Allchorn Blog

I had lunch with the exceptionally talented artist Christian Mugnai at Spiga d’Oro today and we had a rather interesting and amusing discussion about things. Chris and I have been mates since we first taught each other swear words when he moved here from Italy… in std 2 (approx. 5yrs old). In amongst all the jibber jabber and catching up we drew some parallels in our work, and trials and tribulations we face daily.

One of them was the inevitable discussion of the value of one’s work. I had the perfect story to let Chris understand how I feel about evaluating one’s work. Here it is, and if you’ve heard it before and I got details wrong, or know the original storyteller, please comment and let me know before crying foul. I will credit the originator once I know.

Pablo Picasso was walking through a park one day and he came across a woman who recognised him immediately. “You’re Pablo Picasso aren’t you?” she stated, and he replied that he was. “You’re my favourite artist!” she exclaimed. “Won’t you sketch my portrait?”.

Pablo agreed to do so and whipped out his sketch pad and pencil. He looked at her with intense concentration, tilted his head to the left, then the right, closed his eyes and thought for a second, opened them and laid 3 lines on the paper with great dexterity.

He passed the paper to the woman who looked at it for a moment, and she cried out “Absolutely incredible! In these 3 lines you have captured exactly who I am! I must pay you for this sketch Mr Picasso, what do I owe you for this?”.

Pablo thought for a second and said it would be £5,000 for the sketch. “What!?” she blurted. “It literally took you 20 seconds and 3 strokes of your pencil?!”.

“No my dear” he calmly replied, “it took me my entire life.”

And that’s the story. If you don’t understand the moral, or what it’s about, just comment and I’ll gladly explain. It’ll actually be interesting to see if anybody “doesn’t” understand.

Well, we’ve finally completed the initial shell of the new theme. Together with Cobus over at Radiiate, we’re close to completing this site to a point where I can actually leave it alone (aesthetically) for a while…

Please bare with me as I work on populating the portfolio, doing some bug fixing and other monotonous tasks like that.

The Collective are a design and branding agency in Johannesburg, South Africa. I’ve worked with the principal designer there, Leigh Dyson on a couple of projects in the past, and we share a few clients.

They do some truly amazing work in the print field and have an impressive client list.

The design of their site was their creation and with a little bit of guidance to make it web-ready it came out pretty neatly. Tailor made to be viewed no lower than 1024×768, it fits nicely in most screen resolutions.

The tabbed navigation is even semantically coded (plain text in a bulleted list) through some nifty CSS tricks. The site is powered entirely through WordPress with XML files to edit all flash content.

The portfolio items feature a dynamic crumb-trail navigation and pagination on all the sections. The identities section pulls a custom field thumbnail icon onto the page for each item and links it to it’s respective post.

The site is now done with phase one, and soon we embark on the FTP section which will feature a revolutionary file transfer interface. Both uploads and downloads.

A great client, and the site is already showing promise.

Since I’ve recently taken a step back from certain aspects of website design and development (specifically hosting, coding and marketing), I’m delving more and more into the layout and aesthetic concerns of creating a website. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go through the proper discovery steps that precede the design phases, but since I am only consulting on the other topics, the meat of my work is design now.

Being back in the creative cockpit has made me look at ways of sprucing things up using either some slick AJAX or Adobe Flash.

If you know me, you’re probably gasping at the fact that I’d even consider Flash, but I have had a look at things, and if I can pull it off semantically and without interfering with any search engine visibility, I am willing to give it a bash.

The Pitfalls of Flash

My main reasons for not using Flash (on the most part) in the past:

1. Search Engines cannot index flash content (without some form of trickery involved)
2. Sections within a Flash site cannot be bookmarked in the traditional sense either using your browser’s bookmarks OR something like Delicious.
3. Without strict control by someone that knows the pitfalls, it can easily be abused and prove detrimental on a project’s final outcome.
4. Circumventing reason 1, 2 and 3 can add unnecessary time and budget to a project that would make little sense when it comes to ROI.

These have been my major gripes with the use of Flash in the past, although as I’ve also stated in the past, it’s a brilliant and versatile technology that when used correctly for the right thing, it’s results can be amazing.

I reckon that certain aspects of Flash are not going to be changing in any sort of hurry, and as such, I will only make use of Flash when there is either a damn good reason, and that it doesn’t harm things that would be done more effectively in another way. Sometimes KISS just makes more sense.

How Can Flash Be Used Effectively?

