Archive for the ‘design’ Category
Creativity, definition of
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
My talented neice's fancy fruit bowl... very creative!
I’ve just read this article by Andy Rutledge on creativity, and while I cling to my creativity, I have to agree with his sentiments…for the most part.
He seems to believe that you need to be properly educated. He’s written other articles on creating a set curriculum and adding a few letters after your name. I’m self-taught. Some of the best designers I’ve met are also self-taught. I learned web stuff by little bit of luck, mediocre-levels of innate talent, and a lot of sheer will.
Growing up is hard to do
By doing things wrong, I actually knew why those rules were important.
Knowing the fundamentals and being able to apply them do make designs better. Every designer with a few years under their belt should know that. But I still think a creative mind still makes a fantastic job. Any dunce with a bit of discipline can apply the principles to a bit of information. That doesn’t make it good design.
Designers should be creative
The definition of creativity has been warped a bit. Most people say that children are very creative. My niece is a fantastic artist, and she comes up with some really good stuff. In the past, I’ve often confused expressive creativity with useful creativity.
Design, by definition, is inherently useful. For most professions (architecture, engineering, and hey, why not… accounting), I think of it more like problem solving. And those curious and perceptive will work and niggle until a design works, and every pixel works towards its goal. Fitting components onto a page coherently and effectively requires more than just a knowledge of design fundamentals. Sure, they give you a framework for putting things in place, but the elegance that comes from a beautiful design usually comes from creativity mixed with a whole lot of empathy (whether it be artistic, typographic, structural, or any other type of creativity).
More to learn
Some of the design experts that we’re supposed to admire don’t really impress me that much, and a lot of their stuff doesn’t strike me as unique or creative, but their mastery of design theory and care and attention to details do. Within the confines of a new distinction between useful and expressive creativity, most of the problems associated with the terminology disappears. I can say that yes, they have solved the problem, so I guess they are being creative, but they haven’t found the most elegant solution (if your initial reaction is, “Meh!” then can it truly be the best design for that content?).
I ultimately think you can’t hide behind design’s rules either though, just as much as you can’t hide behind ‘creativity’.
Go ahead and read his article. He really says it well.
Taking the short way
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Take the fast route baby!
There are so many resources out there on keyboard short cuts out there. Some really good ones that just got published include Mastering Photoshop: Unknown Tricks and Time-Savers (where I learned how to commit the text I had just written when my toolbars were hidden: It’s cmd enter!) and I’ve just finished installing Zen Coding into my Coda and Textmate, which will save me a lot of time formatting boring static text, definitely.
Shortcuts are great…
I know quite a few shortcuts in the Adobe package, and I can get around my mac pretty easily with a combination of key strokes. It saves me so much time, and it makes it so much easier to get into my “zone”. We all have our techniques for efficiency when we’re on the computer.
…but they’re also really frustrating
The problem is, they’re not universal. I hit the “V” key constantly in flash in order to get my direct select arrow. I hit “command D” constantly in Illustrator to place an image, but that’s the command for inDesign. After a while I get frustrated enough that I’ll go and change them in the settings, but by then, all flow has dissipated.
They also make teaching difficult
I have often gone to show people how to do something very simple in Photoshop, and to be honest, it takes me a while to find certain things in the menus. I hit keystrokes to change tools, and they are shouting, “Wait! What is that?”
Remember these words: patience and repetition. I think people should always learn the long ways of doing it first. Menus and panels often give a context that learning shortcuts do not. It’s like at school with math: the teacher would show you once or twice how a formula was derived, and then you just remembered the formula, but understood its context. It meant memorizing the formula was much easier, because it had something to connect to in your brain.
They make “experts” out of “amateurs”
I’ve met a few people who are whizzes at Photoshop, could talk to the talk, do the shortcut walk and then I saw their stuff, but it turns out they couldn’t design themselves out of a paper bag. Just because I’m really good with the drill and the hammer, doesn’t mean I should be designing the house.
This short-cutter has mistaken tool mastery with real skill, and that’s a huge problem. For those who strive for mastery in design, shortcuts are not important.
The zen of the goat
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Safetygoat as a character, well, he’s my partner-in-crime. He recently let me know he would like a little change of scenery. I liked my old design, but the homepage felt cluttered and busy. Safetygoat also sought a bit of simplicity.
I’m hoping to have more seasonal/weather related stuff in the homepage. Right now, the leaves are all changing in Canada, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. A winter tree will definitely be next.
It’s a work in progress (as every designer’s site is, I reckon!): The haiku collection will return soon but to the footer (the javascript includes were invalidating and I’ve got only one error right now…). I want to do some more work on the posts, and the images will need to be resized. Soon, zen of the goat will be achieved, and he will be at peace.
I would love your thoughts!
Graffed: a tool for tracking body measurements
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
The best apps, I think, are built by the people that really want to use it.
I always thought that the scales weren’t the best way to record losing weight and gaining muscle. I wanted to lose weight in my stomach, but I wanted to gain muscle too. I’m not really overweight, just the wrong shape.
A few sites would let you record measurements, but I wanted to see the measurements on an actual body as well.
So, with the help and expertise of Dan Wichett as developer, we created graffed!
What is it?
It’s basically a simple tool to track body measurements over time. You can compare any date to your goal body shape.
Why?
Honestly, I’ve loved recording my body measurements since I was about 16 or so. I haven’t got any eating disorders or anything, I just liked having a record of how my body changed as I did more exercise (and unfortunately, how cruel these past 10 years of beer and laziness has done to me!). It was fun making the charts, but there was something sloppy about doing it by hand. After all, I’m a web designer– surely I could come up with a better way to do this!
The process
I went through many many iterations of the design and the functionality, and then just hacked it all back so that the app only did the one thing: record body measurements. I also spent a few weeks working on the branding. I’ll probably go through a bit more on those processes later. Coming up with a good name, and making it memorable were very important to me!
The biggest job was to get the bodies working smoothly, and this was done in flex, and done manually. Occasionally I thought my head would explode from the math. This process is far from done, but in “Getting Real” style, it was time to get people starting using the app, so that I can get the usability absolutely perfect. Maybe we’ll even discover a better way to do it!
Let me know what you think!
We’re still putting the finishing polish on things (I hate the concept of beta, especially when companies stay in it for YEARS, but we really are in beta here)– some things still aren’t working as smoothly as I’d like, but it’s time for you to tell me how you’re using it, and what you like and mostly what doesn’t quite work how you’d expect!
For the next few weeks, we’re letting people upgrade for free, so I’d be especially keen to hear how you think all that is working. Thanks in advance for your feedback! Go to graffed!
Meet thepickuptruck!
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
I’ve just completed thepickuptruck.com, my first app of my own I’ve actually finished!
So, it’s pickups, but it allows anyone to add pickup lines in (either by doing it anonymously, but also by claiming your pickups by putting in your twitter name). You can vote on pickups. We (myself and Dan Wichett, a fantastic developer, who has been my partner on this whole thing!) have also made a mobile app, which uses the opera widget process, where you can save your favourites.
I would love your feedback on the truck! Let me know what you think!
screen shot of thepickuptruck
Walking through my resume redesign
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
I’ve just finished writing a blog post on smashing magazine about designing a resume. I ran the competition about Steve Stevenson, and was a bit sad that I couldn’t participate (it wouldn’t have been fair, as I was seeing everyone else’s, and I had come up with the stuff for it). But, as I came up with the competition, I began reworking my own resume. When I started out in design a few years back, I’d always gotten loads of compliments on the design of mine– it was more unique than lots of peoples’ and its character was one of the reasons why people hired me back in the day. So, I opened it up and realized that I hadn’t updated it in over 2 years!
Now, a LOT has changed in the past two years. I’ve blossomed into a full blown web designer now, and I’ve worked on some really great projects. And, let’s be honest, I’m a much better designer now than I was then (at least, I like to think I am!). There was no way I could keep a lot of the old content on there, and print work from 1998 isn’t featured anywhere in my portfolio, so it had to go too.
It was also a bit boring to me now and almost a little bit clinical. It didn’t reflect what I can do, and it didn’t make any of my work seem very interesting or impressive.
I wanted to do something cool and unique– I know there’s a few camps on resume design and its printability and format (one camp saying it should be in word/plain text. But I’m in the “impress me” camp as I work on quite creative projects and want to be hired by people that want something more unique). I’m quite happy in my job at the moment, so I have time to tweak it to my hearts content (hopefully with some great constructive criticism from you kids). Because I’m always interested on how people come up with designs, I thought I’d document my process!
sketching
My initial idea was to have pockets of information– each bit was in its own circle, and the ones that I was most proud of, or were most impressive, would be bigger.
The problem was that it didn’t actually have any flow at all, it was confusing, and there was no chronological ordering (which meant people wouldn’t know where to start reading). As soon as I started putting the circles and the info in, I knew that it wasn’t quite right.
mocking
So the next idea was to have my projects listed, by order of importance. Here’s a screen of that design in progress.
