Years ago, as a junior front end developer in another company, I remember getting a call on a Friday evening at about 4pm. It was from the MD of the company who was on the road after a meeting with a client. He asked me had the design for the client been cut up yet. I said it hadn’t, so he asked me would I do it before I left.
Cut up a set of photoshop documents, write the markup and launch a website. At 4pm. On a Friday evening.
Needless to say, my naivity in this matter and willingness to do a good job had me in the office until very very late that Friday evening. It was all pre-CSS so it was a tabled image dump of the PSD’s. Very in-accessible, very un-usable and guaranteed to fail every user test on the planet. You pay peanuts… That was before we really thought about these things in real depth and detail and way before I heard of the terms UX and Information Architecture.
Nishant Kothary over at Mix (http://visitmix.com) has written an article about the process of re-developing and redesigning the Mix website called “The Anatomy of Web Design”. While quite long (but necessarily so), it is imperative that anyone in the design and development arena read this article and take away from it the thought and process that is truly required to achieve a design such as theirs. From a client perspective, this article will help to inform you as to the process it takes to produce a website and will hopefully educate you as to what is involved. I found the diagrams at the end of the article illustrating the time spent on different tasks and how they crossover and flow within and because of each other, most useful. It shows that there is no point in a good design where the control of the design/development is relinquished. Everything is relative. And everything is important; the research, the discovery phase, the IA, the visual design, it’s all related and all important, all the time.
If I had a cent for every time I’ve heard:
- Sure you’ll knock that out in an hour!
- My son/nephew/daughter-in-law/sister did IT in college, I could get them to do it cheaper!
- How did that take a week!?
- You’re over priced
Then I can guarantee you, I would have stopped working a long time ago. Developers need to understand that design is important to the process. Designers need to understand why the development is important to the process. Clients need to understand the effort required to produce quality designs. Clients also need to realise that website design is not a hobby. If you want a job done, you expect that paying professionals gets you the best that your money can buy. There’s no point in cutting corners or skimping on costs. This is what it takes to get the best advice and best service. At Arekibo, this is a philosophy that we have always tried to employ. We understand that clients don’t always have the budget, but we will always encourage them to strive for the best result. We work with what they want and help them resolve their vision into a final product and design. And we push each other to make sure that we are producing the best quality work we can, often discussing and always challenging. Nothing gets done without a good reason. This is why they have hired us. We’re not going to apologise for being this good.
