Category: Career

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A List Apart business Career Design

Job Hunting For Web Designers

Stagnation is fine for some jobs—when I was a dishwasher at The Earth Kitchen vegetarian restaurant, I enjoyed shutting off my brain and focusing on the rhythmic scrubbing of burnt pans, the slosh and swirl of peas and carrots in a soapy drain—but professionals, particularly web professionals, are either learning and growing or, like the love between Annie Hall and Alvy Singer, becoming a dead shark. If you’ve stopped learning on the job, it’s past time to look around.

Source: If Ever I Should Leave You: Job Hunting For Web Designers and Developers · An A List Apart Column

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A List Apart business Career client services content strategy Corporatism creativity Design Designers UX

A List Apart ? 421 Gets Personal

A List Apart Issue No. 421

THERE’S GREAT reading for people who make websites in Issue No. 421 of A List Apart:

Resetting Agency Culture

by Justin Dauer

Forget Air Hockey, Zen Gardens, and sleep pods: a true “dream” company invests in its people—fostering a workplace that supports dialogue, collaboration, and professional development. From onboarding new hires to ongoing engagement, Justin Dauer shares starting points for a healthy office dynamic and confident, happy employees. ?

Crafting a Design Persona

by Meg Dickey-Kurdziolek

Every product has a personality—is yours by design? Meg Dickey-Kurdziolek shows you how Weather Underground solved its personality problems by creating a design persona, and teaches you collaborative methods for starting a personality adjustment in your company. ?

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Big Web Show Career client services Design The Big Web Show

The Arc of a Design Career: Khoi Vinh on The Big Web Show ? 128

Khoi Vinh, photographed by Khoi Vinh

KHOI VINH IS my guest in Episode ? 128 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”).

Khoi is a web and graphic designer, blogger, and former design director for The New York Times, where he worked from January 2006 until July 2010. Prior to that, Khoi co-founded and was design director for Behavior, a New York digital design studio. He is the author of  How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers (coming in 2015) and Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design (New Riders, 2010), and was a leading proponent of bringing grid-based graphic design principles to web design in the mid-2000s. In 2011, Fast Company named him one of “The 50 Most Influential Designers in America.”

? Listen to Episode ? 128 of The Big Web Show.

URLs

http://www.subtraction.com
https://twitter.com/khoi
http://howtheygotthere.us
http://trywildcard.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21askthetimes.html
http://www.creativebloq.com/khoi-vinh-using-sketch-instead-photoshop-6133901
http://www.behaviordesign.com
http://vllg.com/constellation/galaxie-polaris

Sponsored by DreamHost.

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Big Web Show Career Design The Big Web Show The Profession

Big Web Show ? 127: Those Who Can Teach with Jared Spool

Jared Spool of Center Centre and User Interface Engineering

IN EPISODE ? 127 of The Big Web Show, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering and I discuss the goals and workings of Center Centre, a new school Jared cofounded with Dr Leslie Jensen Inman to create the next generation of industry-ready UX designers. Topics include “teaching students to learn,” what schools can and can’t do, working with partner companies, “Project Insanity,” and designing a program to make students industry-ready.

WEBSITES & URLS MENTIONED

Center Centre
User Interface Engineering
@jmspool
@UIE
@CenterCentre
UX Mobile Immersion
Unicorn Institute
Brain Sparks (UX writing by Jared and others)
All You Can Learn

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Best practices Career engagement eric meyer facebook Happy Cog™ industry

Unexamined Privilege is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”

UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”—a feature conceived and designed by a group to whom nothing terrible has happened yet. A brilliant upper-middle-class student at an elite university conceived Facebook, and college students, as everyone knows, were its founding user group. The company hires recent graduates of expensive and exclusive design programs and pays them several times the going rate to brainstorm and execute exciting new features.

I’m not saying that these brilliant young designers are heartless, or that individuals among them haven’t personally experienced tragedy—that would be mathematically impossible. I have taught some of these designers, and worked with others. Those I’ve known are wonderful people who want to make a difference in the world. And in theory (and sometimes in practice) a platform like Facebook lets them do that.1

But when you put together teams of largely homogenous people of the same class and background, and pay them a lot of money, and when most of those people are under 30, it stands to reason that when someone in the room says, “Let’s do ‘your year in review, and front-load it with visuals,’” most folks in the room will imagine photos of skiing trips, parties, and awards shows—not photos of dead spouses, parents, and children.

So it comes back to this. When we talk about the need for diversity in tech, we’re not doing it because we like quota systems. Diverse backgrounds produce differing points of view. And those differences are needed if we are to put the flowering of internet genius to use actually helping humanity with its many terrifying and seemingly intractable problems.

If we keep throwing only young, mostly white, mostly upper middle class people at the engine that makes our digital world go, we’ll keep getting camera and reminder and hookup apps—things that make an already privileged life even smoother—and we’ll keep producing features that sound like a good idea to everyone in the room, until they unexpectedly stab someone in the heart.

1 Of course, not all my former students and employees work at Facebook; most don’t. But those who have gone there had other, equally lucrative options; they took the job to make Facebook, and maybe the world, a little better.

