A few of Andy Rutledge’s words from The Design View Show, Episode 2, although aimed at answering the question of formal vs. self-taught web design education, reminded me of an important topic web designers need to remember: that constraint – not creativity – should be the overriding drive behind our designs.

As Andy shares, when designers think creativity – not problem-solving – is the prime measure of success, they enter a competition of artistry and decoration. I would add that true originality is often a high expectation of the creative-crazed designer, too. If it’s creative, looks nice, and feels super unique, then it’s assumed to be a successful design.

Such an assumption lays a comfortable foundation for designers to “trust their intuition” (advice often given from one designer to another) and fall in love with something they created – even though it doesn’t work. Too often, we designers create a logo, marketing idea, tag line, web design, or UX technique that we believe is innovative, when, quite frankly, it’s just not.

I call it creative over-thinking; when our desire to be inventive usurps our rational instincts. The end product is forced, and we might even feel some catharsis because of it. Sharpening our internal radars to recognize when we’re headed down this frustrating path is among the best ways to balance the art with the design purposes.

Techniques to stay oriented

Instead of “trusting your intuition,” I say “trust the intuition of others.” Be proactive about seeking feedback from outside sources knowing they usually don’t get it (often for good reason) but they’ll be honest in their reactions. The truth can hurt, yes, but most of the time we’re designing for them – not other web designers.

If you find yourself explaining your design decision in paragraphs rather than a simple sentence, then it’s time to re-evaluate. Portfolio pieces can look great but don’t communicate clearly or connect effectively. The more you explain concepts, the deeper you’ll dig. Effective design decisions will explain themselves.

Regularly along the way, re-orient yourself to the intended users and audience, and don’t waiver from this focus. Generally, “creative flare” isn’t at the top of their list of design needs. It doesn’t hurt, of course, but the best designs are credible, usable, easily digestable, correctly targeted, and clear. Often, it’s the simplest designs that achieve all these characteristics fluidly.

Quick takes to prevent over-thinking

• Know your core: are you an artist or a designer? Identify your leanings.
• Know that naturally creative people aren’t necessarily naturally design-oriented people and vice versa.
• Remember that art and design often clash. Save examples of the two working well together.
• Balance your desire for creativity with a desire for constraint and simplicity.
• Stop forcing ideas. It’s a great waste of time and energy and results in frustration.
• Seek out and accept feedback frequently from non-designers.
• Make achieving the client’s goals a priority over achieving your own personal aesthetic.
• Remember your users and audience and prioritize your design to meet their needs.
• If you’re compromising originality at work, seek fulfillment with intensely unique and creative side projects.

Bigger picture

Yes, this post in some ways falls into the age-old categories of art vs. design, creativity vs. constraint, form vs. function, original vs. ordinary. However, I’m more and more convinced that the best designers are those that understand the balance of all of these things. Here are a few links if you’re interested in any further reading:

• The Design View Show
• Universal Principles of Design
• Be a Beautiful Designer
• Collecting for Design
• Form vs Function (all the way from 2001)

You may have heard of the One Laptop per Child program that was co-founded by Nicholas Negroponte from MIT’s Media Lab. The goal of the organization is “to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.” Their approach to meeting this goal was to develop a rugged, low-cost laptop that could be provided to children in developing countries.

For a long time people referred to the computer as the $100 laptop - since the hope was to design and manufacture something that would cost that much. The machines, called the OLPC XO-1, are going into mass production now and the price is coming out closer to $200 than $100 per machine - but it sounds like they still have hopes of getting the price down in the coming year.

There are reports that initial commitments by some governments for large purchases haven’t been followed up by actual orders. At the same time, the organization has received a lot of interest from folks in developed countries who are interested in helping out, and getting their hands on one of the laptops. To get things jump started they have started a Give One, Get One program where people can purchase two laptops - one to keep and one to be donated to a child in need.

One of things Brian and I feel strongly about is supporting kids. We’ve done pro bono work for both the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and the Medical Care for Children Partnership over the years. We’re also computer geeks and still have the original Apple II from our childhood on display at the Lab. When we saw the G1G1 program we couldn’t pass up the chance to help the kids and get our hands on one of those nifty little machines.

If you’re interested in supporting the OLPC program you should consider attending The Technoliday Party on December 6th in DC.  Proceeds from the party will be used to purchase laptops from the OLPC program.

They say we should get our laptop before the end of the year. Next time you stop by the Lab feel free to take our XO-1 for a spin. Or, better yet, get your own so we can test out the built-in wireless mesh networking!

