There is a sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, a sort of supply-demand curve for an effective design. Although netbooks are cheaper to make and would see increased demand because of that, the constraints of having to make the product cheaper for a specific demograpic enabled innovation. That innovation opened up the product to a mainstream audience.

As designers, we should embrace restrictions and constraints. It’s the essential difference between art and design. I’ve talked about simplicity a bunch of times in previous posts, but this article has illustrated that simplicity can also be an innovation.

Then reality hit me: not many people make a living doing cartooning and illustration alone. Most illustrators & cartoonists take on design work as well. Having that realization, I went on the path of becoming a designer and developing a design portfolio. Below are some tips that I’ve followed and some I wish I had.

Tip #1 – Get a Degree

Having the chance to do it over again, I would have went to a university or college and got a 4-yr degree. So I would recommend going to a school that has a decent art & design program. Concentrate on learning techniques, conceptualizing, and don’t worry about developing a style. Without a degree, I was at a disadvantage when I started looking for a job. The way I overcame not having a degree was by having a strong portfolio and being persistent.

From time to time, not having an undergrad, or a masters for that matter, rears its ugly head. Recently, I was approached by a local art school that offers a 4 year degree program to be an instructor. They saw this site and some of my work and thought I would be a good fit, but all of the instructors are required to have a masters degree in design. So the conversation stopped right there. Thinking back over my twelve years working in design, I can’t remember any colleagues with a masters degree. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a masters if you intend to make a living as a designer. Having a strong portfolio will be more important.

Tip #2 – Be Self-starting & Curious

Being a self-starter is a great quality for a designer to have. It shows passion, resourcefulness and curiosity. Self-starters tend to jump into new things quickly and aren’t resistant to change. Design tastes and techniques change often, so being flexible is a must.

Curiosity and having a well rounded view of art, news, politics and popular culture in general is essential to keeping yourself and your designs relevant. Most design touches a customer, so knowing what the likes and dislikes from a cultural perspective can give you a lot of insight. Having the passion to keep learning new techniques, new software, new technologies is important.

Keep your critical eye out for design you come in contact with in your day to day. I’m always commenting and critiquing logos, signage, web sites, etc, that I come across. Knowing why something is successful and why something doesn’t work is a skill you will always be honing.

Tip #3 – Embrace Criticism

As a designer, your work will be judged critically. There is no way around that so embrace criticism and use it to improve your work. Also, know when to stick to your guns and be able to articulate the reasons for design decisions, but be flexible. When you’re presenting your work, try to get people to just explain the problems with the design and not the solution to the problems. Designers solve problems, so knowing what’s wrong with a design can get you back on track.

Share your work with the world. Use sites like Flickr to get constructive feedback from the community. Flickr has numerous design groups that have hundreds of designers sharing and critiquing work.

Well I hope you like these tips and if any designers out there have anything to add, please do so in the comments below.

1. Openness

The first great thing about Flickr is its openness. Nearly every function that can be executed on Flickr can be utilized in its Web Services API. On my art site rikcat.com I use Flickr’s API to power the artwork section. I wrote a little PHP script using the phpFlickr class that displays artwork from a specified set of images on Flickr. So in the end, Flickr becomes a back-end tool for the front-end of the artwork section of the site. I’m able to add, subtract, and order artwork any way I’d like.

Flickr is constantly improving their product and you can tell the people working on the product love it as well. Yesterday, they released a new feature that allows you to view stats about your account. It’s only available to pro account holders and the upgraded account is only $24.95 a year.

2. Community

There is a tremendous sense of community on Flickr. I’ve met and collaborated with other artists, in which these relationships have rolled into opportunities to show at galleries and so on. As an artist, putting work up on Flickr provides immediate feedback and the ability to provide encouragement and constructive criticism.

Early last year I received a Flickr mail from a book publisher asking for permission to use a photo I posted of my cat Bobo. I agreed, thinking that the book on pet costumes would never be published. But a couple of weeks before Halloween, a copy of “Dog Trick or Cat Treat” was in my mailbox. About a week later, I was approached by People.com to use the same photo for a feature on pet costumes. All because I shared my photos with the community.

