Techniques for More Efficient Coding

There is an old saying that “time is money”. It may seem somewhat cliched to read, but there remains definite truth to the statement, even in the world of the web. Whether you’re designing or developing (or, as is often the case, doing both), there is an element of time involved and, as a professional, that time comes with a certain price tag. That price may be something that you the pass on directly to the client through hourly billings, or something you may absorb yourself when working on a flat rate project, but the simple fact of the matter is that the is a direct connection between the amount of time you spend on a project and the amount of money that you can ultimately bill on that project.

If you’re anything like me, one of the things that seems to take the most time on many web projects is the coding side. It’s just so easy to spend hours and hours coding away, and then wondering if you’ve actually accomplished anything because you may not all that much that can be shown or interacted with a tangible manner.

Personally, I find this to be especially true in the more functional stages of a project. Coding up plain HTML and CSS can move pretty quickly, but sometimes coding the more complex, programmatic aspects of a site can be a long, laborious process.

Creative Ideas for Writing Content

We may, by trade, call ourselves web designers and/or developers, but let’s face it: many of us also have to wear the hat of writer from time to time too. Whether it’s a matter of producing content for our own blogs or perhaps being enlisted by a client to pen some of the copy for their site, I would guess that a sizable number of readers find themselves in the author’s chair from time to time.

But writing in and of itself is not always easy, and sometimes blogging can be even harder. Often, the biggest hurdle of all is just coming up with an interesting and compelling topic to write about.

In this article, I would like to look at a number of different techniques that you can use to help take that first step and come up with a topic that readers will hopefully latch onto, and perhaps even talk about on social media, thereby driving more traffic to your site! Also, while a lot of the examples that I will be pointing to come from the design community, I don’t think that these techniques are necessarily restricted to writing about design. They can be applied to almost any niche at all!

Write the Impossible

One great way to come up with a truly creative post is to look at your niche and then write something impossible that still sheds light on your subject! Sound confusing? It’s really quite simple (though perhaps not easy to execute). It involves looking at your topic from the perspective of something that cannot actually exist, but which will still provide an interesting perspective on your topic.

Want an interesting example? How about discussing how a number of the most popular blogs in the web design niche would smell. Yes, that’s right, smell. Just over a year ago, the site ThreeStyles actually published a blog post in which the author took 10 of the most popular design blogs (including DesignM.ag, based on its design at that time) and actually tried to imagine how each of them would smell.

How Great Clients Can Help You Become a Better Designer

I’m not entirely sure why it is that, when we talk about clients, so often it seems to be with a certain negative connotation. Clients from Hell is, of course, probably the single greatest example of this particular trend, collecting hundreds of anonymously submitted stories about the things that a wide variety of different types of clients have done or said over the years. It’s an insanely popular site, and I’ll bet that a good number of readers have visited the site or are subscribed. Some of you might have even been out there today.

While I personally still take the time to read most of what gets posted on the site, there has been some discussion as to why it may not exactly be the most healthy of places for us to frequent. One video I watched even suggested that in some cases it might actually be the company or freelancer who is the problem, and not the client! These are interesting and important lines of thought. I do believe that too much of Clients from Hell, or other related negativity, can certainly be a bad thing.

So, in an effort to shine some positivity onto the general perception of the designer-client relationship, in this article, I would like to talk about how awesome clients can help you grow as a designer, and actually become better at your craft!

A Frame of Reference, Part 2: Capturing Ideas

In Part 1 of his two-part series, we looked at the concept of inspiration, and how it is something more than just a commodity to be found and consumed from any one of the numerous design galleries out there on the web. I also suggested that, in many cases, what people are actually talking about when they point to “inspiration” is reference material, which they can subsequently use to direct and inform the progressive evolution of a design.

The crux of the article, however, was the suggestion that there is more to the world than just a collection of galleries, and designers should also consider getting out into the real world and partaking of all the potential solutions that it has to offer. We looked at colour, typography, patterns, textures and even just the randomness of thought.

In this second article, we’ll be looking at a number of practical things that you can do to help capture and record and even build upon ideas and reference materials that you come across in the real world.

Camera

Certainly one of the best tools for capturing ideas and reference materials would have to be a camera. Back in the summer of 2010, there as an article published over on Visual Swirl entitled “5 Reasons Every Designer Should Carry a Great Camera”, which offered some insightful tips in this area. The article suggested that a camera is a great way to capture “inspiration” (or reference material), and for capturing textures or images for colour schemes, all of which are directly related to the present discussion.

A Frame of Reference, Part 1: Finding Ideas

As designers, I’ve found that we spend a lot of time and energy talking about and discussing something that we commonly refer to as inspiration. We see it all over the design community. There are countless different galleries showcasing some of the best work being produced, and list posts that fulfill a similar function, though usually with some commonality that thematically binds all of the designs together.

In another article, entitled “The Myth of Inspiration,” I have discussed some of the problems that I think arise out of this understanding of inspiration, which tends to commodify the entire concept, turning it into a product that can be acquired (usually for free) from whatever site happens to have accumulated the best collection of representative works.

From the Browser to the Page: Resources for Web Designers Dabbling in Print

I would guess that, today, more people are entering the broader world of design through web design than any other facet of the larger spectrum. In large part, this is likely due to the accessibility of the web. It’s right there in front of us, and most of us probably spend at least a few minutes (if not hours) on it every single day.

