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Posts Tagged ‘Design’

May 4th, 2007

Cue Pomp and Circumstance

Hello all. I am honored to be giving the speech today at your commencement from [this Art School’s Design Program/University’s Design Program/College of Art & Design].

I have worked as a graphic designer in “the real world” for four and a half years, mostly in Raleigh (“the thinking man’s Portland”). I’ve now been doing this for the exact same amount of time it took me to get a BFA — and I am here to tell you: you are all going down. Seriously, you’re going to get destroyed. There are soooo many things they don’t tell you in here.

Allow me to offer you some incite into how your professional life will start:

I’m sure that you, class overachiever, already have a job lined up with that agency in Manhattan where you’ve been interning during the summers. That’s great. I think I speak for all of us when I say I hope you get run over by a taxi. For the rest of you, it’s time to pound the pavement. Go forth and gather the cream of your theoretically good yet completely impractically crop — type-less posters of randomly placed lines visually representing the fall of communism; packaging mock-ups that use elaborately-divised combinations of bailing twine, corrugated cardboard, and metallic calligraphy ink that has to be mail-ordered from England, etc. — and mount everything on 18×24″ pieces of foamcore and…bwah-ha-ha! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You just look so ridiculous at the interview, wrestling those giant black portfolios through the door! Rest assured, I’m laughing with, not at. I was doing the same thing four years ago.

Don’t get discouraged, my friends, if you can’t land a job right away. It will most likely take months of cold-calling, lead-following, and humiliating groveling before someone will agree to take you in. To them, as you are now, you’re mainly a liability. There’s so much you need to learn. You have no clue.

On your very first day in your newly acquired position, your boss will (in his mind) toss you something easy by asking you to come up with some ideas for a new client’s logo. You will go back to your desk and generate pages and pages of concepts, rendered in Sharpie on typing paper. He will check in on you about 4:30 and find you haven’t even turned your computer on yet. This is where things will start to go south. When you heard “ideas,” you were, of course, envisioning something you’d pin up on a bulletin board for a room full of 30 like-minded people to stare at for a few hours. Your new boss was envisioning something he could take, present to the client, and they would buy…tomorrow morning.

Shortly after the logo fiasco, you will be relegated to “production” (from the Latin, “prod-” meaning “re-,” and “uction” meaning “sizing stuff until you want to gouge your eyes out”) or possibly even web maintenance, where you will cut and paste paragraphs from Word documents onto web pages for a site that your company stole from the interactive firm that created it, by telling the client they’d keep it updated for less money. Either way, this begins a long period known as “paying your dues.”

You will make many glorious mistakes during this time. Attempting to email a nightmare client a 15 MB pdf without embedding the fonts, when they demand an on-screen proof of their brochure; delivering a four-color project to press with three active spot-colors and it’s linked images still in RGB mode; screwing up code in ways you can’t even comprehend while using a WYSIWG editor, like Dreamweaver, because you went to school to be a designer, for Christ’s sake. In the aftermath of each of these events, you will come out on the other end of a shitstorm, knowing not to do whatever it was you did, ever again. You will know it like you know your mother’s voice. And that’s real knowing.

Hold on long enough, and you will be called upon to “work up some comps” for a pitch. This will be both an exciting and a deeply sobering experience. There’s an old adage that people who have been in the industry for forever are fond of saying to clients. It goes: “Good, fast, and cheap. You can pick two.” The client always opts for “fast and cheap.”

Because of this, there is no time for pedantic process, much less original thought. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you have the time to 1) open up the most recent Communication Arts Design Annual, 2) find something with a “look and feel” that fits the project you are working on and 3) do a variation of it that is a) not ugly and b) far enough away from the starting point to not be recognized as the blatant plagiarism it is.

What I’m getting at is, yes, design is an art form, but — you’ll soon discover — it is also very much a trade, and, above all, a business.

In conclusion, fledgling designers of the world, I leave you with these words of advice:

Keep you head down.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
When you’re cranking out 20 versions of the same ad for different publications, take the time to double check your dimensions. Was that quarter-pager supposed to be 4.125×5.375 or 4.375×5.125?
Also, mind the bleed, trim, and safety.
Keep your chin up.
Run spellcheck. Seems like it shouldn’t be your responsibility, I know, but the person who wrote the copy didn’t bother to do it before they sent it to you. Even if a typo is not actually your fault, you’ll be the one who gets blamed for it.
Almost daily, someone will ask you, without giving you an adequate amount of information to formulate an answer, how long it will take you to design something. Each designer has his own ubiquitous answer to this question. (Personally, I always say “half a day.”) Find yours.
Learn from the people who have been doing this longer than you.
Reach for the stars.
Could you make our logo bigger?
Print is dead.
For God’s sakes, use your key commands.

Thank you.

Tags: Design, Ideas - No Comments »

March 5th, 2007

Too Much Information

So, I’ve made some changes to the place.

I kept a lot of the basic design that was here before, but the content — which hasn’t been changed much since early 2005 — needed an update. And I just couldn’t resist putting some of the new things I’ve learned about web design to use here.

I thought for my first entry on “version 2.0” of my site, I’d share the technical modifications I made, and describe how I did them.

Wait, don’t leave! I feel I am in an unique position right now, as I am relatively new to this world. It has only been a few months since I “bit the bullet,” took a new job, and made the transition from “print designer who vaguely understands Dreamweaver and Flash” to “someone who isn’t startled (noticeably, at least) when people refer to him as a ‘developer’.” I still feel a strong connection to those of you who are somewhat curious about — but mainly just confused and frightened by — how the web works. If this is you, read on. I think you’ll find my perspective on creating websites to be pretty interesting. Some of the things I report may even be factually correct (though I wouldn’t count on it). So here we go — I’ll be providing translations, 100%-free of geek-language, for everything I type for the rest of this entry….