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A Book Apart Advocacy An Event Apart business Career client services clients conferences Design Designers Education engagement people

Design Is A Relationship

Mike Monteiro

MIKE MONTEIRO is a man on a mission. He wants to improve design by fixing the core of it, which is the relationship between designer and client. Too many of us fear our clients—the people whose money keeps our lights on, and who hire us to solve business problems they can’t solve for themselves. And too many clients are even more frustrated and puzzled by their designers than the designers are by the clients.

It’s the designer’s job to fix this, which is why Mike first wrote Design Is A Job, and spent two years taking the message into conference halls and meeting rooms from New Zealand to New York.

I wish every designer could read this book. I can’t tell you how many friends of mine—many of whom I consider far better designers than I am—struggle every day with terrible anxieties over how a client will react to their work. And the problem isn’t limited to web and interaction designers. Anybody who designs anything burns cycles in fear and acrimony. I too waste hours worrying about the client’s reaction—but a dip into Mike’s first book relaxes me like a warm milk bath, and reminds me that collaboration and persuasion are the essence of my craft and well within my power to execute.

If the designer’s side of things were the only part of the problem Mike had addressed, it would be enough. But there is more:

  • Next Mike will help clients understand what they should expect from a designer and learn how to hire one they can work with. How he will do that is still a secret—although folks attending An Event Apart San Francisco this week will get a clue.
  • Design education is the third leg of the chair, and once he has spread his message to clients, Mike intends to fix that or die trying. As Mike sees it (and I agree) too many design programs turn out students who can defend their work in an academic critique session among their peers, but have no idea how to talk to clients and no comprehension of their problems. We are creating a generation of skilled and talented but only semi-employable designers—designers who, unless they have the luck to learn what their expensive education didn’t teach them, will have miserably frustrating careers and turn out sub-par work that doesn’t solve their clients’ problems.

We web and interaction designers are always seeking to understand our user, and to solve the user’s problems with empathy and compassion. Perhaps we should start with the user who hires us.

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Big Web Show Career CSS Design people The Big Web Show

Animate This: Val Head on CSS, Pittsburgh, and The Big Web Show

Val Head

DESIGNER/DEVELOPER Val Head and I discuss her new book A Pocket Guide to CSS Animations (Five Simple Steps, 2013); the Web Design Day conference; working as a hired gun; JavaScript and CSS animation; the great city of Pittsburgh; what it takes to run a workshop; and more. Enjoy Episode ? 104 of The Big Web Show on Mule Radio.

There’s Always More

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Career cities Design development Education NYC The Big Web Show

Become a Web Developer: Avi Flombaum of The Flatiron School on Big Web Show 89

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AVI FLOMBAUM, dean of The Flatiron School, is my guest in Big Web Show Episode No. 89. A 28-year-old Rubyist, Skillsharer, storyteller and entrepreneur, Avi founded Designer Pages and NYC on Rails before creating The Flatiron School—a 12 week, full-time program designed to turn you into a web developer.

Listen to Episode No. 89 of The Big Web Show.

URLS, URLS, URLS

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Big Web Show business Career clients Design Designers development HTML

Big Web Show 77: @sazzy

IN EPISODE No. 77 of The Big Web Show, I interview returning guest Sarah Parmenter about designing an app for the homeless; the challenges of multi-device design; teaching HTML and CSS to young people; designing a complex reader app; the ideal number of employees for a small design studio; Brooklyn vs. small-town UK; and more.

The Big Web Show features special guests on topics like web publishing, art direction, content strategy, typography, web technology, and more. It’s everything web that matters.

Sarah Parmenter Photo by Pete Karl II.

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"Digital Curation" Brands Career Design

Saul Bass pitches AT&T

CULTURAL HISTORY GEM: Saul Bass’s Original Pitch for the Bell Systems Logo Redesign, 1969. Article and curation via brainpickings.org. Hat tip: Tim Murtaugh.

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A List Apart books business Career Code creativity CSS CSS3 Design Responsive Web Design The Profession

Build Books With CSS3; Design a Responsive Résumé

“WE ARE ALL PUBLISHERS,” claims Issue No. 353 of A List Apart for people who make websites. Design books with CSS3; craft a responsive web résumé.

Building Books with CSS3

by NELLIE MCKESSON

While historically, it’s been difficult at best to create print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings us the Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting. “Paged” media exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file. It’s a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster. Nellie McKesson, eBook Operations Manager at O’Reilly Media, explains how to build books with CSS3.

A Case for Responsive Résumés

by ANDREW HOFFMAN

Grizzled job hunting veterans know too well that a sharp résumé and near-flawless interview may still leave you short of your dream job. Competition is fierce and never wanes. Finding new ways to distinguish yourself in today’s unforgiving economy is vital to a designer/developer’s survival. Happily, web standards whiz and mobile web developer Andrew Hoffman has come up with a dandy differentiator that is just perfect for A List Apart readers. Learn how to author a clean résumé in HTML5/CSS3 that scales well to different viewport sizes, is easy to update and maintain, and will never grow obsolete.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

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A Book Apart Acclaim Best practices business Career client services clients Designers E-Books Publications Publishing

Mike Monteiro’s “Design Is A Job” is finally available to buy or preview.

