Project Heaven

The nice thing about a project like this is that there’s just no time for the types of things that can get in the way in a normal project. There’s no time for politics, no time for endless deliberation. I often use the phrase “it’s a marathon, not a race” but in these projects – it’s a race.

The difference in making these projects the best or worst experiences of your professional life is entirely who you’re working with, who you’re working for and the tone you set for the work together. I’ve had projects where everyone on both the agency side and the client side checked their egos at the beginning of the project and dove in to do the work as a single collaborative team. The agency/client division all but disappeared and everything was shared – both the failures and the successes. There’s laughter and there’s stress, and no one is in it alone. And at the end of every day, everyone can feel good about the time that was put in on the project.

Project Hell

The other type of project is where there’s no shared ownership, no sense of a collective team. People aren’t collaborating, they’re “put on the hook” for things – and are more often than not, they’re set up to fail. Every day is met with dread. Every day it’s own small failure.

Not a day goes by that I don’t feel lucky to work with the folks that I work with today – meaning both my fellow designers, writers and developers as well as the clients we get to help. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything but that first type of project and I hope I never have to to back to an environment where the second kind is the norm.

A Few Words About the New Design

Faith already doesn’t like it – she liked seeing the three large photos of Cooper at the top of the page instead of ten thumbnail photos in the sidebar. And, now that I’m looking at it in my PC environment at 1024×768, I can see I didn’t leave much breathing room in the left and right margins for folks on smaller monitors. Lastly, I totally didn’t test the new design on IE6. I’m sure I’ll get to that during my next batch of free time, but as this is a personal site and not a business site – I’m going to cut myself a little slack on IE6. I troubleshoot CSS in IE6 enough during the day and I’m not looking to spend a lot of free time doing it on the evenings and weekends too.

That said, I did put “display:inline” in all my CSS floats tonight, as well as SuperSleight to get PNG transparency in for the IE6 folks.

Other Nerdery

It’s been a bit since I tinkered with my WordPress theme and I had forgotten how generally lousy the search results were and how awkward my archive landing pages were. A few Google searches later and I found the Search Except WordPress Plugin for highlighting searched terms and edited a few lines of PHP to put abstracts in my archive pages instead of full posts.

How About a Footer?

One thing I didn’t redesign was my footer – I’m still trying to figure out what to do about that. For the moment, I’m going to concentrate on fixing the couple of validation errors I have and clean up my CSS. At this point I’m just really excited to get the redesign live after a long time of looking at the old site design and wishing it were a bit more contemporary looking.

San Francisco Vacation

During my recent San Francisco visit for Cooper Training, Faith flew out and we made a bit of a vacation of it. Here’s some pics.

Recent Concerts

Dean & Britta played a great set at Schubas, Black Lips put on a powerful opening performance at Logan Square, I was excited to see Low back in action at the Metro, and I saw Joseph Arthur play with a band for the first time at the Double Door.

More Cooper Training This Fall

What a great surprise – three of us from Gerard Design will be attending a Cooper class this fall. In addition to Interaction Design, which I took a few weeks ago, I’ll also be taking Communicating Design.

One of the things that has never quite sat right with me about design, is that it’s all so awfully subjective. Sure, you can point to universal design principles, competitive analysis, heuristics and all of that – but when the rubber meets the road there’s a certain lack of teeth to explaining to someone why a design is not only good, but why it’s right.

That’s one of the many reasons why I’m been making efforts to become more than a web designer, but an experience designer as well. Knowing that this transition takes more than reading Boxes and Arrows and subscribing to UIE’s Spoolcasts, I decided that I needed some hands-on training. So recently, I was able to attend Cooper U’s 4-day Interaction Design Practicum.

Central to the course were personas – archetypes of actual user interviews, used to guide the design of a product or web site. Over the four days we discussed preparing for user interviews, interviewing techniques, methods for interpreting interview notes, creating personas from user interviews and making design decisions based on personas.

The best part is that the course was very hands-on, and each day I got an opportunity to actually try out what we were talking about. It’s one thing to read about interviewing, and an entirely different thing to interview the guy next to you. But I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone, and volunteered for anything that was offered in class. I figured if I were going to fail anywhere, this was a great place to do it. As a result, I got some great experience from the course – and I’m excited to try some of those techniques on my next project.

Fireworks plays better with Flash

Since Fireworks is vector by default, that means that objects you copy and paste into Flash tend to stay vector objects. This keeps your Flash file lightweight and editable, instead of bloated with bitmaps that you have to rework in Photoshop.

Find and replace with Fireworks

When you create a bunch of screen comps and then the client wants to change details across them, that usually means a lot of lost time to busywork. But with Fireworks you can find and replace 10pt Myriad with 12pt Helvetica Neue across a folder full of comps. If you’d like to create two sets of comps with different color schemes, that’s easy too. Just duplicate your folder of Fireworks PNG files, and run a series of find and replaces on colors instead of fonts. I can’t even tell you how much time this has saved me over the years.

Fireworks can save as PSD, AI and more

Let’s say the client loves your screen designs, and now they want the final files as Illustrator files instead of Photoshop files. If you made your comps in Photoshop, you’ve got a long week ahead of you remaking them in Illustrator. But not if you created them in Fireworks – just export as Illustrator. Changed their mind again? Export as a layered Photoshop file instead. Just because you work in Fireworks doesn’t mean everyone else has to.

Fireworks can use your Photoshop filters

Most Photoshop filters work just as well in Fireworks too.

