Normal office politics aside, being able to communicate effectively with your cohorts is a valuable skill, and one that I have had to learn through experience. Group projects in school don’t prepare you for the long-term hierarchical dynamic you find in a typical office. You don’t plan on seeing a classmate after the semester’s over, and typically you’re not accountable to anyone in the group (just the professor).

By nature, I’m a pretty shy person. When I have something to say, I say it, but by and large, I’ve had to force myself to speak up during group meetings, or more personal pow-wows with a co-worker. It takes me a long time warm up to a social/professional situation an feel comfortable speaking freely. When you’re shy like me, speaking clearly and with tact is even more important.

Tact. That’s the name of the game. It’s not enough to have a great idea, you have to put your audience in a situation where it’s easy to accept a great idea. To get them on board, you need to know how to reach them. This is true in business and elsewhere in life and is probably just part of growing up.

Being confidently tactful is a learned skill, but it’s something I’m learning that pays in spades once you get a handle on it.

Why don’t I have a TV? When TV, as I had grown up to know it, disappeared in 2008 (antenna broadcasts were replaced by a mess of digital converter what-whoozels) I refused to pay $40 for the technology that enabled me to watch the shitty local programming I’d always gotten for free.

Truth be told, I watch more programming than I ever have before, and I would still kill for cable or even normal TV, but it isn’t worth the price. I watch streaming services (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, etc…) and my monthly bill doesn’t even come close to what cable would rack up to in my area. Whatever those don’t cover I acquire by other means… I’m sort of ashamed to say. I’m not alone in protesting that if I had a viable option to pay for all the content I’d like to watch, I would.

Take HBO: That’s some of the best programming I’ve ever seen in my life. I am hopelessly addicted to Boardwalk Empire. If I could pay HBO a reasonable subscription fee I would in a heartbeat. The time savings I’d incur from not having to track the show down online would make it well worth a “normal” streaming charge (round $8-$12/month). Hell, they could even serve me ads after I pay them if they want (I’m looking at you Hulu Plus), I don’t care. Instead, to watch HBO online, I’d need to buy cable, then buy a HBO package, and THEN buy the privilege to then watch it online. What gives?

Isn’t it just a matter of time when content providers will realize a screen is a screen, regardless of the method of delivery? Why not treat them all basically the same? How long will we have to wait?

Back to my original point, people think I’m some hipster elitist who scoffs at the idea of frying my brain with an afternoon of cartoons, when in fact I love doing precisely that. It’s time to change our vocabulary. TV no longer exists. we’re plugged in 24/7 and have access to content whenever we want. When will everyone else catch up?

I was a 90′s kid. I spent my childhood decked out in Ninja Turtles garb and collecting baseball cards. These relics of the recent past often com to haunt our present as nostalgic reminders of who we once were, and by contrast how far we’ve come across the brief expanse of time. These are the kinds of things that age generations, everybody has their own “Ninja Turtles.”

This decade’s “Ninja Turtles” is is far more subtle, but also much more pervasive: photo filters.

The difference between my mid-nineties Turtles rampage and pocket photo filters is its widespread use. It’s affected our culture at every corner. How long until our online ads have the ragged frames and simulated lens dirt in every picture? Apps like Instagram, Camera Bag, & Snap Seed have made it easier than ever to create snapshots of our lives and share them with friends. And that’s great! But it’s also what’s going to embarrass us eventually.

Twenty years from now, we might yearn for a clear depiction of what our lives are now. We might tired of these trendy color-corrected, lens-blurred, desaturated digital masterpieces in favor fo something more honest, more accurate, and more compelling.

But filters are the “in” thing, and that’s good. Fashion comes trends in waves, with one thing growing to usurp the previous thing. There’s certainly no stopping that. I’m not proposing that we change our behavior to avoid what we think might become out of style eventually. There’s no way you’ll get it right, moreover, that’s no way to live. But I think we can anticipate a desire for more realistic images of our lives fi we give it a little thought. At some point I know I’ll tire of squinting through layers of gristle and fades to see what I was doing in my mid-twenties.

