There is a sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, a sort of supply-demand curve for an effective design. Although netbooks are cheaper to make and would see increased demand because of that, the constraints of having to make the product cheaper for a specific demograpic enabled innovation. That innovation opened up the product to a mainstream audience.

As designers, we should embrace restrictions and constraints. It’s the essential difference between art and design. I’ve talked about simplicity a bunch of times in previous posts, but this article has illustrated that simplicity can also be an innovation.

The idea of Critikr is that twitter users would be able to send @critikr replies with random criticisms, be them neutral, positive or negative. The sentiment is added by the use of an emoticon that are categorized by checking the the sentiment in the twitter text against a regular expression.

So go take a look, would love feedback and ideas to make the site more useful and fun.

Well, if you don’t own the book already you should snag a copy because I think it gets to the essence of how designers, technologists and business people should be approaching problems.

I work for a very large company and it would be impractical for the visual designers to code all their work. At some point it makes sense to hand the coding responsibility off. I do think their needs to be a close relationship between the designer and the person who is doing the coding. Also the designer should get code approval.

In the end I do believe you will make a better product if the designer codes his/her own work. I love coding in live templates where you can see different instances of the data you are laying out. Makes the end product much more refined.

Like every thing their is not one answer and 37 Signals tends to write articles from there narrow perspective. So take there opinions with a grain of salt.

What say you?

So why are these features a big deal? Recently, I’ve been fooling around with doing some web development for the iPhone and find it liberating. Just having the ability to use PNG24’s with full transparency and border-radius that is anti-alias opens up a world of possibilities. There are ways to use these features in other browsers, but they aren’t as easy to implement.

So check out the article and hope that some day these features become standards.

Then reality hit me: not many people make a living doing cartooning and illustration alone. Most illustrators & cartoonists take on design work as well. Having that realization, I went on the path of becoming a designer and developing a design portfolio. Below are some tips that I’ve followed and some I wish I had.

Tip #1 – Get a Degree

Having the chance to do it over again, I would have went to a university or college and got a 4-yr degree. So I would recommend going to a school that has a decent art & design program. Concentrate on learning techniques, conceptualizing, and don’t worry about developing a style. Without a degree, I was at a disadvantage when I started looking for a job. The way I overcame not having a degree was by having a strong portfolio and being persistent.

From time to time, not having an undergrad, or a masters for that matter, rears its ugly head. Recently, I was approached by a local art school that offers a 4 year degree program to be an instructor. They saw this site and some of my work and thought I would be a good fit, but all of the instructors are required to have a masters degree in design. So the conversation stopped right there. Thinking back over my twelve years working in design, I can’t remember any colleagues with a masters degree. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a masters if you intend to make a living as a designer. Having a strong portfolio will be more important.

Tip #2 – Be Self-starting & Curious

Being a self-starter is a great quality for a designer to have. It shows passion, resourcefulness and curiosity. Self-starters tend to jump into new things quickly and aren’t resistant to change. Design tastes and techniques change often, so being flexible is a must.

Curiosity and having a well rounded view of art, news, politics and popular culture in general is essential to keeping yourself and your designs relevant. Most design touches a customer, so knowing what the likes and dislikes from a cultural perspective can give you a lot of insight. Having the passion to keep learning new techniques, new software, new technologies is important.

Keep your critical eye out for design you come in contact with in your day to day. I’m always commenting and critiquing logos, signage, web sites, etc, that I come across. Knowing why something is successful and why something doesn’t work is a skill you will always be honing.

Tip #3 – Embrace Criticism

As a designer, your work will be judged critically. There is no way around that so embrace criticism and use it to improve your work. Also, know when to stick to your guns and be able to articulate the reasons for design decisions, but be flexible. When you’re presenting your work, try to get people to just explain the problems with the design and not the solution to the problems. Designers solve problems, so knowing what’s wrong with a design can get you back on track.

Share your work with the world. Use sites like Flickr to get constructive feedback from the community. Flickr has numerous design groups that have hundreds of designers sharing and critiquing work.

