Sometimes when Matt asks me for feedback on a design, I find myself saying horrible things like “Make it crunchy” or “More Brooklyn” or “How about a hand-drawn chanterelle?”

I know this is Wrong. What we really need to focus on are questions like: Is this design on-brand? Does it account for the actions users want to take? Does it meet our client’s business goals? Does it solve the problem?

Unfortunately, getting to business goals and problem solving isn’t always straightforward, and sometimes the real goals and problems are buried within words like ‘crunchy’. Part of a designer’s job is to ferret out the hidden meanings behind such annoying, painful feedback—to rend objectivity from subjectivity, if you will.

Ways To Rend It

In an attempt to make discussions about design feel concrete, we’ve built some subjectivity busters into our process. Here are tools we use.

Research & Discovery
Without good R & D, we’re entirely at the mercy of how well our clients articulate themselves. This is fine when a client is super-communicative and prepared, but this isn’t always the case. Thoroughly researching a business (its history, its services, where it’s headed, what it wants), puts us in a better position to know if there is or isn’t a real basis for the chanterelles talk.

Styleboards
Styleboards are collage mash-ups of images that represent a particular style. They’re a fantastic way to draw out subjective issues and separate discussions about the look and feel of a site from discussions about layout and UX issues. Here’s an example:

Matt wrote about this once before.

Site Inspiration
Once we’ve addressed style, color and tone, we try to take things a step further with site inspiration documents. Using our client’s feedback from the R&D/styleboards, we go out and find sites that roughly exemplify what we’ve talked about. These documents serve a dual purpose: they show our clients what their ‘tastes’ might look like when translated into a web page, and move us toward a discussion about how the look of the site will balance with the layout, content requirements, etc.

Interrogation
Interrogating people is the absolute best way to see what they’re driving toward. Don’t know what ‘make it pop’ means? You could just ask: What do you mean by make it pop? Can you show me some sites you think pop? What about them pops? What about your existing site doesn’t pop? How does popping connect with your brand & business goals?

Golden Buy-in

Most the time, this process ends up producing a first round of design that pleases (or at least doesn’t bewilder/infuriate). This has to do with two things. For one, you’ve simply done some good
up-front work. But the more important factor is that you’ve given your client buy-in throughout the process, including her in discussions and asking for her opinion at each step, before you produce a first round of anything. This buy-in is solid gold.

Bold circles, FTW

For the MIX Online team cards, I wanted to extend the “blending circle” metaphor I’d developed for their website. The overlapping and blending colored circles played on the idea of ‘mixing’ and set up a visual motif I knew could work in print.

I cracked open Illustrator, pulled in a few shapes from the website PSD, and started working on an initial design. What immediately struck me was that I had this fixed, definite canvas to play with — 3 x 2.5 inches, front and back, no funny stuff. We lack the constraints of print on the web, which makes it difficult to create intricate designs that hinge on ratios, the grid and proportions.

With this in mind, I made my design ‘sync’ the front and the back side — the upper blue circle ‘bleeds’ over into the circle edge on the back. It’s a small detail, but one that’s impossible on the web, where you don’t have three dimensions to work with. I think it gives the printed card a sense of cohesiveness, even if you don’t notice the shapes lining up right away.

Donny, you’re out of your element

I’m almost a total novice in Illustrator — I can use it about as well as your cousin can use Word 2010 to design a webpage. So I called on the wonderful Chelsea Conboy to clean up my files and give me a few tips on how not to screw up again. Very helpful.

After that, I was off to the printer. I knew I wanted a thick, rough, recycled cardstock and wanted to use letterpress to give the colored shapes a rich, clean, organic look.

What I didn’t know was that print shops carry only a few common paper types—the paper I coveted was distributed by a small Swedish company that only sells in large quantities, with nearly a one-month turnaround time on delivery. No dice on the sweet paper.

To meet our deadline, we’d have to print an offset color down first, then letterpress on top of that.

Evolution to the rescue

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with a good printer. Scott and Molly of Evolution Press helped me refine my production files and choose accurate PMS colors, and advised me on all the details of the letterpress process. They also let me drool over all their Heidelberg printers.

They found a way to source the recycled paper I wanted, too. Long story short, they bought back an old client’s excess card stock (who used it on an awesome card for Seattle’s Still Liquor). I owe a big thanks to Scott and Molly for all their hard work.

