Refreshed

This is embarrassingly tardy, but I wanted to say thanks to all those attended my Seattle Refresh presentation a few weeks ago. My presentation was largely a follow up to a previous Refresh talk I gave, about my first few months of freelancing.

This time, I talked about my recent switch from strictly freelancing to a more strategy, collaborative, and ‘agency-oriented’ model of business. It’s a big topic to cover in a short presentation, but I tried. I’ll be talking about it more in the upcoming months.

Yes that’s right — I’m finally going to start posting here again.

For those that couldn’t attend or wanted to look through my slides, here they are:

Big up

It’s always a pleasure and an honor to speak at any event, but there’s something special about the Seattle Refresh series. It’s an intimate, warm, and friendly community event that we need many more of in our industry — big thanks to Nick Finck and Kevin Tamura of Blue Flavor for putting on the event.

His talk is called Growing Pains: From Freelance to Agency. So as you might suspect, he’ll talk about the aches, pains, and joys of growing your freelance business into a real agency.

He’ll cover a little bit of everything—from organizing your new business and dealing with a heftier workload, to seamlessly bringing someone else into your process and staying motivated & inspired all the while. The details:

What: A presentation about growing your business
When: Thursday, 10/22/09 at 6pm
Where: Fremont Public Library
Important: Seats are limited and you have to RSVP.

In case you don’t know, Refresh Seattle is: a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in the Seattle/Puget Sound area. Refresh promotes design, technology, usability, and standards.

Hope you can come!

This is something I’ve always found a little fascinating with our industry; the barely contained contempt for the people whose projects we’re supposed to passionately care about (and whose money keeps us gainfully employed). It’s hard not to smell the air of smug satisfaction amongst web designers — we get the Internet and everyone else is just dense. This needs to change.

Noah’s opening salvo hits the nail on the head:

First, stop thinking your client is stupid. Your client is not stupid… We are in the services industry. Get used to it. Your client is your lifeline. Show them the respect they deserve, even if they don’t deserve it.

Words to live by. If you don’t play well with others, you might want to go build that “bug tracker two point oh dot fart” web-app (I kid, because I’ve tried). Seriously — if you can’t find the headspace to realize that designing for clients is all about empathy, patience, and understanding, you need to find a different line of work.

Why so serious?

Why do I care so much about this? Because I’ve committed myself to working in this field for the foreseeable future — web design is what I do, and where my passion lies. I love the chance to work with a new medium, and solve design and communication problems for real people.

But this industry is a shared house, a co-op if you will, and one that we all need to maintain. It reflects poorly on us all when some people leave their dirty laundry around this house, and forget to mow the lawn. It’s a fragile garden, and it needs constant tending. All of our jobs will be easier if we focus on service, and not whatever new HTML5 spec is trending on Twitter. Technology isn’t the problem, it’s our collective poor attitude and lack of focus.

The gist — don’t become a web designer just because you can. Do it because you love it, want to grow professionally, and enjoy working and helping others. If we all focused on being ‘best friends forever’ — designers & clients together — we’ll be better for it.

We’re largely wired as under-estimators.

The polite and professional among us keep these thoughts controlled, while others blurt them out publicly. Benjamin Pollack had a really great article on how this “it’s easy” impulse manifests itself in the development community (Brent Simmons also had an equally great piece).

Benjamin’s assertion was that technically-minded people tend to imagine web applications as simple programming and DB logic problems: “it’s just a few queries and some view code.” But the problem with this armchair analysis is that it leaves out all the details — and if one thing is true about user interaction, it’s that all those details are what makes something work well.

That no one bothers to tackle the design details is, of course, why so much user-facing, opensource software is half-baked.

Admitting is the first step

What’s interesting is that excitement for quick solutions isn’t unique to just developers. Designers do it all the time. Recently, two great designers Dustin Curtis and Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab posted unsolicited re-designs of popular websites (American Airlines and Zappos, respectively).

It goes without saying that both takes are marked improvements over the current sites. But are they real design solutions?

Take Dustin Curtis’ re-thinking AA.com. Shortly after posting his rant and re-design, someone at American Airlines got in touch with him over email. It’s not for lack of design talent that AA.com site is the way it is, he said—it’s a matter of corporate approval. While I think there’s truth to Dustin Curtis’ interpretation of why this is (he thinks it’s a matter of lack of taste), I think it’s more nuanced than that — no one at American Airlines has designed and implemented a corporate design process that works.

With no rigorous, systematized workflow to help designers experiment (while protecting business interests), good design just can’t get out into the wild. I’d argue that it’s our responsibility, as designers, to design a workable process for our clients — and see it implemented.

We don’t go far enough

This hints at a much larger issue with interactive design — we don’t go far enough. We make elegant, wonderful deliverables (strategy guides, designs, templates, full websites) that solve goals at a fixed point in time, but we rarely stay involved after those items have been delivered. It’s not often that we see agencies becoming deeply involved and entrenched in their client’s success after the work is complete. We deliver them the shiny new car (so to speak), and then let them figure out how to drive, maintain, upgrade and care for it all on their own.

