The Designer's Law of Diminishing Quality

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:22:12 +0000

Okay, so there's no official "law" called "The Designer's Law of Diminishing Quality," but it very much exists in the design world.

Here's the gist: the tighter the deadline, the lower the quality. Meaning, for every day that you want your project finished faster, the quality and attention to detail drops accordingly.

You want that logo designed in a week? Fine, you can have something generic that "looks cool" in a week. But something that's well researched and thought out just won't happen in that amount of time.

You want a full site redesign done in two weeks? Okay. Again, you'll get something generic that probably will satisfy you. But it the little things that make a design great and more importantly, usable, will be left out and you'll most likely feel the pain of that decision with a higher support load or lost users.

Good design takes time, and not just pure grunt work. Letting a design sit for a couple of days and coming back with fresh eyes does amazing things. "But letting a design sit means I get my design later," you say. Yes, yes it does. But it also means you get a better end product.

It's worth noting here that there does come a point in the life a design where you've just got to call it done and move on. Trying 37 different shades of fuschia is, in most cases, a waste of time. And most designers would tell you there's always more they'd like to do on a design. From a client perspective, you've got to trust the designer to know when a design is finished and give them time to reach that point. You'll both be happier because of it.

Responsive Sabotage

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:07:17 +0000

Designing for yourself is generally just downright painful. As designers, we're our harshest critics. Ask any designer and chances are they've been perpetually redesigning their site for as long as they've been using Photoshop.

Count me as part of that group.

Today I'm proud to launch the most recent iteration of my little design brand, Sabotage.

For the better part of the past year I've been using a web service to host my portfolio, primarily due to having very little free time (who knew a kid took up so much time?!?!). But it was also an issue of priorities and I just had to bite the bullet and knock this thing out.

What I'm most excited about with this redesign is its support for just about any resolution you can think of. Ever since reading Ethan Marcotte's game-changing Responsive Web Design article last year, I've been anxious to implement responsive design into my own work and it's finally here.

With the proliferation of mobile devices (namely iPhone's and iPad's), the screen sizes of people accessing the web is now absolutely unpredictable. Stats on what size "most" of your users are accessing your site no longer really matter. Your site/application needs to support a whole slew of different sizes.

So that's exactly what the new Sabotage site does. Resize your browser window, access the site on your iPhone or iPad, change the orientation...the site adjusts for it all. Inevitably there are a number of tweaks I've already noticed I need to make, but dangit I just needed to get this out there.

Along with the redesign, I've finally included a new blog section that I intend on posting to frequently, whether it be full articles or just interesting finds around the web related to the design world.

If you've read this far, I love you. If you didn't read this far, I still love you but you'll just never know. How sad.

Hope you enjoy the digs!

Sabotage: Notebook

The Designer's Law of Diminishing Quality

Responsive Sabotage