Here’s how cards came out:

Some love for our little company

Since I was knee-deep in bringing one set of business cards to life, I figured I may as well design a new version of our own thingsthatarebrown cards. I’m pleased with the result, especially the very big/bold treatment on our names (set in Century Gothic, tightly tracked) on the reverse side.

Check em out:

What’s even better than the relative lack of paper in the iPad box is the relative lack of words on the iPad papers. Take the instructions. There are only a handful of words (eleven total) on the front side:

On the backside, there are just a few main actions you can take:

And that’s about it.

There are occasions when more words are needed, and those occasions should be honored. Most the time, though, brevity is an acceptable muse.

One of the benefits of having smart, sexy friends includes getting smart, sexy advice about your business.

Last night, I held an informal focus group to talk about messaging and design concepts for the new thingsthatarebrown.com, which we’ve been chipping away at all year. I purposely invited a few close friends, none of whom have internet jobs.

My point was to have them evaluate subtly different pieces of copy & design, to get a sense of what each statement / art direction made them think about thingsthatarebrown.

Here are a handful of options I presented for the “what is thingsthatarebrown” copy:

• thingsthatarebrown is a web design studio in Seattle
• thingsthatarebrown is a web design agency in Seattle
• thingsthatarebrown is a snappy little web design agency in Seattle
• thingsthatarebrown is a web design studio. We design content-driven, standards-compliant websites. We’re from Seattle.
• thingsthatarebrown designs useful, beautiful websites.
• thingsthatarebrown is a boutique web design studio. We’re from Seattle.

Come to find out, minor differences in phrasing had a huge impact on their perceptions. In the above list, for example, the word ‘boutique’ made them want to throw up, as did the phrase ‘snappy little’. They loved it when we incorporated ‘we’ or ‘we’ve’. They didn’t care whether we called ourselves an agency or studio, but thought ‘studio’ made us sound more like ourselves. And so on.

I repeated this process for other areas of the site, like the intro pitch on the home page. As in the first example, subtle differences had a big impact.

Probably the biggest advantage of inviting non-internet folks was learning what items were jargon-y, and how people who aren’t familiar with the “industry standard” perceive our choices.

If you’re going through a rebrand or redesign, I encourage you to step away from your computer. Then, run your ideas by the intelligent ladies / gents you drink with on the weekends.

This, because most clients don’t have time for endless research and exploration. They hired us for that. And of course, most clients manage web design projects on top of their existing workload. So really, it’s just polite to make things as easy as possible.

But the thing is, in order to make things easy, sometimes we have to make them hard first. 

Shoot Me Now

A typical set of discovery questions for a 2-page design + copy project might look like this: 

• What’s Acme Inc all about? Talk to me like I’m 10.
• Who are Acme Inc’s main competitors? What are their websites?
• Who is Acme Inc’s target audience? What do they care about?
• Why did you hire us?
• What don’t you like about your existing design?
• What don’t you like about your existing copy?
• How is Acme Inc different than other companies like it?
• How is Acme Inc better than other companies like it?
• Give me a handful of adjectives that describe Acme Inc.
• What other marketing initiatives will accompany this project?
• Point me to a few sites whose writing you really like.  Why do you like it?
• Point me to a few sites whose design you really like.  Why do you like it?
• DIY Pitch: In three minutes or less, give me a pitch for Acme Inc’s products.
• What do you want people to think of Acme Inc as a result of our work?
• Who will maintain your design + copy after we’re done?
• What main actions do you want people to take on acmeinc.com?
• Please upload any logos, assets, etc that must go on the site.
• Please list any keywords that must go on the site.
• Please upload your branding guidelines.
• Please list any content that must go on the site. (specific phrases, content types, etc)

And so on. Keep in mind, I said 2 pages. Maybe you’re thinking, how hard can it be?

Well, consider this. To get a really good answer (one that helps us design or write a site that’s both effective and interesting), we might have to break each of these questions down into multiple smaller questions, meetings and interations.  