First problem was that it made me look like a freelancer. There was no way to separate my actual jobs from my personal projects. It was also just a little too plain. I wanted to do something different, something that was more of an informational diagram than just a list of things.
the idea
So, as you do, it was in the shower that I had an idea for a chronological-style timeline. What if all the items came off in little pockets from the timeline, like the dinosaurs? I could also do something with colour or section things off so you could see that I worked on things at a similar time.
In practice though, I was still having problems making any sort of distinction between full time work and side projects. I also wasn’t sure how to incorporate my skills in there. I thought about having employment on the top of the bar, with skills underneath, matching my time working with those technology in brackets. A quick try at this and I decided that it looked too busy that way, and I was going to have to simplify things if I was going to make it effective.
My other issue was that I had done a LOT of work in 2008, but not really that much in other years (at least that I wanted to show off!)… I was risking 2008 getting really bloated if I wasn’t careful about how I organized it.
I played around with coloured bars for each year getting darker for each year, finally going to a cyan on current, but it made the page really cluttered and very difficult to read. My other issue was that I worked at Simply Business and BView at the same time. It’s not actually important to an employer, but I wanted to acknowledge that the BView employement went back to 2007, but it’s very much into the 2008-current block. The little tail pushes it backwards towards its rightful place.
The top area is my 4 main design jobs I’ve had. I’ve worked on a lot of other projects as well, but I wanted to focus on the ones where I spent the longest and were most relevant to webdesign.
I have the year display getting bigger and bigger, which means that there’s not a lot of empty space I haven’t used effectively.
My favourite projects besides BView are thepickuptruck, theBoxCat and snowplease, of them, unfortunately only the pickup truck is finished yet (but hopefully the others will be done soon). I wanted to give extra focus to these, as, well, they’re really exciting projects and I’ve worked hard on them (and, when they go live in the next few months, they’ll be the projects I’ll want people to go look at).
I also wanted it to be a fast read. It’s just supposed to be a summary– they’re little tidbits of information to prompt people to ask more questions, or to give them a little taste of a project and then allow them to view the work and let it speak for itself.
I’ve also included little tidbits of information: me learning photoshop, going to Japan, started dressmaking and when I started up safetygoat are all in there instead of having an interests thing separately. Too many resumes I have seen have no personality. (something which will make a person stand out, which matters when people are looking through hundreds of resumes. I always think back about when I came to the UK and got two interviews for jobs I was completely unqualified for, because I had a cheeky cover letter.)
So here it is…
Freelance work is there as well, but it’s not as prominent. I’ve kept the lower left corner for my skills and a brief summary.
I broke a lot of the rules I came up with myself in my blog post from smashing, but I think it makes it a really interesting resume. Welcome your thoughts.
My Top 5 Guy Webdesign Heros
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
A while back, I wrote a post about my female webdesign heros, and felt a bit guilty about singling out girls. It does affect me that there are so many more fantastic guy designers out there than girls (although the girls are starting to come up thick and fast), and I wanted to showcase girl talent (Lee Munroe went further and even featured little ol’ safetygoat on his list of top 26 female webdesigners… *blush!*). But the fact remains that I am actually much more inspired by these talented men. (side note: these are my heros, not necessarily *the best* as I really think that’s way too subjective, these are those that really inspire me…) So here they are!
#5
Brendan Dawes
Brendan Dawes is an inspiration mainly because he doesn’t just have a style, he also tries to display data and information in different and meaningful ways. His intro page displays all his articles vertically and sized by popularity. It’s almost incoherent, but done in a way that makes you want to explore. He’s one of those people that is pushing interaction between the different creative industries, and seems to see no boundaries when it comes to web design. His stuff isn’t beautiful, and it’s layered on top of a traditional blog platform (which isn’t exactly cutting edge in itself) but his experimentations, such as doodlebuzz , make the web a more fun and interesting, and most of all, dynamic place.
#4
mikekus
Mike is Carsonified’s designer. Mike seems to constantly push himself to do really fantastic work, and he’s a really fun illustrator with a distinctive sketchy style. Each of the conference sites he’s revamped recently have been gorgeous, but they maintain a similar feel and style (with different illstrations and colours) to keep them linked together. I saw a video of his presentation at FOWD, and his slides were all hand-drawn. You can tell that he is passionate about designing EVERYTHING, and gives himself a hard time about following web trends too closely. He also preaches that designers should get into html/css as soon as possible in the designing process, which I’m starting to agree with– you make more useable, dynamic, rather than flat websites. Mike is definitely the type of designer you can look up to.
