Drawar

Yesterday I got asked on Twitter if this is a custom design. I guess you could consider it one because I coded it up and “designed” it myself, but I had to chuckle at the question because there really isn’t that much to the design of any of the sections on this site. I try to only add what I feel is necessary, but as designers we know that is hard to do. At least it is hard to do and still make things look good.

Then I came across this quote by Phillipe Starck:

The designer today should not help to produce more — he has to help produce fewer and better things. There is a beauty, an aesthetic and philosophy of the less.

There is already enough stuff in the world. The software that we use already has enough features. The TV remote already has enough buttons. Now it is time for designers to start figuring out how we can design less, but get more out of it.

Dave Winer wrote a nice little piece on minimal email software. It doesn’t exist. The problem though isn’t that I need email software with less features, Sparrow already does a decent job of this. What I need is email software designed to make it so that I only get the email that I really need to pay attention to. I know that has more to do with who has access to my email address, but hopefully you get my point.

Let’s start producing fewer things, but the collective of those things is way better than what exists today. I think it will help the world out more than we could ever imagine.

It seems like yesterday I was lamenting the fact that so many Twitter Bootstrap sites look like Twitter Bootstrap sites. It is kind of understandable because Bootstrap is being used as a framework to get an idea up and out the door and most people that use it are developers who might not want to take the time designing something unique. However, I’m starting to see an even more disturbing trend: the rise of the Pinterest layout.

Of course Pinterest didn’t come up with their layout. It has been around for a while since the arrival of the wonderful Masonry plugin. But you have to admit that Pinterest has totally owned the layout style due to its popularity. Unfortunately, it is being seen as a good design solution, but to me it is creating more problems than it is solving.

This is not a new topic. We had a discussion about this in the Community. The reason I’m talking about it again is because I came across an aesthetically pleasing site by Google, Google Ventures. The problem with the site is that the content doesn’t really fit within the design. The content is meant to be read, but the design makes my eyes move all over the place and instead of trying to focus and read each block I just scroll up and down and eventually click on something random. It is as if they already decided on the layout before they even knew what the site was going to be about.

Where are my eyes supposed to go? I’m not even sure Google Ventures knows.

I don’t have a problem with designers following trends. I have a problem when designers use trends that don’t apply to the problem they are trying to solve. Programmers have a ton of design patterns they can apply when trying to solve a specific problem. In a way designers have them as well, but unfortunately too often we apply them for aesthetic reasons instead of functional reasons. Even worse is that the designers behind Google Ventures are professional designers that help startups with their design decisions. It isn’t like they don’t know what they are talking about, they write some brilliant stuff.

So does this mean that the “Pintereset/Masonry” design pattern should only apply to images? Of course not, I’m sure there are a lot of great uses for it, but breaking up content that is meant to be read isn’t one of them. Unfortunately, your client probably won’t understand that.

Doesn’t matter the resolution, this site is beautiful.

We’re Stry, a new type of news organization. We don’t care much about big headlines or news of the day, and we’re not easily distracted. We’re just a band of reporters in pursuit of great storytelling. We tell stories about the issues that affect our lives.

Works for me.

There are consequences to being the first one out the door with a new design idea. You might get a ton of praise, but it also takes a lot of time for people to understand what you are doing. Usually this is because there are established design paradigms in a person’s head and when you try to introduce something new it throws them for a loop.

Designing Ideas

Today I came across Rechner, the world’s first gesture based calculator.

Personally, I don’t use a calculator enough to remember how a gesture will work. I like to open the calculator app and use the functions that are right there on display. Does this mean that an app like Rechner should’ve never been created? Of course not, but I think it is such a far leap ahead for people that are used to having the calculator functions readily apparent to them, that it might not go over well with the general public.

From a design perspective you have to question if it is a better function to hide the way you use a design or to make it readily apparent. There are ways to bridge the gap when it comes to new design paradigms and old ones. The Apple lock screen on iOS devices is a great example.

Before the camera icon appeared the text read “Slide to unlock”, but there is also an animation going from left to right. This helps anyone new to this design paradigm jump right in without having to figure things out. It is a small touch that most people wouldn’t notice, but subconsciously it does the right job. I can only imagine how long it took Apple to figure it out.

The challenge isn’t in creating a gesture-based design. The challenge is designing one that people will understand.

