Workflow articles

Choosing to work for free, pro bono, gratis, without charge is something that most of us find ourselves doing at one time or another. Whether we’re filling a hole in our portfolio, there’s a friend or relative we feel beholden to, or because there’s an opportunity to aid a cause we value. Recently, I agreed to take on some work, free of charge, for a charity whose goals I share. Because it’s a cause I believe in, I enjoyed the idea of being...

Sometimes you just don’t give a damn anymore. Possibly the only thing worse than designer’s block is designer’s apathy: that sinking feeling you get when you realize that you just don’t care about this particular piece of work anymore is disheartening. The dread of going back to it is paralyzing. There are many reasons you can stop caring about your work. Maybe you’ve just done the same thing too many times in a row. Maybe your client...

There are many reasons you might be wanting to improve your design skills this year. Perhaps you have extra time on your hands and want to put it to good use. Or maybe you’re new to web design and finding that there’s a lot you still don’t know how to do. It could also be that you recognize that the web is changing, and your skills could use some refreshing to keep up. Whatever the reason, there are many ways to level up your web design skills in 2021....

The transitioning of power is fraught with difficulties. Different teams have different values, different experience, different expertise, different priorities, and that leads to different tooling, and different methodologies. It’s tempting to think of web design as an end-to-end process, starting with research and concluding with metrics. The reality is that most designers and developers join projects part-way through an ongoing...

With billions of internet users worldwide spending several hours online each day, the online presence of brands is now a necessary avenue for building, boosting, and maintaining positive value and attracting and interacting with customers.  This has created increasing pressure for web design agencies when creating and managing websites. This pressure is multiplied by all the projects that web design agencies have to handle at one time....

It would be way too easy to answer this question with: “Whoever pays your bills.” And, honestly, I don’t think you can be a very successful web designer if you’re only driven by what the person paying you tells you to do. Then again, that doesn’t mean you should swing to the exact opposite end and say that you only serve the end user. When you take an extreme view or approach to this, you’re bound to leave someone or something important...

When analysts for professional sports teams noticed that marketing promotions that included the team’s logo vastly outperformed similar creative assets that featured player imagery — something which, to the casual observer, this may simply sound like good analyst work — it showed something significant: creatives rarely receive an analytical assessment of their work. Those analysts didn’t just stumble upon that insight....

There’s a lot riding on your shoulders as a freelance designer. You have to play the part of salesperson, project manager, web designer, accountant, and more. That’s why it’s critical to develop more efficient ways to work while maximizing results. One way that agencies and even small teams of designers do this is through design systems. By taking the time to create a collection of design standards, reusable components, and documentation,...

Heart-warming or not, co-creation with a client—the utopian ideal of shared vision—has its drawbacks. There are only so many times you can hear the words “brand strategy” before actually chewing your own face off. In the age of Wordpress, Drupal and, dare I say it, Wix, it’s never been more tempting to pay lip-service to research and consultation. Instead of building a principles framework from scratch, why not roll out something...

Okay, you need three to five new ideas for articles, all on the same general topic. Go… Now here’s where we separate the people who have to come up with regular content all the time from the people who don’t. The people who have things they want to write about but can never get around to it can probably start listing ideas off the top of their head. The people who have to do this for a living, or at least as a part of their job, just groaned in mock agony....

Truth be told, there’s a lot of value that comes from doing design sprints. However, it’s not as simple as adopting Google Vision’s original system and instantly being able to create better digital products or getting greater consumer buy-in.  Let’s take a look at what design sprints are, why they can be valuable, but why you also might need to steer clear of them.  What Is a Design Sprint? In basic terms, the design process looks like...

In a perfect world, we’d all have all the content we needed before we ever touched a wireframe, on paper or otherwise. The hate for lorem ipsum is real, and I do understand why, but it’s a simple fact that we do not live in a perfect world. Clients are often ready to hand over a down payment, but not actually ready to build the site yet. If you find yourself in this situation (and it will happen a lot at the beginning of your career), you’ll need to...

It’s no surprise that some businesses are convinced that all they need is a Facebook page and some awesome paid posts in order to go viral. I get it. It’s relatively cheap. It’s easy. And they see it as a faster way to success than taking the time to build a website, grow an audience organically, and wait. But social media virality is hard to come by and, when it does happen, can be short-lived. Now, making a website or blog go viral? That can have...

As you draw closer to the finish line with a website, does your client see it just as clearly as you do? Or are they still wavering on design and copy choices even while you’re in the final stages of QA, or talking about additional features they’ll want to add to the site “some day”? Unless you are getting paid — and paid well — for every single hour you put into a website, you have to be willing to enforce a final stopping point. If you don’t,...