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Andrew Clarke is an art director and web designer at the UK website design studio ‘Stuff and Nonsense.’ There he designs websites and applications for clients from around the world. Based in North Wales, Andrew’s also the author of two web design books, ‘Transcending CSS’ and ‘Hardboiled Web Design’ and is well known for his many conference presentations and over ten years of contributions to the web design industry. Jeffrey Zeldman once called him a “triple talented bastard.” If you know of Jeffrey, you’ll know how happy that made him.
When I gave this talk a title, I called it “A Modern Designer’s Canvas,” because originally I was going to talk about the tools and processes that I use when I’m designing. But being a good designer or developer is about so much more than knowing how to use tools. It’s also about the way we approach what we do and our attitude towards it.
I’m going to talk about four lessons that can help us do what we do better. These have been important to me, especially over the last challenging few years, when how we make websites has changed so much. They’re lessons that I learned a long time ago, at art school:
Last week at the fabulous Smashing Conference in Freiburg, I gave a new talk, one I’d written just a few hours prior. I chose not to use slides, but instead to speak about three things that I’m incredibly enthusiastic about: Responsive design is not (just) a design or development problem; the client participation process is broken; how to call your client an idiot, to their face. Here are the (slightly expanded) notes that I made before my talk.
In all the excitement about responsive Web design over the last few years, someone forgot to tell our bosses and clients, so we’ve been treating responsive design like it’s a design or an implementation problem, whereas in fact it’s as much an issue for business. In fact, it’s an issue for everyone involved: designers, developers, content specialists, the people who commission websites and those who structure the teams who make the websites.
