SXSW '06: Day The Second
Yesterday was an interesting mix of panels. As per my plan, I started at Traditional Design for New Technology and was very surprised to find how little information was actually communicated. To compensate for this I stayed after and had an interesting chat with Jason Santa Maria and Mark Boulton about what web designers can learn from the history of print design. I'm not a design school trained designer, so what do I need to learn and is design school the only place to learn it?
Jason pointed out that he's learned so much more not in school than in school. However, design school is the place where he learned to be creative with other people and not just for other people. Mark also noted that design programs are changing in response to the new uses of design and many of the artisanal skills that shaped the world of design for so long, like setting type by hand, are getting lost.
I mentioned that all my design work in the last year has been heavily influenced by the growing discussion of grid design techniques and asked what other ideas from print design need to be embraced by designers on the web. Mark suggested illustration, a la the new A List Apart design, and Jason mentioned color theory--an old favorite of mine.
Next I headed over to How to be a Design Superhero with Sandy and had a hard time getting into it. The presentation was by the ever charming Andy Budd and Andy Clarke. The presentation took an elegant metaphor and overextended it a little bit. At least the slides were beautifully designed. For the rest of the day I tried to think of a take-away from this talk and concluded that as a designer I need to be conscious about my backstory and the skills it has given me. It is essential to be a generalist but a designer needs a good foundation, you know, like a superhero has a superpower and supergadgets.
I also popped over to the Ajax panel and found that it wasn't anything I haven't either heard or read about on my own. It did seem like a good overview for newbies so, if that's you, check out the forthcoming podcast from SXSW.
After lunch we raced back for the keynote and I was surprised about how interesting I found Jason Fried and Jim Coudal to be. I've seen them before and have read the Getting Real PDF book. Admittedly, the talk was mostly Getting Real in... real life. I was, as always troubled by the reality that I can't apply 90% of what they say to my daily work. That last 10% is pretty meaty and, though largely unoriginal, important to hear again and again.
- Stay small
- Embrace constraints
- Say no
- Make your product, don't plan it
- Be your own client
It's that last one that trips me up on thinking about applying their thinking to my work work and not just my personal work. Like most designers, I work for other people. There is something to Coudal's rejection of traditional client work but ultimately people and companies need help building for the web because they just can't do it by themselves. So I can't be my own client all the time, that's unavoidable, is there a lesson to be learned from the Getting Real mantra to work for yourself?
Some people are bad programmers and some are bad designers. They need programmers and writers and designers and illustrators and they have to work together. Fried seems to get this implicitly in the way that 37Signals is structured but I don't hear him articulating it. Yeah I can't be my own client but I can, when doing client try to use real UX techniques like actual user research and tools like the Ajax link tracker that show data in its natural habitat. So yeah, get rid of functional specs when you can, throw out wireframes and Photoshop comps and mock up your work in HTML. The point of those examples isn't that they work for everybody, it's the gut check of real or bullshit. Here's the question to ask yourself, is what I'm doing right now doing my work or is it bullshit?
In the afternoon I went to see James Surowiecki give a verbal rendition of The Wisdom of Crowds and just loved it. I've not read the book but added it to my Amazon shopping cart straightaway. His idea is that the collected wisdom of groups larger than fifty is better than the wisdom of the best member of the group. Jelly bean counting is a typical example. The average guess of a group this size or larger is right a shockingly high percentage of the time. For any situation where there is an objectively true and verifiable result (what horse will win the race, where something lost is resting, who will win an election, etc.) the wisdom of the crowds is the best thing you have. Think about desire lines through grass that people use when sidewalks are not designed in a way that adequately gets people from points A to B.
To cap off the day I went to check out the Starting Small:Web Business for the rest of us panel with Leonard Lin of Upcoming.org fame. It was a great discussion of how to let yourself fail in obscurity before you get big and figure out all of your problems.
All in all it was a good day of panels. Not as in depth as I would have liked but I'm hopeful for the rest of the conference.
Who is this guy?
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