And the answer, of course, is both yes and no. You can calculate exactly how much it cost you to create this thing, but then you’ll still have to decide what your time is worth, and what the art is worth to you. And those are much harder to quantify because we humans tend to undervalue our time and because we artists tend to pour too much of our souls into our work.

I think the most expensive piece I saw at one of our senior art shows was something like $200,000. My friends and I were astonished, and at the time we joked that maybe it was a typo (it wasn’t). In retrospect I think she just marked it up because she didn’t want to let it go, and I have to wonder how much of her was hidden in those brush strokes.

I wonder how much of myself ends up in the things I create. I wonder, constantly, if I’m attributing too much or too little value to my time. I had been with Portent for more than three years when I started discussing time estimates with a colleague, and I told him how much I would quote for a project and his first response was, ‘Wow.’ I immediately wanted to backtrack – I was convinced that it was too much time, that I was much too slow, and then he said, ‘I would have said at least twice that.’

I had no idea what to do with that information. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and about process, and about how tight deadlines tend to be. About the idea that good communication can change the world, and what it takes to create something truly valuable – if that’s even possible when the definition of ‘value’ tends to be relative.

In my experience, more value comes from collaboration than anything else, so I want to open this discussion up, look at what it takes to get from start to finish on a creative project (specifically, the design or redesign of a website), and talk to you, dear reader, about how this process can get better, and bring real value to more people.

The Kickoff Meeting

Players: copywriter, designer, developer, UX architect, art director, project manager

In the beginning, there is a brainstorm. In grade school they taught us to do this by writing words in little circles and connecting them to other word circles and branching out until you have a complex thought. In college, they gave us a few hours of studio time to do research and bounce ideas and come back with the beginnings of a plan. It didn’t need to be fully fleshed out, we just had to present some idea of what we’d be doing for the next few weeks, whether that was a sketch or something still too abstract to put on paper.

In a marketing company, this means getting everyone who’s going to be creating something for the project – structure, content, art, code, etc – in a room and coming to a consensus on what the project’s goals are. Are we informing people? Are we inspiring them? Do we need them to take the time to share their thoughts with us, or do we only need them to click a button? How do we make this a positive experience for them?

The brainstorm should give everyone a clear idea of where they’re going, so that the designer can do competitive research and start building a mood board, the UX can begin working on wireframes and site architecture, and the copywriter can begin drafting the voice. There should be check-ins for these things, even if it’s just a couple minutes, to keep everyone on the same page, so that the team can take something like this:

And turn it into something like this:

The Design

Players: designer, art director, project manager

Once the wire frames are approved and the first round of copy has been coaxed into existence, the design starts to form. I worked on a refresh for a hotel site recently and long before we officially got started I was gathering travel apps, brochures, hotel and resort websites – anything that I could get that was beautiful or functional or (preferably) both – to inspire my work. Because of this, by the time I get to the design stage I usually already have a couple sketches or ideas that I want to try, and a solid idea of the style I want to go with. There’s that old adage; good artists borrow, great artists steal. I keep my stolen hoard of good design on Pinterest, as a sort of digital mood board that I can return to frequently while I work.

When I was fresh out of college, my design process (much like my meeting-new-people process) mostly involved sitting alone, not speaking to anyone, and eventually emailing someone a jpeg to look at with an email signature that just said ‘thanks’ though I’m not really sure what I was thanking them for. Their time, I suppose.

I’ve come a long way since then. Today, my design process involves a lot of bass-heavy music and regular critiques with colleagues, which sometimes last less than a minute and sometimes turn into group discussions of functionality, color theory, typography, and best practices for UX and SEO. We no longer email jpegs to people, instead we create presentations, whether that’s a PDF deck or an interactive prototype of the website we want to build.

While creating a comp, I also create all of the hover and on-click states for the page I’m designing, and when we get the necessary internal approval to move forward with presenting the design to the client, I start prototyping it. The tool we use here at Portent is InVision, which recently came out with some pretty excellent mobile updates that allow you to prototype your responsive designs as well. This enables the client to view your work the way they’ll see it once it’s developed.