CO-FOUNDER of Mule Design and raconteur Mike Monteiro wants to help you do your job better. From contracts to selling design, from working with clients to working with each other, his brief book Design Is A Job is packed with knowledge you need to know. This is one of the most in-demand titles we at A Book Apart have yet published, and the long, long wait for its release (and yours) is finally over!

— Enjoy an exclusive Preview of Design Is A Job in Issue No. 348 of A List Apart, for people who make websites.

— Buy Design Is A Job directly from the makers at A Book Apart.

Also of interest:

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"Digital Curation" Advocacy Best practices business Career Design SVA Teaching The Essentials The Profession

Selling Design – an online reading list

TOMORROW, WHICH IS also my birthday, I begin teaching “Selling Design” to second-year students in the MFA Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, New York. Liz Danzico and Steve Heller created and direct the MFA program, and this is my second year teaching this class, whose curriculum I pull out of my little blue beanie.

In this class we explore collaboration and persuasion for interaction designers. Whether you work in a startup, studio, or traditional company; whether you design print, products, purely digital experiences, or any combination thereof; whether you’re the sole proprietor, part of a tightly focused team, or a link in a long chain of connected professionals, it is only by collaborating skillfully with others—and persuading them tactfully and convincingly when points of view differ and yours is right—that you can hope to create designs that make a dent in the universe.

During this spring semester, we’ll explore collaboration and persuasion from many points of view, and hear from (and interact with) many accomplished designers who will serve as special guest speakers. For our opening get-acquainted session, we’ll focus on texts that explore the some of the most basic, traditional (and rarely taught) aspects of design professionalism from the worlds of web, interaction, and print design:

Demystifying Design

by Jeff Gothelf – A List Apart

  1. Draw together
  2. Show raw work (frequently)
  3. Teach the discipline
  4. Be transparent
  5. Take credit for your wins

Design Criticism and the Creative Process

by Cassie McDaniel – A List Apart

  • Critique as collaborative tool
  • Presenting designs
  • What is good feedback?
  • Negotiate criticism
  • The designer as collaborator

Personality in Design

by Aarron Walter – A List Apart

  • Personality is the platform for emotion
  • A history of personality in design
  • Personas
  • Creating a design persona for your website [or other project]
  • Tapbots: Robot love
  • Caronmade: octopi, unicorns, and mustachios
  • Housing Works: a name with a face
  • The power of personality

Design Professionalism

by Andy Rutledge

You should read this entire brief book, but for now, sample these bits:

Do You Suck at Selling Your Ideas?

by Sam Harrison – HOW Magazine

Dyson is used as an example of a product that currently dominates the market, even though nobody initially believed in the inventor’s idea. Lessons:

  1. Tell a personal story
  2. Create emotional experiences for decision makers
  3. See what’s behind rejections

How to sell your design effectively to the client

by Arfa Mirza, Smashing Magazine

  1. Understand the nature of your client
  2. Have a rationale for every part of your design
  3. Show the best design options only
  4. Defend your design, but don’t become defensive
  5. Solicit good feedback and benefit from it

Money: How to sell the value of design – an email conversation

by Jacob Cass – Just Creative

Narrative of standing up to new-client pressure to do something against the designer’s self-interest, or which devalues design. Story told here is about money but it could be about any designer/client conflict in which the designer needs to gently educate the client. (Some designer/client conflicts require the client to educate the designer, but that’s another matter.)

How to choose a logo designer

by Jacob Cass – Just Creative

Basic article outlines ten background materials any designer (not just logo designers) should prepare to encourage confidence on the client’s part:

  1. Experience
  2. Positive testimonials
  3. A thorough design process
  4. Awards won/published work
  5. A strong portfolio
  6. Price
  7. Design affiliations
  8. Great customer service
  9. Business Professionalism
  10. Appropriate questions
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Big Web Show business Career Design

The Big Web Show No. 61: Khoi Vinh of Mixel and NYTimes.com

NOW ONLINE for your pleasure! In Episode No. 61 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview Khoi Vinh, co-creator of Mixel, former NYTimes.com Design Director, co-founder of NYC design studio Behavior, and more.

In this episode we discuss Khoi’s career, including his fine-art background, art school, and design classes, his time at AIGA, how he came to love the grid, why he joined the NYTimes.com and why he left, and more. We also explore the inspiration that led Khoi to combine social with collage, and talk about the choice every design studio faces as it begins to succeed: get bigger, or get more selective? Don’t miss this free-ranging exchange of ideas with one of webdom’s nicest and most influential designers.

The Big Web Show features special guests and topics like web publishing, art direction, content strategy, typography, web technology, and more. This episode is sponsored by Happy Cog Hosting, TinyLetter, and Uncle Slam.

Other recent Big Web Show episodes:

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Advocacy Best practices business Career creativity Design

Veen: Building Typekit on relationships

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.

Building Typekit on relationships by Jeffrey Veen.