If you want to break a client's heart, sell what you don't know how to produce. Bill your client the time necessary to learn the tools you need to make them happy. Wow them with your big thinking and static comps, but be coy about how your ideas can be realized in the appropriate delivery technology.

*

"Hello. We're from [client name redacted] and we're looking for a design firm to create a sales presentation for us. We've been hearing good things about Flash and we were wondering if we could get a quote from you to create a ten-minute movie."

"Hold on… let me put you through to the creative director," I said.

The year was 1999, the heyday of the web animation revolution, and I was working at a small design firm on the East Coast still swimming in print design and production. We'd just finished an annual report, we were knee-deep in some collateral and a logo or two. This request was a new one to my ears. Everyone wanted a Flash splash page for their website or a Director presentation extolling the virtues of their products through slick, interactive animation—or at least, that's what you'd think from the many sites larded with heavy interactive content.

A few minutes later, the creative director came into my office. "So, what exactly would it take for us to make this presentation thing?" he said. knowing I was the only person in the office that knew HTML, or anything vaguely web-like.

I was at a loss for words. Or, rather, I was at a loss for telling the truth: I'd done two Flash tutorial exercises. I had absolutely no idea where to begin with creating what the client wanted. And I was at a point in my career where I feared that being honest about my level of familiarity with Flash could potentially jeopardize my job—even though there'd been nothing in my job description about such skills.

"Let me look into it," I said. After he left, I opened up our trial copy of Flash 4 and stared at the timeline view, wondering what exactly it would cost to create what the client wanted—both in the money we would earn, and in the blood we would need to donate in order to actually produce a quality product.

*

Part and parcel of our trade is managing client expectations. They want to hear us say, "Sure, we're great at [X deliverable], and we can do it for [low amount of $]." However, what we often end up saying is: "Sure, we can do that for you," hang up the phone, and take a swift gap analysis of our lack of hard skills to get the job done. Thus the sprint begins, for us to try to become experts in a foreign computer program or domain of design in a finite amount of time.

Dealing with these technology gaps is a big problem. When we're desperate for work—whether for want of cash flow or killer portfolio material—we should never promise to carry out a client-desired deliverable without acknowledging our level of familiarity with the technology at hand. Our clients can't know or expect to understand the nuances of said technology—they're looking to us to be experts. If we're still learning how to produce the work, then we're expending time where we should be doing the work.

If you want to overpromise and underdeliver, go right ahead. But you're doing all designers a disservice.

*

After spending a day exposing great areas of ignorance in my knowledge of Flash, I put together an estimate for my creative director, padding it with an extra two weeks of time to fumble around. Then my CD padded the estimate by a factor of two. We delivered the estimate to the client, and they chose not to hire us, because the cost was too high.

After that experience, our entire agency huddled to discuss how that experience would never happen again. We set up a plan to learn Flash and HTML across the appropriate resources, and identify who we could tap to help design and execute the interactive work that was starting to trickle into our workflow.

*

I'm not a gambler. When I'm in casinos, you'll generally see me at the penny slots, losing dollars as opposed to paychecks in pursuit of the big payout.

When I'm working on a design project, the opposite is true. I give myself time to explore options that seem outside the realm of possibility, often verging into the surreal. Most of those ideas perish on the cutting room floor, but one or two often straggle their way into the final design concepts. But that is just conceptual thinking—selling the dream of what the final result should be.

Then the work actually begins. And your concepts will only be easy to execute within the domains that you have already mastered. Once you move from flat media, such as print designs, wireframes, or storyboards, and start getting down and dirty in a program that requires multiple animated states—or enters into the realm of back-end—the time cost for any designer to execute an idea increases by an order of magnitude.

A good analogy is from the world of music production. When you're laying down tracks in a recording studio with a band, the average rule of thumb is that any well-rehearsed band will spend one hour per recorded minute of music per instrument. I use the same rule of thumb when designers work in Flash, AfterEffects, Blend, and so forth—but it's more like one hour per couple of seconds per major element.

This is the divide between the soft aspects of the designer's work—the big creative thinking that solves the client's higher-order needs in theory—and the execution and production of those ideas to manfiest that initial concept in the real world in practice. The latter is where design actually becomes real, and the client's expectations are fulfilled.

The further I’ve progressed in my career as designer, the harder it’s become to share with others exactly what I do.

First, I managed layout at a magazine and bootstrapped a few websites in thrilling Adobe PageMill. Then, within a design studio, I was responsible for creating brands and annual reports—with little to no formal training to the otherwise. Add in a number of years in advertising and marketing, leaven it with a few more of user research and wireframing, and set to “Puree”. When I try to describe to my family what I do nowadays as an interaction designer, the confusion level continues to increase.

Now I don’t need to try and explain anymore. I can just send them a copy of Warren Berger’s extraordinarily well-written book, Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World.

This is the first book about the process of design as it’s practiced at its highest levels in our profession, written by an expert journalist for the layperson, that describes exactly how designers think about and view the world. It is the product of hundreds of interviews with today’s top designers, across all major disciplines of design, cross-referenced with deep reading into the texts that have informed the growth of our profession, then distilled into plain English that anyone can easily understand. Along the way, stories regarding OXO Good Grips, the One Laptop Per Child program, the Truth anti-smoking campaign, Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibit, Architecture for Humanity, Proctor & Gamble, TOMS Shoes, and many others are woven through the narrative, illustrating key points regarding design concepts, principles, and sustainability practices with illustrations and sketches. It also includes a good number of everyday people who came to the design profession late in life, after they had their first “glimmer” moment.

Continue reading at The Designer's Review of Books

The new business meeting was going swimmingly—that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology.

Why should we do that thing you called...what was it, task analysis? We’d like some of those personas. They’re important, right? What the heck is contextual inquiry?!

As mental models flew about the room, I realized how hard it is for clients to understand the true value of UX research. As much as I’d like to tell my clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call me back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. The whole team needs a common language and a philosophy that’s easy to grok.

I created a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise. But, before we get to the cheat sheet, let’s talk about how we can communicate the value of UX research at a much higher level.

Continue reading at AListApart.com

I've been asked by the good folks at HOW to participate in the upcoming HOW Conference in Denver, June 6-9, 2010! The seminar I'll be presenting is on the topic of coming up with better design ideas faster. Here's the description:

Have you ever felt stuck when trying to come up with design ideas? Do deadlines cause you to freeze in your tracks? "Better Ideas Faster" is a seminar that will help you learn how to brainstorm better design ideas for print and interactive projects within practically any time frame.

Over the course of this 75-minute seminar, participants will learn how to:

• Approach a design problem with the right ideation questions in order to focus their creative energies
• Use the most appropriate brainstorming methods to coax out tons of ideas
• Learn how to properly ruminate on your newfound ideas and then improve them
• Understand how to generate ideas collaboratively when working on a team

Participants will leave this workshop with handouts detailing a wide variety of brainstorming techniques and methods for reinvigorating their creative process—as well as newfound confidence in their creative abilities!

Along with this seminar, I'll be participating in a panel about creativity. (A topic that you've never heard me talking about on this blog...)

If you'd like more info about the conference, they have an interim site up at http://www.howconference.com, where registration and the full lineup will appear soon.

One of the risks in creating comprehensive brand experience frameworks, replete with scripted behaviors that employees must follow dutifully down to the letter, is that it can make a mockery of conventional human activities.

Take my shopping visit over lunch to Borders, which is a few blocks closer than Barnes & Noble—a critical decision factor when the rain is pelting down in its characteristic Seattle fashion. Walking through the front door, I paused to peruse the new Eoin Colfer entry into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy canon. Scanning through the preface, I was interrupted by a headset-wearing young woman.

"Need any assistance?"

