Andy Rutledge : Design View

Dog and Pony Show Design

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:45:31 -0600

Excuse me for harshing anyone’s mellow, but at no point does design professionalism allow for planned compromise or for entertainment and distraction as substitutes for effectively addressing a client’s unique design challenges. Therefore, any discussion of how many design comps work best to lubricate the approvals process is nothing less than mindless irrelevancy. These considerations are simply a response to situations where the agency or the designer has failed to gain the client’s trust. The thing is, failure is not mitigated by a dog and pony show…

Unify Private Beta

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:30:31 -0600

My friends and I at Unit Interactive have cooked up a sweet little app that should cure a lot of headaches that web designers and website owners currently endure. It’s called Unify, and we’ve just opened up registration for a private beta that will begin very soon…

Of Brands and Commodities

Sun, 31 May 2009 07:45:31 -0600

For web professionals, brand stewardship in action starts at the front door. When someone knocks, you’d better find out if they meet your brand’s standards before you let them in the door. If they don’t, politely send them packing. The alternative is to take up with clients or projects that are not consistent with your brand, thereby negating, damaging, or destroying it. By my estimation, too many web agencies are too comfortable with this practice. Are you sure you want to be one of them? Perhaps you are, but either way you should understand precisely what it is you’re doing…

Big Brand 1080px Design

Mon, 11 May 2009 07:45:31 -0600

In the past couple of years many web designers have experimented with wider-than-960px layouts, mostly for personal projects and experimental cases, but few have employed them for clients. This is especially true when working with large, popular brands …and there’s usually good reason for this, but there are exceptions. Here we’ll examine the case of taking Woot.com —a $165MM/yr. family of retail websites with around 1 million visitors/day—from approximately 810px layout to 1080px layout width. Unlike as with most cases, the project constraints required this change…

Designer, Owner, Manager - 1: Hiring the Right People

Mon, 04 May 2009 07:55:31 -0600

So you’re a skilled and successful web designer/developer and you want to start your own agency. Or, you’re an agency owner and you want to grow or improve your agency. This demands that you hire the right sort of people; else you’ll end up with not so much an agency as an expensive and painful train wreck of an experience. But what if you’ve never hired or successfully managed anyone before? Or, what if the people you’ve hired often turn out to be the wrong people? Do you know what qualities to look for in your potential employees? Are you sure?…

Human Frailty and Design Professionalism

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:05:31 -0600

Design professionalism means many things. The elements I’m going to touch on in this article are concerned with how professionalism requires that you understand the designer/client relationship and craft your practice, process, and requirements to facilitate success for your clients. Toward that end we’ll examine how a design professional should understand and work to circumvent typical human frailties…

Gestalt Principles of Perception 3: Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Good Continuation

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:30:31 -0600

The reason that what you’re reading right now makes sense to you, other than the fact that you are familiar with the written English language, is due largely to the fact that I’m employing—and you perceive—three important Gestalt Principles. The structure of this paragraph is dependent on its adherence to and consistency with the principles of proximity, uniform connectedness, and good continuation. Without these three factors I would be unable to clearly communicate my thoughts to you through this medium (written/typed words) and what you are seeing would bear little or no relationship to language…

Epic

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:00:31 -0600

This article has nothing whatsoever to do with design. I’m a designer, but I’m also a human being like any other. In this article I’m writing about the regular human part. Human beings, as some of you may know, have a body; a physical structure that carries the brain around (“…to meetings,” as Sir Ken Robinson once described). Anyway, since we have this body and all, we have a responsibility to be very physical on a regular basis and to maintain that body. Otherwise, the brain suffers and doesn’t get around so well…

The Blind Leading the Blind

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:00:31 -0600

Pattie Maes talk at the recent TED Conference provides a chilling reminder of how careless people can be and how easy it is to mislead sheeple. I’m a huge fan of most of what I’ve seen come from TED, but Pattie’s presentation demonstrates a measure of irresponsibility, misrepresented facts, and shallow thinking seldom witnessed outside of a politician’s stump speech. In her TED talk Dr. Maes makes it very clear that computer scientists shouldn’t pretend to be actual scientists. In fact the “science” she represents here violates, um, science …and common sense, for that matter…