It takes a real understanding of the problem to provide the right solution. This means designers need to be involved at the very early stages of a project. Thinking that a designer can come along at the end and ‘design’ it basically means that they are looking for someone to simply style their solution.

Design is not simply styling.

If this happens, and if you willfully let it happen then you are harming the profession you work in. To get away from this situation, you need to educate those you work with.

Designers should be involved at the very beginning. This avoids a ‘chinese whispers’ effect of others interpreting the requests a certain way and relaying them. It is best to be with the client or stakeholder to understand their requests firsthand. Afterwards, write a brief and have all parties agree to it. This will be the brief that the design solution is marked against.

This is the start of getting away from simply styling other peoples’ solutions.

• Skateboard deck
• Racing car livery
• Movie poster
• CD cover
• Football kit
• Book cover (OK, so I have done something from the list. Here it is)

So what is stopping me. Well, nothing. Since having this list I haven’t actually tried my hand at any of these.

I think this need to design physical products comes from my tendency to appreciate physical items more than digital ones. Yes, interacting with websites or apps is great (and I love the fact that thousands of people are able to see your work), but seeing a printed business card or poster to me has always given me more joy than the launch of a website.

So I am going to work on producing some concepts just for fun, but maybe with a real product in mind. 2013 is a year for acting on the things I’ve been putting off, so blogging about this now seems like the perfect catalyst, because what is a bucket list for if you don’t act on it.

Do you have a design bucket list? If you do I’d love to hear about them. Leave a comment below or tweet me @paulrandall.

But as soon as you let the client call the shots, you are a pixel pusher, bowing to the whims of a client.

Thing is, if you don’t tell them, they won’t know (what not to do). Laying out the rules early will avoid things like this being said:

• I’ll know it when I see it.
• I think we’re nearly there.
• I showed it to my son/daughter and they suggested…
• I’m not feeling it yet.

You get the point.

The thing is, the design process should be a collaborative one, just make sure you lay out what work the client should be doing.

Clients know their business better than you do.
You know design better they they do.

With this quick understanding, make sure that the client makes the business decisions, and you make the design decisions.

There’s a good reason for it; It gives you the opportunity to demonstrate how you solved the problem. You would be marked on the working out, and not just the final answer.

It’s the same with design work, if you can’t describe how (and more importantly why) things are done a particular way, then the client should (quite rightly) think of it as just a guess.

Being able to do this successfully is probably the most important skill to learn in client services, because without this, you risk a client reject or dismiss good ideas, simply because they can’t see how you worked out the answer.

I literally said ‘fuck’ out loud. workfu.com is lovely. LOVE-ER-LY

— Paul Randall (@paulrandall) February 29, 2012

I was blown away. I’d just never seen anything like it on a homepage recently.

Again, I think this comes back to confidence in design. Knowing that you’ll be able to convey the desired message in such a simple way without additional clutter

When this sort of design pays off, it does it in a big way. I really made a connection and felt compelled to engage.

Being able to succinctly explain what your product or service is makes such a difference in our fast-paced lifestyle.

Forget the elevator pitch, we need to work on a eight-second pitch for the web.

1. Write a post called Ideas of March.
2. Write about why you like blogs.
3. If you don’t already blog regularly, pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
4. Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.

Point 1, done.

Why I like blogs, and blogging

I believe that writing about something helps you to understand it in a different way; in much the same way having to give a presentation or explaining a topic to someone means articulating the topic.

This skills is vital for any professional.

If there is one thing I have learnt whilst being a designer, it is that articulating yourself well makes you a better designer. Explaining designs to a client, boss, or colleague is key. In the past I wouldn’t have been able to describe why I created something the way I did; I felt (wrongly) that talking about it was art bollocks and not necessary.

Describing a design is as important as designing it well.

What I wasn’t aware of was all the thoughts that went through my head whilst creating a design. A client can’t see this, and so you have to articulate yourself to describe your design process. With the client aware of all the decisions made, they are more likely to ‘buy in’ to your work, as they’ve been taken on the same journey.

Back to this blog…

Never thinking of myself as a writer, my blog includes things that I want to explore in more detail. Blogging allows me to collect my thoughts and put it out there, primarily for myself, and secondly for anyone who is interested.

But my blog has never been an advert for myself. If there is one thing I have learnt from my website it is that the most lovingly crafted posts fall by the wayside in favour of posts that were created on a whim, but I don’t write for traffic, and neither should you. Don’t go for the cheap shot of a red-top headline when your content deserves better.

Writing more

In my professional career, i’ve set myself a few goals. Some of which have happened already, like being featured in .net magazine but to have my writing published somehow is still on the list, waiting to be ticked off.

