Content has been at the heart of Web design for me ever since I built my first sites back in the mid-1990s. (That was after working a few years as a print journalist designing news pages with managers and peers drumming into my head that visual communication was a means to an end and that end was to tell the news of the day.)
Continue reading →

I’ve never worked in an environment that I would call user experience friendly. That doesn’t mean I’ve had bad employers or clients. In fact, I’ve been lucky over the years to work at some pretty great places. But if you mapped my resume based on how highly each organization valued user experience expertise, the spectrum would be narrow and range from “somewhat tolerant” to “nearly hostile.”
Continue reading →

Quick: Explain why the long E sound in the word treat is spelled “ea”, but for the same sound in the word wheel it’s “ee”. Now explain how one-third is the same as two-sixths. Now explain why a ten-cent coin in the U.S. is smaller than a five-cent coin. But wait, you have to do all this without referencing the evolution of the English language, numerators, denominators or the price of silver in the late 19th century.

Welcome to helping my six-year-old daughter with her homework. Or, (in the universe’s constant reminder to me that everything is really one thing) helping a recently graduated designer tackle her first information architecture work. In both cases, the challenge is to build a foundation strong enough to support all the learning that comes after it.
Continue reading →

After I ran a panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in 2010 (Imagineering a Fully Digitized and Connected Future), I played around with writing a book about life in the 21st Century. The book didn’t pan out, but I liked the interview I did with Bror Saxberg and I wanted to share it with you all. Bror is the Chief Learning Officer for Kaplan, but that doesn’t really give you a sense of the man. He practiced medicine after earning his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and he’s got a Ph.D. for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Masters from Oxford plus a couple of more degrees from the University of Washington … you getting the idea?
Continue reading →

Design is what it does and what it does is solve problems.

Words and the way we use them cheapen our understanding of design. We screw it up in both directions; sometimes we add modifiers to break the granite of design down into so many pebbles, while other times it floats away from us after we over-inflate it as Design with a capital D.
Continue reading →

Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid are stuck at the top of a high clump of rocks. The summit was too steep for their horses, so now it’s just the two of them. They’ve spent days running from a posse and now they either have to turn back and face the lawmen or jump from their perch into the twisting, violent rapids far, far below.
Continue reading →

This is how you should move: Take an empty box and only put in it what you want in your new home.

But this is probably what you actually do: You load everything you’ve got into boxes, you haul all the boxes to your new empty home and then you ask “where can I put all this stuff?”
Continue reading →

I’m always wildly uncomfortable when people use the term “creatives” to define the professionals who do the kind of work I do. It harkens back to the pre-digital advertising agency world where a copywriter and a graphic artist teamed up and waited for somebody else to tell them the direction the client and the agency had decided to take for a campaign. Armed with instructions from the agency’s account team, the creative team would churn out their copy and graphics. The creatives’ jobs were essential to their agency’s success, but their work was strictly constrained within a specific stage of the project.
Continue reading →

Design should always be a means to an end, with that end being to solve a well-defined problem. If we over-inflate design and allow it to obscure other aspects of a process, we make it harder to address core challenges.
Continue reading →

I’m not one of those designers who stays up nights worrying about how best to define a thing, but I’ve found it useful to figure out what I think design ISN’T.
Continue reading →