Posts Tagged ‘design’

For­give me father, for I have sinned. Actu­ally, I haven’t, but you prob­ably have. I don’t mean glut­tony, lust, et. al. Hon­estly, some of those really have their time and place. I’m talking about the things that I see over and over, on web­sites big and small, that abso­lutely drive me insane. I make web­sites for a living. If I can’t use yours, or get frus­trated by it and leave, there’s a good chance that your target market (unless they’re more technically-inclined than I am, which they’re prob­ably not) is having an even worse time. Lucky for you, I’ll tell you about it! (Just ask about the time I gave a long speech to a poor phone-line person at my bank because their web­site only sup­ported IE.)

1. Text that isn’t text.

Res­taurant web­sites, I’m looking at you in par­tic­ular. Scan­ning your paper menu and throwing it up on your web­site as an image file or a PDF is the equi­valent of cre­ating a door by drawing it in chalk on the side of your house. Never mind the fact that your SEO is going to hell, that it’s a pain to update any­thing, and it prob­ably looks ter­rible. This is just a night­mare from a usab­ility stand­point. This is pretty vital inform­a­tion, and locking it up in as an image means that the inform­a­tion becomes infin­itely less access­ible. Your users can’t copy-and-paste bits. It’s harder to see on a smart­phone. They can’t resize the fonts if they can’t read some­thing. It won’t con­form to the avail­able space, so they’ll prob­ably be stuck scrolling back and forth, or they’ll miss your great deal on Kung Pao chicken.

It’s 2011. You can use almost any font you want in a web­site now. You can do amazing things with fine-tuned typo­graphy you couldn’t do three years ago. There’s no excuse for lazy-designer tricks like these. Text should be text.

2. Flash.

I’ve said it before, and lots of other people have said it before me, but it bears repeating. Don’t use Flash. Flash is slow-loading, doesn’t work on an iAnything, and gen­er­ally is built quite badly. It gen­er­ally crashes my browser these days (poor Laz­arus­Book). Also, see above, and also below.

3. Stuff that sings, jumps, dances, or oth­er­wise behaves like an over-excited puppy.

I’m the first to admit I’m a bit of a con­trol freak, but most people don’t like it when you hijack their machines without asking first. I was vis­iting a web­site the other day that had the most obnox­ious ad I’ve ever seen—five seconds after loading, this huge man appeared in the browser window and started talking at me. It was terrifying.

Most people know better than to load up their web­sites with giant-obnoxious-talking-man-ads, but there are many subtler examples of this. Links that open in new win­dows auto­mat­ic­ally (I’ll do this on my own if I want, thank you). Music and video that starts auto­mat­ic­ally (typ­ic­ally embar­rassing people with speakers con­nected, and leaving me hunting around to find the offending site). 99.98% of anim­ated gifs, ban­ners, and ads. Let your users con­trol how they interact with your web­site, or they’ll just leave.

You can repent all you want, but if your web­site sings at me, you’re damned to an eternity of anim­ated fiery gifs. (Photo from a street corner some­where in Rome.)

4. Ugly design.

My sister’s in lib­rary studies, and one of her pre­requis­ites is a “web design” course. I told her she could save the $500 that credit prob­ably cost her, and I could teach her the whole thing in ten seconds. Hire a web designer. This isn’t a self-serving state­ment. I don’t care (much) if you hire me, or if you hire some other com­petent designer. You can’t learn design from a three-month course. There’s all sorts of crazy com­plic­ated stuff, both tech­nical and aes­thetic, that goes into design. The reason most people don’t under­stand this is because good design is like a great push-up bra: it sup­ports and enhan­cing its con­tent without over­powering it. In theory, you’re not sup­posed to notice it. But it makes a huge difference.

5. Bad code.

Your web­site should be standards-compliant, semantic­ally coded, and easy to update. If your web designer/developer doesn’t under­stand what these things mean, hire someone else. Sur­pris­ingly enough, there are still web­sites using tables. And frames. And inline boxes. Remember that internet years are like dog years, except longer, and that developers need to be con­stantly learning new stuff in order to make great web­sites. Make sure you hire someone who knows what they’re doing from a tech­nical point of view, and you’ll end up with a web­site that per­forms far better—in terms of page speed, browser com­pat­ib­ility, and search engine rankings—than you would otherwise.

6. Business-speak.

A web­site is not a bro­chure. Most people reading online have the atten­tion spans of drunk gold­fish. Keep things short and scan­nable and people are more likely to read what you’ve written (says the woman who reg­u­larly writes 1000+ word blog posts). Stop using business-newspeak to make your­self sound more important. People no longer care about that sort of thing (unless they’re in gov­ern­ment, in which case, aim for as dry and nap-inducing as pos­sible). The internet is a scary place, full of fraud and Nigerian princes. Speak with a voice that’s genu­inely yours and people will be more inclined to trust you.

