kadavy

James, you may want to read my comment again. I said nothing about "the downfall of the independent design industry." Independent designers aren't going anywhere, but there will be far fewer of them.

Synopsis: Design agencies are disappearing. The industry of design has evolved from independent experimenters, to being a core skill of successful founders, and now established enterprises are investing in design talent. But, Human Centered Design has the potential to solve big problems, so that's why the author is starting a design firm in the social sector.

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That's interesting, but I think there's another layer happening (admittedly outside the scope of this article). The very skill of design is becoming democratized, and that's bringing the era of the design studio to an end, while people who wouldn't otherwise call themselves "designers" are learning design, and applying those skills in their day-to-day jobs.

The design industry used to survive through the complexities of the craft. Pasting up layouts and setting type took more resources, training, and investment than most companies could reasonably take on themselves.

Now, the tools are so widely available, everyone is a "designer." If I say "Helvetica" or "Times New Roman," most people will have images pop into their heads of what those typefaces look like. That wouldn't have been the case 20 years ago.

People who wouldn't otherwise call themselves "designers" are already learning design, and they're using those skills across all levels of all professions to create presentations, websites, etc..

Of course, there's much more to design than just being able to use the tools. There are visual communications components such as typography, colors, and shapes.

Many people think of design as something that someone is "just wired for," but it's a skill that can be learned, is being learned, and will increasingly be learned by more people – just so they can do their jobs better.

Source: I used to win fancy-pants design awards, but quit that to write a book called "Design for Hackers" (http://designforhackers.com ). I teach non-"designers" about design. I have doctors, scientists, business consultants, software developers – even a chef – taking my courses.

First of all, thanks for the mention! (I wrote Design for Hackers).

I'll just elaborate so OP and everyone else can get an idea of how I approach things when teaching design.

My goal with the book was to "reverse engineer" everything that comes together to make a good design. In my eyes, the factors of design are always the same (purpose, technology, culture), it's just a matter of understanding how they work together.

OP mentions whitespace/margins. I'm such a white space fiend, I did a whole hour-long talk at SXSW entirely about white space. So, definitely my book talks about that. You can get much better at design very quickly if you forget about everything else (fonts, colors, ornamentation) and just concentrate on white space first.

I also do cover color schemes, and how to build them. If you want an understanding of how I approach color check out the article I wrote "Why Monet Never Used Black"[1].

I also write about font sizes & geometry in design. If you want a sampling of those particular thoughts, Lifehacker picked up one of my tips on the font sizes I always use on projects[2].

Of course, there's also my free email course that creature mentioned.

Hope this helps!

1. http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/d4h-color-theory/

2. http://lifehacker.com/stick-to-these-font-sizes-to-simplify-...

Thanks for submitting, but any chance you could delete this? I published it by accident, but should have it ready next week.

I'm glad Paul wrote this. The work culture in Silicon Valley can be invigorating; but at the same time, it can be poisonous, especially for someone who is naturally inclined to be work-obsessed.

I left 5 years ago, and I'm so glad I did. It's enabled me to think to myself, away from the noise, and at the same time stay in touch with the "real" world, whom, eventually you're really working for anyway.

With all of the opportunities to do things, it can be hard to see that if you just chose to do fewer things, you could be better at the things that you did decide to do. Also, that if you take some time to relax, the quality of your work can be enhanced.

Suggesting that meditation is a "waste of time"... Wow, that's hard to imagine thinking that way if you do creative work!

Just to add a +1 to point #2, I didn't even really like writing when I started my blog, and my first blog post sucks[1]. 9 short years later, I'm an author of a book that has done pretty well[2], and I LOVE writing.

1. http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/my-first-blog/ 2. http://designforhackers.com

Not ugly enough. You need to make the white space less uniform, and the line-heights less generous.

Just kidding, this is terrible. Great work!

The message pattern you describe sounds a lot like "the one-line hook"[1], and yes, it's very effective.

