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Abridged Transcript

Gary
I am in Chris’s studio in Philadelphia because I got the bright idea to drive to Allentown to buy a chair! A little bit more than the audience needed to know! So, before I jump into my first question, I just wanted to let the listeners know that you have an interview on the Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman. Everybody should check that out first because it kind of ties in, but also it’s a really great example of what a modern web design looks like from start to finish and they cover the fonts.com re-design, so, check that episode out and also for the education portion of it that they talked about in the beginning. All right, so in Episode forty-seven [I think it was 45], my guest, Lauren Meranda talked about teaching students how to make WordPress templates and preparing them for freelance work. So, ever since that episode, I’ve been thinking more about freelance as a career path. Just like you would be working in an agency or you’d be working in an in-house team, since you’ve done agency and you’ve done freelance as full time, can you kind of compare and contrast the two?
Chris
Sure. And in some respects I don’t think they’re very different. My experience has been situationally where I have in some respects kind of mimicked what an agency is like in the services I provide but also conversely, I’ve also joined other agencies as a freelancer to kind of augment their teams and expand their ability to service their clients so while I’ve…I emulate a lot of what an agency provides in my own practice, I also am totally happy with kind of jumping on board and joining a team and being part of somebody else’s agency in order to kind of round out my own abilities to make money and keep in business.
Gary
OK. So, I cannot speak for every design educator in this one; this is my own personally how I approach the classroom, and I approach teaching design with the idea that my students are going to get a job at a graphic design firm. I’ve never ever, until this episode, thought about when you go to work at an in-house firm, you’re working with an existing brand. That’s different than how I teach design because I’m teaching design from scratch and then the freelance work is also…it’s not as different from the agency as it is from maybe the in-house but then there’s the other intangibles that you need, that you get at a firm, so if you go to the firm you’re going to learn how to work with a client; when you go to a firm you’re going to learn how to work, not just in teams because we do that in the classroom; we work in teams but we don’t work in teams with different disciplines. And so that’s where the impetus for me asking that question is there any really kind of differences…
Chris
I don’t think I would have had the confidence to be a freelancer if I didn’t start out with many years of experience working inside of agencies; what that provided me was the opportunity to see all the gears, see all the components, understand how projects are managed, understand how projects are budgeted; how you come to some sort of number, how you work with the client to figure out what that number is, how you meet deadlines, how you collaborate with other disciplines. The design education I had at Drexel didn’t kind of hint upon that but what they did have though was they had the co-operative education program which at the time was putting their students into two different real working situations so I had that kind of like early taste of…whoa, OK, this is how the magic happens in the real world and that kind of like drove my desire to look for those type of opportunities once I got into the workforce but all of that, even with all that, fifteen years plus of working for agencies, the moment I stepped out and became a freelancer, I was still scared to death, so there’s a lot you can learn but until you start to actually do it yourself and understand all the different pieces and parts that go into being your own boss, so to speak, is terrifying.
Gary
Again, it’s that whole idea of you don’t know what you don’t know and so I guess my goal as an educator is like, I want them to know what they don’t know. If I can just make them aware of it, I think I’ve done my job. So, in that Big Web Show, you did talk about Drexel a little bit and I’m curious because in that episode, you also kinda mentioned that you think that there other academic institutions that are kind of mimicking that model. I personally don’t know of any, so, I’m curious how did it…what was…logistically: one semester you’re taking classes, the next semester you’re doing X. Is that, logistically, how did that work and did they find you the internship or did you have to find it?
Chris
It’s a little bit more complex than that, but the most part, it’s a pretty well-run machine there. So, Drexel’s based on a quarter system. So, once you are kind of in the quarter system process, you’re either taking class or you’re on co-op and if my memory serves me correctly, there’s really no summers off any more, so what would happen is that you would reach a point in your educational journey there; I think it’s Sophomore Year, might be Junior Year now, and you knew that you were going to be going on co-op the next six months or whatever that phase was going to be; two quarters’ worth, I believe, and so you would work with your Department to submit applications for a list of co-op opportunities that already had approached the School. Often, a lot of the co-op employers were repeat employers.