7. It’s broken.

About three years ago, I bought a box of some­thing from a cer­tain unnamed food com­pany with ini­tials in their name. I’ve never bought any­thing from them since, but they gave me a card and a number at the time and signed me up for their mailing list. When I tried to unsub­scribe, their web­site demanded that I submit both my email address and the number on the card that I’d never used and had lost. I put up with their irrel­evant weekly mail­ings for some time until I finally found my card and unsubscribed.

When I did, their web­site told me it would take ten days to remove my address. Really? Ten days? Is your data­base main­tained in a note­book or some­thing? That’s utterly ridicu­lous. The best part was that after two weeks, they were still emailing me, and I had to send a long, cranky email explaining how broken their system was and that I really should be able to unsub­scribe without put­ting as much effort into it as one typ­ic­ally does when get­ting a divorce. (They never responded, but I haven’t received any more emails—yet.)

This is a more minor example, but I’ve seen lots of web­sites that are broken in more major ways. Con­tact forms fail and there’s no fall­back email address. Shop­ping carts that don’t check out. Val­id­a­tion routines that main­tain “Buenos Aires” is not a city in Argen­tina (I lived there. Trust me, it is.) Test your web­sites, make sure they work, and fix them if they’re broken.

Jesus died for your sins, not so that you can throw the word “syn­ergy” around like it’s going out of style. (Photo from Tierra Santa, the reli­gious theme park in Buenos Aires. Don’t worry, Jesus later rises, in giant animat­ronic style, from the hilltop.)

So hire a designer already, and save your­self for the sins you can really take pleasure in.

So, you’ve decided it’s time for a redesign. All the signs are there, and you’re ready to take the plunge. But where do you start? I’ve seen too many people launch into a web­site redesign without ser­ious con­sid­er­a­tion first, and unfor­tu­nately this can often mean that they’re not get­ting everything they should be from their redesign. A redesign is an invest­ment on your part—both in time and money—and can be a great oppor­tunity to turn your busi­ness around.

1. Get strategic.

Before doing any­thing else, you need to sit down and figure out what you want out of your web­site. The more clearly defined your goals are, the easier it will be for your designer, your copy­writer, and you to direct the pro­ject in order to meet these goals. “I want to pro­mote my com­pany” isn’t a clearly defined goal! You should be thinking instead about who your audi­ence is and what you want them to take away from the web­site. Do you want them to interact with it? Buy products? Send you a quote request? Come back every week to read your blog? Con­sider how you want them to react, feel, and interact with your web­site, and you’ll be closer to having clearly-defined goals.

If you’re having dif­fi­culty defining these goals, it may be helpful to work with a stra­tegic con­sultant, who’ll bring an out­side per­spective to the pro­ject. Anyone out­side of your busi­ness will see it in a very dif­ferent light than you do, which will help you to get a better grasp of what your users are thinking.

2. Eval­uate what works—and what doesn’t—in your cur­rent website

This is the time to be bru­tally honest. If your CEO designed your web­site five years ago, you shouldn’t be afraid to tell him it stinks—if I designed your web­site five years ago, feel free to tell me it stinks! I won’t be offended, it’s prob­ably true. Five years is more like thirty in internet years, and most businesses—and people—will have changed con­sid­er­ably in that span of time. Once you’ve real­ized it’s time for change, you need to be frank in your assess­ment of what’s in place now.

Look at design, SEO, con­tent, and ease-of-use (both for you in updating the site, and for your cus­tomers in using the site). Ask anyone who’ll tell you what they think. Spend a few hours poring over your Ana­lytics to see how users are inter­acting with the site. Better still, drag someone in from off the street, sit him down with your site, and hover over his shoulder while he looks through it. You’ll most likely infuriate him, but it’s incred­ibly useful to actu­ally watch how someone parses your site, and you’ll get an idea of what gets read—and what gets ignored—as well as any ele­ments of the site that are cur­rently causing confusion.

The Alli­ance for Com­munity Trees web­site, before and after. The logo was retained, and we used the same basic colour scheme. The end result was that returning users didn’t feel as though they’d landed on some other site acci­dent­ally, and they wel­comed the change.

