I ran across this interesting blog post about a website that has businesses post a price they’re willing to pay for some design work then designers can try to land that project (or cash prize as I like to call it) with their submission of logo designs. Here’s the article if you want to have a quick read through.

Colorful metaphors aside, he makes some valid points even if he did get threatened with a lawsuit (please don’t sue me I’m here merely to observe.) It’s a dangerous scenario when a client posts a couple sentences description about a logo design for the whopping price of $200 and then expects designers to battle it out posting their blindly informed visual concepts for the customer to choose from. It is a dangerous trend and damaging to design community at large in my opinion. It also perpetuates stereotypes that designers are merely there to make something pretty and anyone can do that..a sort of Miss Universe beauty pageant where the contestants aren’t allowed to speak.

In our society of commodization the last stronghold tri-fecta is that of creativity, innovation, and strategy. You simply can’t outsource that or box it into a plastic package for sale in the checkout isle. Sites like the one he mentioned among others with similar business approaches only cheapen what we do into a 5th grade art contest trying to please the judge with the prize of a some cash in our pockets. There is no give and take between a client and the designer, no partnership in the creative process. Designing is a relationship between the client and creative architect where each educates the other resulting in a well thought out final design solution. The designer explains his reasoning for his visual approach to a business problem and client teaches the designer about their business. If we degenerate into a design community of lowest prices goes based on a few short sentences about our client then it’s game over. You might as well just select from some clipart as a customer since that’s the quality you’ll be getting. Think of it as an investment, spend the extra money and get something that is at that professional caliber your business deserves. You’ll be happier, your customers will be impressed and the designer will respect himself in the morning. There are lower cost design services out there that still offer quality work but making it a contest doesn’t do justice for anyone.

“Anyone can perform open heart surgery just give them the right tools”

“Usability Testing Castaway”

We’ve been working closely with MSU Usability Center to conduct testing on a high profile website client. This testing came after the fact we built the site but now I can see the benefit of testing through iterative phases. While not cheap to conduct an organization that truly wishes to make their site focused and effective should definitely consider running their site through this valuable process.

The testing entails a series of questions they ask typical users to run through in finding some information in the web site or to perform a specific task such as purchasing something. The subjects are monitored on video and they’re encouraged to verbally talk about their process as they decide where to go as well as offer up suggestions that would improve their experience. Meanwhile we as developers watch the testing in another room and can’t seem to yell loud enough through the wall “click on the link that says e-commerce!!” all the while they were just looking for a link that says “Buy this item here.” I think we as web developers and designers often forget that we’re not the typical average user. We often fall into traps of using jargon and terminologies in our sites that an avergage user wouldn’t understand. Many times this is the verbage coming from the organization but they too aren’t the typical user. They come from the perspective of how their business runs and already have their own biases in using internal terminologies that can further confuse a user. If you want to make a happy customer they need to achieve the goals of your site, enjoy the experience and come back. A effective useable website will provide them answers quickly and be presented in a logical layout that strengthens your branding but more importantly accomplishes helping your user find what they need. A happy customer means a happy website owner.

Often during the study we noticed a simple thing of how something is labeled would confound and confused users even if it made complete sense to us. Simply adjusting the verbage to something more simple and clear to the customer and not to expectations of the organization or developer increases click through rate immediately and drives them to the answer they were looking for to begin with. We should always be conscious of how the site is reading right down to how we verbalize the links or the sub headlines. User center design starts and ends with the users and the sooner we can have them involved the better the site will be.

It seems a lot of web designers these day are trend following. The great glossy logo with the the reflective drop shadow, the saturated colors, the large beveled button, the ever omnipresent drop shadows and the same overused content layout patterns that mimic most blogs out there. It’s all fine and well but I think a lot of new media designers never even laid out a brochure or flowed text into a magazine article. How often did they experiment with type as they’ve been confined in a browser that wants system fonts for the default of the body copy.

With traditional print your open to a totally new set of creative possibilities and new types of boundaries so It’s unfortunate they miss some of these great learning experiences about content layout and page flow that could help them increase their web design skills. Really isn’t that the purpose of web? Content presentation and providing information? So when designers get so focused in on making big flashy graphics and ignoring text and how it reads within the page, they’re doing their readers and themselves a disservice. Magazine layouts and brochures are a great resources to get inspiration for line height and weight and unique layouts within an organizational grid. They show us from decades of the industries’ evolution how to effectively make copy readable and impactful. Ever create a 3 column text layout with a quote callout within the body copy? It’s done in magazines all the time but you don’t see it too often in a webpage. Most of the time a webpage’s subpage copy is just a pasting of a word document with some paragraph breaks thrown in. With the power of CSS we are given much more control of the type than we used to and we need to take advantage of it.

We as web designers need to take special attention and care to the text and how we present content and help engage the reader. Save that beveled gradient button for another day. Check out some of these great examples of content presentation in some brochure samples over at Smashing Magazine. 

click on any of these images to see some more.
 

Not just any designer, but a designer who will kick their ass. I’m curious to see where this will go. I’d like to see what people submit, but I doubt they can just publicly display peoples’ intellectual property. Maybe some people will volunteer it, who knows?

If I was going to design their web site, I wonder what I would do? I wonder what anyone on our team at Artemis would do? Maybe for fun, I’ll post something here later.

I’m going to keep checking in on 37S and watch where this goes.

Oh, and this makes me want to post a reference to a quote by Zeldman: “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”