Fame and fortune await thee! BBC would like someone to help reboot the site design and focus. For your efforts, you would receive an Apple laptop. Slashdot is wanting a new look as well. If you win that redesign contest, a new laptop is your prize. Possibly the instigator of this design contest fever, The Big Noob is holding a t-shirt design contest, offering $150 to designers that get chosen.
Is something in the water? Are there some cosmic rays or sunspots appearing that make websites do design contests in late April?
I think these contests are a total joke. They irk me and make my chin get all aquiver. At first glance, no big deal, right? Get a bunch of eager fans of your site all worked up and give away a cool prize. This is what is called spec work, and the problems are numerous once you get below the surface.
I’m featured this week on Designers Who Blog, Cat Morley’s site all about, yep, designers who blog. As it turns out, I’m not the only one doing this. No, really, believe it!
In fact, you could spend a lifetime reading all the design blogs out there. I do believe I have something interesting and original to add to this, otherwise I don’t believe I’d be doing it.
That reminds me of something I heard while eating pasta with a bunch of folks at SXSW. We were chatting about the length of the conference, how many panels there are and how certain people get asked to be on panels. Cameron Moll was wishing that the conference be twice as long, so we could have more panels and more people on them, because everybody has something to lend to the conversation. Despite the fact that I was downright pooped after SXSW, and that the idea of doubling up on all the panels, parties and awesome conversations makes my head want to explode, that sounds great! Really.
Until then, we …
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Here’s a really obnoxious piece of web design. When I go to eBay.com there’s a part where it greets me by my username. Right next to that is a link to sign out, and thus, not get that personal greeting. There’s also a part where it offers to sign me in so I can see special custom information.
Am I signed in? Or am I completely logged out? Are there two levels of signing in? Are there multiple levels of being logged out? There’s been a lot of talk these days about how some sites that aren’t really well-designed have a certain charm that would be lost if they were. I suggest that’s nonsense. Not only that, but poor design, especially of the information design variety, can actually hurt, or at least confuse, your users.
When I updated the design a few weeks ago, I did some slashing and burning with some features. It was a liberating move on my part, because one of the most difficult parts of web design is finding great spots for all the bits and pieces that make up a site.
One of the great and easy parts of web design, particularly if you’re doing a redesign, or realign, of your own website, is that you get to decide what stays and what goes. Just like a homeowner who picks up a sledgehammer one day and decides that he never liked that wall anyway, the web designer says “well, I never liked that link blog anyway” and starts swinging.
So, for this new design, I left out both the “browsing…” and the “on tap…” features. If you want to see what those looked like on the old site, you can go here. Not a single person mentioned to me that they noticed the absence of those features, so I figure they aren’t missed. I’m hoping the signal-to-noise ratio of the new design is good, and I’ll try to keep other …
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At South by Southwest, a couple of panels that really got a couple of us fired up were Holistic Web Design and Design Eye for the List Guy. They were great panels, but the idea behind the projects they worked on really resonated with us. In both instances, a group of professionals got together and redesigned a website. Each person had the thing they were awesome at, such as branding, usability or CSS. They collaborated and the results were amazing.
The Coudal/Fried Keynote (mp3 link) was all about starting a business small and on the side. Embracing the constraints of being small, having no time or money, and so on, you can really do amazing things, often because of those constraints, rather than in spite of them.
So, while still at SXSW, Mark Bixby and I put our heads together and said “Is there any reason we couldn’t get some people together to collaborate on a regular basis?” Naturally, we said no, let’s do it. We’re calling it MethodArts.
We’ve identified three …
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Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.