I’m not saying photo filters aren’t awesome, or that they aren’t fun. Modern apps and social sites have made it easier and more fun than ever to share our lives than ever. I’m modestly suggesting that we might be mindful of how history will reflect on photo documentation, and how we might regret putting that image blur/cross-fade/color-correction filter on all the photos of ourselves for a decade. We just might be prudent to toss in some nice, clean, well-composed photos of ourselves somewhere in there as well.

With that perspective, I started to jot down the important things I heard Rutledge discuss in a google doc for my own use.

Today I’ll share my notes. I figure since these ideas and guidelines have been invaluable to me, other designers who don’t want to watch hours of video may benefit from it as well.

How could this be translated to the web? Social media is the traditional approach… Anyone remember the hubub when Facebook blended fact and fiction by using photos of your friends in the ads they showed you? The backlash forced a retraction, but it’s just a sign of things to come.

Showtime’s “Scandalous” took a different approach. At first glance it appears to be a legit, credible political news site (and in many ways it is), but upon closer inspection, you’ll notice the show’s fictional Mayor of Chicago “Tom Kane” mixed into the news stories.

Although the “news” on the site is little more than categorized twitter feeds, it begs a bigger question, is this the future of marketing? Just because the site has an agenda, does that make it’s content invalid?

By providing some content in the same vien as the show, will it lend the credibility they hope? In any event, it’s a very unique approach to web marketing, and one that I think we’ll see more of in the near future.

Check the site out here: http://scandalousdirt.com/#/

This is how clients think of the web

Let’s imagine a scenario where you’re a widget maker. Your widgets are friggin’ awesome. Since you started widget-making, these things have been flying off the shelf of your corner widget store. You can’t wait to get your widgets out to a broader customer-base. You say, “Man, I need to expand my widget sales by shipping them to customers that can’t come to my widget store. I need to put these things in a box of some sort so I can deliver them to people.”

We are the box makers

That’s where web designers come in. We are the box-makers. If you think of web design in this way, a lot of basic design concepts come naturally. What kind of box is best for the widget? How should it close? How should it open? Is the box hard to open? Is it clearly labeled?

This is also where a ton of widget makers get strung out over the box. I was once told in an interview that “The problem with web sites is that they’re all so black and white.  It’s so boring! I want a site with TONS of colors.” Tons of colors? Fair enough. Should I dust off the ol’ marquee tag?

Focus on the box

As designers we’re trained to focus on the box, but in relation to the widget. Many clients simply view a website as another widget. Something pimp-out, toss in features, and put on their shelves for sale.

This is clearly wrong because it ignores the purpose of a site, to house content. Would you buy an empty box? Probably not. Would you buy something if you needed to struggle for a half hour with garden shears to open the damned thing? Probably not. Yet this is what we are creating, time and time again.

Getting on the same page

The trick here is communication. Direct communication where possible. It’s usually the case that a client just wants what’s best for their company. If you can communicate your ideas and make it clear to them why that is the best thing for their company, they will likely be onboard. It just takes a little finesse.

This is great! Except when I get multiple emails at a time, as is the case during peak hours at my day job, or when my personal gmail decides to sync up. Then these nice notifications become a huge annoyance. A digital wall of “Read” & “dismiss” button that come between me and whatever I might be doing on my phone. Ever been unable to end a call because of the barrage of emails swarming your screen? I have.

I don’t want to bash Apple too much. I’m a huge fanboy. I love their design, usability, blah blah… You get to picture. That said, a simple gesture the “Dismiss All” could solve this quite easily.

Who’s really the victim?

While streaming the Congressional hearing n SOPA yesterday it seemed to me like the same insane, infantile, and ridiculous argument kept being made. Congressperson after Congressperson would claim “If I Google for ‘Free How The Grinch Stole Christmas’ I can’t tell what’s an illegal site and what’s legal.” By playing the victim, they are essentially claiming they’d like to watch free content, but are unable to determine a legal means to procure the content because of the illegal sources.

Really?

