In modern web interface design, no other principle has been heralded and pushed onto us as much as the concept of user-centered design. User-centered design tells us that we should do everything we can to make our user interfaces as easy to use and as intuitive as possible.

However, a big part of designing user interfaces that are easy to use also involves figuring out what things should be a bit more difficult to to use. It’s a counter-intuitive notion that’s central to effective user interface design.

Why Make Certain User Interface Items Difficult to Use?

I can think of 3 main reasons for making an interface element more burdensome to utilize:

1. When using the interface element is costly to the user if used by accident
2. When there’s an overall improvement to the UI as a whole
3. When the cost of maintaining a feature is costly to the provider if used frequently

High Cost of an Error in Usage

When you accidentally delete a file or click on a button that you didn’t mean to, there’s going to be a cost. For example, recovering a deleted file in a traditional operating system such as Windows costs time. To get your deleted file back, you need to:

1. Minimize your current application so that you can see your desktop
2. Click on the Recycling Bin icon
3. Locate the deleted document in your bin (or type in a search term if you have many files in your bin)
4. Right-click on it to see and issue the restore command
5. If you want to continue working on the document, you need to reopen it

That’s a costly mistake. Good user interfaces will have safeguards for this situation, such as obfuscating the visibility of the delete command and showing you a confirmation dialog that asks you if you really want to delete the file. Burdening the deletion process is a purposeful design choice to avoid the more costly event of accidentally deleting the document.

Example: Deleting Content in WordPress

In older versions of WordPress, when you deleted content by accident (such as that post draft you’ve been working on for a month), there was no simple way to recover from the mistake. There was a confirmation dialog window that asked you if you did in fact mean to delete the content, but if you’re quickly going through, say, spam comments and deleting them one by one, there will be accidents. In older versions of WordPress, when you delete something, it was irreversible.

To fix this, WordPress added an additional feature called Trash. It works much like the Recycling Bin in operating systems that temporarily house files you’ve deleted in case you want them back.

Although it’s now harder to permanently delete WordPress content since you have an additional step to go through to remove the stuff you deleted inside your Trash, by intent, the deletion process was extended and made more difficult to prevent the more costly event of accidentally deleting a post or comment.

Improving the Overall UI System

When there are a lot of interface items competing for your attention, the result is an intimidating and cognitively burdensome UI.

For newer users of the system, having too much noise going on all at once can slow down their ability to learn how the system functions.

But we want people to have ready access to all of these awesome features, so the tendency is to fit as many things as we can into our screens.

Fitt’s Law

To help explain the value of making some interface elements more difficult to use for the overall good of the system, I’ll borrow from Jeff Atwood’s discussion of the opposite of Fitts’ Law.

Fitts’ law is a human-computer interaction (HCI) model that predicts the speed in which someone can move to an objective. It applies to any human-computer interaction situations that involve human movement and a target.

In the context of graphical user interfaces on computer screens, the model attempts to quantify the factors that improve someone’s ability to, for example, point and click on an interface element such as a call to action button.

If that sounds too complicated, we can simplify the model this way: Things that are important and frequently used should be bigger and closer to the user^[1].

It makes sense: Bigger things that are closer to us are easier to get to and touch than those that are smaller and farther away.

So, if Fitts’ Law states that interface elements that are essential to the user should be bigger and closer to them — or in the context of a computer screen, easier to find and see — Atwood looks at the problem in reverse and asks, "What should we do with UI elements we don’t want users to click on?"

The answer is simple. By logic, we make those UI elements more difficult to use, locate, and find by making them smaller and more distant to the user.

Doing this forces us to prioritize what interface elements are more important. In turn, this creates visual hierarchies in our UI elements that help the user understand how the system works.

Example: Freshbooks

One of my favorite apps, Freshbooks, demonstrates this point well.

The web app’s design smartly implements a logical visual arrangement of its interface elements to make things easier and more intuitive.

For example, in the Expenses tab, there are 6 commands you can perform from the top interface command set:

1. Add a new expense
2. Archive
3. Delete
4. Copy
5. Convert to an invoice
6. Search

Look at the variations in size, grouping and spacing of those commands. Some are close together, some are farther down to the right, Search is deemphasized.

Which command is the most important? Which one is the least important?

Counter-Example: Microsoft Word

Just because they’re our favorite whipping boy, let me follow the trend and pick on a Microsoft product: MS Word 2007.

MS Word has a cluttered main menu, and there’s not a lot of thought put in, in terms of Fitt’s Law. They all seem of equal value and thus, it’s harder to find the things you need.

How many times do you need to adjust your document margins or theme? Probably just once.

How many times do you need the Acrobat tab? (Never in my case).

Should all of these options be shown by default, or should they be hidden and more difficult to access for the overall good and simplification of the UI?

By hiding some interface elements or by making them smaller, you are afforded with more room to work with for commands that are truly important and often used (such as styling commands for bolding and emphasizing text).

High Cost to the Provider

Some features might be too costly to us as providers if they’re used regularly. An example of this situation is in obfuscating or burdening the customer support process so that users are encouraged to help themselves before submitting a help ticket.

Let’s use a real-world analogy to explore this topic: Toilet paper in public restrooms. Toilet paper in public restrooms are typically provided free of charge as a courtesy to bathroom goers. You can guarantee that toilet paper in these restrooms will be as rough as sandpaper and manufactured as cheaply as possible.

The reason this is so is that it’s a free service. One of the ways to cut costs is to get the cheapest toilet paper possible.

But what if the public restroom operator had some spare money to spend? Should he/she improve the quality of their toilet paper?

Nope.

There are other benefits to keeping toilet paper as crappy as possible. By making toilet paper difficult to use, they discourage people from taking advantage of the offering unless they absolutely need to.

For instance, many would hesitate to take rolls of toilet paper home because they’re unbearable to use and they probably have better stuff waiting at home. Some might even refrain from using public restrooms if they know that in five minutes they’ll be at home and in the comfort of their own restroom.

It doesn’t take away from the user; they still have the feature (toilet paper) but they’re just less likely to use it if they can avoid it. There is no lack of feature availability, so it’s okay.

Example: Download Feature in Design Instruct

I’ll use an example closer to home. On Design Instruct, everything is free: You don’t have to pay a subscription fee to access the site, you don’t have to register to use any site feature, and you don’t have to jump through hoops to download stuff (such as Photoshop files and freebies).

On similar sites that provide free downloads, they’ll often have large call to action buttons placed prominently at the top of the web page, enticing the user to download their source file.

In retrospect, on Design Instruct, the download feature is at the very bottom of the tutorial, as a link with a purposefully intimidating heading ("Download Source Files") and link name ("some_file_name").

Our reasoning is to discourage the feature’s use unless you really need to. This is because the download feature, although great for our users that need it, costs us an arm and a leg in bandwidth and servers (we need a dedicated server and CDN just for these downloads).

The download option will be used more by long-time readers who are already familiar with the interface and less by one-time visitors who’ll never return to the site again.

The objective here is simple: we want to prioritize our resources in such a way that the readers who’ve been with us longer are the ones that are likely to take advantage of this feature.

Example: Minimizing Free Signups in Basecamp

Another example where this concept can be seen is in Basecamp’s pricing page. Basecamp offers a free plan, but they’d much prefer you sign up for their premium plans.

In the screenshot below, I’d wager that many people miss the "free plan" option and find it more difficult to click on because of the option’s size and position, especially when compared to UI elements around it.

Even though they want to make this option available, minimizing free signups versus premium signups is the objective of this screen.

Further Reading

Here are a few articles related to this topic.

• The Opposite of Fitts’ Law
• Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization
• Visual Hierarchy – 52 Weeks of UX

References

1. Fitt’s Law

Related Content

• Negative Space in Webpage Layouts: A Guide
• An Introduction to Website Split Testing
• How to Increase Conversions on any Website in 45 Minutes
• Related categories: User Interface and Web Design

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development and a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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Recently I released a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics that adds a tracking code and dozens of various pieces of meta data to blogs. Since the release of version 4, I’ve updated it 6 times, to the point where it’s now at version 4.0.6. In this article I would like to share with you my experiences in maintaining this and other WordPress plug-ins and common good practices that I’ve distilled from that work.

The updates that I released had a couple of purposes, ranging from bug fixes to new features and fixes in documentation. While all of these are nice to talk about, the bug fixes are the ones you’ll learn the most from, so let’s start by going through these.

Website and Account Configuration

Almost as soon as I released the plug-in, people who updated were telling me that it worked wonderfully, and others were telling me that it didn’t work for them. Turns out I hadn’t tested the plug-in with a Google Analytics account that has only one website registered; I expected the websites to be an array. Fixing this bug was easy, but determining that this was the problem took a while.

Being able to log into a few hosts of people who gave me access to their back end and FTP so that I could test my fix proved invaluable. This enabled me to release 4.0.1 within an hour of the 4.0 release.

Another mistake I made was forcing everyone to reconfigure the plug-in. I assumed it wouldn’t be too much work for people, and it wanted to be sure the settings were clean, but it turns out quite a few people didn’t want to reconfigure. With 4.0.2, I came up with a way to inherit some of the settings and clean up the mess I made, and in 4.0.4 I made a change that I will add to all of my plug-ins:

Large view

Good practice #1: Don’t assume anything about people’s websites and external accounts.

