Posted On November 28th, 2007 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, Business, 0
Last week on Boagworld, Paul Boag interviewed Andy Budd from Clear Left, a well-respected web design agency in England.
Andy commented on how they do things differently than many agencies in that they only offer one design to clients. You can read the interview transcript or download the podcast (see show 101)
Essentially his points were as follows, regarding presenting multiple design options:
1) Lowers value for the client.
Doing two or three times the amount of work necessary and the client only get half or a third of the value, they get to pick one of those three designs. They are essentially paying for work they’re not using. I don’t go to a restaurant and purchase three meals, knowing I will only eat one.
2) Clients make wrong choices.
No offense to clients, but they usually pick the option that’s least on strategy due to personal opinion. Is that their fault? They’re paying us to tell them what their best option is, are they not? If I go to a lawyer, and he presents me with three completely different options, I want to know what he thinks is the best option, after all - he’s the expert.
Usually a designer will spend more time on one design than another and therefore that typically is the design that is closest in line with the clients goals. Clients, if given the choice will usually try to blend elements of two or three choices into one concept to feel they are getting value - which results in a mish-mashed design, which is less in line with their goals than the one design that had more thought put into it.
3) Design becomes less about problem solving and more of a beauty contest.
As to whether multiple designers should work on different designs for one client, Andy says that you’re using more internal resources to inevitably produce one design for the client. Again, the client is paying the firm for their design expertise. So instead of presenting the firms professional opinion, they’re letting clients pick what they feel works, and it usually is picked based on personal appeal (I have those colours in my living room), rather than a design that will work for the target. This is not how we want them evaluating our design.
4) Lowers value for the firm.
Designing two or three options is counter productive in that you’re spending time and money on designs that are never used, essentially wasting that time which could have been used on other things, and at the same time, spending effort on designs that will be thrown in the garbage in the end anyway.
Keep in mind, we’re talking primarily about web design here. In many cases it makes sense to present multiple options for things like logos and ad campaigns, as they are usually higher level concepts that attack a problem from multiple angles, and they are generally quicker and easier to present in concept form (not execution). Web design, and publication design for that matter, is more about information architecture and requires much detailed problem solving. It is difficult to completely start from scratch all over again once you’ve worked through the problem the first time. Sure you can change a palette or adjust a font, but complete restructuring of information is a lot to ask once you’ve solved it the first time.
This is a subject I’ve thought about for a while, and am more convinced of the benefits of only showing one option the more it comes up. What are your thoughts?
Posted On October 26th, 2007 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, Business, 0
There are three kinds of service. Good, fast and cheap. Pick any two. You know the rule right?
This is easy to remember when we offer others our services, however it’s easy for us to forget when we have to commission others to do our work. How does this work in the world of design and web development?
Design
Good design cheap won’t be fast.
Good design fast won’t be cheap.
Fast design cheap won’t be good.
What is good design? Is it design that we feel strongly attached to? Not always. In many ways good design is about 3 things; semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. In other words; meaning, aesthetics and practical application. And those three things have to apply to the audience we’re trying to reach. For example, a design might have a lot of meaning to you and me, but not to your end target.
Design is a process. As the designer, you can’t always get the design right on the first try. Designers use problem solving techniques to accomplish the three aforementioned goals, and this usually requires experimentation and rounds of self-made revisions before it even goes to the client.
Design made too quickly isn’t usually going to have the necessary time invested to balance the meaning/aesthetic/practical issues that are required in order to be considered good design. However if you want the care put into your designs, in order for them to be considered high-quality, that means the designer is going to have some late nights ahead of him/her. And that doesn’t come cheap. After all, designers have families too - and time away from them should be compensated for. Therefore, if you want the design to be it’s best, and you don’t want to pay top-price, then don’t expect a quick turn-around. The designer will probably be more than happy to work on something over a longer period of time for little money if he/she can make it a portfolio piece.
Development
Good websites made cheaply won’t be made fast.
Good websites made fast won’t be cheap.
Quickly built websites made cheaply won’t be good.
Again, let’s define what a good website is. Aside from the design, which was previously discussed, how does the good/fast/cheap rule apply to the technical/usability planning and front/back-end coding of your site?