That’s like claiming “I’d like to take some Morphine, but when I rove the streets of the inner city, I simple cannot tell who’s a certified pharmacist and who’s a drug dealer.” They’re ALL drug dealers, just as all search results for “free” content online are pirates. Why in the world would you search for “free” content and expect to get legal means to watch said content? Of course you can’t, and that’s not what this bill will provide. There’s no good reason why anyone could expect to freely view a studio film online legally.

As one Congresswoman brought up, if you simply search for “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” piracy doesn’t clutter results. Only by searching for illegal versions do you get illegal results.

That’s not the real reason they’re pushing the bill through, yet it’s their talking point. The real problem is that the people who pirate already know the sources to get the illegal content. The pirates don’t need Google results to find the latest bit torrent or Megavideo site.

Does my client care about elegance in code? Not at all. They just want it to work, as fast as possible. Creating the most elegant solution always takes more time and in many cases, doesn’t gain much in scalability or maintenance. These concerns are things that are usually way down the road anyways, and you’re better off not worrying about them at first.

My point is that it’s a balancing act, and one that I’m still trying to get right. My impulse is to hone every line until its absolutely perfect, but I know that it really isn’t needed. I don’t want to be ridiculed by fellow developers, but going the extra mile to please them isn’t going to make me any more money or make the client any happier.

How do you handle this balancing act?

Taking WordPress to a New Level

Although I’m always looking for the latest and greatest tricks in WordPress, this project was all about speed. Since the filmmakers needed the site done quickly for their early round of festival submissions, I had to be quick. For me, that meant child themes, page-specific classes, and a few key plugins.

Thematic

Thematic makes it easy to create your own child theme on top of the fluid, reset blank theme that comes stock. There’s no quicker way to create a child theme that to use Themetic. It even comes with a sample child theme ready to go, just copy/paste and you’re already on your way.

Page-Specific Styling

The semantic, organizer in me always wants every style to be created with the most elegant, efficient execution possible. In reality though, this sometimes just gets in the way, especially when you have a time crunch and a artistically demanding client. Although the filmmakers let me execute my vision, they had very specific points to be made about the art direction and styling of the site. As this will be the representative of the movie to a broad majority of potential viewers, I can understand their need to have the site accurately communicate their vision. In execution, this meant a lot of doubling back on styles, trying something, reversing it later, etc…

Doing everything the most elegant way possible would have been nearly impossible or at least taken twice as long. That’s why I defaulted to basic global layout styles and page-specific selectors for the more minute details. Will there be duplication? Will the stylesheet’s organization be less-than-ideal? Yes, but I can double back after launch and clean those things up. The important thing during development is to stay agile enough to respond to feedback quickly.

Quick & Dirty Plugins

• Widget Logic – The best little things I’ve found to just “get it done.” You can select a widget to just display on one page, or remove it from just one page. This is perfect for quick additions to the homepage, or contact page because you don’t have to mess with editing the child theme files and putting the logic in php.
• Simple Music – I needed something quick a simple to play the film’s theme on page load. This is just about the simplest music plugin I’ve ever seen, not to mention it works like a charm with no fuss or muss.
• Vimeo Video Player With Playlist and Google Analytics –  This impressive-looking plugin is one of the best for playlist-enabled Vimeo content. Along with a backend UI page, the plugin comes with an great flash player for any Vimeo content you specify. One fairly huge caveat: There’s seems that a bug in the php breaks WordPress’ backend javascript. This means no widget edits while the plugin is enabled!

The following Monday, I received a tweet from the “editor-in-cheif” at Lifehacker, asking if I minded if the republished my article. I wasn’t an avid reader of the site, but I said yes without hesitation anyways. Being “republished” sounded cool, and I had heard of Lifehacker, so why not? I could try to play it cool here, but the truth is I was pretty pumped to be part of Lifehacker and curious to see what affect this might have on my site.

Also Monday, I glanced at the analytics, curiously wondering how much traffic Hacker News had solicited. I was astonished. My lowly blog spiked by more than 400% the day that article flourished on HN. After that, of course, the traffic settled back down to a more reasonable level (still a net gain).