One co-op comes in, the next one comes in after that, so they would often be opportunities that you could talk to people about and find out more information; hey, this is what this opportunity is like. But you also had the opportunity as a student to kind of go out and find your own, so you don’t have to prescribe to necessarily what was just being offered to you. For example, when I was the…the Design Director and VP of Design at HappyCog, we had a co-op who came to us and they were like hey, do you do co-op and we were like, I don’t know, do we? Sure, let’s try this out! And it ended up being a great, great relationship, working relationship for them and us as well, so it puts the impetus back on the student to say, you know what? If I’m hungry and I’m looking for opportunities out there, I can go out there and pursue them and it becomes part and parcel with part of your education.
Gary
Yeah, the only the thing that I can’t wrap my head around, and I should at some point maybe actually call Drexel and see if they’d even talk to me about it, be on this show, but the one thing that I can’t wrap my head around and scares the bejeezus out of me is making something a requirement, like an internship, a co-op, however you want to frame it: just go out there and work with a real professional to learn: you got a lot of students. That’s a lot of people you have to find work for!
And so that part always, anyway, I’m going to have to pick their brain about it, see if they’re willing to share. OK, so, I’m going to assume that ninety-nine per cent of existing four year graphic design programs are geared towards preparing students for a career path in an agency or firm. What kind of additional training do students need for a career in freelance design, from their graphic design professors, that they currently aren’t getting that you’re not seeing?
Chris
That’s a tough one. I have some thoughts on this and opinions on this.
But it’s, when I think back to my education and then I also think back to when I was adjunct at Drexel, I did adjuncting there for about five or six years or something, one of the things I really liked to do when I was teaching, I would like to bring the real world…I say real world…the client work I was doing back into the classroom, so I would kind of take a few moments at each class, the beginning of each class, to kind of a little show and tell: like, here’s literally what I was working on today before I came into class tonight. Here’s some of the things that I struggled with; here’s some of the things that the client’s struggling with; here’s some of the things I’m struggling to communicate to them; here’s some of the things I had to learn in order to do this work.
So, I don’t remember a lot of that when I was in School and I think what I find rewarding and at least what I think the students found rewarding also was it was detaching the theoretical in applying the practical in a way that they could understand, that I’m not just somebody who’s coming in and talking design theory: I might be talking something about something that’s theoretical but then I’m showing them a practical reality of what’s actually happening and to me, that’s not necessarily something I could carve out in the curriculum but it was something that I think should be a part of all conversations because it starts to set foundation for the student that I see this person, they know that they’re out there trying to service a client, they’re trying to solve problems and they don’t necessarily always know the right answer to everything and you have to kind of work through it.
So it’s kind of a long way of saying I think the biggest thing missing for me in education is the constant learning; you need to establish in the students that learning doesn’t stop when you leave the classroom, it doesn’t stop when you leave the University, it doesn’t stop when you get the degree. You’re always going to be learning and struggling and fighting and scrapping in this industry and the second you think you’ve learned it all, something else is going to come out and it’s going to supersede everything you feel comfortable with at that point and that goes for design skills, technology it takes to service your clients, whatever; learning how to just be a better communicator, all those things kind of roll up into the ball of what it’s like to be a modern designer.
Gary
Yeah, and I think that’s something that I’m going to speak only to myself on this one but when I think of the term practice, you’re a practicing designer; well I stopped and thought about my practice. I’m a practicing educator. What I do is I practice on how the best way to deliver content, so it’s been a long time since I’ve worked at this firm; it’s been a long time since I’ve done freelance work in a high stakes environment, so there’s that practical knowledge that I don’t have; I know how to deliver content and I know how to organize the stuff so that skills build upon skills, so I think that practice is…and then, if you want to even kind of theorize about the industry a little bit more, we’re talking an industry that interactive design, how it’s a fairly young industry; most designers who are educators, who are teaching interactive design, are probably self-taught so there’s no best practices, so I think we’re…I think we’re dealing with all of that kind of stuff now so I guess I’m looking for the magic bullet: how can I introduce the idea of client work and working with a client when the fact that they don’t even have the ability to produce a website for a client, because all they can do is the visual design of it, not the…
Chris
It’s…I understand that struggle. The thing that I like to tell designers and I even have to tell it to myself from time to time as good mantra, because it’s easy to get overwhelmed; like, oh my gosh, I feel like I need to know this or I need to know that, I need to be able to produce this type of work. The biggest thing that a design can do right now, the smartest thing they can do is make sure that, in the work they do, it demonstrates design intent. So, when we look at the landscape now of all these new interface design tools that are coming out, prototyping tools; and tomorrow there’ll be another one. These are all tools for designers to demonstrate design intent. They are not production tools; they’re not tools that are going to kick out production level code that is going to be the live website.