[1]http://onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-messages/

Hey, thanks for mentioning "Design for Hackers" (I wrote it!)

If anyone is looking for something beyond just the Kindle sample, there are some links to sample stuff at http://designforhackers.com

I realize Paul is doing it for the sake of learning, but that seems like an insane amount of consideration to display and bandwidth.

I remember seeing an article that argued that you should just serve up big images, and that slow cellular data networks scale down and optimize images pretty well already.

Basically it argued that it wasn't worth the trouble. Even with some Googling I can't seem to dig it up.

Thoughts on this, anyone?

Actually, I get better results with http://lmgtfy.com/?q=picnichouse+mason

I redesigned my blog recently[1] and purposely made the type slightly bigger than intuitively felt comfortable. The funny thing is, plenty of people complain about it being too big, but nobody complained when it was way too small.

[1] http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/reverse-engineering-redesign/

Hey, thanks for mentioning "Design for Hackers" (I wrote it).

I'm a bit late to the thread, but if anyone wants to get a sampling of the approach that I take to explaining design check out some sample articles I linked to on http://designforhackers.com

I talk about design more abstractly than most, but I try to keep it entertaining. More than anything I want you to see differently.

I also occasionally send out emails. If you sign up on that site I already have some queued up for new subscribers.

Sacha Greif also sends out some good emails: http://sachagreif.com and of course there's http://hackdesign.org (I'll even be doing a lesson on there eventually)

By the way, just noticed a similar "hanging indent" method on the author picture on the 37Signals blog: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3442-the-design-roulette

Looks good! I love those short lines of text ;)

Hey Kevin, think of it as akin to "hanging punctuation." Since the photo is a circle, I consider its visual "edge" to not be its literal edge.

Notice also how the edge of my face sits along the imaginary line of the left margin.

Thanks for checking it out and commenting, and good work with HackDesign!

The one killer application of Google Glass will be using it as a second monitor in a cafe. That would be entirely worth looking ridiculous.

I'd be interested to hear some specific ways that Brian defined and maintained this company culture. For example, what was one vision of environment, vision, or values, and how did that affect an instance of hiring or process?

Awesome to hear all of that. I'm so glad that it's been helpful. That's why I do it, after all!

Thanks for recommending "Design for Hackers!" (I wrote it)

I think your advice is good. So much design is really about thinking. If you have a clear picture of what the experience is like for your user, and can create some wireframes or pencil sketches based upon that, then it makes the following steps much easier.

I just found this on the "DecidingToBeBetter" subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/DecidingToBeBetter/comments/12jh16/p...

One comment: '"Permission to suck" is quite the erotic sentence :)'

Love that Ira Glass video. Very relevant to this concept.

> particularly to fail in public

This reminds me of when I learned to dance Salsa, and more recently, Tango.

It's a far more public failure than writing a blog post. Your body – the very thing that experiences the embarrassment of failure – is your instrument when dancing. To add insult to injury, you're failing in front of a never-ending stream of women.

But, thankfully, sucking is temporary and life is long.

EDIT: I'd like to add that life is much, much, better when you know how to dance.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job comes to mind. They make an art of "sucking."

Lou Reed has a horribly sucky singing voice. I love him for it.

Good points. Part of being okay with sucking is that if you're okay with sucking – you're more likely to be okay with shipping.

The surprising thing I've found about being okay about sucking at writing is that often the "barf drafts" (as I call them) that seem god-awful when I'm actually writing them, turn out being pretty darn good when I revisit them.

I've been playing guitar for 13 years, and I still am not very good.

A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing.

Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage with musical instruments.

Hehe, I was just describing what my friend said about meditating. I did, in fact, tell her that it wasn't really about thinking about "nothing." Talking about the specifics of meditation wasn't really my aim here :)

If distribution was the problem, wouldn't this be taken care of by having a huge group of indie filmmakers banded together.

I'm feeling very naïve about the movie industry here – is what we're describing simply a movie studio?

Fair point :)