"No, thank you," I demurred, glancing briefly through the tome before wandering deeper into the wilds of Fiction & Literature. As I strolled along the stacks, the book spines flicking past in reverse alphabetical order, I was stopped by another Borders employee.

"Looking for something?"

"No, just browsing, thanks," I said. I didn't want to let her know the title of the book I was seeking—Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness—so I wouldn't be sucked into dialogue regarding cross-listing of books within various departments, opportunities for special orders that may be delivered to the shop, and an infinitude of other actions that could emerge from that simple request for help. She can tell that I am hedging my true intent, as most customers do, and swiftly moves along to Westerns.

I arrived at the B's. They only had copies of de Botton's On Love and How Proust Can Change Your Life. I took the former book from the top shelf and began to read the first chapter.

"Finding what you're looking for?" I turned to see another Borders employee, kindly smiling up at me as my mind froze mid-sentence.

"You bet, no problem," I said. She continued about her business. I continued to read about transatlantic flights, the probabilities inherent in meeting your true love, and a host of other topics. After glancing at a few other volumes on the shelf, I started to walk out—only to be confronted by yet another staffer.

"Need any help?" he said.

What I wanted to say: "I do need help. I need you to seriously rethink what customer service looks like in a bookstore."

Instead what came out was a final, cavernous "No." This was the last word I emitted before leaving.

*

The level of tact and nuance expected from an employee being paid $8 an hour (plus potential benefits) in an industry that expects a high level of literacy and devotion to the printed word is staggering, considering the volume of information contained within the 10,000 square feet of a retail store. This defies the notion of the designed, logical user flow within the computer interface, an ever-open search box beckoning for controlled input. In bookstores, we have seen people dance and mime book titles, noting that they'd been on NPR or in the New York Times or highlighted on their favorite blog, and expecting staffers to pluck out of the ether the most likely result. The air is our interface, and the computer is our adjunct.

As a result, it's easier to reduce the set of possible actions to canned behaviors and rote interactions when not near a computer. Never engage with your customer, allowing them to dive deeply into books on the shelf, and you risk alienating them—or letting them treat the store like a library in both atmosphere and expectation of free book consumption. Aim for over-service, and your staff's behavior can smack of desperation. (In retail, the latter can also happen because the staff has identified you as a potential shoplifting risk, and feels that they can goad you to leave by piling on an excess of proffered help.) A hard-lined set of rules and regulations that must be followed to the letter. The computer is the fall-back position, the single hub that all the worker bees must return to in order to access the primary catalog.

Over time, a further decentralization will wash over the book-selling world, where staffers can fall back on WiFi-connected devices that provide the same data on the spot—speeding up the likelihood of placing the right book in the customer's hands. Add in book-reading devices like the Nook and augmented reality apps that are swiftly moving from proof of concept to mobile devices, and the scenario I experienced today will probably cease to happen. The onus for seeking what I need will have shifted from the customer service professional to the customer.

But in the process, we'll lose something important—the fruit of someone's physical and mental labor, placed gently into our hands, with the attention of another soul who had confirmed the value and importance of the contents contained wherein. A tweet is a far cry from the heft of a handshake. Commerce will always require at some point a physical component, applied with the right volume of attention, at the right moment in time.

Call this the weight of lived knowledge. Perhaps as we load more books onto our Kindles and Nooks, the device should grow heavier or glow more brightly, to imply that our shelves are becoming more and more laden with the meaningful intelligence borne out of a hyper-connected society.

*

If any of those staffers in the store had seen the Alain de Botton book in my hand and said, "Oh, you like that? Let's chat about a few other books that you'd probably like," then I think the situation would have played out much differently.

Adding improved context to our potential dialogue—maintaining the human element and the quality of information provided—should be the result of any in-person interaction, in a store or out in the world. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, parroting the words of our masters, and otherwise denying the passions that we should always be seeking to share with the world.

Can a phone be your trusted best friend? Your personal trainer? Your confidante? Can it cheer you up when you're stressed? Can it know what you're feeling, and why you're feeling it? Can it go away when you just want to sit in the corner and cry?

If we're serious about pushing the utility of mobile devices to their absolute limit, then we will have to create software so sophisticated that it can discern the difference between the perceived intent of user actions and the actual intent contained in our brains and bodies. Computers will need to make us feel like they're reading our minds—not just our words, where our eyeballs are pointing, and where our body is positioned in physical space. And when we behave in a irrational manner (meaning like human beings) these same computers will need to withhold judgment on what does not compute.

We will call these design challenges "HAL 9000 problems," because this leap in technological evolution brings up some very gnarly dilemmas for designers and developers—though not because an AI in a spaceship is preparing to kill us. (Yet.)

Let me paint a culinary scenario of the near future...

A week ago, I installed an Augmented Reality Diet App. Since the installation, I've been eating healthy. Until yesterday. I was a bit peckish and went to Burger King and had a Double Whopper with extra pickles. Now my phone's going crazy.

Tonight, as I amble down the block, looking at my augmented reality Dinner Locator for what might meet my stomach's fancy, the application dims out places where I really shouldn't eat—that is, if I want to stay within my caloric intake for the week. I recently upgraded to the iPhone 7G SX, which is able to track how many calories I've eaten on a daily basis, by meal, and how many calories have been burned by my activity. It knows that I'm skinny and unlikely to binge out on a regular basis. But the app is making some assumptions based on the likelihood that I'll consume something that conflicts with my stated diet goals. (I filled those in when I set up the app, and it measured my fat levels by sending a little electrical current through my body when I was holding the phone in my hand.) A few stray variables have been screwing with my Diet App, which perceives my intent as follows: "Dinnertime + hungry + low blood sugar + surrounded by bad dietary options = likelihood of making bad choice."

If I started to walk towards one of those places the app deemed a dangerous choice, my iPhone won't let me pay. (The app is connected to my credit card.) Thankfully, I'm carrying cash, so I just turn off my phone and buy some fried chicken. But my iPhone can detect how my stress level is rising due to limiting the choices that I want to make, and throws a final wrinkle into my evil master plan. It lets me go where I want to eat, but whines and barks as I reach the upper limit of my possible caloric intake. And if I go over that limit, I'll risk being mildly shocked. After all, I did click "Agree" on those terms of use in the App Store...

*

I crafted this scenario to sound farfetched and silly, and I think I've succeed. But most of the technology I referenced exists, in one fashion or another. Give us time, and we'll be talking with our phones in hushed tones, asking for advice, rather than shouting at them in frustration when they crash.

Which brings us back to HAL 9000. Poor Dave had to shut HAL down because HAL thought that his mission was being jeopardized. HAL could detect human stress levels in a number of ways, intuiting stress and emotional upset with his auditory and visual sensors. "I can tell from your voice harmonics, Dave, that you're badly upset," speaketh the machine. Of course, HAL was overreacting just a tad, in his highly logical fashion. But isn't that what humans are supposed to do? Overreact?

I lifted that HAL quote from an article about how researchers have fitted a Roomba to detect the stress level of people around it. Grow too tense, and the area around you will stay dirty. (So even though I was worried about getting this blog post done, I did want the carpet under the coffee table to get clean. Damn you Roomba!)

Discerning the intent of users is a tricky business, even with metrics tracking your every gesture online, people being paid to observe your actions as part of research assays, and the never-ending quests of e-commerce websites to ease you through purchasing flows to acquire that fancy blender you've always coveted. UX designers aren't going to be put out of business because of system intelligence—at least not for another fifteen to twenty years.

