rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 266,Collaborative Development for a Responsively Designed Web,"In responsive web design we’ve found a technique that allows us to design for the web as a medium in its own right: one that presents a fluid, adaptable and ever changing canvas. Until this point, we gave little thought to the environment in which users will experience our work, caring more about the aggregate than the individual. The applications we use encourage rigid layouts, whilst linear processes focus on clients signing off paintings of websites that have little regard for behaviour and interactions. The handover of pristine, pixel-perfect creations to developers isn’t dissimilar to farting before exiting a crowded lift, leaving front-end developers scratching their heads as they fill in the inevitable gaps. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Drew’s checklist of things to consider before handing over a design. Somehow, this broken methodology has survived for the last fifteen years or so. Even the advent of web standards has had little impact. Now, as we face an onslaught of different devices, the true universality of the web can no longer be ignored. Responsive web design is just the thin end of the wedge. Largely concerned with layout, its underlying philosophy could ignite a trend towards interfaces that adapt to any number of different variables: input methods, bandwidth availability, user preference – you name it! With such adaptability, a collaborative and iterative process is required. Ethan Marcotte, who worked with the team behind the responsive redesign of the Boston Globe website, talked about such an approach in his book: The responsive projects I’ve worked on have had a lot of success combining design and development into one hybrid phase, bringing the two teams into one highly collaborative group. Whilst their process still involved the creation of desktop-centric mock-ups, these were presented to the entire team early on, where questions about how pages might adapt and behave at different sizes were asked. Mock-ups were quickly converted into HTML prototypes, meaning further decisions could be based on usage rather than guesswork (and endless hours spent in Photoshop). Regardless of the exact process, it’s clear that the relationship between our two disciplines is more crucial than ever. Yet, historically, it seems a wedge has been driven between us – perhaps a result of segregation and waterfall-style processes – resulting in animosity. So how can we improve this relationship? Ultimately, we’ll need to adapt, but even within existing workflows we can start to overlap. Simply adjusting our attitude can effect change, and bring design and development teams closer together. Good design is constant contact. Mark Otto The way we work needs to be more open and inclusive. For example, ensuring members of the development team attend initial kick-off meetings and design workshops will not only ensure technical concerns are raised, but mean that those implementing our designs better understand the problems we’re trying to solve. It can also be useful at this stage to explain how you work and the sort of deliverables you expect to produce. This will give developers a chance to make recommendations on how these can be optimized for their own needs. You may even find opportunities to share the load. On a recent project I worked on, our development partners offered to produce the interactive prototypes needed for user testing. This allowed us to concentrate on refining the experience, whilst they were able to get a head start on building the product. While developers should be involved at the beginning of projects, it’s also important that designers are able to review and contribute to a product as it’s being built. Any handover should be done in person, and ideally you’ll have a day set aside to do so. Having additional budget available for follow-up design reviews is also recommended. Learning how to use version control tools like Subversion or Git will allow you to work within the same environment as developers, and allow you to contribute code or graphic assets directly to a project if needed. Don’t underestimate the benefits of designer and developer sitting next to each other. Subtle nuances can be explored far more easily than if they were conducted over email or phone. As Ethan writes, “‘Design’ is the means, not merely the end; the path we walk over the course of a project, the choices we make”. It’s from collaboration like this that I’ve become fond of producing visual style guides. These demonstrate typographic treatments for common markup and patterns (blockquotes, lists, pagination, basic form controls and so on). Thinking in terms of components rather than individual pages not only fits in better with how a developer will implement a site, but can also ensure your design works as a coherent whole. Despite the amount of research and design produced, when it comes to the crunch, there will always be a need for compromise. As the old saying goes, ‘fast, cheap and good – pick two.’ It’s important that you know which pieces are crucial to a design and which areas can allow for movement. Pick your battles wisely. Having an agreed set of design principles can be useful when making such decisions, as they help everyone focus on the goals of the project. The best compromises are reached when both sides understand the issues of the other. Richard Rutter Ultimately, better collaboration comes through a shared understanding of the different competencies required to build a website. Instead of viewing ourselves in terms of discrete roles, we should instead look to emphasize our range of abilities, and work with others whose skills are complementary. Perhaps somebody who actively seeks to broaden their knowledge is the mark of a professional. Seek these people out. The best developers I’ve worked with have a respect for design, probably having attempted to do some themselves! Having wrangled with a few MySQL databases myself, I certainly believe the obverse is true. While knowing HTML won’t necessarily make you a better designer, it will help you understand the issues being faced by a front-end developer and, more importantly, allow you to offer solutions or alternative approaches. So take a moment to think about how you work with developers and how you could improve your relationship with them. What are you doing to ease the path towards our collaborative future?",2011,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2011-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/collaborative-development-for-a-responsively-designed-web/,business 268,Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics,"Something a bit different for today’s 24 ways article. For starters, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m an evil man who sells things to people on the internet. Second, this article will likely be a little more nebulous than you’re used to, since it covers quite a number of points in a relatively short space. This isn’t going to be the complete Google Analytics Conversion University IQ course compressed into a single article, obviously. What it will be, however, is a primer on setting up and using Google Analytics in real life, and a great deal of what I’ve learned using Google Analytics nearly every working day for the past six (crikey!) years. Also, to be clear, I’ll be referencing new Google Analytics here; old Google Analytics is for loooosers (and those who want reliable e-commerce conversion data per site search term, natch). You may have been running your Analytics account for several years now, dipping in and out, checking traffic levels, seeing what’s popular… and that’s about it. Google Analytics provides so much more than that, but the number of reports available can often intimidate users, and documentation and case studies on their use are minimal at best. Let’s start! Setting up your Analytics profile Before we plough on, I just want to run through a quick checklist that some basic settings have been enabled for your profile. If you haven’t clicked it, click the big cog on the top-right of Google Analytics and we’ll have a poke about. If you have an e-commerce site, e-commerce tracking has been enabled
 If your site has a search function, site search tracking has been enabled. Query string parameters that you do not want tracked as separate pages have been excluded (for example, any parameters needed for your platform to function, otherwise you’ll get multiple entries for the same page appearing in your reports) Filters have been enabled on your main profile to exclude your office IP address and any IPs of people who frequently access the site for work purposes. In decent numbers they tend to throw data off a tad.
 You may also find the need to set up multiple profiles prefiltered for specific audience segments. For example, at Lovehoney we have seventeen separate profiles that allow me quick access to certain countries, devices and traffic sources without having to segment first. You’ll also find load time for any complex reports much improved. Use the same filter screen as above to set up a series of profiles that only include, say, mobile visits, or UK visitors, so you can quickly analyse important segments. Matt, what’s a segment? A segment is a subsection of your visitor base, which you define and then call on in reports to see specific data for that subsection. For example, in this report I’ve defined two segments, the first for IE6 users and the second for IE7. Segments are easily created by clicking the Advanced Segments tabs at the top of any report and clicking +New Custom Segment. What does your site do? Understanding the goals of your site is an oft-covered topic, but it’s necessary not just to form a better understand of your business and prioritize your time. Understanding what you wish visitors to do on your site translates well into a goal-driven analytics package like Google Analytics. Every site exists essentially to sell something, either financially through e-commerce, or to sell an idea or impart information, get people to download a CV or enquire about service, or to sell space on that website to advertisers. If the site did not provide a positive benefit to its owners, it would not have a reason for being. Once you have understood the reason why you have a site, you can map that reason on to one of the three goal types Google Analytics provides. E-commerce This conversion type registers transactions as part of a sales process which requires a monetary value, what products have been bought, an SKU (stock keeping unit), affiliation (if you’re then attributing the