Every day I wake up and I see inspiration all around me. This might not be positive inspiration. Sometimes it is negative inspiration where I see something that could be done better and I think of how I would design it. Because of this I’m already planning in my head how I am going to go about it. 99.9999999% of the time these ideas don’t get beyond my subconscious and that is okay because they help to make sure that the 0.000000001% do succeed.

At least I think.

Unfortunately when those far and few between ideas reach the screen they might not be able to succeed, but it doesn’t matter. The fact that I can get them out makes me a better designer. It makes me a better maker. It makes me a better inventor.

You rarely hear the term ‘inventor’ anymore, but back in the days a lot of famous people were inventors. Yesterday I even briefly talked about how designers are inventors. It isn’t easy being an inventor though because we live in a time where we immerse ourselves in everyone else’s designs. We continuously search for inspiration and whether we know it or not this inspiration sticks with us. It sticks with us so long that when we think about designing a solution to a problem we use the same approach that someone else already did.

How do we go about showing a ton of media to people? Do it the Pinterest way. We think like this either because the stakeholders want us to design it that way or it is the only idea that sticks in our brain. Designing new ideas is very, very hard.

The Safe Route

But knee-jerk design decisions are worryingly commonplace, and pose substantially more risk to software users. Familiarity is only one factor, and it’s often a deceptive one. Consider the entire scenario and context, and take the time to truly design your user’s experience.

Matt Gemmell

I’m in the process of designing some new software. I took the quickest route to get to a final objective that I could to please the stakeholders. At least that is what I told myself. As a designer I should’ve taken the time to really design a better solution because I believe there is always a better way to do something than what is currently out there.

So I went back to the drawing board and came up with a new solution that I don’t believe exists yet. It makes putting the rest of the pieces a bit tougher to put together, but when was innovative design ever easy?

The Problem With First

There are consequences to being the first one out the door with a new design idea. You might get a ton of praise, but it also takes a lot of time for people to understand what you are doing. Usually this is because there are established design paradigms in a person’s head and when you try to introduce something new it throws them for a loop.

Clear for the iPhone.

Clear is a great example of this. When it first came out it received a ton of rave reviews for its innovative UI. I loved it at first and spread the love around, but now I don’t even use it anymore. Why? I just couldn’t remember all the gestures that I need to get the task done so I went back to the iOS applications that followed the same conventions. Does this mean Clear failed? No, but maybe they made a giant leap too fast for everyone on the planet to understand it. However, they have cleared (I’m so witty) the path for more designers to think outside the box and design new ways to interact with their applications.

Never Really First

WordPress has a feature that allows you to edit a post in full screen. This is what I’m currently looking at:

WordPress fullscreen mode.

People love this feature. It is a distraction free writing, but is it new? There are writing applications that have been taking this approach forever. Before computers you had typewriters offering this very feature. Before that you had pen and paper. The problem with designing new ideas is that we are too busy looking at what the people are designing around us to realize that many of the solutions to the problems we are facing have been solved already in a different time.

You will never be first with a new idea. You will be first with a new way to present the idea or a new way to combine that idea with another. Ideas are nothing more than mashups of the past. Once you can embrace that, your imagination opens up a bit more and you start to look elsewhere for inspiration.

The toughest decision comes down to deciding if you want to stick to normal conventions or pursue something better. One is easier, the other is more fulfilling. I’ve gone down both paths depending on budget and time constraints. However, every time I went with convention something in the back of my head keeps telling me there is a better way. Sometimes I just can’t shut the inventor up, but he has earned the right to speak his mind.

At my current job, I’m a Senior Product Manager. That title is a bit a misnomer because in reality I’m really a designer. Even that label might throw people off because I don’t handle the visual design of the product at all. I blueprint it out so to speak as well as do a ton of other things. Job titles have always been a difficult subject because they don’t really give into detail what someone does unless you are the CEO or something.

Buckminster Fuller was a man before his time. He would’ve suffered a lot if given a specific title. Fuller could’ve been labeled a systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He lived from 1895-1983 and was by all account a genius. Don’t believe me? He said this before we even had Twitter:

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist & evolutionary strategist.

Buckminster Fuller

Before the web was even around, Fuller came up with a quote that epitomizes what a web designer is today. The best designers understand this and the other ones simply think they are something less.