Of course, much of this is due to the economics and relationship between agency and client. Running a successful agency is about scoping fixed deliverables tightly — and then getting those projects completed, on time and on budget. To do truly exceptional design however, a LOT of work is needed. Far more than we, as designers, ever expect or adequately scope. Even the most successful design projects will still need constant iteration, testing, and re-thinking. The web is a fluid, flowing medium — the sooner we stop treating it like we’re designing print pieces, the better off everything will be.

Stop pretending it’s easy

How can we solve this seemingly untenable problem. Simple — we stop pretending design is easy. It’s a labor that requires far more than just producing great deliverables. Really, it’s about strategy, process, communication, and designing more than just webpages. As professionals, we have to be equally concerned with our clients’ business strategy and their internal structure as we are with the design comps we pass them.

The real value we provide is educating our clients on how to be successful on the web. Design, as we traditionally define it, is just a small piece of that puzzle. You can’t succeed without it, but you can’t be great with just great design.

Besides — if it was all easy, it wouldn’t be any fun, right?

It goes without saying that all companies, even those run from a house by a husband and wife team, should have formalized processes: divisions of labor, official lunch breaks, the whole bit.

Yet, the reality of running your own business is that you’re constantly adjusting to new scenarios and shifting priorities: the game changes quickly. If you’re smart, you learn to change with it. Otherwise, you risk locking yourself into a singular way of doing things and miss out on opportunities for creative thinking.

Keep it flexible

So how do you allow for flexibility, while keeping your internal processes crisp and effective as a freelancer or small agency? For us, the answer is short daily status meetings. No Gantt charts, scary to-do lists, or advanced technology — we just meet every morning over coffee and granola to talk about the day’s priorities. What each of us is going to do, what we probably won’t do, what’s changed since the previous day, and how we plan to kick ass. About once a week or whenever’s convenient, we address long term strategy and side projects we’re interested in doing. The meetings are short, informal, and face-to-face.

Our way of doing status allows us to be realistic about the fact that priorities do shift (when a client wants 30 more hours of billable work or a really great new lead comes in, for example), while keeping each other informed and on track. More importantly, we both leave feeling inspired and motivated—effectively tackling the biggest challenge of working alone.

It looks like Tiffani (my wife!) has beaten me to the self-promotion punch — as mentioned on her blog, we’ve each submitted solo panels and a joint discussion to this year’s SXSW Interactive conference. It would be absolutely awesome to speak at SXSW — it’s easily the most fun and inspiring conference we’ve both been to. Sharing our experiences with the best and brightest would make the trip even more exciting.

So, I too am asking for your vote. You’ll have to go to SXSW’s panel Picker and create an account to vote, but it only takes a minute. Here are direct links and summaries of our talks:

Guerilla Web Tactics: Design Like a Hippie:
What’s the best approach to web design? Too many designers let technology — not creativity — drive their design process. thingsthatarebrown owner Matt Brown will talk about some lo-fi, but high-return, methods guaranteed to improve your process (and leave you smelling like patchouli).

DIY: Running a Business With Your Spouse:
Common wisdom says never mix family and business, but we beg to differ. Running an internet company with your spouse can be a fun, profitable, and liberating experience — as long as you follow some basic rules. Matt (my husband, co-conspirator, and co-owner of design agency thingsthatarebrown) and I will show you how.

Writing Web Content for a Living:
By now we all know that “content is king,” yet there’s still a dearth of knowledge about the mechanics and business of web writing. I’ll talk about how to write great copy, why web content is special, and how to make money doing it — whether you’re an independent, agency, or in-house type.

Graphpaper, dropping the knowledge

Tiffani already put up a great list of talks to vote for inclusion at SXSW this year, but I wanted to give a big recommendation to consider Chris Fahey of Graphpaper and Behavior. His blog has always been one of my must reads (and an inspiration for finally starting my own), and the last few weeks he’s put out a bunch of great posts. I can only imagine his talks will be super awesome. So go vote for him too.

After a lot of piecemeal iteration, I finally arrived at a visual language I could live with, one that shows what thingsthatarebrown is all about.

1+1 = 3

Now that I’m working with the wonderful Tiffani Jones (soon to be Tiff Jones Brown), the goals, abilities and positioning of my agency change considerably. Gone are the days of just being ‘a solid freelance designer’ — today we’re a bona fide agency, with serious combined talents and a decidedly collaborative approach to web design. I’m more excited for the future than I’ve ever been — ain’t no mountain high enough… and all that.

So really, what we most needed was a site with Tiffani’s name on it, as well as one that showed over a full year’s worth of my best design work (the old site was painfully out of date). It also needed to scale in order to fit some very exciting projects that we’ll post in the coming months.