But in the next few years, we'll be seeing technology that evaluates your emotions as part of how they relate to you. And at the same time, we'll be finding ways to make our interactions with our phones even more private. Can you imagine trying to decide where to eat with your A.R. diet app, pointing it at McDonalds—and then red, flashing warning lights appear on the screen, visible to those around me…

Technology is no longer the great enabler, but a potential source of public shame. We no longer have the luxury of the computer screen to shield us from our users, or each other. In the most advanced mobile technology, our intent can be observed and recorded in more ways than we can imagine.

It will be our task to provide the right shape to these kinds of experiences, so we do not reduce the humanity of those who use them. And it will be the role of users to smack down those artifacts of novel technology that reach far beyond the bounds of what a computer should provide a human being—emotionally, and maybe even spiritually.

Until the upcoming robot invasion. At that point, all bets are off.

What DNA does conceptual art share with interaction design? More than any technical profession would care to admit.

"The idea in conceptual art is that the artist causes experiences to happen to himself, and then ruminates on the interaction between the self and the experience; an audience may be permitted to observe, but is not essential," says Roger Ebert, in his recent (and fantastic) blog post "The agony of the body artist."

So if I was to apply Ebert's thinking about conceptual art to the discipline of interaction design, then it would read as follows:

The idea in interaction design is that the designer causes experiences that happen to others, then ruminates on the interaction between the other and his or her experience; a designer may be permitted to observe, but s/he is not essential.

Is the core activity of my profession really this simple—and this complex? We want to control the user's experience as much as possible, though it's often like grasping at soap bubbles. And unlike the conceptual artist—who needs no audience to perceive the effect of his or her actions—designers depend solely on the audience's reaction in aggregate. We spend so much time and energy trying to boil ourselves out of the work to ensure that it functions properly, it's inevitable that we have no place in the actual day-to-day use of what we create. And the cost to us is that we only have our personal experience to represent the whole.

*

Asides...

Ebert's definition of conceptual art comes from his coverage of the work of Chris Burden, whose fame in the art world revolved around performing art pieces in which he was shot at, nailed to a Volkswagen Beetle, shut in a locker, at risk of execution, and otherwise caught in scenarios that tore down boundaries between the spectator and his own experience. When experiencing his works in a college class in the mid-90s, I remember thinking, "What will we put ourselves through to shatter the illusion that our lives are wholly within our control?" Chris Burden's "body art" work is so unsettling because it forces us to think deeply about what he is doing in the moment, empathize with his experience, simultaneously focus on him and ourselves reflexively as we watch.

It's infrequent that I find a user experience professional bleeding for a great wireframe. Look at Stefan Sagmeister's poster for his AIGA Detroit lecture, where he carved a poster for a lecture onto his own body. This seems right out of the realm of Chris Burden, where a rumination on one's body of work—the interaction between the self and experience—becomes the actual commodity we comment upon. His "Sagmeister on a Binge" poster is just as scary and points the way towards the Super Size-Me mentality, where life and limb is risked to force a deeper emotional bond between the artist/designer and viewer. We have yet to find the same kind of artistic expression in the field of hardcore interaction design... but the form it would take is definitely in the realm of conceptual art.

Perhaps the pursuit of meaning in our century will require making an audience out of designers, and designers out of the audience. Everyone will identify themselves as a "YOUser"—a term I've been using recently for the user as designer, and the designer as user. The concept of a "user" has always lacked a sense of embodiment, and anything we can do to bring how we talk about whom we design for (besides ourselves) helps to remind us of our humanity.

Two words that make a designer's ears bleed: "Over budget."

Estimating is the scariest activity that designers manage for themselves or their studios. We are experts at making intuitive design decisions based on qualitative information—but in the rational world of dollars and cents, that same intuition doesn't always make for a better profit margin. We learn (and forget) this, over and over again. I've heard countless designers say to me, "I haven't done this kind of work before. I don't know what to charge. So I just made a guesstimate, and if I go over budget, I'll just eat the difference."

Sadly, "the difference" is not edible. While designers may hate estimating, it's a business skill that you'll need to develop—that is, if you'd like to make some money.

For professional estimating advice, I emailed Fiona Robertson-Remley, a fantastic project management guru I'd worked with at Worktank Brand Storytellers on a wide range of interactive and traditional marketing programs. This is what she had to share on the subject.

First and foremost, create a high-level plan. "You need to map out the steps and milestones of the job," Fiona says. "Lay out the roadmap of how you are going through the project." For a solo designer or even a larger team, this can emerge from a quick whiteboard session that helps map out the overall arc of the project, key deliverables through a set number of client reviews, and what resources will be necessary to complete those deliverables. At that point, be sure to also begin a list of assumptions—you may need to include those in the estimate to put a lid on scope creep.

Take a stab at how many hours you think the project will take. "Then take a step back and review. Then pad by about 20%, especially in the areas where clients are involved. Designers notoriously under-estimate their hours." This is hard for some designers to swallow, but it's the truth. We're often quite optimistic about how quickly we can reach a design solution, when actually we need the space to meander (while being paid). Consider setting up a spreadsheet in Excel where you can estimate hours—and having your 20% buffer hardcoded into the formula that creates the total.

Never, never, never give discounts. "Avoid the tempatation to reduce your rate. I see freelancers do this ALL the time. if you need to cut the cost, cut a deliverable—not your rate, and not your time." This requires tough negotiating tactics, but this is the only way to maintain your profit margin.

Bill for thinking time, not just computer time. "Make sure you… allow a little time for off-the-wall-thinking." Creating the time and space for dreaming in the midst of cranking out a big design deliverable can have a beneficial effect. And you should be paid for it.

Never under-estimate yourself. If you're in an all-out bidding war, you should stick to your guns and be willing to walk away from what seems like a great opportunity, but you won't make much money actually fulfilling. "In general, agencies/freelancers always under-estimate. Add an [low] bid to that, and you are deep trouble, my friend!"

Don't be afraid to pick up the phone and get insight from a colleague. "Talk to a Project Manager or someone who has done this [frequently] to get their perspective." They may save you with a crucial piece of information you wouldn't have obtained by any other method.

Do your timesheet! And refer back to it after the project is over. "Track, track, track your hours religiously. You will need to keep data on what things cost—so next time you have to estimate, you have something to refer to." A useful metric when evaluating your timesheet is burndown—how much of the project was completed, based on time used by each person (or each role you fulfilled) over the life of the project. If you're burning the majority of your hours on production as opposed to concept generation, it gives you a good indication of what skills you may need to improve, or what hours you may need to pad on a future estimate.

Resources:

For a much deeper dive into this subject, especially with regard to how much you should pad your estimates with regard to a client's initial ask, see Andy Rutledge's "Calculating Hours—The Client Factors" on Design View.

Cameron Foote's The Business Side of Creativity has a nice section about estimating and how to work with clients through the negotiation process.

*

This post was suggested by designer David Cole. Did you know you can email me or tweet me topics you'd like to see on ChangeOrder?

When I first moved to Seattle, I freelanced at what was considered to be the meat grinder of the Seattle agency world. My first assignment was to serve as a production artist for a series of pet food ads. I was provided with layouts in QuarkXPress 4.0, consisting of a few dozen black and white portraits of happy Scotties, terriers, and other sedan-sized pups. The traffic person then handed me sheet of paper completely filled with three- to six-word phrases. "These are the headlines for the ads due today," she said, and scooted away.

I spent the next few minutes puzzling over the page. Some of the lines made no sense to me, outlining in scientific terms the benefits of Pet Food Special Formulation A to Crappy Pet Food Type B. Others were clever puns and riffs on animal lingo. The rest of the lines seemed like doggrel, and at the time I didn't really understand why the writer had even included them.

Until that point, I'd never been exposed to the full brain dump of a creative person, and while I could see which lines were pretty good, I was a bit stumped as to which would make the best ads.