Since most of my sites and my client’s sites are built to perform some form of business function, I am pretty sticky on the fact that good, valid, semantic HTML styled with CSS is a must. I think very few people would dispute that fact.

I do very few don’t do Flash only sites, and there are not a lot of industries that can benefit from them. Sure, my friends over at Prezence do a lot of all Flash sites for music artists, movie launches and the like, but that is a very specialised market, and requires the visual versatility that Flash offers. Paul Tooze at Wireframe also does some amazing Flash projects for his clients, but suffice to say, a lot of it is educational and or best suited to Flash’s abilities.

Sure, HTML and CSS could be used to create the “aesthetic” that both Prezence and Wireframe create, but does not offer the same fluid animation and slick motion you can get with Flash. Javascript has come a long way, but it’s still limited and subject to considerable browser issues. Flash however, with it’s pervasive adoption is the ideal candidate to do what it does, and might I add, without any serious competition.

Okay, so you get that I’m not going to be making an HTML document and throwing an SWF (pronounced swiff I believe) file in the middle and doing the rest in Flash. For my clients, that would be search engine suicide!

I am looking at ways of including semantic content for things that are already in the Flash files, and there are some options. One of them is having the content in normal code, and somehow not displaying it (pointless to visually duplicate the content), so the search engines can index you for what you are all about.

There are ways of doing this that will get you penalised by the SE’s but there are some work arounds. Nothing completely fool proof at this stage (or that I can find), but advancements are being made.

Eric Enge discusses this in more depth with his SEOMoz invitiational blog post on A Comprehensive Guide to Hidden Text & Search Engines.

I think the best way to approach this whole thing is the use of flash sparingly, and only as loose elements where they are absolutely required to give some of that visual “wow” factor.

As you might have noticed, I am not referring much to “dynamic” flash where it connects to a database, or has an external XML ot TXT file to feed it content. I’m assuming that this is done if it’s needed. It still doesn’t get indexed by SE’s, hence my search for a viable semantic workaround.

Where To From Here?

Well, I am going to be doing some intensive reconstructive surgery on this website which will be ready in the next few months. Still using WordPress as my CMS, and still having a good dose of HTML content, but with some embellishments that you’ll either love or hate.

Being the fact that SEO on a website designer’s site is like spending money on marketing the sale of bottled salt water at the beach, I doubt I’ll damage my search engine rankings much.

Right now, I need to dive back into the storyboarding for the new allchorn.com!

I’ve decided that I am going to re-brand myself. Starting with a new logo. Quite honestly, I’m sick of my glassy globe with cheesily gradiented AD.

The direct metaphor of the earth representing the “world” wide web being the audience of my creations is replaced with a pretty direct graphic representing design in the form of a fairly realistic looking fountain pen drawing a vector line over the d.

If I remember correctly, I did the fountain pen illustration a few years back in a concept for use on one of my websites, but never managed to fit it in anywhere. Some aspects of the vectors aren’t quite up to the standards I set for myself these days, but thats just a matter of tweaking it.

I will refine the vectors, but in the meantime, I’m happy to use it on the web (in 72dpi). Before going to print with cards, I’m going to make it 100% for just about any medium. Right now, it works equally well on white and 90% black, or anything in between.

There is a whole website redesign in process too, which is currently in the theming phase. I’ll hold off on showing that till it’s actually live. Put it this way… it’s a complete change in direction, style and colour.

More soon.

High levels of stress and a reasonably obvious truth have driven me to write this post. A rather corny title it may be, it’s pretty spot on to what this is all about. It all stems from the true nature of the internet, and the common misconceptions of what that true nature really is.

Defining The True Nature Of The Internet

Is it like print, where you design or typeset your way to a happy conclusion? Possibly fight a bit with colours and plate registration, but ultimately end up with something you can reproduce?

Or perhaps it’s like television where you produce a linear presentation of audio visual goodness?

Nope, it’s actually like both of those, but with more factors drawn into the mix which -in my opinion- closely resemble that of vehicle maintenance rather than some facet of any advertising aspect.

Am I nuts? Maybe, but hear me out.

The internet is a living breathing entity which has ins and outs. It is fed with information (text, video, files, images etc.) and it allows for this information to be extracted, viewed, manipulated, deleted and well… used.

With this interactive nature and the fact that it is constantly changing, there is always margin for error. There is always a loophole for malicious action. There is also the amazing opportunity for which the internet is used for at large and thats it’s main intent; facilitating greatly enhanced communication.

So How Is Website Design Like Motorcycle Maintenance?

