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  I sketch out
  solutions

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  I evoke emotions
  through design

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  I deliver fully
  integrated work

Category Archive: Design

1. Content with personality

   March 13, 2013 10:56 am Leave a Comment

   We spend a lot of time talking about “content first”, but we talk a lot about the why of content first. It helps how figure our hierarchy, flow and other structural information. This has been analyzed over and over again so today I won’t be going into that. I want to talk about the how of having content first. To put it more bluntly, the “how are you going to bring out the personality of the given content?” I can hear you saying the personality? Yes that’s right. Many people don’t even realize it but the content of any given project has a personality in the same way that colours or fonts have personality by evoking different emotions or feelings of friendliness.

   Writers spend days trying to find the right words to use when filling a page. They write and iterate on these words constantly. Why do they do this? They are trying to create the voice of the content. They can usually hear this voice in their head in the same way a musician hears a guitar riff before ever playing a note. Writers can visualize the speaker of their content better than anyone whether it’s a character in the next epic novel or a 140-character tweet. No matter what the context of the content is the content always has a voice and a personality that wants to be expressed.

   Why should we care about this personality as designers? As designers, it is our job to bring that personality to life. This is how we focus on having content first. We need to see that content and understand the underlying personality of it. We can’t properly design for a brand without first knowing what that brand wants to say and how it is going to express its message. Without having that content, we find ourselves in a situation of forcing content into a predetermined design container. This can get very frustrating for clients, designers and everyone else involved in the project.

   Writers are brilliant at crafting flow and rhythm together through the use of words but that’s not enough to let the content’s personality truly shine. We need to approach our designs with the mindset of helping enhance the personality. I’ll throw a strange idea out to you. It’s like when you are naked. I know weird but stay with me on this. Let’s say you’ve stepped out of the shower. Just because you don’t have clothes on doesn’t mean you still aren’t you. Your clothes, makeup and accessories help bring your personality outward so you can share it with the world without having to necessarily speak a word. Content is the same way. When a designer first gets it from a writer, it’s naked. The personality is still there but it’s just hidden “in-between the lines” rather than on the surface for all to see.

   Without style or design, content needs to work harder to show its personality. By giving it “clothing”, we give the content personality an opportunity to shine on the surface. By bringing the personality to the forefront, we are giving our readers the ability to easily scan and understand the voice and message that our writers were hoping to get across.

   What type of design techniques should you use to enhance the personality? Well, that depends on the personality of the content. You should never design in one technique over another just because you want to experiment with that particular technique. The technique should match the personality. In fact, design should never be a debate about skeuomorphism or flat design or anything else. It should be about what is right for your content. Ask yourself “Does the design enhance and match the personality of the content?” If the answer is no, then maybe you need to start again or rework the solution. The answer should always be yes. If that means you’ve left your site as white, clean and minimalist as you can but it fits the content then fine. If you’ve added multiple backgrounds, curves and drop shadows on everything and it still fits the content then fine. Design should be about what is right for your content and nothing more.

   Let’s stop worrying about whether we should be using skeuomorphism or flat design theories. Instead, let’s work as a community to build to enhance the personality of content. One thing that has helped me personally work with content personality has been the required use of GatherContent for clients and writers. This app allows me to separate the content from the design process. It helps show both the writer and the designer how the flow of information will go throughout the project. You can then easily edit, copy or even paste it into designs to see if it’s a match.

   Matching design can be as difficult as finding the right font pairings or setting up a complimentary colour palette. Take your time with this. Separate content and designs for as long as possible. Build a style guide and compare it with your content personality. Does it work? Playing the matching game with these two easily editable methods. By having separate content documents and editable style guides can save you hours of work and iterations later on in your workflow.

2. Trimming The Fat

   January 18, 2013 3:45 pm Leave a Comment

   Over the past several years, there has been a debate raging online and offline about the benefits of building separate mobile sites verses using techniques like responsive design or building an app. There has never been a clear winner in this fight and unfortunately I’m not going to offer you one here either. However, I want you to stop and think for a moment before starting your next big web project and how you will deal with your content on a mobile view. No longer is it a question of rather or not you should offer optimized content for mobile rather ask yourself how am I going to deliver it to my audience while providing the best experience possible?

   The stats continue to climb in mobile usage. No longer can we boast that our sites should only deliver content to desktop browsers or that our audiences are only interacting with our content while at home or on a bus. We have no control over how or where our content is being received. Maybe it’s from a tweet, or a Reddit link. Maybe the content was being viewed on a Kindle PaperWhite or broadcasted on a SmartTV. We have no idea. Our content needs to be ready for all of these cases and for ones that don’t even exist yet.

   But we’re just going to publish it on the web and hope for the best. That should take care of it, right? Well, maybe you’ve given it a bit more thought than that and have included a social media strategy to help deliver it across various social networks. But have you actually thought about how your audience is going to view and interact with your content. These strategies are great for a very limited portion of your traffic, but do they actually work for everything. As far as the internet world has come, people still scan information rather than read word for word. They look for the relative information that applies directly to them.

