Over the years Angela (my wife) and I have created and built up a few businesses. People often ask me what are the ‘must do’s’ and I often speak to Universities / business groups about these ideas.
This article is part two, and perhaps the most controversial, of the series: don’t trust professionals. Enjoy…
On November 26, we held our first ‘Socials’ event where a large group of agencies and individuals discussed issues that arose from the article ‘We all have the same problem’. It was a great event and we had a full house with guests from the length and breadth of the United Kingdom.
What follows is a frankly massive essay in note form. These are the notes I made to justify the aims of Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design - a presentation I did for the FOWD Tour in Leeds, September 2009. Thus, there is a vast array of ideas, conclusions and speculations with regard to the future of our industry. Take it with a pinch of salt, and think of this as a conversation, and not a manifesto.
I’ve been organising our development workflow with an aim to start putting out more small plugins and extensions. They now live at GitHub: http://github.com/erskinedesign/, and I’ll keep adding more as I build them. This post’s purpose is to tell you that, and also quickly mention our current approach to add-on development.
Over the years I have created and built up a few businesses. People often ask me what are the ‘must do’s’ and I often speak to Universities / business groups about these ideas.
This article is part one, and perhaps the most important, of the series: cash is king. Enjoy…
The previous part of this little series saw us fighting through some motivation/direction problems, and the realisation that even non-client projects need managing and scoping properly, right from the word go. We also found our ‘fuck yeah’ design direction (as I call it); a visual approach that would give us a decent platform from which to design the actual website pages effectively.
At last (and I am as relieved as you are), we reach the final transcript from The Process Toolbox presentation. Over the previous eight posts, we’ve looked at backbone, collaboration, audience, methodology, roadmap, creativity, convention and prototyping. To conclude, we’ll look at a method for pooling all of this together to reduce noise and leave only the finest signals to present a project narrative - a single, focused design path.
Okay, part eight - and the penultimate transcript from The Process Toolbox. As much as all parties may talk about requirements and argue over features, often they won’t really “get it” until they can see the concept represented visually, and understand its exact behaviour. This brings us on to various methods of prototyping.
After a short break, I’m back with part seven of The Process Toolbox, a transcript of my @Media presentation. Having dealt with inspiring creativity in the last installment, I’m moving on to conventions and flexibility. Without question or compromise, every website needs to be built with a solid foundation layer and an Ultimate Package.
Blimey, we’re now on part six of The Process Toolbox, a transcript of my @Media presentation. Already, I’ve covered backbone, collaboration, audience, methodology and the roadmap. With all of that in place, we probably need to build something at some point. So, lets think about creativity. By getting the dirty work right, we can allow more time to do what many of us really love - design and develop stunning websites.
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