Artist

Artists make things look good and while the main role of a designer is to solve a problem, the most elegant solution usually involves some type of rare aesthetic quality that helps it stand out from other solutions.

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On dribbble, my favorite designer to follow is Bill S. Kenney. While most shots on dribbble go for the glamour and glitz, Kenny’s shots show progression of thinking through a problem. Each shot is of course beautiful, but it shows the artist on top of the problem solver.

Part of your role as a designer is to make things look good, but not at the expense of making them useful.

Inventor

What worries me about design trends isn’t that people follow them. They should follow them. What concerns me is that so many designers are applying solutions to other problems to the ones they are trying to solve. Every design is a solution to a problem. It is not some wrapping paper that can be applied to every package you come across.

The most fun part of being a designer is inventing new and better ways to get things done. Sometimes this means you follow a design trend from a different industry in a different era. Everything is a remix.

How many sites are popping up with the Pinboard look now?

Mechanic

Should designers know how to code? I’m not going to enter this debate, but if you look at designers in other industries they all understand the tools. Maybe not to the extent of an expert, but they make sure they know about them so they can understand their limitations and how they can possibly be transformed to do something new. The architect might not be able to use all the tools required to build a house, but he understands what they can do along with the materials being used.

Print designers have a firm grasp of color, paper, and printing. They don’t design something in Photoshop and send it off to the printers not knowing what is going to be the outcome.

Should web designers know how to program crazy jQuery interactions? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t know that those things are possible. Understanding the tools can only make you a better designer. Once you know what is possible with the tools at your exposure, the greater your imagination will open up to help you solve the impossible problems.

The best inventors always have a little bit of a mechanic in them.

Svbtle admin interface

Would Dustin Curtis have come up with his unique take on blogging if he wasn’t an inventor and mechanic? Sometimes the best things come out of just playing with the tools in front of you.

Economist

This one is interesting because it challenges the expertise of the designer. When we design a site for a client, I’m sure most of us feel that it is the best way for the client to go. We tell them how great it is and why it will work wonders for them without much consideration of the bottom line. There are hundreds of studies out there telling you how best sell to people and odds are you have read zero of them. How many marketing, sales or business books have you read lately?

One of the best non-design books that I have read is Ogilvy on Advertising. Not everything in the book applies to today’s Web, but the stories and insights that Ogilvy provides definitely opened my eyes up to consumer thinking.

As a designer if you don’t understand the audience or the business, how can you truly think you are solving the problem to the best of your ability?

Strategist

The hot term in business is “design thinking”. Part of the reason for this is that designers are at the core strategist, whether they realize it or not. They can see how designs can transform and evolve over time. It isn’t about knowing how everything will look 10 years from now, but it helps to have an idea of how it will all function by then.

A List Apart and Smashing Magazine both started off as online publications and have now morphed into full-fledged media companies. Strategists are behind these companies, but people see them more as designers. Is there really a difference?

The Shortage

I often read about how companies are struggling to find designers, while there are a ton of designers out there starting to look for work. Most of them though are still at the “just a visual artist” level. A designer needs to be all of the things above and that is what a lot of companies are looking for without realizing it. Unfortunately a lot of designers don’t realize that they should be these things as well and you won’t be those right away, it takes time.

Today’s designer is a renaissance man. At least the great ones are. Study the topics that you didn’t think about studying. Read the books you didn’t even knew existed. Write your ass off. Design new thing without worrying about the look of it for a while. Plan ahead.

Be a Buckminster.

A complementary site made for the Hunger Games. This site is wonderful on so many levels. The feel of the site gives it an rustic, but futuristic look. The content matches the design. The little details all come together nicely. My only beef would be the terrible movie times ribbon at the top, but I guess it was necessary to promote the movie.

Today I was fortunate enough to have an article of mine published over at Smashing Magazine called You Design It, They Do It. The premise is that so often we try to figure out why people act the way they do when they are on our designs when the answer is pretty obvious: when designed those actions into it. When talking about “undesign”, I made this comment:

The design world as a whole is finally moving towards a place where we understand that we need to just get to the damn point with our designs.

What is the point of the page you just designed? Is it to get people to read the content? Is it to get people to click the ads? Is it to get people to type in whatever they want so they can search for it on the web?