Developing a website isn’t the same as designing a logo, which is more conceptual than technical. Commissioning a website is more like contracting a house to be built. Building a house must be done in stages. Before you start the wiring, you need a foundation. Before you lay a foundation, you need a blue-print. Before you start painting and decorating, the walls have to be built. Each stage takes time, and must be done in a particular order. Web development is similar. It has several stages, and stage 3 has to be finished before stage 4 starts. If you’re done stage 4, and you want to go back to stage 2, a lot of work has to be redone, and this slows down development. The basic stages of most websites are:
- Accessing the needs of the website
- Usability/content/structure planning
- Design
- Front-end development (ie: stuff you see on the website; XHTML/CSS/DOM controls most of this)
- Back-end development (ie: stuff you don’t see; databases, CMS, forms)
- Content implementation (ie: getting the copy in place, and the pages built)
- Testing
- Launching
If you are at the testing or launch stage, and you want to go back and change the structure of the site, or make a design change, this can slow down the progress of the site. Also, remember that much like the design of the site, which can be good or bad, especially when it comes to usability, the technical side of the website can be good or bad too. If you get broken links, it’s a bad site. If your site breaks in major browsers, it’s bad. If there’s typos, it’s bad. Ensuring that your site is functioning well requires—you guessed it—time!
So the old rule is the same — ensuring your site is functional takes time(and this scales accordingly depending on the level of functionality you require. A simple site doesn’t take as much time as a large site that has a lot of complicated features). If you want your site to have technically complicated features, and work really well, with no kinks - expect either high-costs, or a long development time.
This rule actually works well for the client, even though in a perfect world, we’d all like to have all three. When you want something to be good, paying a fair price and giving it adequate time is insurance that you’re getting a quality service. There are very few circumstances in which you want fast and cheap instead of good. So if you are getting fast and cheap, you should be calling into question the quality of work that you’ll be getting in the end.
After all, you might save money and get it right away, but isn’t it a waste of time and money if it’s is ineffective?
Posted On August 12th, 2007 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, 0
My wife and I were watching an interior design show, where a designer’s own home was presented. He had a lot unique ideas for his space.
There was a lot of muted gold and red textures used in the walls and fabrics, and then in the oddest place, a painting that used a completely contrasting bright aqua palette. The use of contrast was extensive—next to a sleek modern chair was a block of untreated lumber used as a table. Next to a large, black, Japanese-style table were two golden, Victorian-style coffee tables that had almost cartoonish floral carvings. Was it ‘out there’? Yes. Was it poorly designed? No.
My wife’s reaction was “I hate it”.
The difficulty in designing, no matter what category of design it falls into, is always the same: Design is partly subjective and partly objective. While the designer’s home was ugly to my wife’s taste, it was not poorly designed. In contrast, there are many poorly designed spaces, the owners of which are in love with. In many cases, it comes down to personal taste.
So where does that leave us? Are we as designers always doomed to the mercy of the crowds in the Roman arena? Does 100% of the people who glance at our designs need to become so ‘wowed’ that they immediately grab a copy to stick on their fridges? Should our design decisions always be based on what the client is going to ‘like’? In school, my instructor wouldn’t allow a student to simply state ‘I like it’, regarding a peers design. He would retort, ‘Do you like pie as well?’ All criticism had to be qualified.
We all know that you can’t please everybody. So how does one qualify his/her design? Obviously there are some rules that come into play with design, such as proper use of contrast, alignment, repetition, gestalt, harmony, flow, movement, proximity etc. And it takes study, practice and a bit of talent to be able to use these principles masterfully in your design. But more importantly, you need to know who it is you want your design to please.
To me, what separates design from art is that art is a personal expression which is left open to interpret, discuss, or ultimately—like. Design is trickier than that. It’s a calculated expression of creativity. And while it is usually seasoned with personal influence, it is really supposed to speak to a target audience. That means that if your design is required to speak to a select group who finds rainbow gradients appealing, and you can use it with an idea backing it up, while ensuring it’s well-designed—then use it. It can be ugly to 90% of the population, and yes, even ugly to you. But if it’s working it’s mission, and your not compromising good-design for client satisfaction, then work your rainbow-gradient-magic (RGM) I say.
It is rumored that the president of Nike, when originally looking at the choices his designer presented for logos, felt strongly about several options other than the check mark that has since defined the company. So, why did he choose the swoosh? Although he didn’t personally like it, he felt it was appropriate for his audience. Is it a coincidence the company has done well?
The designer mentioned at the outset accomplished his objectives. He used solid principles and some unique ideas to design a space he felt comfortable calling his own. In that case he was the audience, and not the viewing public. The key: Good design is good design. Make it appropriately speak to your audience and it won’t matter if your wife or your boss, or even your client dislikes it.
Posted On May 8th, 2007 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, 4
If there’s one class that gets slept through a little too consistently in design school - it’s typography. There’s something about it that can seem so unattainable to some designers, and yet - like most things in life - it’s a simple mix between art and science. Easy to learn - hard to master.
