Make them dance, make them dance.
TYPEKIT FOUNDER JEFFREY VEEN has always shared knowledge freely, whether writing great books about web design and user experience, or (in this case) happily sharing a key secret of his business’ success: raising money isn’t about raising money – it’s about people.
IT’S BEEN CALLED the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-conomy, with the “e” standing for electronic, entrepreneurial, or perhaps eclectic. Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We’re no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we’re part-time lawyers-cum- amateur photographers who write on the side.
Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, many of them love it.
IN ISSUE NO. 334 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
Marry Your Clients: Learn to keep the client/agency relationship warm and passionate over time.
Being Human is Good Business: Turn word of mouth into your strongest brand asset through genuine, personalized, compassionate customer service.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.
FROM MY TWITTER STREAM of late:
Okay, that last one isn’t a web design link and the Apple comment could go either way, but that’s how I roll. Follow me on Twitter for more snarkeractive funucation!
Message:
To Whom it may Concern,
I recently discovered your “Home” page here:
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/10/17/ipad-as-the-new-flash/
Would you please consider adding a link to my website called Job-Applications.com? It is a resource that provides hundreds of printable and online applications for retail stores, department stores, pharmacies, grocery stores, restaurants, shops, etc. Its a great way for people to find part time and full time work quickly.
If you think it would be of use to your visitors, would you please consider adding a link to my website on your page here:
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/10/17/ipad-as-the-new-flash/
Here is the HTML link you could add: Job-Applications.com – Find hundreds of online applications and printable job forms.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks!
[Name withheld]
ISSUE NO. 330 of A List Apart for people who make websites tackles the thorny problem of using paper or PDF to convince potential clients you’re the right team for the job.
by Greg Hoy
If you work in any kind of service industry you’ve undoubtedly come across the Request For Proposal, or “RFP.” Alas, in practice, RFPs are the least creative way to hire creative people. The rigidity of the process, and the lack of meaningful dialogue makes this little more than a game of roulette. How can we successfully navigate the heartburn-inducing RFP process? And what can we as an industry do to turn RFPs into the exception rather than the default means of hiring an agency?
Comedy is easy, proposals are hard. A compelling proposal requires more than a jumble of clichés and a nervous estimate of costs. It needs structure, organization, and joie de vivre. Learn the key questions every client needs answered—and how to use them as the basis of a proposal that convinces your client you’re the right team for the job.
YOU FIND ME ENSCONCED in the fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta Intercontinental Hotel, preparing to unleash An Event Apart Atlanta 2011, three days of design, code, and content strategy for people who make websites. Eric Meyer and I co-founded our traveling web conference in December, 2005; in 2006 we chose Atlanta for our second event, and it was the worst show we’ve ever done. We hosted at Turner Field, not realizing that half the audience would be forced to crane their necks around pillars if they wanted to see our speakers or the screen on which slides were projected.
Also not realizing that Turner Field’s promised contractual ability to deliver Wi-Fi was more theoretical than factual: the venue’s A/V guy spent the entire show trying to get an internet connection going. You could watch audience members twitchily check their laptops for email every fourteen seconds, then make the “no internet” face that is not unlike the face addicts make when the crack dealer is late, then check their laptops again.
The food was good, our speakers (including local hero Todd Dominey) had wise lessons to impart, and most attendees had a pretty good time, but Eric and I still shudder to remember everything that went wrong with that gig.
Not to jinx anything, but times have changed. We are now a major three-day event, thanks to a kick-ass staff and the wonderful community that has made this show its home. We thank you from the bottoms of our big grateful hearts.
I will see several hundred of you for the next three days. Those not attending may follow along:
I HIRED JASON SANTA MARIA after reading this post on his site.
The year was 2004. Douglas Bowman, one of my partners on a major project, had just injured himself and was unable to work. I needed someone talented and disciplined enough to jump into Doug’s shoes and brain—to finish Doug’s part of the project as Doug would have finished it.