This is especially useful when we can present in person or over screenshare, so that we can expand on the logic behind our choices, describe what the color palette is meant to convey, the energy the design is supposed to elicit, the interactions the users will experience, and if there are animations, how and why they’re there. The client can discuss the design, express concerns, and ask questions while they’ve got the full attention of their Portent team.

Bringing it to Life

Players: designer, copywriter, developer, project manager

A development environment has to be set up. The developer can (and should) work locally at first, but at some point they’ll need server space to host the fledgling site. Then, if it’s being passed off to the client for them to manage content after launch, it’ll need a content management system. The content needs to be edited and finalized, if it hasn’t been already. If there’s no imagery, the designer will need to source some from stock photography sites, which is a time-consuming process if you want quality images. If there is imagery, some (if not most, or all) of it will probably need to be resized to suit the new design.

The developer has to slice up the designs and convert them to HTML/CSS/JS – at which point they are going to desperately hope  that whoever created the design file organized their layers and clearly labeled all the hover states and interactions. Once the HTML mockups are done, the reusable elements (menus, headers, footers, etc) need to be separated out to create a template system that can be integrated into the client’s CMS.

Before launch, the scripts and images need to be compressed, and the images and content need to get entered into the client’s database. If the structure of the site has changed, 301 redirects will have to be implemented for pages that no longer exist or have moved, and incorrect links need to be removed from all onsite content. SEO, Social, and UX need to make a final sweep of the site and provide recommendations of changes that should be made before launch. The site needs to be tested across several browsers and platforms – there are tools for this, like BrowserStack, but it’s always a good idea to use actual devices as well. Bugs have to be logged and fixed and finally, when everything is done, launching will hopefully be as easy as switching the URL over, running a broken link report and testing everything. Twice.

Every site launch is its own brand of challenging, and we should always be looking for ways to make that process better. Working on the internet, and particularly in communications, allows us to improve the world around us faster, so long as we always aim to create something that can be objectively considered valuable.

So how do you get through launching a site with your sanity intact and make sure that you have dotted and crossed everything put in front of you to dot and cross? How do you make sure that the things you create are worthy of the time and soul that you give them?

The post Creative Process: Where Does All the Time Go? appeared first on Portent.

The above image was taken by light artist Leo Villareal and shows the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge at night during a test run of Villareal's The Bay Lights art installation. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Information Space has a conceptual mirror... Physical Space

Having recently worked my butt off to earn a Master of Architecture, I often come across those who are curious about my decision to channel my design education into the wonderful world of the interwebs. Basically, I'm regularly asked what capital-A Architecture actually is– as in, physical space-making (i.e. buildings, cities, landscapes)– and what it has to do with web design and development.

The Short Answer:
Everything!

The Slightly Longer Answer:
There’s a good reason that information technology professionals have co-opted the terminology of traditional architects and engineers. The processes of creating physical spaces and information spaces require similar strategies for problem solving, throughout both design and development– both are focused on handling complexity. You need field-specific knowledge for each, but the system of design is interchangeable.

Building dynamic artifacts

The resultant physical building or web site/application is all that remains of this process at the end. The product acts as a functional artifact of the process. Each artifact, whether physical or digital, requires maintenance (hopefully minimal) and offers an opportunity for improvement the next time around. Cities, buildings, and landscapes, just like websites and web applications, are living and breathing entities. They are not static, but intended by design to be lived in, played with, updated, improved, personalized. Nothing (even if it literally is) has to remain set in stone.

Creating anything this dynamic, whether it manifests as an everyday object, tested through generations of use, or as the most bleeding edge technological innovation, requires serious negotiation with a significant degree of complexity. True art emerges when complexity is rendered intelligible through smart design and development.

Where simplicity and elegance meet

Distilling complexity into something simple, intuitive, and meaningful is extremely challenging. And, it just so happens that excellent design seeks to realize these outcomes, whether the medium be digital or physical. Superb architectural design and suburb digital design never overlook or diminish the experience of the user, regardless of the complexity of the behind-the-scenes systems that help create it.

