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.

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.

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+?

Giving Google some credit, they saw Google Wave was a complete flop and scrapped it; something Kevin Rose’s company Milk did today with Oink. Having only launched 3 months ago, they have decided to shut the service down for good.

Scrapping things takes guts (and a ton of money) but ultimately admitting you are wrong and moving on is a better thing to do then leaving it to turn into a ghost town.

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.

“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.

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.

It is clear that he has an admiration for type, but having read and watched a fair few pieces on typography, very little of the content felt new. I would find myself remembering stories I had read in Type: The Secret History of Letters, or being reminded word-for-word the interviews with designers for the documentary film Helvetica.

By this book if…

You want a beginner-level book to read about type origins, type history, and some of the modern day stories about type, then this book is for you. But if you want a bit more substance I would recommend Type: The Secret History of Letters. In fact, I think I would suggest reading that book, and watching Helvetica over getting this book any day.

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?

All you can eat information

For me personally, this information overload means that I generally cannot remember many of the things that I have read. This is because our brains are not programmed to hold lots of short-term memories.

We can use various tools to overcome this. Services like Delicious and Instapaper mean we don’t have to commit it all to memory, but it still takes an involved process to catalogue all of the content we read on a daily basis.

So what is the answer? Reduce the number of people we follow on Twitter, or RSS feeds we subscribe to? Rebalance the signal-to-noise ratio and remove some of the more superfluous things we read? Or have a system in place to catalogue online consumption for future recollection? I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the subject: You can either leave a comment below or reply to me on Twitter.

Stopgap technology

So I get it, you can go from viewing an advert for a game or DVD on a poster to hovering over the ‘buy it now’ button on your mobile in seconds just by taking a picture of a barcode; I see the benefits, but this is just interim technology stuff.

In an ideal world, if you simply looked at the poster with your mobile phone you could be downloading the demo of the game, browsing the movie trailer, or making a purchase instantly. This is, sort of what you can do now, but what makes this an interim measure is the fact that people have to go out and download software to scan these codes. This really limits the audience, and until software is built into the operating systems, it will always be a niche thing.

Regardless of this, QR codes look too technical anyway. Even if they turned into designed objects like these barcodes from Japan they aren’t sexy; and who wants to see black and white barcodes over everything? How about if you didn’t need a barcode? What if you could just look at the advert through your phone?

Removing the need for barcodes completely

Recently I stumbled across Aurasma that does this, in a sort of clunky prototype way, but the technology is promising. Again, the downside at the moment is that you need to download the app, but if this was built into camera software, and the practice became widespread (so that people almost expected to get something if they looked at it with their phone), no longer would you just look at a printed advert, or watch a 30 second TV clip, you could further immerse yourself into the advertised item, but only if you were interested. This is the key. These things are only popular because people want to find out more.

Final thought

The end result of this becoming mainstream is a deeper connection between what you are consuming in the real-world and the digital realm. This happens at both a social and software level. In an age when we go on to IMDB whilst watching a film to find out what else that guy has been in, to reading real-time comments on twitter when watching X-Factor we can link this together to make things we are interested in easier for us to consume, creating a much more fulfilling scenario.

Feedback

I’d be really interested to find out what your thoughts are on this technology, and how you might think we could interact these things in a better way, if we need to at all.