3. Storage

The final reason to love Flickr is disaster proof storage of your images. In the past, I’ve been bitten by some bad backups. One incident, I lost 10 years worth of artwork on a bad Iomega Jaz drive. With a pro account, you get unlimited storage, unlimited uploads, unlimited bandwith and permanent archiving of high resolution images.

Free accounts also have ample features with 100megs of bandwith per month, with some other feature restrictions. Free account holders are limited to 3 sets and photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images. The free account is a good way to find out if Flickr is right for you, then you can upgrade to a pro account for $24.95 a year.

There are so many more features and functions Flickr provides that make it one of the best sites on the web. If you don’t use it already, what are you waiting for?

A couple of months back, I wrote about Facebook’s Platform and its closed nature. I still think that its walled garden approach is a problem, but I think the platform creates bigger problems for branding. My experiences on Facebook are a mixed bag, with quality of their installable applications all over the place.

Branding isn’t just about look and feel, it’s about the full user experience. My feelings about Facebook since they launched their platform has changed. I find the site fun but also quite juvenile. With all the adolescent noise that the applications create, it makes it hard to take Facebook seriously. So with all of these other networks getting on board Open Social, are we to expect the same wild west, anything goes type of environments?

The host services for Open Social have to keep their brands in mind when deciding to allow truly open application building in their host environments. I have a feeling that sites, like Linkedin, that have a specific brand and audience will have some sort of application approval system. So the Open Social isn’t going to be that open when all things shake out.

The Good

A friend of mine recently used one of the more well known services for a project. It was a new project that had a design, but needed the XHML and CSS code. He let me take a look at the code to assess the quality of the code. The markup was pretty good, they did a real good job with semantics and the code was valid. I did think there was a small case of DIV-itis and the markup could have been trimmed a bit.

My friend said they were accommodating with change problems that came up in the code and the turn around was as advertised. These services are perfect for small agencies that don’t have designers that code themselves and do a lot of brochure-ware small business sites.

The Bad

The biggest problem with these services is knowing when to use them and getting maintainable CSS code. Most of the services are really only suited for new projects. It’s somewhat difficult to use these services with existing sites. Then I found the way they wrote their CSS hard to follow. There are many ways to write CSS and if the service doesn’t write in a similar style, it can be hard to build upon the existing style-sheet.

There were also minor problems with cross-browser consistency. It’s good that they are willing to make changes, but I can see it becoming a pain to go back and forth, especially if you are on a deadline of your own.

The Ugly

I’ve come to think of good XHTML & CSS as sort of an art form and this makes the skill a commodity. WordPress.org says “Code is Poetry” and what these services do is make it more like gossip. I think it’s right for some situations but I think those situations are quite small. For anybody that’s worked on large, highly trafficked sites their services are just not an option.

Has anyone tried these services? What’s been your experience?

I find IMing to be an invaluable tool for working in a team. Email is a passive medium where response times are not immediate and can get lost in a rapidly filling inbox. IM’s are more direct and most people feel they need to respond with some immediacy. The other thing about IM’s is that you can be less formal and get to the point quicker. At work, I use IM’s to work with a team of designers and developers to quickly pass files and code snippets back and forth.

On the downside, instant messaging can also be a distraction, but it’s all in how you use it. I tend not to respond to people who want to chit-chat about their cat while I’m at work. I’ll catch-up on what mister twinkles is doing when I’m at home. Not that I’m ever rude about it, I just let the person know that I’m at work and I don’t have time to chat at the moment.

I use a multi-platform IM client for the Mac called Adium. It allows me to use one client for many of the different instant messenger services that people use. It can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more. It’s highly customizable, supports file transfers, and is super easy to use.

So what do you think? Does IMing make you more or less productive?

Recently, there was a post on the Campaign Monitor blog about the need for standards in HTML e-mail. Having toiled with HTML e-mail for years, it would be a huge step forward if e-mail clients would render HTML to some standard. Even if it isn’t the exact standard that is used for web browsers, anything would be better than the current state of HTML e-mail.