#3
wez maynard
Wez is one of my buddies on twitter, but that’s not why he’s here (I have lots of great fun web design buddies on twitter but I can’t feature them all!). I’ve chatted with him a lot, and he’s a really nice guy. Little did I know, he was also the creator of YoDiv‘ and divVoted’s design (my screenshot here), both of them sites I’ve admired and put in my inspiration book. Wez is fantastic at integrating in his illustrations and textures into his headers and footers. His design utilizes his artistic abilities so well, and while he’s definitely a web 2.0 designer, he has his own style which resonates through each and every design. Looking through his portfolio, he experiments with different techniques, but always produces cohesive designs. Take a look at the footer of his most recent design for Dean and Reddyhoff Marinas. I love how the design is bursting out of the water. Wez is one of those designers that pushes me to try and use graphics and illustrations in more effective ways. His work is definitely drool-worthy.
#2
Jason Santa Maria
It’s hard to make one of these lists without this guy appearing on it. Before I knew of his own site, I had admired his work a few times (just look at wordpress or alistapart). Jason really spends the time to design things right. His current blog is simple, but a great framework to allow him to individualize every post. It is nice to see a designer, who is also a good blogger (it’s amazing how many quality design bloggers are not very good designers, but that’s another story), actually spend the time to individualize each post that he writes. He is also thoughtful and conscientious about where he’s come from. You can read how he came into typography and design from an art background in this article, but I love one of his recent posts has been about his first and second online portfolios back in the day. They’re pretty good, yes, but you wouldn’t call him amazing at that point. That’s what makes him an even bigger hero: he used to be mediocre, and now he’s amazing. This says to me, “If I work hard, with a little bit of luck and a lot of sweat, I too can be amazing. That’s a hero.
#1
Olliekav
Ollie has to be my biggest webdesign hero. He’s self-taught, both at design and code, and he is one of those people that pushes himself all the time, because he wants to be better. In code, he is the one who has made me care about standards compliance, microformats, and new technologies. In design, he has instilled in me the importance of grids, pixel perfection, and the value in the little details. A few of my favourite examples of his work is his design for theBoxCat (launching soon). I worked on the logo, but he took that logo and came up with a better webdesign than I could imagine. I remember seeing it and immediately wishing I had done it, and respecting him even more as a designer. His illustrative style is unique, but the area I admire most is his logo design. Just take a look. He loves typography and is always experimenting with type– an area where I need the most work. Of course, Ollie doesn’t sit down and tell me about these things, he is my hero by his example. Now, I’m sure you’re all thinking that I’m just saying all this about him just because he’s my boyfriend. But the truth is, we don’t work together too closely. He always wants to get better, and nothing pushes me harder to want to be better as well. Take a look at his stuff, and talk to him. You will never meet a more helpful and hardworking designer.
How about you? Do you agree with my choices? Who are your heroes?
“Because I’m WORTH it!”
Monday, January 19th, 2009
L’Oreal have been trying to convince me that I’m worthy of… well, I’m never quite sure what… but worth, has definitely been a question on the mind of webdesigners and graphic designers recently. I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts and reading lots of articles on how much to charge (it depends, but probably more than you think), how to charge (by project apparently), when to charge (upfront 30-50% seems to be the recommended) and what not to (never unless it’s for a charity, but try and convince my friends and family on this one!).
How good do you have to be to be ‘worth it’, is the thing I’m wondering. After recently looking into the daily rate for a webdesigner, (and finding out that, of course, I am again severely undercharging), I’m getting to the point where I’m not sure I even LIKE the idea of client work anymore. (That’s a whole new can of beans that I think has been caused by hanging out with too many developers and seeing all the cool things I can help build WITHOUT someone else calling the shots.)
I think this chronic mis-calculation by some webdesigners to undercharge is terrible. Not to name names, but I know an EXTREMELY talented webdesigner who got featured on smashing magazine as well as every other major gallery, and still charges peanuts. If you’re getting fan mail, you probably should be making more than £20 an hour to do design. Why? Because you’re good, and you’re definitely worth it. There are so many designers out there charging an absolute fortune for rubbish, that it’s time the humbly talented to buck up and take over.
So stop bending under cheapskates that want to pay you peanuts! Charge to make a profit, because they really are getting a good deal (a friend in Canada says she’s more than tripled her rate in the past two years, and said that she still finds out other contractors and agencies are charging 4 times as much as her for work she has to re-do).