I must admit only at this time did I take a few moments to investigate Lifehacker. It seems like republishing is sort of their bread and butter… A time tested technique for all sorts of seedy blogs on the web, the difference being they ask permission and give proper attribution. At this time my synacism kicked in and thought how hey essentially be making money with my content. Well ok, that how any business works, an it’s not like I sell ads on my site (yet anyways) so why should I care? Feeling a bit better about everything, left it alone and decided to forget about it for a few days.

More comments came in! The first sign of fresh traffic! Then some interesting
trackback links were submitted. I noticed many of them were from other duplicate republished articles.

I tested to see how much my post had been duplicated with this Google query. There’s not a ton of results, but mroe than I expected. At the time of my query, I counted seven duplicate posts from unknown sources and two from Lifehacker which I expected. I didn’t expect that all the duplicate results would rank above the original (mine) but perhaps I should considering my blog is fairly young.

It appears likely there are some sites that just copy anything Lifehacker publishes, which is evidently a solid seo strategy, considering many of them rank pretty decently. Grain of salt. It’s something web publishers have to tolerate until Google cuts them out completely I guess.

On a positive note, Lifehacker did give me a bump in traffic (although it was less than 1/5 of what HN drove) and it legitimized the blog somewhat.

Moral of the story? Like most things in life, it’s not black or white, but shades of grey. I’ll take the bad with the good. Duplicated content is a small price to pay for the fun of contributing readers and the interest of others.

Did anyone have a similar experience? Tell me about it.

I commit to small one-off projects for friends, longer-term work with acquaintances, and whip up my own projects all the time. Sometimes the projects are freelance, and sometimes they are simply “free.” All this serves to satiate the needling feeling in the back of my brain that I might just be missing out on something.

I used to compare my workload with the incredible stories of start-up legends who recall sleeping in their desk chair for five months until a million dollar product was born and they were set for life. Now I think those people could have the over committal problem licked. Those famed entrepreneurs had something an over committer doesn’t, focus.

It’s common sense that the more fractured your focus becomes, the less attention you can give to each piece. The other side of that coin is that you have to be super confident in that one thing to rest comfortably on it and avoid everything else. It’s perhaps a bigger gamble, but it’s probably the kind of gamble that pays off. People don’t trip and fall into hugely successful ventures, they think it through and focus.

Sprinkling your attention across many endeavors just ensures that none will likely mature. The more I work at hitting the right balance between current and ongoing projects, I have come to think that doubling down on the one solid idea you have may be your best bet.

What do you think?

Every major news outlet these days has a user-submitted portion of their web property. With the advent of smart phones, everyone and their mom has a camera on them at all times. When something  important happens someone in the 24-hour news cycle  is sure to cover it.

User-submitted journalism could easily be the future of online news, as the web has afforded coverage to become more and more fractional. The one-stop-shop for anything online has become less viable since users have access to a multitude of niche journalism sites, Twitter, and Facebook. To counter-act the the niche specialization which springs up from such a wide variety of media outlets, the big players need to depend on iReports so their content stays cost effective and compelling.

I think this service is pretty interesting, but I wonder how successful it can be in the near term. To take advantage of the service you’ll have to have the app ready on your phone, and I would bet a majority of users won’t suspect they’d need the app until it’s already too late and they’ve missed out on capturing that one shiny moment worth a thousand words. As online journalism is further democratized, the idea of supplying major media outlets with content will probably be part of the zeitgeist. Check out Citizenside’s site. It’s worth a look.

Compared to the things I used to do on breaks, like surfing the web or secretly playing a iOS game, sketching has a defined end point. Once you put the pen down, nothing jumps up on my monitor or flashes on my desk to tempt me to resume. By doing something nontechnical, it’s very unlikely the break will stretch on for too long because once I’m done doodling, I’m not thinking about it at all. The inverse is also true, once I’m doodling my mind couldn’t be farther from my daily work, which is more therapeutic than getting caught up in any digital distraction.

You don’t have to be Picasso either. By no means am I an artist, nor do I do much doodling in my spare time. I just grab a pen let my mind wander for a few minutes a day to clear my head. I don’t plan on framing these half-hearted gems or having a self-indulgent showing at some gallery because that’s just ludicrous. Point is, doodling only works if you don’t take it too seriously.

