“Writers and graphic designers seem preoccupied with stylistic and aesthetic concerns rather than making information understandable to the public.”
-Wurman, Leifer, Sume, and Whitehouse in Information Anxiety 2

I was bad in the sixth grade. I got demerits which led to punishment. Punishment was staying in at recess and writing reports on topics chosen from the encyclopedia. Research and writing was not fun.

Now art class- that was fun. I was free to create and the grading was based on participation rather than quality.

Designing a web site requires some of both. Most of my colleagues and clients agree that the interface design process is way more fun than the content development part. So fun in fact that I need to introduce some satisficing (this design principle is also known as “best is enemy of good”).

Here’s the rub: It is and always was about content first. Good content is good regardless of the interface design. Good interface design does not make bad content better. Good content is well written and well organized.

There are five ways to organize information. This principle is often referred to as “Five Hat Racks.”

1) Alphabetical

2) Chronological

3) Spatial (location)

4) Contiuum (hierarchy)

5) Category

Different organizational strategies may apply to the same information set and each offers different characteristics and applications but your choices are limited to these five. If you are faced with the daunting task of organizing information in order to produce web content, knowing this principle might help.

Colors are important members of the design choir. Here are a few principles that inform my use of color.

Good designs often use a limited palette. The eye can process around 5 colors at a time (depending on design complexity).

Harmonious pallets tend to use colors that are:
Analogous (adjacent on the color wheel)
Complimentary (opposing on the color wheel)
Triadic or quadratic (symmetrical polygon)
Found in nature

Cool colors tend to recede to the background, warm colors are perceived as foreground.

Saturation refers to the amount of gray in a color. Less gray, more saturation. Color is like fat. Too much of the saturated kind on one plate can make you sick.

Symbolism is cultural, not psychological. “Blue is soothing” or “Pink is feminine” theories have been tested by numerous psychology students with little evidence found for their substance. Different meanings are found for colors among different cultures.

In design for screens, what you see is NOT what your viewers necessarily get. Designers for screen know that the colors they choose can be perceived quite differently based on the viewer’s screen type (LCD, CRT), screen settings (contrast, brightness, gamma, hue) and ambient room light. A  good example is found at any computer or TV store where you can compare the same image on many screens.

Good design relies on palette, hue and saturation to succeed across a broad shift of display screens.

Or you may be a totally seat-of-the pants kind of person and choose to think of other things before and during the trip and just deal with choices as they present themselves.

The purpose (get to Totonto) and objective (walk there) are the same. It’s the process (steps taken) that will differ.

When you get to Toronto and if you choose to think back over the journey, you will recall what steps where taken and in what order. You will see how previous steps impacted the steps that came next.

Lets say that, before we set off, we stated our purpose as “to be in Toronto” and our objective as “to walk there.”

You just read about two different processes that both satisfy the stated purpose and objective. Anyone who claims one process is better than the other is assigning a degree of value (better) that is not implied  by the stated purpose and objective.

The value statement about a process must include consideration of constraints. If my plans are to be in Toronto after walking there, a constrant mandating the fewest steps (a type of budget consideration) would suggest which process is the better one.

Designers talk about the “design process.” Current design theory discussion often alludes to two contrasting schools of thought about “how good design happens,” known as the Rational Model and the Action-Centric Model.

However it plays out, process happens and for designers, it’s worth thinking about.

Content , gui and systems folks follow a process to get from concept to completion. While the steps found in the processes are not indentical, the first two steps are shared by all.

Step 1 - State Purpose(s)
A purpose is a conceptual goal. It does not identify any specific ways to get to that goal.
1) Sell more widgets – sell more widgets at retail
2) Enhance public perception – support public image campaign
3) Distribute information – provide customers with installation instructions

Step 2 – State Objective(s)
An objective is physical state or action that one intends to make manifest. Objectives are created to satisfy a purpose.
1) (Sell more widgets) Objective= Provide product store environment with online transaction capability.
2) (Support public image campaign) Objective= Publish press releases.
3) (Distribute information) Objective= Maintain navigable links to PDF document library.

Thinking about, discussing and stating purposes and objectives are important first steps in the process that will follow, particularly in a collaborative environment. As new ideas, design options and editorial choices present themselves, they should be evaluated in the light of the purposes and objectives.

Do you know that your brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies? Those from the berlin school think so, and so do I. Besides, it’s fun to say- try it: “gestalt.”

The law of prägnanz (German for pithiness) says that we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple.