Fireworks has layers and frames

Fireworks has layers just like Photoshop, but it has frames also. Want to create all your comps in one file? Just put all your global items (your masthead, for example) on a shared layer and then create your individual art on frames. When you’re ready to export all your comps, choose “Export Frames” and Fireworks will save each frame as it’s own image.

There’s a ton more timesavers like these

I could go on all day like this, but I’ll stop here for now. If you’re looking to work more efficiently on your screen designs, you owe it to yourself to check out Fireworks. Besides, Fireworks works hand-in-hand with Dreamweaver to make your web workflow even more seamless.

So when I stopped for directions at a local coffee shop and noticed that the woman I was speaking to had dense, dark hair on her knuckles ? I was simultaneously surprised and not surprised. The thing I noticed about my reaction was that I didn’t know whether to relate to her as a man or a woman. The social cues were all mixed up, and one moment she came off as a mothering figure drawing a map to my destination, and the next she was stroking her stubble trying to remember the name of the street I was to take a left at. Confusing.

Marginally disoriented, I decided to skip my original destination and head back to the hotel. The tricky thing about walking in an unfamiliar area is that you have no idea where the good and bad blocks are. I suspected I was beginning to walk through a rougher part of town when the bars looked like they also might have been strip clubs. I stopped in at a convenient store to get a Coke and a bag of peanut M&Ms when I noticed a familiar smell in the neighborhood. A combination of incense, marijuana, and plastic. I scanned the area and found the source of the familar scent ? there was a CD store across the street.

Ozone Records is a nice CD store on Burnside and 7th Ave. They have a great collection of indie and electronic music, as well as a decent selection of used CDs and music DVDs. I picked up a copy of Cobra Killer’s “76/77″, Manyfingers’ “Our Worn Shadow”, Burnt Friedman’s “Secret Rhythms 1″ and a bootleg DVD of Tom Wait’s “Big Time”.

After leaving the CD store, I decided to pop into a chinese restaurant for dinner. On entry, I quickly gathered that this place was not known for it’s fine cuisine. There were only two other people in the place, and one of them was singing kareoke. I decided to play it safe and order their chicken fried rice. I had eated about half of my dinner when a restaurant patron launched into a truly tragic rendition of a popular Fleetwood Mac song. Personally, I think Fleetwood Mac is unlistenable in it’s original form ? and this person wasn’t doing the song any favors. I quickly paid my bill and retreated back to my hotel room to catch up on my email and get some sleep for day 2 of Webvisions 2006.

He also got into the details of a variety of usability and user research methods, which I’m particularly excited to start using in my web projects. In the past I’ve been a bit intimidated to attempt user interviews and ethnographic research, but I think through this session I’ve found a new enthusiasm to use try and use them both.

Day two was a little less exciting. The first session of the day was Mark Wyner’s “Building Better HTML E-mails”, which was useful information, but not particularly exciting. Next up was Garrett Dimon’s “Improving Front-End Architecture”, which seemed like it was taking a long time getting to any kind of useful information. So I left 20 minutes into his session and finished out the hour in Kelly Goto’s “Designing for Lifestyle”. Her talk dealt mostly with Web 2.0 applications and the mobile web, so didn’t have a lot to do with my immediate web projects. But it was an interesting view into what other people are doing, which I’m sure will come in handy in other ways.

I had to catch a flight back to Chicago, so my last session for day two was Christopher Schmitt’s “Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7″. That was a particularly helpful session, because I’ve been a little concerned about the clearfix method I’ve been using to clear floats in all my site designs. So I was relieved to find out that I only have to change one line of CSS to make my sites work as expected in IE7.

But over time, I’ve begun to think that Fireworks might be safe after all. In addition to ImageReady being a lemon, there’s the fact that Fireworks and Flash work well together. And Flash is the golden egg. Plus, Dreamweaver is a keeper, and Fireworks and Dreamweaver work even better together.

Adobe France just announced that Freehand and GoLive will no longer be developed, but they will be supported for a while. What they didn’t announce is that Fireworks is dead. Which means I’m hoping that it’s either killing off ImageReady, or it’s best stuff is going to replace the crap in ImageReady. And that’s a lot of replacing.

Cool new features: the main three photos are linked from my Flickr account, and I can update them via my cameraphone. Also, the sidebar features events from my 30 Boxes account, as well as links from my del.icio.us account.

Plus, now my smartass friends can heckle me on my own site since WordPress has functionality for comments. I’m looking forward to what you people have to say. Kinda.

Take a look around, let me know what you think. I hope I’ve made something you’ll enjoy as much as I do.

This should be an exciting position for me, since in addition to designing and developing web sites, I’ll be able to contribute in other areas I haven’t had an opportunity to in the past. And I’ll learn more about print design as well.

Most importantly, they’re a small shop of people who care about doing good work for their clients, and taking care of their employees. For example, they have a realistic bonus program, and a dedicated yearly training allowance for each employee. That’s a refreshing change from my last workplace, where the environment had more to do with ego, posturing, and going public. Plus, I’ll be working among other designers (and learning print), instead of being the lone designer at my last two gigs.

The only challenge will be that as the only full-time web designer in a shop of primarily print designers, I might have to fill my need for web community elsewhere. Which isn’t such a bad thing really, since I need to network more than I do. Looks like I’ll be spending more time at A List Apart, YayHooray!, Speak Up and Kirupa.com. Maybe while I’m at it, I’ll join AIGA again, start going to Macromedia User Groups, and attend an occasional AMG meeting.