sale to a third party or franchise) and so on. The benefit of e-commerce tracking is not only assigning non-arbitrary monetary value to behaviour of visitors on your site, as well as being able to see ancillary costs such as shipping, but seeing product-level information, like which products are preferred from various channels, popular categories, and so on. However, I find the e-commerce tracking options also useful for non-e-commerce sites. For example, if you’re offering downloads or subscriptions and having an email address or user’s details is worth something to you, you can set up e-commerce tracking to understand how much value your site is bringing. For example, an email address might be worth 20p to you, but if it also includes a name it’s worth 50p. A contact telephone number is worth £2, and so on. Page goals Page goals, unsurprisingly, track a visit to a page (often with a sequence of pages leading up to that page). This is what’s referred to as a goal funnel, and is generally used to track how visitors behave in a multistep checkout. Interestingly, the page doesn’t have to actually exist. For example, if you have a single page checkout, you can register virtual page views using trackPageview() when a visitor clicks into a particular section of the checkout or other form. If your site is geared towards getting someone to a particular page, but where there isn’t a transaction (for example, a subscription page) this is for you. There are also behavioural goals, such as time on site and number of pages viewed, which are geared towards sites that make money from advertising. But, going back to the page goals, these can be abstracted using regular expressions, meaning that you can define a funnel based on page type rather than having to set individual folders. In this example, I’ve created regexes for the main page types on my site, so I can create a wide funnel that captures visitors from where they enter through to checkout. Events Event tracking registers a predefined event, such as playing a video, or some interaction that can trigger JavaScript, such as a Tweet This button. Events can then be triggered using the trackEvent() call. If you want someone to complete watching a video, you would code your player to fire trackEvent() upon completion. While I don’t use events as goals, I use events elsewhere to see how well a video play aids to conversion. This not only helps me justify the additional spend on creating video content, but also quickly highlights which videos are underperforming as sales tools. What a visitor can tell you 
Now you have some proper goals set up, we can start to see how changes in content (on-site and external) affect those goals. Ultimately, when a visitor comes to your site, they bring information with them: where they came from (a search engine – including: keyword searched for; a referral; direct; affiliate; or ad campaign) demographics (country; whether they’re new or returning, within thirty days) technical information (browser; screen size; device; bandwidth) site-specific information (landing page; next click; previous values assigned to them as custom variables*) * A note about custom variables. There’s no hope in hell that I can cover custom variables in this article. Go research them. Custom variables are the single best way to hack Google Analytics and bend it to your will. Custom variables allow you to record anything you want about a visitor, which that visitor will then carry around with them between visits. It’s also great for plugging other services into Google Analytics (as shown by the marvelous way Visual Website Optimizer allows you to track and segment tests within the GA interface). Just make sure not to breach the terms of service, eh? CSI your website Police procedural TV shows are all the same: the investigators are called to a crime and come across a clue; there’s then an autopsy; new evidence leads them to a new location; they find a new clue; they put two and two together; they solve the mystery. This is your life now. Exciting! So, now you’re gathering a wealth of information about what sort of people visit your site, what they do when they’re there, and what eventually gets them to drive value to you. It’s now your job to investigate all these little clues to see which types of people drive the most value, and what you can change to improve it. Maybe not that exciting. However, Google Analytics comes pre-armed with extensive reports for you to delve into. As an e-commerce guy (as opposed to a page goal guy) my day pretty much follows the pattern below. Look at e-commerce conversion rate by traffic source compared to the same day in the previous week and previous month. As ours is an e-commerce site, we have weekly and monthly trends. A big spike on Sundays and Mondays, and payday towards the end of the month is always good; on the third week of a month there tends to be a lull. Spend time letting your Google Analytics data brew, understand your own trends and patterns, and you’ll start to get a feel for when something isn’t quite right. Traffic Sources → Sources → All Traffic Look at the conversion rate by landing page for any traffic source that feels significantly different to what’s expected. Check bounce rates, drill down to likely landing pages and check search keyword or referral site to see if it’s a particular