Currently, the company that I work for produces many HTML e-mail products with little or no idea how each client renders it. Then there are browser based clients, like gMail, that strip out CSS all together. Browser makers have come a long way to making browsers standard compliant. It’s time for e-mail client producers to do the same.

It will be interesting to see if a standards movement can be started around HTML e-mail. It will probably take years to get any type of progress, but something has to be done.

Talent and creativity is not some magic fairy dust, it’s hard work. I’ve had many people over the years say “you’re talented” and I’m always gracious and accept their compliment, but in the back of my head I know talent was just a head start. What it really takes is years of hard work.

Talent is just the seed. If you don’t continue honing your talent it will never grow into a professional career. There are a few characteristics that people have that enable them to grow their talent to its fullest potential. I do agree that some people have a bigger seed of talent, but it’s really what you make of it.

Being a self-starter is a crucial part of cultivating your talent. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing and your motivations aren’t pure, you won’t continue to refine your talent. I find it to be the single most important factor. With most of the creative things I do, I’d probably continue to do them even if I wasn’t being paid.

Having a thick skin is also important. The very nature of creating things opens you up to criticism, so embrace it and use it as a tool to get better. It’s probably why every college and school art class are nothing more then a feedback forum. I don’t remember doing much work in class, most of the time it was about figuring out ways to improve what was done for homework.

Well, I’d love to hear what you think on this subject, leave your comments below.

I’ve always thought Facebook Platform was sort of a throwback to AOL circa 1998. Back then, everybody and their mother wanted to be on AOL’s proprietary Rainman interface screens to generate traffic to their properties. Facebook Platform is a walled garden that is anything but open. It goes against a lot of the principles of the post-bubble, web 2.0, semantic web ideals that the last wave of darling sites have followed. Nine years ago, the idea that AOL would be virtual non-player in 2007 would have been laughable, but the walls always come down.

Having looked at the sample apps and the hooks Facebook provides, it’s easy to see that they have a bunch of very smart people working for them. They have done a good job providing developers with the tools to build some decent applications, but is it worth it to build inside their walls? There have been a couple of applications that have seen success and a couple have been acquired by larger companies. I think the primary usefulness of building an application is to market an existing site or product to Facebook’s rabid user base.

As for Facebook’s basic social network product, I find it somewhat juvenile. I see why it caught on with its core audience of college students, but I don’t see a lot of professional uses. If only Linkedin would let me bite some chumps and turn them into zombies. What do you think of Facebook and Facebook Platform?

Update 8.9.2007 — ReadWriteWeb also did a story on this topic

Search is Broken

If you’ve done a search at your favorite search engine, you’ve probably come across your share of search engine spam. It’s almost impossible to avoid, especially on certain searches. Recently I was looking up information about a rare medical condition on Google. It was impossible to find credible information via the search engine. Well, after fumbling through different keyword combos, I just went to Wikipedia and immediately found what I was looking for.

Status Quo

Where is Google’s innovation in search in the last 2 or 3 years? I know they plan on implementing what they call “universal search” by combining Google Base, Google News and other properties in their search results. In my opinion, this is just going to add to the problem of spam. It may not be in Google’s best interest to fix the search spam problems because most of the spammers use Adsense to monetize there SEO spamming efforts.

Google should add refinement options to there results by Open Directory Project categories, page rank, publish date and related keywords. Having refinement options would do a lot to combat the problem of users trying to figure out the proper keyword combo that will get them relevant non-spammed results.

Humans are Smarter

Along the lines of my previous use of Wikipedia, I’m using del.icio.us now to find stuff on general topics. The great thing about del.icio.us is that every url entry is human generated. Yahoo would be wise to leverage the collective wisdom of the del.icio.us users to help its own search engine. It has a huge opportunity to supplant the search algorithm with its own human-filtered results, and with the user-entered tags, create a great refinement system.

It seems that there will always be problems when companies build products that have no human intervention to discern meaning or intent. It’s a cat and mouse game, and the humans usually figure out a way to out-maneuver the algorithm.

What do think? Is search engine spam unstoppable, is there a better way, or do you think it’s not a problem at all?