And the longer I work in this industry, the more I see that there is still value in the designer really strongly and purposefully communicating what they’re essentially trying to solve and making sure that they’re doing the best job possible they can. That means I don’t expect designers to have to be able to shift production level code. I would struggle to do that myself. I can build a rudimentary website but somebody who actually writes code for a living is going to look at that and be like, what are you doing? I think that’s the most important thing to remember.
You need to be able to understand the technologies; you need to be able to understand what and how these things are happening but your job as a designer really is to make sure that the vision is correct, you’re using the tools you have available to communicate the vision, you ensure that your client or whoever you’re doing the work for understands what has to be essentially what you’re creating, but you’re also communicating to potentially your team-mates or somebody else whom you might be working with, who essentially has to maybe bring this to life or also sell it to somebody else.
Gary
Yeah, OK. So, back a little bit more to the freelance kind of train of thought. There’s a lot of work out there for designers to build websites using a CMS like Squarespace or WordPress. However, I’m not sure what I think about teaching students to manipulate existing templates for a variety of reasons such as they’re building on top of another person’s design; it’s not really their own, instead of learning…and the trade-off to that is, if you’re teaching that, you’re not teaching the fundamentals of graphic design and then there’s the learning curve of the CMS templating language because just to be able to design the visual, they have to be able to do both. So, as a freelance designer, agency designer and adjunct professor, where do you kind of stand on that whole spectrum?
Chris
To me, all these kind of quick, editable CMSs, they’re all tools, they’re all things we can turn to in considering how we’re going to solve a problem for a client. So, either in the classroom or out in the world, you have these things available to you, which is amazing when you think about it these days. That said, I don’t think any of these things should be considered good or bad: I think it’s all the right tool for the right job, so for example, I have a client that I’m just wrapping up a project with who wanted to get a new blog out to the world and with this blog came a kind of branding package, identity design.
It didn’t make sense for myself to try and build something from scratch or design something from scratch when it came to the fact that this person needed a vehicle to get their writing out into the world, so what I did is I kind of partnered with a developer who I knew could help me out and we collaboratively picked a template we knew we could edit, malleable enough to do what we needed to do and from there, that’s where the design effort started, so for me, that was all I needed: I didn’t need to re-build something from nothing in order to solve the problem; we had these tools available, we were able to start with that and that saved the client a lot of money, it saved me a lot of time and we still got out of this what we needed to do in order to solve the problem.
So, somebody might say: that’s cheating. I don’t understand why it would be. It’s available to us and it’s how we kind of solve the problem, so that doesn’t, to me that doesn’t mean I can’t design a blog from scratch, something unique and creative that would be also solving the problem but for the business constraints of the problem we’re trying to solve, that’s what we had to do. So I don’t know if that answers your question?
Gary
Yeah, no, well it helped me re-frame it in a way that makes sense to me because the students were using Font Awesome and using pre-existing icon sets and I was like, I kinda like…there is a time and place for those and it wasn’t…somehow it popped into my head that, OK, when you present to the client you can say, this is…if you want custom icons, it’s going to cost this. If you don’t want custom icons, we will use this set and it’s just now like you said, it’s a business decision, so I can therefore wrap my head around the Squarespace stuff. Not Squarespace…but using an existing template, again it’s like using existing icon sets: it’s a business decision, it’s not inherently good or bad, just a business decision where it works best for you. So, there’s…so I mentioned earlier in-house where if you’re working at an in-house, you’re always working with an existing brand, with existing standards. It just literally popped into my head just now that using somebody else’s WordPress template is the same exact thing. You’re starting with an existing framework of stuff that you have to build upon and so I think that’s a good exercise too, so…
Chris
You can do a lot with a little bit of knowledge with somebody else’s WordPress theme; the way these things are built and I’ve spent some time in WordPress lately on this project that I just mentioned. We can push and pull these things in ways and manipulate them in ways that ultimately if you look at what we end up delivering for our client and the original theme we started with, there’s not a lot of similarities other than the fact that they’re basically a blog and a blog-type structure for the page layouts, so there’s a lot of room I think for experimentation and using these tools as kind of a jumping off point and learning and understanding what you can do to change them. I think that’s probably more important than being the person who gets in under the hood and really manipulates the template itself.