Here’s some examples of how I don’t let my artistic ineptitude hinder my hobby:

I implore you give it a shot sometime!

Feel free to disagree with my approach or offer critiques. I do not contend this is the end-all-be-all to quick iterative front-end development, but it‘s a good start.

Open Source is my friend

WordPress, WordPress, WordPress. It seems like just yesterday I knew nothing of the most successful blogging platform in history. Fortunately, it’s easy to pick up. After dev’ing out a few sites with it, I began to see how it worked. Now I’m feeling like a regular ole guru. The platform provides one of the biggest time savings for a front-end developer because it does so very much for you, e.g., url rewrites, menu creation, seo finess, and simple jquery plugins. Having a collection of reliable plugins also helps. Here’s mine:

• WP Unformatted - Ever get annoying by WordPress’s automatic paragraph tags? They can really mess you up if you’re not careful. Well, fear not, this plugin eliminates the “autop” loop from the page render process if you’ve added a handy custom field.
• All In One SEO - The mac daddy of SEO plugins.
• Lightbox Plus – A image gallery plugin that’s so simple it hurts.

Child Theming

I’ve touched on this in a previous post, so I won’t linger here. Suffice it to say, child themes not only make it easy to get started with your styling, but they preserve the ability to keep things updated. My theme-de-jour is Thematic because it provides a ton of hooks for custom widgets and has a great CSS reset built into it.

Common Sprites

There are a few sprites that are more common than others, icons and navigation. Along with a fairly uniform use, they can be laid out in a fairly uniform way each time. I’ve got a warehouse of commonly used sprites templates for buttons (3-states), pillboxes (horizontally flexible) and icon grids. That’s not all, if you’ve got a collection of commonly used image sprite schematics, then you might as well reuse the corresponding CSS.

Know What Needs to be Scalable

Is that button style used elsewhere? Will that headline need to be a custom font?

If you’ve got a simple “learn more” button thats repeated on various pages, my natural inclination is to spritify the image, and then use it for all button instances throughout the site. For a lot of these small site though, that “Learn More” button may be one of the only buttons used at all. In which case I’ll chop up a static button image, with a static size and just move on. Will this approach suck down the road when we’ve added more text so that it no longer fits in my predetermined graphic? Yes, but we’ll worry about that when the time comes.

What’s crucial in older browsers?

I typically support as many browsers as possible, which includes the red-headed step child IE6, but that doesn’t mean the site is identical in older browsers. Knowing where to draw a line will save a lot of time and money during your development phase. CCS3 techniques are easy, clean and a whole lot faster than creating image sprites for things like box shadows, rounded corners, & text shadows. I usually use CSS3 for these design elements and forgo them in older browsers, knowing that the UX will be lightly different, but not broken.

This decision is made individually a hundred times during the site’s development and it’s really a judgement call as to what’s a crucial design element and what the user can go without. If my main navigation is using a rounded corners, a gradient and text shadows, I may chop up a sprite for it as that is a much more important UI instance than, say the chevrons I’m throwing into the rail navigation using content:”>”…

Are Grids Overkill?

I’m a big fan is CSS grids (960 grid, 1140 grid, even the new Twitter Bootstrap), but for a small site I’m building an afternoon it’s overkill. I’m not going to need 20x variations of the 960 grid; I’m probably not even going to need 3x. If I’ve kept the design in line, it’s likely I’ll only need a few simple layout variations, which I’ll style and then move on.

Workflow

I usually start with the content, plug in some basic html around it and get all my pages set up with a working navigation before I style anything. This way I know exactly what I’m working with which helps CSS conventions and call out potential issues in the design. This also forces me to streamline the design process as there’s not enough time to linger in Photoshop getting the background pattern “just so” because it’s clear I have much work to do.

As with any website, the homepage is the most important, so I start with that. Starting with global elements and then working my way down to page-specific elements I finally get a sense of what the site is going to look like. Once I’m done with the homepage, 80% of my work is finished. All the global elements are done, and the more tricky page elements are usually completed.