Blending the physical and digital

As information technology continues to penetrate further and further into our physical spaces, it behooves us to continue to look towards capital-A Architecture for inspiration regarding how best to approach the complex task of designing and developing tightly integrated artifacts. We are not trying to create a pseudo-built world. However, by consciously and carefully blending influences from both the physical and digital, perhaps we can eventually seamlessly integrate the two. And, while we’re at it, we can learn from the physical pioneers that came before us, to avoid the pitfalls that can ensnare a project, destroying otherwise nobel design intent.

We should aim for wholeness, a balance. If we root our digital systems in the real world, we create Place– a specific space that we experience and identify, navigate to, and associate with the experience of being there. The creation and habitation of space goes back to civilization’s very foundations, but only recently could we create Places in both the physical and digital realms.

(If you want to fall down this philosophical rabbit hole, checkout Martin Heidegger’s work.)

The application of design thinking to solve complex, interconnected problems applies equally to information spaces and physical spaces. Ultimately, the intent is to deliver a seemingly simple product that is immediately approachable, legible, functional, performs well, and is enjoyable to use. Of course, this isn’t easy. There are numerous stakeholders whose expectations must be met (and hopefully exceeded) throughout the process. So, here’s the kicker: when things get complicated, old-school design process alone isn’t enough. The way out is Integrative Design.

This is merely the preamble

An integrative process creates a support system within a creative environment. There is a multidisciplinary blending of specializations in which a diversity of fields inform, support, and elevate our work. In practice, Integrative Design is hard– really hard– but the rewards far outweigh the challenges.

So, I know you’re saying, “Wait, what?” But, this post is simply the first entry in a series on the topic, so stay tuned. In our next episode, we'll look at what composes the Integrative Design process. Following, we’ll explore the specific challenges of such a process, for example, the switching cost for an individual between different modes of thinking, and the challenges faced by a multidisciplinary team as they quickly iterate between cycles of design and development.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my inaugural post here at Portent. Until next time, keep making.

Bonus Section for the curious types: A theoretical perspective on the relationship between physical and information architecture

In both professions, a congruent process makes sense. It's no wonder that Christina Wodtke’s recent essay, Towards a New Information Architecture, takes its cues from Le Corbusier's seminal work, Towards a New Architecture.

At one point in Christina's treatise, she responds to a query by Jesse James Garrett asking where we can locate the "great works of information architecture." Christina asserts that they are "just showing up now." And, that they are not “pseudo-libraries or pseudo-buildings." Instead, information architects are “understanding spaces made of information. They are new works that make data dance. They make the impossibly complex clear."

The featured image above was taken by light artist Leo Villareal and shows the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge at night during a test run of Villareal's The Bay Lights art installation back on January 24, 2013. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The post What Does a Degree in Architecture Have to Do with Web Design & Development? appeared first on Portent.

A Loaded Gun Versus a Load of….

Here is the Tarantino quote, from the episode of Sundance’s Iconoclasts he did with Fiona Apple. It’s a truly fascinating episode and I highly suggest watching it in its entirety. But for now, here’s what one of our culture’s leading cinematic visionaries had to say on the subject of creativity:

Here’s the thing. They can write a mean letter. But these guys don’t have any real fight in them. But if you’re a real artist, you will go all the way. If you’re an artist as opposed to a careerist and your movie is more important to you than a career, you have a loaded gun in your waistpants, and its filled with bullets and you know you have what it takes to put it in their face and blow their heads off. If you have what it takes to do that, if you know you can go there, its about never taking the gun out….It’s about not going there, it’s about not doing it, but you know you can. So if you have to flash it, it means something.

Like every brilliant thing Tarantino does or says, this quote cuts deep and has reverberated in my mind for quite a while after hearing it. After mulling it over, here are the key points that, as a creative professional, really reassured me. Let’s take this explosive quote apart piece by piece and see what it’s made of:

The Creative Secret Weapon: It’s because you care more.

Here’s the thing. They can write a mean letter. But these guys don’t have any real fight in them.