Versioning Option Arrays

As a seasoned WordPress developer, I store all of the options for my plug-in in one option in the database, which is basically a big array. Why I hadn’t ever added a version number to these options is a mystery to me. Doing so makes it possible to do some very cool things: I can now add new features and set a default for these new features as soon as a user upgrades; I can show the user different messages based on the version they had before they upgraded; and more.

Good practice #2: Add a version number to your option arrays.

I’m still not using the WordPress option API stuff (check out this post by Ozh to learn all about it), which I probably should, but for now I find it easier to handle the saving and validation of options myself.

Don’t Release Too Soon

If you’ve got a bug that’s bugging a lot of your plug-in’s users, you’ll probably want to release a bug fix as soon as possible. I know I do. This caused an issue with my 4.0.3 release, though, because I didn’t properly test some of the code I introduced, causing me to have to release 4.0.4 just two hours later to fix a stupid mistake I’d made with booleans. Nothing is as painful as 500 people downloading a version of your plug-in that doesn’t actually work.

Good practice #3: Test, test, test before you release, even when you’re in a hurry.

Know Which Version People Are On

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been helping several people who said they were on the latest version of my plug-in but in fact were not. To remedy this, I’ve started outputting the version number in the comment that the plug-in outputs before the tracking code. Problem is, if people run a plug-in such as W3 Total Cache (which everyone should use by the way) or anything else that minifies their output, that comment will get lost.

There’s a solution for that, too: I’d already wrapped the script in <CDATA> tags, to help with Strict XHTML validation. Minifying will not occur within those CDATA tags, so I moved my “branding” comment to the CDATA section, and I can now always see, first, that my plug-in is active and, secondly, which version of the plug-in they’re using.

Good practice #4: Make sure you can see which version of your plug-in people are running.

URLs in WordPress

One of these things that can generate pretty awful bugs is a blog’s URL. Whether it’s due to people running their entire blog on https or “simply” running their blog in a sub-directory, it can cause headaches. It did for me in version 4.0.2 when I added URL sanitization: all relative URLs in posts and text widgets starting with a / were made absolute, in order to properly track these URLs. Tiny issue: I forgot about blogs in sub-directories, so a tiny portion of people would end up with links that used to go to /home but that now went to http://example.com/blog/home. I know, that was stupid; but that’s why I’m telling you: so you don’t make the same mistake.

Good practice #5: Make sure all URLs you use will work in all circumstances, whether WordPress is in a sub-directory, on a subdomain or just in the root.

Writing to the Root Directory

Somewhat related to the last issue, although I encountered this while developing my WordPress SEO plug-in, not the Google Analytics plug-in: if you write a file — say, an XML site map file — to the root of a website, and the website is actually a WordPress multi-site installation, things can go horribly wrong.

Check out the following scenario:

1. User 1 writes and publishes a post on example.com/blog-1/.
2. An updated XML site map for example.com/blog-1/ is generated, and example.com/sitemap.xml is updated.
3. User 2 writes and publishes a post on example.com/blog-2/.
4. An updated XML site map for example.com/blog-2/ is generated and example.com/sitemap.xml is overwritten.

See what just happened? The XML site map now contains only the posts from blog-2… This is exactly why the wp-content directory was created. There’s hardly ever a need to put a file in the root of an installation, and by not doing so, you make it far easier to run your plug-in in a multi-site/WordPress MU environment.

Good practice #6: If you’re generating files, generate them in the wp-content directory of your blog. Do not write files to the root directory unless you absolutely, positively have to. And if you do have to do it, make sure it doesn’t go wrong when your plug-in is active on multiple blogs in the same multi-site instance.

Rethink Your Filters

On the day that I released 4.0, I got quite a few feature requests, ranging from very simple to somewhat more complex. One that came in quite rapidly and caught my eye happened to be quite simple: the user wanted the same outbound link that in my plug-in tracks the content of an article to track in text widgets. Because I don’t use text widgets that much, it never occurred to me to do this. It was a valuable lesson, though:

Large view

Good practice #7: If you’re filtering content, try to filter it in as many places as you can, so that users get consistent results all over WordPress.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

Never Assume

It’s true for everything, I guess, but especially true for WordPress developers: never assume. The seven best practices above mostly boil down to abandoning all assumptions about states, URLs and locations, and even about people knowing which version of a plug-in they’re using. Take all these matters into your own hands; your plug-in will be the better for it!

(al)

© Joost de Valk for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: plugin, wordpress

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You’ve heard it plenty of times before: We’re at the precipice of a transition in the way we, as developers, do things. Leading the way are future standards like CSS3 and HTML5, both already partially implemented in 4 out of the 5 major web browsers, with IE9 promising support, empowering us as with new ways of making interactive and rich user experiences.

Just how awesome is CSS3? Find out by checking out these 10 experiments and demos that push the capabilities of the specs.

1. Our Solar System

This experiment presents our solar system’s planetary orbits (fast-forwarded, of course) by utilizing CSS3’s border-radius, transform, and animation. Additionally, hovering over the names of each planet on the right displays an animated tooltip using CSS (learn how to make CSS3 animated tooltips). You can read about how this experiment was developed from this walkthrough by Alex Girón, the creator of this stellar CSS3 demonstration. The animation, at the moment, only works on the WebKit browsers (Google Chrome and Safari).

2. CSS3 Ads Versus Flash Ads

Flash animated web banners are notorious for being intrusive in the user’s experience. Ad-blocking apps can turn these off by looking for all embedded Flash objects on a web page and hiding them. However, using CSS3 animation, these Flash ads can be mimicked in functionality, but will be harder to disable with third-party software. In this experiment, several ads were recreated using CSS3, and the results are almost identical to their Flash-constructed counterpart.

3. CSS3-Man

This is a robust animation sequence inspired by the Spider-Man animated television series in the 60’s. Making the sequence work involved using CSS3’s transform, @key-frame and rotate; a bit of jQuery was used to preload the images as well as HTML5 for the audio. The creator wrote an explanation of how the CSS3-Man animated sequence works, which will give you a general idea of the level of effort involved in this amazing experiment.

4. The Man From Hollywood

This demonstration is an animated sequence (based on kinetic typography) that explores a way in which we can replace rich animation components such as Flash or After Effects. This proof of concept chiefly utilizes advanced CSS selectors and CSS3 animation, however, it’s not purely CSS since JavaScript was used to toggle element classes on and off.

5. Anigma

We often use Flash (or Silverlight) for rich and interactive web-based video games. This CSS3 demonstration is a puzzle game and a proof-of-concept of how we can use open standards to create games — though admittedly, not as facile as Flash yet if you compare it to Flash games on sites like Kongregate. HTML5’s <audio> element was used to embed the sound.

6. Animated Polaroids

This demonstration is of stacked images that look like Polaroids. Hovering over a photograph transitions it smoothly to the front of the stack, making for an interesting interaction for presenting your photo gallery. The demo was made by leveraging transition, transform, dynamic psuedo-selectors (to animate the target element), as well as stylistic properties such as box-shadow for visual effects. Read the tutorial on how this was constructed if you’d like to learn how this was developed.

7. CSS3 Music Player Menu

With HTML5’s <audio> and <video> APIs, which will enable us to utilize multimedia without dependence from proprietary plugins, we’ll eventually have a need for GUIs that provide our users with controls for the media we serve them. Though we could use static images in conjunction with other HTML elements (such as buttons) to build these interfaces, using just HTML and CSS to render media controls mean we’ll have a more malleable solution. This user interface for a music player was built using only CSS3 (gradient, border-radius, box-shadow and all that good stuff). Read the explanation on how this was contructed in this tutorial.

8. Sliding Vinyl with CSS3

This demonstration, found in the ZURB Playground, takes vinyl album covers that, when hovered on, animates the sliding out of a vinyl record that contains additional controls ("more information" and "play"). This proof of concept could one day be used as an elegant web-based interface for a site that plays music when combined with HTML5’s  <audio> API.

9. Gabriel Sharp’s Small Planet

This animated cartoon sequence depicts a fast-forwarded cycle of day and night. It works on WebKit browsers (Safari and Chrome) using the @keyframes CSS3 property for moving and transitioning PNG images.

10. Falling Leaves

WebKit presents the capabilities of CSS3’s animate property with a spectacularly smooth demonstration of falling leaves. Tip: Use your browser’s "view source" feature to read the source code of the demonstration — the code’s well documented with explanations of how it works. Read WebKit’s blog post about the animate property to get a better feel for all the possibilities.

Related Content

• CSS3 Techniques You Should Know
• Basic CSS3 Techniques That You Should Know
• 20 Useful Resources for Learning about CSS3
• Related categories: CSS and Web Development

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is people — professionals and newbies alike — who make it truly remarkable. It’s the photographer behind the camera. It’s his imagination, passion and talent and knowledge of the medium. You don’t need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent and a way of looking at things differently is together more than enough for a great shot. It’s also the ability to envision the final result in your mind which is also important.

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. You can easily construct this camera by yourself using things lying around like match boxes or any kind of boxes, paper, duct tape etc. The small amount of light passing through this pin sized hole produces image on a photographic film or a CCD sensor.

