Remy Sharp and Chris Mills gave an excellent, from a designers point of view, introduction to unobtrusive development and accessibility. As a designer getting more involved in technology and development the level was excellent, some stuff I knew and some stuff were new that I didn’t know of.

The technology Remy and Chris spent two hours describing was completely focused on enhancing the user experience of a website. The point of the talk was to show how and what you could do to make a site work no matter what plaform or level of css-, html- and javascript support the visitor has. It was obvious that what they talked about has to be used by us designer and developers to make the most out of our clients businesses and the sites that we produce for our clients.

The shocking thing to me was some of the questions from the audience and some of the tweets after Chris and Remys presentation:

“Have you talked to a designer about graceful degradation? How do you think we designers feel creating a lot of different versions of a website?”

“Isn’t graceful degredation just a lazy/bad (couldn’t hear the exact wording) solution … why don’t you just force the user to upgrade to a better browser?”

“… sane thoughts but not appliable in reality …”

I might have quoted some of you wrong but it’s the general attitude in the questions I’m trying to capture.

What the …? How on earth can you ask such questions after seeing and hearing Chris and Remy for two hours? And the sad thing was that some of the questions came from people working at some of the most promintent agencys in Sweden.

If you as a designer or developer doesn’t understand the value or choose not to use the available technology, you will lower the possibility for your clients to run their business online and in the end you are going down a quite risky path wasting your clients money and, worst of all, risking their business.

As a designer it’s your responsibility to dig into technology and get a brief understanding of what it does and how it works, you don’t have to know it inside out, you just have to get a brief understanding so that you can design and plan for it in your projects.

Design is not about beauty or pixel perfection, it’s about delivering content and functionality to the end user so that the get a hassle free experience when they encounter your clients business.

If you fail to do that you will, hopefully, be out of business pretty soon cos:

1. Your clients will go somewhere else because what you deliver will be bad for their business. If a site fails to make a sale due to lack of decent degredation you have failed. No matter how great the design and error free validation the site has.
2. Your co-workers won’t continue working with you because you’ll become an obstacle, a no-doer that hinders the development of great sites and services.

That’s my response to the questions.

Watch the talk here:
http://bambuser.com/node/218451
Slides will be available at:
http://my.opera.com/chrismills

In his traditional way of thinking there is a clear and strict agency-hierarchy. The production slave is at the bottom of the food chain. He or she is eaten by the designer who then gets wolfed down by the copy/art director. On top of it all the Creative Director is orchestrating the gluttony. And that’s the way it always has been … not in every agency of cource, but unfortunately in way to many agencies run predominately by middle aged white men there is a love for the hierarchy.

In my world tech and design/creativity goes hand in hand. But hierarchys like that that is outdated and will strain creativity. Your ideas and creative is not better just because you have the title “Art director”, probably you have a lot more experience in a lot of fields but using the hierarchy today as a validation of quality is wrong.

To me the hieararchy was valid when tech was slow and there were well defined surfaces between the communicator and the reciever, when there was TV, radio, print and old school web. Then the distribution chains and channels of communication was fixed and monopolitized by creatives. It did cost a hell of a lot of money to reach the broad masses, and as a creative you could charge a hell of a lot to let people use your fixed channels. The time from idea to public apperance and impact was long.

But that is pure business and, again, has nothing to do with creativity or quality of ideas.

The essence of personal creativity to me is to capture and realise your ideas, nurture your curiosity and most important get your ideas out in public. To me an idea is worht nothing if it’s not outed and valued and viewed by others.

Back then it was impossible for John Doe to get his stuff out and make an impact on the broader mass and therefore the correct and only way to do things was to move up the hierachical ladder. To support and be apart of the hierarchy.

Today it’s different. The time from idea to apperance and impact is close to zero.

As a creative you need to get into tech cos it’s is the way to commuicate today. It is the way to realise your ideas. It is the way to impact the masses. Tech has made it possible for anyone to have an idea, produce it and make it available for the masses, thus making an impact. And the beauty of it is that tech doesn’t care if you are an art director or production retard. As long as you know how to tech you will have the power to change the world.

You don’t have to become a rockstar developer, you just have to get your ass out of your creative dungeon and move over to where the tools and techs reside. Read, learn, test, try and explore.

I condemn the hierarchy, if you support it you will be sitting with your brilliant ideas in an ancient structure that doesn’t let you realise your ideas. You will be left behind because every idea you have will be made public by someone else long before you.

You can be a brilliant copywriter but noone will hear you.
You can be a fantastic art director but noone will see you.

If you want to make a change, if you want to impact a broad mass. For gods sake, embrace tech.

We are also hosting two Noded Tweetups; the first in Linköping on april 23 (sponsored by Twingly), and the second in London on the 28th of april (sponsored by Huddle). You are all very welcome to join us for a fab night with drinks and fab people. Here are invitations and details for both the Linköping and London events.

I'm really happy with the environment I have. It's based on the MAMP php/Apache/mySql server.

The environment I have had for a while now is basically:

• Local server – MAMP (MySQL, Apache and PHP5). Since I’m a designer by heart I wanted a really simple interface to start with and Mamp gave me that.
• Mac and Windows environment. Through Parallels Desktop I can run Windows XP which is really valuable when testing sites, scripts and such.
• A bunch of browsers for both Mac and Win; Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

That base will get you a long way, but it might be a good idea to check your stuff with Browsershots.org that will batch render your site in a vast amount of browsers and platforms. Or check out Litmus new Alkaline app. The downside with those services is that you get a astatic render of the site you are testing so interaction, javascipt and such cannot be tested, thats why I bought Parallells to run XP on.

Googles Chrome browser is picking up speed but it’s still not available for Mac, so if you to check your site in Chorme you can install CrossOver Chromium. It’s a ported version of Chorme developed on the Wine open source project. Be aware that CrossOver Chromium is still a test so don’t rely too hevily on it yet.

For hosting I’m using Bluehost (US) and Binero (Swe).

When developing sites iPhoney is a good Mac iPhone simulator running webkit.

When developing sites it might also be good to check them in a mobile interface. If you don’t want to flip your iPhone out every minute you can install the iPhoney desktop application. It simulates browsing in the iPhone and is built on Safari/Webkit. iPhoney is only available for the Mac.

Coding software.
Which web development software you use is a matter of taste as long as you don’t use crap like Frontpage or any other app that generates code for you via a wysiwyg interface. Your site is doomed to be filled with tons of crapcode and you’ll learn nothing.

Personally I have switched from Dreamweaver to Coda about a year ago, and I must say that I really love Coda. As soon as you get that basic knowledge in HTML, XHTML, CSS you should get an app that lets you handcode your own sites. In that way you learn more and get much better control of what you are doing … or at least what you are trying to do :-)

Browser plugins and other tools.
There are tons of addons and plugins for you to use. Some of the ones I use for development and debugging is:

Firebug - one of the most popular addons for Firefox. It gives you full overview of your site/components. Has really good debugging features like DOM-, CSS-, Html-, script-inspectors among others.

YSlow - analyses what, when and how fast every component of your site loads. So if you have a slow site, install YSlow and find out whats causing the lag.

CSS Edit - Initially I used CSS edit, but after a while I switched to Firebug and Codas built in DOM-inspector. CSS Edit gives you a custom browser in which you can examine your DOM elements and classes. One of the best things with CSS Edit is that you can create local CSS overrides for existing websites.

When developing column based designs Gridfox lets you set up your custom guides.

Gridfox - If you have built your own CSS framework or are using an existion one Gridfox lets you create guiding columns to aid your development. You can specify number of columns, widths, padding and more.