Enemies can be unwittingly helpful
So someone hates you and is being turdy to you, trying to tear you down in front of the class, and your lecturers, in the hope of getting better grades. That doesn't mean you don't listen to them closely and analyse what they've said. Sometimes a grain of truth in it that helps you, even if it burrrrns it burrrrrns. Learning to find those grains of truth is a skill in and of itself.
Someone being better at something than you are, doesn't make you any less good at it
However, it still makes you less desirable in the job market, should you be in direct competition with one another.
Serve your client, not your ego
You may love sword and sorcery, but that doesn't mean you put sword and sorcery into every freaking thing you do. Especially not stuff that has nothing at all to do with it, and whose target market thinks the whole S&S thing is utterly stupid.
Keep your principles, change your designs
Almost, but not quite, the same as the above about serving your client.
Almost, but not quite, the same as the above about serving your client.
...and of course, there's the last thing I only learned when I went out to work.
Sometimes people pay you for the privilege of overriding your professional advice
If you fail to convince them after doing your best to make them understand, and if you leave paper trails (when needed), you've earned the money.
If you fail to convince them after doing your best to make them understand, and if you leave paper trails (when needed), you've earned the money.
For those who would argue that it's impossible to evaluate designs without real content, let me ask this: why then, is it okay to evaluate content out of context of the designs? To review copy decks devoid of color, typography, layout, and styling means that readers are missing out on the important signals communicated by design-cues to priority, weight, and hierarchy of information, but also emotional and aesthetic appeal. If content strategists want to ask designers to stop using Lorem Ipsum, maybe designers should insist that content strategists add style sheets to their copy decks that match the proposed design direction.
via uie.com; emphasis mine
Why?
Because, you utter failure as both designer and writer, good writing should be powerful even if it's untidily but legibly written on 100 sheets of onionskin.
P.S. I agree that Lorem Ipsum can be used in the correct context, and is a valid tool. But the paragraph above is an incredibly annoying straw man argument. Oh, and she's also missed that design supports content; the reverse is called art.
via html5rocks.com
It's really, really beautiful. Not obvious HOW beautiful till you start zooming in and out but... O.O
Needs Chrome.
Goooo, go forth and resize dat cat! It's soooooo kyoot.
While every engineer may find Search easy and efficient, that is not the experience of most people under many conditions, including those encountered by the users of the systems Craig has referenced—Contacts, iOS, and Lion. Learning to type into a box is easy. Memorizing the names of perhaps several hundred apps so you know what to type into the box, not so easy. Unless you are an engineer.
Graphic designers, left unchecked and unschooled, are likely to aim for maximum visual simplicity at the expense of both learnability and usability. Such interfaces require users to discover new capabilities by clicking around and seeing what happens. Users don't do that.
via asktog.com
So much good stuff in here! The second quote about graphic designers, in particular, sounds like what I spent the first 3+ years when I started working in the digital space arguing against, usually on the losing side.
Great talk on Microsoft's 'Metro' styling (though they aren't allowed to call it that anymore).
Particularly interesting is the part about how 'digital natives' - folks who've grown up with the Internet and digital being everywhere don't need skeumorphs. E.g. a 10 year old *now* doesn't need or even understand a phone app with an oldschool 'dial' for numbers. If you give it to a great-granny though, it suddenly works.
Responsive design is more work. And more expensive. Maybe you don't need it as much as you think you do.
I've run into the idea that since responsive design is a more efficient mobile solution than creating unique mobile sites or alternate page templates, it is therefore going to be cheaper and simpler than what everyone is expecting. Not true. The fact of the matter is that doing responsive design requires work that just wouldn't be done at all if mobile wasn't a consideration. Now, I'm not advocating that we ignore mobile. But in some cases, I'd argue that mobile is probably higher on the priority list than a serious cost/benefit analysis would merit.
Our audience is primarily comprised of people working in the advertising, marketing and design industry. They're people who influence or make decisions about design and development projects. With our audience in mind, if you were to ask me if mobile should be a higher priority I'd say absolutely. I'd think of all of our hip and stylish visitors and how many of them probably already have an iPhone 5. But you know what? In the last month, just under 10% of our website's visitors accessed it with a mobile device. That includes phones and tablets. If I extend my look to the last six months, the mobile population is exactly the same. The last year? It drops to 8%. So, mobile traffic is growing, but not as rapidly as I would have assumed based upon what I think I know about our audience. With those numbers, should mobile be prioritized as much as it has been (we're about to launch a site redesign that makes heavy use of responsive design techniques — more on that later)? With over 90% of our visitors still coming in through a "desktop" computer? Probably not. But for us, there's an additional consideration of needing to demonstrate our capabilities in this area, which pushes the benefits over the cost. For many other businesses, though, that additional benefit doesn't exist.
Very few of our clients have a "money is no object" attitude when it comes to budgeting for a web project. In fact, for many of them, our costs are a bit of a stretch. But they believe in the value of what we offer and trust us to lead them to the best outcomes. It would be wrong for me to push responsive design on all of them, indiscriminate of what they know about their audience, their actual visitor data, and their actual budget. If their money could be better spent in some other way, then it should be.
via newfangled.com
Superbly practical and down-to-earth article about responsive design.
Too many creative leads (and writers) jump onto the idea of responsive design like it's the next wonderfully shiny new toy that will display their leetness, without regard for whether or not it's actually suited to what they're producing. It's refreshing to see something so logical and well-thought out about the subject.
via acqualia.com
