Adam Partyka

I stumbled across this awesome video interview at Big Think with Jason Fried, Co-founder of 37Signals yesterday. Take a moment to watch it and come back.

Much of what he is talking about is a reference to their Getting Real, “Meetings Are Toxic” essay.

After mulling over the points from the essay and what Mr. Fried mentions in the interview, I thought of one thing that neither the book or the interview points out; If meetings disrupt work-flow, when do meetings actually become necessary? Certainly, we can’t go through a workweek without having one or two meetings that are either focused on employee relations or the company budget right? Every indented point made in the essay covers why you shouldn’t call a meeting, but, are there some general rules we can follow on why you should call a meeting?

My thoughts on this subject relate to a set of rules to follow when working on designing a new piece of functionality for a web app. They are as follows:

1. Why are we building this?
2. Who needs it?
3. Will it generate more revenue?

Now, take those three rules and apply it to scheduling a meeting:

1. Why are we meeting?
2. Who needs to be in the meeting? (If you made it to this step can you use electronic communication instead?)
3. Will the meeting subject be about employee/customer relations, revenue, etc.

The third point, I feel, should be a rule (or rules combined) that needs modification for different situations and be unique to the company in question. What I mean by that is it should really be the absolute and final reason to call the meeting because it can affect two of the most important parts of the company; your employees or your customers. If you make it to that third rule then yes, this meeting is probably important. If you didn’t make it past rule one, forget it. But, if you made it to rule two you should still ask yourself “Can I communicate the matter through email or instant messaging instead?”

I understand that not all situations fall under these three rules and they should be taken with a grain of salt. There are planning meetings, budget review meetings, and annual reviews, all of which can have a lot of value depending on the organization of them, but, I think the manner of how 37Signals presents the topic of removing distractions should never be forgotten.

For those of you who haven’t read the entire Getting Real book it’s a short (and free) read. If you’ve already read it, I suggest going back and reading it again.

The next time you think you have the best web interface that will educate and inspire your users know this: they probably don’t care.

It’s crazy to think that “less than 8% of people interviewed” in the video below knew what a Browser was. If that’s the case globally, then we as developers, designers, and web entrepreneurs share a common bond:

Job security. We haz it.

Generally, people want to perform a specific task when they go to a website, whether it be online shopping, checking sports scores, or browsing news feeds. The rest of their experience, clicking an “IE” icon, toolbars and settings, are just details. That’s why the internet will need us to continue to make rich and engaging user experiences for the great amount of the population that doesn’t care about the technological details that we’ve dedicated our careers to. It can be discouraging to see the percentages of average users that don’t understand something about the internet that we all know well and use often, but, I can say the reason that keeps me motivated to design for the web is its constantly rewarding to discover and remedy problems with user experience.

Check out the short article and video below from UX Magazine.

I’ve been thinking every now and then about how much my work relies on using Photoshop for starting a design. In the past, I was used to a workflow of:

Photoshop design > Revise/Edit > Markup/CSS > Browser bugs > Revise/Edit Photoshop design after more client requests > Change Markup/CSS > Browser bugs > Finished (maybe)

This process is not uncommon in the web and freelance design world. Those last three steps could potentially cycle into what may seem like an infinite revision hell. Revisions that mean returning to Photoshop and perhaps adding something like rounded corners or applying a font change. Both of which, if several layers have been created, can be very time consuming.

What I’ve discovered is that designing in Photoshop is not at all that different than designing with Markup and CSS. You’re still going to use Photoshop for graphic touches and polished png’s, but you’re skipping all the monotonous layer changing and crappy text rendering that doesn’t translate to what the web browsers will look like.

After reading this years’ “24 ways: Make Your Mockup in Markup” article, I am completely convinced ditching Photoshop from the start of the design process is the best (and painless) way to approach modern web design. What I think is the most convincing point made early in the article is a quote by web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman:

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration. – Jeffrey Zeldman

If you think about anytime you’ve started a project with little direction from a client and had no content other than the name of the url, what did you end up doing? If you worked the “old” way you probably opened up your sketch pad or Photoshop and started mocking up ideas using dummy content. But what’s going to happen? You’re going to bust out a kickass design that you feel great about, but, we can find from past experience that there exists no “perfect client(s)” who are happy with that first draft mockup. They’ll start asking questions like, “What are these tab rollovers going to look like? How will video posts work? I want to add a cool lightbox window for all image previews, can you mock that up for me? I don’t like your color scheme, do it in lemon chiffon.”

So you revise and fumble with your layers.