   This does not mean you should limit the content you provide your audience like most mobile sites tend to do. We can’t decide for our audiences what they can view or interact with if they choose to view our content on a mobile device instead of on a desktop. But wait, can’t we just give them a link at the bottom to view the “Full Desktop” view. Absolutely not. We then run back into the issues of having content that isn’t optimized for these various devices. Meaning we’ve wasted a significant amount of time and resources while creating this separate view. By creating a limiting experience, we also find ourselves in a situation where we have to update two sets of information. Unless you have an extremely large budget and a bunch of extra time this can be an exhausting and frustrating exercise.

   We need to provide our audiences with the ability to scan and access all of the information that is available. How we can make this relative to our audiences is by conducting a content audit on our information. When performing an audit like this, we should look at several different pieces of information like last time the information was updated, relevancy to our company, relevancy to the audience, click throughs and traffic. If you feel that the content shouldn’t be on your mobile view then ask yourself should it really be on your desktop view? By using mobile as a guideline for importance and relevancy for audiences, we can start to make smarter decisions when it comes to our desktop layouts. Our sites will finally become extensions to our companies rather than just a necessity. Make your site work for its existence rather than just being your online presence. This will help increase your traffic, search engine rankings and other performance objectives that most companies are looking for. In the future, it will help you make decisions on how and why your site should scale. Take a moment before you start planning out your next site redesign by looking at the content. Trim out the fluff and organize your content with the mindset of relevancy to users and importance on the smallest screen size. Let your content will help to focus your decisions on whether you need a mobile site, responsive design or an app.

3. But The Government Does It

   December 19, 2012 9:16 am 2 Comments

   This was the argument I heard today for why we should continue to support IE8 for some non-government clients. The argument was presented to me by an IT guy for this particular client. He says that because the local government still uses and supports the use of IE8 that everyone building digital products should be supporting it as well. But let me ask you if the government endorsed the use of horse and carriage still instead of using a car as the common way of transportation would we all follow them and do that instead. No because it doesn’t make sense. It’s insane. So why would we continue to support a legacy browser that goes against the mentality of innovation that modern browsers have commit to?

   Governments are slow moving and are so filled with stubbornness to change that it would make sense that they would still be using IE8 because they don’t know any better. But this isn’t always the case. Look at the movements that the UK governing bodies and the Obama administration have been making in the last few years. They are showing the world that governments can stay modern and relative. The lack of growth and maturity in the digital age in my local area has always been a challenge. But without leaders in our industry helping to show the way we are just supporting bad practices rather than standards.

   I never intended this to be a political rant. In reality, the question is not about what governments are doing in regards to browser support, it’s about what are the users using. Yes, if your audience is the government then unfortunately you will have to continue to support legacy browsers. If your audience is the regular public then it comes down to what is the data saying. Have you been tracking your traffic through analytics? If you haven’t seen a user in IE8 and under for several months then do you really need to support it? The answer is no. Some of the largest corporations in the world have even made this decision. Google, for example, no longer supports the use of IE8 in any of its applications. This should make you stop to think for a second. If a company like Google can justify a decision to stop using IE8 and under then do you really need to waste hours and hours working through the struggles of making IE8 work properly.

   What you should support is a practice of progressive enhancement so that if a user does come to your site through a legacy browser they are still able to access everything. They just won’t see the beauty and standards that you’ve carefully crafted to enhance your content. But remember the content still needs to be accessible. I find this is the hardest part for clients who are screaming for the support of legacy browsers don’t understand. They think that all browsers should look and function the exact same way. However, that is never possible. Not with all the polyfills and fallbacks in the world. You can make it look similar and create a flow that still satisfies all your content objectives, but to have the same emotional level of connection with users, it will never happen.

   Remind clients that they are in fact not the audience for their projects. If they think supporting a legacy browser they use is the right move, then take a moment to review their analytics with them. If the actual audience isn’t accessing the content through this option then work with your clients to help them understand why it’s would be a waste of their budget. Show them the analytics, make them understand that you aren’t being stubborn because you don’t want the headache. This usually leads to a stronger more trusting relationship with your client. Help them know that just because you won’t support a legacy browser doesn’t mean they won’t be able to access the content. Show them the benefits of progressive enhancement. Heck, show them the benefits from outside of standards compatibility like security.

   But please if you can help clients move to a modern browser. Even ask your government rep to push for it in their industry as well. We can be the advocates of innovation that we are suppose to be. We just need to reach out and be heard.

4. The Magic Trick

   November 30, 2012 12:00 pm Leave a Comment

   Designers are often hit with this overwhelming need to use the greatest and latest features to display our designs. But what we are doing is creating an illusion. We’re clouding our designs in magic. We do this because often times the content we are using to build our sites is weak at best. Maybe it’s too dry. Maybe it’s poorly written. Maybe it just doesn’t tell you anything. But all these things make us feel uneasy. So what do we do? We add glitter and spicy it up with CSS or Javascript magic.