Aside from an hour of my life I’ll never get back, you get Dr. Waddles Wiki. If there’s anyplace for such hi jinks, it’s the internet.

Know the doctor?

Any additions/suggestions to his bio are welcome in the comments section of this post.

Ok, so what? The benefits of WordPress aren’t exactly a secret, and even though the platform started off for blogging, it’s morphed into a catchall small-business website builder that can handle mom & pop’s trinket stand or Mary Joe’s cooking blog. All that’s needed is a little set up and some style. That’s where the WordPress themes comes in, and where the relatively unknown child themes truly shines.

Child themes allow you to start with a theme and overwrite the parts you want. You can change the style, image treatment, add or move markup and even create your own widgets. The child theme works as a separate entity to the main theme, and will override only the parts you decide. In this way, the parent theme remains untouched. When the theme gets updates, none of your changes are touched in the child theme, and you’ll be able to maintain the most current versions while keeping your additions organized.

The Thematic theme was my introduction to child themes, and remains my favorite out-of-the-box solution. The theme is free, and comes packed with all sorts of goodies, including a host of widget hooks to create your own custom modules, a sample child theme that makes creating your own as easy as one copy/paste, and a great minimal style which is the perfect CSS set to style your design on top of.

Recorded with my friends in a dusty old house on the wheat-filled plateaus of Springfield.

http://soundcloud.com/glenjabo/dead-bird

7:30 AM: I run by my favorite coffee shop on the way to work and grab a cup o’ joe for the road. Every morning I do so, the clerk (and owner of the establishment) presents me with a fresh “punchcard” and makes his first stamp in the upper left corner. The card reads “Hartford Coffee: Buy10 drinks and get 1 free” and has 16 little circles in which 16 little stamps are meant to be placed as a customer returns to purchase a drink.

7:45 AM: Check email…. drink coffee…

8:00 AM: I leave the coffee shop for work, and promptly toss the punch card in the trash or my pig-stye of a backseat.

Perhaps I’m being idiosyncratic, but the promise of a free coffee is no where near worth the price of holding onto this meaningless piece of paper for other two weeks. Granted, they have my repeat business so this customer retention tool is somewhat moot, but I don’t think I’m alone in my cost/value evaluation. The dream of one day redeeming this wrinkled, tattered card for a prize that costs a mere $1.83 makes the whole proposition not worth my time.

Customer retention in the Groupon age

Punch cards were your Dad’s customer retention tool. Groupon has desensitized us to small incentives like this. Now, merchants have to provide a ton of value for a customer to return. This little punchcard equates to a “Spend $18.30 for $1.83 in credit” tagline in Groupon. Not very compelling. Ironically, customer retention is an ever-growing problem from Groupon merchants as well. The service is touted as a customer acquisition tool for local stores, but a growing breadth of evidence says otherwise.

Birthday Boy

Jurassic Park

Avatar

Shutter Island

Casino (Gay Joe Pesci)

I love the way he talks about matching the aesthetic to your product. His example of the Japanese tractor company that wanted to look like a German automaker was very telling. We all have to make these kind of decisions when designing any sort of product.

Creating a professional brand that evokes the kind of company we’d like to be and accurately representing the company of today is a tough road to navigate if you don’t keep the user in mind. Perhaps someone might be temporarily fooled by a mismatched identity and think that Japanese tractor company is a classy automaker but in the end that misses the mark.

It seems like every startup has it’s contingent of employees that espouse the benefits of enforcing a strict 40hr work week with no overtime or weekends. As an employee of a startup, this line of thought is appealing, even lucrative, albeit unproductive and off-base. As I stumble into articles like this one at Stack Exchange (was recently upped on Hacker News), the more I begin to wonder about the validity of such thinking, and more importantly, the point of those articles…

Are they aimed to inspire startup companies to shape their work cycles around a manageable 40hr work week? Or are they simply trolling for over-worked developers to agree and start a bitch-fest? I think the later.

