Is Gordon Brown still Prime Minster?

An idea that came out of nowhere in the office between Isaac and myself late yesterday evening, launched this morning and seems to have ‘gone viral‘ on Twitter in the space of a few hours. Now that’s agile!

A simple answer to a simple question. Is Gordon Brown still Prime Minister?

When design becomes less about design and more about decorating

Eric Karjaluoto over at Ideas on Ideas has written a great post about how design as a skill and profrssion has become a great mimic-fest. How there’s a race to the bottom of faddy design whipped up by very talented people who are extremely adept at mimicry but very much lacking in methodology and discernible design skill.

I’ve found this many times when interviewing designers. Lots of style over substance and surface gloss. An impressive portfolio of expertly executed Photoshop effects but lacking when it comes to reasoning, process, rigorous thought or any of the other traits or skills that mark a true designer out from the stylists. Anyway, enough from me, I’ll leave it to Eric and his post - Drones at the karaoke lounge of design.

“The newest design blogs are particularly telling of this as they largely seem to concentrate on a steady-stream of eye-candy and visual masturbation. Seemingly, the past year has played host to the superseding of actual writing and reflection on design to vapid graphical lists like “25 Great Green Websites”. Easy to create, bookmark, and subsequently mimic, it’s as though we’ve collectively walked into the great karaoke lounge of design–all of it somehow comforting but unlikely to result in anything of substance.”

Made By Many just got one more

After seven months freelancing I’m very excited to announce that I’ve resumed the position in the Creative Director’s chair.

I talked last October about wanting to search out the new, the innovative and the exciting. At the time I felt I was being ground down by the ordinary. Creating marketing sites for average companies wasn’t, and indeed isn’t, what I wanted to do.

I’ve spent the last seven months doing all sorts of things. I’ve written some HTML, done a bit of affiliate marketing, done IA wireframing work for clients, sharpened my knowledge of PPC and a whole host of other things – including some service design. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

Over the last couple of months, however, I’ve been spending more and more time with a group of people who are doing some extraordinary things with technology and creative in the digital space. The more time I spent working with them, the more I realised their approach and ideas were very well aligned with how I felt a digital agency should be both structured and run. It was a very comfortable fit for both of us.

As such, the approach to take up a permanent position at Made By Many came a few months ago and I’m pleased to announce that I accepted at the end of last month.

Made By Many don’t do websites in the traditional sense. They build platforms, utilities and services. They use creative and sketching to articulate complexity and build services in whatever technology is appropriate using agile process. (I should mention at this point that the founding partners of Made By Many have been colleagues historically / friends for years.)

It’s a very big position and what I hope will turn out be a tremendously exciting opportunity. I’m already ensconced and working on a whole suite of services in the youth volunteering sector. But more on that at another time.

In the future, you’ll be able to see me blogging over on www.madebymany.co.uk though I’ll still pop up here from time to time.

Looking back at the Future of Web Design 2009

I’ve had a few days to reflect on my experiences at this years Future of Web Design conference here in London. This is the third or fourth year I’ve attended but unless some things change very drastically I won’t be dishing out upwards of £220 to go again.

Historically, I’ve always felt that the conference never gave any answers to the question its name poses. But, as I’ve blogged before, it didn’t really matter because there were often very useful and insightful presentations from very talented practitioners and speakers. That was enough to keep me going back wanting more year after year.

This time round, however, I didn’t feel that I got anything of true substance out of the conference. With a few notable exceptions the presentations lacked any depth or insight and on a couple of occasions the future of web design turned into a history lesson with a couple of (well known and respected) speakers delivering retrospectives on their work from the last decade. Not good enough. We attend these conferences to hear some gems of insight into what these guys and girls, who are supposedly at the top of their game, think the future will hold or at least what direction it’s heading. I’m not talking about crystal ball gazing, but a few ideas about emerging trends would slake the audience’s thirst which is derived from the very title of the conference.

In a whole eight hours of presentations not one person mentioned ideas around designing sites and services from APIs and open data. Nothing about designing for UGC. Nothing about service or utility design. Nothing about designing apps for the Air of Silverlight platform. These challenges are the future of web design. This is what’s happening out there in the wild but it seems that the very conference whose job it is to address these issues is failing. There was one presentation about designing on projects using agile methodologies which didn’t get nearly enough stage time and was levered into a dead space early on in the conference. Too many of the presentations seemed very lightweight with little substance or evidence.

Having said all that, there were a couple of notable exceptions – presentations which exhibited a great deal of preparation on the part of the speaker. Mark Boulton’s talk on web typography was knowledgeable, insightful and he showed feeling, passion and opinion towards his subject matter. Molly Holzschlag, similarly, displayed great passion about web standards, but did drift towards web development. And Robin Christopherson gave a superb demonstration of the frustrations of browsing the web with a screen reader.

