Selling designs to Clients is one of the hardest things you’ll do as a Designer.
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: Continue reading
Remember hearing your maths teacher say that?
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. Continue reading
Firstly, If you don’t know what Ideas of March is, it is to:
Point 1, done. Continue reading
As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.
I think this ex-Googler has it spot on: You can’t force people to use your stuff. How many of us have a Google account? And how many times did we use Google Wave, or Google+?
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.
This I can guarantee will enhance how we build sites in the coming years. Some of the questions I have are:
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:
With the emergence of responsive and adaptive designs, do ‘mobile’ versions still have a place on the web?
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.
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…
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?
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?
You can submit your own questions before the discussion takes place on the 23rd Feb by going to the website http://responsivesummit.com/.
I’ve recently read Creative Mischief by Dave Trott.
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: Continue reading
“Every agency wants a happy client.
There are two ways to do this.
One: do the best job possible.
Two: do what the client wants.
They are the short-term view, and the long-term view.
In the short term the client will be happy if you do what he wants.
If it doesn’t work, he won’t be happy.
The alternative is you insist on doing what you believe to be right.
In the short term the client may be unhappy.
But if it works, he’ll be happy.”
A quote by Dave Trott in the book Creative Mischief. It’s a fantastic book; it reminds me of the books Paul Arden wrote.
This book seems to have gained more column inches for a type book than any other I can recall in recent times; probably because it can appeal to people who are just casually interested in type.
Part history book, part modern day news stories, the editing makes the book feel awkward; like a cobbled-together school project made up of historic articles and personal opinions by the Author, Simon Garfield. Continue reading
I’ve been looking back on the amount of online content I read recently and I think I am probably like many who over-consume on a regular basis.
Technology today means we can gorge on content from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, constantly throughout the day without hesitation; But how much of it can we actually take in? Does it reach a saturation point where we keep consuming even though our minds are full?
These square images are being used more recently in the last few years as a tool for interacting between two different media. In a study conducted recently the most interacted placements of QR codes were on magazines, packaging, websites and posters.