3. While you’re at it, ser­i­ously con­sider your branding.

If you’re redesigning your web­site anyway, it may be a great time to con­sider redesigning your logo and branding as well. A gor­geous, well-thought-out redesign is going to have lim­ited impact if your logo sucks. When redesigning, you often don’t neces­sarily want to rebuild everything from the ground up—you’re best off taking what’s there and subtly chan­ging it to make it better. A great way to do this is to change the struc­ture and graphic ele­ments, but retain the same (or sim­ilar) colour scheme and typo­graphy. This way, it won’t be so jar­ring to return vis­itors as it would be if you were to rebuild everything from scratch. Basic­ally, the more estab­lished your busi­ness is, the more estab­lished your branding will (or at least should!) be in your cus­tomers’ eyes. This means you’ll need to make more subtle changes to avoid ali­en­ating your cli­en­tele.  Realign, don’t redesign.

The DVD Edge web­site, how­ever, had a less estab­lished brand and a less strong logo, so we were able to play with the logo a bit. Keeping the overall image means that it’s still not such a dra­matic change, but redrawing it to be a little cleaner and more modern made it stronger.

4. Con­sider a CMS.

I feel like I extoll the vir­tues of Word­Press a lot, but it’s ser­i­ously fant­astic. If you’re already revamping your web­site, and you’d like a way to manage your con­tent more easily, I’d recom­mend get­ting the whole thing built in Word­Press (or another CMS that suits your needs). While you’re at it, you can also add a blog to the site, which is great for bringing in traffic, boosting search engine res­ults, building valu­able con­tent, and increasing con­ver­sa­tion with your users. Static web­sites are out. Web­sites you can update easily and quickly the moment someone sends you a glowing testi­mo­nial are in.

5. Work on your con­tent first.

I’m willing to bet that your con­tent could be better. If you can’t write it your­self, hire someone. Great con­tent is every bit as important as great design, and if you’ve already got great con­tent plotted out, a great designer will be able to work with it in order to make the whole thing come together nicely.

Fern­wood Pub­lishing went for a com­plete over­haul and a custom-build CMS, while they were at it. The end result is a sleek, easy-to-use web­site that allows them to manage their large inventory of titles.

Con­sider the voice of your website—too many sites read like bro­chure copy written ten years ago by someone with an MBA. If your audi­ence is other people with MBAs, that’s fine, but chances are, your audi­ence is just put off by buzzwords. If you speak to them in an honest and friendly way, you’ll find your audi­ence is much more receptive, engaged, and more likely to hand over their money to you.

6. Hire great people, and let them do their jobs.

Who you hire for the pro­ject is up to you, but I recom­mend at least a designer—obviously! A copy­writer and a stra­tegic con­sultant, as men­tioned earlier, will also be a great help. When you’re looking to hire someone, you obvi­ously want to be sure they’ve got a great web­site already. Unfor­tu­nately, while many people in the website-making industry suffer from pretty severe cases of “carpenter’s house”, their web­sites are the best way for you to determine their abil­ities. Past pro­jects, of course, are also quite telling, as are client testi­mo­nials. Once you’ve found someone that seems like they may be good, send them a few emails. Ask ques­tions. Make sure that they respond within a reas­on­able time­frame, answer your ques­tions to your sat­is­fac­tion, and know what they’re talking about.

Then, hire these great people. Send them your stra­tegic plans, your con­tent, everything you’ve already worked on—and let them build you some­thing great. Design is very much a col­lab­or­ative pro­cess, and a good designer should lead you through the pro­cess, keeping your goals in mind at all times, making sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. Remember you hired these people for a reason, and you should be able to trust their pro­fes­sional guid­ance! If you allow the pro­cess to play out like a part­ner­ship, rather than a dic­tat­or­ship, you’ll find your­self with a much stronger end result.

And I recom­mend that you hire Trig­gers & Sparks.

Crossing the Rio de la Plata after a week-long “hol­iday” in Uruguay, I real­ized how much the way I spend my money has changed. Now that I no longer need to steal film from the gro­cery store or cal­cu­late the exact per-grain price of a loaf of bread, I find I’m more willing to spend a little bit more money on things. For example, I’ll no longer buy a pair of shoes that retails for less than $100, although I’m almost insistent on only allowing for new shoe pur­chases when the afore­men­tioned shoe is on sale. I’d also rather pay a little more for a direct flight, or a faster ferry, or even the con­veni­ence of a cab to the air­port. While I’m sure this isn’t sur­prising to most people, I’ve always been per­petu­ally cheap. It took some time before I real­ized that price and value aren’t always as dir­ectly related as I thought.

