I had the chance to spend an afternoon working at Designing Interactive (D-I) this past week. It was a good time. Not the most productive afternoon, but sometimes a little unproductivity one day can bear fruit down the road.

I was chatting with a local developer working co-working in the conference room and he was telling me about his new freelancing business. I asked him what would separate his business from others already out there. Without blinking he said he would focus on speed and quality, or basically offering better service than everyone else. Makes sense, that’s pretty much what I’ve done and it’s worked really well.

Afterwords I got to thinking about what better service means to web designer/developers. Traditionally I thought it meant when a client calls and tells you to jump you ask “How High?”. When I started freelancing fulltime about a year ago I was going to be the fastest most responsive guy you could hire. My service was going to be top notch. You want a red butterfly instead of orange I’ll get it to you in an hour. What I’ve learned is that isn’t what people really want. A quick turnaround is appreciated, but what they really want is quality. Quality comes from understanding what the client needs and the client understanding how you plan on meeting those needs.

I find myself spending hours every day just explaining why I made the decisions I made. A lot of that time is spent telling them why I don’t want to make the changes they sent over. I do it professionally of coarse. It’s part of the dialoge that you build on successful projects.

Every design is going to have changes. If I get a list of things to change I try and understand why each one is being made. Some changes completely change the tone or structure of a layout. Usually if you talk it thought you can figure out why a change is being made and offer up a better solution.

It’s natural for a client to try to solve problems they see in a design, they know their business inside and out, but I’m the profesional with years of design experience. I’m the one they hired to solve the problem. The end result is so much better when you take the time to help them solve their problems instead of just making whatever changes get sent over. That is service and that’s what drives my business.

To this day I still remember the very first project I did in my intro to graphic design class. We had to take a big piece of bristol board and write down the ten principals of design. I think ten is a bit lengthy, so here are the ones I like the best:

• Size contrast
• Hierarchy
• Alignment
• Consistency

Whenever I get stuck on a design I go back to these principals to pull it all back together. I also think back to these principals when I look at other designs. Recently I came upon (what I believe is) the new Romanian site for Lipton Tea. The design has been making the rounds on inspirational blogs and galleries and I can see why, at first glance it’s a great looking site. The designer(s) who worked on it are obviously talented.

At the same time I also felt like this site was lacking something. There is some awesome Photoshop work going on here, but some of the basic design principals were missing.

Size Contrast and Hierarchy

There are a lot of similarly shaped sections of this page making it hard to find the focal point of your page.

Overwhelm your visitor with to many messages at once and they will get lost and probably bail. The sections are also very close together in size. This would be very easy to fix by expanding the photo area to be wider, maybe the width of the page and incorporate the text to the left of it. That would change the shape and increase it’s size making it the visitors focus when they land on the page. The most important message on the page should be the largest and most visible.

Alignment

This is where a lot of unconventionally designed sites have a hard time. When you have boxes it’s easy to line them up, when you are using more organic shapes the alignments aren’t as clear. Since there is no coherent grid structure to the page each element becomes its own floating island.

A very effective design element is having a a clear structure and having elements break the borders of that structure. It looks like that’s what is trying to happen here but since there is little structure the photo elements look more like an afterthought. A site that does this well is the new GoMedia redesign. The reason the organic shapes work so well is because there is a structure there to break.

Consistency

Going back to the grid image of the Lipton site above, you can see there is little consistency in the width of the columns. There is also little consistency in size and shape. Consistency also helps visitors to navigate. Here it’s hard to tell what is a link and what is text. Using the same color or button image or syle will clear that up. A little inconsistency can make your design exciting, but too much and it becomes chaotic.

Back in February a couple faculty members from Kent State came out to the Cleveland Web Standard’s Association meeting. It was a crazy night. The topic was a business case for web standards and we had over 50 people rsvp for the meeting. Unfortunately it was February and this is Cleveland and we had one of the nastiest ice storms in memory. Only a handful of people made it up. On the spot we decided to push back the presentation and have a round table discussion about the adoption of web standards instead. It was a lively discussion.

Yesterday one of the folks from Kent that came to the meeting posted a survey on the Adoption of web standards. If you have a couple minutes head on over there and let them know what you think.