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty on creating a pin hole camera by yourself, you can use your DSLR with some modifications (replacing camera lenses with a pinhole). Also, pinhole cameras are available in the market: and they are quite popular, too — after all, you don’t have to worry about the focus and distortions as there are no lenses involved. Also, you might end up with lovely motion blurred photographs.

In today’s weekend post we present beautiful and inspiring photographs created using a pinhole camera. Please notice how photographers use the camera creatively to produce quite remarkable images. At the bottom of this post you will find links to some photographers and references to related resources that will help you get you started. Also, we listed related Flickr pools which contain thousands of further examples of what can be achieved with this technique. Get inspired, folks!

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

Beautiful Inspiring Pinhole Camera Photographs

Tarquin Coates

Tetsuya

The calmness of blue by Andrew Watson

Daniel Tückmantel

Invader by TEIKO

Mackeson

Danielle Hughson

Tea Room

A. Wallis

An Oceanic Ghost Forest by Danielle Hughson

Zeb Andrews

Mackeson

Danielle Hughson

Scott VanderStouw

Tea Room

Scott Speck

Scott Speck

Mackeson

Bruno Malegue

gonebiking

The Iron Cycloid by Scott Speck

Matteo Bagnoli

The Sleeping Zebra by Scott Speck

Sarah Knopf

Follow The Tunes by Tim Franco

Bill Bresler

nhung dang

Darren C.

Scott Speck

Tea Room

Celeste Brignac

A. Wallis

Darren C.

Zeb Andrews

Kakki

Kent Mercurio

Mackeson

Sara

Erik

Zeb Andrews

Michael C. Pastur

mist-y

Zeb Andrews

Tea Room

Always de Sun

Remarkable Photographers

And here is a brief overview of some remarkable pinhole photographers from Flickr. They have added a new demission to photography: their photo streams are full of beautiful photographs.

Zeb Andrews

Tea Room

Scott Speck

Further Resources

• The Ultimate Guide to Create Your Own 35mm Pinhole Camera.
• Exposure Times for Pinhole Photography
• Photography 101 – Light and the Pinhole Camera
• 20 Strange Beautiful Pinhole Cameras
• Turn Your DSLR into a Pinhole Camera
• Turn Your Holga into a Pinhole Camera
• DIY: Pinhole Lego Camera
• DIY: Panoramic Pinhole Camera
• Pinhole Calculator
• Flickr Pool: Pinhole
• Flickr Pool: Pinhole Photography
• Flickr Pool: Color Pinhole Photography
• Flickr Pool: Polaroid Pinhole
• Flickr Pool: Pinhole Perspective

© vailrodrigues for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: photography, photos, pinhole

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Did you know that becoming a designer is relatively easy? You go to school (some people even skip that part), you interview for a job or start your own freelancing business, and then you start getting paid in exchange for making stuff look cool.

That’s about it.

Or is it?

Becoming a great designer — like becoming great at anything — takes a lot of practice, hard work and dedication. Maybe you are a student wondering if a design major or minor is the right way to go. Or maybe you are already a designer but you’re wondering whether a career as a designer is really right for you.

If you get through reading this article and find a couple reasons why you shouldn’t be a designer, it’s probably no big deal. If, on the other hand, you find that the huge number of these reasons apply to you, you may want to re-think design as a career.

1. You’re Not Artistic

I know this seems like a no-brainer, but it’s worth discussing. Some people have the mentality that designers and artists fall into two completely different, only vaguely related categories.

In reality, that type of thinking couldn’t be farther from the truth. Designers are artists — or at least they should be. Just because so much of what designers do these days takes place on a computer doesn’t mean there is no art involved in the modern day design process.

Many of the best logo and website designs start as sketches on a blank piece of paper. If you take the time to notice, you will see that many of the software applications designers use take cues directly from the art world. For instance, Photoshop and Illustrator — industry-standard software in the design field — both have painting-inspired features and vocabularies.

2. You Don’t Have Passion for Design

To be a great designer, you’ve got to have passion for creating things. Having passion is more than just liking or tolerating something. Passion pulls you in full-throttle, and makes you thirsty for more.

If you aren’t incredibly passionate about becoming a designer, don’t become one.

Burnout is a big obstacle for many designers; just wait until you’ve been working on the same type of project for months on end. That’s when you start to feel burned out and that’s when your passion will fuel you to push forward.

3. You’re Easily Distracted and Have a Hard Time Meeting Deadlines

Design requires the ability to focus, oftentimes for long periods at a time. It’s not to say that people with ADHD can’t be good designers as many believe that individuals with ADHD can hyperfocus on things they’re interested about — which is a big plus.

Are you planning on working for a local advertising agency? Ask yourself if you can sit through the time required to tediously and meticulously add realistic shading, remove skin blemishes, tweak typography and play with color combinations on an ad piece or a poster design until you reach pixel-perfection, sometimes over a weekend to meet a deadline.

Don’t get me wrong, design isn’t all work and no play, but there are times when you’ll need to concentrate hard on finishing a task for an extended period of time.

4. You’re Not a Good Communicator

How well do you get along with people? Do you work well in groups? If these questions sound familiar, you must have applied for a job sometime in the last few years. Business owners are putting a premium on communication skills these days, and it’s really no different for designers.

There are times when you’ll be working solo, but there will also be times when you’ll need to collaborate, take orders, give orders, and so forth.

When I say you need to be a good communicator to be a good designer, I’m not talking solely about being able to effectively talk to clients and people you collaborate with. I’m also talking about the medium of the work itself. After all, design is essentially a form of communication — the only difference is that design is visual instead of verbal.

5. You Don’t Respond Well to Criticism

When someone tells you there is room for improvement, do you feel the urge to punch them in the face? Criticism — and the ability to incorporate insights gleaned through critiques of your work into your projects to make them better — is an everyday part in design.

Obviously, you can’t go around punching people in the face all day, so do you have what it takes to understand the role that criticism plays in design? Nobody likes to be told their ideas are no good, but sometimes it’s not worth arguing.

If you are a freelancer, for example, your client (who is not a designer) may want to make some changes that don’t work well, or give you some harsh (even if inaccurate) criticisms. It’s best to roll with the punches so you can get paid for that project.

Alternatively, if you work as an in-house designer, your superiors are probably going to be standing over your shoulder telling you what works and what doesn’t (even if you don’t agree). It will take time to work your way up the ladder until you are the one who calls the shots — in the meantime, can you take the heat?

6. You’re Bad at Brainstorming

Designers need brainstorms like koalas need eucalyptus — without the ability to brainstorm effectively, you’re as good as dead.

Every design starts as an idea. Originality is everything in the design world. Even the best designers get stuck at times, but the truly great ones drive a mental bulldozer right through any roadblocks and keep going strong.

So, if you’re driving a mental tank, you’ll make a great designer, but if you’re riding in a mental clown car…

7. You’re Always Disorganized

Designing requires good organizational skills. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It all starts with your workspace. If you work in an organized environment where your stuff is easily found, you’ll be more productive. But it doesn’t end there.

You’ve got to organize your schedule as well, but there’s more, much more — design itself is an organizational task. You’ve got to organize information in a way that makes sense to people who view your designs. Design is, to a large extent, the art and science of visual organization.

8. You’re Lazy

Laziness is the enemy of good design. Students, I hate to break it to you, but gone are the summers where the most important thing to do was catch up on daytime television. Once you graduate from college, you’re going to be working full time.

If you choose design as a career, you’re going to have tasks to accomplish (surprise, surprise). It’s something like schoolwork except if you don’t "turn it in" on time, you’ll get an F for Fired. It’s that simple, really.

If you want to get paid as a professional designer, you have to work. And you can’t just work, you have to do good work. To do good work, you have to practice, put in the hours and not give up.

9. You Hate Not Being Physically Active on the Job

Designing is not running. It’s not swimming, it’s not hiking, it’s not snowboarding. It’s not a physically strenuous  job. You’ll spend the majority of your day in a chair getting to know your computer monitor, mouse, keyboard and pen tablet a little better.

If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you’ll have to do that on your own time.

10. You Don’t Like Learning

If you barely survived college — and let’s be honest here, it’s literally not rocket science, design is one of the world’s easiest majors — you may not like what I’m about to say next.

Design requires a lifetime of constant learning to maintain relevance. Some people enjoy learning (especially if they are passionate about what they do for work), but others shy far, far away from it.

New versions of programs are always just around the corner, new technologies are born and designers must learn how to create for new mediums all the time. Learning new things and changing your set ways (if having set ways is even an option as a designer) is a huge part of the job.

Some Parting Words

Design, like any profession, takes dedication. You should only consider a career as a designer if you are truly passionate about design, have strong communication skills, can organize yourself and information and love to learn new things.

What are other traits that designers can’t afford to have? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Related Content

• Five Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Expand Your Design Business
• Why Designers Should Learn How to Code
• How to Design for Your Worst Client: You.
• Related categories: Productivity and Project Management

About the Author

Chris McConnell co-founded the Brandeluxe network of sites, which includes Freelance Review, Design News Source and Daily Design Advice. Be sure to follow @Brandeluxe and @DesignNewsSrc on Twitter.

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Smashing Editorial: Please notice that the language in some parts of this article may be very informal. If you think you might be offended, please stop reading this article now.