The first web­site I ever built, as a gradu­ated pro­fes­sional, cost my client a whop­ping $300. I wish I could say I was six­teen when I did it, but I was twenty-two, working a full-time job and freel­an­cing on the side. Looking back, it’s no sur­prise when my first year of busi­ness after quit­ting my job landed me in debt. I’ve always had a policy of keeping my expenses as low as pos­sible, but char­ging $20 an hour simply didn’t cover such non-tax-deductible neces­sities as “eating on a daily basis”.

When I first started out, my biggest mis­take, bar nothing, was char­ging too little. My inten­tions were good—I wanted to save my cli­ents money, and I wanted to provide quality design for a low price. What I failed to realize, of course, was that would become a dif­fi­cult task when I quit my day job to run my busi­ness full-time. Sure, my cli­ents were happy, but I was broke, over­worked, and stressed out.
(more…)

After spending three months in a cast earlier this year, I have man­aged to suc­cess­fully break my other wrist now. (Appar­ently my bones are made of egg­shell.) I’m still in the early stages, so typing is a chal­lenge, and I’ve had all kinds of emails and busi­ness to attend to. Accord­ingly, I’m taking the easy way out this week, and sharing some inter­esting, mostly design-related, items from my Google Reader.

Pretty and/or inter­esting things

Jewel House Col­lec­tion: Gor­geous pat­tern, and it res­on­ates nicely with my new infatu­ation with Eng­lish royals around the time when they liked chop­ping heads off willy-nilly.

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang: The font’s a bit over­used and inel­egant, but the titles are oth­er­wise rather charming and lovely.

Stun­ning NYC Subway Sta­tion Hidden From Plain Sight, Until Now: My love for subway sys­tems knows no bounds. I thought Grand Central was NYC’s piece de transit res­ist­ance!

Infographic of the Day: What the Bible Got Wrong: The short answer is “everything”.

Inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmake­able” Inter­active Book: Remember real books?

Sixty-two Reasons Why “Gami­fic­a­tion” Is Played Out: More argu­ments against FourSquare!

How to Bribe Police in For­eign Coun­tries: Some­thing I’ve always been curious about, and will almost invari­ably at some point need to know.

Noc­turnalis / Dur­inalis: More gor­geous wine packaging.

Turns out, it *is* a river in Egypt: Utterly gor­geous view of Africa from space.

In Real Hot Sauce Now: I need to find this girl and marry her.

Design

Gender Dis­par­ities in the Design Field: I wasn’t actu­ally aware there were any, although it becomes rather obvious the more technically-inclined you are. Is it Lady Ada Lovelace day yet?

Equal Height Column Lay­outs with Bor­ders and Neg­ative Mar­gins in CSS: I am almost cer­tain this will come in handy soon.

Quick Tip: Using Nested Styles with InDesign: Holy crap, this is going to save me SO MUCH time.

Learning to Love HTML5: Because I already know how to love SmashingMagazine.

You Suck at Power­point!: Tips for better-looking presentations.

Busi­ness

Are You a Freel­ancer Or a Con­sultant?: An issue I’ve been thinking about a good deal of late.

Hand­ling Cli­ents Who Just Aren’t That Into You: My cli­ents love me, so of course this is never an issue.

Giving good feed­back is integral to good design. While I’m sure all designers—myself included–would love to just whip up a gor­geous design without asking anyone else for their opinion, good design can be made better by working within lim­it­a­tions and incor­por­ating the feed­back of others. And of course, we gen­er­ally want to make our cli­ents happy and give them what they want. Accord­ingly, any designer worth his salt will make sure that the design pro­cess includes his client: we make mockups, ask for feed­back, then refine, ask for more feed­back, refine, ask for more, refine—and so on a so forth, until everyone’s happy (in theory).

Some­times everyone really is happy, and the end result is beau­tiful and usable and made of design-love. Other times, though, one of us is going to end up miser­able, and the design can end up so off-target, messy, awk­ward, or down­right ugly, that your designer won’t put it in his port­folio. That’s a bad scene. In order to make the feed­back pro­cess as effi­cient as pos­sible, I’ve rounded up a few tips from years of going through this pro­cess with a rather sub­stan­tial number of clients—of both the dream and the night­mare variety.

(more…)

Hiring a designer is a tricky pro­cess. You’ve got to pick someone, some­times out of nowhere, pay him a bunch of money as a deposit, and hope that he comes up with some­thing you love. Chances are good that whatever you need designed is some­thing you care a great deal about (espe­cially if you’re a startup or have a stake in the suc­cess of the product/company/website), so you really want to make sure to get it right. But how do you go about finding a designer that’s going to be a good fit for you?

I’ve never felt the need to hire a designer, what with being one myself, but I’ve cer­tainly been hired by lots of people who are looking, and I’ve also heard all sorts of nightmare-designer stories from my cli­ents. (Yep, for every client from hell, there’s also a designer from hell.)

