In any given day I can find myself reading up on a new W3C proposal, fixing an issue with our tax return, coding an add-on for our product, writing a conference presentation, building a server, creating a video tutorial, and doing front end development for one of our sites. Without clients dictating my workload I’m in the enviable position of being able to choose where to focus my efforts. However, I can’t physically do everything.
Topic: Business
Growing Your Design Business
So you’ve launched your own creative business, and you’re starting to grow. That’s great! But good growth won’t just happen. Just as a junior designer starts with small projects and slowly builds her skills, a new business needs time to mature, test new ideas, and prepare itself, too. If you want to grow in a sustainable, satisfying way, then you need to pay attention to how you’re growing, not just how much. Jason Blumer looks at four common pitfalls of growth in the design industry, and how to avoid them.
They Keep Using That Word
The word “real” gets tossed around a lot when people compare physical objects and digital ones. That’s fine for casual conversation, but when publishers use that kind of sloppy language it reveals serious flaws in how they think about their products and businesses.
Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.
How do you know if you’re doing a good job? There’s always an external way to measure quality—being prepared, attending to the details, listening to the collective wisdom about what it means to do good work. Give a crap about the little things, and you’re good.
What about doing a great job? There’s no checklist, no guidelines that will get you there. Being great means being vulnerable; not giving a fuck about what other people think. It’s harder than it sounds.
W3C in the Wild
W3C really wants to hear from web designers and developers. We want our specs to be useful to you and to keep up with real-world issues. We’ve set about to broaden our community and to find new feedback channels that work better for busy web professionals. If you’re reading this, you’re part of the community we want to talk with more.
Designing Contracts for the XXI Century
A design contract is like a business card—it comes from the same desk, and bears the same creative mark. But it’s also the business card you hate handing out: a folder of legal gibberish with terrible formatting that reminds the client of everything that could possibly go wrong before the work has even started. If we want to address the readability problems unique to our era—and improve communication with our clients—then it’s time we fix the language, layout, and typesetting of our contracts. And who better than designers to do it? Veronica Picciafuoco shows how modernizing your contract to match your carefully crafted brand can also help you reach an agreement faster, and even strengthen your position when negotiating.
Becoming Better Communicators
As designers, we already know how to communicate with users in a language they understand. Yet, we often don’t do this when communicating with those whom our work requires us to talk to every day: our own colleagues. Inayaili de León shows us why—and how we can build the human relationships and shared vocabularies we need to get better at it.
What Ate the Periodical? A Primer for Web Geeks
We’ve all heard about the painful transition newspapers and magazines are going through. Two decades after the arrival of the web, the search for durable, profitable business models that make sense in the digital age goes on. And it isn’t going well. Advertising, subscriptions, and data-as-service have failed. Now is the time for web developers, designers, and digital strategists of all stripes to lead experiments with making (and saving) money from the things technology and the web are good at.
Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery
Brasília is a remarkable, bizarre city. An architectural gem built to be Brazil’s “shiny citadel,” it’s now known as a violent, crime-ridden, and congested city—because the architects who designed it weren’t thinking about the millions of people who would live there. This myopia echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where we see monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them—and the VCs who are scouting them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rian van der Merwe shows us how to discover before we build.
Product Management for the Web
Whether we prototype, write, design, develop, or test as part of building the web, we’re creating something hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people will use. But how do we know that we’re creating the right enhancements for the web, at the right time, and for the right customers? Because our client or boss asked us to? And how do they know? Enter product management for the web, bridging the gap between leadership and customers on one side, and the user experience, content strategy, design, and development team on the other. Learn to set priorities that gradually but steadily make your product (and the web) better.
