Once again, the blog over at Boagworld.com has posted an excellent article that has me thinking. I highly recommend reading the entire piece, particularly since it deals in great detail over the importance of the designer’s roll of proper communication through the phases of a project.

While it may slow down the process at the start to make sure every phase of the project is explained thoroughly, it can save a project from going south due to assumptions and misconceptions made when clients need to “fill in the blanks” as to what happens next. Most importantly, communication is an essential tool to make sure we are providing the best experience during the project, and the best solution when it is complete.

So often, those on the designer end of the relationship assume the process is second nature to both ourselves and our clients. Some clients may be ones we have had a long-standing relationship with; some may have recently turned to us after working with another agency; others may be brand-new startups who are new to the process altogether. No matter which category a client fits in, they ALL benefit from clearly outlining each step the project will work through, AND explaining why we are asking the questions we are during each phase.

The next time you feel a client has reduced your roll to pixel pushing, review the communication you’ve had up to that point. Instead of just sighing and obliging, ask questions and get further feedback. Often times, a client’s desire to take over the roll of the designer is because there has been an assumption along the way, instead of an open dialogue.

Jennifer Soloway [follow me on Twitter] // Art Director // Strategic Insights

1. Does your website look amazingly slick and well designed but not perform exactly the way it’s supposed to?
2. Does it look like a broken down site from the mid 90s and but yet function perfectly?
3. Or does it look great AND do what it is supposed to?

If you answered yes to question 3, you can stop reading now. If you answered yes to questions 1 or 2, you may want to keep reading. Many of you maybe even have a site that neither works well nor looks good… in which case you should definitely continue reading.

Many sites out there for whatever reason have only been designed well OR only been programmed well. That’s because many pure designers get their hands on a copy of dreamweaver and declare they can do it all and just as many pure programmers get a copy of photoshop and declare they can do it all.

As a general guideline think of it in the following way:

Web Designer: Typically can create outstanding "wow effect" graphical layouts. Not really interested in web standards as long as the design stays as true as possible. Familiar with Adobe design suite and or other graphic tools. May know basic html/css but has no knowledge of server side or dynamic scripting. May or may not have a copy of dreamweaver that will only get them in trouble.

Web Programmer: Typically an expert in a server side language like PHP/MySQL, ASP.NET/SQL, etc. May be an expert as well with a client side language like javascript. Despite getting their hands on a copy of photoshop has no real eye for design. Can do "skeleton/plain" layouts at best and may or may not care about web standards.

Web Developer: Typically a true jack of all trades of sorts. They are a hybrid of both the Web Programmer and Web Designer and not just posing as one or the other. They care about standards, clean code, clean design, best practices, and latest trends in general web design, scripting and development.

So when you’re looking to have some web work done, a 2 person team consisting of a good web designer and good web programmer or 1 or more solid web developers would ensure that your site will look good AND function properly as well.

In conclusion look for web developers and avoid the pure designer or pure programmer unless their best friend/colleague is the other… my proof? Just click around the web… it’s full of sites that are non-designed and/or non-functioning.

After installing Snow Leopard last week, I started having the infamous dreamweaver CS4 crashes among others that many in the blogosphere and various industry related forums are ranting about. I even followed Leander Kahney’s advice from his article over at Cult of Mac — How-To: Upgrade To Snow Leopard — The Right Way. It’s a great piece and I followed it to a T except one very important part that lead to me nearly going insane over the holiday weekend. Leander’s article explicitly states not to import any old user account/configuration files from the old system… I unfortunately chose to ignore that. I figured I wouldn’t migrate apps but I also didn’t feel like bringing over work files and folders plus passwords, preferences, etc. all by hand right? Little did I know that migrating these items from my old user account/previous system would later cause me to burn endless hours in troubleshooting at Adobe and Apple. My clean install wasn’t so clean after all… it was tainted by my migrating account folders that contained Libraries full of old App Settings and Preferences that in hindsight had definitely been the culprits.

After exhausting all troubleshooting resources I could find and working through various “tricks” and/or cache resets, preference/settings rebuilds, I thought I would go back and “start from scratch again” but this time not import anything as those who were saying they were having no problems all seemed to have that as a common thread. As daunting as that sounded I figured it had been a while since I watched the Alien Quadrilogy, so I started the slog on Labor Day monday as it was raining in NC anyway. To get around having to re-setup absolutely everything after the Snow Leopard reinstall, I iSynced my email, bookmarks, address book, calendar and keychains beforehand so atleast those things would be there and I could press on with app installs and back ups as I rebuilt my house of cards waiting at every turn for Dreamweaver to start crashing again. Funnily enough somewhere during the end of Aliens (Alien 2), I had reinstalled Snow Leopard from scratch as well as CS4 and was putting Dreamweaver through the rigors and I couldn’t get it to crash at all…. whereas it was crashing by simply breathing on it before. I did incremental time machine backups from there on until I had everything installed that I needed and then brought over files / folders by hand which helped trim some hard drive fat as well. I will say the only way any of this starting over madness was even possible was because I carbon copy cloned my old leopard system to a firewire 800 drive as per Leander’s tips… really saved me. Thanks again mate.