More than anything, the new site is really just an evolution of my brand, clarification of my message, and a stronger showcasing of my work — as Cameron Moll said smartly, “good designers redesign, great designers realign.” The brown birdy has grown up nicely. It’s powered by my eternal frenemy, Wordpress, and it’s both a flexible design and platform to keep up with my rapidly growing company.

Hope y’all like it.

Instead, I want to discuss a few of the design choices I made for the new secondandpark.com, and how I tried to force myself out of my comfort zone.

A page is all you need

I’ve long been a proponent of the lean and mean, singlepage-style site. And yet it’s intimidating to actually limit yourself to just one page — will it really be enough?

As it turns out, there’s a certain elegance in limiting yourself to a single page — you focus solely on the message, branding, and pitch in a way that escapes a typical website structure. Much like the way Twitter forces you to edit your thoughts into little ‘idea nuggets,’ a single page site can make you re-think your entire strategy.

Many of the conventions and patterns we use on a ‘standard’ website don’t apply to a single page site. Navigation, plopped into the site header? Well, you really don’t need much navigation on a single page site — what you do need, you can integrate within the text. A consistent, rigid grid layout? You won’t need one, because the site doesn’t have to support pages of boilerplate text. You get to design each block of copy (instead of each page) much more closely, and you can work a lot more personality into the styles without worrying about consistency across a large site.

See if you can design your next site with fewer pages or views — You may find that imposing a little constraint makes you a more disciplined designer.

A big, chunky, sexy font

I don’t have a formal background in type, but I do know a good typeface when I see one. Enter Sentinel. From Hoefler & Frere-Jones, a foundry that has been on an absolute roll the last few years (Gotham, Archer, Knockout, and Whitney are pretty much the most lovely, versatile fonts around these days), Sentinel is a seriously sexy slab serif. Big, chunky, curvy and very flexible.

When you get your hands on a good font, you can let it do the talking. I’ve been itching to really experiment and push myself by ‘going big’ with type and using it as a graphic callout. This draws a lot of focus to the copy, which is exactly what I wanted to do with Tiff’s wonderful callouts and headings. If it feels like the site is saying “Blammo!” with a little nod and a wink, I’ve done my job.

Headless horseman

Tiff and I felt she’d have the most luck on her web copy business working with other design agencies. She’s got a lot of of experience and is one helluva project manager — so she knows about hitting deadlines, how important it is to get good content from clients, and working well with teams.

So, in addition to the leaf-monster callout on the homepage, I wanted to have a direct and clear pitch that spoke directly to the needs of agencies. This is the design I came up with:

Notice there’s no header? I felt that designing this page ‘headless’ would make it feel like a one-sheet print piece — a uniquely designed and well-crafted layout that fit into the overall site design language (colors/type), but also felt unique and thoughtful. This way, we could send clients the link directly, and the pitch could inform the homepage (and vice-versa).

The site also follows some basic landing page design concepts — it doesn’t compel you to go follow links. The goal is to get people to digest this page in full, not fritter themselves away to some other site.

Danke

One thing that great web app companies do well is humanize their interface copy. Twitter, Flickr, and 37signals are all exemplars of the idea that the copy is the interface. Every bit of language on an application or a page counts.

For Second and Park, I wanted to make sure that filling out the contact form wasn’t boring — instead of the normal “Success: Form submitted!” robot-noise, you’ll see another custom-designed page. I think it keeps the site’s tone friendly and excited.

I hope you all dig the new secondandpark.com. If you know of a design agency who could use some copy help, don’t be afraid to pass them our way.

Look and Feel
For the look and feel of the site, we took inspiration from eclectic sources: The wallpaper behind the bar at Cafe Presse, the typewriting on the side of a bag of coffee, a beautiful blue-green colored door on a subway, a rainier cherry, articles from The Atlantic, and an old photo book.

Writing
As far as the actual writing was concerned, we wanted something very straightforward and as easy to make sense of as a menu board — but less formulaic. We also wanted the copy to be fun, without obscuring our main message (“I do web writing, mostly for design agencies”), one that is surprisingly difficult to communicate since a lot of folks don’t know what web copy is.

No-Computer Tuesday
We stepped away from the computer a number of times throughout the process, using sheets of paper and cut-out chunks of text to experiment with the placement of words on the page. Oddly, this lead to more than just a better layout — it actually helped us focus our overall strategy and generate better branding concepts.

Collaboration
One of the best things about having two people working at thingsthatarebrown is that we now have all sorts of opportunities to collaborate and inspire one another’s ideas about design, copywriting, and business. For the Second and Park redesign, collaboration was key, with each of us filling in the blanks for the other.

The re-vamped Second and Park hasn’t yet replaced the current landing page — but it will soon. Stay tuned.

* And one more thing: we should mention two great articles about content and design that we kept in the back of our minds in the course of this work — one by 37Signals and one
from A List Apart. Essentials, both of ‘em.

Enjoy!

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