You may be familiar with this famous statement that is often associated with Gestalt phsycology: “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

As humans have designed and created things, certain “principles of design” have risen up as usefull across many disciplines. Here are 5 that often are listed first:

• The law of closure – The mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (that is, to increase regularity).
• The law of similarity – The mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. This similarity might depend on relationships of form, color, size, or brightness.
• The law of proximity – Spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.
• The law of symmetry (figure–ground relationships) – Symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.
• The law of continuity – The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patterns.
• The law of common fate – Elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

A quote (one of my favs):

“The best designers sometimes disregard the principles of design. When they do so, however, there is usually some compensating merit attained at the cost of the violation. Unless you are certain of doing as well, it is best to abide by the principles.”

-Lidwell, Holden, Butler “Universal Principals of Design”

If you like sitting in the basement and watching family vacation slides, here you go…

Tools:
Flat Griddle or large flat pan
Basting or pastry brush
Chef knife or pizza cutter

Ingredients:
Corn tortilla
Vegetable oil
Mashed potato (soften left over potatos with milk if needed)
Garlic cloves- roasted and chopped
Roasted red pepper (jar ok)
Kalamata olives- pitted and chopped
Feta cheese- crumbled
Fresh Basil- chopped
Dried Oregano
Fresh lemon
Salt and pepper

Heat griddle. Brush oil on one side of a tortilla and spread other side with mashed potato. Top with next 6 ingredients, squeeze a little lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Place on griddle with oiled tortilla side down. Put another tortilla on top, press down gently and brush with oil. Turn when bottom is golden and crisping and continue to cook until second side is done and filling is warm. Let cool and cut into halves or quaters. Serve with selection of salsa, picodegallo and Greek yogurt sauces such as tzatziki.

The standard recipe for s’mores is more than marshmallow, graham cracker and Hershey Bar. It’s roasting your own goodness on a stick over an open fire, usually with good company and good conversation. Cowboy fondue.

Then there’s the construction step. A personal, almost ritualistic experience. Chocolate on top or bottom? Do you lay the bottom cracker on the picnic table and feed the marshmallow with top cracker in one hand and roasting stick in the other? Or do you do your entire assembly in the air,  cracker/chocolate sandwich in one hand?

One of the things that makes the graham cracker the traditional substrate of choice is its well suited texture. Crispy enough to provide adequate structural integrity yet soft enough to yeild a controlled bite without excessive crumbling. You get a nice mouth crunch without overly mashing the entire sandwich.

But lets face it- in the world of cookies, grahams are kind of boring. And there’s no reason to avoid exploring the vast world of yummy chocolates either.

Here’s the spread I like to do for the gang-

Marshmallows- the big ones.

Crackers- a few grahams for the purists, Voortman windmill cookies (both almond and gingerbread), any other flat, not to crumbly cookie that looks good.

Chocolate- Hershey for those purists, variety of good solid chocolate bars (sweet to bitter), Nestle Crunch, Mr. Goodbar, other specialty/regional chocolate bars that are not too thick.

Condiments- yes, spice. Particularly cayenne or other ground chile. That’s for your almond cookie with marshmallow and two chocolate (milk and dark) s’more. The pepper wakes up the tongue for all that messy gooey sticky wonderfullness.

Build the fire, arrange the chairs, sharpen the sticks and spread out the fixins. Remember, both the roasting and assembly are personal things. If your neighbor feels the need to offer a sacrificial burnt offering of their first marshmallow, let them.

I talk to lots of people about their use of e-mail and I see a big variety in how they use and understand it. Many seem content to say: “I don’t care or understand how it works, just so it works.” But the ones who bother to learn how their mail client (Outlook, Blackberry, etc.) works and where that e-mail actually goes and gets stored seem to be the ones who work and communicate more efficiently and with less stress.

Servers are the computers that pass your e-mail around until it ends up at its destination. When you send me an e-mail, the first server that may see it is your outgoing server (usually an SMTP server). That server says: “OK, you have mail to send and I see that you are using the right username and password so I’ll just send it off into the internet.” The outgoing server then throws the packets of data that make up your message into the internet “cloud.” Servers that constitute the “cloud” take a look and say: “Ahhh, your recipient, has an incoming mail server (often a POP server) and I know just where that is.” After bouncing around a bit (other servers can come into play such as spam filtering services, etc.), your e-mail hits my incoming (POP) server and sits there waiting for me to take a look at it.