The art director came by and hunched over the headline sheet, circling various headlines that met his fancy. He then stood over my shoulder and instructed me which headlines to place in which layouts. Then, after pushing up his chunky black glasses and asking me to "add a little air" to a few headlines, he vanished, leaving me to print about six comps and send them out into traffic for proofing.

Thus began my first day of work at a "real" advertising agency... though it would take me a few years to realize that what I'd imagined as the world of advertising would always be a better place than the reality it embodied. (I didn't stick around that agency for more than a few weeks, just to get a taste of where I wouldn't ever work again.) And I'd share the ads, if I could find them. I only remember my emotional reaction to his art direction effort: a frothy admixture of surprise and dismay. Surprise at seeing how much energy was being expended (100 headlines!) for promoting pet food, and dismay at realizing that some of the weaker headlines (grammatically) were much stronger in ads than on the plain white page.

Since that day, I've tried to invert my work ethic regarding quality versus quantity. It's been an ongoing, uphill battle. Quality is the most important result of the work—but without a quantity of output within an design organization, it's quite difficult to determine that your design decisions will succeed in context.

Earlier in my career, I would rest as soon as I'd hit upon what I felt was the perfect idea, coast through photo and typeface selection, only to discover that the client didn't agree with my thinking. Or if I didn't spend enough time locating just the right illustration or font, those choices would be called out and beaten up in the client review. Or be asked to make changes, and realize that my well of options had ran dry and I'd fail to make the desired changes in the time frame I had left. I had to get rid of the idea of waste through every part of the creative process.

This led me to a principle regarding working in companies that depend upon great design work: To be wildly successful in a group of designers, your first ideas need to be wildly divergent.

Not just divergent—wildly so. From different planets, with little to no resemblance to each other.

This is only possible by being as generative as possible, in as many instances as possible. Instead of sitting around and thinking of solutions, you need to be documenting your thinking through the entire process, through each phase where you're expanding the client's view of potential solutions.

In the case of the pet food ads, this was a retained account, so people were paid to sit around and think of headlines—that's more billable time that can be applied against the retainer. Focus allowed those creative types to be generative.

But even with the specter of budgets and billable hours and account managers breathing down your neck, preparing to snatch the work out of your hands, I think that's an excuse. Instead of thinking of how much time I have on a project and limiting myself accordingly, I like to think about how much time I have to generate work, then trying to produce options without becoming too attached to one or two ideas and polishing them accordingly in the time frame.

One you throw out the fear of your work and time being wasted, there's nothing that stands in the way of exploring a wider range of design directions. More options always means better choices—not always better ideas, but a better frame for making decisions around them. Just because you have 100 headlines doesn't mean you'll share them all with the client—that's just cruel. But limiting that set down to the best range of options for your client, based on your far-reaching explorations, will serve both you and the client best.

I've been putting off writing about procrastination for some time now. I thought I knew what I wanted to say, but now that the subject has rattled around my brain for so many days, I'm not quite so sure.

This is the curse of being an iterative design thinker—the longer you mull over solutions for a big problem, the more options you end up considering for the result. Possibilities shift and morph in your mind like taffy. Arguments and counter-arguments scrape and spark, misaligned gears in a house-sized machine that keeps chugging along no matter how hard you try to feed it another subject... unless you're dealing with a well-defined problem. Solutions can appear fully formed, like magic. These "rabbit out of the hat" moments seem like the norm in our community, but we are rarely clocked upside the head with a stellar idea, ten feet tall and luminous, just like the sign letting travelers know that you have arrived in Las Vegas.

Gigantic problems must be chipped away, slowly but surely, until the solution emerges from paring away excess. Opportunities come out of nowhere, but the ideas in our mind must be given form before they can be regarded as proper. Otherwise, we're just thinking some more.

So I think I've hit upon the right rhythm for how to incorporate procrastination into my daily routine. It required me to draw a very hard line between rumination—which is critical for doing creative work—and procrastination. If the chart above shows what my daily work process had been like in the past, the following one shows what it looks like now:

Rumination is taking a walk around the block after doing a round of sketches or designing some wireframes. It's eating, sleeping, exercising, and otherwise being fully in my body and focused on one continuous experience. Doing integrative practices such as yoga has almost become a struggle for me, because when I lie down to meditate puzzle pieces are falling into place.

Procrastination is none of those things above that I'd mentioned. Every time I try to distract myself with catching up on my Google Reader or checking Facebook, I am avoiding active engagement with the task at hand. A designer never wants to be driven by the fear that this is the one time they won't produce the right solution, or complete the task they have at hand. (As an aside—just while I was writing this paragraph, I ended up reading reviews for a book on Amazon I was thinking about buying. That sure didn't help me complete this paragraph... in a manner of speaking.)

Being curious is a curse for many designers. When I have a few days until a big deadline, I enjoy reading books, talking with friends about what interests they are pursuing, and otherwise letting the current problems du jour simmer in the back of my mind until I have a coherent point of view. When faced with the choice between checking email and putting more time against the (still insoluble) problem, I check my email. I've got time, right? I can just bang something out that will be good.

Not anymore. These past few years, I've been dealing with bigger and bigger problems in work and in my writing, and that has required focused, dedicated, scheduled, and mindful attention. So any time I don't schedule procrastination into my daily routine, meaning a smattering of time each morning and night to check the social medias and some blogs, I risk losing focus in the midst of an activity that demands every ounce of my energy to make serious headway.

At first, this change in my behavior has been a great struggle, as I meander endlessly through the margins when given enough leash. Being connected is also a challenge. My iPhone sure doesn't help this problem, which has led me to leaving it on Airplane Mode for whole chunks of the day. This means I'm out of touch with people for much larger periods of time—but when I do have a chance to connect with them for a substantial amount of time, I can provide them with my immediate attention.

That, to me, is the definition of procrastination in the domain of design: to distract yourself from providing attention to what must be done, rather than distract yourself with the purpose of improving what must be done (better). The latter is rumination, and should be fostered in its appropriate place and time.

I continue to dream of the day that I will be lying on a beach, not a care in the world, napping lazily and considering what big problem I will have to solve next. But to get there, I think I have a little more work to do. Starting now.

Much like the First Law of Thermodynamics, which expresses the conservation of energy between various states, my imagined First Law of Design Dynamics states: "We are unsolvable problems."

Or, to put it another way: Problems persist, and we are an expression of them.

The problems we face as human beings are wound together so tightly, they only improve or degrade over time against a man-made metric—they do not go away. We create them, we attempt to solve them, and those solutions are expressed through the lens of our humanity.

Over time, many of these design problems prove insoluble—in the same manner that we can barely describe our human selves through word or deed, let alone sketch the outline of whom we would like to become over a lifetime.

Why, then, would you devote your waking days to being a designer?

Because in the process of shoveling rock from Pile A to Pile B, we never cease to generate exceptions to our man-made rules. We continually thrust our hand into the magician's black hat, pulling forth endless wonders that never seem to have originally fit within such a confined space.

A design solution, in the grand scheme of our universe, rarely solves any matter of great import forever. The limits of our efforts are delimited by years, if not minutes. But for this brief period of time, designers can express the change desired in the world.

Beyond the arts, there is no other discipline that allows us, in the words of designer Brian Collins, to "make hope visible." You rarely see this change until it's been expressed through something that has been designed.

We are the limiting factor, however. Our lives are shaped by design, but never solved.

If you're looking to uncover the mechanics of our world, become a scientist first. Design solutions rarely persist, unless cross-bred with the rigor of science.

If you're looking to describe the grand gesture of our future society, become a politician. Far-reaching design solutions for our societies require intelligent meta-decisions from those who control the government.

However, if you're looking to change the fabric of our humanity, be a designer first and foremost. We actively create the future, rather than waiting for the future to remake us.