It’s also relatively easy to get started with designing for the web (which is not to say that it’s easy). I started creating my first sites with Windows Notepad and a freeware copy of Paint Shop Pro. It’s certainly not the most ideal setup, and if I was starting again, I would probably be using Gimp and some sort of freeware coding app. Regardless, web design is relatively immediate, and while there are many different areas that need to be considered, there is still the sense that we are very much in control of what we are doing.

Designing for print is a bit of a different story. First, while we can do a lot of work in Photoshop (and probably Gimp too), somehow this kind of design feels somewhat more inaccessible. That’s not to say that it’s difficult or complicated, but rather that it’s probably not something that as many people would just sit down and start doing because they’re bored and sitting at their computer one evening. Designing for print is generally much more intentional and purposeful.

5 Reasons Why I Love (and Am Sticking With) jQuery

In the same way that I think that it’s safe to say that WordPress has become the defacto blogging engine on the web today (and possibly the most popular content management package, period), it seems to me that jQuery has probably also become the nearly equally dominant JavaScript framework. At the very least, it seems to be the one we’re talking about the most.

I think that there are a number of different reasons as to why this would be. Altogether, it’s just a really awesome framework that readily and easily extends what we can do with client-side coding routines. In this article, I would like to look at the five key reasons why I have personally and enthusiastically adopted jQuery.

Selectors

jQuery’s ability to use CSS-like selectors in order to target certain elements or groups of elements within a document is, hands down, my absolute favourite feature. It’s just so incredibly useful. For instance, if I wanted to use CSS to style all the list elements in a list with the id of “mylist” I could do it like this:

#mylist li{ color : blue }

But let’s say I subsequently wanted to use jQuery to change the color of all these elements to red (likely based on some condition). Well, I could use the exact same selector syntax to accomplish this:

jQuery(“#mylist li”).css(“color”,“red”);

There are a couple of things that I really love about this. First, the familiarity makes the syntax very accessible and easy to learn for people who are familiar with CSS. This was the case with me when I first came to jQuery. I was already quite proficient with creating styles and had a solid understanding of how to target elements with selectors. Ultimately, this meant that I was able to pick up on jQuery’s selector syntax almost immediately, cutting down on the overall learning curve.

Create a Cool Text Effect in Photoshop With a Single Texture

There’s no doubt that you can create some stunning effects in Photoshop, but it doesn’t all have to be really complicated. In fact, there are all kinds of interesting things that you can do really easily. In this tutorial, I want to show you how you can use a single, grungy texture to bring a really interesting treatment to a typographic design.

To start off, we’re going to need a texture. I’m going to be using this one from the Mega Textures Pack that I released over on the Echo Enduring Blog:

Purpose in Functionality

As a web designer/developer, I’ve found that there exist several common (if not nearly universal) truths when it comes to clients. One of these is that they love to talk about functionality. I have had several clients whose initial approach when they contact me is to provide me with a complete list of functionality – in other words, a listing of what they think that their website needs to do.

What I tend not to get quite so often is a description of what the purpose of the site is.

To my way of thinking, that is a problem. Recently, I wrote an article entitled “HTML (and CSS) do not a Website Make,” in which I discussed some of the things that I thought constituted a website. Obviously, part of the argument that I make is that a website is more than just its HTML and CSS, and one of the areas that I touch on is the notion of purpose. I think that some of what I wrote there has an important bearing on what I want to discuss in this article, so instead of rewriting it, I will simply quote my original words:

Every website should have a purpose. It may be to inform potential customers about your business (probably one of the most common types of websites). It may be to function as an informational resource. It may be to connect people with other people. It may be to showcase yourself, or even simply to entertain. Whatever the purpose is, it is ultimately the core of the site, the nucleus around which everything else that we have looked at so far is ultimately wrapped.

The purpose of a website is, in a very real sense, also its heart. It is the very reason for its existence. Every other element should be built, created and designed to support that purpose in some way. This of course, includes the basic (or advanced) functionality. In fact, I would even go far as to suggest that this relationship of support between functionality and purpose is actually more important than the actual design–which is not to say that the design is not important (because it most certainly is).

The Reality of Stock Art in Design

Today, designers are faced with the incredible benefit of having an absolutely massive library of digital stock art that can be downloaded (either freely or for a fee) and incorporated into a design in a matter of minutes. Stock photography sites like iStock or Shutterstock provide photographs, videos and illustrations, while some really amazing companies out there are providing stunning stock vectors, like GoMedia’s renowned Arsenal or the various packs available from Designious.

Add sites like GraphicRiver, MediaLoot and hundreds and hundreds of others, and we have a virtually limitless supply of vectors, icons, brushes and other graphical resources right at our fingertips. This is, ultimately, an amazing privilege and an undoubtedly valuable resource.

But it’s not a substitute for good design.

In order to help promote themselves, many sites that are selling stock art of some description will partner with blog owners to sponsor giveaways, in which one or more lucky entrants will actually win licenses to download and use specific graphic files. This is an awesome way to get added exposure. I’ve run a few such giveaway over on the Echo Enduring Blog, and there have been some here on DesignM.ag in the past too.

The other day, however, I was pursuing some of the comments on one such giveaway, and I couldn’t help but notice (as I had on other such contests) that many of the entrants were suggesting that they would love to win this particular vector pack because they thought it would help them become a better designer. They may not have said so in those exact words, but that’s pretty much the sentiment that lurked beneath the surface of many of the comments.