Let’s use the sample question, In three minutes or less, give me a pitch for Acme Inc products, as an example.  Here’s how we might get to a good answer:

• I ask question
• Client takes 3-10 minutes to answer
• I review the answer
• We have a phone call about the answer
• I notice there are actually three parts to the answer, say benefits, features and brand attributes
• I ask client to elaborate on each of these 3 components
• Client sends me some more brainstorming or writing
• I use that writing to generate either more questions, or a rough draft of the benefits and intro message for the home page
• We revise that writing
• As more info comes to light, we repeat

And that’s just 2 sentences and 3 bullet points on a home page.  

Not Your Average Easy Bake Oven

The point is, the process of designing and writing a website is not an input-output binary.  We don’t just submit our neat form, which our client then fills out, which we then transform into a dozen Littlest Pet Shop Shortbread Cookies.

No. We have to put our clients through their paces. Ask them lots of questions. Have some calls. Try some stuff.  Redo it. Have another call.

Of, course we can be responsible and pragmatic about this, but there’s no getting around the client-side effort those shortbread cookies take. Oh it hurts.

Out Pops Dinner!

When it comes to a client’s involvement in the web design process, we’ve found that gain does, in fact, arise from pain.

In wrenching every last drop of genius from our clients (and believe me, you will experience much genius when you encourage clients to be creative and involved), we’re able to produce better work. It makes more sense. It’s more interesting.

Make things hard to make them easy.

“…sick and tired of hearing about how you should be producing “content” to attract a web following. Treating content as a category on its own is missing the point entirely. Nobody cares about content. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, hey, I should read some content today.”

My first impulse is to agree.

Good Content Is More Than An Output Stream

I love the idea of foregoing labels and treating what many content strategists, web writers and bloggers do as an outpouring of “ideas, analysis and insights” which work best when they emerge naturally and from our day-to-day experiences.

And I like David’s idea that we produce better stuff when we’re inspired or close to a topic, than we do when adhering to a rigid publishing schedule. Typically, the resulting product is more interesting and thought-provoking. People often like it more.

As David’s post suggests, really good content amounts to more than an output stream. Publishers, writers and everyone else in between need to frame what we’re doing appropriately.

On Publishing

And yet, the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to disagree with a few of David’s points. And with this point in particular:

“This also means that it’s hard to schedule. You can’t put neatly into timeslots when you’re going to be annoyed, ecstatic, disappointed, have a great insight or discover a new awesome technique… The great thing is that it doesn’t really matter that much anyway whether you follow a tight schedule.”

I agree that great content is hard to schedule, just like the emotions that usually produce it. But scheduling (ie, an editorial calendar) is what keeps most successful purveyors of content in business.

If 37signals posted once a week, they wouldn’t be as successful. If the New York Times doesn’t deliver fresh, relevant news, they’ll be in even deeper trouble.

If you want people to keep coming back, your content has to be both inspired and timely. This means that most content providers—just like designers and artists—have a very difficult task on their hands: Staying inspired and being creative on a deadline.

It’s hard, but it’s reality.

On The Term Content

Beyond David’s qualms with scheduling content, I’m not sure about his denunciation of the term itself. As he put it:

“Treating content as a category on its own is missing the point entirely… so no more content, please.”

I’m all for rethinking our terms, especially when those terms don’t capture the breadth and depth of what they really mean. I believe that the labels we choose have power, and can greatly cheapen or enhance the value of a thing.

But at the same time, what’s really at stake in calling what we produce ‘content’? And what else are we gonna call it? ‘Stuff’? ‘Ideas in writing, video and photo form on the web’? If we abandon the term altogether, will we be better off?

I’m curious to know what a better term might be.

The Argument Behind the Argument

Although I disagree with some of what David’s saying, I think the spirit behind his argument has value. It seems like his true beef is not with semantics and editorial calendars; it’s with cheap, awful crap that gets published in the name of a ‘strategy’. It’s disappointing.

And yet, not all content consumers long for quality and thoughtfulness. There are plenty of folks in the world who will read what we call crap, which is probably why so many publishers produce it religiously, and on a schedule.

Why So Serious?

I think the key thing to remember is, we don’t have to be slave to the term ‘content’ and whatever we assume it entails. We’re free peoples, and free to modify the term for our own use. To hate ‘content’ is to take it too seriously—most of us are trying to do our jobs, produce decent stuff and find helpful phrases and shorthand for talking about it.

But thing is, he’s right, mostly. The default configuration of WordPress simply isn’t built to handle more than one new visitor per second.