Can I rephrase that to “Motorcycle Design, Production and Mantenance”? Sure I can. This is my blog!

The reason I see it this way is through my experience of designing, maintaining, developing, moving, deleting and administrating websites since 1999. All websites start somewhere. Maybe in the mind of an entrepreneur, or perhaps in the marketing department’s weekly board meeting. Regardless what the website’s inception was, it had a beginning, and from there it grew into what it is now.

Designing the website -if you’ve read anything I’ve written- doesn’t relate only to the pretty colour scheme you used and the frilly edges, but rather the the overall design. The proverbial engine behind the website (be that straight HTML, or a fully fledged Content Management System) as well as the page layouts, the structure and flow of information etc. It all needs to be “designed”. If not, you’re using someone else’s design (ready made software/solutions), but either way, it was or is designed by someone.

Production of a website can come at whatever phase the team or individual finds to be the most effective time to do so. Whether things are meticulously planned out with all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed, or if a single page objective document was drawn up and an evolutionary project was embarked on. It’s the same thing at the end of the day and the end result is subjective and up to those web “builders”.

Maintenance of a website. This is where things get interesting. Does the website maintain itself? Does a website fix itself when a human or non-human error causes something to go wrong. Does a website with user generated content work indefinitely without some form of moderation?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding no. It does not. You can fake it. You can make it do some form of moderation and clean out naughty words, or go with the best hosting provider money can buy. At the end of the day, no the website will not stand the test of time, neither in looks (another subjective matter that) nor in it’s structure.

A motorcycle’s valves wear. It’s pistons grind up against the barrel and it’s constantly exposed to varying degrees of intensity of use and heat and cold.

Similarly, a website sits on a server. It’s visited by varying quantities of visitors. Information is pumped into it and drawn out of it and not only by humans. There are automated programmings scraping information from it. There are search engine spiders following links. There are spam bots posting anoying links to their Viagra sites.

Maybe your host is insufficient? You take it out of that provider’s warm comfy bedded engine mountings and plonk it into an unknown environment and things break. They need to be fixed. Folder permissions change and the engine’s fuel line is effectively clogged. The website slowly or quickly suffers and dies.

Okay, Enough Drama

You should now understand what I mean in my metaphoric comparison of Websites to Motorcycles, and if not, read it again. If you still think I’m wrong, then maybe I’m crazy, or you are.

There are other aspects to a website that aren’t mentioned above. Things like online marketing and SEO, optimising content for the web (believe it or not, you cannot copy and paste from Word without creating an invalid botch job of your site) or just keeping things fresh by tweaking colours, focal points, specials, announcements etc.

A new browser might come out and get very quickly adopted (Firefox as an example grew from nothing to almost a 30% market share). If your website doesn’t work in the new browser… are you willing to exclude 30% of your target audience?

Have a think. I reckon my point makes sense.

I’m busy writing about three articles concurrently. All of which lose my interest after sitting in front of them for longer than 10 minutes. I need to step back from them for a bit and this is why I’m writing this interim post. One is a piece on big brands with horrible websites, another is self defining article to try and put my thumb on who I am, and then there is a follow up of the first one showing outstanding websites.

While I write those, have a look at 37 Signals’ book entitled Getting Real. It truly is one for your bookmarks if you’re a programmer or designer, or even a client interested in having something developed or designed.

I came across the site after reading someone’s mention of 37signals‘ business model and subsequently followed the natural progression of link following. You know how it goes. “They have a book… cool, let’s check it out *click*. They have a PDF version, cool. $19 is fair. Ah, there is a paperback version too. Nice. They have a FREE version! *click*.” And this is where I ended up.

I found a section in chapter 2 particularly interesting. It basically states that budgets and timelines can be fixed in application development should be kept flexible. It makes sense to me that if you’re to launch a piece of software, rather make it with 5 solid, well rounded features than 10 badly thought out and issued ones. An excerpt:

If you can’t fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don’t expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There’s always time to add stuff later — later is eternal, now is fleeting.

A 100% free 16 chapter book on keeping things real in application design. A must have for any serious geek. I mean, Basecamp… who can argue that that was not built by designers and developers in the upper 99 percentile.

Being the fact that I am in the website design industry, this post relates first and foremost to that specific line of design, but some parallels can surely be drawn with other forms of design.

First and foremost, my favourite saying is:

“Design is not about making things pretty, but rather about making things work.”

I don’t know who first said that, but in my experience, it is the truth, and cannot be refuted ever. Even if your objective is to drive away sales (I don’t know why you’d do this), then if you designed with that purpose in mind, and it works, then well… it worked. Your design worked!