Gary
OK. So, it’s a hypothetical classroom exercise instead of going through getting a bare bones WordPress starter theme thing where you kind of are working with the PHP behind there and tying it into the CMS. It’s better off to just find one of those templates that modular built where you can go back into their editor…they have like a visual editor, some of them, don’t they now at this point? So those would be kind of a decent exercise. I don’t know where I’d put it but it’s a worthwhile exercise.
Chris
I have opinions on this and everyone’s going to kind of come around this idea a different way. Personally, I don’t think in the classroom we should be teaching code. If this is design education, let’s stay away from that. Let’s teach the layout theory; let’s teach the interaction backgrounds; let’s teach the ability to understand typographic hierarchies and the methods and the micro-systems that come together to create a strong, interactive screen design. Back to my earlier point, continuing learning beyond the classroom: to me it’s up to the students to understand the technology in their own time. Back in the old days when we were doing a layout class and we had to use QuarkXPress to do the layout, we didn’t take time in the classroom to learn QuartXPress; our professors were like, that’s just the vehicle we’re going to use, you take the time to figure out how to solve the technology side or learn the software to deliver what you need to do and in many ways, I feel like that’s where we’re at now and with screen design.
There’s so much information out there. Good information a Google query away for you. And if you don’t understand that, if you don’t know that that’s right there for you and we end up taking time in the classroom to have to write CSS or whatever, I think that’s a missed opportunity. I think we should be really talking about larger issues, larger discussions about screen design, interaction design, and keep the new ruling in the code editors to outside the classroom.
Gary
Yeah. So, I have two questions, hopefully I remember both: I should write this down. The first one is interactive design. You kind of, your interactions you…could you talk a little bit more about that, define that, because I have a follow-up on that, and the other one is just kind of more of just a statement about yeah, the software; I have no idea why there’s a class in almost every program that…learn the Creative Suite because you just…I learned it on my own, everybody should just learn it. I make my students learn it on their own…I’m like, OK, you’re going to be using…you can either use Sketch; you can use XD or if you sign up early, you can use InVision Studio and figure it out. I’ll help.
But there’s a problem with that. The one problem is like you said: you can Google anything and so they do, so OK, I Dropbox, I got what I needed to and I Googled this; OK, this is one way I can do this, so what they’re kind of missing from the software then is like the way to use it as a time-saver. So, they’re not setting up styles, they’re not setting up all those things that can save them time in the future because they’re just learning how to get what they needed that one second, so I think that’s something that I’ve been thinking more and more about lately is like, OK, how do I get them to be better, more efficient users of the tool but at the same time not be the one teaching the tool?
Chris
That’s a struggle and that’s a struggle that extends beyond the classroom too, in the professional setting. I’ve seen both sides of that. So, I love Sketch. I’m all in! In the past few years I’ve been using it almost exclusively and really love the built-in powerful methods in which you can establish a front-end style, maintain it, edit it and really build off of it. That said, I’ve also worked with people who have used Sketch and they don’t understand that. They just think it’s the immediate way to very quickly mock up something and they don’t understand what is baked into this tool that allowed you to really kind of, and I guess it’s kind of like the root system of a really powerful, strong tree.
The tree is beautiful, the tree grows well but it’s really because it has such a strong bass underneath it and it’s providing that structure, providing that ability to maintain and continue growing; that’s what Sketch provides underneath that, in that interface, that ability to create symbols and the over-rides and the nesting of symbols and all these things you can do to establish strong typography, strong symbols, strong modules; it’s…to do that almost kind of atomic design level structuring; it’s all right there.
So, I had a point and I was going somewhere! But I think the thinking is, this is what we have now; to not address that in the classroom might be a disservice to the students because I think it’s inherently part of what makes Sketch successful is because you cannot introduce a tool like this and not understand or not communicate to students that this is set up for team and enterprise level problem-solving. It’s not just you noodling yourself trying to solve a problem for a client; this is really set up for the ability to manage full-scale, enterprise-scale design systems.