subset of visitor. You can do this by clicking Secondary Dimension and choosing Keyword or Source. If it’s direct, choose Visitor Type to break down by new or returning visitor. Content → Site Content → Landing Pages I then tend to flip into Content Drilldown to see what the next clicks were from those landing pages, and whether they changed significantly to the date I’m comparing with. If they have, that’s usually an indicator of changed content (or its relevancy). Remember, if a bunch of people have found their way to your page via a method you’re not expecting (such as a mention on a Spanish radio station – this actually happened to me once), while the content hasn’t changed, the relevancy of it to the audience may have. Content → Site Content → Content Drilldown Once I have an idea of what content was consumed, and whether it was relevant to the user, I then look at the visitor specifics, such as browser or demographic data, to see again whether the change was limited to a specific subset. Site speed, for example, is normally a good factor towards bounce rate, so compare that with previous data as well. Now, to be investigating at this level you still need a serious amount of data, in order to tell what’s a significant change or not. If you’re struggling with a small number of visitors, you might find reporting on a weekly or fortnightly basis more appropriate. However, once you’ve looked into the basics of why changes happen to the value of your site, you’ll soon find yourself limited by the reports offered in Standard Reporting. So, it’s time to build your own. Hooray! Custom reporting Google Analytics provides the tools to build reports specific to the types of investigations you frequently perform. Welcome to my world. Custom reports are quite simple to build: first, you determine the metric you want the report to cover (number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and so on), then choose a set of dimensions that you’d like to segment the report by (say, the source of the traffic, and whether they were new or returning users). You can filter the report, including or excluding particular dimension values, and you can assign the report to any of the profiles you created earlier. In the example below, I’ve created a report that shows me visits and conversion rate for any Google traffic that landed directly only on a product page. I can then drill down on each product page to see the complete phrases use to search. I can use this information in two ways: I can see which products aren’t converting, which shows me where I need to work harder on merchandising. I can give this information to my content team, showing them the actual phrases visitors used to reach our product content, helping them write better targeted product descriptions. The possibilities here are nearly endless, but here are a few examples of reports I find useful: Non-brand inbound search By creating a report that shows inbound search traffic which doesn’t include your brand, you can see more clearly the behaviour of visitors most likely to be unfamiliar with your site and brand values, without having to rely on the clumsy new or returning demographic date. Traffic/conversion/sales by hour This is pure stats porn, but actually more useful than real-time data. By seeing this data broken down at an hourly level, you can not only compare the current day to previous days, but also see the best performing times for email broadcasts and tweets. Visits, load time, conversion and sales by page and browser Page speed can often kill conversion rates, but it’s difficult to prove the value of focusing on speed in monetary terms. Having this report to hand helps me drive Operation Greenbelt, our effort to get into the sub-1.5 second band in Google Webmaster Tools. Useful things you can’t do in custom reporting If you have a search function on your website, then Conversion Rate and Products Bought by Site Search Term is an incredibly useful report that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site’s search engine at returning products and content related to the search term used. By including the products actually bought by visitors who searched for each term, you can use this information to better searchandise these results, escalating high propensity and high value products to the top of the results. However, it’s not possible to get this information out of new Google Analytics. Try it, select the following in the report builder: Metrics: total unique searches; e-commerce or goal conversion rate Dimensions: search term; product You’ll see that the data returned is a little nonsensical, though a 2,000% conversion rate would be nice. However, you can get more accurate information using advanced segments. By creating individual segments to define users who have searched for a particular term, you can run the sales performance and product performance reports as normal. It’s laborious, but it teaches a good lesson: data that seems inaccessible can normally be found another way! Reporting infrastructure Now that you have a series of reports that you can refer to on a daily or weekly basis, it’s time to put together a regular reporting infrastructure. Even if you’re not reporting to someone, having a set of key performance indicators that you can use to see how your performance is improving over time allows you