The good news is: few things in life are as easy as protecting a WP site against heavy traffic. If you can install WP to begin with, you can likely install the single plugin needed to make it run as fast as your web host will allow.

How WordPress Works

A default WP install configures your site to run dynamically. Every page request hits the database a number of times (about 15 queries) to present any post or page. This usually takes just a fraction of a second. And since most blogs aren’t very popular (sorry everyone, it’s true!), this tends not to be much of an issue.

But if you do get internet famous, you’ll run into issues with site stability. For example, if a popular blogger links to you, your site will probably tank (and everyone will be looking at this).

If you’re smart enough to write something that people want to read (the hard part), it’d be wise to make sure everyone can see it (easy!). Here’s how.

Enter WP Super Cache

Ask anyone who knows anything about databases, and they’ll tell you this rule of thumb: only talk to the database when you really need to. If you’re letting WP constantly pester your database server on every user request, things aren’t going to be fun. You’re making everybody work hard when there’s a much, much better way.

WP Super Cache is the simple solution. It seamlessly converts your WP website into a set of static HTML pages. If there’s one thing that’s easy for a webserver to do, it’s to serve up regular ‘ole HTML pages and assets. Apache can crank those things out for eternity.

If you’re running a current version of WP, here’s how to install it:

• Go to “Plugins → Add New”
• Search for “WP Super Cache”
• Click “Install”
• Ensure your file permissions are correct (the only difficult part)
• Activate the plugin

If you’re competent at installing web software it should take you less than three minutes to get this running correctly. Here’s a more complete installation guide.

It’s important to point out that, while not perfect, WP Super Cache is an elegant solution. After you configure it, you can use WP just as you normally would. It handles all the dirty work of keeping your site static to handle load, and yet dynamic when needed (when you add a post, change your templates, a user posts a comment, etc.). 99% of the time it “just works.”

Install this plugin and you likely won’t ever have to worry about WP crumbling under heavy traffic again. And maybe we can keep Gruber from having to link to Google cached versions of our websites.

Here’s a recent example of a WP site that, using WP Super Cache, survived heavy DF traffic, unscathed.

Going further

Of course, there’s a lot more you can do to make your website load faster and run more efficiently. Here are just a few other things that help:

Use a good web host
No amount of great software is going to get you around having a shitty host. While shared hosting has some downsides, I’ve been completely happy with the excellent up-time and support of WebFaction. You’d be smart to sign up today (affiliate link).

Of course, if you really know what you’re doing and manage a popular site, you’re probably 1) not reading this and/or 2) running a dedicated server for your site. Good for you!

Install WP Minify
When I build-out my HTML and CSS templates, I tend to include far too many files. This makes things a bit slow to load, as the HTTP protocol can only juggle downloading so many files at once. Well, this sexy little plugin will take all your CSS and JS, smash them all into just two files, and compress them down to almost nothing. Surprisingly, it makes a noticeable difference.

Host big assets elsewhere
If you’re putting up a big video, make sure to put it on Vimeo or YouTube. Same goes for MP3s. If you’re clogging up your server with big downloads, people won’t be able to read your posts.

Don’t go crazy
Just remember: Don’t go overboard with optimization. Your site probably isn’t popular enough to need all of this (mine isn’t). Good optimization always begins with the highest-return, simplest configuration fixes — in WP’s case, a caching framework like WP Super Cache is simply the best way to protect against high traffic and keep your server running happy.

If you get a chance, check out the article (and all other cool stuff on Design Sponge).

Making A Well-Adjusted Frankenstein

Many have said it before, but there’s definitely a offspring-like quality to a family business. Your business is your baby, your brainchild, your own little Frankensteinian beast. And the person you created your business with—in my case, my husband—is your mad scientist partner. Sure there are rules you can follow, and mentors you can lean on. But no matter how neat, tidy and prepared you are, you’ll always experience a bit of the creative business mania entrepreneurs talk about.

Which is why it’s important, if you’re thinking of starting a family biz, to establish some orienting concepts for yourself before you start sewing legs together… together. You’ll have to check out the full Design Sponge article for all the tips, but I’ll summarize what I said there, here.

