Recently I attended a workshop run by the legendary designer and boundary-pushing problem solver, Bruce Mau. The workshop, hosted by PennPraxis and the Penn Institute for Urban Research (PennIUR), focused on a large scale (citywide) question, “How Do We Design a More Equitable Philadelphia?”
We’ve launched two projects with NYIT and Philly.com in two weeks and it’s got me feeling reflective. It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of a launch, especially when I’m so very pleased with the results, but a faithful launch isn’t always certain.
How many times have you been coding a navigation and found yourself overriding the default padding on a list? Or, have you ever dove into a teeny tiny “product meta block” only to find that all your paragraphs have this ridiculous default font-size of 16px? What do you do? Well, you do one of two things… you override everything or you set more simplistic defaults.
I just returned from a whirlwind trip to Brooklyn with four of my coworkers. An all-day client workshop was the reason for the visit but we also squeezed in my first employee review (over tagliatelle, no less) and a team dinner. I spend most of my days away from the Philly office, working in my studio in Baltimore. So it’s refreshing (and fun) to see my colleagues in person.
I’m back in the office today with my head aswim with ideas after attending Owner Summit in Atlanta this past week. One of the topics on everyone’s mind was collaboration.
In a mad dash to join all things product many are taking their design or development talents to South Beach the product space. Why the exodus? Curiosity led me to ask former digital agency practitioners representing design, development, and business analytic practice areas why they left agency life to pursue product work.
Guys I figured it out! I figured out how to code type on the web.
I kid. However I have been really digging my approach to type in the template-build phase as of late. It’s super simple, saves you tons of time, makes your files smaller, and communication both with your teammates and the client more focused. I’m not selling CSS snake oil here, I’m just that into it.
One of the things I like the most about what we do is the fact that there’s always a bunch of different ways to do the same thing. Chances are, the end result is still just HTML getting rendered by a browser. But the real fun is starting a new project with a little bit of tech freedom that lets you ask yourself: “Wouldn’t it be crazy to try ____?”. Granted, with this team, the answer is almost always “Nah. Go for it!”. But it never hurts to gut check.
It’s a new year, and yup! you’ve guessed it: I’ve got some goals. The goal spanning my personal and professional life is to learn more about art history in hopes of developing this into a lifelong habit. As I continue to deepen my understanding of art and design history, decisions I make in my professional work will become more informed. I always loved my art history classes in school. They were a departure from my other classes since the coursework didn’t require me to solve anything, just study visual patterns over the course of history. I found that whenever I had an art history class on my schedule, my concurrent creative work got a lot better. The subject matter covered in my art history classes varied quite a bit, but always gave me an existing art movement or piece of art to relate to in a fresh way and take into other aspects of my work. Even if I didn’t particularly like an artifact or era, it brought something of value to my work.
A few weeks ago, I left my comfortable, everyday life in Philadelphia to travel by myself to Southeast Asia. I learned about the culture and history of the areas I traveled to, but the most important lesson I took away was that it’s necessary to switch up my normal ways of life in order to grow. When I came back to the States (and work), my fellow designer Dana and I were given the opportunity to – well, wouldn’t you know it? – literally switch it up.
It’s been a busy year for Happy Cog, but it’s never too busy to recognize the people you’ve been fortunate enough to work with, the work you’ve done together with great clients, and acknowledge a happy and healthy 2015.
Over the last year, I have been using Brad Frost & Dave Olsen’s PatternLab for many projects. In doing so, I have learned about building systems rather than web pages. Most of what I’ve learned is that I’ve been doing wrong out of habit.
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