Once a quarter (roughly the third Thursday of every third month) we take an afternoon off with the whole staff and do something fun together that has nothing to do with our day-to-day work.  It’s a tradition that began when we started the company almost 8 years ago.  Over the years, we’ve done everything from sailing to baseball games to go cart racing to cooking class. 

It’s officially considered a ”teambuilding” activity, but we’ve never taken it too seriously.  We work hard all year long, so in many ways it’s just a chance for us all to take a break together, have some fun, and recharge.  Since we now have two offices, getting everyone together for events like this is even more important.

Last week we had our most recent outing, and we braved the mud and welts for an afternoon of paintball.  Two teams — the Rats and the Dogs — were chosen at random.  The Durham office made the trip, any they were into it.

It’s fun to look back over the years and see how the team has grown.  Here we are at Cantler’s in Annapolis in 2004:

This is from a cooking class all 7 of us took in early 2002:

Traditions like this are a big part of making a company feel like more than just a place to go to work.  The bigger we get (we’re hiring!), the more TTTs feel like official “events” as opposed to simple afternoons out of the office, but they’re always well worth it.  I come back feeling refreshed and reconnected with everyone — especially those whom I have to blame thank for my various paintball bruises.

There’s a lot going on here at the four labs, and so the four of us attending Carsonified’s Future of Web Design conference this year had to make a long day trip up to New York. Fortunately, when it comes to Ryan Carson’s conferences, even the sub-par conferences are well worth every resultant hour of sleep deprivation.

I say sub-par mainly because this conference didn’t have the polish that we tend to take for granted when it comes to Carson conferences. The venue was large, echoey, and didn’t allow for much audience feedback — if a speaker told a decent joke, audience laughter was swallowed up by the space, and it sounded like awkward silence. The venue was also essentially a glass cube, and the sunlight coming through shone directly on the presentation screen, making speakers’ slides nearly impossible to see for much of the day. Ryan Carson did the right thing and is offering attendees video of the conference free of charge.

On the other hand, the content of the conference was definitely the high-quality fare you expect. It was action-packed, with no fewer than eighteen speaking spots in just over nine hours. While many of the speakers were familiar faces from the web design / web standards speaking circuit, there were a few who were new (to me, at least), and a couple who really stood out:

• Elliot Jay Stocks, Carsonified’s new Senior Designer, was given ten minutes to make his case for abandoning some of the trendy design motifs we’ve seen in the Web 2.0 space. He made the most of each of those minutes, and left the entire audience wishing he’d been given a full slot, with an engaging, witty, and eloquent monologue. I’m sure we’ll see more of him in the future.
• Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Chief Creative Officer at SkinnyCorp, did a really great job on his talk, answering questions submitted by users. It was a creative and engaging way for him to deliver a talk on community.

Of course, there were other speakers more familiar to us who made the conference worthwhile. Brian Fling delivered a reworked twist on his mobile talk that always gives a good primer on the basics of mobile development. Our friend Cindy Li gave a good (albeit brief) talk on how illustration can bring a two-way communication with your users to the web in a way few other media can. Jon Snook gave a good overview of some design considerations related to AJAX. And Matthew Patterson from Campaign Monitor talked about the challenges in HTML email, and why we should care — and we should care.

The highlight of my conference, as far as the presentations were concerned, was Keith Robinson and Ryan Sims presenting “Inside the Designers’ Studio: IMDb,” in which they reworked the popular movie site. The crux of the talk involved the process the two talented designers undertook in the redesign, and I always find it very interesting to see how people actually attack a project. Keith had some technical issues with the remote he was given to advance slides, but the presentation was solid and informative, and was a great anchor leg for the conference.

Afterward, Brian and I headed out to engage in the best part of any conference: socializing. We talked with a ton of people in the few hours before our 10pm train back to DC, including one of my long-lost friends from elementary school. These conversations are always great, but the MediaTemple closing party had other ideas for what to do at the end of the day: something involving deafeningly-loud music and crazy lights. I think the MT parties are best either quite late the night of a one-day conference or, better yet, on the last day as a larger conference.

We had a great time, met a lot of great folks, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone again at SXSW, if not before!

Several Viget Labs developers participated in RubyConf 2007 from November 2-4 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ben was once again selected as a speaker, and Patrick, Clinton, Kyle and I came along.

Unlike the Ruby on Rails-oriented conferences we attended earlier in the year, RubyConf is devoted to Ruby outside of the specific context of Rails. As such, although several presenters made passing references to Rails, it was not the focus of any presentation. Our attendance at RubyConf would, therefore, provide an opportunity to think outside the Rails box we usually occupy in our work at Viget.

