I'm a Christian, a designer, and a gadget fan who lives in Cheltenham, UK.

This is my blog, a creative outlet to mess around and play with as well as a place that logs my thoughts and inspirations.

Tag: content

Content Origins ›

A sub­ject I’ve been think­ing about a lot late­ly is that of the per­son­al site and own­ing con­tent. Since I dis­cov­ered the microblog­ging “move­ment” I’ve been think­ing about how it should affect my post­ing to sites like Twit­ter. Man­ton’s thoughts in his post Long-form writ­ing as a fil­ter are echo­ing where I’m start­ing to land. I want to post/write for this site more, but I strug­gle to think of con­tent. Maybe if I switch to orig­i­nat­ing all my con­tent on my site first, those ini­tial thoughts will grow into more sub­stan­tial posts, or remain as micro-posts pushed to Twitter.

Design Machines ›

When we let the suc­cess and fail­ure of oth­ers super­fi­cial­ly guide design deci­sions, we skip over the con­text and unique­ness of what makes our prod­ucts dif­fer­ent. Design becomes a game of catch-up. Not an intel­li­gent pur­suit of find­ing unique for­mu­las that help the orga­ni­za­tion stand out on its own. 

This is one of those arti­cles that as I read it I found myself nod­ding along to more and more. It’s easy in a world of short dead­lines and on demand solu­tions to default to what we know works, or at least what appears to work when we’re approach­ing a new job. But what’s most impor­tant in these sit­u­a­tions, is that this kind of behvaiour/design does a dis­ser­vice to our clients.
I’ve lost count of the num­ber of times over recent years that we speak about being pro­fes­sion­al design­er, or design­ers grow­ing up to be on the lev­el of lawyers and accoun­tants. Experts who know what they’re doing and, in many cas­es, have earned that respect. The trou­ble is, that the web doesn’t always por­tray that, and the glimpses of the web in this piece cer­tain­ly seem to be back that up.
Each client and each job is unique, treat them that way. There is no one size fits all when it comes to design.