As a part of the designer’s guild, I’ve been suffering the same problems than you everyday working with different kind of clients. I want to share with you some thoughts that may help you in your daily job and projects.

I’m tired of hearing you (and my self) blaming the client. Let’s go a bit more further than a simple “fuck off, they want the logo bigger, they can’t teach me how to design”.

I’ll be referring to “you”, but as I told you, I’m part of the guild. Also note that I’m talking about all kind of clients: internal and external ones.

It’s not the client’s fault

In the 99% of the time, the problem it’s yours, not the client. You’re not doing a good work as designer, you are suffering from your weaknesses as designer, so you are blaming the client.

Because it’s easy to blame someone else and not recognize that the problem in this case is just you, the designer. The client had a problem and hired you to solve it, but now he has 2 problems instead of one: the old problem and also managing a kid that draws on the screen.

There are good and bad clients, but assuming you picked the right one, that doesn’t mean that you will be able to do whatever you want. The client hired you because he doesn’t design, so don’t expect design skills from him.

Putting the record straight

Because a client it’s not supposed to tell you the right questions to ask him in order to get useful information. You designer, should be smart enough to communicate, find and ask the right questions to him.

Because a client it’s not supposed to list, organize and explain you the real problems, he just tell you what he thinks the problems are, so you should be able to understand the situation and find solutions to that problems.

Because a client it’s not supposed to know how to give you constructive and good feedback. It’s part of your job as designer explain him how to participate and share useful insight about the design. He may fail again giving you feedback, but again, it’s your job manage that “bad feedback” and turn it in something useful.

But I’ve worked so hard and client doesn’t like the design!

This time you followed and worked hard (as a real designer) and missed the shot, the client doesn’t like your design. Fuck off, blame the client! No.

A good designer should be also a good communicator. You must be capable of presenting and explaining your work rationally, in a friendly and easy way to the client. He will understand the entire process, recognizing the problems and their proposed solutions to solve them.

If client understands the whole thing, you’ll receive a better feedback and not just things like “I don’t like it”. So you’ll be able to fix or improve solutions for specific problems. That’s much better than blaming and crying because the client didn’t understand anything of your perfect designed solution.

Final thoughts

All these things have led me to the conclusion that it’s equally important to design and present your work (if not more important). It’s part of our job as designers to communicate and to facilitate the process.

Always remembering to both sides that you’re the expert in design, and the client knows more than anyone about his business, you’re in the same boat, you should work together to achieve the same goals.

Said that, we aren’t living in the country of lollipop and some clients won’t understand never our job as designers. If you find yourself explaining multiple times what’s your job and asking for respect but the client still doesn’t get the point… BLAME THE CLIENT AND GO FOR A GOOD ONE!

But in that case… the problem is still ours, we failed at picking the right client.

“To read more”. That’s one of my 2013′s goals. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading but truth being said, I didn’t manage well my time in last years, and I didn’t reserve enough time for reading.

I’ve been defending “doing” over “thinking” in last years, but I was wrong, I think we should find a balance between both things. It’s really important to do things, to build things, but it’s also important to read, to feed and cultivate our mind.

Combining the experience from making and the knowledge of reading allow us to grow personal and professionally, and that’s a powerful combination and a good way of life. Our personal relationships and daily job will benefit from the very first day.

Giving it the importance that reading should have, pushes me to reserve each day a little portion of the day for reading, and it’s becoming a good way of relaxation and meditation for me.

That said, I hope to share with you some of latest books I found interesting,

Cheers!

For those impatient people, I’ve created a online working demo on dabblet. Let’s take a quick look to the CSS code:

.loader {
	width: 32px; height: 32px; display: inline-block;
	font: 0/0 a; text-shadow: none; color: transparent; /*font hack replacement*/
	background: transparent url(http://f.cl.ly/items/1J161J3L0A2x0c1r303O/loader.gif) left top no-repeat;
	-webkit-animation: 'animation' 1s steps(10, end) infinite;
	-moz-animation:    'animation' 1s steps(10, end) infinite;
}

@-webkit-keyframes animation { from { background-position: 0 0; } to { background-position: 100% 0; } }
@-moz-keyframes animation    { from { background-position: 0 0; } to { background-position: 100% 0; } }

I’m using a css sprite as background-image so I can make use of CSS3 animations to recreate the loading spinner varying the background position in 10 steps and it works perfectly on modern browsers.

That’s a great solution but… what about Internet Explorer? In this case we have an easy solution: use a real gif image as background. I didn’t make it but you have a lot of options:

• Conditional CSS stylesheets
• Hack selectors
• Real fallback for old browsers, using non supported properties

Real fallback? Yes, for example we could type this:

background: url(loading.gif) no-repeat;
background: url(loading-sprite.png) left top / 100% 100% no-repeat;

So old browsers will validate the last supported property (in this case the first one) and new browsers will load the second one because their support for background-size 100% 100%.

Hope you find it useful!

View online demo and source code →

One of the advantages of living in Madrid is the vast list of events celebrating in the city each week. One of this events is Startup Weekend Madrid.

Startup Weekend is an event where different kind of people form teams to develope a business idea in a weekend. Attendees’ backgrounds are roughly 50% technical (developers, coders, designers) and 50% business (marketing, finance, law).

Maria Encinar is the main responsable of organizing the event in Madrid, and she invited me as coach to help other teams in the process.

See you tomorrow!

Hi there folks!

I’m writing a quick update to announce that I’ve joined Tuenti, one of the biggest sites in Spain (I hope also international soon!) as Senior UI Designer.

In fact I’m close to complete my first month here, and it’s really awesome working with really talented and great people.

I just hope I can learn as much as I can from this talented team in personal and professional way and contribute to new products we are cooking for all of you.

Cheers!

Hi there folks!

This is something I got pending a few days ago, I’ve received a Dribbble invitation so I’m sharing it with you, but in an inspirational way, you just need to follow these steps…

1. Post a comment with an URL to your 400×300 pixels image.
2. Follow me, I will be releasing the winner via twitter!
3. There is no third step! Just wait until the winner is announced!

I have been wondering in sharing this invitation with some of my friends, but I doubt about their activity / interest you know… So I prefer to share the invitation with you, the community out there :]

That’s all guys, good luck to everyone and spread the word!

[Update] — Finally the invitation goes to Dimi, here you have his screenshot:

Thanks to everyone for participate and see you soon on the next giveaway!

I’m releasing my first PSD freebie! I’m sharing a minimalistic and light widget music player. I will be releasing tons of pixels as freebie on next weeks as a way to improve my own skills… Hope you find it useful!

Download this freebie (488.94 kB)

It wasn’t an easy decision for me, since I was working very hard last 3 years on my own startup Cokidoo and of course in our biggest and ambitious project: Erasmusu. Am I leaving the company? No, but I will be spending less time on it, of course.

Why? Well, I’m not sure how to explain it but since I’m not motivated as when I started it’s time to a change, to move on forward and search for new opportunities, Madrid can give me that.

I will be joining to a big team (+45 employees), it’s the first time I work with that kind of  teams because I spent most of my work time on my own projects with little (3 people) teams.

I was thinking about redesigning yensdesign or make an english version of Ontuts but finally I decided to start a new blog, more based on my new role in Indeup, about ux and design so I will be releasing some freebies, usability patterns and much more over here in the next months…

Wish me luck please!