The variables may change over time, but the equation of our humanity still holds true. How we express it is what creates a difference.

My wife and I were staring into our closet at a big bundle of framed photographs we'd accumulated over the past eight years.

"What are we going to do with all of these?" I said. It was unlikely we'd ever show them again or own a place large enough to accommodate them all. Wouldn't they look better in someone's home? At this point, would it make sense to just give them away?

"Let's throw a 'Part with Your Art Party,'" my wife said. Hence, a plan was hatched.

Step 1: Invite Your Friends

I opened up my laptop and banged out the following description/invitation and fired it off to a cross-section of people we knew, as well as some random acquaintances and colleagues. (I've revised it since to include feedback from participants, feel free to copy/steal):

What do you do when you've got a piece of art that you love, but that you're ready to part with? Join us for an art appreciation party that will end in the exhibition being taken home by the partygoers.

If you've got a piece of art lying around that you just haven't had space to hang in your home, bring it on over and donate it to a friend.

If you're looking for that perfect photo or painting to spice up your living room, perhaps this is where you'll find it.

Whether you love art, love to make art, or just like to look at art (and then take your favorite pieces home) with fellow friends while noshing, this should be fun.

The ground rules...

• You aren't required to bring a piece of art in order to take one home...
• You can bring no more than five pieces to give away, per person...
• You don't have to have created the work to donate it...
• Flat works would be most ideal—painting, photography, illustration, and so forth...
• Anything left at the end of the evening will be donated to charity, so please don't bring something so big we can't fit it into our car when we deliver it...
• Feel free to write up the story of the artwork and put it on the back, if you know how it was created or details about the artist...

We then included our location, a start time, and the time that the art could begin to depart. We called it B.Y.O.A. as well as B.Y.O.B.

Step 2: Have the Party

A few weeks later, we had thirty-five people in our home with over forty pieces of art arrayed about our living room: photographs, paintings, custom-letterpressed posters, woodcuts, prints, professional illustrations, and hand-blown glass. Some of the pieces were brought to share with others, such as an Ord poster of Seattle neighborhoods. Others were provided to purge the memories associated with the piece, or they'd just grown sick of it on their wall.

We handed out Post-It notes and Sharpies to people, and told them to put their names on what pieces they were interested in taking home. If multiple people wanted a piece of art, they would need to add their names to the Post-It. (We later discovered Post-Its claiming things we didn't even expect were art, such as our microwave and a fifth of Crater Lake vodka that had been waiting in the freezer for a special occasion.)

After people had a chance to see all the art and eat and drink their fill, we told everyone that they would have a chance to take home their first choice. In cases where there were multiple people angling for the same piece of art as their first choice, my wife or I listened to the reasons why they wanted it, looked at what other works they also wanted to take home, and functioned as arbitrators. Whatever art was then left after the the first round, people could take a second piece of art, a third, and so forth. At the end of the evening, we only had a few pieces left for us to donate to charity.

Step 3: Show Where the Art Went

As people left the party, we took photographs of them with their new pieces of art, and asked them to take pictures of their new art and send them to us when the evening was over. We then passed those photos along to whomever donated the piece of artwork.

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Probably the best thing about having a Part with Your Art Party—other than having a reason to catch up with people that you don't know, and get to know those whom you may have not really had a chance to talk to before—is that you've taken money out of the process of acquiring art. One of my friends said to me, "This is the least pretentious art show I've ever been to," and I think part of the reason it felt so casual and exciting is that there was a clear quid pro quo to the experience. Almost every person left with a piece of art they were excited about, as well as a fun story to tell about how it ended up in their home.

If you throw a Part with Your Art Party, let me know how it goes and ways that we can keep improving the concept.

I can see into the immediate future. It will consist of millions of people standing around looking at their phones. On their phone screens will be information regarding what they're looking at, and based on what verbs are provided to them, they will either be smiling in delight and pressing the appropriate button overlaid on reality, or cursing in great frustration, wishing doom upon the designers who tried to cram too much functionality into the next great augmented reality application.

While reading a recent article by Luke Wroblewski about the benefits of creating first-person interfaces, I had a realization that one of the most intriguing challenges we're going to have as interactive designers is dealing with verbs when designing first-person interfaces.

Usually when we think of verbs, we're trying to determine what labels best fit a button in an interactive design. Should the call to action say "Buy" or "Check Out" or "Submit"?

At a higher level, there's another layer of verbs within the system: the defined set of actions that you can initiate when dealing with any specific object that can be pressed. We've all had the experience of right-clicking an element in a program like Photoshop and popping up a menu that affords us a range of possible actions. Each of those actions is a verb—cut, copy, paste, and so forth. These are the verbs that can be applied to the point in the application my cursor is hovering upon (the object).

In using desktop software and more highly evolved web applications, there's another layer of complexity: the verbs that are revealed after a specified interaction with a group of objects, such as a selection. In these cases, objects need to be grouped or highlighted to provide another layer of verbs. Files and other desktop elements present different options based on their selection state.

Now, leave the controlled world of the desktop and enter into the real world as our interface. Suddenly, all the physical objects that surround us are treated like objects on a drag-and-drop desktop—but the affordances we're allowed in manipulating those objects is practically infinite, as well as the number of potential verbs that may be utilized as a user interacts with them.

So, we provide tightly defined limits for what the user can accomplish. Yelp's Monocle is functional because it's only providing only one layer of information that a user can act upon. In fact, most augmented reality apps as they're presented today treat reality as a substrate that allows a highly limited set of verbs to be applied to it.

The real challenges for our profession will begin, however, when we try to overlay and manage in real time more than one limited set of verbs for how elements are grouped in reality. As layer upon layer of verbs are added to your feature set, the level of complexity for how it's managed in the interface goes up by an order of magnitude—both for the user (cognitively) and for the system (in data presentation and context management). We will be crushed by the laws of physics.

Layar is a great example of this problem in action. The user is given the abilty to dial or filter what information is provided to them in the interface... but if you have everything shown to you at once, it risks becoming a firehose.

I dread opening an application designed to help me accomplish real-world tasks and discover useful data while being brutalized with dozens of features, expressed through multiple sets of verbs. After this brief period of novelty, users will clamor for convergence, as we can only hold so many dozens of apps on each of our devices. Users will begin to expect greater context from verbs provided in augmented reality, with the system providing back an extra layer of intelligence about what needs to be presented based on your point of view. And what scares me most is the branding that will likely occur through an inevitable augmented reality land grab. Open up your Facebook app to gain access to the status of those people who are close to you, but be prepared for the commercials pointing out what Facebook thinks that you'll enjoy based on your interests and your network. I can already imagine the virtual communities we'll begin creating layered content on top of our physical world, and it's likely to be commercialized just like Second Life and the Internet as we know it today.

Those who live in a world of Web pages rarely have to deal with object-verb issues. But as Web-based content begins to be reused as part of augmenting our current reality, solving these kinds of verb-object issues on a regular basis will become one of the primary design challenges we'll face. I could imagine that augmented reality becomes a second cousin to duplicated reality, where we can create our own rules for how things are organized, and that is the space where we expend our design energy, more so than trying to continually overlap the real world...

Don't try to chop down a difficult design problem with one swoop of your mental ax. Instead, chip the problem apart using ideation questions.

In their simplest form, ideation questions are restatements of issues that form the basis of a systemic problem. As an example, it would be difficult to attack the following challenge provided by a client: "We want you to improve the health care system." The problem, as it is currently stated, is much too wicked to approach with a measure of intelligence.

So, you'd start to try and approach that stated problem by breaking it down into questions. First, we'd restate the problem as, "What should we do to improve the heatlh care system?" Answering that question, from at least one angle, might be the broadly stated goal of your effort with your client. At this point, you can start to break that massive question down into a series of ideation questions that surface latent issues. How do people access health care services? Who provides those health care services? What people are not currently served by health care services? And so forth.

