Viget Inspire

The idea of working from home every day sounds awesome, doesn't it? No commute. No office politics. No chance of someone taking your stapler. That was my life for the past four years, and it definitely had a lot of perks. I walked to work (upstairs), the dress code was always casual because I said so, and I often had office visits from my kids. But it wasn't long before I started to feel a little off my game. Ideas weren't flowing, I seemed to have designer-block more often, and my level of frustration was growing.

I soon realized that my lack of collaborating with other people was hindering my ability to generate good, innovative ideas. I don't care if you're a designer, developer, UX designer or in a completely different field, collaboration is important. The all-knowing Wikipedia says it like this:

"Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals - for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature-by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus." (Wikipedia)

In less formal terms, put a group of kindred spirits together, give them the freedom to learn from each other and create ideas together, and the result will be something that is far greater than what each individual could produce alone. Simple, yet amazing.

Continue reading "The Secret Ingredient for Innovation"

Every few weeks, the web design community stirs itself into a tizzy rehashing the same old debates. We were just getting past the "design in the browser" brouhaha when the "designers must code" tweets (and follow-up blog posts like this one) started cropping up again.

If you haven't seen it yet, you're probably holed up in some #snowpocalypse ice hut. The controversial tweet came from Elliot Jay Stocks, a talented designer with over 9,000 followers.

It was exactly the kind of off-the-cuff remark that incites riots and comment wars. It inspired lots of back-and-forth between players large and small. It's hard to articulate any complex ideas within 140 characters, so it's not surprising that most of the responses were shortsighted knee-jerk reactions.

I'm not going to throw around metaphors comparing web designers to architects, TV producers, photographers or musicians. I'm not going to rehash the rehashing of an already played-out debate. Instead, I want to focus on the nature of our arguing. Why is it that designers, who should be open-minded and creative in our thinking, can't seem to see beyond black and white? And why is web design as polarizing as politics these days?

It's another false dilemma, and watching everyone pick sides and lob dodge balls across the fence is getting incredibly boring. Everyone wants to argue about these issues as if there are only two answers. Design everything in the browser (die, Photoshop, die!), or design every last detail in Photoshop. Designers must excel at markup because it's essential to know your medium's limitations or Designers shouldn't learn code because it will tether their creativity.

These choices are not mutually exclusive, and we all know it. Very little of what we do can be labeled as right or wrong. Unless you're a template churner every project, client, and technology requires a slightly different solution. It's part of what makes web design so much fun. So, aside from the traffic generated by rehashing controversial subjects, why are we all arguing about the same thing every few months?

Dichotomous thinking is our brain's way of simplifying an argument down to its basic elements, choosing a side, and moving on. We need to fit everything in our world into a mental category, and it's human nature to reduce these categories down to polar opposites. Good or bad. Easy or hard. iPhone or nothing at all, you might as well use a tin can. We ignore all the less extreme options in between even when those are the ones that make the most sense. It's the easy way out. Pick a side, shout from your soap box, and save the rest of your energy to tweet your thoughts on the next big debate.

And while we're at it, that ultra important side you're picking? Chances are it isn't the one you know to be right, it's the path of least resistance for YOU. If you spent a lot of time learning markup, you probably sided with Elliot and made snarky remarks about the designers who weren't as awesome as you. If you consider markup a waste of time and focus all your energies on more visual aspects of design, you were linking to Mark Boulton's well-crafted retort. But each of us landed on our side of the fence for a number of reasons - not purely because it was "right". When I started learning code, I did it because I'm a control freak. Now I can say I believe in that choice because it makes me a better designer, but it's an easy argument to make since I already did the legwork.

The thing is, we shouldn't forget that we are helping to shape a young industry. We are doing our craft a great disservice by taking mental shortcuts. We should be thinking harder, questioning more, and resisting the urge to jump on any bandwagons. Please, take time to stop and think about all the possibilities - and all the incredibly talented people behind those possibilities - before filling the web with more blanket statements.

The hip trend these days is to use in-field labels on form fields. What are in-field labels you ask? I'm sure you've seen something like this recently:

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This is a pretty nice effect, and it can really help to save space on forms. There are a billion different ways to implement this, and I don't suggest you use the example from above because that was just a quick way to show the effect. So let's walk through a couple of different implementation approaches and figure out the best way to implement this feature.

Continue reading "A Better jQuery In-Field Label Plugin"

Even with the EE 2.0 release in December, I think the best ExpressionEngine event in 2009 was the rise of Travis Schmeisser's Structure. While 2.0 lays the groundwork for a bright future, in the short run it's more of a step backwards because so few of EE's amazing community-built addons have been ported so far - even with new functionality, a 2.0 upgrade takes away far more than it gives at the moment.

In contrast, the Structure module immediately makes major improvements to your site's UI, construction, and template codebase, and it also plays nice with other addons, creating a faster, smarter EE experience. No software I installed last year saved me as much time and effort as Structure did, and Travis deserves all the credit for that (and he got quite a bit, including Devot:ee's Module Of The Year award)

So what is Structure, and what about it makes EE so much better?

Structure is a module that overrides EE's URL/template setup and creates its own hierarchy of pages and "Listing" pages, along with a new interface that's meant to handle most user needs. Why is this such a big deal?

1. A page is the basic unit of most websites, but in EE, there's no great way to handle them. EE developers spend a lot of time trying to simulate a page structure using templates, categories, and weblogs - which tends to make bulky, finicky sites that can be hard to extend and update. Structure brings the page concept into EE beautifully, and adds breadcrumbs, navs, and a host of other traditionally hard-to-develop features.
2. Entries are now linked to templates, and not vice versa. This might not seem like such a big deal unless you've made a big EE site without it - large EE sites rely on a large number of repetitive templates, which are especially difficult to handle. With Structure, you can run a big site with hundreds of top-level pages off a handful of templates - a huge time-saver.

We had a few false starts with Structure - mostly because we were trying to bring it into existing EE sites (recommendation: don't) or use to do the wrong things, but we eventually got the hang of it. A few pointers:

Continue reading "A Whole New Wooooorld: Structure + ExpressionEngine"

Alright. You've got me. These Valentine's day ideas aren't just for designers. They can be for anyone with a divine sense of taste and style just like you and me. Here's a few ideas that came to mind as I was shopping for my better half, an English major, for Valentine's day.

Bacon-Flavored Lip Balm

Let's start with the edibles and get those out of the way. Everyone loves bacon, right? Ok, well at least things that taste like bacon. By giving your special someone bacon-flavored lip balm it's like giving yourself a gift. Just be careful not to bite down at pucker-up time.

Source: Source: BaconSalt.com

Continue reading "Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Designers"

Recently, Owen Shifflett and I combined forces (not unlike the Wonder Twins) to work on the design for Viget's annual holiday gift (it's still January, it's not too late to write about holiday things yet, right? Right?) This year it was VigePops, yummy handmade lollipops (read all about them and maybe even snag some VigePops for yourself here). The project included branding, packaging, web design, and illustration. Lots of illustration.

Continue reading "VigePops : Making Them Look As Good As They Taste"

When reflecting on my creative intake and output over the past year, they simply stand out: the three guys that cursed a lot but admittedly got me fired up creatively. Simple as that, but with warnings:

• You may have already happened across these.
• I don't agree with all that is being said.
• Explicatives fly. You may be offended. The cursing may make them more memorable than they actually are.
• I most assuredly did shed a tear over #2 (the part about the dad).
• #3 was posted at the end of 2008, but I didn't come across it until earlier this year.

#1: Now is the Time

#2: The Clackity Noise

#3: America Is F*****

Let us know if something has you passionate going into the new year.