Clients are the tools (software) that we use to send and receive mail. Oulook is the most widely known and used mail client. Other mail clients include Eudora, Thunderbird, and Entourage. Blackberries and other smart devices have mail clients and you can even call a webmail interface like HotMail a client. When I use Outlook to receive mail, it connects to my incoming (POP) server and looks for any new mail, then downloads that mail to my hard drive. Now I see your e-mail in the Outlook inbox. Since I am using Outlook’s default settings, when the new mail is downloaded, it’s also removed from the server. That means the only place that mail now exists is on my hard drive. Mail clients like Outlook allow you to change these default settings so you can, for example, download the new mail but also keep a copy on the server so when you check mail from a second client (your  laptop), the mail is still on the server for that second client to find.

If you are going to leave mail on the server, it is important to understand what each client is doing with it and how and when you are going to actually remove old mail so the server doesn’t continually fill up and reach it’s max capacity. Using the variety of options in your mail clients along with a strategy that meets your needs, you can control how, where and when all that mail ends up where you want.

E-mail messages are files. Like all your other data, good file management usually aids productivity. You know how your computer’s file system was designed to reflect the real-world experience of organizing documents into folders that get filed away in drawers? Well your mail client is doing that with its in and out boxes and the folders you can create. I only use Outlook to manage mail until I’m done with it. My inbox is usually kept pretty empty. After I read and reply to a message, I either delete it or move it to a custom folder. My custom folders could be ones I created in Outlook like, “Leisure Reading” or “Urgent Matters” or I may drag a message that I want to archive into a folder I created outside of Outlook like
My Computer/C:/Clients/ClientName/Correspondence.

You say you don’t really have any kind of file management system and you didn’t know you could just drag and drop e-mails out of Outlook to any folder you want? Well there’s no shame in that. If you don’t mind wading through an inbox with messages going back months if not years, you really don’t need to be reading this.

A word about webmail.
Webmail interfaces like Hotmail typically use a protocol (IMAP) that is different from a client like Outlook (POP). Usually with a webmail interface, mail is always stored on the server and only deleted if you delibrately do so. All is fine unless that server crashes. Now big services like Hotmail and Yahoo have tons of backup and redundency so the likelyhood of losing all your mail is slim. But if you are using the mail services that come with your web hosting provider, even if they offer a webmail interface, best practice is to not rely on the server to be your storage device. You have much more control if you use your mail client to download annd store your mail locally.

My first thought is “who told you that and did they explain what you’re missing?” What I usually ask first, though, is:

“So you mean like a WordPress Blog where you have a web-based interface for posting your thoughts, professional musings, articles and other stuff? One that is built using Open Source (OS) applications that reside on a remote server and that is typically free either through your hosting provider or by signing up at www.wordpress.org?”

I ask them if when they say “blog” they mean a set of web pages that are updated on a somewhat regular basis and organized in a descending date order? Built on one of thousands of free templates that include “widgets” for lots of things like navigation and search, calendar, weather and you name it?

The type of blog that can add to the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of another web site? The type that is all about freedom to talk to the world, anytime, from any place, without having to pay an expensive web guy?

“Yeah,” the client usually says, “all of that.”

That’s cool. Next question- What have you got to say? Know anybody that actually wants to hear it? Yes to all of that? Great. Now you just need 3 things:

1) Set up WordPress with your host or at www.wordpress.org. Pick a template, configure your site, start publishing. It’s free, and designed for folks like you remember?

2) Start publishing. That is- write some content, borrow some content, pay someone to write, or a combination of the three. Again, blogging is about having something to say.

3) Get seen. Advertise your URL, get links. The old “if you build it they will come” does not apply.

Any more questions? No? Well tough. I have a couple more answers. Like in theory, the whole Open Source Blog and Content Management System (CMS) movement is all about web publishing power to the non web professional people. So, in theory, it’s cheap (if not free) and you can do it all yourself. Would you believe me if I said theory is one thing, practice is another. If you have a free evening and know your way around your computer pretty well, you can definately make youself a blog. But the software doesn’t tell you everything you should know. Things like best practices for design and communication, search engine optimization, etc.

And you’ll want to keep your applications updated. Open Source apps like WordPress, and especially the third party  plugins, are popular hacker targets.

By this time, a few clients will say: “I want all that but I don’t have that much to say and I want you to do it all so I’ll give you my content from time to time and you just post it…”

My answer- You already have that. It’s called your web site. Should we talk about updating your web site?

Or do you really want a blog. Like a WordPress Blog where you have a web-based interface for posting your thoughts, professional musings, articles…