to set yourself business goals on a monthly and annual basis. For my own reporting, I take some high-level metrics (such as visitors, conversion rate and average order value), and segment them by traffic source and, separately, landing page. These statistics I record weekly and report: current week compared with previous week same week previous year (if available) 4 week average 13 week average 52 week average (if available) This takes into account weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual trends, and gives you a much clearer view of your performance. Getting data in other ways If you’re using Google Analytics frequently, with any large site you’ll come to a couple of conclusions: Doing any kind of practical comparative analysis is unwieldy. Boy, Google Analytics is slow! As you work with bigger datasets and put together more complex queries, you’ll see the loading graphic more than you’ll see actual data. So when you reach that level, there are ways to completely bypass the Google Analytics interface altogether, and get data into your own spreadsheet application for manipulation. Data Feed Query Explorer If you just want to pull down some quick statistics but still use complex filters and exotic metric and dimension combinations, the Data Feed Query Explorer is the quickest way of doing so. Authenticate with your Google Analytics account, select a profile, and you can start selecting metrics and dimensions to be generated in a handy, selectable tabulated format. Google Analytics API If you’re feeling clever, you can bypass having to copy and paste data by pulling in directly into Excel, Google Docs or your own application using the Google Analytics API. There are several scripts and plugins available to do this. I use Automate Analytics Google Docs code (there’s also a paid version that simplifies setup and creates some handy reports for you). New shiny things Well, now that that’s over, I can show you some cool stuff. Well, at least it’s cool to me. Google Analytics is being constantly improved and new functionality is introduced nearly every month. Here are a couple of my favourites. Multichannel attribution Not every visitor converts on your site on the first visit. They may not even do so on the second visit, or third. If they convert on the fourth visit, but each time they visit they do so via a different channel (for example, Search PPC, Search Organic, Direct, Email), which channel do you attribute the conversion to? The last channel, or the first? Dilemma! Google now has a Multichannel Attribution report, available in the Conversion category, which shows how each channel assists in converting, the overlap between channels, and where in the process that channel was important. For example, you may have analysed your blog traffic from Twitter and become disheartened that not many people were subscribing after visiting from Twitter links, but instead your high-value subscribers were coming from natural search. On the face of it, you’d spend less time tweeting, but a multichannel report may tell you that visitors first arrived via a Twitter link and didn’t subscribe, but then came back later after searching for your blog name on Google, after which they did. Don’t pack Twitter in yet! Visitor and goal flow Visitor and goal flow are amazing reports that help you visualize the flow of traffic through your site and, ultimately, into your checkout funnel or similar goal path. Flow reports are perfect for understanding drop-off points in your process, as well as what the big draws are on each page. Previously, if you wanted to visualize this data you had to set up several abstracted microgoals and chain them together in custom reports. Frankly, it was a pain in the arse and burned through your precious and limited goal allocation. Visitor flow bypasses all that and produces the report in an interactive flow diagram. While it doesn’t show you the holy grail of conversion likelihood by each path, you can segment visitor flow so that you can see very specifically how different segments of your visitor base behave. Go play with it now!",2011,Matt Curry,mattcurry,2011-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/,business 270,From Side Project to Not So Side Project,"In the last article I wrote for 24 ways, back in 2009, I enthused about the benefits of having a pet project, suggesting that we should all have at least one so that we could collaborate with our friends, escape our day jobs, fulfil our own needs, help others out, raise our profiles, make money, and — most importantly — have fun. I don’t think I need to offer any further persuasions: it seems that designers and developers are launching their own pet projects left, right and centre. This makes me very happy. However, there still seems to be something of a disconnect between having a side project and turning it into something that is moderately successful; in particular, the challenge of making enough money to sustain the project and perhaps even elevating it from the sidelines so that it becomes something not so on the side at all. Before we even begin this, let’s spend a moment talking about money, also known as… Evil, nasty, filthy money Over the last couple of years, I’ve started referring to myself as an accidental businessman. I say accidental because my view of the typical businessman is someone