Topic: Trends
Advice, Trends, and Resources for People Entering Web Careers in 2009
Many have us have spoken to people who will soon be entering careers in web design related fields this year, and this led us to have discussions with each other about what we thought was important for those people to know. Each of us had different advice to share based on each of our own unique perspectives, so we thought it would be helpful to put it into a blog post. Some of the questions we wanted to respond to were:
- What trends have you noticed in the past year?
- What advice do you have for people entering the field?
- What are some resources to help people get started?
Brian Talbot
Advice: Don’t Grow Up Just Yet
Many of the students I’ve taught and worked with want to hit this field’s ground running, but tend to be confused and overwhelmed by all of the various titles, processes and disciplines involved in working on the web these days. If you’re feeling this way, remember that you don’t have to pick a definitive career path or niche in the web just yet (if ever)! Instead learn about and try all of these disciplines as your work allows. You can always dive deeper into those that really strike a chord. Until then, don’t sweat those fancy terms or titles too much. And here’s a secret, some of the strongest web professionals are “generalists” instead of “specialists” in a particular area.
Advice: Work Smarter
Find ways to automate repetitive tasks for yourself – its usually an enjoyable problem to solve for yourself and will reward you with more efficiency. Finding and tweaking a series of applications and services that help you achieve is crucial. Some of my favorite set-ups include:
- LittleSnapper + Dropbox + A Dedicated Flickr Account = A quick and great way to organize (with tags) design inspiration across multiple computers and to share online.
- TextMate + Some Awesome Bundles + Your own templates + TextMate Projects = The start to a lean and mean front-end development area (for extra points, dive into things like Shell Variables)
- Delicious Subscriptions RSS + Delicious Network RSS + Flickr Design Inspiration Sets and Groups + select blog/site RSS Feeds all in Google Reader or Feedstitch = A good, portable start to having your ear to the ground on what’s happening around you (for extra points, you could add Twitter to this in EventBox.)
Doug Avery
Trend: Tuning Out
I’ve heard more and more designers this year talk about cutting back on blogs, Flickr feeds, and magazine subscriptions, in an attempt to to overcome the noise of “inspiration.” Sometimes, consuming design is a convenient excuse for procrastination, so be careful about how much you’re watching vs. how much you’re doing.
Advice: Try It
You can have a huge stack of Readymades and an RSS reader full of A List Apart articles, but if you’ve never built any of the stuff they’re talking about, you’re missing out. Take some time to play around with new ideas, techniques, or plugins whenever you can. It’s fun, it relieves stress, and you often learn more than you expected to.
Resources: Firebug & Designers Toolbox
For buildout, you should know about Firebug, the smart little tool that makes diagnosing layout woes a snap (and has the muscle to fix much bigger problems down the road). And in general, you should know about Designers Toolbox, a one-stop shop for print sizes, templates, web element PSDs…you name it.
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A Graphic Look at SXSWi 2009
Sharing notes at this year's conference went beyond Twitter -- there were a few folks at the SXSW Interactive Conference who took sketchnotes. Sketchnotes are elaborate notes with handwritten lettering and sketchy drawings of what is happening during the talk. They are an artform; a combination of comic strip and information design. It takes a good listener and fast illustrator to get down a good sketchnote. The popularity of taking sketchnotes has grown and many people are now scanning in the pages of their moleskin and uploading them to flickr. I thought I would share with you a few of my favorites from this year's conference.
Corporate Advertising Meets Kinetic Type and The Walrus
As pieces of osbservation and inspiration, I'd like to point to a couple of recent examples where I've seen underlying design trends hitting mainstream corporate television advertising.
First, if you're not yet familiar with kinetic type, it's a newish term for something that's been around for a while (animated typography). It pays special attention to syncing directly with dialogue and typographically reflecting the emotion of the script or lyrics. I really enjoy some of the videos popping up over the past couple of years. Here are two:
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Pimp Your Twitter Background
I've been addicted to Twitter for quite a while now, but my background has always been nothing more than a repeat pattern I found somewhere online. It was pretty, but it didn't say much about me - and Twitter doesn't offer much to help you introduce yourself. So as more and more people come to know me through Twitter without having met me in person, I felt like it was time to give my background image some attention.