Typography for the ages
Part of the reason type is so fascinating to me is because it is a visual representation of our most precious cultural touchstone - language. Even the lay person can look at a piece of type and instantly recognize the time period it came from. Think of everything from as far back as the Victorian era and the arts and crafts movement, to the modernism era. They all had distinguishable characteristics that even now, transport us to a time we never lived through. The graphic styles speak almost as much as the words and meaning they represent do. Even as recently as the 1950s through the 1970’s, each decade seems to have its own distinguishable typographic style.
Then a remarkable shift happened only within the last couple of decades. Designers began making the shift from typesetting by hand to typesetting by key stroke. The computer brought about great efficiency in some respects, but along with that, there was a price to pay. Now it was easy to open up a computer program, select a typeface and start typing away - and gone was the need for an understanding of typography.
In practice
Even now, some so called ‘designers’ know very little about typography, though this study is central to the very basic principles of graphic design. I once had the misfortune of working with a very arrogant (and untalented) individual who prided himself on his “fontography” skills. That’s right, to him, the only knowledge needed was in choosing the right typeface.
However, there is more to it. Remember the part where I said it’s an art and a science? Great typography is about knowing the rules, and then knowing how to break them. It’s about communicating in a way thats practical and methodical and easily read, but also about communicating a feeling by the way your letters appear, the place your words sit, and how your paragraphs are positioned on the page.
Question is, how will people remember our era? By keeping in mind the basics, you can take your designs to a whole new level, and keep our time from being remembered as the era of ugly type:
Letters - the building blocks of typography
It’s important to know the anatomy of letters and words. Remember how you used to print on looseleaf in the elementary days? You would have 3 horizontal lines that you would be used for each line of print. The top line would be where the top of your capital letters started (In typography this is the cap-height), the middle line would be where your lowercase letters reached their height (the x-height), and the bottom line would be where all the bottoms of your letters would sit (the baseline). And then you would have some lowercase letters that would go beyond the x-height and the baseline. For example the lowercase “d” has what’s called an ascender which reaches the cap-height even though it’s lowercase. The letter “y” has a descender which goes below the baseline.
Is all of this just useless head knowledge though? Check out what some designers have done by simply manipulating the anatomy of letters.
Text
When letters sit together, they form text. Knowing how to place letters next to each other is key to good typography. For example, one of the most common type blunders are not kerning letters. Take for example the word “Fan”. At small sizes you don’t notice the fact that the letter ‘a’ should slide in underneath the ‘F’. When set at large sizes though, it becomes apparent. The computer automatically sets the ‘F’ and the ‘a’ to have the same distance apart from each other as other letters. However, you have to override what the computer is doing automatically for aesthetics.
Paragraphs
One thing you have to pay attention to is the shape and size of paragraphs of text. Our eyes are not meant to read extremely long wide columns of text. It is much easier to read narrow columns, because your eye can skim in one place without having to travel long distances. Another common oversight among amateur typographers is not cleaning up orphans and widows.
When a new paragraph begins at the bottom of a column of text, or conversely if a paragraph ends at the top of a new column - that’s an orphan. It just doesn’t look right. Its better to break the column prematurely than to have this happen. Similarly, a widow is where one word has it’s own line at the end of a paragraph. Better to break the second-last line prematurely and let the poor widow have a companion.
When good type goes bad - a list of felonies
This is what not to do:
Do not run text vertically like Chinese characters (ie: all the letters have different baselines). Roman characters were not meant to do this. Instead, if you want a vertical line of text, simply rotate the whole line. It’s better to have to read the text sideways than up and down.
Using justified text on narrow columns. You know how newspapers have “Rivers” or large gaps between letters that make strange patterns through a paragraph? That’s what not to do. Narrow columns should use left or right alignment. Type does not have to be perfectly symmetrical to be legible.
Stretching letters. You see it all the time. Somebody wants to make a line of text fit how they want it, so he/she stretches the letters horizontally or vertical. This is bad! A common analogy with typography is to make the shoe fit, not the foot. In other words, create a flexible design, that can accommodate what you need it to, without forcing letters or typefaces to do what you want them to.
These are just a few of the things that go a long way toward making communication design practical, beautiful and meaningful.
And the extra credit question: What’s the difference between a font and a typeface? A font is the computer file that makes a typeface what it is. In other words, it is correct to say “I don’t have that font on my machine”. It is not correct to say “I love the look of that font”. The characteristics that make letters aesthetically pleasing, or identifiable are referred to as a typeface. So it is correct to say “That’s a beautiful typeface”, not “You need to copy over the typefaces to your computer”.
For more great tips on basic typography see Thinking with type
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