College Web Guy

A powerful two paragraphs from Mike Richwalsky’s post about crowdsourcing content in higher education:

Let’s face it, the staged photos of a professor leading a faux discussion with a group of students who happen to cover all races and genders isn’t going to cut it for much longer. Kids growing up in the user generated content era want to get the real info. They’re going to find your students sharing videos that you probably don’t know existed and their Facebook posts and Twitter updates. It’s those media touches that are going to make up a students mind, not the glossy view book.

Something to keep in mind for ‘10 and going into ‘11. How can we best tap into that base of content and get them to create content for us and how can we promote that content front and center. It’s going to scare the old school to death.

…found this post via the recent Higher Ed Experts Newsletter

Often, just as print designers are tasked with shepherding a project from design through production, a large group of web designers also tackle the production task of bridging the gap between photoshop and a browser with html/css coding.

Or, in the very least, they have an understanding of HOW their designs and IF their designs can be realistically, technically, implemented.

And this isn’t as easy as it may seem to the unknowing manager/administrator who may appreciate the surface value of good web design but may not understand technical taekwondo and craft involved to produce it.  It’s an unfortunate situation and is directly reflected by the compensation of web designers across the board.  Sure, some simply deliver mockups to developers.  But often our commitment to the project takes us way beyond photoshop.

Show me a print designer who doesn’t concern himself with holding a finished piece in his hands, and I’ll show you a web designer who doesn’t open a browser and nitpick.  Those people don’t exist, and/or they suck and should be fired.

Competent designers (print and web) care about the finished, “live” product.  And we must naturally concern ourselves with not only design, but production.  Not because we’re paid to be developers, but because we care.

A recent Smashing Magazine post provided a nice list of hurdles that we face when bringing design to the web, listed under the heading, “adaptive to diverse users”.  And this list, in a nutshell is what makes the transition from print to web so crazy:

• Browser
  Is the design attractive and usable with the most current and popular browsers? Is it at least usable with old browsers?
• Platform
  Does the design work on PC, Mac and Linux machines?
• Device
  Does the design adapt to low-resolution mobile devices? How does it look on mobile devices that have full resolution (e.g. iPhones)?
• Screen resolution
  Does the design stay together at multiple viewport (i.e. window) widths? Is it attractive and easy to read at different widths? If the design does adapt to different viewport widths, does it correct for extremely narrow or wide viewports (e.g. by using the min-width and max-width properties)?
• Font sizes
  Does the design accommodate different default font sizes? Does the design hold together when the font size is changed on the fly? Is it attractive and easy to read at different font sizes?
• Color
  Does the design make sense and is the content readable in black and white? Would it work if you are color blind or have poor vision or cannot detect color contrast?
• JavaScript presence
  Does the page work without JavaScript?
• Image presence
  Does the content make sense and is it readable without images (either background or foreground)?
• Assistive technology/disability
  Does the page work well in screen readers? Does the page work well without a mouse?

This is not a comprehensive list; and even so, you would not be able to accommodate every one of these variations in your design. But the more you can account for, the more user-friendly, robust and successful your website will be.

Additional reading:

Dear Print Designer Doing Web Design
This is a very “blue-collar” list coming from the perspective of an XHTML/CSS coder who’s job it is to implement designs.

The Way to the Web, Print Designers!
More often than not, the reflexive approach that I’ve seen print designers take on the Web is to treat it as a vehicle for print-based design practices: fixing type sizes, specifying typefaces, ignoring usability and expediency, and perhaps most notoriously making the assumption that, over time, users will come around to a print-focused way of consuming content.

Another great excerpt from Curt Cloninger’s book: Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process

The Development phase:

“You can repeat the steps of the development phase forever, but at some point you will have to abandon your quest for hypothetical perfection, go with your best guess, and proceed to the implementation phase.

1. Build
2. Test
3. Revise
4. Implement
5. Market
6. Maintain and Improve

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously observed, “Real artists ship.”  An architect who never gets hired to design any actual 3D buildings is call a “paper architect.”  It doesn’t matter how ingenious his blueprints are: unless he actually gets some buildings built, the history of architecture will not remember him.  By the same token, real designers implement.

It doesn’t matter how well the design succeeds in the hypothetical test environment of the development phase.  How a design weathers the implementation phase is the true test of its success.”

1. Predesign
2. Design
3. Develop
4. Implement

Skipping the predesign phase and diving straight into the design phase is like taking a hasty, blurry snapshot of a still life and then devoting weeks meticulously painting from that blurry snapshot.

…As Joe Jackson sang, “You can’t get what you want till you know what you want”

Above was a quote from the Curt Cloninger’s book “Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process“.  Below is another:

“At the end of the day, knowing grid systems, color theory, and the history of typography doesn’t necessarily make you a creative designer any more then knowing a pinch from a pint and how to operate a Cuisinart makes you a creative chef.”

Cloninger by the way, is also a lecturer of Multimedia Arts & Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville

I’ll share more nuggets from his book as I progress beyond page 14.  That’s what my blog is for, right?  Referencing things from other people and producing nothing original?

Part of hiring a web communications specialist involves browsing around the internet(s) looking for insightful questions to ask a web writer, because I aren’t one.  In the process I found this neat girl Tiffani Jones, a sort of web writing gunslinger for hire.

An awesome one-two punch from her amazing recent presentation are below.  …The raccoons put it over the top.  Put me under obligation to share it:

You should check out the entire presentation.  Not to me missed.

In the talk, I presented a series of commonsense–but regularly overlooked–tips on how to create good web copy. We covered the basics of solid writing, what makes for effective copywriting, and why web copy is special.