Loving this piece of advice.
You can have everything in the world, but without the ability to know when what you have is enough, you will continue to seek more and more without ever being happy.
Dan Mall on the post-PSD era
I’ve written on design comp ping-pong with the client and how we’ve improved on it over the past few years. Dan Mall also talks about the change in the web design process and sums it up beautifully:
To be fair, I don’t think we’re in a post-PSD era, but I do think we’re moving towards a post-“full-comp” era. I can’t envision a project where I don’t use Photoshop. Photoshop isn’t the problem. It’s a great tool. My favorite, actually. It’s the stigma that comes with presenting a full comp (I define “full comp” as an image of a website viewed on a desktop, typically around 960px wide). By default, presenting a full comp says to your client, “This is how everyone will see your site.” In our multi-device world, we’re quickly moving towards, “This is how some people will see your site,” but we’re not doing a great job of communicating that.
As an industry, we sell websites like paintings. Instead, we should be selling beautiful and easy access to content, agnostic of device, screen size, or context.
Coding Tip: Small Goals
If you’ve ever done any coding, you know getting in the zone is super important. I mostly do HTML & CSS and although I love it, getting into the right frame of mind can sometimes be a problem. Especially if the project I’m working on isn’t the best thing in the world, or if I’ve hit some roadblocks earlier and I know getting back into the groove won’t be easy.
I’ve heard writers use a trick that is similar to mine, and that is setting small goals. So here’s how I approach the problem—I start with something small. It can be as small as just writing a couple of crappy lines, just to get things going. It can be analyzing the semantics and rethinking the structure. It can even be as small as going through the code and thinking of ways to optimize little pieces of it. Sometimes all you need is a small trigger to set things off. And even if what you end up with is writing bad code before realizing the timing is not right, at least you’ve done something to kickstart your next session. So start small and take it from there.
On Opinions and Personal Attacks
This morning, I read Paul Boag’s post which includes a comment on personal attacks I very much liked. It’s something that’s been on my mind for years, and Paul sums it up better than I could:
Unfortunately this caused a massive and aggressive reaction in the SEO community. Smashing Magazine was attacked for publishing the post, I was told I was out-of-date and ill informed (which is of course entirely possible), but worst of all there were a shocking number of attacks on me personally.
To be honest this doesn’t entirely surprise me. I have been working with the web long enough to be all too aware of the over reaction it creates in people. However, it is always hurtful when somebody attacks you as a human being, rather than your opinion.
Of course, controversial topics will produce controversial debate, but this does not give you permission to attack anyone. Debates are welcome and you’re always free to disagree. Disagreements will make us rethink things and make progress. But disagree on someone’s opinion, don’t attack the person. Tell them why you think they are wrong, but don’t be hurtful. The unimmediate nature of debating through article comments and the fact you aren’t speaking to someone face to face makes these sort of personal attacks easy, but you know better, so please don’t use that as an excuse to attack anyone.
FFWD.PRO 2013 Conference
FFWD.PRO 2012 was awesome and for me, memories of June in Zagreb are still very much fresh. As soon as FFWD.PRO 2012 ended, the folks from Creative Nights were working on FFWD.PRO 2013 and now we have confirmation of the first speakers, as well as the date of the new conference. So make a note of June 10 and 11 2013 in your calendar, because you’ll be able to see the likes of:
- Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Mag
- Eva-Lotta Lamm of Google
- Leisa Reichelt of Disambiguity
- Joe Leech of cxpartners
More super good news: you can now buy super early bird tickets at just € 199. I grabbed my ticket, hope you do the same and we can hang at the conference.