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Taste, talent, creativity and stamina

A friend emailed me a while ago asking how to create a good website.

Here’s my response to him, edited and expanded a bit for publication here.

Creating “good” design for a website is a combination of taste, talent, creativity and stamina.

Taste is more inherent than the other three. I don’t think it’s genetic or anything, taste can be developed like any other skill, but I think you’re at an advantage if it’s something that you possess naturally. And by taste I mean the ability to distinguish between quality and kitsch, thoughtful work versus lazy execution, proper proportions and so forth.

Talent is just a factor of time – how much you have to invest in learning CSS, reading about graphic design principles, learning about typography rules and guidelines, etc. Copy work that you admire to develop your own skill set. (Just don’t ever publish this copied work as your own!)

Creativity comes from thinking of something and then being able to produce a tangible real-world item from those thoughts. Creativity is influenced a lot by what you see and experience around you. It’s harder to be creative in a vacuum, surround yourself with things that inspire you.

The major frustration with creative work is the difference between the idea of what something should look like in your head versus what is actually created in the real world.

Stamina is what is required to keep plodding along when the chasm between the ideas in your head and the execution with your hands seems incomprehensible. Over time the gap becomes more and more narrow until you’re fairly efficient at executing the ideas you think of.

Revisiting the CSS box model

Tired of declaring the width of an element and then having to subtract from it as padding and borders are added later?

* { box-sizing:border-box; } is the set it and forget it of box models. Set your desired width and leave it intact as you later add padding and borders; they don’t affect the overall width.

Paul Irish has more of the specifics on his blog.

And in case you were wondering, margins are rendered the same either way.

(via Jeff Croft)

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence… It kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Symposium of web thinkers

A List Apart has published summarily a collection of thoughts by leading web thinkers on what they learned about the web this year.

I enjoyed Chris Fahey’s:

Making is momentum. Everything you make is a step toward making something else. Making your first product is a lot like finishing your first novel. Like most first novels, it will most likely collect dust in a shoebox while you move on to better and better work. Later, when your masterpieces come, you’ll always know that the unreadable dreck in that dusty old shoebox—or that wonky web app that nobody ever used—made it all possible.

Magic is a process

In a 1995 interview, Steve Jobs lays out an eloquent encapsulation of the relationship between ideas and finished products. Quoted at length because there’s no better way to say it:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.

And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.

Full article on CNN Money

Via daringfireball.net

Work/Life Balance

Wendell Berry is a prolific author who lives about an hour northeast of Louisville. His writings are critical and prophetic of the way we live and their consequences. Mr. Berry writes beautifully about what he’s for as well: “sustainable agriculture, a connection to place, the miracle of life, and the interconnectedness of all things.”¹

At the end of an essay about the specialization of poetry (written in 1974) there exists one of the most elegant and true descriptions of the balance between work and life that I’ve ever read. I’ve quoted it at length below for your edification:

Perhaps the time has come to say that there is, in reality, no such choice as Yeats’s “Perfection of the life, or of the work.” The division implied by this proposed choice is not only destructive; it is based upon a shallow understanding of the relation between work and life. The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however, they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either, or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary. One would like, one longs in fact, to be perfect family man and a perfect workman. And one suffers from the inevitable conflicts. But whatever one does, one is not going to be perfect at either, and it is better to suffer the imperfection of both than to gamble the total failure of one against an illusory hope of perfection in the other. The real values of art and life are perhaps best defined and felt in the tension between them.

The Specialization of Poetry, “Standing by Words,” Wendell Berry, pp. 21-22
  • ¹Quote from the publisher’s — Counterpoint Press — bio.

Design ROI

I am currently working on a refresh for the popular Social Media Explorer. We are almost finished and should be launching soon. Jason Falls, the CEO & Founder of Social Media Explorer, made a comment about the project on his Google+ public profile that I wanted to share here as well:

As I work with +David Yeiser on the new user experience for Social Media Explorer’s website, I feel compelled to reassure all of you that there is absolutely great value in investing in good design. If anything, I feel confident and comfortable my site is going to look and behave in awesome ways for people. The best designers will never be cheap, but damn are they almost always worth the money.

Good design = good investment.

Also, #humblebrag :)

Writing is fun. Writing is fundamental. If you don’t write, you don’t know what you think.

The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory.

Non-sexy responsive design

If you’ve been wanting to add responsiveness to your site but don’t know where to begin start with something small. In other words, you don’t have to jump from a 960 pixel fixed-width design to one that adjusts from the iPhone to an 80” wide-screen TV.

I’ll give you two examples of minor responsiveness.

If you’re viewing this site with a browser viewport larger than 1240 pixels it looks like this:

Design Intellection About page at full-width

If the viewport width goes below that threshold then the layout adjusts slightly to this:

Design Intellection About page at adjusted width

An even more minor implementation is the design for Wake Forest University that I did last year. In the header, the logo mark hangs outside of the primary left margin by 63 pixels. This creates a tasteful emphasis on the logo and has a nice balancing effect to the overall layout; except if a visitor’s computer has a resolution of 1024x768 (or less). Then the left portion of the logo is hidden by the screen and the visual emphasis we sought to achieve is destroyed. So we used @media queries to push the logo inside of the margin when the view port is less than 1080 pixels wide.

Keep reading →

When you subtract quality from quantity, the gross result is not a net gain.

—Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

Church Plant Theme demo site

The demo site for the Church Plant theme is ready for viewing: Church Plant theme demo

The theme will go on sale next week. I’m not sure exactly what day but I will announce it here, on Twitter, etc. Additionally you can sign up to be notified immediately when it’s released by entering your email below. (Update: The theme is released and available for purchase.)

And to reiterate this is a one-time announcement list that will be deleted after the initial announcement.

An update on the Church Plant theme

A month ago I announced I was building a WordPress theme specifically for churches. Nothing has changed since then except that it is taking me a bit longer than anticipated. I know, surprise, surprise.

Further delays notwithstanding, the demo site will be ready soon and the release will follow shortly thereafter. I am very happy with the product — it’s undergirded with a solid development layer and is extremely flexible and user-friendly. The design is also responsive, so any site that uses the theme will be optimized for mobile and tablet devices.

For proof of progress I’ve included a couple screen shots after the jump.

Keep reading →

Rates

Earlier this year, I chatted on the phone with a fellow in charge of a healthy business that needed a refreshed web presence. All the typical signs were go: he was friendly and likable, the expectations were normal and he was serious about the project.

Towards the end of the conversation he asked me what my typical rates were, I told him and he asked me why they were that high since most designer’s rates were a little less.

He had framed the conversation as my rates were too high and I needed to prove my value. I fell into the trap and began to brainstorm verbally for a silver bullet that would justify my “high” rates. In hindsight all the evidence I needed was the prior conversation, my portfolio and professional reputation. I should have answered, “my rates aren’t high, the others were too low.”

I tell you this story for two reasons:

  1. Don’t ever undervalue your work
  2. And if you ever get asked that question now you have a better answer than I did!

WordPress, commerce and the GPL: the ultimate cognitive dissonance

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a software license that promotes software freedom. Free as in speech, not beer, as they say. From the preamble it sets forth its goal:

[T]he GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program—to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

It is designed to make sure that:

  • “you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish),”
  • “you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs” and
  • “you know you can do these things.”

Further it expounds:

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

And to drive the point home in case you’re unsure:

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

Now contrast the above with this first paragraph I found in a plugin released under the GPL on WordPress.org:

All functions defined in this plugin should be considered private meaning that they are not to be used in any other WordPress extension including plugins and themes. Direct use of functions defined herein constitutes unsupported use and is strongly discouraged. This file contains custom filters have been added which enable extension authors to interact with this plugin in a responsible manner.

Enter the dissonance: use this code however you wish but please don’t use it in any way.

I can use his code in my theme according to the license under which it’s released. But I would feel guilty because he asked me not to use it — and I’m sure he must have felt odd adding restrictive clauses that were in direct contradiction with his GPL-licensed code. You see how messy it is! I can only speculate as to why he would want to restrict his code, but I would guess it had something to do with wanting to retain ownership over his creative domain.

In the end I found a tutorial with code examples that were easier to follow so I didn’t have to bother with the plugin. But the small ordeal illustrates the fragile dance of many who create products for WordPress (especially commercial products) between adhering to the GPL and “please don’t screw me over with your freedoms.”

Perfection

Your fundamentals as a professional web designer should be perfect.

Your execution should be perfect.

Sometimes you have a mis-directed idea.

Or the market isn’t quite ready for your vision.

You miss the mark.

You’re not perfect.

But one thing should always be perfect: the fundamentals.

A tailored product for churches

A tailored website designed well is an invaluable asset to anyone. If I didn’t believe this to be true then I wouldn’t be offering them. But there is a breaking point where the cost of a custom website outweighs the benefits for many. And a major demographic for which this is true is churches.

Numerically speaking the majority of my clients are churches. My very first paying client was a church and the last project I completed was for a church. Save for one church I’ve worked with, most churches have budgets set aside for websites that were I a large agency would get them a creative direction meeting and an exciting phone call from a sales rep.*

As it is though I’m a one-man operation and sometimes I take on projects with small budgets. It’s a tough assignment to build a website under these conditions — all the conventional processes you have to leave out notwithstanding. But with a cash flow business sometimes you are in a tight spot where it’s the only option and you try to make it work. Sorry to disappoint the business purists out there!

Usually what happens is you invest more time than you’re being paid for because you want the end result to be something you’re proud of. And it’s kind of a destructive spiral too: nicely done church websites beget more church website projects.

Don’t mistake my tone, I am grateful to have worked with the clients that I have had; but if you continue to fulfill these types of projects you’ll drive yourself out of business.

Churches still need website though. I could refer them to others, perhaps junior designers just entering the field or maybe spread it out over a lot of people like me who can afford to take on one or two projects with smaller budgets. But frankly my network isn’t that big and most professionals aren’t banging down my door to snatch up net-loss projects.

Keep reading →

Refreshed

The entirety of last week was spent alternating between sunny Charleston, South Carolina and sandy, salty Folly Beach. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your productivity is to stop doing work for a while. It never fails. When I return from vacation code and markup have never looked so beautiful and design ideas never seem so fresh.

Bowman's Island dock

It doesn’t take long to catch up on what you’ve missed either. The pace of design and development for the web may seem lightening fast but I can tell you from experience that you will be right where you — and everyone else — left off upon your return. The only difference will be your demeanor.

Pedale Design

Tyler Deeb, a Louisville-based graphic designer, has a new website. Go check out his great work.