   However, we don’t need to do this. There is a better way. If we pushed back on what’s actually important on our sites by asking ourselves what is the overall purpose of this section or what do we want our readers to get out of this then we start to remove the illusions. Fellow designers have preached about less is more and about how to trim out the stuff that clutters our sites. This usually deals with visual design elements, but I believe it can be done with content as well. I mean what really makes some blogs so successful? It’s not the design or the length of an article. It’s what goes into the article that makes it great. The same goes for offline materials like books. We don’t judge the quality of a book by how thick it is. We judge it on our emotional connection to the writing style and the content.

   All content should tell a story. Not a narrative as such but it should leave you feeling like you’ve gone through a journey. I think this can be applied even to medical or law content. Give the readers a sense of completion once they finish. This can be done through several different methods. Speak in a language that is appropriate to your audience. Don’t make them feel stupid. You want them to come back and read more so guide them through your content by showing support along the way. You can do this through short callouts that better describe complex ideas or definitions. You can also add a visual since a picture can be worth a thousand words. Remember you are not writing for yourself. You might know an expert in everything you want to post but maybe it’s beyond the scope of the reader. See the content from their perspective, rather than yours. Make changes to the content that will help enhance it and further the readers ability to understand it.

   Whatever you do, don’t misdirect your readers by creating an illusion of glamour and gloss. Readers know when you’re trying to hard. Your readers are a lot smarter than you may give them credit for. Don’t be the Wizard of Oz hiding behind a curtain. Drop the curtain all together and let them see you and your content in all its glory. Your reader is more likely to forgive you for your shortcoming if you just lay it out on the table instead of hiding them behind some sort of magic.

   Finally, if your content is weak. Spend some time with it. Look at it from a reader’s perspective. Ask yourself how this can be rewritten to suit your reader. If you can’t see it in that way then test it with prospective readers. Get them involved. This will not only strengthen your relationship with them but will provide you with future insights into how your readers think. Find the benefits in your content. Bring emphasis to the important pieces. You might realize it’s all fluff and that’s ok. The next round will be better. No writer has ever written a novel without revisions. Our content should be treated the same way.

   Sell the story, not the magic trick. 

5. Build for yourself

   October 27, 2012 10:13 am Leave a Comment

   I’d heard it a millions times, read a thousand articles and had hundreds of conversations about it. I never realized how rewarding and inspiring it can be to build products for yourself. Most people don’t even build products related to their industry. Take Elliot Jay Stocks for example. He wanted to do something outside of web design and created one of the most beautiful ongoing typography publication, 8faces. Others have created t-shirts, or written books in seven days instead of always focusing on the web. For me, I kept my focus simple, straightforward and related to my day job. Why you might ask?

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6. Prototyping Can Make You Better

   May 30, 2012 8:40 am Leave a Comment

   I’ve been giving a lot of thought to our design processes lately. I don’t think we can design the way we used to. If you equate it to a math equation, there are just too many variables out of our control. That’s kind of a scary thought isn’t it? But I don’t think it has to be a bad thing. This new approach to design will actually be better for our clients and us. We’ll be able to show our clients the true value of what they are paying us for.

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7. A Common Voice

   May 11, 2012 4:25 pm Leave a Comment

   Believe it or not every site is sending users a message. It’s not just site that is sending this message but the elements we have built into it. Whether it’s a template site that you bought or had custom built by a professional designer, your site is saying more than just what is written on the page. Your logo is saying a lot. The color, shape and size of your buttons are speaking as well. Of course we can’t forget the fonts and imagery that have been included.

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8. A Common Voice

   4:25 pm Leave a Comment

   Believe it or not every site is sending users a message. It’s not just site that is sending this message but the elements we have built into it. Whether it’s a template site that you bought or had custom built by a professional designer, your site is saying more than just what is written on the page. Your logo is saying a lot. The color, shape and size of your buttons are speaking as well. Of course we can’t forget the fonts and imagery that have been included.

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9. No More Crap

   April 26, 2012 11:16 am Leave a Comment

   Let’s be honest. Not every designer is the same. Not every solution for a client is the same. But does that mean that clients should put up with designs that are crap? I think not. As designers, it is our responsibility to leave the world looking a little prettier than we found it. If you can’t do that then you shouldn’t be calling yourself a designer.

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10. Feel love from mobile

    April 16, 2012 10:44 am Leave a Comment

    Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increasing amount of attention turn towards mobile design and development. This is to be expected with the new hi-resolution screens and device abilities that have appeared on the market. The focuses of these conversations are about how we should limit our designs in the mobile space. How we have to scale back. I think we’ve got it backwards. I think we’re able to connect our designs with users at emotional levels we’ve never been capable of before.

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