My boss at my full-time job got his degree in geology and spent the first part of his professional life working for oil companies.  He was sent all over the place; it wasn’t unusual for him to spend time on actual oil rigs in rickety laboratories, and not infrequently he’d have to drive 50 miles to get to the only functional telephone for miles.  He has many a colorful tale to spin and even speaks some Indonesian because of all of these efforts.

He also doesn’t like it when people complain.  If I kvetch, I’m also expected to suggest how to fix whatever it is that’s bugging me.  So, if I’m banging my head against my desk because I’m struggling to design a new webpage (or whatever), he sometimes will put my peril into perspective by saying things like “That’s frustrating?  No, no… frustrating is [insert various perilous oil-related story here].  Frustrating is [insert an increasingly improbable-sounding oil story here]. Etc.”

As rich of a person he’s become through all of his experiences, I think it’s important to point out that he has made me cringe more than once by trying to design a logo in Microsoft Excel.  He routinely drives me crazy by noting that (probably thanks to his parochial school background) he prefers symmetrical designs to those that are not.  From what I’ve been able to ascertain, there’s a certain harmony that he draws from symmetry; asymmetrical designs wreak havoc with that music.

He’s a different person than I, and his experiences are vastly different from my own.  That said, I’m sure he absorbs at least a fraction of the amount of sheer brainpower, effort, energy, refinement and polishing that goes into designing a successful interface just by virtue of the fact that he sits less than fifteen feet from me.  He’s also learned, just by osmosis, that when I talk about a  “successful” interface, there is but one metric to evaluate that.  A “successful interface” is one that is so simple and so elegant that users just naturally understand it.  If a user thinks just a single time something like “How do I…” and abandons the task, the design is a failure.  It’s a zero-sum game.  (He’s a numbers guy–he’s picked up on that. Believe me.)

People like me are paid to come up with “perfect” interfaces, and I’ll tell you firsthand that we aren’t successful every time.  Rare indeed is the project where I hit a home run on the first inning–more often, I’ll come up with an idea and have it implemented only to later come up with a half-dozen “patches” to fix holes in my solution that I didn’t initially see.  Just like a tire, you can make repairs so many times, but eventually you just have to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch.

So I hope this explains why, over the years, I’ve had so many days where I’ve been at the office until 7 or 8 PM at night and why I’ve been so tired/crabby when I’m out and about.  The truly hilarious part of all of this is that it’s utterly amazing and terribly gratifying in the end to see my work… well, work.

In my day job, I try and keep myself from complaining too much or too often, mainly because my boss has a decidedly different definition of “frustrating” than me.  He (who, incidentally, is not a designer, and would be the first to admit it) spent the first part of his professional life working for oil companies.  He was sent all over the place–he spent time on actual oil rigs in rickety laboratories, and not infrequently he’d have to drive 50 miles to get to the only functional telephone for miles.  If I’m being particularly verbal about my daily struggles, he’ll occasionally remind me that my difficulties aren’t all that bad (relatively speaking!) by saying things like “That’s frustrating?  No, no… frustrating is [insert various perilous oil-related story here].  Frustrating is [insert an increasingly improbable-sounding oil story here]. Etc.”

Given his background, I can appreciate that his definition of frustration clearly involves a degree of physical brawn and time waste that I don’t have to deal with.  But, in my own defense, I think it’s also fair to say that he, as a non-designer, may not fully see the amount of sheer brainpower, effort, energy, refinement and polishing that goes into designing a successful interface. Continue Reading »

It’s accurate to say that the United States is a troubled nation.  Our economy is in trouble, with some of the biggest banks facing buyouts or uncertain futures thanks to billions of dollars in bad mortgage commitments.  Politically we’re divided right down the middle, and even our current candidates who are running on a platform of change are sniping at each other using the same old political mudslinging and empty rhetoric as always.  Not even including natural disasters like Hurricane Ike , which is currently bearing down on a large swath of the Gulf Coast, the USA is a troubled nation.

Natural disasters aside, I think the biggest problem facing the nation right now–the root cause, if I may be so bold, of many of our other issues–is the stunning lack of logical reasoning and reading comprehension skills amongst wide, wide swaths of our population.  I am constantly amazed by people who are completely incapable of digging even slightly below the surface of media.  It seems that most of the time, most people are happy to simply skim the news and pretend that they have a sufficient grasp of the issues.

Statistics would seem to be on my side here, as the United States seems to fall further and further behind in measures of reading comprehension, science aptitude and mathematics aptitude year after year.  Public opinion polls demonstrate every day that the American people are fundamentally unable to recognize rhetoric or tricky wording–you see it every time the same question is asked two different ways and yet the results are wildly different.

Sadly, it would seem that broadcasters and media producers seem to understand this pathetic reality all too well, considering some of the offerings that have appeared on the airwaves as of late. Continue Reading »

I’m at the HOW Design Conference in Boston for the first part of this week, thanks to the generous support of my employers, who like to send me on little adventures like this every now and then so that I can keep myself sharp, learn new things that might benefit our company, and (possibly most importantly) not go nuts and kill everyone in the office.

One of the most interesting parts of the HOW Conference is, for me, the opportunity to be around thousands of other designers. Generally speaking when someone says "I’m a designer" there’s a certain expectation of creative ability–the casual observer naturally wants to assign the designer some preternatural ability to ooze creative juices nonstop.

To some extent this is true; I’d certainly expect the folks at a conference of this sort to be the type that are always questioning everything around them and looking at things in new and different ways. But in all honesty, designers can be quite lazy, just as employees in virtually any other field can be (witness highway construction projects wherein one guy is in a hole doing something and seven other guys are standing around said hole, discussing it). And a couple of things that I’ve seen so far from my fellow attendees have dismayed me.

Continue Reading »

My latest article has been posted on the Black Star Rising blog, which is a little bit more procedural in nature than last time and speaks to what I do with photos as they relate to design. Here’s a bit of it:

Neutral areas can be critical in choosing stock photography, particularly with spot photos. In many cases I need to place text on a photo to create promotional images or advertisements, but if an image doesn’t have enough of a neutral area around the primary subject, then I’m stuck unless I resort to some Photoshop manipulation.

On more than one occasion I’ve had to create long rectangular promo graphics advertising events featuring specific political figures, but have only been given official government 8 x 10 headshots to work with. As a result, I have to slide the image to one side of the canvas, match the background color and fill in the rest of the canvas with that, using the retouching tools to hide any “seam” between the two.

I don’t prefer to go this route, of course; if I have a choice, I like to be able to have a custom shoot or to select the best photo I can find on the Web, regardless of price. Unfortunately, these days it rarely works that way, particularly for online publishers and small businesses.

If you feel so inclined you can read the entire article at Black Star Rising.