From here, the fun really begins. Select a key question out of those that you've written, then start to ideate around a key component of it as a tightly focused question. If we choose "How do people access health care services?" as our starting point, then we generate a series of questions that directly address the root cause of issues within it. "How can signing up for health care become easier?" "How can we more quickly admit people to emergency services?"

You can see how these focused questions speak to the initial challenge posed by the client, but have tangible outcomes. You could spend hours writing and answering questions when using this process, but the trick here is to be very selective in ideating against the questions that are most specific and most intriguing to you. The resulting ideas that emerge from your brainstorm will be more actionable as a result.

This approach may sound like common sense, but there is always a point in the design process where we begin to build our design execution off a set of baseline assumptions. Using ideation questions will force you to face assumptions buried in big, messy problems that we'd like to try and solve, but don't quite know where to begin.

And you can already see where this is helpful when you're working to frame the desired outcome of a client project, before you even begin...

Being creative is a mind game.

No matter how much time you have for ideation, you can always come up with a good idea. It just takes extra time and energy to identify which of those ideas is the best one to pursue, then iterate on it to achieve some polish. This can be accomplished through the use of timeboxing. This is a technique that is regularly used in agile software development, but is also quite adaptable and useful for any creative professional to improve their speed to an idea.

Timeboxing is also excellent for defeating procrastinators. Most designers—myself included—ruminate subconsciously on a possible solution for days on end. This is a luxury of time that isn't feasible if you're working regularly to tight deadlines. And besides, most designers have trouble meeting their deadlines no matter how far off they twinkle in the distance.

So, what is timeboxing? And how can you use it on your next project?

In its simplest form, timeboxing is the use of short, structured sprints to achieve stated ideation goals. This chunking of time allows you to dismantle a big, thorny challenge into a series of manageable steps that have tangible output.

For example, if you have been provided with a creative brief for 2 logo designs that are due in two business days, you could set up a timebox of 30 minutes to sketch at least 10 design ideas that could then be refined (in another 30 minute timebox) to arrive at three executable ideas.

With those three ideas in hand, you would use the rest of your project time for refinement. While executing those ideas, you would likely encounter another idea or two, conduct any necessary reviews with your boss or colleagues to incorporate feedback. Those latter activities would be structured to keep you from spending the last five minutes frantically finishing the last logo before the client review. (This always inevitably happens, but at least this way you've planned for it.)

Does spending only an hour on creative concepting sound inhumane? The enemy of great work? Or does it guard you from distraction? Create more focus?

For me, it's the latter. Without the sharpness of an oncoming deadline, I can spend hours ping-ponging between my stated work goals and voraciously consuming information the range of subjects I find interesting, talking with my co-workers, staring out the window to watch traffic, and so forth. Because of my tendency for distraction, I use timeboxing to encourage maximum productivity in a timeframe that still leaves enough open space in the margins for activities like, say, writing this blog. (Most posts on this blog are timeboxed to 15 minutes for ideation, 15 minutes for writing an outline, then 30 minutes for writing the guts of the piece.)

I've met design professionals that partake in wildly different kinds of rituals in order to cough up compelling visual ideas—ranging anywhere from always using their lucky pencil to opening up Adobe Illustrator after having exactly 1.5 cups of coffee with sugar and a dash of cream. Upon asking these folks how they arrived at this ideal method for creative inspiration, the consistent response I received was, "It has worked for me more than any other method." Then, when really stuck on a thorny problem, they would sleep on it, go for a walk, or otherwise let their subconscious ruminate on a possible solution for days on end.

Timeboxing is a great way to put boundaries around rumination, which is useful as a tool, but it is part of a much larger set of weapons in the designer's toolbox—and should always function as the last resort of the creative professional. (I liken it to shooting a flower with a bazooka.) Also, this kind of reliance on a single technique for your best work leads to a similar kind of output. Besides, reducing the number of avenues you can use to pursue discovering novel creative solution is a risky venture.

The more that you use timeboxes, the more effective you become as a creative thinker. The activity of timeboxing teaches you to switch your creativity on at will and think more intuitively. You will also fear deadlines less.

However, there are some caveats as to how using timeboxes should be put into practice...

If you're working in larger than 30 minute increments, you aren't timeboxing. Timeboxes, when used for individual and group brainstorming, have to be brief to be effective. Otherwise, you aren't feeling the pressure to fill the time with your effort.

Timeboxing won't let you luxuriate in flow, in the traditional sense. This is a stated goal for most designers—to lose themselves in the process of artistic creation. Timeboxing lets you dip into the experience of flow, albiet briefly, in a manner that keeps you focused on producing raw, intuitive material that leads to flow in refinement. It'll take some time for this activity to not feel overwhelming. Working to mini-deadlines requires detachment, which you'll need to cultivate through practice.

Timeboxing in collaborative teams can exponentially increase the volume of a team's output. Working for 15 minutes in a small team can yield as many ideas as an individual over a few hours. But be realistic about the quality and quantity of output you can generate the first half-dozen times you try this.... team members with varying dispositions will adopt the activity at their own pace.

Brief timeboxes are great for ideation, but terrible for making. This is especially true when fulfilling tasks on the computer, where iterating and refining a visual design can become a massive timesuck. It just isn't physically possible to execute an idea within an ultra-tight timeframe. The tools you're using don't support the activity. Execution is where, in our profession, we will always spend the most time. My spending 30 minutes writing a full blog post doesn't mean that it's a good post—it may need further time spent in revision to really shine.

Just because you use timeboxes doesn't mean your work will always be great. Getting from good to great results when using timeboxes will force you to identify when you'll need to break out of the process to seek further ideas or more refinement. Just because you spent 30 minutes in ideation doesn't mean you came up with 3 killer ideas. Timeboxing will force you to build in moments to cast a critical eye towards the output of your work at hand, and decide if more time will need to be applied against your goals to succeed.

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This is just a quick overview of timeboxing for use in a creative practice. In future posts, I'll go into further detail regarding this subject—both in individual brainstorming and in its use for collaboration.

The first fifteen minutes of conversation with a new client will often tell the story of your whole business relationship.

Just gauge the difference between these opening ripostes from two potential clients:

"Hello, my name is [REDACTED] and I'd like to see if your firm would be interested in taking part in an RFP for Big Fancy Technology Client's new website redesign."

"Hello, I was passed along your name by our mutual friend Lorrie. She said that you create amazing websites, and since we're looking to overhaul ours, I thought I'd give you a call."

In both cases, the budget and timeframe could be exactly the same. You just don't have any context yet for how the conversation will progress—except in how business and personal relationships are already being cued from their tone and assumptions.

So, how do you conduct your first client discussion to set yourself up for success?

Immediately provide structure to the call. When you start any client meeting, you should be providing an agenda. The first client call is no different. If the client isn't savvy about purchasing professional creative services, casually relate to them a mini-agenda of what you'll be covering over the length of the call after you've made sure they have 30 minutes or an hour to chat.

Be fearless regarding understanding the competition. It's hard for you to focus on your strengths, in the eyes of a prospective client, without knowing the competitive landscape. "So, are you talking to any other designers/agencies for this project." Don't be afraid to say this. And don't be afraid to take it further. "May I ask which ones?" Guarded reply follows. "Oh, I don't need to know their names. I'm just looking for a clear understanding of what different options you are considering." Get any details that you can: size, type of work, and so forth. You can usually extrapolate names from that data, and have a rough idea of how to position your experience.

