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.

On 23rd February the first ever Responsive Summit takes place in London. Thinkers and do-ers in the field of responsive web design get around a table to discuss how to make this easier for all of us.

http://responsivesummit.com/

This I can guarantee will enhance how we build sites in the coming years. Some of the questions I have are:

How we can serve up the right images for the right device?

Because of the responsive nature, images usually have to be created larger to compensate. I am wary of this because there have been discussions about increased page bloat and serving up multiple versions.

Further reading:

• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-images-how-they-almost-worked-and-what-we-need/

Is there still a place for ‘mobile’ versions of websites?

With the emergence of responsive and adaptive designs, do ‘mobile’ versions still have a place on the web?

How do we ‘sell’ responsive design to clients?

This is of course, down to the agencies and salespeople themselves. High profile responsive sites, such as http://bostonglobe.com/ have helped, but clients still need to be educated. That is our job.

There is, naturally a slightly higher cost to designing responsive sites, but this is minimal and when compared to separate desktop and mobile versions is usually a lot more cost effective.

How do we present responsive designs to the client?

Designs are typically served up in visual format, most proabably created in Photoshop or Illustrator first. Is there a good way of presenting these to the client whilst conveying the concept? Which leads on to…

Are we going to abandon Photoshop?

Is Photoshop even the right tool to design nowadays. With frameworks and tools available to create demos relatively quickly will this be the standard in the coming years?

Should we still be designing in pixels?

With the emergence of the retina display iPad and multiple resolution devices, have pixels had their day? Has the concept of pixel-perfect designs gone in favour of percentage and em-based designs?

Any other questions?

You can submit your own questions before the discussion takes place on the 23^rd Feb by going to the website http://responsivesummit.com/.

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.

Follow the journey I took when interacting with this QR code from a Co-op leaflet

QR code in a Co-op leaflet

Then I saw this on my phone:

The Co-op website on my phone

Now, given that they created the QR code, they knew that people would be looking at it, most probably, on a mobile device. So why not optimise it? All the link did was take me to their website. It didn’t entice me in, they didn’t focus their message, and I lost interest.

Here is what I would have done

Mockup of a Co-op mobile website layout

It is a quick example of how much more inviting it is to a mobile viewer.

Take note where you take people to with a QR code

If you do fancy using a QR code, next time, think about if you can create a page specifically for that purpose. You might find it has more impact than a regular page.

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.

Another month, another redesign. I think this all stems from the fact that I have never really been 100% happy with my website.

So, it is back to basics. With an update of WordPress comes their default theme, so I can concentrate on the content before I work on a custom design.

It’s all about the content

From day one, I have really used this site as a dumping ground, posting anything on here, not really thinking about the audience and so for this new era, I want to focus the content and deliver something of use (hopefully) to the people reading it.

Get out the statistics

I had never really looked into the popular sections of the site, so I dug out the page visits over the last few years, to see which elements were the most visited; here they are:

• /2010/01/19/dribbble-invite-giveaway/
• /2009/04/28/six-high-resolution-cloud-images/
• /projects/
• /2009/10/16/the-kitchen-sink-of-html/
• /2009/07/30/august-2009-wallpaper/
• /about/
• /2009/06/25/july-2009-wallpaper/
• /category/wallpaper/
• /2009/02/06/the-h1-debate/
• /2009/05/28/june-2009-wallpaper/
• /2009/10/13/good-design-is-invisible/
• /2009/04/24/london-2012-coin-design-competition/
• /2010/03/19/css3-multiple-backgrounds/
• /2009/08/31/september-2009-wallpaper/
• /2009/07/17/creativity/
• /category/downloads/
• /contact/
• /2010/01/10/type-the-secret-history-of-letters/
• /2010/02/22/should-the-grid-be-visible/
• /2009/11/15/thinking-with-type/
• /category/design/
• /2009/10/29/november-2009-wallpaper/
• /2009/01/19/if-you-make-everything-bold-nothing-is-bold/
• /2009/08/14/background-alignment-bug-fix/
• /2009/12/04/december-2009-wallpaper/
• /category/freebies/
• /2009/07/01/the-one-song-sketch/
• /2009/01/11/how-i-got-into-web-design/
• /2009/04/22/five-simple-steps/
• /2009/01/12/design-work-on-footytweets/

So, what can I learn from this:

1. Giving away free stuff interests people and drives an audience to your site
2. The ‘about’ page is very important
3. Design-centric posts are most popular

So having analysed this, I want to expand a section with HTML/CSS code snippets, further develop my profile on the site, and spend time writing some posts on design, something I have always wanted to do more of.

Timescale?

My first mistake would be to set a limit of this. The only times I have pushed the development of this site forward is during several hours at the weekends (or on a bank holiday like today). I don’t want to rush it, because the chances are that I haven’t thought about it enough, and it’ll mean I want to redesign it again too quickly, so for now, I will concentrate on writing more, and will slowly develop the plans for the site in the next few months.