RobGoodlatte.com

Facebook Design

Rob Goodlatte — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:39:59 +0000

The Facebook Design team just launched a public profile on Facebook. We’ll be sharing our design philosophy, processes, and content we find interesting.

What excites me the most is the opportunity to share retrospectives on past Facebook designs and the product decisions leading to our current interfaces. Publicly sharing our ideas and insights through this page is one of the first steps we’re taking to connect with the larger design community. That trend will only continue over the coming months.

I’ve been with our product design team for a year. It’s been one hell of a ride so far. We design and build the products and interfaces of Facebook, and we do so with a tiny group of ten.

We’re a pretty unique team.

Our designers write code. We’re responsible for Facebook’s user-interface library: an object-oriented extensible PHP library that renders the bulk of Facebook’s front-end. We write Javascript renderers for Chat and async endpoints for friend collection dialogs.

We move fast. We stay with a project for it’s entire development process, so we have no communication gaps to slow us down. That means we ship products in half the time and with half the resources needed by others.

We sweat the details more than any team I’ve ever been a part of — down to correcting a single pixel in the upper left of our search typeahead and applying the subtlest shading and detail on our icons.

We take a product from an idea to a launch before an audience of hundreds of millions. We’re modest enough to learn from our mistakes and have vision enough to make the right product decisions when faced with criticism. I’m proud and humbled to be a part of this team.

The Facebook Design page also includes updates from our communication designers, our user interface engineers, and our user experience research team. Check it out at facebook.com/design.

Huge respect to Ben Barry, likely the most talented designer I’ve ever met, who beautifully illustrated Facebook Design’s seal.

Dr. Inman’s Prescription for RSS

Rob Goodlatte — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:06:12 +0000

Today, Shaun Inman humbly released the best RSS reader to date.

It’s called Fever.

Why am I so excited? Fever is the first news reader that’s considerate of you.

Contemporary RSS readers borrow heavily from the interface and language of email. Unread items in bold, unread count in red, two panes, and sorted by time. I’m horrible at managing email — piles of unread messages stress me out and waste my time. Why should reading my feeds do the same?

Fever re-thinks RSS. The interface doesn’t force me into un-bolding rituals, nor do I feel like I’m missing out on important news. Fever pulls RSS back from the brink of uselessness.

Photo by perfectsnap under Creative Commons

Flow Theme for WordPress

Rob Goodlatte — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:59:51 +0000

Liquid layouts are decidedly out-of-fashion. Fixed-width, centered layouts have become the dominant design pattern for the Web, and for good reason too. Fixed-width layouts allow designers to define strict proportions between columns, and keep line-lengths under control.

But, setting a fixed width isn’t the only way to maintain a reasonable measure. There’s a very reasonable alternative that is rarely explored — variable type size. Cameron Adams toyed with the idea as an experiment, but I’ve found few examples of this technique used on an actual production site. To that end, I’ve developed a proof-of-concept WordPress theme called Flow.

Flow scales the type size of the main content area in proportion to the browser width to preserve a consistent measure of around sixty-six characters, as prescribed by Mr. Bringhurst & Mr. Rutter. The sidebar column, present on the home page, is set at a fixed 12px font size so it always remains secondary (scaling it would result in nearly un-readable type at small sizes).

Test drive Flow at the example blog and let me know what you think of this experiment. I hope you don’t mind scrolling.

Download

Installation

Open flow.zip and upload the extracted folder to wp-content/themes/. Then activate the theme in your Admin panel.

Features

Facebook Connect Ready
Flow was designed to work with Facebook Connect. Just upload the WP-FacebookConnect plugin to your plugins directory, activate it, and follow the instructions on the plugin’s settings page.

Widget Ready
As much as I hate them, this theme supports WordPress widgets. This was by far the #1 most-requested feature for my previous theme. Go nuts with calendars, blogrolls, and feed importers.

Built-in Widon’t new in v0.2
Shaun Inman’s fantastic WordPress plugin, Widon’t is built-in for article titles. This prevents multi-line titles from leaving a single word by itself on the final line.

Update 2/27/09: Fixed issues with search and formatting of list items. If you’re using the theme, please update to v0.2. Thanks to Eugene for the help.
Update 3/4/09: Updated to v0.2. Fixed small display issue with archive formatting.
Update 3/5/09: updated to v0.4. Now licensed under GPL.

Strikethrough

Rob Goodlatte — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:30:30 +0000

Sometimes you’re just flat-out wrong. That’s the case with my assertion that faking confidence is a viable strategy for one’s life and career. It’s complete bullshit — I tested the theory myself and watched it fall short.