who is driven by money, and I usually can’t stand such people. Those who are motivated by profit, obsessed with growth, and take an active interest in the world’s financial systems don’t tend to be folks with whom I share a beer, unless it’s to pour it over them. Especially if they’re wearing pinstriped suits. That said, we all want to make money, don’t we? And most of us want to make a relatively decent amount, too. I don’t think there’s any harm in admitting that, is there? Hello, I’m Elliot and I’m a capitalist. The key is making money from doing what we love. For most people I know in our community, we’ve already achieved that — I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who isn’t extremely passionate about working in our industry and I think it’s one of the most positive, unifying benefits we enjoy as a group of like-minded people — but side projects usually arise from another kind of passion: a passion for something other than what we do as our day jobs. Perhaps it’s because your clients are driving you mental and you need a break; perhaps it’s because you want to create something that is truly your own; perhaps it’s because you’re sick of seeing your online work disappear so fast and you want to try your hand at print in order to make a more permanent mark. The three factors I listed there led me to create 8 Faces, a printed magazine about typography that started as a side project and is now a very significant part of my yearly output and income. Like many things that prove fruitful, 8 Faces’ success was something of an accident, too. For a start, the magazine was never meant to be profitable; its only purpose at all was to scratch my own itch. Then, after the first issue took off and I realized how much time I needed to spend in order to make the next one decent, it became clear that I would have to cover more than just the production costs: I’d have to take time out from client work as well. Doing this meant I’d have to earn some money. Probably not enough to equate to the exact amount of time lost when I could be doing client work (not that you could ever describe time as being lost when you work on something you love), but enough to survive; for me to feel that I was getting paid while doing all of the work that 8 Faces entailed. The answer was to raise money through partnerships with some cool companies who were happy to be associated with my little project. A sustainable business model Business model! I can’t believe I just wrote those words! But a business model is really just a loose plan for how not to screw up. And all that stuff I wrote in the paragraph above about partnering with companies so I could get some money in while I put the magazine together? Well, that’s my business model. If you’re making any product that has some sort of production cost, whether that’s physical print run expenses or up-front dev work to get an app built, covering those costs before you even release your product means that you’ll be in profit from the first copy you sell. This is no small point: production expenses are pretty much the only cost you’ll ever need to recoup, so having them covered before you launch anything is pretty much the best possible position in which you could place yourself. Happy days, as Jamie Oliver would say. Obtaining these initial funds through partnerships has another benefit. Sure, it’s a form of advertising but, done right, your partners can potentially provide you with great content, too. In the case of 8 Faces, the ads look as nice as the rest of the magazine, and a couple of our partners also provide proper articles: genuinely meaningful, relevant, reader-pleasing articles at that. You’d be amazed at how many companies are willing to become partners and, as the old adage goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. With profit comes responsibility Don’t forget about the responsibility you have to your audience if you engage in a relationship with a partner or any type of advertiser: although I may have freely admitted my capitalist leanings, I’m still essentially a hairy hippy, and I feel that any partnership should be good for me as a publisher, good for the partner and — most importantly — good for the reader. Really, the key word here is relevance, and that’s where 99.9% of advertising fails abysmally. (99.9% is not a scientific figure, but you know what I’m on about.) The main grey area when a side project becomes profitable is how you share that profit, partly because — in my opinion, at least — the transition from non-profitable side project to relatively successful source of income can be a little blurred. Asking for help for nothing when there’s no money to be had is pretty normal, but sometimes it’s easy to get used to that free help even once you start making money. I believe the best approach is to ask for help with the promise that it will always be rewarded as soon as there’s money available. (Oh, god: this sounds like one of those nightmarish client proposals. It’s not, honest.) If you’re making something cool, people won’t mind helping out while you find your feet. Events often think that they’re exempt from sharing profit. Perhaps that’s because many event organizers think they’re doing the speakers a favour rather than the other way around (that’s a whole separate article), but it’s shocking to see how many people