The digital design space is unique, because it is an industry of largely positive dialogue and sharing. We collectively care about the web, so we want to help our clients solve their digital and/or content-related problems. Ultimately, as vendors and practitioners, we’re in this together.
I remember when I was a kid, and all of the adults around me would ask: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, as if my 7-year old self had all of the answers. I used to hate that question. I still do. I try my best to avoid asking that of my own kids. Not because I get answers like “a dinosaur”, “a princess” and “a tractor”. Those are all amazing answers and most likely, equally lucrative careers if they managed to pull it off. I steer clear of that question to avoid undue stress. What child needs to take time away from building a fort out of couch cushions to worry about getting a job, how they’re going to pay the bills, or what their purpose is on this planet? There’s plenty of time for that stress much later in life.
At an Owner Camp a few years back Wil Reynolds, founder of SEER Interactive, mentioned he collected a personal board of directors who provide advice and mentorship across a spectrum of areas of his life, personal, professional, etc. Inspired by that idea I’ve made it a priority to cultivate a similar professional mentorship network.
If you work in a small organization, chances are your org chart was (or still is) a horizontal line, commonly known as a flat organization. As your organization grows, so does the chart. It gets taller, with lots of lines, some solid and some dotted, connecting lots of boxes. It’s been the case at our company, as well as lots of other companies I’ve gotten to know through Bureau events.
I have a confession to make: I was a theatre nerd in high school. The heights of my nerdom were reached when I joined an improv troupe that was aptly named “Awkward”—a ragtag bunch of 16-year-olds literally making it up as we went along. Perhaps you remember our renowned performances at the local Chick-fil-A?
“We have so much content, we don’t even know how many pages are on our website.” “It’s impossible for anyone to find anything.” “Our call center spends too much time answering questions about already-available information.” “I’m more likely to Google what I’m looking for than dig for it.” “I just bookmark everything.”
We are constantly improving our approach to code. We build it. We break it. We love it. We hate it. And sometimes we blow it all up and start from scratch. If you caught @alliwagner’s swansong article about our starter files, you can recognize the value in years of iteration. But that doesn’t stop with just code. We’re constantly iterating on process, workflow, content strategy, etc. You name it, we’re always looking for ways to improve it. Nothing is ever set in stone. And the same goes for some of the less glamorous (depending on who you ask) tasks like… how do we put these things on the web for people to see?
Two weeks ago, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Confab Central, the ultimate content strategy conference. I am a designer with no formal training in writing or content strategy. As a non-content-strategist, I thought I’d be entering a whole different world. A world I had only a rough understanding of. While I had read about content strategy in a few books years ago, before the conference I couldn’t clearly articulate what it was. The gist of it from my fuzzy point of view was: It’s the practice of charting a roadmap for future business writing. But how guidelines were to be created, in my mind, was still alchemy.
I have spent close to 7 years as a front-end developer at Happy Cog and in that time I’ve seen our discipline go through many great changes— from spacer gifs to responsive web design, we’ve all iterated quite a bit. This rate of change is one of the things I most love about frontend— the collaborative, communicative community that pushes us all forward whether we like it or not. As process has evolved, so too has it improved.
Why are doctors sometimes considered “cool under pressure?” Is it because their personality is one that doesn’t get riled up when faced with a challenge? Is it because they have an ingrained character trait that allows them to remain calm when everyone else is completely losing it? Have you ever noticed that web developers are sometimes labeled the same way? Is it the same thing? Are web developers saving the world too? Probably not.
“If you can design one thing, you can design everything” –Massimo Vignelli
My husband and I are in the midst of buying our first house together. It’s a bit of a fixer-upper but nothing too major. Our first priorities are to refinish the floors, repaint, redo the kitchen, and update the bathroom vanity. The house is nothing like the Modernist glass box I once dreamed of, but it definitely has character.
Comedian/actor Eddie Izzard makes an interesting point in his 2011 stand up Dress To Kill about communication. Through a (famously misunderstood) historic example of JFK’s 1963 address in Berlin, he illustrates how what you say, is often overshadowed by how you say it. The literal translation of what JFK said could have been interpreted in one of two ways. It could have been interpreted to mean he called himself a jelly doughnut. Because of the powerful way he delivered his message however, and the connection he had crafted with the Berlin crowd, they properly understood his meaning and responded enthusiastically when he declared himself a Berliner at heart.
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