I lack the ability to emulate other designers (especially classy ones like Douglas Bowman) and I was a Photoshop guy whereas Doug worked in Illustrator, so I knew I needed a freelancer. But who?
A Google search on Illustrator and web design led me to a post by a guy I’d never heard of. The post was enjoyably written and reflected a mature and coherent attitude not simply toward the technique it described, but to the practice of design itself. Yes, the blog itself was intriguingly and skillfully designed, and that certainly didn’t hurt. But what made me hire Jason was not the artistry of his website’s design nor the demonstration that he possessed the technical skill I sought, but the fact that he had an evolved point of view about web design.
Anyone can write a how-to. Not everyone thinks to write a why.
Jason had.
I offered him the thankless task of aping another designer’s style for not a ton of money under extreme time pressure, and to my pleased surprise, he accepted. He did so well, and performed so selflessly, that I hired him for another project, this time one with full creative freedom. I have never regretted those decisions.
Just about everyone I know and work with I first met online. And, although well-done portfolio services have their place, neither I nor anyone at Happy Cog has ever hired someone purely (or even largely) on the basis of their portfolio. It’s all about how you present yourself online. Before I even meet you, do I feel like I know you—or like I wish I knew you?
Have you got a point of view? Are you sharing it?
IN MY APPRENTICE DAYS, I worked for Marvin Honig, a Hall of Fame copywriter who created indelible commercials for Alka-Seltzer, Cracker Jack, and Volkswagen during the 1960s and 1970s, and who assumed creative leadership of Doyle Dane Bernbach upon legendary founder Bill Bernbach’s death. It was not one of those bloody successions that stain the pages of history and advertising. Bill chose Marvin to carry on in his place.
By the time I met Marvin, he and I were toiling at Campbell-Mithun-Esty. He had been brought in to radically upgrade the financially successful but talent-challenged agency’s creative product. I was there because it was the first job I could get in New York.
Marvin was gentle. He never told you how stale your ideas were or how disappointed he was in you for not working harder. He made you believe you were the future, not only of the place, but of the profession.
Besides his warmth, what I remember most is a piece of advice he gave me: “If you’re not a creative director by the time you’re 40, get out of the business.”
Continue reading But What I Really Want to Do is Direct at Cognition, the blog of Happy Cog.
Q. Working with print designer who is just getting into web and they want to control everything. Any advice on how to deal with them? – @FossilDesigns
A. I ASSUME YOU’RE CODING what your colleague designs. Gently explain how pixel-perfect design falls apart on the web, using visual examples. Start with a design that looks great in the environment it was designed for. Your colleague will smile. “Yes, it does look nice here,” you will agree. Then move on to three or four common environments where that same design breaks or is unpleasant to use. As long as you are not being a jerk about your superior knowledge, your calm, friendly expertise together with a few examples should make your colleague amenable to learning more. At that point, there are dozens of resources in print and on the web. Start with gentle, introductory books and articles. (I wouldn’t plunge your friend into Mobile Boilerplate.) I leave it as an exercise to readers of this page to list articles and books that can help.
If your colleague remains adamant about pixel-perfect design, you’re working with the wrong designer. Relationships only work when respect flows both ways. If your partner will not listen, you need a new partner. If this is a freelance gig, find one. If it’s a job, and you simply can’t get through to your new colleague, involve your boss. Be firm but not threatening. You’re not trying to get your colleague fired, you’re simply trying to resolve a dispute in which only one of you has expertise. If you’re afraid to involve your boss, you’re in the wrong job, and your non-web-savvy colleague is merely a symptom of a larger organizational problem. Get out! You can do better.
Mandy Brown, Roger Black, Daniel Mall and I discuss the state of web design and publishing at SXSW Interactive, Sunday March 13, 2011.
Photos courtesy Adactio. Audio element courtesy HTML5. Sorry, no transcript is available at this time.