seem to think they can profit from content-makers — speakers, for example — and yet not pay for that content. It was for this reason that Keir and I paid all of our speakers for our Insites: The Tour side project, which we ran back in July. We probably could’ve got away without paying them, especially as the gig was so informal, but it was the right thing to do. In conclusion: money as a by-product Let’s conclude by returning to the slightly problematic nature of money, because it’s the pivot on which your side project’s success can swing, regardless of whether you measure success by monetary gain. I would argue that success has nothing to do with profit — it’s about you being able to spend the time you want on the project. Unfortunately, that is almost always linked to money: money to pay yourself while you work on your dream idea; money to pay for more servers when your web app hits the big time; money to pay for efforts to get the word out there. The key, then, is to judge success on your own terms, and seek to generate as much money as you see fit, whether it’s purely to cover your running costs, or enough to buy a small country. There’s nothing wrong with profit, as long as you’re ethical about it. (Pro tip: if you’ve earned enough to buy a small country, you’ve probably been unethical along the way.) The point at which individuals and companies fail — in the moral sense, for sure, but often in the competitive sense, too — is when money is the primary motivation. It should never be the primary motivation. If you’re not passionate enough about something to do it as an unprofitable side project, you shouldn’t be doing it all. Earning money should be a by-product of doing what you love. And who doesn’t want to spend their life doing what they love?",2011,Elliot Jay Stocks,elliotjaystocks,2011-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/from-side-project-to-not-so-side-project/,business 281,Nine Things I've Learned,"I’ve been a professional graphic designer for fourteen years and for just under four of those a professional web designer. Like most designers I’ve learned a lot in my time, both from a design point of view and in business as freelance designer. A few of the things I’ve learned stick out in my mind, so I thought I’d share them with you. They’re pretty random and in no particular order. 1. Becoming the designer you want to be When I started out as a young graphic designer, I wanted to design posters and record sleeves, pretty much like every other young graphic designer. The problem is that the reality of the world means that when you get your first job you’re designing the back of a paracetamol packet or something equally weird. I recently saw a tweet that went something like this: “You’ll never become the designer you always dreamt of being by doing the work you never wanted to do”. This is so true; to become the designer you want to be, you need to be designing the things you’re passionate about designing. This probably this means working in the evenings and weekends for little or no money, but it’s time well spent. Doing this will build up your portfolio with the work that really shows what you can do! Soon, someone will ask you to design something based on having seen this work. From this point, you’re carving your own path in the direction of becoming the designer you always wanted to be. 2. Compete on your own terms As well as all being friends, we are also competitors. In order to win new work we need a selling point, preferably a unique selling point. Web design is a combination of design disciplines – user experience design, user interface Design, visual design, development, and so on. Some companies will sell themselves as UX specialists, which is fine, but everyone who designs a website from scratch does some sort of UX, so it’s not really a unique selling point. Of course, some people do it better than others. One area of web design that clients have a strong opinion on, and will judge you by, is visual design. It’s an area in which it’s definitely possible to have a unique selling point. Designing the visual aesthetic for a website is a combination of logical decision making and a certain amount of personal style. If you can create a unique visual style to your work, it can become a selling point that’s unique to you. 3. How much to charge and staying motivated When you’re a freelance designer one of the hardest things to do is put a price on your work and skills. Finding the right amount to charge is a fine balance between supplying value to your customer and also charging enough to stay motivated to do a great job. It’s always tempting to offer a low price to win work, but it’s often not the best approach: not just for yourself but for the client as well. A client once asked me if I could reduce my fee by £1,000 and still be motivated enough to do a good job. In this case the answer was yes, but it was the question that resonated with me. I realized I could use this as a gauge to help me price projects. Before I send out a quote I now always ask myself the question “Is the amount I’ve quoted enough to make me feel motivated to do my best on this project?” I never send out a quote unless the answer is yes. In my mind there’s no point in doing any project half-heartedly, as every project is an opportunity to build your reputation and expand your portfolio to show potential clients what you can do. Offering a client a good price but not being prepared to put everything you have into it, isn’t value for money. 