Don't let them escape the call without a budgetary range and rough idea of expectations around timeline. Waiting until the very end of the conversation to talk budget and timeline is hardwired into our DNA. But in this case, you need to be up front and firm about garnering that information at the front of the call. If they want a website in a week for $5, and they aren't willing to budge on their working assumptions, there isn't much reason to continue the call. And if the client says they really don't have an idea of how much it should cost—which happens often enough—still strive to pin them down to a budgetary range. This is where, if the client isn't talking, I use the line, "Do you have $5 for this project, or $1,000,000." If client expectations aren't clear from the start, especially with regard to the time necessary for designers to do quality work, then this is a harbinger of what the entire project will feel like for both parties involved.

Do as little talking as possible. Create a space for the client to immediately start sharing their true desires and fears. This is the dirty secret of any great designer: initiating what almost approximates "marketing therapy." All of the best client/designer relationships I've had have been predicated on the client being able to be 110% blunt with me, and vice-versa in a professional context. It can take some time for the tone of detente to fall out of daily or weekly client conversation, but if you don't hear a glimmer of client honesty in the first day of contact, it doesn't bode well for the long-term future of serving that business well.

Never, ever share your professional experience until you've heard the context regarding why they're calling you. This is smart salesmanship in action. You can't spin your work experience if you don't know why you're in the running for a project. This can be easily redirected in client conversation: "Before we talk about our relevant work experience, I'd want to explore some of the background details around why you're embarking on this website redesign. Then I can share with you some appropriate case studies." Or, if you don't have work samples that are a perfect fit for the assignment, you can redirect regarding results on projects that are tangentially related to their industry and need. You should also solicit the reason how they heard about you—I like to do this at the end of the call—to gauge the warmth of the referral. A personal recommendation from a friend will carry more weight than pulling your name out of the online White Pages.

Don't be afraid to say that your services may not be a good fit for the project... unless you need more information. If the client is considering you alongside a range of multiple studios and/or individuals, you don't need to sell yourself immediately as the right person for the job. A strategic thinker will observe, reflect, then act upon the information at hand. New business solicitations are the same case. Rushing into the opportunity full bore from the first second could have you miss out on critical inputs or subtext to conversations that, in hindsight, were the first warning bells of a bad fit for your studio.

If possible, try to meet in person before submitting the final estimate. Geography often doesn't permit this, but meeting face-to-face with an prospective client will expose much of the information that you need independent of the words that you speak. If the client is concerned that you're the right fit, they will often be guarded in conversation. If they are rooting for you to get the gig, they'll be truthful about where you stand in the running.

No one likes a typo. Especially clients.

When it's the 14th time we've made revisions on the 128-page magazine and you need to get the files off to the printer, it's inevitable that a typesetting error or grammatical mistake is still lurking somewhere in the document. The same issues apply when completing content for a website and porting it into a CMS, where gremlins always seem to lurk in the hallways of our code.

Mistakes happen, but we can catch them. Try out the following tricks from the proofreader's playbook.

1. Know what level of proofreading your need to provide for the material. There are various grades of proofing that you can apply to a document. If you're conducting a light proofreading, you read through the material and see if there are any grammatical errors, typos, and so forth. If you're working through multiple rounds of edits, you would highlight areas where the changes were made in a document and only reproof those areas after the edits had been made.

On a heavier proofreading pass, where you would want to dig deep into the material to ensure that it's error-free before releasing it for output, you would carry out what follows...

2. Go line by line through the text. Use a physical aid, such as an index card or sheet of paper, to block out all of the text except for a single line. Then review each line, one after one in order, without distraction. By using this method, your brain can't default to its typical human reading behavior—where you read words by their shapes, instead of inspecting what letters on the page compose those shapes. This method of reading will also make you pay closer attention to typesetting issues such as widows, orphans, and ladders, which can detract from the elegance of a printed document.

Killing a tree with printouts is the least painful way to carry out this process. Even if you're working on a 1,000 page website, you should consider this step. There are always ways to manage how the content is printed out—duplex, lighter ink, recycled paper—to maximize the output and reduce the impact on your physical printing supplies around the office.

This work can also be carried out on screen in a manual, somewhat painful way by double or triple-spacing the text and making it big. I dream for the day of a simple proofreading web app that would make one line at a time really big and mute out the rest, so you can scan through the material in a similar manner to print layouts...

3. After you've read the text forwards, re-read it backwards. For most professional proofreaders, this is their dirty secret. When they reach the end of a piece that they've proofed forwards, they keep their index cards on the page and do the same process in reverse. It's rare that a typo can escape your notice on this second pass, as each word is now abstracted out of our regular reading flow. This is hard to do on screen.

4. Highlight and verify all factual sources—no exceptions! As you're reading through the text forward and backwards, you should be indicating and verifying page content that can be cross-checked from other (reputable) sources.

This can be the most time-consuming part of any heavy proofreading job, but it is the most important part as well. Even if the client says that everything in the document is correct, it's your duty to be sure. I can't count how many times this situation has come up in professional practice, and I always do the necessary fact-checking—and find at least one factual error. Anything that you can't verify, you should query the client for their sourcing. This way, you are indemnified via a paper trail if they take their product to press with a potential problem.

5. Flag missing information in a manner that can't go to press. When asked to show layout with fake calls to action, such as placeholder information like 1-800-123-4567, you need to do so in a manner that screams out "FPO!" Think yellow highlighting, bold text—whatever stands off the page.

One of my former colleagues had a blood-curdling story about one of her projects—a Wall Street Journal ad—going to press with the above phone number. Her agency had to purchase the phone number from a little old lady and the account manager had to answer the phone personally for the life of the advertisement running. Then, he was let go, as he had been the final proofreader for the ad before it went to press. This is serious business!

6. After you've finished your hard proof, conduct a light re-proof all fixed changes to make sure new errors didn't slip in. There are inevitably one or two small typos or new errors that sneak into layouts after a heavy proofreading pass. Also, reflow mistakes or re-ragging can occur that should be checked. Even one-word edits can push the final line of a story off a page in a print file, and when those problems aren't caught, there is often a hard cost associated with fixing the error in page proofs. This can be less of an issue in websites, but an extra carat or ampersand may cause all sorts of mayhem.

7. At the final proof stage, you should re-read all content forwards and backwards. Again? Augh!

This is the one area where you can't afford to see a new mistake introduced—and even the best printers accidentally introduce errors at prepress. For a website, this would be the proofing that happens when content is flown into your CMS or coded into the system. Quality assurance should be happening at the testing stage, as cleaning up what seems like a typo can sometimes be an issue associated with a major bug fix.

8. Know when to outsource. Proofreaders know that if you give a complete and thorough proofing to your client work at every round, you'd end up wasting valuable time. But depending on the scale of your project, outsourcing proofreading can make a lot of sense at critical milestones through the life of a project.

But be aware that even if you pay a professional to review your work, you are still ultimately responsible for any errors that slip through into the final, finished product. So it's always in your best interest to proof the material before it goes to the proofreader. Spend the necessary time fixing any errors that you're aware of, then get a professional's point of view. This is the best use of their time—and yours. At some agencies, I've seen professional proofing employed both at the end of a project (before going to press) and then re-employed when reviewing the page proofs back from the printer or the website as it's coded and ready to go live.

9. Make yourself a proofing protocol. Then never, ever deviate from it. Even if you're under a tight deadline, this is one corner you choose never to cut. Because once you do, typos invariably happen. And if the error sneaks out into the wild—there goes your reputation.

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Keep in mind that this entire post has been about proofreading, not copy editing. If you're making substantive rewrites to client-provided copy, or creating content wholesale, you are not taking part in the activity of proofreading. The tricks I've shared here only apply when you're proofing fully-formed material before it will be released out into the world.

And while using these tricks might take more time out of your workday, you'll have greater peace of mind in knowing that you reviewed the work in-depth before it went out into the world. Plus, you can build the necessary time into your client estimates and charge for this activity as part of your service offering.