I hate the division represented in this title. It’s the major stumbling block in modern business. Power struggle is never constructive, and it at least doubles workforce effort at a time when streamlined is crucial for a positive ROI. You can spell “team” from the word “marketing,” but I’ve yet to see a sense of it in marketing. What can one spell from “creative”? “Reactive”? I’ve seen plenty of that, and for good reason.

Don’t get me wrong: I love marketing as a practice! Relatively speaking, marketing is a fairly new practice (marketing in the sense of “public”, broad mass marketing, applied to products in the modern age — ed.), and one that has to evolve each day to keep up with consumerism and technology. As a designer, coming up with marketing ideas is orgasmic. Guerilla, sabotage and viral marketing are the work of genius, which is why we don’t see them very often. But you are probably thinking horrid thoughts about marketing practitioners right now, so let’s rethink for a second.

I have known a handful of great marketing people in my career, and they were smart enough to form their own companies. They always managed to do the delicate dance to create something that was effective and not just popular with anyone who might, oddly enough, have an opinion. And then there are the people you see every dreadful day.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter!]

It’s A Diverse Crowd Out There

I have a ton of marketing stories, but my favorite one comes from when I was art directing and designing a major push for a new licensed character across all marketing channels. The staff and I worked like crazy to get the lines done in time for approval. It took months — that’s how many lines there were.

After our submission for approval from the licensor, a member of the marketing staff, lower level, came to me, telling me the changes that were needed. First off, don’t tell someone the changes: write them down so that there’s no misunderstanding. Luckily, I was taking notes. One of the changes called for major surgery on the main character to remove markings on their face. It made no sense to me, and I questioned it, but he stood fast and insisted that that’s what the licensor wanted. I asked to see the email from the licensor.

“No.”

I asked that he email the licensor to ask for clarification.

“No.”

The most infuriating thing was that this over-sized man with a cherubic face, looked like Baby Huey from the old Harvey Comics. Sounded a bit like him, too. It was hard to speak with him without laughing. As his new nickname circulated through several departments, a contest started among the staff to try to deal with Baby Huey without laughing.

I knew trouble was brewing, and so, like any smart person who would make file copies or turn off layers, the art staff and I stated cutting the image and placing everything the licensor wanted removed on a hidden layer. We did this to hundreds of pieces. A month later, we submitted the changes, and then (surprise, surprise) the licensor ripped marketing a new one for removing the marking, so essential to the character. An impromptu witch-hunt was held right outside the art department, next to the marketing offices. The president personally led it.

Without wasting any more column space than is needed to state the obvious, Baby Huey was spanked… and I believe the president actually asked him, “What is your major malfunction, Baby Huey!?”

The best part was when I was asked how long it would take to fix it. Explaining to the lay person that I would simply turn on some layers in Photoshop took longer than actually turning them on, but I scored big points with the president, while my “marketing step-brother” was sent to military school.

This doesn’t happen enough. But it does and can happen! At another corporation, marketing was publicly spanked for taking eleven-and-a-half weeks to work on an initiative that had only twelve weeks in total — giving creative, copy and design three or four days to execute lines for hundreds of products. Creative would always get it done, so action to stop it took a while, but the grumbling and angry staff meetings got some relief in the form of at least six weeks.

Are We Or They The Strange Ones?

What do creatives look like to non-creatives? Obviously, everyone thinks they can design an ad or logo in Microsoft Word, so immediately we become snooty, whining snobs. A great marketing person I worked with wrote a recommendation for me and said, “…great designs without a lot of creative baggage!”

“Creative baggage.” What could that mean? For anyone who has wrangled creatives, whether staff or freelance, we can be intolerable freaks. It’s hard to remember the last creative who actually followed my art direction without an argument or apology. We are also weak and lack the social skills to deal with corporate power. We often give up our power in an effort to be seen as “flexible” or “a team player.”

An art director who was firmly a puppet on the hand of the company she worked for gave me this recommendation: “He usually hits strategy, but if some adjustments need to be made, he is very open to suggestion and direction. [Speider] has worked with our team for a long time and understands our process.”

The process was that I went into meeting all smiles, told a few jokes and did exactly what I was told to do. The pay check helped me live with myself.

In most cases, that means doing what you’re told by anyone bold enough to speak their opinion about the creative process and not be questioned. I have had to pull marketing co-workers aside and remind them that we were both reporting to the same person and that no one ever told me anything about reporting to them. I’m not “being difficult”: I’m taking control of my work for my department so that I don’t have to take the fall for failed initiatives and low sales down the road that result from someone else’s design decisions. I never get angry or aggressive, although people who have worked with me say that my sarcasm could be deadly at times. Baby Huey’s ghost haunts me.

Be Different, But Expect The Same

Just the other day, a client showed me a product catalog that I thought was from 1972. It was their 2010 catalog, and the creative department’s directors asked me to bring one of their paper products into the present (or future) and do “something different.” I love when they say that.

I did some of the finest work of my career… some good work. The creatives were really on board, and revisions were almost non-existent. Imagine basically having free reign to design some fun and impressive paper products and having the full support of your clients? Well, no good effort goes unpunished, and I was informed that the marketing department rejected the work in favor of a catalog that looked like a sequel to the one from 1972.

What has the fear in business done to our ability to make fast, hard decisions in the marketplace? Safe and take-a-step-back has gotten us into the mess we’re in right now. How do we get out of it? I include this passage from someone who would refer to himself only as a “suit.”

I have to have the confidence that the design solution is meeting the needs of the client and is achieving strategic/tactical goals. Because of that, if there are elements of your design that I’m uncomfortable with, I will call them out and, in some cases, will nix them. Similarly for the client, they have to be comfortable about how their own brand is being presented, how their market will react, even how their own staff will react.

“How their market will react.” That should be the only concern. And how did this “suit” become the tip of the approval funnel? The truth is that people can’t let go without second- and third-guessing what will be successful. It’s not a question of whether, say, a good marketing plan based on researched demographics would improve a creative brief that professional designers and writers could use to create a cohesive package. The reality is more like, “Just design, and I’ll make changes until I see what I like.” That always makes for a great waste of time and resources.

Business is tight for many reasons, but just one wrong move could cost you big time. My question is, if the marketing plan is sound and the sales staff is competent, then why would those simple little changes that are requested to please people truly affect the product?

”You know, Bob, I was about to buy that package of Fluggelbinders that I wanted, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“Too expensive?”

“No. The color of the package turned me off.”

Happens like that every day, doesn’t it?! I used that exchange in a committee meeting in which the background color of an exclusive product was discussed and sampled for a week. The marketing manager turned to me and said that I had negated marketing’s input. I thought marketing’s responsibility was to figure out the target audience, their habits, income and so on and how to best reach them through media and other advertising venues — not how blue or green the product should be? Silly me! Maybe it’s a marketing secret that can’t be shared with creative. They’re spies for… something.

Do You Want To Get Involved In Office Politics?

What can one say when sitting in a committee meeting and subjective suggestions are flying around, usually contradicting each other, and people are echoing previous requests but adding “More red” or “Bigger logo” or “I’ll know when I see it”? I sit and listen, take notes and then turn to my contact (if it’s a freelance job) and ask what he or she would like me to implement. To be sickeningly submissive, I say, “Some great insights here, but some are counter to the creative brief and some other directions suggested here.”

I turn to the art director, boss, marketing person or whoever hired me and ask them to go over what they think will be needed. Usually, they tell me just to follow what I was told in the committee meeting. This is when I’m thankful for hourly rates, because the Frankenstein created by the committee is usually too monstrous to please anyone. It goes around and around as long as more than one person has a final say on the project. Imagine what would happen if too many cooks worked on a dish. The chefs I know are insane and would stab and de-bone each other.

When freelancing, you are removed from the eternal struggle between creative and marketing. You are only a tool used by creative and a bludgeon used by marketing to wield its power over creative. Just ignore it and let the creative department deal with it.

But what happens when you are the art director or designer on staff? If you are, then prepare for office politics. The struggle between creative and marketing has nothing to do with design or marketing: it is the good old human impulse to assert one’s power over others, to be the alpha dog.

Whatever your position or department, everyone in it is jockeying for some measure of power over others, from the frowning minimum-wage guard at the front desk who tells you to sign in (as you’re doing it) to the mail deliverer who won’t give you your mail away from your desk to the co-worker who tries to convince you that part of their job is now your job or that part of your authority is now theirs.

Humans usually spend a lot of effort blending in with the herd and shying away from confrontation. Confrontational people know this and use it. When the person taking your order asks if you want to super-size it, do you say “Sure” or “No”? You say yes because your brain and protective nature tell you to go the easy route and say yes. Less aggravation. Why do good girls like bad boys? Because we… I mean they go against the herd, they break with convention, and they’re confrontational.

So, it stands to reason, while you’re in the workplace — where you face the pressure of HR rules, progress reports and the ever-present cliques of workers and executives — that you would feel alone and stay away from confrontational co-workers. But you can bet that they will at least size you up from day one, if not start stealing your authority and setting a standard that will follow you throughout your career at that firm.

You must start a new job with basic knowledge of your rights as an employee. Listen, and be bold, compassionate and assured. Show no fear, and show that being flexible is not the same as being a wimp. Any business book will tell you that the weak die. You have to set your own boundaries when starting a job. If you “wait and see,” then standards will be set for you as you adjust to the learning curve. If you relinquish any territory, you will not be able to get it back. You will open yourself to charges like, “That’s the way it’s always been done, and you said nothing last time.”