I had a few goals. I wanted my background to be simple, and I wanted it to tell people where else they could find me. I'm not a marketer trying to get 1,000 followers so I can spam them with crap and get more site traffic... I just want the small group I do have to be able to follow me elsewhere. Twitter isn't meant to replace social networks, so I had some hesitations about hacking the system to put some personal links (like my portfolio, LinkedIn account, and the Inspire blog) in the background image. For one thing, they'll never be clickable and that feels weird. But more importantly, I felt like I might be breaking some Twitter etiquette by going all Guy Kawaski Twool-ish with it.
An Age of Presentation: Styles, Trends, and Trendsetters
At Viget, part of our culture involves attending, participating in and sometimes speaking at events. It is not required, but is recognized as an important benefit to career growth and knowledge exchange. We don't take this idea lightly and we encourage presenting on a regular basis internally, whether presenting to the entire company or at a team level. Not only do we get to practice speaking in front of a familiar audience, but we all get to learn something new together. It's one of the practices that originally attracted me to Viget and now I'm happy to be a participant.
Recently, I've become aware of some emerging trends regarding presentation styles and have recognized some individuals who seem to be at the forefront of these trends. Stylistically, these trends often involve rapid, compact presentations spoken over carefully chosen words and imagery to punctuate the points being made. These 'cut the crap' style presentations can be surprisingly informational and quite entertaining if delivered well. It's something that personally gets me motivated to attend events and makes me hopeful for the future of visual storytelling.
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Colds. Remedies. Web Designs.
So I've had a nagging cold for two weeks now, and I'm one grumpy Crumpy. I might write up my persona as: thirty-three year old web designer, tired and a bit on the cynical side, coming to pharmacy site hoping to find a good cold/flu product via some effective design. I'm overly touchy (because of a 2-week cold) and I'm overly analytical (because I'm writing a blog post).
I recently visited 4 sites:
Here were my generally subjective evaluation questions:
- How do I respond to the overall visual approach (layout, colors, typography, hierarchy)?
- How appropriate does the home page feature area feel? Does it inform or annoy?
- Does the main product page make it easy to get a comparative overview of what's available?
- Are the tools for narrowing my remedy search effective, focused, and fast?
Data Visualization: Is it the Future of the Internet?
There is social media popping up everywhere and sucking data out of our heads (and hearts) propelling it into the vast wonderment of The Internets. We’re bombarded with locations, opinions, emotions, hometowns, and photographs, and even our deepest darkest secrets ... all of which is massively being compiled and sorted.
The web is an immense and wonderful resource that can be tapped for so many purposes; the trick to leveraging it will be establishing interesting and useful ways to navigate it. At one point, I was certain it would be the future of the web. I have blogged about interactive information design and social media before. It is something that holds a place deep in my heart; however—contrary to my previous blog post—I am beginning to wonder where its place on the web will be.
Visualizations, which are a fantastic marriage of design thinking and badass technology on the web today, can enrich the user experience by creating an environment in which the user physically interacts with data. Invigorating my infatuation with this concept is http://twistori.com, a site that extracts adjectives in Twitter‘s tweets, displays them by color, and allows the user to view tweets grouped by similar feelings. Twistori led me to revisit and rethink Jonathan Harris’ "We Feel Fine," one of the most spectacular blends of social media and interactive information design on the web.
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Recent Comments
Hi Doug!
I just want to print this article :) But the print version is yet to be fully polished. I hope you guys spend sometime :) Viget inspire is a really nice resource for me....
- Lance on 'What To Expect When You're Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff'.
- Erik Wallace on 'What To Expect When You're Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff'.
- Jonathan on 'Switching Mindsets: From WordPress to ExpressionEngine'.
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