Then, the content the client didn’t realize they wanted at the start creeps out. All of a sudden…that first draft you created has turned into a burden of layer changing and pixel pushing. Also, any questions about dynamic content or user interactions are a royal time zapper to mock up as a static .psd. There are always more changes after that first mockup if you haven’t learned your lesson about setting a feature limit, but that’s another topic of discussion.

Really the two points I got out of this article that I find a lot of value in are, this will save you oodles of time, and that by approaching web design in this manner we can help push the newer advancements in xhtml and css forward into the standard that they should be.

In summary, what you have to gain from using the web browser as your design tool:

1. Standards compliant markup for clean accessible code from the start
2. CSS3 properties for those design touches (rounded corners, border colors, text-shadows, @font-face)
3. A client that can see results in their vision and be apart of the design process
4. Less time spent making small revisions in a static environment!

If you’re on the fence about this approach here are a few other juicy articles on this topic that help solidify this approach to web design.

Time to stop showing clients static visuals

Walls come tumbling down presentation by Andy Clarke

How you can use the internet to communicate your brand and designs in one page. Or, just look really ridiculously good looking in html.

As a designer, a web portfolio or a personal blog are two beacons that we can use to showcase the best of what we’ve worked on to stand out in the “Great Sea of Html”. How we construct them can lead to great feelings of personal achievement, or after a week or two of seeing other sites that visually own, you may go back to the drawing board to try to one up yourself and the competition for the umpteenth time.

So then, how as a designer/developer/blogger have you approached the design of your personal inter-space? While browsing my google reader feeds I came across this interesting post about single page sites and their use of the page to showcase the content.

I’m currently in the 12th or 13th stage of re branding my self for freelance work. Every time I see cool posts and sites like this, I reach a new stage of design denial and garbage canning current designs…which leaves me questioning my own design and coding abilities. Being stuck in “design purgatory” has it’s advantages though. Quite often I’ll learn a new skill from a re work or become more aware of the faults I had in previous versions.

Here are some of the highlights of the aforementioned post I picked out. What do you find effective in these designs, and how do you think you could use the same techniques applied to the design work at your own company?

visualelixir.com

legworkstudio.com

webleeddesign.com

sursly.com

I’m satisfied with this blog theme. My only problem I’m having is setting up category names as links in the nav bar in the header section. This is probably because I know jack about php. Or, I’ve yest to fumble across the easy button for the widgets section.

But, I do know something about jQuery. Chris Coyier, over at css-tricks.com, put together a simple and very effective jQuery drop down menu. There are a boat load of “plugins” and cumbersome jQuery scripts for navigation out there on the interwebs, but this particular one I have found to be the most effective and easiest to personalize for your projects. I especially like the simple addition of…

$("ul.dropdown li ul li:has(ul)").find("a:first").append(" » ");

…to add in the “»” after the anchor in a nested list to show there is more to that anchors category. Check it out if you’re looking for a semantic and valid code solution that works in all browsers!

For some time now at work we’ve been working in small teams and following the practice of Agile Web Development. I’ve become so accustomed to this style of design/dev work that I’m 2% certain it can have a side affect of adult ADD outside of work. Even now as I write this I am checking facebook status and switching from tab to tab in…YES lolcatz!!..So yeh, did I mention I’m a big fan of cheese curds now? They have them at the Trader Joes near us!

For real though. Breaking up the design work into smaller sprints and completing projects at breakneck speed has had an effect on my attention span at home in other activities. If I’m cooking pasta, the first 3 minute sprint will involve me taking the pasta out of the bag setting it in the pan (sans water), getting out the jar of sauce, and then walking away to check the next milestone/to-do task for my next sprint of cooking the food. My fiance acts as my project manager for general house chores. And so on and so on.

It has been a test in organizing daily to-dos, and it has forced me to be much more efficient with my markup and awareness of how much Internet Explorer royally sucks ass. I blame 37signals and their superb “Getting Real” philosophy. It’s crazy efficient and highly recommended if you’re looking for an excuse to tell your doctor you need prescription meds to cope with the onset of ADD from reading a book and using agile development…even though the book says nothing of being able to get away with that. Reader beware!

I haven’t kept up with a professional looking website or blog for myself in almost 2 years time. Why? I don’t know really. Wordpress however, has grown and changed so much since the last time I used it (May ‘08?). The result of the changes and the ease of use within the admin portion is so easy there is no reason for me to be lazy anymore with experimenting and building  my skills in using it as a design tool.

I’ve grown so accustomed to agile web development and building quickly that the design of this site doesn’t represent me personally or as a designer. I like the grunge elements this template uses a lot, but I don’t want to remain a copycat for too long. Keep an eye out for a new design to this site sometime (hopefully) soon.