Gary
Yeah. And that’s exactly it.; That’s the part I feel like I have to…at some point, I haven’t been doing it, but at some point I feel like I have to interject and say no, no, no, no, we need to stop and this is what it can do, this is how you should approach…I don’t know, I’ll have to think through that one.
Chris
It’s like, here’s what you do, you need to do like a spot-check on their file.
Like, all right, everybody hit pause and let me see what’s in your type pallet: let me see what’s in your color palette; what have you got in your symbols? And if they aren’t using those aspects of the tool then that could be your…
Gary
Are you kidding? I struggle to get them to name their art boards in layers and I’m like…how’s the developer going to know what that is unless you tell somebody what that is; they’re not magical, all-knowing beings! But anyway. So, back onto interaction design, you kind of mentioned that and I want to flesh it out a little more because that’s one thing…well, what do you mean by that? That term?
Chris
I don’t know. That’s a kind of a big question. So, what I do on a daily basis is I am trying to bring form to a task, usually, right? The user needs to accomplish this task and how do I, using the tools I have available to me, create design intent that solve the problem for that user? So that’s usually a sequential type of design. It’s…this is step one, these are the co-dependents of what that might entail; here’s what could happen if they do X, Y or Z; here’s what happens if this type of information is returned.
I feel like it’s my job to often suss out all those potential pitfalls that go along with an interaction and make sure I’m accounting for that in the solution that I’m providing, so for example, the last week I’ve been working on a website design with a really, really robust tool in the center of it and this tool has a lot of different inputs and a lot of different ways in which the tool can spit out information back to you based on what you’ve put into it and a lot of the things that
…a lot of the work that’s come out of this has not been necessarily the easy-flow, it’s not the easiest path, it’s all of the ancillary little tangents that come off of this tool based on these conditions that pile up and so what I’ve done is I’ve worked with Sketch and combined it with InVision and I’ve pieced together a rudimentary prototype that essentially allows you to click through and see these scenarios coming to life and to me that is…what I would assume in at least my role as interaction design; it’s creating something, creating form, creating a point A to point B structure but making sure I take into account all the kind of squiggly spaghetti paths that could also connect those two points.
Gary
OK, so the reason I ask, and it’s good to hear a definition, but I was thinking more on a very rudimentary level and micro-interactions, animations, essentially like, how does a page…does it slide in? Does the…how does the menu button drop down? Does it slide in, does it fade in? All these different kind of…the animations of the website. How do you go about designing them? And I’ll outright say, I think we do a terrible job of innovating that stuff!
Chris
No, you’re right, and this is all part of a designer’s ability to communicate intent. So there will obviously be projects in which you can get that detail; in some you might not be able to, but in the case where you have that opportunity as a designer, you should take advantage of it. That is often a detail that is left on the wayside and the designers kind of, everything they’re accounting for and often it’s just left up to the developer to make those decisions, so I think this is where you look back at your toolbox, what’s available to you, and you think about those kind of small, micro-interactions, those minor animations that, as designers we have the opportunity to shape and form and potentially innovate, what you spend the time on and you can’t…unfortunately you can’t just expect to tack it on at the end of a design sprint in design process and hope it goes well.
I have some friends who focus in this space exclusively and they’ll probably tell you the same thing is, interactions, micro-interactions: they’re not an after-thought. They are carriers of the brand as much as the font choice. How you animate something also says something about the brand in an interactive situation so it’s very much should be part of the conversation earlier as anything else you do as a designer.
Gary
So, where do you do it then, in your ideally, because like I said, it’s one of those tricky things. But ideally, where would you stick that into the design process from beginning to end? And what I’ve been having my students do, they start off with an initial client meeting where they’ll interview the client to build style tiles and so then they build their style tiles and then they show them to the client, get the feedback and then they jump into element collages and then from element collages they then start atomic design, like elements, dropping wireframing and then jump into the mock-up. So, assuming that that’s not a horribly out-of-whack process, where would you drop the animations in that?
