One of my regrets for this year was my inability to attend An Event Apart: Boston or @media ‘09. I’m sure each conference was full of great speakers, tons of new ideas, and an atmosphere alive with fellow professionals sharing thoughts about what they love about their jobs.
In particular, though, I’m sad that I missed Andy Clarke’s “Walls Come Tumbling Down” presentation (warning, link goes to a very long presentation transcript.) He expressed a good deal of nervousness about how the topic would be received, which implied it was going to be pretty eye-opening considering his usual bravado. It’s something I just had to see… if I had the funds for traveling, attending, and food and board.
As I don’t, I didn’t see it. Which is sad. Fortunately for me, he posted the transcript and slides online (see link in prior paragraph.) It’s a long read, but it’s worth it for every single one of you to go take the time and check it out. It’s good. It’s great. It pushes on a lot on updating the web design process to reflect not only the state of the modern web, but also the state of the modern economy. It’s so good I wish I could build a time machine, go back to earlier this year, and do the presentation myself to sound as clever as he does.
My short-lived attempt at building a time machine ended when I discovered that DeLoreans are slightly beyond my means to purchase. So instead, I had to content myself with creating a 80’s themed comic that portrayed my agreement with what Andy is preaching. I think today’s comic proves two things: 1. Andy Clarke would probably fit in quite well with the pastels and whites of undercover Miami cops and 2. Some things can’t be built with just a picture.
Let me focus on that last one in more detail, because it’s something I’ve encountered in my own career and talked about before, but keep encountering.
In the example listed in the comic, you can’t expect a speedboat to be built from just a drawing. By the same token, there’s a vast majority of products that require a design that is more than just an image. This is something we accept as common sense in our everyday lives. Have you ever had a home built based only on a picture some guy drew, rather than blueprints from a contractor? No, of course not!
So why do we expect modern web sites (which are more often than not actually applications) to be something your developer can make or your client can easily grasp with a static visual proof/comp? Yet, all too often, this is exactly what we show clients. We finish making a pretty picture in Photoshop set to just the right width, then get our clients to sign off on that. It’s then handed over to your developer (or whatever you’re calling the guy making the code) with little to no cues for how the site responds to a changing browser resolution, how it interacts with the user, etc.
As a result, an iterative process begins. The developer interprets the designer’s vision. It goes to the designer, who naturally will find issues caused by a disparity of vision on how the site interacts, or whether it has a fixed width, or whatnot. Then they mark up their preferred changes, and send it back. This goes on until the designer is happy enough to show the fledgling site to the client, who almost invariably will have a problem with it because it wasn’t what they imagined when they looked at the static picture they were shown!
So it gets revised… again.
Finally, it all seems well, until the client’s mother sees the site on their old e-machine running IE6, and they want to know why it looks different. Where are the rounded colors, the transparencies?
Time and again I’ve heard of this happening or experienced it myself. Why is it still occurring? The web is interactive. The web is different from browser to browser. The web is sometimes seen on a screen slightly larger than a postage stamp. We know this. In order to properly design for it, we need to move beyond habits we inherited from print.
Andy proposes designing in the browser, showing the client how it changes depending on a browser’s support, and how it might interact with different widths, etc. For some designers this could be a pretty radical step, as accustomed as we’ve become to using Photoshop’s powerful toolset. But on tighter budgets in an increasingly complex Web, we don’t have a lot of choices in the matter.
I could repeat Andy point for point, but let me just play the role of fan boy and tell you that he’s brilliant. He’s saying what we all understand: We have to change how we design for the Web. It’s even more crucial in this economy than it was a couple years back. Go read Walls Come Tumbling Down. Even if you’re not in a position to adopt all of his suggestions (or even if you disagree) you’ll come away from it improved.