Ideology

I no longer want to be a designer and developer. I've come to a conclusion that lead me to believe to produce better work I don't need to be a better designer & developer. Design & development refers to the technical skills idealized by the people that make up the industry. But where do those come from? They come from the limitation of the mediums such as print and web along with use and needs of the people consuming it.

At this point trying to become a better designer & developer means taking even more time and isolating myself to more contact with others in those industries. With that may come a stronger set of technical skills and knowledge but comes with one major limitation: I won’t necessarily produce better quality work.

It might be better produced and have higher production values but the one thing that attracted to me to this field is that the value of the work isn’t purely derived from the quality of the execution. Instead the quality of our work is determined by the effectiveness at communicating the founding ideal to it’s audience. Therefore a good design piece doesn’t need to be made by a good designer.

Instead, I need to be a better human. I need to live more, experience more to become more empathetic to other people. With that comes understanding. Understanding that can be used to create better works that touch who we are as people. For instance we don’t love characters in our favorite movies because they are technically well handled. We identify with them, we understand them in some way and they evoke a response from us that becomes a positive connection. For instance in the original Star Wars trilogy I can identify with Darth Vader being those rare moments where we are blinded by ambition and use our power to harm the goals & ambitions of others. Because we can identify with characters like that the technical theories are produced to try and create the same result.

So in order to become a better designer we need to not spend so much time trying to be a better designer, but a better person. The more positive connections we can create with the world around us, the more cultured we can become, the more valuable our work will be as we try to use that to better connect with people, the ever-important creatures that consume our work.

While it may appear I'm speaking as becoming a business man that is the actually my limitation in my ability to communicate this idea. People are keen when you're not legitimate. People can tell when they're being manipulated and they do not like it. So it's in my best interest to be genuine in my cultural and social development and become a better person to have a better life. The better quality of work should be a by-product of those efforts.

Ok, so maybe previous articles and other stuff out there kind of abstractly talk about "good" design in terms of goals. However today I am presenting an metaphor I think we can all relate to.

Good Web Design is like Riding an Elevator

So lets think about this. Why do you use an elevator? We use them to get to places typically within the building we're on that are other than where we are now. Why use it? There's something we want on another floor whether it's something we want like another store or something we need from the place we're at. Sure they can also be used to just check out what's around as well, no harm in that.

When thinking about your destination is the elevator on your mind? Not really right? Exactly how a well designed website should be. You don't want it creating a bunch of visual noise that suffocates your content. You want people to be able to instantly make use of it to obtain the content they want while making sure the journey was pleasant enough for them to come back.

How People Use an Elevator

How does an elevator work? Well I'm not going to go into the specifics of how an elevator works but from a user perspective, the people who will be paying money at your stores or in our case using your site, their perspective is that you press a button an elevator comes to your floor. You wait a bit, enter it, then press the button to go to the desired floor and it goes there while picking up people along the way who pushed the button on their floor.

Strong Elevator Experience

Strong user experience for an elevator relies on the buttons being easy to find. The elevator being quick but not too quick, along with it being a smooth ride plus some sort of lighting (kids used to take out the lightbulbs in the elevators at my apartment, it was like riding in a coffin which was entertaining but still a bit off putting).

What a strong user experience doesn't need is someone welcoming them into the elevator, music, especially "elevator music", buttons that don't indicate where you're going, mechanical panels to reveal the buttons upon entering, nor security key fob scanners or card scanners. While those security measures are tolerable they're annoying.

Elevators are like Websites

Now back to websites. Websites are much the same way. Who wants to wait forever to get information you're looking for? Even on entertainment websites on Facebook it's important that you can use them to quickly find information on your friends so you can go back to what you're doing or share your next moment when the time comes. You're not waiting for the Facebook theme-song to play, animated buttons to load the content in box-by-box, everything that's there helps you use Facebook. Even the background color white is there to provide good contrast against black text which is generally the more preferred type colors based on readability.

Sure there are exceptions when more of an "experience" is needed to better sell the content. However I do challenge when they are needed, for instance: game sites. There was a game that came out a few years ago called "Nier" and wanting to learn more I went to their website: http://www.niergame.com/ the problem is I NEVER LEARNED what the game is about. Never found any gameplay footage or anything interesting, just sounds and animation and color that didn't help me get anywhere so you know what I did? I left. I haven't been there since just now and I never even played the game, I just didn't care anymore by that point.

Ok enough dramatics but I really like that song! Anyway I just pulled an all-nighter working on some projects for the last day of classes in this semester. As per usual my brain is still going no matter what so I got to thinking about the whole situation and I realized I kind of enjoy it once in a while. It's thrilling to find how committed you are to a particular interest or field. I think that's what you gotta do with your self to make sure you are where you want to be. Can you sacrifice a night of sleep for your job, career, passion?

It is rewarding though when all the assignments are handed in and the work is complete and the last class of the semester is dismissed. While I may not be standing tall, I'm at least still here. Still breathing. Sometimes, that's enough :)

I find myself often trying new software and techniques to help me get more out of my initial design ideas and documentation before I begin a site. What's worked best for me so far has been designing it in photoshop since it's less limited than the web.

However, it just occurred to me that the best tool to wireframe a design is actually paper. The reason is there's far fewer creative limits on it. For instance if you are working in HTML for your prototypes, you're always going to have to work in giant rectangles that either go side by side, vertically, or on top of each other. You can work around it but I feel if I were to start with HTML I wouldn't be pushing my designs to use those properties creatively.

The reason why I think that's bad is that it limits the result you'll have. Your design shouldn't be solely based on how it works behind the scenes but rather how it is experienced from a user's point of view. Therefore you should be working in a medium that focuses on the result and not the process and the mechanics behind it. There are of course exceptions but for most the client work I got, I'd be better off thinking more freely of what is the pure experience I want to offer the users of this website.

So from now on when faced with a design project I'm not going to jump into photoshop I'm instead going to take the time to really flesh everything out on paper using some 960 grid paper and color.