Chris
That’s a good question. I would probably try to…and this is hypothetical because I think we’re talking about a perfect situation. The element collages are I think a perfect spot to kind of do this because this is where you’ve kind of graduated beyond the initial conversation and I think the language of design becomes very important in here. You’ve established kind of what is the key characteristics of the design from a language standpoint and you’ve brought these things to life visually. Style starts to take shape and form; style is not divorced from interaction, I think, in the terms of the way we’re talking about it so these animations, these micro-interactions, these are things that can and should be affected by this primary language of design at this point that we’ve started to find. That said, I think there’s always room for talking about this stuff earlier. Quite often, we assume there’s a sophistication on the client’s side when it comes to the language of design. And sometimes we also assume that there’s just one client that you’re talking to. I’ve worked a lot in Higher Ed, done a lot of Higher Ed websites…
Gary
…ah, sorry!
Chris
…and as you know, there’s never one person involved.
Gary
Oh no!
Chris
And so how do you communicate design thinking, establish a common design language when you have not just maybe a primary committee but a secondary committee and a third level committee and some of the time these committees are made up of different people in different disciplines with completely different understandings of what you’re trying to build and problems you’re trying to solve so sometimes you need to kind of do a little bit more work up front to come back around and maybe fill in the details, so one technique that I’ve used in the past and I’ve worked with some other agencies that use it, is to
…let’s maybe think about a little bit more of that total package up front: get the big idea solved earlier and then come back and fill in the details with maybe some of the information architecture and content level that needs to be thought about in a little more detail, with a little bit more detail and care, so this might mean comping up big, beautiful, multiple concepts earlier; getting them from the people who need to make decisions earlier; see and discuss some of the different feelings that come out of that process. A mood board or a style board and even a style collage: we understand what those are.
We understand the value they carry but putting that artifact in front of Dean of Admissions, it’s often you’re going to be struggling to understand and communicate to the inherent value of what you’re trying to inform them about, so you have to be very conscious of the artifact you are creating and who you’re selling it to.
Gary
Yeah…no, and so I also love that you mentioned if we don’t do it, the developer will, and I have been harping on my students about that. For the first time this semester it’s like, that is a design decision: if you do not make that design decision, you are leaving it to the developer to make that design decision. They…were they trained in that? We don’t know. So, you are just making a huge guess by not doing it and so…and it’s funny because actually, I notice with students, they actually gravitate towards animation; they actually inherently want…I keep oscillating back and forth, but for a while I was teaching HTML and CSS and they just wanted to animate everything and I was like, oh, cool, they want ownership over that space and so now that I’ve shifted back to the other end of…no, we’re visual designers: we just need to know enough HTML and CSS so we understand the medium we’re designing for, and that’s it. Now, the vehicle to design those animations is sorely lacking. I’ve experimented with having them do it in Aftereffects and that worked, but that only worked because some of them had already had prior After Effects experience…
Chris
It’s not an easy program to jump into.
Gary
Yes. And so the other way…and so that’s why I hate to be a cheerleader and get excited about software but that’s why I’m really excited about Studio, InVision Studio having the built-in animation features and Anima App having that timeline plug-in for Sketch. I hope one of those two tools sticks!
Chris
Yeah, I’m right there with you. As someone who actually spent many years doing Flash animations…
Gary
There you go, there’s the other way…
Chris
…my…the muscles that I’m able to communicate with in terms of talking about animation have atrophied, so I look at these tools with eager eyes also and hoping that we as designers, we can kind of dive back into that realm and add that missing component to our work to ensure that it’s not left to the wayside.
Gary
Yeah, and not even just left to the wayside:…when you said about animations being part of the brand, definitely part of the brand, but I also kind of look at them as, they’re part of the hierarchy of the page; they can influence the layout just as much, if not more than the physical layout in this space. So, it’s just important for design to, not just kinda like think of it as an ancillary thing but like, let’s leave that out, let’s kinda own that and it’s ours!
Chris
It’s true and once again, how we communicate animation to our clients is going to be just as important as the fact that we’re taking time to care about it. Many moons ago I worked on a project at HappyCog and we had…it was kind of a high-end’s not the right word, but a high, luxury brand we were doing a small site for and we knew what they wanted in terms of what that high-end feel needed to be, so our plan was to spend more time on the animation earlier, showing them how the page would kind of build and flow and move than it was to actually kind of just work in static comp. So I had our developer and our designer kind of pair up and create more of a working prototype of how the feel of the page would work and that seemed to kind of solve that problem at the time. But unfortunately those type of situations, they’re kinda hard to carve off and find that perfect scenario where you have a designer and developer willing to work together and do something like that.