Friday’s agenda started with Rails core developer Marcel Molina Jr.’s “What Makes Code Beautiful?” attempting to bring definition to what is always a subjective matter. This was followed by Jim Weirich’s “Advanced Ruby Class Design” which approached readable code from a slightly different angle. Following a tasty lunch, afternoon sessions included discussions of Camping, a “micro-framework”; Treetop, a system for text parsing and interpretation; and the intriguingly-named “Hurting Code for Fun and Profit.” The day concluded with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of Ruby, answering a variety of questions from the audience.

Saturday morning brought a discussion of three alternate Ruby language implementations: IronRuby, targeting .NET; JRuby, targeting the JVM; and Rubinius, targeting Ruby itself. In his evening keynote, Matz made reference to these three implementations, as well as the upcoming YARV virtual machine, calling himself merely the “designer” of Ruby, rather than its implementor. Matz is famous for this humility and good humor and sees these alternate implementations as widening the scope of Ruby rather than competing with his own work. Between the morning plenaries and evening keynote, break-out sessions included profiling and tuning Ruby, shipping desktop applications written in Ruby, and the vastly-improved Ruby support in the new Leopard release of Mac OS X.

On Sunday, we were awakened to the sounds of TV’s “A-Team” in Dr. Nic’s presentation on Rubigen, an extraction of Rails’ generators into more generic Ruby form. This was followed by David Chelimsky and Dave Astels presenting on the current state of behavior-driven development with RSpec, and Jay Phillips speaking on his Adhearsion VOIP framework. Ben finally got to speak in the last set of break-out sessions; his “Cleanliness is Next to Domain-Specificity” showed how creating a domain-specific dialect in Ruby can really clean up your code. Other afternoon sessions included discussions of OpenID, JRuby, and the solr search engine.

Outside of the conference hours, we enjoyed taking in some of downtown Charlotte’s restaurants and bars (be sure to stop in at Mert’s for some excellent soul food if you’re ever in the area); meeting with friends, colleagues and clients; and reuniting with our fellow developers, whom we mostly see over Campfire since the opening of our Durham office. For all of these reasons, RubyConf 2007 was a great experience, and a fitting end to a year of conference appearances in Portland, Berlin, Raleigh, Austin, and Pisa, among others. We’re already making plans for 2008, so keep an eye on the Four Labs blog for details, and look for us to come near you soon!

Trying to navigate the sensitive communication involved in keeping a project within scope in the early stages of your relationship with a client can be tricky. When a client begins to ask for bells and whistles beyond the original discussions, but doesn’t want to compromise on budget or timeline, it’s essential that project managers be comfortable pushing back.

Being honest early in the relationship that some seemingly “simple” changes can dramatically affect the bottom line or the launch date will set the stage to promote effective communication. Just as we — a dynamic, full-service web consulting company (and a fabulous one, at that) — are accountable for the quality and deliverables of our work, the client must be responsible for making informed choices. She can’t do that if, instead of openly mentioning the impact of those decisions, we quietly scramble to try and accommodate her requests. Keeping mum until the critical final stages can lead to the client *understandably* wondering why the project is late and over budget.

On the flipside, allowing for some flexibility whenever possible shows the client that her wishes are being weighed realistically. Committing to five small changes might push the limits of the budget, but their effect on the overall relationship with the client could be priceless — particularly if that flexibility and nimble reaction leads to future work.

Learning to balance this desire to please with the realistic constraints of money and time is a challenge project managers wrestle with each day. But our long-term relationships with clients — and their ongoing commitment to our company — is dependent upon us demonstrating the utmost integrity and honesty during a site build, especially when we have to say “no.”

First, the Washington Post photographer was walking around.  I noticed him as the only guy there over 40.  Then, staff writer Kendra Marr, whom I’d talked with by phone before, was wading through the sea of laptops that was Startup Weekend.  I gave her a tour of the new office and introduced her around.  Having the Post visit was one of a million things going on at Viget that weekend.

This morning, I opened my print copy of the Post and did a double-take when I saw the Viget logo sitting squarely above the fold on the cover of the business section, thanks to this photo by Richard A. Lipski:

I had heard that the story might print today; but, I’ve learned over the years that such things are unpredictable, so it was a nice surprise.

As I read through Building a Community, Byte by Byte — Start-Up Weekend Brings Strangers Together to Launch an Internet Company I thought Kendra did a great job of capturing the spirit of Startup Weekend.  Richard’s photo gallery was also impressive and is a nice complement to the amateur slightly less professional shots on flickr.