Content, Structure & Communication

I believe that designing websites should be focussed around your content. Creating content to suit your pre-imposed design is working backwards and counter productive.

Think about the message you are trying to portray. Yes, that is communication. Be it communication to the masses, communication to a small group of people, or even communication to one person; you are communicating.

Does your message come across clearly in a no-frills format? Can people readily and easily pick up on what you’re trying to say without a background image and frilly edges? If not, then your foundation for the design to come is made of squidgy, non-drying mud.

Think beyond aesthetics (the concept of beauty) and come back to “designing” your message. Be that in the form of visuals (either created or photographed visuals) and your all important copy (textual content).

Think what your prospective customer would need to instantly recognise your offering.

Designing a website also involves the choice of structure, be it a static site, one powered by a CMS or something else. You need to carry out the wireframing of the layout to achieve the best usability for your visitors as well as determining how things must work and the users will interact. Often this is an evolutionary process, and one which cannot be pre-determined.

The Finishing Process

Applying the visual finishing touches to a website in my eyes is a step -contrary to my calling it the finishing process- that can come in the middle or end, or even the beginning of the project.

Normally I don’t promote nor condone the design being number 1 on the list, but sometimes a project is visual design only, with little or no back end considerations. In this case, go ahead.

If your project requires more than one page, and perhaps some on-page changes like dynamic navigation etc, the number of design mockups would likely need to be in the hundreds if you wanted to show every conceiable state of the site.

In Conclusion

To sum up what my view is of design, is that it is a process in which frills are just icing on the cake. Placing all emphasis on how things look is incorrect thinking should you wish to have a resulting website that performs. Get your foundations right and then start doing some window dressing.

Designing websites for a living, or for extra money, is an exceptionally popular part of life for people all over the world in all age groups. There are kids and recent school leavers either doing it as a hobby or full time, as well as many people with intentions of making it big in the industry after growing bored of their nine 2 fiver..

I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching lately, with the drowning flood of insurgents bombarding the market with half baked proposals with ridiculously low price tags. It seems to be happening more and more frequently, and with these newbies not fully understanding the nature of design as a business, the commodity market continues to spread like a disease.

I Repeat, Design is NOT a Commodity

Designing a web presence, not only visually appealing, but designed to perform and communicate effectively is not something I can offer on a half price special, or a buy 2 get one free business model. You will invariably end up with work that is squeezed out of the lower creative orifice. Something that makes the designer or the client go “oh cool!, but ultimately not perform, or in more severe cases, actually damage the company reputation.

Spec Work and Free Pitching

I’ve had a bit of a lengthy email conversation with Cathering Morley from no-spec.com and contrary to my previous article on spec work vs pitching, she has convinced me how damaging the practice of spec work and free pitching really are. I mistakingly perceived pitching as a necessary evil where a portion of the work should be a sacrifice of time to land a possible large project.

An excerpt from one of her emails:

“I’ll bust my butt doing my best for them, but I want to start off right. I want them to respect what I do as much as I respect what they are doing.”

Catherine effectively convinced me that not only was I wrong and it will waste my time on the whole, it’s also an irresponsible and damaging practice. What you’re effectively doing is giving your uneducated, un-researched “opinion” of what the client needs and leaving it to them to choose the prettiest of the bunch.

The portfolio should represent the quality of one’s work, and a frank, honest discussion with a designer and the possible commissioning of him/her for a paid pitch is an ethical and effective plan of action (should you not be 100% certain about them).

If you don’t like the resulting work, talk to the designer. Maybe the brief was not clear enough. Maybe the designer went another route to that what you expected. Worst case scenario is you pay them for their time and use it as a learning step towards reaching your goal. If you choose a good, professional, reputable designer with trade references, you’ll likely not have to do this. Pick someone amateur or unqualified, then you probably will and spend more money either taking ages to get the desired result, damaging yours our your company’s reputation or having to pay somoene else to fix their mistakes.

Design Business & Ethics

AIGA, the professional association for design have published a series of brochures explaining the necessary ethics and business acumen of both the client and designer on a professional level. Well worth downloading, reading and keeping as reference.

One thing I read in the client document mirrors mine and all professional’s thoughts on the topic:

“Unlike so much in today’s business world, graphic design is not a commodity. It is the highly individualized result of people coming together to do something they couldn’t do alone. When the collaboration is creative, the results usually are too.”

Download the client’s guide to design brochure here (216KB PDF).