The entire site is beautiful, but I was particularly impressed by the genius idea you will see illustrated below. An end user or casual browser such as myself can very easily narrow projects by discipline using the navigation to the left. For instance if you click “web & interface design” the portfolio is narrowed to only those selections matching the criteria. The matching pieces remain at 100% visibility while the pieces that do not fit the criteria sit quietly behind a darkened overlay. All pieces remain completely interactive and can be viewed at the click of a mouse. On click a full size image gently slides down into view with a short client/project brief, again keeping all of the additional portfolio pieces in view while focusing on the chosen piece.

This type of creative thinking and innovation is really what motivates me to keep at it day after day.

See site www.synthview.com

Design is where science and art break even.
— Robin Mathew

I really enjoyed participating in this questionnaire as it gives me yet another outlet to share some of my experience and thoughts, this time focusing on developing a blog and the writing process. As I state several times throughout the brief questionnaire, that is really what it is all about for me.

I highly recommend checking out both Design Feaster and Design Feast as well. Some very insightful and enjoyable writing being done here, a wonderful and much needed resource for the design community.

A special thanks to Nate Burgos of Design Feast for allowing me to participate.

You can also follow Design Feast on Twitter

Inspired by a family member who, while discussing a project we will be working on together, pulled out the “artistic” card. I got to thinking, if don’t have my own family convinced that what I do is a bit more than adding embellishment or being artistic, then why should I expect my client (our clients) to understand it for more than that.

How can we go about explaining the basics of what we do using general ideas and concepts? How can we do this outside of the client/designer interaction?

The point would not be to teach a client how you might go about calculating line-height or what exact steps you might put into developing the check out process for a complex shopping cart system as you might attempt to do in educating other designers or developers. The point would be to illustrate that just as an electrician wires an extravegant home theater system or an engineer develops a complex road system, we as designers use much more than artistic ability to solve complex problems and develop best routes.

It takes time to learn principles and foundations. It takes careful study of what does and does not work, drawing on experience in the field. It involves continuing education in both what has already been discovered and the technologies being developed in the future.

More importantly it takes the application of the above to careful research and discovery of the problem at hand to develop the best solution.

It is not just a matter of having an eye for it or applying your artistic qualities to a solution, it is careful thought out calculation.

Anyhow my point was not to get into a long discussion about what design is and is not, rather to raise the question of how we might help others to gain a better understanding of the designers job or what it is that we do on a daily basis. In turn making out jobs and possibly our live a little easier, or at least more understood.

(I am just looking for general ideas here, examples would be great to if you happen to leave a comment.)

… design “isn’t about cosmetics, pixel-pushing, and button placement. It’s holistic and it’s everyone’s concern, not just the realm of ‘artistic’ types.”

— Peter Merholz, President of Adaptive Path
(qtd. “10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design” – Mashable.com)

I’m afraid that in a few years Webdesign is nothing more than: Download -> Fill With Content -> Upload -> Get Fame.

Quote taken from the Drawar Forums written by username: Flowrush, a student of Communication and Multimedia Design

While I might not include fame as a definite, quite often I find myself thinking about were web design is headed and noting the above as one of the possible outcomes. I do not see this as the only avenue we will head down in years to come but I do see it as a major factor in determining the public perception of design as a profession as well as the way in which one practices and makes a living from the practice of.

What will it mean to be a designer, specifically a web designer or developer a year or five from now?

I have my own theories, ideas and moral dilemmas concerning the topic and will perhaps expand on them in future articles, but a comment like this really makes me think.

Where do you see things heading?

Since I got this site up and running a few months ago, I have been slowing refining it, making it better, adding useful little pieces here and there. This morning I was so inspired to do so after catching this image via The Book Cover Archive. It’s amazing how quickly and easily you can be inspired when you really aren’t digging for inspiration at all. On other occasions when you are really searching for something to grab you and inspire it’s near impossible.

I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundament­ally more. Design isusability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.
- Mark Boulton

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Here are my thoughts on this subject. Often times during my design process I am faced with the problem of the client focusing too much on the “look” of the design rather than the way in which the content is presented or furthermore, functions.

Let’s take a typical process example. I present a client with a rough comp of the site, a visual comp in jpeg form let’s say. The client is pleased and signs off on the comp so I proceed to development. (shortened version of the process).

Now we fall upon a review of the site. The client while at home views the working draft in the latest version of Firefox, things look wonderful to them. However they then decide to grab a quick look later that day, this time viewing it on IE 6 at the office. Interestingly the button on the check out page seems to have shifted 2px to the right when compared to FF and certainly does match the design visual first presented. Oddly this is now of primary concern and we will spend the better part of the day fixing it.

Ok more than likely an easy fix, but here is the point. While that might be an annoyance to them, most of their end-users will never know the difference. What the client should be focusing on are things like how inviting is the button based on placement, color etc. How much sense does it make and will it lead the end-user to click or can it be done better. Secondly they should be focusing on what happens when the button is clicked. Is the next step logical or is it confusing. Can step 1 and step 2 be combined to make this process easier and thus more inviting.

In my opinion these are the types of problems that design should be concerned with solving, but unfortunately we are now concentrating on that pixel instead.

How does the original visual comp influence this behavior? By presenting the client with the visual representation of the site we are encouraging them to focus on the look of the site from the get go.

Unfortunately this is not the way the web works, it is a living working machine that will be viewed by hundreds of different users of varying technical skill and understanding, on hundreds of combinations of software and hardware making it near impossible to truly accommodate the same visual experience in each. Thus the focus should be on the interactive experience.

That is not to say that the “look” of the site is not important to certain degree. The aesthetics should play a role in the overall design itself, but they should just make sense. They should work cohesively with the architecture of the site to lead the end user to complete the process with little thought.

Take for instance a well designed home. You may see it and say Wow look at all of those beautiful windows! or Wow, so modern looking, I love it. But if you where to dissect it further you might gain a better understanding of why the architect choose to design the house with so many windows on this particular side of the building. Possible energy reasons, lighting etc. Things that will lead to the way the home is used and interacted with. These intricacies or more technical aspects of the design are what will come to matter in the daily life of the home owner after the initial awe has sunk in. The home owner is the end user in this case.

How do we go about alleviating this problem. It’s certainly going to depend on several factors both on a per business case and per project case. Things like current work process, type of business, type of client and even project budget are going to play key factors in how you approach it.

Overall I think there needs to be a stronger communication of how things work rather than how they look leading the client to focus more on the important aspects of the site.

The concept of skipping Photoshop and going straight to development has certainly been discussed.

Or perhaps you explore a way in which you continue to present the client with design visuals in more of a diagram format explaining the interaction more deeply.

Perhaps a meshing of wireframe with visual comp that truly explains interaction on the site. What happens when you click here.

I think there are a lot of possible approaches to solving these issues and it is going to have to start with allowing yourself to break free of some of your current thoughts and processes. It is also going to rely heavily on the education of clients. Preaching the importance of on site interaction and end user intuition and how they relate to achieving the true goals of the design project.

Stay tuned, there is a follow on article in the works.