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS designing websites and applications, I still don’t think in words like “affordance.” And when my colleagues use a word like that, my mental process still clatters to a halt while I seek its meaning in a dusty corner of my brain. (When someone says “affordance,” there’s always a blank where thought stops, and then I see a mental image of a finger pushing a button or stroking a surface. Somehow that one image stands in for everything I know about what “affordance” means, and I’m able to jump back into the discussion and catch up with everyone else.)
Should you ask B.B. King if the lick he just played was in Lydian Mode, he could probably answer you after stopping to think about it. But after all these years playing blues guitar, B.B. King doesn’t say to himself, “I’m going to switch to a Lydian scale here,” he just plays blues. Scales and vocabulary are necessary when we are learning the craft behind our art. But the longer we practice, the more intuitive our work becomes. And as it becomes more intuitive, it disconnects further and further from language and constructs.
This is why young practitioners often argue passionately about theory while older practitioners tell stories and draw pictures.
Of course any practitioner, green or experienced, can create a word to describe the work we are inventing together, just as anyone, young or old, can have the next great idea. And it is most often the young who come up with exciting new ideas in UX and design and on the internet—possibly because they are still exploring theories and trying on identities, while those who work more intuitively may shut themselves off from the noise of new ideas, the better to perfect a long-term vision.
But the nice thing about the experience arc I’m proposing is that it allows younger practitioners to use words like “affordance” when working together to create a website or application (and soon we will stop distinguishing between those two things), while the older, storyteller practitioners use simpler, down-to-earth language to sell the work to clients, investors, or users.
We need both kinds of practitioners—theorists and those for whom everything has become intuitive second nature—just as we need both kinds of communication (craft vocabulary and storytelling) to do Our Jobs in Cyberspace.™ Don’t you think?
Where are you on this arc? Are you the kind of designer who gets fired up from reading a new theory? Or do you sketch and stumble in the dark, guided only by some Tinker Bell twinge in the belly that tells you no, no, no, no, hmm, maybe?
A FEW QUICK NOTES from the first hour of A Day Apart: Mobile Web Design, an all-day learning session led by Luke Wroblewski (aka Day III of An Event Apart Seattle), Bell Harbor Conference Center, Seattle, WA:
“I don’t want to be the record executive clinging to CD sales.”
Yelp: every other second a consumer calls a local business and generates driving directions from a Yelp mobile app.]]27% of all Yelp searches come from their iPhone application, which had 1.4 million unique users in May 2010.
Zillow.com: Viewing active listings 45% more often from mobile devices (audience is primarily active buyers, on location or scoping out neighborhoods)
Facebook: People who use Facebook on their mobile devices (200M active) are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users.
Let’s look at Gmail:
But what about mobile web usage?
40% of tweets sent via mobile.
16% of new users start on mobile.
Follow the live tweets at afeedapart.com.
ON SUNDAY, while leading a discussion on the future of web design and publishing, I noticed a slightly confused look appearing on some faces in the audience. The discussion had been billed as “Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel,” and I thought perhaps there was a disconnect for some in the audience between “design” and such topics as where content comes from and who pays for it.
So I asked, “Who here is in publishing?”
A few hands were gently raised.
Uh-huh. “And how many of you work on the web?”
Every right hand in the room shot up.
“You are all in publishing,” I explained.
Now, I like a good rounded corner talk as much as the next designer. I’ve given my share of them. Also of line height and measure, color and contrast, how to design things that don’t work in old versions of Internet Explorer, and so on. In the practice of web and interaction design, there will always be a place for craft discussions—for craft is execution, and ideas without execution are songs without music, meaningless.
But right now (and always) there is a need for design to also be about the big strategic issues. And right now, as much as design is wrestling with open vs. proprietary formats and the old challenges of new devices, design is also very much in the service of applications and publishing. Who gets content, who pays for it, how it is distributed (and how evenly), the balance between broadcast and conversation, editor and user—these are the issues of this moment, and it is designers even more than editors who will answer these riddles.