The funny thing about faking confidence is that you wind up convincing yourself that you’re always right, even when you’re wrong. The confidence game becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — it’s right because, damnit, it’s right.

I’ve come to realize that self-confidence is not, in and of itself, a quality worthy of pursuit. True confidence is a byproduct of a far greater quality — authenticity. Faking confidence may alleviate tense social situations or win arguments, but it’s not a long-term solution. Rely on the confidence mask too often and you become arrogant, distanced, and self-absorbed. You become the over-confident jerk whose mannerisms you copied.

Authenticity, for me, means matching my actions and words to my passions. Worrying about projecting confidence is a dangerous, and ultimately irrelevant diversion from more important pursuits.

Photo by Matt Callow under Creative Commons.

No Confidence? Fake it.

Rob Goodlatte — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:30:26 +0000

One of the greatest career and life lessons I learned in college was one I picked up freshman year from my friend Dave. He’s a guy who projects confidence in any situation, in the face of any intimidating social environment. Awkward introduction? Not for Dave. Anxiety-ridden job interview? Dave wouldn’t even sweat.

This isn’t to say Dave’s abundance of confidence was always a blessing—he rarely relinquished a position in argument and often entered into pissing matches. But to a younger and more timid me, Dave’s seemingly limitless reserve of self-confidence was a quality I deeply envied.
…

When we hang out with our friends, their mannerisms, postures, and other behavior tend to rub off on us—psychologists call this “the chameleon effect”. Just by hanging out with Dave, I began to pick up behaviors such as making eye contact, maintaining taller posture, using hand gestures, and speaking assertively. I still didn’t possess the internal confidence I coveted, but I began acting as if I did. I slowly recognized that my change in behavior affected how others perceived me. My ideas were taken more seriously and others placed more trust in me.

I soon began “faking it”—deliberately acting more confident and self-assured. At first this was un-natural. Acting confident required a lot of conscious thought to think out exactly what to say and how to say it. Internally, I still felt awkward and anxious in high-pressure situations, but I did my best to hide my fear under my newfound confidence armor.

Over time a strange thing happened: I stopped having to make an effort. I began asserting confidence without thinking about it, which had to uncanny effect of boosting my self-esteem. By pretending I was confident I became confident.

Why am I writing this? Because I’ve known too many designers, programmers and artists who possess unbelievable talent, but slip up in job interviews because their speech and physical presence don’t communicate confidence. There’s a natural tendency amongst creative people to self-criticize — a fantastic motivator for improvement — but this can be self-defeating in situations where you must talk about your work. Just put on the façade. Confidence is an amazing social currency, but the secret is: you can be your own mint.

To borrow a line from Jim Coudal: the meek won’t inherit the earth, the creatives will. But we creatives must shed our meekness if we want to break through the limitations we place on ourselves.

Photo by *miQ under Creative Commons

Platform Atop a Platform

Rob Goodlatte — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:01:35 +0000

This morning Dan, Justin, and I rolled out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls.

Simply log into StrawPoll with your Twitter username and password (which we don’t store), post a question, and we’ll take care of the rest. Using the Summize API, we monitor Twitter for replies to your question—transforming your Twitter account into your own polling robot. We pull in your background image and color settings from Twitter and, with some quick color calculations, create a color palette based on your settings. Check out my page and Justin’s for an example.

This is a side project we’ve been working on for the past couple of months while we weren’t in class, writing papers, or taking finals. Try it out here—We hope you like it.

Photo by Kagey B under Creative Commons

Passionless Pre-Professionals

Rob Goodlatte — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:45:16 +0000

In two weeks I’ll be graduating college—leaving academia after 16+ years in the system. For the first time in my life, there will be no more classes, professors, tests, or grades—no artificial benchmarks of success. If I fail, I’ll get back up and try again; if I succeed, I’ll receive the real benefits of my success, not just the letter “A” on a sheet of paper.

To me, this is extremely liberating. But I’ve noticed others in my graduating class, friends included, who look to the “real world” with trepidation. A few don’t yet know what they want to do with their lives. That’s okay—we’re still young.

But many more know exactly what their career will be, yet have absolutely no passion for what they’re about to pursue. For these passionless pre-professionals, college was simply an economics equation to be optimized: earn the best possible grades in order to get the highest paying job. But hey—most of these people will make great money in careers like investment banking. Mission accomplished, right?

Maybe. But…

What if you pursued the thing that interests you the most…as your career?
What if work could be a source of happiness?
What if you could feel like your work is the very reason you exist?

Too many of my peers are discarding, or never discover, their passion in life. They’re playing the academic game: trying to optimize their outcome by earning good grades. It doesn’t matter if your job interests you—just do it well and make a lot of money.