OK Granted, this shouldn’t have to be. Apple, Adobe and other software developers should run through all the user install scenarios and make sure they work including migrating old user accounts. However, that said, now that I have my pristine snappy new setup that has a much smaller footprint, I feel it was totally worth it and actually quite cathartic to rid myself of loads of files and apps that I hadn’t used in ages. So hopefully for those of you who really want to use Snow Leopard with CS4 this solution will help you and save your sanity. For those who want the ease of use of migrating everything over auto-magically and having it all work and not worrying about it? I would wait until for the next round of updates. Hope that helps.

I would love to hear any experiences anyone else out there has had with Snow Leopard good or bad. Thanks and cheers!

Like most of my office mates here at Strategic Insights, I not only work on a Mac, but I am a huge Mac-o-phile (not to be confused with an Apple Fanboy).  For the past 6 months, I’ve been looking forward with baited breath to the release of the new Snow Leopard operating system.  Not because it had anything special to offer in terms of new features – in fact, this release wasn’t touted as having many new features at all, but more of an optimization of user experience.  Still, it was new and it was Apple, so I wanted it.  (OK, maybe there’s a little Apple Fanboy in me after all.) But as the hours ticked by and the clock wound down, I found myself thinking of holding back and letting others take the fall. Rumors had started popping up about software incompatibility and required upgrades.  Plus, I don’t have a spare machine to install it on and give it a test run before throwing caution to the wind and updating my work machine. Caution prevailed and I back burnered the decision.

So now a good solid week and change has gone by and I’m once again considering the upgrade.  An office mate took the plunge on day 1 and has had a mixed experience, which might result in a complete, start-from-scratch reinstall.  Plus, less than a week after its official release, an update to the operating system has been seeded to developers to address a number of bug fixes.  This action, while responsive on the part of apple developers, does not inspire confidence.  In fact, one of the other grumblings that has been circulating around the internet water cooler for some time is that Apple was rushing the not-ready-for-prime-time Snow Leopard out the door to beat Microsoft to the punch in releasing their own Operating System update – Windows 7.

So to those of you early adopters who upgraded with a devil may care attitude, what would you recommend?  Dive in headfirst now?  Wait for the upcoming 10.6.1 update?  Or adopt an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” state of mind and stay the course with good ol’ reliable 10.5.8?  Share your experience.

Chris Griffin
Assoc Creative Director
Strategic Insights

Or as the title might read…

Alternative font use for the web.

Are you sick of the “web safe” fonts as much as I am? Well there are some options. Here is an interesting article about it by Ross Johnson called “8 FONTS YOU PROBABLY DON’T USE IN CSS, BUT SHOULD“.

Ross got his availability percentages from codestyle.org which I thought gave a good overview of which faces would be correctly rendered on windows, mac and linux.

If the 8 that Ross talks about aren’t enough for you and you just want to be able to use any face. You may have already heard of the alternative solutions that dynamically replace type on your webpage as the page loads.

Are you already from the sIFR school of thought? Perhaps a Cufón devotee? Maybe a Typeface.js groupie? A fan of FLIR?

They each have their strengths and weaknesses but I still feel that despite being slightly more complicated to set up, sIFR covers all the bases I need covered. And it does it without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, markup semantics or copying and pasting text out of the browser window which are all very important to our clients and their users.

However, I’d like to hear from people about their preferences and why and if there are other up and coming solutions I’ve left out.

Weigh in!

David H. Ford // Director of Web Services // Strategic Insights

I’ll admit this up front: this is not the blog post I had intended to publish this afternoon. In fact, the post I had been writing and researching for was on a completely different topic, and one I had been giddy about for 2 days.

That is, until some candid last-minute research proved what I had stumbled upon this week was really 5 months old.

Woah. Talk about a harsh dose of reality.

Harsh, but not nearly as devastating as if I had plundered along, blissfully unaware of the similar discussions that had already taken place, back when my “news” was actual news. I would have excitedly posted my new perspectives, only to be disappointed when I later found others had already shared similar perspectives on the same topic.

I’m not going to lie, I’m glad my original post turned out to be a wash.

I Was Living in a Vacuum

Plain and simple, it’s easy to assume you are the first to have a particular idea, or be the first to observe a certain angle. Consider the responsibilities, tasks, projects, assignments—just plain stuff—we all deal with on a day to day basis. When we get 5 minutes to observe the ideas and experiences of others outside us, it is very easy to misconstrue the timing of when you happen upon a tidbit, and when that tidbit was truly debuted.

When it comes to ideas, if we limit our realm of experience to only what we deal with personally, we are doomed to spin our collective wheels in the pursuit of something truly new. This is the lesson we pay thousands of dollars to University to come away with. We study former artists and designers in design school, corporations in business school, and chefs in culinary school to not be quizzed upon how well we memorized their work. We study these past and present influences to understand that there is value in seeking out how others have solved a problem in order to arrive at a completely new solution for ourselves.

Even if two people share a similar perspective that they each arrived at independently, it is when those two perspectives meet that the opportunity for growth happens.

In the case of my blog post, it brought me back to this small but critical lesson.

What about you? Share your experiences in the comments.

Jennifer Hoy [follow me on Twitter]
Art Director
Strategic Insights

Adobe CS4 will have been a whole year next month. I am still happily using CS3 despite hearing good things about the new version. If you’ve already made the jump to CS4 or on the brink of upgrading, share some of the benefits, why you upgraded or why you don’t feel an upgrade is necessary.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments to try and nudge me one way or the other.

David H. Ford //  Director of Web Services  //   Strategic Insights