Monthly Archives: September 2009

We don’t design for our clients

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Yes, that title is correct. We don’t design for our clients, and by the same token we certainly don’t design for ourselves! Who we design for is the customer, our client’s clients.

designing

So many designers these days are producing “questionnaires” that ask your favourite colour, do you want a symbol in your logo, what type of font do you like? All of these things -sorry to say- are not up to the company owner. They’re not up to the designer to impart their opinion on either. These factors are established by research.

  • Researching the the client’s company
  • Researching the industry
  • Researching the competition
  • Researching the end user/customer

This is where you draw your conclusions from. Not from the company owner’s nor the designer’s “opinion”.

Design is about communication

Nothing more, and nothing less. I sometimes get irritated when people say things as obvious as that to me, and while you might agree and get back to your normal way of doing things; take a minute and think about it.

You’re designing to communicate a message “buy this”, “subscribe here”, “register now”, “enquire”, and if your design efforts are not focussed around those objectives, you might as well be putting lipstick on a pig.

“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.”
Paul Rand – 1914-1996

There are a lot of Paul Rand video clips and tributes going around the design community at the moment, and for sure, he deserves all the credit he can get.

There is one very important message I get from him where I can sense his frustration in trying to get his message across. It’s summed up in that quote above, and what it really comes down to is that people need to first become capable of the basics of communication before they can start innovating. Walk before you can run in other words.

Why we will continue to support IE6

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Possibly adding fuel to the fire, but to at least put my opinion on the matter out there… here is my view on the prospect of web developers discontinuing support for Microsoft’s eight year old browser Internet Explorer 6 (released on August 27, 2001).

According to Wikipedia:

“The end-of-life support for Internet Explorer 6 is July 13, 2010″

That alone tells me that it is an actively supported means of people accessing websites for at least another 10 months.

A lot of opinions seem to be around the lack of standards support by the browser and I don’t dispute this fact, but you also can’t look beyond the fact that there are still users out there that are stuck with it. Unfortunate, but true.

Just so you’re clear on my position on the matter; we will support IE6 until there is what I deem to be a sufficiently low enough percentage of visitors using it. There will be exceptions in cases where I know for a fact that the audience of the site/intranet is closed enough and mandated to use a newer or different browser, but by rule of thumb, we will support it.

My clients’ reputations are important to me!

According to w3schools, last month 13.6% of users were still on Internet Explorer 6.

For technology to cause their image to possibly be tarnished to approximately 13% odd of their visitors is simply unacceptable. Especially when those possible problems are avoidable through producing “gracefully degradable” sites where necessary and providing code hacks (a sad reality my geek friends) to have them rendered properly.

Really people… if you’re not in the web design and development industry, and you can’t update your browser, then you probably wouldn’t give a toss about anything besides the fact that you’re inconvenienced by a breaking website! In my eyes, thats not good business.

A good coder should make a site work in all required browsers

The discussion often pops up in forums I frequent, and it’s usually someone having a hard time getting something to render consistently. While I do empathise with them (I have been there too), you need to suck it up, figure it out and make it work… it is your job, do it properly!

Usually someone with a bit more experience will chime in that it’s not that hard when you know how. Those people -in my opinion- are the true professionals. Not the guys whining about it and trying to get everyone to stop supporting it.

Upgrading your browser is necessary

All the above being said, don’t get the impression that I think the www should stagnate and indefinitely be stuck with archaic systems like IE6. There is a world beyond simple browsing, and the likes of the Mozilla Foundation, Google, Opera, Apple and even Microsoft themselves have forged on and created some far more modern, more secure, more user friendly and just better browsers.

Here is a list of browsers I recommend: