerge. I hate contributing to this kind of post because I am inevitably wrong. However, this is what I eventually wrote:

Headscape co-founder Paul Boag reckons 2012 will be the year of customer service within the web industry: “As web designers, we like to think we just build websites. We don’t. We also offer a service to our clients. We are often so obsessed with user experience, code and design that we forget other important factors such as good communication, understanding business needs and exceeding client expectations. If we are going to prosper in 2012 we need to blow our clients away, not just their users.”

I’m sure some smart Alec will be quick to remind me of this when the year finally comes to a conclusion.

The question is do you agree? What do you think were the emerging trends in 2011 and what are your predictions for 2012? Let me know in the comments.

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• Following me on Twitter
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Thanks for subscribing to Boagworld; a web design blog, forum and podcast run by Paul Boag and friends.

If you are new to my feed may I recommend also:

• Following me on Twitter
• Checking out my get started guide
• Having a look through the archive of posts
• Subscribing to the podcast
• Visiting the forum
• Maybe even hiring me!

It’s an article on the subject of web governance. This is a fancy term for an important subject – how to integrate your site into the broader business and manage its running.

The article is stuffed with great stuff if you work with or in a large organisation. However, the following two paragraphs particularly summed up the problem.

Organizations have been using the web for more than 15 years. During that time, it’s grown from being one channel among many to being the channel : the website is now the digital manifestation of the organization , critical to marketing and sales, communications, branding and reputation, and customer service and support. The internet revolution has created huge social change: it’s changed the way people relate to organizations and it’s already destroyed several once-mighty industries, like newspapers, travel agents, and music publishing.

Although we’re comfortable with the idea that the web is critical to organizations, we often miss the corollary: the web has changed the way organizations operate , and in many cases it’s changed their business models, too. When executives can’t see that, it causes a crisis. Welcome to your daily web-making reality.

This is so true. Gone are the days when the web was just a marketing channel. It is now a crucial component of almost all businesses. This not only changes organisations about also those of us who offer web design services. As the article goes on to say:

Today, the critical skills of a web professional aren’t technical. They’re skills like advocacy, facilitation, diplomacy, pragmatism, and patience. Technical skills still matter, but they don’t differentiate us in the market anymore, and we can’t use them effectively without tackling organizational change.

When looking for a web design agency it is important to look for these skills as much as the technical ones.

Thanks for subscribing to Boagworld; a web design blog, forum and podcast run by Paul Boag and friends.

If you are new to my feed may I recommend also:

• Following me on Twitter
• Checking out my get started guide
• Having a look through the archive of posts
• Subscribing to the podcast
• Visiting the forum
• Maybe even hiring me!