It is sad that pageviews are used as a measuring stick for how well a site is doing on the web because most of the time it is pretty inaccurate. While we think that people go through a lot of pages on site because they are loving the content and want to see it all, often it is just that they don’t know what to do on a page so they click around and are sent somewhere else. Making it completely obvious what someone should do would drop the pageviews of a ton of sites and that means a loss of revenue. There should be a new type of revenue model that focuses on helping the user, but that is another post for another site.

Hotel Bathrooms

Hotel bathrooms trip me out sometimes. Have you ever been into one where there is a tub, shower, phone, and television? What are you supposed to do in there? I can go and sit on the toilet, while watching TV and making a phone call, but that seems awkward. Contrast that with a restroom in a stadium and it is obvious what actions it was setup for. Toilet and sink. Get in and get out. It isn’t a lounge area.

The design world is going back to the basics of making things obvious, but it is going to be an uphill battle with the higher ups that think there should be more involved. The iPhone is a pretty basic phone. Take pictures, record video, make a phone call, and talk into it. However, there are a million different uses for it because of the App Store. Apple though only has to focus on the core features of the phone meaning they can continue to produce a brilliant product.

Whatever you are designing right now, look at it and ask yourself is it obvious what someone should be doing with it? Now take the weekend off from the design and come back to it Monday and ask yourself the same question.

Undesign and minimalism. They seem to be terms that some people enjoy using when it comes to designs that don’t offer six fonts families and 39 unique colors. More recently on a very popular web design blog, there was an article about undesigning your portfolio. Curious as to what undesign meant I had myself a gander and it made me sad.

Even the most ineffective, unattractive or simple of man-made objects have been designed in some way. The same is true for the Web: Even the most hideous of websites are created by someone who has consciously made decisions into its design.

For web design professionals, it’s normal to put a lot of work into a design, using research, analysis and their expertise to form a design to delight and engage. This process is not quick and while many of us spend hours crafting websites for clients, our own website goes wanting.

This makes sense to me. We all know that Craig’s list was designed whether we like to admit or not. There is always a decision about how something will work and that is design. However, things take a turn for the worse in the next section.

I associate “undesign” with websites where the design and content is scaled back to the bare necessities, allowing for the quick implementation of a simple yet professional design.

So far, only a small group of designers have adopted such an approach, so how undesign is defined in the future will inevitably change as more of us experiment with it.

Shouldn’t all designs be scaled back to the bare necessities? This might include a full-sized background image along with a well-produced video to get the desired effect, but every design has just enough of the bare necessities to get the desired effect. Some designers and clients just feel that they need to add more to their design to get there. If only a small group of designers have adopted this approach the world is in trouble. Essentially the world is filled with design hoarders who have to keep everything they own in a design. Doesn’t really sound like a designer to me.

I’m not going to reference any more of the article, but I understand what the writer is trying to say, I just think it is harmful to use a term that doesn’t apply to anything out there. There is no such thing as undesign. Undesign means no design and you can’t say that everything is designed and then reverse the argument by creating a term that goes against it.

The argument was made over six years ago that the web is 95% typography and that hasn’t changed. Is the new rdio undesign? How about the Build Conference site? These are just finely executed examples of great design that don’t rely on a million elements to pull everything together. However, they are also designs that are extremely hard to achieve.

The design world as a whole is finally moving towards a place where we understand that we need to just get to the damn point with our designs. It isn’t that we don’t have enough time to create something that is perceived as elaborate. In fact, it takes us more time to finally come to these perfect solutions of “undesign” and “minimalism”. Don’t you think it is weird that every designer you come across says they like minimalism? Minimalism is an art term that designers tried to bring over into our realm. We don’t do art. We engineer solutions and if that solution is anything more than ‘minimal’ then it usually means we lost a battle with a client.

Design is design. I know it is easier to place special terms on designs to help categorize them, but at the end of the day they are aiming for the same goal. To suggest that there is something called undesign does an injustice to the people that follow you and you have an influence over. Everything that we do has a decision behind it, whether we are conscious of it or not. If you are ever going to undesign anything then you need to make sure you go unpaid as well.

Snake the Planet! takes the classic Snake game and adopts it to the MPU urban canvas. Each level is generated based on the architecture of the building it is projected onto. Windows, doors and signs become the boundaries and obstacles in the game as animated objects collide with and bounce off them using real-time physics simulation. The multiplayer game also has a Tron-like competitive element, where one player can intentionally block the others’ path to win the game.