I’ve been employed at three internet startup companies in my young career as a web designer and they have all had longer work weeks than 40hrs. Sure, there are successful startups like LinkedIn who have adhered to a strict work-week. I don’t think that’s the norm, and for every successful LinkedIn, there’s a SliceHost who grunted through incredibly long hours of work to achieve success.

I don’t pretend to know what the best way to manage a fledging new startup is. I think if you’re pursuing a new venture, you’re more-than-likely very passionate about it, and therefore will have no problem pouring much of your life into it. Different approaches seem to have worked for different companies, so there may not be a best-practice. From my experience, long days and weeks are the norm, and should be expected.

Anything that claims different is either academic or trolling for sympathy.

They offer just enough essential tools to get a basic wireframe up and running without the clutter of extra bells and whistles. By keeping it simple, and using a nice “sketchy” aesthetic, you’re forced to get to the point and jot down your idea. This eliminates needless distractions and time-wasting decisions that are better left for the design process itself.

At $80, the full product pays for itself after a few months of use. Alternatively, the “Web Demo” offers the basic features in a web-based platform. I’ve found this to be perfect for simple projects.

Offering more type faces than you can wrap your mind around, indistinguishable text over low-contrasted backgrounds, crazy iconography, and more information than you could ever conceivably (or safely) read whilst driving past, this billboard is the mother-load of poor decisions.

I can’t pretend to know the design process that delivered such dribble, but it amuses me to imagine someone quipping “Throw a green star in there. Yeah, that looks real nice…” The reality is probably less amusing. This is the kind of thing that is derived from pure lack of thought. I doubt the designer set out to create a masterful work of art that throngs of John Q. Public would travel to for inspiration. It’s more likely the designer didn’t know what he/she was trying to accomplish, and that the creative reigns were handed over to another party. This is precisely how a lack of responsibility can contribute to a rather meaningless product.

So what’s my point? All too often I hear and read about designers who don’t take responsibility for their end product. They complain about constraints from bosses or clients and fail to take the blame when the product fails to do it’s job. Do those constraints exist? Are there unwieldy clients or managers who breath down your neck to deliver exactly what they have in mind? Yes, of course, but it’s your job to make sure whatever they want is what they should want. Its your job to pick that font face, your job to vet that slogan and your job to ask the right questions along the way. In the end that is what they want you to do anyways.

The clients will be happier with a little push-back and some bright ideas (it is what they’re paying you for).

Simply pushing pixels is not what got you into this business, so don’t let it be what gets you out.

Last month, I got an email from a local Mac dealership, Mac HeadQuarters. This place isn’t a trendy Apple store, just a regular-looking Mac dealer. In fact, the furnishings in the store couldn’t be more dissimilar to a typical Apple store. Instead of the obsessive elegance Apple stores are known for, Mac HQ is covered in mauve carpet, accented with retro-yet-still-uncool wood paneling on the walls. It feels like your uncle’s basement. Aesthetics aside, the place has some killer sales, I’m writing on a Mac I got there as you read this.

The following is a perfect example of why logo design competitions are a bad idea:

1. Not enough $

Not only is $1,000 probably too little to charge for a professional logo design, but it’s only store credit! Don’t get me wrong, I could waste $1,000 at an apple retailer pretty easily, but to only offer store credit is ridiculous. The end result is a degradation of the perceived value for design as a commodity. Much has already been written ont hat, so I won’t linger on that point.

2. There’s no input

They claim to have no affinity to their previous logos, but offer no guidance in terms of aesthetics or direction. I’m sure the company has a direction or some ideas of what they’d like to see. It’s tough to provide a broad base of designer with guidelines without feeling like you’re constraining them, but if they were to hire a real designer, there would be a conversation about the values they want highlighted in their design. Without any such discussion, the results wil be a mixed bag of off-base ideas and a general waste of time for all involved.

3. They’re too complicated

I’ve read through the voting instruction on that email several times and still don’t understand. Vote by email via the Facebook fanpage? Barf. Say what you want about 99designs, but at least that process is fairly straightforward. How is the winner decided? Just by a majority vote from gen-pop, or do the owners of the company have some say in what their new logo will be?