Here’s what I’d do!

1. Look at his portfolio!

Above and beyond any­thing else, this will give you an idea of what you might be able to get from a designer. Obvi­ously, your res­ults will vary (you, as the client, are an integral part of the design pro­cess), but you’ll be able to get a feel for a designer’s style and abil­ities from his port­folio. If a designer doesn’t have a portfolio—well, quite frankly, this shouldn’t even be pos­sible. If you’re looking to hire a designer who doesn’t have a port­folio or a web­site, there’s some­thing amiss.

2. Ask around.

Ask your friends for recom­mend­a­tions. Most good designers sub­sist almost entirely on word-of-mouth, and with good reason! If you know people who’ve hired a designer, chances are they’ll be happy to refer you so long as they had a good exper­i­ence. You can also check the bottom of web­sites whose design you really like—most of the time, there’ll be a link to its designer in its footer, and you can go from there.

3. Ask questions.

And lots of them! Does he write his code by hand? Does he follow W3C stand­ards? How long has he been in busi­ness? The more ques­tions you ask, the more com­fort­able you’ll feel when it’s time to start working. This will also give you the oppor­tunity to see how your designer com­mu­nic­ates, so make sure that if you plan on doing most of your com­mu­nic­a­tions during the pro­ject via email, you are asking ques­tions over email. If you’ve found a great designer who can’t com­mu­nicate, you will run into prob­lems down the road.

(more…)

Last week, I made an important, life-changing decision. One that I should have made years ago, but I’ve cow­towed to abuse for too long. From here on out, I will no longer be devel­oping web­sites that work in IE6.

I will, instead, be using the fab­ulous IE6 Update script on all of my web­sites. (There’s even a Word­Press plugin. It’s going to be so simple, it’ll almost be auto­matic. In fact, if you run a Word­Press site, could you just run out an install it, right now? I just did. It feels good.) I won’t even bother trying to check what I’ve cre­ated in IE6 any more (though I’ll admit I didn’t often).

According to Net­mar­ket­share, almost 17% of the internet still uses IE6. That’s utterly insane, given that IE6 is nine years old, three ver­sions out-of-date, and famed for being the scourge of the internet. If you’re bored one day, sit a web designer/developer—or whatever hybrid you prefer—down and men­tion IE6. I can almost guar­antee you’ll get a frus­trated or sickened face, and maybe a string of explet­ives, if you’re really lucky.

(more…)

Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steam­ship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ricane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­at­ively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­urdays off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glistened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally figured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in work­aholi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
(more…)

I get asked ques­tions about my tat­toos a lot. It some­times strikes me as strange—I have seven of them, which I sup­pose is quite a few, but they’re all really tiny black symbols—so it’s hardly as though they’re at all surprising.

A few years ago, before I quit my job to launch a busi­ness, I had my logo tat­tooed to my shoulder blade. (And actu­ally, I haven’t been tat­tooed since—I’ve run out of stra­tegic body space!) People thought I was insane. “What hap­pens if your busi­ness tanks?” was the pop­ular question.

Of all the tat­toos I’ve had done, I’m fur­thest from regret­ting this one. Admit­tedly, my busi­ness didn’t tank, but I don’t think it would have made much dif­fer­ence if it had. It’s impossible to start a busi­ness without having it become a major event in your life—to me, tat­tooing my logo to my shoulder was no cra­zier than the people who tattoo their kids’ names to them­selves. (And it’s cer­tainly less crazy than those who tattoo their lovers’ names on them­selves. As far as I can tell, my busi­ness will never leave me for a younger woman or run away with all my money. I hope.)

(more…)

Bad cli­ents are notorious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror stories like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad cli­ents that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good cli­ents. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great cli­ents, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other factors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trouble­some Cli­ents receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their pro­ject. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client exper­i­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your pro­ject as you do? Here, a few tips culled dir­ectly from my Dream Clients:

(more…)

I’ve really been focusing on trying to build my busi­ness these days, and I’m lucky in that it’s been working, for the most part. Of course, this means that I keep run­ning out of time for all those fancy things I like so much, like sleeping and drinking martinis.

It’s reached the point at which I’m so busy trying to stay on top of all my pro­jects that I don’t have any time to do the busi­ness side of things, and I’ve totally stalled as far as growth is concerned.

So, it’s time, once again, for the con­trol freak in me to take a back­seat, and sit quietly by while I hire someone.

Tell your friends! Here’s what I’m looking for.
(more…)

Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent cli­ents, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

(more…)