“All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed,” is one of the many ideas behind documents such as Rick Waldon’s Idiomatic JS and Nicolas Gallagher’s Idiomatic CSS.
By now you’ve probably seen Noah Stokes tweet assailing responsive web design’s command over aesthetic:
Who doesn’t love to talk about process? Every week, it seems, someone has discovered “the new way to work that everyone should be doing.” While I love a healthy process debate, I find discussions that promote a one-size-fits-all design approach problematic.
We work in a wonderfully open community where ideas and best practices are shared and implemented liberally. Well, except when it comes to sales.
When I was a young designer, I always asked other people how they got noticed for their work. The answer I most consistently received was “do good work.” Now, when people ask me the same question, I respond with the same answer. Good work always speaks for itself. It’s a self-promoting robot.
While the rest of our coworkers are creating design and code, we PMs focus on the intangibles. Deadlines, documentation, resourcing—it’s not exactly sexy. When a website launches, the first reactions you hear aren’t “Amazing site—must have had a great PM.” PMs are often the last to get the glory and the first ones to get knocked down when something goes wrong. It can be easy to feel like Mr. Cellophane if you don’t have the right perspective.
We’re all busy at work. It’s a “good thing,” right? Well, it is, unless your to-do list is a mile long, you’re always stressed out, and you don’t know where to start. You see, there is an art to being busy, and it’s not easy to master. You have to stick to your obligations, do a good job, and enjoy yourself while working. Oh, and you totally need to protect your time off.
Website redesign projects are not for the faint of heart. The path is filled with dangerous pitfalls and scary things—but also great wonders. Critical junctures in a project’s timeline can slow or even possibly derail. I’ve worked on small but smart ways to improve these periods from being abrupt stops and starts to being more seamless transitions.
Every project at Happy Cog starts with a kickoff meeting where our project team gets together with our client partners to meet, discuss, and collaborate on ideas for their project. We moderate a variety of exercises, surveys, workshops, and discussions. One of our favorites is the “Design Studio”—where we ask the team to sketch solutions to design problems for its redesigned site.
As we near the end of December, it’s pretty natural to begin to reflect on the past year. Cognition is the place where we share new processes and create a dialogue around new ideas. In the spirit of reflection and end-of-year lists, here are the top five trafficked Cognition posts of 2012 and some parting thoughts from an alternate point of view.
Grids are everywhere on the web, and there is no hiding from them. We need grid systems to help create grids that are usable and manageable, and with Responsive Web Design, this has been a tricky tightrope to walk. We need our layouts to react to different media query breakpoints, and the way we have built grids in the past needs to be extended to do that.
The process of making a website used to be like an assembly line. It was a series of hand-offs with each team member contributing his/her part before giving it up to the next person. Like a game of telephone, the same content was passed from person to person, and, at each step, it took a slightly new form. What started as a glimmer in a client’s eye became a sitemap, then a wireframe, then a Photoshop file, and eventually it became code that went to live in its final resting place, the browser.
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