A pay telephone ringing in the midst of a crowded subway terminal. A woman in hospital scrubs, dark bags under her eyes like smudged blue paint. Young girl looking away from a red plastic BlackBerry into the blur of lights whipping past the window. Smell of nectarines, humid air, irises and gerbera daisies poking from a Trader Joe's paper bag.

This is history, and we are living it in perfume and thoughts of recent wreckage. Arthritic hands fidgeting with a laminated ID attached to a lanyard embossed with the GTE logo. Never-ending scrape and racket of train-track wheels against steel. Recorded red-black ringtone automated to sync with the closing doors. Balled-up newspapers dated Thursday and stuffed into the gaps between mustard-yellow vinyl seats.

Clammy cold handrail. This carpet has been inspected by 30. Baby is crying. Mother is crying too.

While walking through the National Portrait Gallery with my cousin, I began a game: Take a photograph of each portrait of an important figure in history, careful to crop out the face. Could the details that compose the substance of each painting tell the complete story of a person? And how many people could then fit that story? A thousand? A few dozen?

Take, for example, this doctor holding up a slide to be examined under a microscope. In this case, the face belongs to Charles R. Drew, an African American physician who organized the Blood Transfusion Association during World War II, became the medical director of the American Red Cross's blood-donor project, and considered today to be the "Father of the Blood Bank." He also resigned from the Red Cross when his organization ordered that non-Caucasian blood needed to be stored separately in their blood banks. All of this data could never have been encoded in Betsy Reyneau's portrait.

This pen is almost out of ink, so the lines it leaves on the Moleskine's smooth ivory page resembles the gouge of a tattoo gun. Such is the course with any kind of data; the mechanisms by which any data is recorded always has a finite lifespan.

The gestures we utilize to record that data, however, are timeless. The hand pointing at where we should be paying closest attention, as if we will always be schoolchildren.

Portraits are close kin to the world of commercial art: paid commissions for those figures whose role in history were meant to last beyond their lifespan. Spend a few hours looking at portraits across the whole of recorded history, and it's unlikely you'll find much evolution in their composition. The eyes speak: "There is a spirit within this body, exposed and alive in this focused gaze." The face then melts back, the crags and whiskers from each pore less important than the outline of jaw, chin, flaring nose, neck falling into a the depths of a black gabardine sweater that barely floats above a textured velvet backdrop rendered in oil.

Bring in the digital camera, add a few hundred years, and the tropes still hold. This picture may evoke a thousand words, but there a few million more that would begin to express what is flattened here upon the wall. So we are left with details.

Details are the delicate lace of stories, summed into human memory. "The design is in the details," said Charles Eames, but the space between the details are the design as well. We are biologically wired to forget the minutiae of the moments that tax us most, and recall the ideas that have led us through history to trudge through much pain and terror for a life that will be manifested through what could only be considered—in language—a set of circumstantial details.

In the tangible world, not the space between our ears, details are physical memory. We make stories out of those details in order to define and design our very lives. Every night, we re-experience those details in dreams… and upon waking, consider the logic of what defies description. In poetry, as in life, experience is objectified—a never-ending series of abstractions layered like paint upon the ever-present now.

Humans, when starved of details, begin to invent their own—with dramatic consequences. This portrait of John James Audobon, hunting dog and rifle at hand as he posed for his portrait by an unknown artist. "Although he would shoot the birds for sport, he also shot them in order to paint their features," says the New York Historical Society. Rewind a century, and you might have needed to kill for information that today, you can capture with a tiny device in the palm of your hand.

The businessman peers out into the snarl of traffic on Route 66. He bears a striking resemblance to a portrait I'd seen earlier in the day at the National Portrait Gallery: manicured, silver-black beard, fine eyebrows with a little parabolic hiccup two-thirds of the way towards each ear, fine part of gray hair to my right, piercing blue eyes, creased black slacks overlapped by a Impressionist purple tie draped onto his right leg as he slouches back in his seat.

He looks straight at me and I look away, warding off his gaze by trying to capture as much detail as I can into my tiny notebook. He can't know what I'm writing from thirty feet away, and anyways, his stop is coming up soon. (There are only three left.) He turns his head back to the window, and I see it: the portrait of a forgotten man, only recognizable by the tiny black type next to the canvas or the bronze nameplate bolted into the picture frame.

His shiny black leather shoes glint under weak fluorescent lights. The automated voice calls out each station in the same unwavering tone. We have many miles to travel, fake leather padfolios clenched under sweaty armpits encased in 50/50 cotton-poly blend no-wrinkle formal pink shirts that rumple and collapse limply in the moist summer heat.

Confronted by the individuality of an unfinished portrait, still asleep, straining to be human.

Make the most of these days, for they will be remembered in vague particulars.

As artists and as designers, this is our sacrifice.

It's not just what you say—it's how you say it. This maxim could not apply more to sending thank you notes to those people who've supported you most: short- or long-term clients, vendors, colleagues, friends, and family. And as designers, we're quite well equipped to trump the usual off-the-shelf rote cards and send out simple, elegant cards that transcend the Hallmarks of the world. Clients don't just remember the results you've provided. They always remember that you thanked them for the opportunity to do the great work. And while you shouldn't expect anything discrete back from a thank you besides appreciation… often great things will happen as a result that you couldn't have anticipated.

The artwork shown here is by the amazing artist Curtis Steiner, who runs my most favorite store called Souvenir. He is a designer of many things: cards, jewelry, arrangements for window displays, and has had his art featured at the Seattle Art Museum. If I had multiple lives, I'd go apprentice at his shop. My wife donated some antique trimmings we had lying around the house, and we were stunned to receive this handmade, hand-lettered card from Curtis. He had clearly spent a great deal of time on this card for us, and we could only appreciate his thank you more in return.

Next time you're in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, stop by and see him. Here's his address:

Hitchcock is a storyboarding application for iPhone and iPod touch. From photographs in your iPhoto library or on-the-go location shots taken with your phone's built-in camera, you can quickly built a multi-frame storyboard, animate it with voice over and pan-and-scan effects, then output the resulting frames to an annotated PDF for client review.

My friend Wes Kim tipped me off to this app right before it entered the market this weekend, and I'm very excited to start using it—but not quite in the way the designers intended. While this app is first and foremost for filmmakers—especially those involved in producing 30-second spots and short films—I think there are some ways that I can use it for creating user scenarios and for pre-visualizing shots at photo shoots.

As an example: If I was looking to sketch up some fairly complex user scenarios that showed people interacting with a system, I could stage quick photographs of people arranged in the correct orientations in photographs through Hitchcock, output them as a PDF, then hand-sketch them (via pencil or traced in the computer) with my initial storyboard serving as a visual reference. (The program lets you throw in outlined people or draw on the boards (in a rudimentary fashion), but with the lack of a comprehensive people-outline library, I'm not so interested in using their pre-made symbols unless they get more sophisticated in quality of line and character.)

Setting up for a commercial photo shoot, though, is where this app could really sing. When pre-planning a complex shoot, especially on location with a ton of props, I can pre-shoot the desired shots and immediately output them as a storyboard for my client to review off-site. This app only lets you create landscape orientation shots, so if you're planning any vertical shots, they'll show up horizontal in the storyboard. (You're out of luck if you want to shoot square.)

The price may seem a bit steep at $19.99, but for what it can accomplish in terms of optimizing a designer's workflow, it's easy to justify the purchase against saved billable hours. And I can only imagine the creativity it's going to unleash for other iPhone app designers and developers. It's (currently) rare that you would find such a professional-grade tool on your phone.

Check out the official site and demo video for the application at http://www.cinemek.com/hitchcock/.