(By the way, a comeback to that last line is, “It may have been done that way in the past, but part of my job is to streamline the process to get the best results, faster and more efficiently. I’m sure you’ll love what my system will do for the workflow and product.”)

As with any situation, your gut will tell you what’s right and wrong, as will your job description. To whom do you report? To whom do others report? If a marketing person reports to the same person as you or is lower on the corporate ladder, why would you let them dictate anything if you were not told to follow their lead? Sometimes, someone may be assigned to oversee all aspects of a project. In that case, they are the boss, and that’s that… but that role ends when the project ends.

If a colleague of yours on the same rung of the corporate ladder makes a poor suggestion in a committee meeting, it’s best to nod and just not execute it. Either you’ll never hear a word about it or the colleague will approach you about it — in which case you shouldn’t respond that you don’t have to take their suggestion, which could be labeled as “confrontational” (it’s always the people who defend themselves who are “confrontational”), but rather that their idea, after much consideration, was found to have no merit. Simple and easy. It deflates their ego and could lead to sexual performance problems down the line. How can you argue with that?

“I thought my suggestions were good!”

“Sorry, but I didn’t think so, and no one else echoed your concerns.”

(This cuts the person off from others by setting a line that people would rather not cross. You are showing strength as the alpha dog. The pack will fall on your side.)

A more direct and devastating attack would be to ask, “Why do you think I’m incapable of doing my job?” This is a heart-stopper because it cannot be answered. They may argue that you lack team vision or that they’re protecting the client’s interests. Again, ask why they think you haven’t fulfilled the team’s vision, drawn from the creative briefs, and why they see you as acting against the client’s interests.

It’s like a fistfight. It lasts only a few seconds before the herd breaks it up… Yes, this is confrontation. Even confrontational people are taken aback when confronted, unless they are psychotic — in which case, pray that HR rules keep them from turning violent. And if they do become violent, taking a knuckle sandwich from your lunchbox is a small price to pay to see the aggressor fired and spend a night or two in county jail awaiting a bail hearing, opening the way for you for a civil lawsuit. A win-win situation!

On the other hand, you might encounter a “squeaky wheel,” who runs to the boss demanding “respect” and a title over you. Often, in the interest of a quick resolution, the boss lets the squealer have their way. You’re only hope is to calmly state your case, note your accomplishments without the squealer’s input, and add that it’s a business office and not a therapist’s office for people to work out their personal problems by laying them on others. Firm, direct and sound.

If Squeaky gets their way, then you’re doomed. But then, you don’t really want to work in a place like that anyway. If the boss would so easily knock you down the ladder, then you need a new boss. If you get your way, others will fear confronting you. I think coining the name for Baby Huey may have frightened my colleagues into avoiding my displeasure and gaining a nickname of their own.

The Enemy Within?

Once you establish that you are not a push-over, most people will respect your boundaries, and the natural order will be restored… with an occasional bump as a stray member of the herd probes your weak spots. Those weak spots, as some will discover, are your department colleagues: lowly designers and writers who will surely tremor when someone storms into the office and demands the changes that “I called for in the meeting.” Now you, as that lowly worker, have another problem. You have just given up your power to a stranger and put your creative director in a tough spot. Your actions affect how your supervisor controls the department and your job.

The proper thing to do is to tell the intruder that you are just a designer or writer and that they really need to speak to the creative director so that they can assign the proper revisions and work. Then smile and point to the creative director’s office. If your colleagues are on their toes, one of them will summon the creative director to come into the department and protect his or her minions from intruders. I’ve done it a gazillion times.

Summon your righteous indignation, flair your nostrils and imitate the tiger. When the interloper leaves, send an email gently reminding them that they must come to you for any requests, because only you know everyone’s schedule, and all changes must be signed off by you, as department head. Don’t assume that HR will intercede to stop this; they believe that the process should be flexible enough to keep work flowing. And as long as the bloody wound isn’t squirting arterial red like a fountain, HR likes as few problems as possible.

Points to Remember

1. You were around. In fact, aside from occasional bathroom breaks and meetings, you’re around 12 hours a day on average.
2. You are responsible for everything that comes out of your department and will be held accountable for it.
3. People want their way and will try anything to get it.
4. Don’t allow people under your authority to sabotage your power or security.
5. Prepare a response to an objection or make a list of responses for when a ridiculous argument is used to attack you.
6. HR wants the easiest path to peace and calm. Present all squealers as troublemakers and not team players. Use corporate-speak to your advantage.
7. Sometimes you will lose the battle. Sometimes you will also lose the war. Form as many strong allies in the company as you can. The higher the executive level, the better!
8. Does someone want to comment on a design in a conference meeting? Make some well-educated comments yourself. Perhaps you see a hole in the marketing plan, or the project doesn’t have enough creative time, or the sales material is a week past deadline. Bring it up gently and kindly. I believe that’s called passive-aggressive. Use it!
9. Grab power, and don’t wait for it to be offered. Take on an extra project; start an initiative yourself; or earn a few million dollars for the company. They’ll sit up and take notice.

Power grabs are often made by people too incompetent to do their own work, and public displays of “directing” are thought to mask that incompetence. They often are. But handled correctly, they aren’t, because they won’t get the chance.

Every Relationship Has Good And Bad Times

When I worked at one large corporation, I was closing up my office and the art department at 7:00 pm on a Friday night when a young woman from the marketing department caught me in the hallway and asked to step into my now locked office. She immediately went into an act about how “her” project was so important and how I had to do it by Monday and email it to her because she would be away for the weekend.

I looked at her in silence. I asked who she reported to and learned it was one of my subordinates (if you went by the order on the corporate masthead). I told her I would talk to her boss on Monday to find out why she would have the utter nerve to hope that I would be in the office at 7:00 pm on a Friday night and then expect me to work all weekend on something that was not important enough for such a tight deadline. She stormed off.

I don’t remember why I was late on Monday, but as I walked down the hall, people were shouting for me to check my email. There was an email from the young lady I spoke with on Friday evening. She must have gone back to her office and written a very angry message, courtesy copying the entire corporate division, about how unwilling I was to work on her project, and how she was cancelling it, and how I was costing the company millions of dollars and immortal souls, and hail Satan, hail Satan, and so on.

In walks her boss, one of those fine marketing people who I mentioned do exist. The young lady had the project for three weeks (grabbing it as her first project and naturally wanting to make a big splash), and as I suspected, it wasn’t time sensitive… Mind you, she sat on it for the previous three weeks, and it did have to be at the printer the very next day. Being of sound minds, the head of marketing and I were able to come up with a solution, work hard together and make the deadline. Creative and marketing did it… together, with no arguments or stepping on each other’s toes or egos, and we both shared in the glow of accomplishment. It can happen. Maybe we just need guns to our heads at the time?

(al)

© Speider Schneider for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
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The amount of code that developers encounter regularly is staggering. At any one time, a single site can make use of over five different web languages (i.e. MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML).

There are a number of lesser-known and underused ways to enhance your site with a few simple but powerful files. This article aims to highlight five of these unsung heroes that can assist your site. They’re pretty easy to use and understand, and thus, can be great additions to the websites you deploy or currently run.

An Overview

Which files are we going to be examining (and producing)? Deciding which files to cover was certainly not an easy task for me, and there are many other files (such as .htaccess which we won’t cover) you can implement that can provide your website a boost.

The files I’ll talk about here were chosen for their usefulness as well as their ease of implementation. Maximum bang for our buck.

We’re going to cover robots.txt, favicon.ico, sitemap.xml, dublin.rdf and opensearch.xml. Their purposes range from helping search engines index your site accurately, to acting as usability and interoperability aids.

Let’s start with the most familiar one: robots.txt.

Robots.txt

The primary function of a robots.txt file is to declare which parts of your site should be off-limits for crawling.

By definition, the use of this file acts as an opt-out process. If there are no robots.txt for a directory on your website, by default, it’s fair game for web robots such as search engine crawlers to access and index.

While you can state exclusion commands within an HTML document through the use of a meta tag (<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />), the benefits of controlling omitted pages through a single text file is the added ease of maintenance.

Note: It’s worth mentioning that obeying the robots.txt file isn’t mandatory, so it’s not a good privacy mechanism.

This is how the robots.txt file interacts between a search engine and your website.

Creating a Robots.txt File

To create a robots.txt file the first and most obvious thing you will need is a text editor. It’s also worth pointing out that the file should be called robots.txt (or it won’t work) and it needs to exist within the root directory of your website because by default, that’s where web robots look for the file.

The next thing we need to do is figure out a list of instructions for the search engine spiders to follow. In many ways, the robot.txt’s structure is similar to CSS in that it is comprised of attribute and value pairs that dictate rules.

Another thing to note is that you can include comments inside your robots.txt file using the # (hash) character before it. This is handy for documenting your work.

Here’s a basic example telling web robots not to crawl the /members/ and /private/ directory:

 User-agent: *
 Disallow: /members/
 Disallow: /private/

The robots.txt exclusion standard only has two directives (there are also a few non-standard directives like Crawl-delay, which we’ll cover shortly).

The first standard directive is User-agent. Each robots.txt file should begin by declaring a User-agent value that explains which web robots (i.e. search crawlers) the file applies to.