Well I hope you like these tips and if any designers out there have anything to add, please do so in the comments below.

What’s Design Rhythm?

Design rhythm is a consistent repetition of design elements that builds a pattern or rhythm. The pattern creates unity and helps users distinguish one post to the next. The flow that is created makes people naturally scroll to the next item and creates good scan-ability.

If you look at any of the major print publications’ websites, you’ll notice that they try to translate their print approach to the web with various degrees of success. I would love to see a major publication experiment with a rhythmic approach to designing their homepages. One company who is giving it a shot is AOL with their news.aol.com site. While not a news organization, their previous design was more like a traditional newspaper site. It’s interesting to see a larger site like AOL change its design philosophy.

Rhythm Supports Usability

Design rhythm supports consistency and contextualization, two of the ways I wrote about in the post “5 Ways to Make a User Interface Intuitive“. Consistency creates pattern which helps users easily scan pages to find beginnings and endpoints to posts. Contextualization is supported by grouping information like category, date published and comments together in context with the posting.

Search is one of the most used applications on the web and the design of results pages haven’t changed much. This is because their user interfaces are universally understood and follow the principals of design rhythm. Search result pages were some of the early pages that broke web design conventions and still have staying power.

In Conclusion

The design rhythm approach is accepted because users are much more savvy about scrolling. Users respond to discernible patterns that they can scan quickly and intuitively understand.

1. Openness

The first great thing about Flickr is its openness. Nearly every function that can be executed on Flickr can be utilized in its Web Services API. On my art site rikcat.com I use Flickr’s API to power the artwork section. I wrote a little PHP script using the phpFlickr class that displays artwork from a specified set of images on Flickr. So in the end, Flickr becomes a back-end tool for the front-end of the artwork section of the site. I’m able to add, subtract, and order artwork any way I’d like.

Flickr is constantly improving their product and you can tell the people working on the product love it as well. Yesterday, they released a new feature that allows you to view stats about your account. It’s only available to pro account holders and the upgraded account is only $24.95 a year.

2. Community

There is a tremendous sense of community on Flickr. I’ve met and collaborated with other artists, in which these relationships have rolled into opportunities to show at galleries and so on. As an artist, putting work up on Flickr provides immediate feedback and the ability to provide encouragement and constructive criticism.

Early last year I received a Flickr mail from a book publisher asking for permission to use a photo I posted of my cat Bobo. I agreed, thinking that the book on pet costumes would never be published. But a couple of weeks before Halloween, a copy of “Dog Trick or Cat Treat” was in my mailbox. About a week later, I was approached by People.com to use the same photo for a feature on pet costumes. All because I shared my photos with the community.

3. Storage

The final reason to love Flickr is disaster proof storage of your images. In the past, I’ve been bitten by some bad backups. One incident, I lost 10 years worth of artwork on a bad Iomega Jaz drive. With a pro account, you get unlimited storage, unlimited uploads, unlimited bandwith and permanent archiving of high resolution images.

Free accounts also have ample features with 100megs of bandwith per month, with some other feature restrictions. Free account holders are limited to 3 sets and photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images. The free account is a good way to find out if Flickr is right for you, then you can upgrade to a pro account for $24.95 a year.

There are so many more features and functions Flickr provides that make it one of the best sites on the web. If you don’t use it already, what are you waiting for?

On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction.

Should web designers know how to code?

Really good post on nclud debating whether designers should know how to code. I agree that it is not totally necessary for a web designer to be a CSS master, but I do think designers who know how to code produce better work in general. The biggest problem with not coding your own designs is handing it over to another person to translate. Also, if you code your own work, you can make improvements to the design in the coding process.

NFL Network

If your a football fan that has Time Warner, Cablevision, or Comcast you probably didn’t see last night’s game due to a dispute with the NFL Network. The cable companies insist on making the NFL Network a premium, pay to watch channel. Well, the NFL Network basically streamed the Packers versus the Cowboys live on their website last night. I found the broadcast quite enjoyable and glad to see the NFL fight to get the channel to be on basic cable packages.