The video series is almost at an end, and it’s approrpriate that we’ve finally gotten to Stowe. The seed of these interviews was a post I wrote a while back, which came from hearing Stowe and Leisa Reichelt both talk about designing sites. Neither of them are designers in the traditional “graphic design” sense, so there was a bit of a definition question there for me.
Stowe’s pretty well known online, but if you haven’t read his blog or seen him speak yet: he’s a consultant, blogger and thinker, so far over “the edge” of social tools that he often sounds a little crazy (and I mean that in the most admiring way). He writes about social tool developments on /message, and earns his money by helping companies think through (or design) their tools.
Funnily enough, a number of people at Reboot asked me, “what exactly does Stowe do?” Admittedly, I didn’t really know exactly either. He explains it pretty good in the interview.
And what’s Stowe’s take on design?
It’s the laying out of processes or models that represent some thing that’s going to be built or manufactured.
Unfortunately we got cut short by the rain. I’ll see if I can’t squeeze some more out of him next time we see each other.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the ninth video in the series. The last two, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal, should be up tomorrow.
After seeing Cennydd’s presentation at Reboot 10, “Beauty in Web Design”, I knew I had to interview him as well. So in the ten minutes he waited on his taxi to the airport, we had a chat.
When I asked what design means to him, Cennydd said it was a “bloody hard” question, but judging by his definitive and certain answer, I reckon he was just playing coy.
Design is art within constraints. The primary one will be that it has to be functional, it has to do something. Design has to be for a purpose, it has to meet some kind of need, it has to achieve some kind of goal.
We then veered off into a discussion of canonical works of web design, and web design and beauty, which is maybe more interesting than my original question. I look forward to having another chat with Cennydd at the upcming dConstruct in September!
This is also my first test of viddler, which allows you to add a comment directly on the video itself. If you’ve got something to say, roll over the playback head on the timeline and then click the green + that appears.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? There are currently eight videos in the series, and more coming soon. Next up is Stowe Boyd.
I don’t mean to suggest for even a second that Leisa, Stowe, Ryan and Jeffrey aren’t designers. They’re just four people who, although they all work in the indernetz, do wildly different things. Talking and listening to them, and my discussion with Mathew Patterson the other day, got me thinking about how the folks who call themselves “designer” define what they do.
The web has exploded the concept of design. Once was the day that a designer was someone who made aesthetically pleasing things (that’s right, objects you could hold in your very own hands) which solved a problem. Sometimes the problem was a selling a new car, sometimes it was selling concert tickets, sometimes it was earning points for taste with your neighbours, and the list goes on and on. Although these are very different endeavours, all are called design, and there are also fancy, well-designed drawers for all of them: industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, and so on.
Now we’ve got “web design”, a drawer that’s full of folks who do funky stuff in photoshop, some who think and scribble, others who write HTML and CSS and quite a few mash-ups of the above.
Do you call yourself a designer? Think about design for a minute, and write a comment below and let me know:
What do you do every day?
How do you define “design”?
What parts of what you do are essential to your definition of design?
The more answers, the more interesting the comparisons, so even you lurkers and off-chance one-time-only visitors are encouraged to chime in.
Mathew (with one “t”) Patterson wrote a thoughtful post called “A new mind for web designers?”. In it he poses and tries to answer these questions:
How do web designers fit into this new world? When the html and CSS can be done for a miniscule price in the Philippines, India or China, what will web designers be doing?
But I’ve got to say all of his answers get under my skin slightly. If it’s true that Indians will soon be hacking out beautiful standards compliant, accessible and semantic code, and tweaking CSS with flair, and all for 20% of the price, then yes, that should make a number of people I know nervous. But none of them are designers.
Design is problem solving. Design is visual thinking. Design is an understanding of communication, and how to use colour, form, typography, etc. to get across a message. In the web, design is also understanding usability learnings, guiding users effectively, thinking about flow from page to page and more. Design is not writing HTML or CSS, any more than operating a printing press is design.
But I can’t say Mathew’s wrong exactly. Before computers, “design” was a pretty clear term. There were industrial designers, packaging designers, furniture designers and many more categories, but they all strove to do basically the same things with different tools and materials: solve problems in beautiful and elegant ways. Even when computers made the mechanical side of design accessible to everyone, there was still a clear distinction between desktop-publishing and design. Desktop-publishing was cheap and looked crap, and design was expensive and looked great.
Not long after HTML came along, and visionary businesses realised they were going to need a web site, the word “web designer” popped up. Most people calling themselves web designers at the time were nerds who had learned something about HTML and could put a page together, but they didn’t know the first thing about design. The great thing was that HTML was super-easy and anyone could learn it. The big drawback—for the label “designer”—was that having quickly learned HTML from some tutorials gave you the title “web designer.” Although in most cases “frontend programmer” would’ve been a better fit, “web designer” stuck.
Nowadays those nerds are still hacking code and calling themselves web designers, but at the same time thereareplentyofmastersouttherewho definitely know the difference between Helvetica and Univers, and handcraft their own HTML and CSS. What’s the difference between the “web designers” and the designers? Mathew answers that himself, sort of…
You’ll need to be offering demonstrably more value for your work than the other alternatives. That might be achieved by case studies showing improvements in site sales after website changes, or a proven ability to work with complex backend systems and produce great results.
Insight. Thought. Ideas. Experience. Solutions. Quality. That’s the value of design.
So if you’re out there throwing together code, without much thought to balance, style, user experience, clarity, simplicity, and all the other things that make a good design, you might want to take Mathew’s advice, and think about what to do when the Indians put you out of business. But if you actually are a designer, keep delivering quality. It won’t go out of style.