Using * for the value of User-agent indicates that all web robots should follow the directives within the file;  * represents a wildcard match.

The Disallow directive points to the folders on your server that shouldn’t be accessed. The directive can point to a directory (i.e. /myprivatefolder/) or a particular file (i.e. /myfolder/folder1/myprivatefile.html).

There is a specification for robots.txt, but the rules and syntax are exceptionally simple.

Robots.txt Non-Standard Directives

Of course, whilst having a list of search engines and files you want hidden is useful, there are a few non-standard extensions to the robots.txt specification that will further boost its value to you and your website. Although these are non-standard directives, all major search crawlers acknowledge and support them.

Some of these more popular non-standard directives are:

• Sitemap: where your Sitemap.xml file is
• Allow: opposite of Disallow
• Crawl-delay: sets the number of seconds between server requests that can be made by spiders

There are other less supported directives such as Visit-time, which restricts web robots to indexing your site only between certain hours of the day.

Here’s an example of a more complex robots.txt file using non-standard directives:

 Allow: /private/public.html
 Comment: I love you Google, come on in!
 Crawl-delay: 10
 Request-rate: 1/10m # one page every 10 minutes
 Robot-version: 2.0
 Sitemap: /sitemap.xml
 Visit-time: 0500-1300 # military time format

Whilst not a standard, there is an extension for robots.txt which has mainstream support.

Favicon.ico

A favicon (short for "favourites icon") is a small image (like a desktop application’s shortcut) that represents a site.

Shown in the browser’s address bar, the favicon gives you a unique opportunity to stylise your site in a way that will add identity to browser favourites/bookmarks (both locally and through social networks).

The great thing about this file is that every major browser has built-in support for it, so it’s a solid extra file to provide.

This is how the favicon.ico file affects your site visually through the browser such as IE.

Creating a Favicon.ico file

To create a favicon, you’ll need an image or icon editor. I am a fan of Axialis IconWorkshop, but there are free editors like IcoFX that do the job well.

You can also find quite a few free online favicon tools by viewing this list of web-based favicon generators.

You need to have a 16×16px icon (or 32×32px, scaled down) that matches what you want to see in the browser.

Once you are done creating your icon’s design, save the file as "favicon.ico" in the root directory of your web server (that’s where browsers look for it by default).

Note: It’s a good idea to use the .ico file type, as some browsers don’t support PNG, GIF or JPEG file types.

To make this file work properly, refer to the location of your favicon in the <head> tags of all your HTML documents, as such:

 <head>
 <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="favicon.ico" />
 <head>

The rel attribute values of "shortcut icon" or "icon" are considered acceptable and the MIME type of "vnd.microsoft.icon" (as of 2003) replaced the older type ("image/x-icon") as the official standardized favicon MIME type for .ico files on the web.

Note: While Internet Explorer (and some other browsers) will actively seek out your favicon in the root directory of your site by default (which is why you should have it there), it’s worth adding the above code into the <head> of your HTML just to make it explicitly known by other types of browser agents.

There are multiple online tools which can create a favicon from existing images.

Favicons in Apple Devices

Another standard (of sorts) has appeared in light of Apple’s iPod, iPad, and iPhone. In this situation, you can offer a 57×57 PNG, ICO or GIF file (alpha transparency supported) that can be displayed on the devices’ Home screen using the web clip feature.

Apple also recommends that you use 90-degree corners (not rounded corners, which the devices will do for you automatically) to maintain the "feel" of such icons.

To make this file work properly, place the following code into every page within your <head> tags:

 <head>
 <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="images/icon.png" />
 </head>

For users of Apple devices, a specially produced "favicon" can be produced.

Sitemap.xml

One thing website owners worry about is getting their website indexed correctly by the major search engines like Google.

While the robots.txt file explains what files you want excluded from results, the Sitemap.xml file lists the structure of your site and its pages. It gives search engine crawlers an idea of where things are on your site.

This is how the Sitemap.xml file interacts between a search engine and your website.

As always, the first recommended course of action to produce a Sitemap is to create the XML file that will contain its code. It’s recommended that you name the file as "sitemap.xml" and provide it within the root directory of your website (as some search engines automatically seek it there).

It’s also worth noting that while you can submit your Sitemap file location directly to search engines, adding the non-standard Sitemap directive to your robots.txt file can be useful as it’s widely supported and gives spiders a push in the right direction.

Below is a basic example of how a Sitemap looks like.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url><loc>index.html</loc></url>
 <url><loc>contact.html</loc></url>
 </urlset>

Each Sitemap file begins with a Document Type Definition (DTD) that states that the file is UTF-8 encoded, written in XML, and uses the official Sitemap schema.

Following those formalities, you simply produce a list of your URLs that exist within your website’s structure.

Each URL must be contained within two elements: <url> and <loc>. This is a very simple specification to follow, so even less experienced developers should be able to replicate this basic mechanism with little effort.

To reference your Sitemap inside your HTML documents, place this code between the <head> tags:

 <head>
 <link rel="sitemap" type="application/xml" title="Sitemap" href="sitemap.xml" />
 <head>

Just like most XML-based schemas, there is a protocol and specification to follow.

Other Sitemap Tags

While you could limit yourself to simply listing every file, there are a number of other meta-information that can be included within the <url> tag to help further define how spiders deal with or treat each page in the site — and this is where the Sitemap’s true power lies.

You can use <lastmod>, for example, to state when the resource was last modified (formatted using YYYY-MM-DD). You can add the <changefreq> element, which uses values of always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never to suggest how often a web page changes (for example, the front page of Six Revisions has a value of daily).

There is also the <priority> tag, which uses a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 that you can utilize to indicate how important a web page is to a website.

Here’s an example of using the above tags:

 <lastmod>2010-05-13</lastmod>
 <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
 <priority>0.8</priority>

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to submit your Sitemap to initiate its analysis of your site structure.

Dublin.rdf

Ensuring you provide metadata has become big business among SEO professionals and semantics advocates. The appropriate use of HTML, metadata, microformats and well-written content improves the chances of appearing in the right search results. They also allow an increasing number of browsers and social networks to aggregate and filter the data so that they can accurately understand what your content represents.

The Dublin.rdf file acts as a container for officially recognised meta elements (provided by the DCMI specification) which can augment the semantic value of the media you provide.

If you’ve ever visited a library and tried to locate a book, you know that you will often have to flick through the library catalogs to find books based on their subject, their author, or perhaps even their title. The aim of the DCMI is to produce such a reference card for your website that will help search engines, social networks, web browsers, and other web technologies understand what your site is.

This is how the Dublin.rdf file interacts with supporting social networking mediums.

Creating a Dublin.rdf File

To begin, you need to produce the file itself (which we shall name "Dublin.rdf"). In order to maintain consistent meta details about the site (as opposed to individual DCMI meta tags for specific pages and resources), we shall create an RDF file (formatted as XML) with a reference within the HTML document to indicate that the information is available. While you can embed DCMI meta tags within HTML, RDF allows you to cache the data.

When a supporting spider or other resource that acknowledges the DCMI core sees the file, they can cache and directly relate to the information.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use traditional meta tags, but the file can serve as a useful supplement.

 <?xml version="1.0"?>
 <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc= "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
 <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.yoursite.com/">
 <dc:contributor>Your Name</dc:contributor>
 <dc:date>2008-07-26</dc:date>
 <dc:description>This is my website.</dc:description>
 <dc:language>EN</dc:language>
 <dc:publisher>Company</dc:publisher>
 <dc:source>http://www.yoursite.com/</dc:source>
 </rdf:Description>
 </rdf:RDF>

Like most XML files, this RDF document has a DTD — and within that, you have the description element (which links to the resource being referenced).

Within the description, as you can see from the above, there are several elements (beginning with the prefix of dc:) — these hold the metadata of the page.

There’s a whole range of terms you can add (see this list of DCMI metadata terms), it’s simply a case of adding the term’s name, then giving a value as denoted by the DCMI specification. You’ll end up with a library of useful data that can improve your site’s semantics and interoperability with other sites and applications!

To make this file work properly, place the following code into every HTML document within the <head> tags:

 <head>
 <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="Dublin" href="dublin.rdf" />
 <head>

The Dublin.rdf file makes use of the DCMI specification to provide meta information.

OpenSearch.xml

The ability to search a website is one of the most important ways people locate content.

The OpenSearch file allows you to add a custom search engine listing (on your own site) through the search feature that appears in all modern browsers. All of the major browsers can take advantage of OpenSearch; it’s pretty durable.

While you will still want to provide a search mechanism on your website, this core enhancement complements the user’s in-browser search capabilities.

This is how the OpenSearch file interacts with your site through the browser.

Like with all things we’ve discussed thus far, we need to produce the file for the code to be placed in.

As this particular type of file doesn’t have assumed name reservations like robots.txt or sitemap.xml, we could call the file whatever we like. However, the convention for OpenSearch files is to name the file, "opensearch.xml".

You’ll want to include the code below as your starting template, then proceed to customising the required tags such as <ShortName>, <Url> and <Description> (they are case-sensitive) to describe your site.

