Great article about how detailed a rendering of an object can drastically change our perception of it’s meaning.
In the design community there often seems to be this need, or this want to immediately critique a design. Critique might be too kind of a word, it’s more of a hate on a design. To immediately call something out as terrible, wrong, ridiculous, stupid or just plain dumb. In offices I’ve worked in I often hear people immediately yell out that something is “clowntown” or laugh about how terrible a design is or how horrendous a drop shadow might be.
It’s not just limited to the office, online people are abhorring some new redesign, or how some small design tweak on a site is ruining everything.
This makes me sad.
It’s also not helpful to the community or design in general. I’ve been trying to figure out why web designers as group do this so often. My hypotheses so far:
Immaturity. Our profession is still very, very young and people in it our often very young. Few have had formal design training, and even fewer in a university setting and the ones that have often aren’t the really talented web designers out there. Our profession is so new that the pioneers didn’t have classes to take, and so haven’t had any formal training. Which, in turn, means they haven’t spent much time in any formal critique settings. Critiquing when the end result is positive is fantastic and a critical piece of the design process, but calling something out as stupid just because you’re angry isn’t.
Speed of delivery. Twitter, Facebook and blogging all give us the tools to immediately call someone out and blast it to 100, 1,000 or even 10,000+ people in just a few seconds. The speed at which you can say something is shocking so take a little more time to be clear.
A desire to seem intelligent or thoughtful about design. It’s the thinking that if you talk louder than the person next to you you’re going to come off smarter than the next guy. I don’t think most people do this consciously, but designers want their voices heard and they want to prove that they know what they’re talking about. It’s quicker to hate on a design picking out all the little things that should have been done than to just do something great yourself.
To be clear, it’s not actual design critique that’s a problem, it’s the quick comments and tweets that do more harm than good. I just don’t see how sending out hasty rants and complaints help us as a community create better designs. We’re just coming off as whiny and not solving any problems.
Instead we should be raising the level of debate in our community to produce and talk about designs at a higher level.
How can we do this?
Tweak before you speak. Just a small rephrasing of a remark about some new redesign can make a huge difference. Turn “OMG what the hell were they thinking with this site. Total fucking clowntown!” into something like “Looks like they missed their audience completely site feels bland a bit undersaturated and the type just doesn’t quite fit.”
Know your radius. You’ve got 20,000 followers, know that you’re going to blast a huge amount of people who respect your point of view. Be sure you’re clear and aren’t firing off without considering the impact it’ll have to the community.
Stop loving the sensational. Our community loves to jump on the bandwagon of something sensational. When Jason Fried publicly rails on Get Satisfaction or Merlin Mann’s enraged about Twit Shirt or John Gruber writes about the Apple’s app store people love to pile on. We place too much emphasis on the negative, the sensational, the bad, and not on conversations that help everyone get better. Imagine what great work people would be doing if they weren’t a bit afraid of the community jumping out and hating on them for something. Imagine if all of these “followers” were creators. Instead of getting caught up in the next mob lynching, they were busy creating something they truly love for us all to use.
I’m not looking to be a hall monitor, or suggesting that people shouldn’t be angry from time to time, but right now, at this stage in web design’s evolution, we’ve swung too far away from a positive discussion.
Let’s raise the level of debate and critique across the web, not just to be nice or to feel good about design, but because in the end it’ll produce better design by everyone.
I love reading about the design process, but this video showing the evolution of Convert for the iPhone is even better.
Absolutely love the new design. Does anyone know who did it?
Can’t. Stop. Drooling. Great iconography work here.
Friend and kickass designer/developer Shaun Inman has launched his new feed reading application Fever. It looks great and is something I’ve been hoping someone would develop for a long time. I don’t see mass adoption for something like this, but for those of you willing to dangle your feet in a little web geekery it looks fantastic. Both beautifully and smartly designed it definitely looks “hot”.
I forgot how much I enjoy Mark Pilgrim sometimes. Very well said sir, very well indeed.
A really nicely redesigned personal site for Jackson Wilkinson. He’s beta testing and using Savoy, the Django project Jeff create, I’ve contributed too, and the “magic” behind T Incorporated.
Love this. Hopefully it’ll be kept up and added to.
Love this post from Rands In Repose and it couldn’t come at a better time. I’m working on finishing up a lot of little details on a web application and it’s great to remember how important these little things are.
It’s already a fantastic resource and it looks like there are plans to add more stuff in the future. I’ve subscribed.
“Screen and Web Snapping for Mac OS X Leopard.” Looks like a great solution to something I’ve been hacking together for myself for years.
I’ve been using Instant Domain Search for years, but I like the suggestions this Domainr provides. It’s getting nearly impossible to get a good top level domain these days, hopefully this will help.
Saved so I can remember how to do this again when I setup a new machine.
Glad to see ALA is shifting to a broader design focus. I’m 100% in favor of this move, good call guys.
Basically the “safest option is to shade the alternating, individual rows of your table with a single color”. If you can’t do that stick with a horizontal rule for each table row.
I absolutely love this interactive graphic depicting the medal counts since the modern games inception in 1896. Big kudos for representing the different regions using color and a rough “map” via large circles. It’s great that you can quickly flip to just a straight numerical order too though.
“Oh! I’ve got a this problem with my email…” An absolutely perfect infographic depicting the problem our industry faces when we try and explain what we do.
Interesting new browser concept Adaptive Path did for Mozilla Labs. Lots of good, well thought out concepts but like a concept car this isn’t something we’ll be seeing anytime soon.
I love the new redesign. It’s clean, straight forward, ad free and there’s finally a character counter to let me know how long my description can be instead of being randomly being cut off. I’ve almost switched to ma.gnolia three or four time, but was always turned off by the ads. With this redesign I don’t see any reason to switch now. Well done del.icio.us design team.
A nice follow up to the previous article about budgets and website pricing on the Blue Flavor blog. It’s never easy to explain to someone how much a site costs, but this gives you a good idea what Blue Flavor generally charges.
A great stencil resource from the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. I plan on field testing these on my next project.
Glad to see it’s back, complete with a nice redesign and some “new” features like tagging and comments. It seems quaint that it didn’t have them before. A cold-water-to-the-face reminder of simpler era of the web.
Great advice from Ryan Singer over at 37 Signals. Whenever I’m building out site structures I’m constantly thinking about user tasks or “paths” as well.
A fantastic article from George Oates, one of the designers at Flickr. There’s too many quotes in there to choose just one, but it got me thinking about community design in a slightly different way.
I’ve been following along now with the project from Rob Goodlatte and his buddies. It’s not something I’m particularly interested in, but the design and concept is top notch. If you’re on Twitter and need a quick poll look no further.
A nice, and looks to be very complete wireframe stencil set from Graffletopia.
Nice new site from Paul Boag for his podcast. I finally met him briefly at SXSW this year and he was great to talk to. The inaugural interview for the new site is friend and fellow Blue Flavorite, Jeff Croft.