I left my last job a few months ago for one primary reason. I was a designer working in a vacuum. I was the only designer in the company, a position a lot of people would love (you get paid well, they can’t afford to lose you, etc. ). However, I have a core belief that design is best when it involves other people. Because I was on my own there, I left.

I’ve been at this design thing for a few years now and there’s still one major aspect that I am missing. The social design community – not just in a specific job, but on a broader scale. Here’s the thing. I’m on twitter, facebook, flickr, tumblr, simler, blah blah blah. Somehow, there is a disconnect between this thing we call social media and any actual interaction with other designers. Like any other social situation in the world, there are certain groups or cliques, and it can be hard to break into them. In the design community, you make friends if you produce incredible work or if you have something valuable to say. At least that’s the theory. The reality is more like this. You make one good connection and that person sees something nice in what you do, and they share it. Begin ripple effect.

But that’s where it gets’ sketchy for me. things begin to catch on, which is kind of exciting. Suddenly thousands of people are hitting your site every day, and everybody wants to retweet everything you say on twitter. But what’s so social about that? It might as well be a faceless system. We are still single designers, working in a vacuum. What I’m looking for is for a way to work WITH people on projects. Not some place to show people the projects I’ve completed. That’s a single moment in time (when you share your work), but what about the process. The process is what I’m interested in. I think if we spent more time working on the process rather than trying to promote the product, we would have better products to promote.

I’ve got this list of possible projects scribbled on a piece of paper in a moleskine in a bag I keep with me. It’s always growing. There has to be close to 50 ideas on there  - most of them full-on business models. The problem is that for me, ideas get stuck when I have to carry them from idea to product all on my own. It’s not that I can’t do it (although I am increasingly aware of my inadequacy in many areas), but who wants to go through all of that by themselves. I want to work with a team to make things happen. I want to sit down with friends and hammer out the details. I am keenly aware that working with other talented people is going to produce something far greater than I could produce on my own. And so, those ideas will stay on that page, and probably a few new pages, until I can actually find a community. Not a community to share my finished designs with, but one to share my raw ideas with.

The picture of an idea designer is often one of a freelancer, sitting in his PJs, designing the world’s next big thing – alone. Unfortunately, this simply isn’t the reality. While this exists, most of the great products we see were not designed alone at all. There was collaboration, critique and a desire to do something bigger than just one person. That’s where I want to be, and I think that’s where most of us need to be headed. PJs are optional.

After a conversation at lunch today with Sven Elligen and Alex Coles, I have come one step closer to realizing how I fit into this online design community thing, and the answer is… not as much as I thought. For the past few years I have been trying to make the connection between the design community and the blogging community.  It seems like every big designer has an equally successful design blog, and I’m not sure how I haven’t realized this before, but that really isn’t true. The reality is that most of the blogs that I read aren’t by successful designers. They are by successful bloggers (which has dramatically reduced the number of items in my Google Reader as of late).

Without a doubt, there are some really great designers with really great blogs. However, the fact that these two things require different sets of skills is inescapable. I’ve been rounding this corner for a while, but I am really starting to realize that the people I admire as designers are not necessarily the most vocal online and they don’t necessarily have the best or most popular blogs. While this is a fun realization, it also leaves me back at square one in some respects. Where do I find the really great designers, and how do I build design community with them.

Designing a Community

There are some really great ways to meet other designers in the online community and I am really appreciative for those tools (Dribble comes to mind). However, it seems that most of these tools are are based on sharing the final product. Even most links on twitter are based around sharing a piece that is just finished. While I think this part of the community is very important, I also feel like it is over emphasized. What interests me more is the process of design.

Without understanding the process of how a design was created, we’re really just looking at one big internet gallery. We need someone to create the tools for designers to collaborate on projects together. I want to find the places where I can share roadblocks in the thought process and ask for help, not by crowd sourcing it, but by creating real relationships with real people that I can talk to about real things. From what I understand, the development community does this much better than the design community. Code is open-sourced rather quickly and then people work on it together. People share ideas and help each other a lot. This interconnectivity is increasingly important as we sit behind our screens day after day after day.

My Community

For me, the community of people I work with is very important. It’s one of the most fun and fruitful parts about any project. Some designers are great at working alone. I’m just not one of them. I am most inspired when I’m in conversation about a project we are working on or a particular design philosophy. I am most productive when I work closely with a team. And for me this is one of the main roles of blogging (and a lot of the other community tools we use).

Blogging is another means of communication. I have, for some time, valued the opinion of some of the thought leaders in the design community, and have aspired to offer that same type of advice. However, they are thought leaders because of the valuable things they have to say, which is where we differ. This is why I have decided to rethink how my website is structured.

I enjoy writing and so I think I am going to keep my blog. However, as I was thinking about a new site design, I realized that blogging is not who I am as a designer, and therefore it should not dominate my design website. This means that a redesign will take a little longer as I think about a better way to adequately represent myself on this site. I’m really sick of “Hey, I’m Josh, and I’m a really awesome designer with a great fun personality”, portfolio types of websites – so shoot me if that’s what I come up with.

All That to Say

This is more of a ramble than anything, but I have been wanting a better way to connect with the (quality) design community for quite some time now. I am still searching for it, but now I will be taking steps to create it as well, and to become a valuable part of it.

Let’s work on something together!

If you have any suggestions, or feel I have missed something, I’d love to hear from you

Something New

Last weekend was a new experiment.

For the most part, when I make websites, I do all the planning, graphics, and markup myself. I’m normally a one man shop (although I’m actively looking for new people to collaborate with), writing most of the (X)HTML and CSS by hand. That control is very important to me.

However, while writing everything by hand plays well to my OCD desire to have control over everything, it takes time, and I’m limited to only the things I know to do. So, naturally, a quality CMS would be a great next step. It would allow me a little more power, and hopefully remove some of the time to write markup.

Enter the CMS search.

I have looked around and haven’t really found much that I was pleased with. However, about a year ago I was introduced to Squarepace.com. I looked around and it claimed that you have control over the whole process and that it would be easy for you to move modules around, edit them, and delete them. After a year of curiosity, I finally found an appropriate project to start last week.

So I met with my client, got everything planned out, and explained that it would be an experimental process, but we were hoping to get the site done and live pretty quickly. And we did it. AmyLashelle.com launched within a week of me starting the design process – by far a new record for me.

The Rundown

I’ll start by saying that, by using squarespace, I was able to make a somewhat powerful front-end experience with very minimal effort. The site has a nice (although not fully customized) contact page, a jquery shadowbox slideshow, an integrated blogging engine, and another slideshow on the home page. Nothing too fancy, but keep in mind, I built the whole site in a little under three days worth of work. I felt pretty good about what the site can do.

Here’s where it gets a little rocky. The user experience of building this site was frustrating at best. To the best of my knowledge, Squarespace is aimed at “designers”. It appears to me though, that those would be graphic designers, and not web designers. It seemed that almost every step was just a little harder than it should have been.

Messy Markup

Control over styles is supposed to be easy in their interface, but some key features (like width) are not editable there.

Once or twice, I wanted to wrap something in a div tag and couldn’t do it because their editor only lets you add HTML inside specific places. I upgraded so I could have “code injection points”, but it turns out that those points are very specific, I still cannot access all the HTML. The points also weren’t where I really wanted them. For instance, some things like Cufon and Google Analytics are supposed to be right before the end of the body tag, but their interface made me put it inside a nested div somewhere near the bottom of the content.

While I can appreciate that a template gives me all the markup I will need, it really needs to be flexible so that I can cut out unnecessary markup. This was a big issue on this site. I was incredible unhappy with the final markup. It is incredibly cluttered, messy, and non-semantic.

It also only allowed me to edit some commonly editable styles. The main page styles were not accessible. For example, I could not change the font stack for the whole site. I could change one main font in their interface, but not the whole stack.

Here’s the one that got me the most. You can export the styles… in an XML file. And the main page styles are minified! It’s as if they were trying to make the process as hard as possible for me.
Little things like this meant that I had to relinquish control over the markup – something I didn’t want to do.

User Experience

As far as the Squarespace interface, it did a couple things that made me use a lot of hacks to present the page well. I could not add a class or change the ID of page links, which meant I had to inspect the code with Firebug, find the randomly generated ID, copy it, paste it in the custom styles section, and create a new style – which was overriding current styles, instead of just editing them.

I suppose I could go on, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

What to do?

So essentially, I’m still looking for a quality CMS designed for front end web designers like me. I can’t imagine I’m really that much of a minority. I’m looking for something that gives me complete control over the markup without making me wade through piles of PHP.

If there is a CMS out there like this, I would really appreciate hearing from you. Otherwise, maybe this means I need to work with someone to make this type of product. I know I would love to use it.

For years the complaints have been filed about fonts on the web. The limitations are strong which leaves only a few typographic choices. This is nothing new. When I first started designing websites, I remember being shocked by the constraints. MS Word could use many more fonts than the web could, and I felt like the internet was a much more evolved place technologically. This was backwards.