But these were scant compensation for the failings of the rest of the conference. And judging by my Twitter search stream at the time (#FOWD) and retweets of my own comments, there were genuine pockets of disappointment around the room throughout the day.

How to mend this broken conference? Well, better briefing of the speakers would help. Allowing them to present a re-hashed agency creds. presentation is lamentable. And, if you get a print designer to talk to a room full of digital folk they better have something really interesting to say and not just hide behind some nicely designed slides.

If this conference is to work long-term then I feel they should get the direction right or change the name. The web is a tremendously exciting place to be working at the moment with an incredibly exciting future. We have the conference to celebrate this. What we seem to be lacking are the speakers.

Customer service – it’s the little things that make the biggest impression

Just returned from a very nice lunch at Hummus Bros. on Wardour street, Soho. The food was great as always, but it was the attention to their customers that really showed on this visit (I usually get take away).

I was eating with two work colleagues and, being the gannet that I am, I finished first so was sat chatting and waiting while they finished. On seeing this, one of the waiting staff brought me over a complimentary glass of mint tea.

And when my friends had finished they each got a glass too so as not to feel left out.

The cost of doing this is negligible. But it shows a great commitment to quality customer service and left me feeling as though they valued my custom.

As Apple’s Steve Jobs says, it’s about the total end-to-end experience. Having a great product that people want is one thing but making it a great experience to buy the product, use the product and a pleasurable follow-up service is what makes companies stand out. And in this market, coupled with the highly competitive landscape of central Soho at lunch, Hummus Bros. deserve to do well.

An advert advertising advertising

I’m convinced. Where do I sign?

Dieter Rams’s 10 Commandments of Good Design

Back in the 1980s, to help himself decide whether what he was producing was good design, Dieter Rams drew up what has come to be known as his 10 Commandments.

My personal favourite.

“Good Design is as little design as possible”

Read the full list on vitsoe.com.

His work still looks fresh many years later and is often held up as inspiration for the current aesthetic of Apple product design. You only need to look at his Braun calculator alongside the iPhone calculator or the punched aluminium casing of the Mac Pro alongside his T1000 Braun radio to see how his clarity of design thinking has endured long after the fads of a moment have been confined to the land fill.

Link Digest. February 2009

Do it, then fix it is a blog post from ad guru Dave Trott. In it he comments on something I agree with wholeheartedly. Why sit around talking about something when you can just get on an do it? One of the analogies he uses is from the film set.

“On a film set you’ll always have to choose between two ways of shooting something. The worst thing you can do is sit around thinking about it. Because you’re wasting time and money, while the actors and crew sit around doing nothing. And when you’ve done all the thinking you’re no nearer to solving it. So the best thing is just pick one route and go for it. Then you can change it as you see whether or not it’s working.”

I’m subscribed to his blog and I can recommend it. Even though every post is written like an ad end line.

Ever been doing a piece of work and needed a beautiful ampersand? Well, The Mesmerizing Curves of Ampersands is a great resource for helping to find the right one for the job. With links to download and buy – some of them are even free.

Courtesy of James Higgs, Layers is a great little tool which captures your display in a layered Photoshop file. Think Cmd+Shift+4 on steroids.

Grappling with some difficult interface design? ecommr may provide the answer through its extensive gallery of interface design elements.

Just recently found MediaShift. Haven’t spent long rummaging round but first impressions are good. In their own words. “Since January 2006, MediaShift has been tracking how weblogs, podcasting, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and online video are changing our media world. MediaShift includes commentary and reporting to tell stories of how the shifting media landscape is changing the way we get our news and information, while also providing a place for public participation and feedback.”

Want to know how social media tool du jour Twitter came into being? Well now you know.

The Art of the Title Sequence is a collection of some of the most beautiful movie title sequences.

The Directory is a list of design studios, individuals, blogs, shops, photographers, resources etc. May take some time to go through that lot. If I find anything of particular interest I’ll post it here next month.

Volunteering can be so inspiring

A site that I was working on just before Christmas with the good folk over at Made by Many has recently gone live.

vinspired.com is all about volunteering. They believe in free. They do favours for free – and by doing them they look to open doors of opportunity. Run by ‘v‘ which was set up in 2006 by The Russell Commission and supported by the office of the third sector, they are working to get more 16-25 year olds volunteering. They organise events up and down the country and provide opportunities for the target audience to increase their own skills while at the same time helping others.

It’s a really great organisation with lots of life and energy.

As far as the site is concerned it was a simple reskin and tidy up of what went before. I’ve made it look more energetic and edgy and the architecture and usability have been reworked too. We really wanted to make it feel like there was a community of people all participating in activities and sharing experiences.