• Be polite to your family business partner, even though he/she’s your family and therefore more tempting to vent at / throttle.
• Dot your contracts, cross your bank accounts and sign your operating agreements. Because due diligence will make you clearer and more confident about your business’ teleological goal.
• Set boundaries, but expect to over and under-step them all the time. Part of this family biz business is about being flexible. Because you’re just *going* to talk about business over dinner. Doing so keeps you creative and inspired. Even though you’ve set limits, get used to a certain amount of creative sloppiness.
• Don’t hire more people unless you know how to hire, have time to manage them and are prepared for the extra stress of another mouth to feed. Same goes for moving into an expensive office space, or taking on debt.
• Make sure you can make money, because even though it may feel romantic to throw caution to the wind and drive through the proverbial desert with your proverbial shirt off with your proverbial soul mate, you will be very sad when the sun gets hot and you run out of gas. Unless you’ve got someone (or a trust fund) to support you, your excitement for running a business on passion alone will run out quickly. Businesses may start on passion, but they run on profitability.
• Stress Sanity. There’s a lot at stake in running a family business, and your happiness is the most important thing. It’s not worth ‘doing what you love’ unless you can honor and respect your family. You’ll have to find creative, kind ways of working through tough times, talking about money and negotiating power.

Stepping off the soapbox now.

A Website Named Desire is based on a poster that illustrates the web design process—from sign, to fight, to launch. We worked with Nishant Kothary and our good friends at Mix Online to build a microsite to showcase and sell the poster, which they’d created with XPlane.

Making Complicated Simple

The poster is very intricate—there’s a web design scene happening in every square inch. We needed to communicate all this action while holding tight to an uncomplicated, single-page microsite format.

Here are a few examples of how we did it:

Bold copy introduces the poster, who it’s for and what it’s all about. A big image of the poster on the top of the page gives people context (ie, what is this thing?):

Pictures of the poster ‘in the wild’ show what it really looks like:

Close ups of the poster with microcopy resonate with the web designers and devs who it’s made for:

Content-Driven

And as with most sites we create, this one is built on content (images and writing). We created the content, worked out themes and wrote most of the copy before touching Photoshop. Thanks to Mix Online for yet another happy, rewarding project.

So, I’m going to talk about some of the wheat: The good parts of the content strategy trend.

For background on what content strategy is, check out this or this or this or this.

A Content-Driven Design Process

One of the biggest and best side effects of content strategy’s activism is that it’s encouraging agencies to reorder their design process. It’s no longer: discovery, information architecture, design, templates and development.

Instead, we’re doing: content strategy, information architecture, web writing, content production, design, templates and development—or some version of this.

The important thing is, we’re starting to think about content, early on.

From a designer’s perspective, this means we no longer begin projects by evaluating the design of a site; we start by evaluating what’s on it. Text, videos, etc. Do they make sense? Do they achieve the intended effect? Are they interesting?

If the need for content-driven design seems obvious to you, it might be because of the content strategy hoopla. It wasn’t so obvious five years ago.

Less Crap

Economizing, reducing unnecessary words, and having a plan for maintaining content over the long haul are core tenets of content strategy. So, another side effect of CS activism is that we’re starting to remove crap from our websites.

As agencies and clients adopt CS-like practices, many websites will shrink, because we’ll be designing around less stuff. And eventually, websites with hundreds of randomly-tacked-on pages will become far less common, as clients implement their own editorial calendars, content audits, etc.

A New Breed of Web Design Agency

I also suspect that content strategy (among other things going on right now, such as new publishing) is going to nudge different types of folks into the industry.

Agencies will start employing writers, strategists and big-picture thinkers either full time or on contract. And the stereotype of a “copywriter” who “doesn’t get the web” will evolve: More writers will understand design and technology. And more designers and developers will understand writing and content-driven design.

Discipline Kissing

It would be silly to think that every agency is going to upend its process in the name of content strategy. For most agencies, I smell a rapprochement, not a revolution: IAs, designers and art directors will learn or enhance their content strategy skills.

As it stands, the boundaries between IA, web strategy and content strategy are porous. They will become more porous later.

So, disciplines: kiss.

But Let’s Be Clear

Content Strategy certainly has buzzword qualities—like anything else, it can be turned into snake oil. But it’s not just a buzzword. Used intelligently, it’s just a smart way to create good websites. If you want, you can dispense with the term altogether:

Call it whatever you want, Ms. Kristina Halvorson once said, just make sure somebody’s doing it.