Unfortunately, many educational institutions encourage this behavior by treating grades as incentives. As early as elementary school, my parents incentivized good grades by rewarding me with allowances and video games when I brought home A’s. When I reached high school the incentive for maintaining a high GPA changed—now the goal was to get into a good college. But after I got into that great school, I started to fall off the track. Suddenly it was junior year and I found myself pursuing a major I hated. I stopped caring, stopped going to classes—I didn’t want to play the academic game anymore.

I took a step back from the rat race and thought about what makes me tick. What I found was simple: I enjoy creating. Whether through design, programming, or writing, I find fulfillment in bringing new objects into the world. To that end, I started creating Web applications on the side, began writing about design, and sought out freelance clients that gave me more creative freedom.

I called these “side projects”. But in reality, school was the side project.

When I started looking for a job last year, my GPA was in the toilet. But I had a portfolio filled with self-started design projects, a blog with my ideas, and an enthusiasm for the subject of design. I had no problem getting great job offers despite my bad grades.

You’re the only person who decides how you’re going to spend your life, so invest the time to discover your passion. Don’t accept the path laid out before you by others—just figure out what you enjoy doing and do it.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”
—Steve Jobs

Photo by sgis under Creative Commons

WISER up for a Webby

Rob Goodlatte — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:08:46 +0000

I’m extremely proud to announce that the site I built for WISER has been nominated for Best Student Website in the 2008 Webby Awards. This not only provides me with a great sense of validation, but more importantly highlights the fantastic work and mission of WISER.

The students behind WISER are an incredibly inspiring bunch—not because their mission of education and equality is so lofty, but because they’re actually making it happen. They’ve already raised over half a million dollars to build the first boarding school for girls in Muhuru Bay, which is scheduled to open next year.

As a nominee, the WISER site is also up for a People’s Voice award in the student category. I would really appreciate if you voted at http://pv.webbyawards.com/.

The Paradox of Perfectionism

Rob Goodlatte — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:26:46 +0000

Stop being a perfectionist—just throw it out there and see what happens. It’s simple advice, but something that I’ve been ignoring for too long. Not every blog post will be your opus, not every design will be your masterpiece. Stressing over every detail and clinging onto the project until it’s “perfect” only constructs a barrier in your creative process.

Moreover, the perfectionist’s creative process is so tiresome that he or she will lose motivation fast. If each blog post takes three hours to be written, formatted, and thought-out perfectly, you’ll publish less often and you’ll discard a lot of ideas that could’ve been great. This is the paradox of perfectionism: your best work is produced when you’re not striving towards perfection. Being a perfectionist is so de-motivating that you’ll wind up producing less and never create the masterpiece that realizes your full creative potential.

Your best work is produced when you’re not striving towards perfection

This is not to say you should lower your standards towards quality. Just lower your resistance towards putting your work out there, even if it’s not fully realized. To that end, try to remove other barriers towards creating. Figure out what part of your process takes too long and find a way to reduce that time or cut it entirely. Then you’ve got more time to spend on the essential elements of a project, and you’re not too worn out to continue onto the next project.

Thanks to Bryan Veloso for motivating me to write this post.

Photo by brentbat under Creative Commons

California Here We Come

Rob Goodlatte — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:07:59 +0000

In about a month I’ll be moving to Palo Alto—land of buzzwords, venture capitalists, bubbles, and most important: opportunity. After graduation this May I’ll be packing my bags and traveling 2,800 miles to join my forty-niner friends on the left coast.

I’m excited to announce that I will be joining Facebook’s product design team in June. Speaking of opportunity: this is a company that is changing socialization and the way people communicate and a product that isn’t afraid to re-invent itself along the way. The product design team is at the core of this: the team designs and builds new features for Facebook’s audience of millions. I’ll be diving right into the deep end, so I’m both excited and nervous about this new chapter in my life.

I had several options for my post-college career, but Facebook won me over with a few factors:

Design Process:

Facebook’s notion of design is as holistic as my own. Design is not about decoration but problem solving. As such, product designers are given far more responsibility over their projects than at other companies I considered. At Facebook, product designers craft whole solutions to problems—from concept, to interface, to implementation.

Code Speaks:

If you’ve got a great idea at Facebook you don’t have to persuade management to give you the green light—just build it and let the code speak for you.

The People:

I’ll be working alongside the most talented people in the business, who also happen to be cool—an amazing coincidence. I had a great time hanging out (read: getting drunk) with some of the product design crew at SXSW and can’t wait to work with them in June.

And yes, I do enjoy playing that song when traveling to CA. Yep, I’m a dork.

Photo by SlightlyNorth under Creative Commons