There’s more to come in the coming months. Go and check out vinspired.com.

How to do design on an agile project

Everyone’s doing agile. The days of the monolithic project are seemingly numbered. Whether that’s true or not I’m not sure. There will always be the big enterprise stuff going on somewhere.

But for the rest of us it’s getting quicker and cheaper to build web products and services. OSS, SaaS and a plethora of APIs has reduced the time frame down to days to get something out into the wild.

At the same time that all this is happening, the increased complexity of the user interactions online now necessitates greater attention to the design of a given site. But, with the deadlines getting shorter, where does the extra time come from to get the design right? This is something I’ve been asked a number of times. Most recently by a developer specialising in Ruby on Rails development – the grand daddy of all web 2.0 rapid, agile development platforms.

I’ve worked on a couple of agile projects. And let me say, it’s not for the feint-hearted. No room for newbies here. Sorry. You need to begin with a designer who has plenty of experience in designing and delivering web projects. That designer also needs to let go a little, become less precious and realise that if it’s not perfect now, it can be in 24 hours time – but more of that later.

Right let’s get started.

Defining the interface through sketching

As I may have mentioned before, I like to sketch. I find it’s the best way of getting an idea down in visual form and in front of the client quickly. What’s great with this approach is that the client won’t get bogged down in the details of colour and copy. They’ll focus on content and the broader layout and examine if everything they need/requested is on the page. Just to note at this point, I’m not talking about managing scope creep in this post, just how the design bit might work within the wider project.

What’s lovely about sketching is that it lowers the barrier to producing layouts to anyone who can hold a pen and apply it to paper. In fact, one method I have used historically is to gather the project team around a whiteboard and gradually ‘build’ the interface as a collaborative exercise. A snap with a camera phone then records it to be shared. Which ever way you do it, the sketching process helps to iron out any potential issues with development before committing pixels in Photoshop.

Working up the interface

The developers can go and start to build some stuff working from the sketch as a starting point. It’ll be ugly (probably) but at least they have something to build. Without the sketching bit they may be hanging around waiting for your designs which creates a bottleneck.

You’re probably looking at getting a design out in a couple or three days from here. Before the project started you may have done some initial investigative design work and got a broad ‘look and feel’ working which makes this stage a little easier.

It’s a convenient point to mention that working in the same room as the client on an agile project really helps. They are engaged, not going to any other meetings (this is agile – it takes both a physical and time commitment) and are, therefore, on hand to answer any questions. That client also needs to be in a position that allows them to sign things off quickly. No committees allowed. No 6 rounds of design amends. Get a design done, keep reminding them of the deadline and hopefully get it (largely) signed off. If there is one particular widget or element that isn’t working, you may be able to ignore it for the time being and commit the rest of the design leaving the sticking point to later.

This signed off design can then go and start the transition into CSS, XHTML and Javascript. As this is happening you can start to work on other screens or refine the design of that widget that the client wasn’t happy with. Again though, you’re not holding the process up. Everyone has plenty to do and aren’t wanting for finished designs.

This should be the way the process then works for the rest of the page templates on the site/service.

The PSD is not king – the prototyped site is

One point to mention in an agile project and, in my eyes, it’s very important. Unlike other projects where the client likes to see armfuls of printed out PSDs; in an agile project the PSDs have a diminished authority. As soon as they’ve started to hit the front-end mark up guy, the prototype site has the authority. That’s the working, living, breathing product. We’re not in the habit on an agile project of creating artwork for gallery walls.

A very efficient method of working I’ve found is to screen-shot the prototyped site and work on that in Photoshop for the subsequent iterations. That way you don’t waste time recreating PSDs to match the prototype. It’s all in place for you and you can get on with designing the portion of the interface that you need to get done.

The only certainty is change

Always remember that this is a two-way process. Development / client / HTML  can come back to you at any point for clarification or indeed amends for any number of reasons. Ideally you should commit 100% of your time to this project. Dividing your time between projects may mean that you miss decisions being made and have no idea of functionality that may have changed from half a day ago. Services such as Twitter (or any enterprise variant) come in handy to help keep communication channels alive on the project. Perpetual contact with the team and multiple releases a day make it both and exciting but at the same time exhausting process.

Talking of multiple releases. As mentioned earlier, precious designers may find the whole process a nightmare of frustration and chaos. If you let go a little and remain pragmatic then you can still produce well crafted sites. The very thing that may create this frustration allows you to change things very quickly – the multiple releases. If you embrace the process and adapt to a way of working that sits well with you and just as importantly with the rest of the team, there is every chance that you will be able to get a great product out in a time-frame that you never thought possible.