Geek: Greetings!
My Translation: Hey.

Geek: Captain’s log, Stardate 917837248.
My Translation: It’s a Monday.

Geek: Stupendous, it’s working!
My Translation: Baller.

Geek: The new version of robertwitchger.com uses XHTML for content.
My Translation: Ok, so what this means is the information on each page of this site was created so it could be read in a web browser by coding it out in “Extensible Hypertext Markup Language” (XHTML). XHTML is, as far as basic web designers like me are concerned, the most recent version of HTML.

The information is written out in the code so it will appear in a linear, nearly text-only fashion (sort of like the way you could most clearly order the information if you had to write a term paper of the information on one of these pages) in a browser window.

Geek: CSS is used for the structure.
My Translation: The layout for every page on this site is being controlled by a single, completely separate document. Each XHTML page has a link to this document, which contains a list of rules for all its elements. (Example: h1 {font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; color: #336633;}. This means the largest heading on the page should appear in Verdana, at a size of 18px, and be green.) This document is called the “style sheet.” It is composed in a language called “Cascading Style Sheets” (CSS).

The name refers to the fact that generating a design in such an indirect, convoluted manner will make you want to send your computer cascading off a cliff…. Ha-ha! Just kidding! Mostly!

The “cascading” part means that, when those first rules are written for an element, they will automatically be counted into all other sets of rules written for that same element, later on in the document. The rules cascade down the page.

And why would you need to write multiple sets of rules for the same element? Well, it’s sort of hard to explain in words…but I’m going to try. Remember these are the elements of the content, which, remember, looks like a term paper. How many “elements” (“elements” here meaning “general areas that contain information”) does you average term paper have? A heading, paragraphs, a list or two, perhaps sectional dividers, some subheads, and supporting graphics…that’s pretty much it. And these are pretty much the same elements you can use in an XHTML page. And therefore they get used over and over and over again. While this approach results in properly organized information, the outcome is not very interesting to look at. (In fact, click here to see what the “naked” XHTML for this page looks like.) That’s why there’s a need to “style” different occurrences of the same elements in different ways, to create some variety in the design.

The “cascading” thing is a bit of a double-edged sword. Statistically, it will work for your design (with no need to work-around or hack a rule that has cascaded down) exactly 50% of the time. It will work against it 110% of the time.

Geek: This site adheres to the Web Standards created by the W3C.
My Translation: The way I’m using my XHTML and CSS is kosher with some of the guys who invented the World Wide Web…. More on these bastards later.

Geek: Each page is section 508 compliant.
My Translation: This means this site is “accessible.” It will allow people who are visually-impaired or with limited mobility to “turn off” the page’s design (by breaking the link with the style sheet) and receive the information on the page via a screen reader or by simply scrolling straight down the page. Most organizations that receive government funding are required, by law, to create their websites in this manner.

Geek: Text edits and updates can be made quickly and easily.
My Translation: Yes, as anyone who talked to me while I was first trying to learn this implementation process can tell you, it is not the most intuitive or frustration-free way to make a site, but a huge advantage of it is, even after the site is finished and launched, changes to text on the page are still very simple to make. No going-back-to-the-Photoshop-file-what-the-hell-
did-I-do-with-the-Photoshop-file?-is-this-the-final-or-a-working-file-I-just-
opened? needed.

In my experience, dyed-in-the-wool designers (like me), are resistant to join the XHTML/CSS movement. I’m sure we’ll continue to fight it for at least a few more years, but I think, after we truly grasping what we’re doing, we’ll admit to ourselves that, for dispersing information (which is what the web was originally intended for) this technique is the way to go.

As a quick aside/doomsday-prophecy, though, with there now being something of a single, approved “formula” for site creation, and it now being so easy to load one up with tons and tons of information, I often wonder where original and exciting page design will fit into the equation. I’m sure you’ve noticed that, recently, websites are starting to look more and more alike (like this one, for example). A good topic for another day….

Geek: To make site-wide changes to XHTML, all pages are built with Dreamweaver templates.
My Translation: Basically, if you have parts of your site that are supposed to be the same on every page, you can created a file in Dreamweaver containing only those parts, then create as many individual pages as you want, based on this file, and then, when you need to modify something on one of the uniform parts, you need only do it one time, to this Dreamweaver template. Pretty awesome.

Geek: I must admit I’m still working out the bugs in IE.
My Translation: Ah, yes. The main problem with creating a site the way I did is your end product looks a little different in every browser. While it was nice of the W3C to publish their definitive “Web Standards” for the optimal way to write code, they have absolutely no control over the software manufacturers and how they let the browsers everyone uses interpret the code. This makes the almighty “web standards” really more like “web suggestions” or “web advice.”

For this site, the differences are minor enough to not bother me…except if you’re viewing it in Microsoft Internet Eck-friggin’-splorer. There, none of my rollovers work, weird spacing issues pop up all over the place, and my footer is forced way off to the right. Even on version 7. I am still trying like hell to fix this stuff.

This brings us to the last piece of wisdom I’d like to impart in my explanation of web design. If you’re planning to make a site in the near future, start memorizing this phrase: “Hopefully they’ll come around in Version 8.” You’ll be using it quite often.

Tags: Design - No Comments »