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.

Well, if you don’t own the book already you should snag a copy because I think it gets to the essence of how designers, technologists and business people should be approaching problems.

I work for a very large company and it would be impractical for the visual designers to code all their work. At some point it makes sense to hand the coding responsibility off. I do think their needs to be a close relationship between the designer and the person who is doing the coding. Also the designer should get code approval.

In the end I do believe you will make a better product if the designer codes his/her own work. I love coding in live templates where you can see different instances of the data you are laying out. Makes the end product much more refined.

Like every thing their is not one answer and 37 Signals tends to write articles from there narrow perspective. So take there opinions with a grain of salt.

What say you?

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.

What’s Design Rhythm?

Design rhythm is a consistent repetition of design elements that builds a pattern or rhythm. The pattern creates unity and helps users distinguish one post to the next. The flow that is created makes people naturally scroll to the next item and creates good scan-ability.

If you look at any of the major print publications’ websites, you’ll notice that they try to translate their print approach to the web with various degrees of success. I would love to see a major publication experiment with a rhythmic approach to designing their homepages. One company who is giving it a shot is AOL with their news.aol.com site. While not a news organization, their previous design was more like a traditional newspaper site. It’s interesting to see a larger site like AOL change its design philosophy.

Rhythm Supports Usability

Design rhythm supports consistency and contextualization, two of the ways I wrote about in the post “5 Ways to Make a User Interface Intuitive“. Consistency creates pattern which helps users easily scan pages to find beginnings and endpoints to posts. Contextualization is supported by grouping information like category, date published and comments together in context with the posting.

Search is one of the most used applications on the web and the design of results pages haven’t changed much. This is because their user interfaces are universally understood and follow the principals of design rhythm. Search result pages were some of the early pages that broke web design conventions and still have staying power.

In Conclusion

The design rhythm approach is accepted because users are much more savvy about scrolling. Users respond to discernible patterns that they can scan quickly and intuitively understand.

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.