So throw off your insecurities, you talented designers! Rant over.
New safetygoat!
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
Well, well, well! I said I was going to fix up safetygoat, and it’s taken me a lot longer than I thought….but it is here! It has been a time consuming endeavor. For example, adding in a simple plug-in often took three hours of frustration (followed by 2 minutes of knowing bliss!), sometimes two days, but it was never as simple as people said (which leads me to believe that I’m a wordpress retard). I will post code snippets that I figured out in the coming weeks so hopefully others will learn from all my pains (and hopefully the codies out there will tell me if I’ve done a really big ‘faux pas’ or two!).
Some of the things I really wanted were easy-ish… getting flash and jpgs into the same gallery for my portfolio, for example, but my main goal was to make the front page more interactive. This meant having haikus that people could scroll through and add to, a sneak peak into my portfolio (I’ve grown quite fond of that frame and don’t feel bad for one second about how much of your bandwidth I’m taking up!), somewhere where I can pull in photos of safetygoat that other people have taken (add yours to my flickr group!), as well as feeds for my last.fm, brightkite and twitter. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be tweaking it and testing it in different browsers, but I would appreciate all of you lovely people to take a look through. If you could let me know if you spot any bugs, or if you have any tweaks I can make to just tidy it up, I will put on my tough girl skin and take your advice lovingly into my arms.
Safetygoat’s 2009 hopes and dreams
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
Everyone is writing new year’s resolutions, making predictions, and looking back, and at first I wasn’t going to join in the party, because most of these dreams fade come February 1st. But let’s face it– I’m an annoyingly cheerful individual and I can’t help but be excited about 2009. So, in no particular order, here’s my 2009 resolutions.
1. Rework, rework, rework safetygoat
This is actually a cheating one– I’ve been working on this for the past few months (speeding it up in the past few weeks), and my grasp of wordpress is slightly above dunce level now. Sure, putting a plug-in (that’s not a widget) seems to take me 3 hours to configure, something that would take someone even remotely proficient a few minutes, but I’ve depended on other people too much to get this site up, so now it’s time for me to do it myself, with all the optimistic bells and whistles.
2. Launch apps I’ve been working on for ages
Let’s face it. It’s sad having to go edit your portfolio page to change the launch date, which you set to November, thinking you were leaving lots of room for contingencies, way back until march. BUT I WILL ACTUALLY FINISH THEM! (I hope, soon).
3. Get a vinyl toy designed and made
I’ve made my own plastic safetygoats this past year (if you want one, email me and I might just send you one) and it’s been fun hand painting them and giving them out to people, but I think it’s time to do this properly. This means a) doing the sketch/3-d model b) finding someone who will do a short run. No problem!
4. Make more custom things
I’ve made some dresses, but they haven’t been perfect. BUT I got a dressmaking mannequin for Christmas from olliekav, and have already made my first dress, which I wore to new years. 2009 should see more dresses, but I also want to make some custom shoes, maybe some bags… you know, stuff with drawing on them!
5. Learn learn learn
I’m amazed how far I’ve come in the past 2 years. I mean, I made my first real website with css then (I don’t think html tables in high school really count, do they?). I’m thinking I’m very good at css now, and have gotten great working in the java environment, but I would like to master styling in ruby and flex as well as getting the hang of some of the more advanced jquery stuff. As I get better, I will be able to try out more experimentative webdesign, and use a lot of the css3 selectors well and properly.
6. Write more
I used to keep a diary in high school and uni and used to write in it every night. Of course, it was just hormonal teenage rage, but it’s so interesting to reflect on things and then have a paper trail to actually see where and, more importantly, who you’ve been. So, writing, yes, but maybe writing more blog posts too. I’ve learned a lot while redoing safetygoat this past while, so I will definitely be sharing some of the stuff I’ve learned.
7. Talk to my best friends more
I live in the UK. My best friends are in Canada. We will always love each other, but I’m rubbish at keeping in touch. This is unacceptable!
8. Get into shape
I know, I know, this is everyone’s resolution, but lord I’ve packed it on over the holidays. It would be nice to at least get back to where I started.
9. Spraypaint
I did a bit of work practicing this past year, but I’m frankly rubbish. It’s fun, so I will be doing more. This is definitely not a chore!
10. Have an adventure
Pretty sure I know what this will be, but I’m going to keep it on the down-low for now. Stay tuned for my crazy times!