A few people I follow on Twitter have wrote books. Their tweets during the writing phase make it sound like a kind of literary torture, but having your work in print, being able to buy it in the shops, and being in Amazon must be quite a cool feeling.

Don’t just say it then, do it!

In the coming months, lots of things will be changing for me, and I hope to be able to delve deeper into the process of designing, in particular for the web. It’s an exciting time with lots of innovations to come and I want blogging to become an integrated part of my work.

So I’m not going to get hung up on the design of my site (yes, it is the default WordPress theme at the moment) because people will hopefully be reading these posts on Readability, Instapaper, or an RSS reader, but I do hope to develop my site to include more development work, code examples, snippets and other tools in the near future.

Now it’s your turn…

If this post, or the Ideas of March concept has spurred you on to write your own, let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure I link to it.

Because of this, more people are talking about SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics. These XML-based images can store vector data, and so can be upscaled. Other options include creating special icon fonts, such as Pictos. I prefer the idea of using SVG over font solutions because the font method is just like using Wingdings; plus it adds non semantic letters to your code, even if you can hide them.

I was aware of SVG back in around 2006 during my college course. I naively thought at the time that was little point in learning about them, as I couldn’t see the advantages. If you want to see my first creation 6 years ago – this was it (if you view the image separately the text should zoom in):

So this weekend I decided to go back to my college work and create some SVG by hand. Luckily, for more complex designs, you can use something like Inkscape but I thought it would be interesting to hand code the icons I wanted to create.

First I started by drawing some very simple shapes on an 8×8 grid:

I then created a very simple XML file, and started adding the paths:

Note: The M stands for move, the L stands for line and the Z closed the point. That is as far as I got, but suffice to say that more complex icons won’t be created in this way. You can see the final version here: https://paulrandall.com/experimental/svg/img/pr-icons.svg

For the next part, I used this post as a tutorial: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/16/resolution-independence-with-svg/ and the traditional process of displaying a background image. I ended up using an empty span because I found it easier to play around with, but as you can see from David’s tutorial this doesn’t have to be the case.

Conclusion

Seeing the browser support for SVGs, support is varied, but for progressive designs it is worth considering in your next designs. Do have a play, experiment and look into the new ways of constructing sites, because it is an interesting time to create websites.

See the finished article: https://paulrandall.com/experimental/svg/ (and make sure you upscale/downsize it to see the full effect)

It’s a fantastic book; you should buy it.

One thing I loved was his writing style: No fluff; no waffle; just the story. In short, succinct sentences. Here is my attempt:

– – –

People say that there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance.

Paul Rand once said this about designing the NeXT logo for Steve Jobs:

I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.

So how can someone charge $100,000 for a logo, and others charge $100.

Confidence.

Rand knew he would understand the brief and produce the right logo.

People who aren’t confident in the work they produce will create a couple of versions, and let the client decide.

The client isn’t paying you to choose. They are paying you to design the right one for them.

That’s why they hired you.

It’s a cop out to make the client choose. It shows a lack of conviction.

It creates so much imbalance in the client/designer relationship you are saying “help me do my job”.

By placing the client in the design seat they will try and steer the direction for you because of your initial lack of conviction..

You’ll hear things like “I’ll know it when I see it”.

This will lead to you bemoaning the client for taking over the design.

But you see, they didn’t.

You invited them to.

It is clear that this is a problem not unique to me. There have been many attempts made to make the experience a better one. From Safari’s built in Reader mode to Readability, designed to ‘zap online clutter and save web articles in a comfortable reading view’.

Focus Mode

The purpose of these systems is to remove the other distractions of adverts, additional links or related stories. At a much deeper level, Information Architects understood this whilst building their iA Writer they created what they called Focus Mode:

Thought goes into writing, not using: Focus mode allows you to think, spell and write one sentence at a time. This lowers the temptation to cross edit and keeps you in the flow.

I like the idea of keeping people ‘in the flow’ and so created a very quick mockup of a ‘focus mode’ for reading posts, not just writing them.

https://paulrandall.com/experimental/focus-mode/

This could be made into a JS snippet, or as an idea for someone to use on their own site.

Because the script uses :hover this wouldn’t currently work on a phone, but I’m open to suggestions.

“We decided to recommend a straightforward sans serif font. Predictably, this recommendation was greeted by complaints. It was too generic, too mechanical, too unstylish, too unrefined. I had trouble responding until I added two more elements to the presentation.”

Does this look stylish to you? Does it communicate anything about fashion or taste?

The next slide…

Now what do you think?

It worked every time.

I’ve really enjoyed reading this book so far, and because they are short essays, you can pick it up and read a section in just a couple of minutes.