As the complaints continue to mount up, various options have slowly started to break down the barriers in recent years. SIFR and Cufón have recently been seen as a solid replacement to the somewhat bulky and antiquated (although not even close to obsolete) method of image replacement.

Enter Typekit (and a whole bunch of other great technologies outside the scope of this article).

Typekit

There have been a few major issues that have prevented us with limited web font options until now. One is the (in)ability of browsers to support something like the @font-face CSS declaration, which is now garnering a lot of support from modern browsers. The other major concern has been font foundries coming to agreement on the best way(s) to license their fonts on the web. Typekit is bridging that gap by hosting fonts from a growing number of foundries. Many of the foundries have been smaller ones until FontFont joined this week. I heard about this from an understated twitter message, but this is huge news.

There has been talk of more fonts on the web, but we are finally reaching a point that may be pivotal. It is already starting, and within a (relatively) short period of time, we could have a rather large set of fonts to choose from when designing new sites.

A landscape of chaos

So where does that put us?

Unfortunately, along with this freedom come a sense of chaos, driven largely by “designers” that don’t know anything about typography and abuse this newly found typographic “ability”. With this new power we, as designers, will need to exercise large amounts of responsibility. Choosing the font that is right for the project will become much more important that it has been in the past.

I agree with the sentiments of Jason Santa Maria in that we are going to see a great abuse of this new ability. However, I am optimistic. The chaos will reign for a period of time, and designers will do all kinds of new tricks, just because they can (does anybody remember the blink tag). I predict though, that when the dust has settled, the good designers will be even more apparent. You will recognize them as the ones using decent typefaces in their design.

The day is coming when fonts on the web will serve to further distinguish great designers from those that don’t know what they are talking about. Typekit is leading the way in what will hopefully be a future full of visually rich websites.

I guess it’s time to really hit the books and start learning about these typefaces and their best uses. We’re gonna need it.

I started at a new company over 6 months ago and from day one my primary job description was to create a new website for our company. It is finally done.

It took about 6 months to wait on content, and then when I finally got permission to write it myself, it took about two more weeks for it to launch. Such is life. (This is also my disclaimer for the quality of copy writing).

Orchid Event Solutions

Being a company that focuses on excellent technology, reporting, and other pretty cold elements, I chose to highlight our more friendly side – our full service solutions. The main point here was to connect with the site users and convey a message of simplicity, competence, and confidence. I did this with images of nature that were meant to convey a much more casual environment- one where our clients are free to talk to us about any need they have.

The copy is also very casual and conversational. I really wanted to stay away from any type of dry corporate language or technological verbiage that could be distracting. The whole site was designed to be forward thinking but light and simple – not bogged down with any extra baggage.

There is still some work to be done, and the site will constantly be evolving, but I think the initial goals of upgrading our site to something more modern has been accomplished. Here’s the previous version – as you can tell- outdated, cold, corporate, and overall disgusting.

Orchid Event Solutions (before)

The keen reader may have noticed that the new site also includes a new brand. Good eye Magellan. There will be more about that an upcoming post.

It seems that a lot is being said recently about separating content from design, an issue which is by no means a new one (see this article from A List Apart in 2004). This time around, it seems like the target audience is those of us that never really got it in the first place for whatever reason. It’s got a new twist though.

This is where I am. I have seen a ton of great sites lately, at least visually. I don’t think I am that hard to impress if we’re being honest. But where I see a lot of sites falling short is in great content. It’s not that the content is so bad, but it’s just organized so poorly. This is where the new focus comes in. It’s now on highlighting great content through your design. But the distinction is that the content comes first! I know I’m very guilty of designing first, and then trying to fit everything into the design I have. Of course things aren’t going to work as well as they should. The content was an afterthought. Even if it was good content, it was shoved into a place that it probably shouldn’t have been.

So what do we do? First, we have to realize the type of content we are going to have. Then, we have to look at that content, recognize what the USER is going to want to read, and then design something around that. The idea of progressive enhancement here is crucial. A site must be able to be stripped down to its content and still be valuable. If it is, then we can rebuild the site around that value.

Another key concept is labeling our CSS tags with tags that describe what the content IS or does, and not where it goes, or how it looks, because looks or location may change, but the essence of the content will not. For example, labeling a div “leftColumn” sounds great until you decide to change that column to the right. Try naming it somehting like “navigation” instead. That way, no matter where you put it, your structure will still make sense. Plus, everybody can see that it is on the left, that doesn’t help define your content at all.

So as we continue to progress, and new technologies continue to emerge, just remember to keep your content as top notch as possible, to keep it organized properly, and only THEN to design how your user should interact with the content.