The example used below is for Six Revisions using Google Search.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
 <ShortName>Six Revisions</ShortName>
 <Description>Search this website.</Description>
 <Image>favicon.ico</Image>
 <Url type="text/html" template="http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sixrevisions.com%2F&amp;as_q={searchTerms}"/>
 </OpenSearchDescription>

The tags included above are:

• ShortName: the title you want for your search extension
• Description: explains the purpose of the search box
• Image: this isn’t required like the others, but I recommend referencing your Favicon with it so the search feature has a unique icon
• Url: requires a MIME type and a template attribute which links to the search terms

To make this file work properly, place the following code into every page within the <head> tag:

 <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="Website" href="opensearch.xml" />

Other OpenSearch Tags

There’s a range of additional tags we can provide. Among these are:

• AdultContent: if the site has adult material needing to be filtered, set to false
• Attribution: your copyright terms
• Contact: an email address for the point-of-contact of your site
• Developer: who made the site?
• InputEncoding and OutputEncoding: The MIME type used
• Language: i.e. EN for English
• Query: for more detailed search terms
• Tags: keywords, separated by a space
• SyndicationRight: The degree to which people can request, display or send results

Example usage of these other tags:

 <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
 <Attribution>Copyright, Your Name 2010, Some Rights Reserved.</Attribution>
 <Contact>None@none.com</Contact>
 <Developer>Your Name</Developer>
 <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
 <Language>en-us</Language>
 <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
 <Query role="example" searchTerms="terms" />
 <Tags>Example Tags Element Website</Tags>
 <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>

Simple, Small and Effective

While this guide represents a crash course in producing these useful files, it’s worth pointing out that taking the time to understand the syntax of any language is important in order to determine what the impact of these files on your website.

These files represent a truth that there’s more to a website than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and while producing these files will certainly not act as a replacement for your existing code workflow, their inherent benefits make them worthy of consideration to supplement your projects. Give them a try for yourself!

Related Content

• The Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites
• Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers
• Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times
• Related categories: Web Development and Website Management

About the Author

Alexander Dawson is a freelance web designer, author and recreational software developer specializing in web standards, accessibility and UX design. As well as running a business called HiTechy and writing, he spends time on Twitter, SitePoint’s forums and other places, helping those in need.

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The word chocolate can be associated with many words: dark, white, milk, hot, sweet, spicy, etc. But have you tried to combine it with the word web design? We did. We searched the Web for websites in any way related to chocolate and what we found is worth to be collected in this showcase. The interesting thing is that you would probably never stumble upon some of the sites, so the overview below may provide you with a unique perspective and get your creative juices flowing.

As one would expect, chocolate website often use an appetizing brown dominant color. If you take time to look at the panel of colors associated with it, you will find out that there is a lot of combination working really well. Apart from this component, each site is unique and features an original identity, depending on product presentation and given information.

Feel free to explore the designs featured below. Some of them are nice examples for Flash used for product presentation. Some designs are very classy while others are more artistically designed. But they all have in common this fascinating sweetness everyone loves.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the Smashing Book?]

Similarities In Chocolate Website Designs

We found out that there are three common techniques that seem to crop up over and over again on various chocolate-related websites. A vast majority of the sites use a horizontal top-navigation, brilliant product and ingredient images as well as a dark brown color scheme which is often combined with vivid, strong colors.

CharlesChocolates: the bright blue color scheme here is fun and fresh, but the thick footer navigation is what really makes the CharlesChocolates’ site stand out.

The navigation patterns are mostly common and convenient, however we’ve noticed quite a few uncommon navigation menus as well. The interesting part is that we’ve seen only a couple of typical boring stock templates. Apparently, most chocolate and confectionery website owners do care about their branding and their unique presentation on the Web. In fact, many sites try to be playful, creating an engaging, interactive and memorable user experience. That’s not something you will see in every industry, e.g. certainly not among medical websites.

Horizontal Top Navigation

Because chocolate websites vividly highlight product and ingredient images and therefore fill a large part of the layout with visuals, the choice of horizontal top navigation seems quite appropriate. The number of navigation options varies from five to nine links per navigation menu (excluding sub-navigation links). The most common navigation links lead to pages describing the manufacturor of the chocolate, shops where the chocolate is available and “gifts” pages where users can order business gifts, wedding gifts etc. Sometimes the navigation also contains a link to the recipes page.

Jeff de Bruges
Offsetting each navigation element with it’s own double border makes each link stand out and adds visual interest to the header.

Godiva Chocolatier
Placing the navigation directly under the header works well on the Godiva Chocolatier site.

Jacques Torres Chocolate
Having the top navigation highlighted by a thin orange border makes it more visible to new visitors.

TCHO: Buy Dark Chocolate and Gifts
The top navigation here is simple and a bit on the minimalist side. Placing it above the bold header text makes it stand out a bit more.

Chocri chustomized chocolate bars
Classic tabbed navigation works well with multi-colored text and a subtle gradient.

Daskalides
Simple horizontal navigation is combined with a playful Flash-based navigation in the middle of the page.

Cadbury: Cadbury Chocolate
A simple, traditional top navigation bar is user-friendly and almost always looks good.

Product and Ingredient Images

The quality of product photography on chocolate websites is remarkable. Images are often large and dominant and are given a lot of both horizontal and vertical space. In fact, chocolate, especially gourmet chocolate, is often very visually interesting. The ingredients that go into it can also be very aesthetically pleasing. So it only makes sense that a lot of designers are opting to include mouth-watering images of the chocolate being sold on a given site.

Festival Internacional de Chocolate de Obidos
This site of a chocolate festival uses a striking background image as well as a nice chocolate photos on its main page.

Green & Blacks Organic Chocolate
The broken chocolate bar used here gives a casual look to the site, while the embossed logo helps reinforce the brand.

Dagoba Organic Chocolate
The combination of chocolate with blueberries and lavender reinforces the organic nature of Dagoba’s chocolate bars.

Mindy’s Hot Chocolate
An almost-macro image of chocolate shavings in a chocolate martini, combined with other images of their offerings sets apart the Mindy’s Hot Chocolate website.

Patrick Roger

Toblerone
Toberlone opts for limited product images, but including just a couple of well-placed images can have a positive impact.

Haigh’s Chocolates
A large, close-up image of the product adds a ton of interest here without overwhelming the otherwise simple and minimalist design.

Chocomize
Showing the variety of possible chocolate bar customizations can go a long way toward enticing visitors to create (and order) their own customized chocolate bars.

Brown Color Scheme

Obviously, dark brown color scheme dominates on chocolate websites. However, very often the scheme is complemented with vibrant, dynamic colors such as bright green or red. In general, most sites do stick to the dark scheme, often with tiled or photographic backgrounds which are closely related to the main theme.

Dove Chocolate
The Dove Chocolate site has an almost exclusively brown website design, with varying shades used to offset different parts of the site.

Divine Chocolate
The Divine Chocolate site uses brown in limited quantities, but it’s still prominent in the design.

Valrhona
Dark brown used throughout the design of Valrhona’s site makes one think of dark, high-end chocolate.

Hemmankonditor
Varying shades of brown, from the very dark brown (almost black) of the background to the lighter browns of the navigation and header are all evocative of the many varieties of chocolate out there, and what can be made with them.

Promise Me Chocolate…
The combination of dark brown and pink works really well together, especially on a site specifically targeting brides-to-be.

The Cocoa Tree
Using brown as an accent color sets apart The Cocoa Tree’s site. It feels fresh and light, something that’s often hard to accomplish while still bringing to mind chocolate.

Brookside Foods
The Brookside Foods site brings together various shades of brown with black and gold to create a high-end looking site.

Unique Designs

Some chocolate websites fight for user’s attention with striking design elements and unconventional navigation schemes. Some of them are presented below. In these cases, (for site owners) the engaging and memorable user experience seems to play a very important role.

Max Brenner
The Max Brenner website is set apart for a few reasons. The right-hand vertical navigation is one reason. But also the retro, grungy design with the animated eye (you’ll have to visit the actual site to see it).

Bloomsberry
The animation used on the Bloomsberry site is interesting and very well-done. The navigation is also atypical, with links easily identifiable but scattered throughout the main part of the home page.

Pierre Marcolini
The Pierre Marcolini site is very minimalist, with not a trace of brown showing up in the main part of the design.

Wispa
Another site that uses no brown in the main design, but instead opts for colors reminiscent of the product’s packaging rather than its contents. The hand-drawn elements also make it stand out.

Chocolate Research Facility
The animated chocolate dripping onto the screen is a bit gimmicky, but also adds a lot of interest to what would otherwise be a very simple site.

More Chocolate Website Examples

zchocolat

Kommunarka

Pionir

Chocolate Editions

Icam

Spartak

Chocolatfrey

Kambly SA

Askinosie Chocolate

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related showcases:

• Showcase Of Beautiful Vertical Navigation Designs
• Beautiful eCommerce Websites
• The Unusable and Superficial World of Beer and Alcohol Websites
• What If Oscars Were Given To Movie Websites?
• Principles Of Minimalist Web Design, With Examples

(jb) (cs) (mm) (cc) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: chocolate, showcases

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Creativity needs a jumpstart at times. When you’re feeling creatively low, one of the best ways to get inspired is to admire and look at exceptional web designs. In this collection, you’ll discover some new web design galleries to check out. I hope you find at least a couple of new favorites that you’ll bookmark and visit regularly!