Gary
Well that again just leads back…and you talked about this in the Big Web Show, that agile versus waterfall. If you’re working in agile, that tends to get that.
Chris
So, this is just a side added note, but some day, some day, there will be no difference…some day we’re going to have designers and developers working together. It just has to happen because otherwise we’re going to end up with this still kind of fragmented roll the stone a little bit further and then let somebody else take it because the way these…I think the way to do really strong interactive screen-work is to have that partnership that just can’t pry those two roles apart.
Gary
Yeah, well design has reverted back to the day when you needed an…you were a conductor of an orchestra because you had type-setters, you had paste-up artists, you had photographers, you had type-setters, you had all these different components that was part of the design; you had illustrators. And then with the computer it kind of funneled all that but it’s funneled right back out again!
Chris
I’ve made that analogy before too and what I’ve described is, I said a UX designer is the conductor because there’s often a lot of different roles and responsibilities that have to be accounted for. You might be working with a developer, you might be working with a researcher, you might be working with an illustrator. You have to know essentially the symphony you’re trying to create. I don’t know if I’m taking the metaphor in the right way but the idea is that you might not be doing all these things but you have to understand their impact on the big picture.
Gary
Yeah, I’m with you on that one. All right, so just a couple more questions just seeing where time is at. Since you are a practicing professional, you were an adjunct professor. How do you suggest students get the necessary client experience, specifically I’m thinking like Mike Monteiro’s book, Design Is A Job, and he’s out there advocating for that and he’s even said things like, design programs should be in the business schools but I don’t even know if business schools teach those skills!
Chris
What do they teach? I don’t even know.
Gary
I know, that’s why I was like, I have to actually go look and see what they do to see if that would be…I mean, it makes sense. But so…what do they need? What can they do because again, they can’t produce a full-blown website, so all they can do is a static mock-up, a clickable prototype. Who needs that? They need the whole thing.
Chris
There’s a couple of ways you can go about this I think. So, I was scared coming out of school; didn’t know the first thing about getting a client, what you do with them when you have them; didn’t know anything about starting a business. That said, I think the ways in which you can do these things now and the tools available and the fact that there’s this amazing internet thing that just is unbelievable, I would recommend to younger professionals, jump into this sooner; take more risks earlier. You might have a job, you might not have a job but start a business for yourself. You could just be something as simple as saying, you know what? I might be working nine to five but in the evenings I’m going to try to dedicate a little bit of time to just starting a business.
That sounds easy but it’s not actually that hard. What I would do and this is kind of how I got started: while I was working nine to five I established, essentially my own practice, Cashdollar Design, without any clients because the thinking was that some day, I might make a go of this and when I do make a go of it, I wanted to feel like I’m actually not starting from scratch. And so what I did was I found one client and I just did a little bit of work for them for many years, just a little bit. Nothing exciting, nothing incredibly mind-blowing but it allowed me to in a less…lower risk situation begin to feel more comfortable with this idea that I can do this work independent of some other sort of organization or some of agency or some sort governing body.
Gary
It’s hard for students to produce full-on production-level stuff, but that’s what the people need. So, this semester I’ve found a…somebody who’s doing a bus-tracking app and he’s doing it in his own side-work, so we’re re-designing his site for him, so that worked out great because he didn’t…he was the developer, he just needed the visuals and so that worked great but then another semester I tried it, the person needed the visuals but they also needed the development and we can only deliver half that material so…
Chris
If I’m putting the other portfolio, and I’m going to go back to this design intent to me still sings the loudest. I don’t, if I’m in a hiring situation, I don’t need to see a final website to see the thinking you’ve done, if you have only taken something from idea through clickable prototype. And that’s OK because for somebody who is maybe just coming out of school or is making that transition, they might not have the relationships, they might not have the ability look at their rolodex and call their favorite WordPress developer to bring something to life.