Tarantino’s very first sentence here is an incredibly crucial message to creative professionals. If you are a creative person in a commercial setting, at a cursory glance it can seem you are outnumbered, under-appreciated, and surrounded by adversity. The sheer force of commercially-minded persons in your periphery, breathing down you neck, can make it feel very deeply like you are a butterfly in a sea of barracudas. Bullshit. As Tarantino very astutely points out, it’s the other way around. it doesn’t matter if you are the single token creative in a cloud of suits. It doesn’t matter that you receive a million emails a day pilfered with forboding threats about budgets, and deadlines, and angry clients. As long as the proverbial “they” is just going through the motions (which they always are) even their gravest threats, or most pompous grandstanding cannot touch you. Because at the core, they don’t really care. They may appear to, but really, they are just following protocol, and protocol makes a most dusty bedfellow. But you, the creative professional, you do care, and deeply. Cling to that. NOTE: Am I saying that creative professionals care more about their jobs than other people? Yep. Creative people are so close to their craft, and the work they do is so intensely personal, that the wily creative brainchild is always going to wield more weight than the rubber stamp.

Artists versus Careerists: It comes down to purity of vision

If you’re an artist as opposed to a careerist…

That said, I have already mentioned above that I was going to use a broader definition of artistic temperament in this article, so here’s what I’ll say. Artists aren’t just designers and flash animators. An artist is anyone who cares more intensely about the work itself than they do about job titles, or checking off a list, or winning in office politics. As long as that work itself, and its potentially transformative nature, is what enthuses you, you are an artist-whether butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. For example, by this definition, I would call Barack Obama an artist. I heard echoes of Tarantino’s above comment reverberating last night in Michelle Obama’s opening statement at the Democratic National Convention. She said that she and Barack “never talk about being President, or what it would be like to be President. We talk about changing the world.” And that’s the key. If you have a loaded gun and you’re shooting for your own wounded pride, you’re a thug. But if you have a loaded gun that you use to fiercely protect the integrity of a creative vision, you’re…you guessed it…an iconoclast.

When pretty creativity meets a piranha tenacity

But if you’re a real artist, you will go all the way.

So beyond the core meaning, how does the difference between being an Artist and a Careerist manifest? Bloodlust, baby. Forget fluttering visions and glittery prose. The truly artistic people I’ve known, the leaders and the trailblazers and the rainmakers, have been the single most intense, unstoppable people I’ve ever known. Why? Because
the result of artistically pure motives is conviction, whereas the result of petty careerist motives is confusion. If you’re playing political games, you have an ever-changing destination full of pitstops, second-guessing, and about-faces. If you have artistic conviction driving you, it’s full steam ahead. Your creative vision will balloon and unfold until it’s big enough to sustain you through every bureaucratic argument, every budget constraint, every trouncing from your boss. An Artist just keeps going, meeting every obstacle with the mindset of “This needs to happen. How can we make it so?” not “Can we do this? How hard will it be?” Instead, piece by piece, artists follow the knotted string through all the snares and tangles until they reach the triumphant end. They are so polite and so patient, but artists on the hunt to finish a vision are the most scarily persistent people you’ve ever met, and they never stop until they get what they want because they can’t.

Don’t Shoot!

If you have what it takes to do that, if you know you can go there, its about never taking the gun out.

With such a fire under your feet, Tarantino’s parting piece of advice becomes the most crucial. Now that you acknowledge the force of your own creativity, you need to control it very, very carefully. Creative, artistic people are temperamentally fiery, explosive, audacious personalities. But this doesn’t work in a commercial environment. You must never flash that fierceness unless it becomes absolutely necessary. If you are too self-indulgent about expressing your feelings, your incisive bullets quickly become a dull, bludgeoning hammer banging on every minor point and high horse. This is why Tarantino (rather ironically) points out that the second, equally important part of having the gun is never, ever using it unless you absolutely have to. The line between madcap blowhard and bohemian genius is the simple ability to transcend the pedestrian. That’s all for now, my fellow iconoclasts! Now go out and rent Kill Bill!

The post A Loaded Gun – Quentin Tarantino’s Secret Weapon for Creative Professions appeared first on Portent.