Want to find more design galleries? Check out these other collections:

• Where to Go to Find Design Inspiration
• 20 Fresh & New Design Galleries
• 16 Best Web Design Galleries for Inspiration

1. Wireframe Showcase

Wireframe Showcase lets you peek under the hood of a web design. Instead of focusing just on the finished layout — which is how most web design galleries work — featured designs on the site have a discussion by the web designer and screenshots of preliminary sketches, prototypes, and wireframes, giving you insight on their production process.

2. Heart Directed

A recently popular design trend is blogs that publish custom-designed blog posts. Heart Directed, a web project by Design Informer, highlights some masterfully crafted and visually stunning blog posts.

3. siiimple

siiimple, as the site’s name implies, features clean and simple web designs. It’s a great place to visit if you want to see how great designs can become when they’re boiled down to the bare essentials.

4. Grid-Based

Using grid layouts gives your designs a sense of order through systematic placement and alignment of design elements. Grid-Based is a niche web design gallery that showcases beautiful sites that employ grid systems (of course, presented to you as thumbnails aligned on a grid).

5. MephoBox

Typical web design galleries feature an entire screenshot (or a partial thumbnail) of web designs. However, MephoBox steps outside of this convention by placing common website components such as headers and web forms on center stage.

6. HTML5 Gallery

The HTML5 Gallery seeks to promote the use of HTML5 by inspiring web designers with real websites that already use the new standards. Richard Clark, a front-end designer in the UK and owner of the site, hopes that "a side effect of this [website] is that browser developers will see how many people are implementing HTML5 and add more support for it."

7. Typekit Design Gallery

We’ve talked about @font-face in the recent past through a guide on @font-face as well as a tutorial on the free Google’s Fonts API web service. Typekit, a leading subscription-based service for web fonts, has a web design gallery featuring the use of web fonts on real sites.

8. Mobile Awesomeness

Though some may contest the value of having a mobile design today, Mobile Web — without a doubt — is certainly the future. Mobile Awesomeness indexes and presents aesthetically awesome mobile web designs for your inspiration.

9. HTML Email Design Gallery

A popular task amongst web designers is the construction of HTML emails. For web designers looking to be inspired in the oftentimes hair-pulling-inducing activity of designing HTML emails, check out Campaign Monitor’s gallery of beautiful HTML emails.

10. The Drawar Design Gallery

Drawar, a blog by 9rules and CSSVault founder, Paul Scrivens, curates an on-site web design gallery where you can find meticulously handpicked web designs. The process of getting your site featured involves a highly sophisticated quality decision algorithm with an equally arduous submission guideline that’s best described by Scrivens himself: "You submit a site and it gets put into the system. I look at the site and if I like it then it gets moved into the Gallery."

Related Content

• 16 Best Web Design Galleries for Inspiration
• Readers Pick: 16 Sites for Web Design Inspiration
• The Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites
• Related categories: Web Design and Design Showcase \ Inspiration

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and PHP development, and a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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Web professionals have to be both flexible and creative to meet the needs of each client — and these characteristics often transcend the design and development process. Each of us has a unique approach to our work. The particular mindset and methods by which each of us turns a mental image into a delightful and usable website is worthy of investigation.

In this article, we’ll discuss three approaches taken by many Web designers and developers. While a creative individual usually falls into more than one of the three categories, each of us is still likely more heavily weighted towards one. These approaches might help determine what paths someone is best suited for and might shed light on how they achieve their goals. So, without further ado, we introduce you to the artist, the scientist and the philosopher.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter!]

The Artist

Sitting in a studio apartment, engrossed in Adobe Photoshop, ruminating on the powers of shape and color, is a person like no other. The artist is a creature of great creative power, who sees beauty in their surroundings and attempts to reflect it in their work while meeting the requirements of their clients. The artist might not be inclined to write the next Google killer, but everything they produce is inspired by their care and keen eye.

Definition: Artists are best defined as those who are more interested in the presentation itself than in the mechanics of the mode of presentation. Graphic artists, Web designers, content writers and podcasters often fall into this category.

Passion and the need to create are the hallmarks of the artist. Her wish is to satisfy her love of the visual elements of the Web industry. She relishes showcasing her skills and stays at the forefront of exploration in the field of design. Her imagination is matched only by that of children and children-at-heart.

Living in a fantastical world of beauty — which can actually breed sensible design — is not the only characteristic of the artist. Visitors are drawn to her work and feel an emotional connection to it. The artist also acts as a muse for other designers.

With a range of tools, the artist conveys emotion in a beautiful and professional design. Here are some examples:

Single-page animated websites powered entirely by Flash are common.

Typography that goes beyond Web-safe conventions can enhance artistic value.

Clean, visually appealing designs that attract many eyes.

Minimalism and a focus on content demonstrate a keen use of space.

jQuery animations and colorful focal points increase visual interest.

The Scientist

A cup of something caffeinated and some snacks lie on the desk. It’s the middle of the night, and a man is furiously typing away at his computer, producing line upon line of code to meet an looming deadline for “the next big social network.”

The scientist is a creature of habit, working longer hours than other colleagues. He has the stamina to render thousands of lines of PHP in an engaging, thought-provoking and memorable project filled with complexities and structured progress.

Web developers — their term — are well known for late nights and working at ungodly hours. They can produce code at the drop of a hat. While these habits may seem rather unhealthy, the scientist’s willingness to solve complex problems, his enviable powers of memory and his ability to solve problems logically make him a different but still inspiring creature in the technological world and workplace.

Definition: Scientists are best defined as those with an interest in code. Making things work and creating structure tend to be their top priorities. Think of programmers, developers, database workers and their kin.

Pictures of a coding monkey might come to mind, but remember that writing code is just as involved and requires as much creativity (though perhaps of a different sort) as the work of the artist and philosopher. It’s also just as much of a gift. To give you an idea of the inner beauty of the scientist’s work and of how this driven mindset can be a powerful asset, see the examples below.

Following specifications shows the scientist’s commitment to presenting code properly.

Server-side scripts process forms silently and in the background.

Innovation and careful planning lead to elegant and complex search mechanisms.

Keeping things simple increases speed and minimizes redundant code.

Frameworks and microformats facilitate well-maintained, elegant, optimized code.

The Philosopher

Our friend the philosopher sits on a train. He is on his way to meet a company. His laptop is open, and he is reading the business plan — or so it seems. Underneath, the wheels are turning; he is dreaming up a revolutionary way to help the business evolve. The philosopher, a unique breed, incorporates the skills of the artist and scientist while bringing to the table his keen insight into trends and target audiences. He is engaging and friendly, and he shows empathy, that rare and valuable gift.

Definition: Philosophers are consultants, officially and unofficially. They are masterful advocates and are able to coordinate and empathize with both artists and scientists. Think of accessibility and usability gurus, UX and IA advisors, SEO planners and information architects.

Those who design and build websites tend to receive the most credit in our industry. The philosopher knows that if he does his job well, he is invisible. His work should integrate seamlessly with the work of his colleagues. He is the person who performs UX and usability tests, audits websites and advocates for the end user.

The skills of such a person might seem questionable, but their understanding of the end user’s needs and their ability to help execute the team’s vision for the Web are attributes worthy of distinction. The philosopher is calmly neutral and can sense what is best for everyone involved.

Below are a few examples of contributions made by philosophers to the evolution of the Web.

Techi highlights that a well-structured navigation menu is paramount.

Jakob Nielsen is a famous master of usable Web design.

Philosophers put a great deal of thought into simplifying information requests.

Accessibility gurus consider the potential of mobile and handheld devices.

Looking for errors and potential improvement is all part of the job.

Which Are You?

The world is full of job titles that are meant to define people’s roles and usefulness. While a title can delineate a person’s skill set, it doesn’t come close to explaining how each professional sees themselves or what they mean to a community. A question inevitably left unanswered is: what makes an individual’s style and approach unique?

Bridge the Gap

Under the right circumstances, each of us gets to be all three: artist, scientist and philosopher. Being a Web professional often requires an equal measure of skills related to art and design, development and theory. Still, the way we conduct ourselves and perform our duties hints at our true “inner being.”

You’ve met these three equally gifted professionals (in this article and probably in real life), but keep in mind that distinguishing between these three types is simply an exercise in professional development. None are in any way better than the others; this field has a genuine need for all three. It goes without saying that approaching tasks in different ways helps us to be innovative. If you’re just entering the industry, perhaps a little self-analysis will help you find your niche.

We are all a bit of everything. Most of us can draw; even if we’re limited to stick figures and finger paintings, we all have an artistic outlet when we need it. We can all think logically, even if we don’t always show it; and our ability to work and code within parameters is helped along with HTML and CSS. We are all social beings, able to interact and understand one another, and we all have personal tastes. Everyone also has bad habits and prejudices. Stay open-minded and accept that “it takes all kinds”; a variety of skills and personalities makes the workplace vibrant.

We possess the knowledge and skills required to undertake the work our clients pay for, and acknowledging these three approaches can aid us in our work. In doing so, we might feel driven to learn new skills or find ourselves better able to understand and cooperate with our colleagues, and we might gain enough insight to take a step back from a project to get a fuller view of our goals.

Be proud of your unique approach (if it’s working), whether you’re an artist, a scientist or a philosopher. We are, each of us, unique, and we are more than the sum of our qualifications.

(al)

© Alexander Dawson for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
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