4. Supplying the right design When I started out as a graphic designer it seemed to be the done thing to supply clients with a ton of options for their logo or brochure designs. In a talk given by Dan Rubin, he mentioned that this was a legacy of agencies competing with each other in a bid to create the illusion of offering more value for money. Over the years, I’ve realized that offering more than one solution makes no sense. The reason a client comes to you as a designer is because you’re the person than can get it right. If I were to supply three options, I’d be knowingly offering my client at least two options that I didn’t think worked. To this day I still get asked how many homepage design options I’ll supply for the quoted amount. The answer is one. Of course, I’m more than happy to iterate upon the design to fine-tune it and, on the odd occasion, I do revisit a design concept if I just didn’t nail the design first time around. Your time is much better spent refining the right design option than rushing out three substandard designs in the same amount of time. 5. Colour is key There are many contributing factors that go into making a good visual design, but one of the simplest ways to do this is through the use of colour. The colour palette used in a design can have such a profound effect on a visual design that it almost feels like you’re cheating. It’s easy to add more and more subtle shades of colour to add a sense of sophistication and complexity to a design, but it dilutes the overall visual impact. When I design, I almost have a rule that only allows me to use a very limited colour palette. I don’t always stick to it, but it’s always in mind and something I’m constantly reviewing through my design process. 6. Creative thinking is central to good or boundary-pushing web design When we think of creativity in web design we often link this to the visual design, as there is an obvious opportunity to be creative in this area if the brief allows it. Something that I’ve learnt in my time as a web designer is that there’s a massive need for creative thinking in the more technical aspects of web design. The tools we use for building websites are there to be manipulated and used in creative ways to design exciting and engaging user experiences. Great developers are constantly using their creativity to push the boundaries of what can be done with CSS, jQuery and JavaScript. Being creative and creative thinking are things we should embrace as an industry and they are qualities that can be found in anyone, whether they be a visual designer or Rails developer. 7. Creative block: don’t be afraid to get things wrong Creative block can be a killer when designing. It’s often applied to visual design, which is more subjective. I suffer from creative block on a regular basis. It’s hugely frustrating and can screw up your schedule. Having thought about what creative block actually is, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually more of a lack of direction than a lack of ideas. You have ideas and solutions in mind but don’t feel committed to any of them. You’re scared that whatever direction you take, it’ll turn out to be wrong. I’ve found that the best remedy for this is to work through this barrier. It’s a bit like designing with a blindfold on – you don’t really know where you’re going. If you stick to your guns and keep pressing forward I find that, nine times out of ten, this process leads to a solution. As the page begins to fill, the direction you’re looking for slowly begins to take shape. 8. You get better at designing by designing I often get emails asking me what books someone can read to help them become a better designer. There are a lot of good books on subjects like HTML5, CSS, responsive web design and the like, that will really help improve anyone’s web design skills. But, when it comes to visual design, the best way to get better is to design as much as possible. You can’t follow instructions for these things because design isn’t following instructions. A large part of web design is definitely applying a set of widely held conventions, but there’s another part to it that is invention and the only way to get better at this is to do it as much as possible. 9. Self-belief is overrated Throughout our lives we’re told to have self-belief. Self-belief and confidence in what we do, whatever that may be. The problem is that some people find it easier than others to believe in themselves. I’ve spent years trying to convince myself to believe in what I do but have always found it difficult to have complete confidence in my design skills. Self-doubt always creeps in. I’ve realized that it’s ok to doubt myself and I think it might even be a good thing! I’ve realized that it’s my self-doubt that propels me forward and makes me work harder to achieve the best results. The reason I’m sharing this is because I know I’m not the only designer that feels this way. You can spend a lot of time fighting self-doubt only to discover that it’s your body’s natural mechanism to help you do the best job possible.",2011,Mike Kus,mikekus,2011-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/nine-things-ive-learned/,business