That’s something that usually comes from time. I know this person because I’ve been working for a long time and only now am I starting to feel really comfortable with…oh, I know a person that can do this. I know a girl who does this type of work, I know a guy who does this type of work and I can reach out to them to partner up on something. Being able to demonstrate that design intent, the thinking behind what you’ve done, communicate that to me, is always going to trump…here’s the finished product and then just stepping away and expecting somebody to understand what you’ve done.
Gary
Yeah, so…this bizarre thing that popped into my head and I want to say it out loud so it’s on the recording but it may have effect…because we do have an IT department. I don’t know if they teach front end development or not in there but it’s worth going round and poking and exploring but just an idea of designer-developer speed dating. Just go find a developer, just speed-dating kind of thing and just find one that you click with that you’re friendly with and even if you don’t do anything together other than just hang out and talk…
Chris
It’s not a bad idea. There’s probably a meet-up group you could put together just around that idea.
Gary
Yeah, just talk, that’s all you have to do. All right, Chris, so before I let you go…oh wait, no. Previous question. So I have one new question that I want to ask and then before I wrap things up is, so, this is a new question and I’m starting to ask every single guest. What piece of advice would you like to give design educators to prepare…better prepare students for post-graduation life?
Chris
Oooh, hopefully I didn’t tip my hand too much at this earlier, but that idea that you can bring the practical back into the classroom and to marry with the kind of blue-sky work that often is occurring, that’s the first thing. And the second is that idea that you cannot expect to ever stop learning in this industry; really I think it can never be stressed enough. A degree does not mean you’re done with your schooling because it’s constantly going to school, everything you do.
Gary
So then, before I let you go, is there anything that you are working on personally that you’d like to share or something you want to promote?
Chris
I’m trying to work on my writing skills, based on my many years of being in this industry and some of the things I’ve seen and experienced, trying to get some of these ideas out, so I’ve set up a Medium account, I believe my user-name is just Cashdollar which is my last name, so you can find me there, and also I tend to…my whole…the reason I even did this type of work is I used to love to draw and I don’t draw enough any more so what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to write an article or an essay and then actually do a little bit of editorial illustration work to accompany it, so that’s my goal with this new endeavor.
Gary
That’s an awesome idea just for a project for…OK, I promise I’ll let you go after this one, but…I show…when students, some of them are looking at Creative Writing minors and stuff like that and they’re like, oh, what classes should they take? I don’t know what we offer in the Creative Writing but I point them to A List Apart, I point them to Design Observer and I say, take these two things, take them to somebody over there and say, you need to write like that! But that would be…I could see now just like a natural kind of something like working a little bit more with the Writing Department saying hey, this is the kind of stuff that we need to do: how do we do it? And that would be a great project, series of, OK, you write an article and you illustrate the article!
Chris
Maybe this is an idea back to your previous question about what educators should be stressing more - writing more.
I mean, there you go and there’s really no way around it.
Gary
Yeah, and that’s…we’re well aware of it and that’s just students just don’t like doing it. That’s the struggle with that one!
Chris
This makes sense and I’ll stretch this out a little bit longer. We spend so much time as professionals these days, because we’re often remote, writing about the work we do because that’s often what has to live beyond your immediate contact, so the idea that you can’t just design something and throw it into Base Camp and expect it to be understood. You have to be able to articulate ultimately what’s in that thing you’ve just made and it has to be able to stand on its own without you necessarily being there to walk somebody through so in a way, maybe that’s something else that can start to happen in the classroom. You don’t just critique: you have to actually present and maybe that presentation has to occur in multiple different kind of mediums.
Gary
That’s a good one because again, the whole idea of…I had students design, it was an app but we went through the whole UX process where they started, they interviewed stakeholders…they did everything from the beginning of finding the problem that they were going to solve, to interviewing people to make sure it was really a problem that they were solving, all the way to the end, it was like…we were putting the Post-it notes on the wall, doing affinity mapping and like, if you just put just this, the finished screens in your portfolio, you are doing an enormous disservice to yourself, but I really didn’t…the only way that I know is, you have to write. You have to write to explain to somebody because otherwise, it’s just a screenshot and so that drove it home from them a little bit more that your screenshot next to their screenshot; they both looked good. Who’s going to get the job? The one who articulated theirs better.
Chris
Oh, that’s a great way of putting it.