As I wrote the night Startup Weekend finished, I had a great experience participating.  A lot of our work at Viget is with web start-ups, and Kendra had it right when she quoted me as saying that DC is more of a start-up kind of town than people give it credit for.  [Shameless recruiting plug: want to do this for a living? We’re hiring.]

She was also right that we had a bit of guacamole on the wall; but, it washed right off — no harm, no foul — and for that to be the extent of the damage after having 70+ people cranking away in our office for 54 hours, who could complain?  Startup Weekend is welcome back anytime.

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A group of us from Viget are jumping on an early train on Wednesday to hit the Future of Web Design conference in New York, which looks like it will be better than ever. The speakers list is impressive and I’m sure the audience will be more than mingle-worthy.

I had a chance to spend some time with Ryan and Gill Carson this past week, who I’d invited to speak at the New New Internet conference here in DC. They were both excited about FOWD (they mentioned that it will likely sell out) as well as the Media Temple after-party, which they strongly recommended. We’ll be there.

If you’ll be in NYC, join us and say hello!

A bunch of Viget folks, as well as around 800 other attendees descended on the Reston Hyatt yesterday for the 2007 version of The New New Internet. The event holds a special place in my heart because it was about one year ago that I met Brian and eventually became part of the Viget team.

This year’s event had a power-packed line-up, including the local Renaissance business man Ted Leonsis, James Surowiecki (author of the The Wisdom of the Crowds), Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek), Sir Gary Vaynerchuck (Wine Library TV), and Om Malik (GigaOM), amongst many others (including our friend Geoff Livingston, whose blog — The Buzz Bin — we recently re-designed).

Leonsis opened the day by describing the landscape of today’s marketplace.  He described how consumers now have more purchasing power but no time, dual incomes but less savings, and more self-satisfaction but not happiness. Consumers have more choice than ever and the web is a key part of that.

I was particularly looking forward to — and was not disappointed by — Surowiecki’s discussion of the ideas presented in his The Wisdom of the Crowds. It has been on my reading list but not tackled to this point. I must admit that I was skeptical toward the title, biased by what I now know is a misuse of this often-quoted concept within web circles.

The idea of the wisdom of the crowds is that, under the right circumstances, groups of people can be remarkably smarter than the smartest individual in the group. The key phrase is “under the right circumstances.” It’s arguable whether the web, as a whole, meets all the criteria Surowiecki identifies. The conclusion of the power of collective intelligence, however, makes it compelling to foster an environment to make a crowd smart.

One of the more lively and conversational panels, entitled, “Engaging Your Client Community via Blogs and Social Media,” was moderated by Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy PR and blogger at Influential Marketing) and included “Buzz” Livingston, Vaynerchuck (Wine Library TV), and camera-on-his-head-wearing Frank Gruber (AOL and blogger at Somewhat Frank). Each of these gentlemen has his own social media success stories, which they shared with the crowd to emphasize the point that social media really works if you are real with people. As Sir Gary put it, regarding your clients and customers, “That’s my whole thing … you have to punch them in the face.” (Note: Viget Labs only supports this notion metaphorically.)

Of course, there was plenty of networking throughout the day, a very cool tech showcase (where Brian served as a judge) , and a cocktail hour at the end of the day. Yes, you should have been there. There’s always next year.

Last week we hosted the inaugural meeting of Refresh the Triangle at our Durham office.  As promised, here’s a quick recap of the event:

• Turnout was fantastic. About 28 people came, which was double what we hoped to have.  As you can see from the photos, we were pretty much at max capacity!
• Jackson Fox presented some very helpful methods for building user-centered web applications even on tight money and time budgets. He shared both inspiration and practical tools.  His slides are available on slideshare.
• A quick show-of-hands poll showed that a little more than half of the attendees call themselves developers, a little less than half call themselves designers, and several people identify as firmly in between. This is exactly the balance Refresh is all about.
• Viget’s own Jackson Wilkinson was down from HQ for the day. As one of the coordinators of Refresh-DC, he shed some wisdom on what it takes to grow a large, thriving Refresh community.
• People were engaged – there was some great Q & A after the presentation and a big group of people went to Alivia’s afterwards to continue talking.

Based on what I saw last week, it looks like Refresh will flourish in the Triangle.  It’s very cool to be a part of something that kicks off with so much momentum.  Visit Refresh the Triangle to learn more or make suggestions for future topics, and if you’re in the Triangle, we’ll see you soon!