I absolutely agree, but it’s hard to fathom the process required to get rid of them. The article is dead on, though, enough is enough.
My name is Ryan Heath and Formed Function is my web design and development business. I do my best to produce great work every day, and I love to write down my thoughts, explorations, and ideas as I go. That, plus a few other coding-and-design-related tidbits, is what you'll find here on this blog.
A great response by Andy Rutledge in reaction to a recent 37signals post about designing in the open. As Andy mentioned, I was in agreement with Ryan Singer until he pointed out his solution to “designing in the secret.” Unfortunately, Ryan’s solution leaned toward micromanagement. And to top it off, micromanagement by anyone involved (non-designers included). As most designers are aware, that could go awry real fast.
I agree completely, the fold is irrelevant in the traditional sense. Website visitors don’t mind scrolling, and often expect to. However, I still believe it’s important to keep interesting tidbits of a design near the top to give the user reason and desire to stay on the page (and by association, scroll), but maybe that’s a discussion for another time.
Fight Through The Crap
It’s typical for all designers and creative people to hit a long-lasting wall where nothing they create seems good enough. It’s a defining period of time for a lot of careers, and if you’re going to make it in the design industry, it’s important that you fight through the crap.
Ira Glass puts this in perspective better than anyone else I’ve seen, so I’ll defer to him:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Here’s the video.
The Instagram Square
All images posted to Instagram must be a squared crop before they can be uploaded. I personally think this was a brilliant move. Here’s why:
- Squares are proportionally correct. There are no misalignments or elongated edges.
- Forcing a user to choose a cropped square has somewhat of a Dribbble effect in that it demands the most interesting section of the picture.
- Squares are predictable in terms of designing an interface. It’d be hard to argue that against the fact that better designs can be built around images that are all of the same aspect ratio. Guesswork for unknown shapes creep into design decisions early and can look clunky more often than not, and when you’re dealing with something that is largely for visual purpose (i.e. photo galleries), that matters.
- Easier implementation has to be mentioned, since there’s no post-processing needed to crop images into squares.
- There are no surprises: what goes in is what comes out. The image proportions remain exactly as they were prior to upload.
I don’t know if those things were considered beforehand or if it was a side-effect of some other reasoning, but I do know that I’m glad Instagram only supports squared images. It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back.
I often come across sites and interfaces that make me question why something works the way it does, and I’ve often thought it’d be a fun experiment to try and improve that interface myself. But having not been there from the beginning, designing under the same constraints as the original designer(s), I rarely view it as fair or constructive. That doesn’t mean it still can’t be fun, though.
Like the last part of the article states, perhaps doing unsolicited redesigns is okay as long as you remind yourself that all of the original constraints have magically been lifted for your version of the design, rendering it much easier and free-willed.
Readability certainly has its place. But as a designer, I read mostly articles written by other designers, so naturally I enjoy looking at the craft behind the body. I lose this with Readability (along with Instapaper and RSS for that matter).
While Readability works as advertised today, we recognize that reading isn’t just about “data in”. Just as a great article can evoke strong sentiment and emotion, so can a great visual experience around the text.
Well put. It’s good to know they’re at least aware of the problem and are trying to help bring back some of the visual appeal a lot of articles end up losing.
The duality between city and nature.
Design Is Never Done
Iterations are expensive if nothing comes out of them (and yes, sometimes that’s unavoidable). But reminding ourselves that design can (and will) always be updated helps promote a flow of constant improvements, even if they’re not perfect.
I find that asking “Is this an improvement over the last version?” instead of “Is this perfect?” yields a better release cycle and (hopefully) happier users. Let’s face it, perfection doesn’t exist, even though we all use the term (loosely). Our goal should be to release, learn, update, and release to make sure our interfaces are always trying to solve the right problems the best way possible at that moment in time.
Remember, design is never done.
From Wufoo: “A web developer’s quick reference guide detailing today’s browser support for HTML5 form technologies.”
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