The names don’t matter; the song remains the same as ever.

An experienced and well-respected designer wrote a blog post suggesting that a current school of thought is the One True Way (OTW), and anyone not practising OTW isn’t a real web designer. An up-and-coming young designer disputed that and called him a dick. Cue lots of people attacking and defending both sides.

The thing is, nothing should be holy. OTW is great right now, and I have a great deal of respect for the industry figures pushing it and opening our eyes to it. But it’s just a school of thought. Quickly and routinely suppressing any mention of criticism to get more life out of your current conference talk? That’s pretty lame, and it’s against the spirit of innovation.

Up and coming young designers should be questioning every single thing we hear at conferences, intelligently reasoning with every blog post and every hot new technique. If you come back at the end of it agreeing with the motion, great. If you disagree, also great. This industry is about figuring things out and innovating. Making up your own mind. Not getting preached to.

But don’t be a dick, and don’t call people dicks. And if you’re that well-respected industry figure, you should know better than to threaten to break a 21-year-old’s fingers.

There’s also been talk recently of less ‘snark’ on the internet recently. This isn’t what this or this were. Just to keep that clear. Constructive criticism isn’t always a personal attack, and without constructive criticism we won’t progress as an industry.

“Desingineer” -> mythical person startups are looking for who can do UI, UX and also excellent front- and back-end coding.

— chris dixon (@cdixon) December 19, 2011

You don’t need to code.

If you’re a talented designer you probably don’t need to learn Ruby on Rails. JavaScript is something your front-end engineer writes. Touching Objective-C and the iOS SDK is outside of your job description, surely. You don’t even need to be able to write the most semantic HTML or the most cutting edge CSS — a designer’s job is to design. Kind of.

But then you could get away without manually kerning, or devising a typographic scale, or putting your type on a baseline grid, or trapping your artwork for print, or making every single pixel perfect.

The point is, just because you can cut corners doesn’t mean you should. Sweating the details is what makes the best designers, and similarly the most curious designers are the most employable.

No, you won’t be working for Google designing interfaces AND writing production-ready, scalable backend stuff, but the chances are that being curious about this stuff makes you more open to opportunities, more able to patch a hole in an emergency, and a more rounded designer all over.

If you care about every pixel then I think it’s irresponsible to not want to understand every other layer of the stack.

Spreading yourself too thin is a legitimate concern – no one wants to be a mediocre designer and a mediocre coder. I don’t think this is a predetermined fate though – I’d rather occasionally do a bit less design than I like and keep up to speed with technology than fall behind and be that 30-something Art Director who is afraid of anything other than FreeHand and OS9.

—

Me? I could never write a JavaScript game but I can do all the jQuery I need to know on a day-to-day basis. AJAX calls and interactiony things. I can write simple apps in Rails & Django – just enough that I can get out a working prototype of hotnewstartup without relying on others. And I’m a crappy iOS developer, but I’d like to think I’m better for knowing the basics.

That’s me, how about you?

Actually, I was so curious about the Lumia that I spent £470 of my own money on one to put it through its paces. I should probably just ask for a review copy in future. But hey, I have a great phone and I want to tell you all about it!

I’m not great at writing tech reviews, and over the past few drafts this post has taken all different formats. Perhaps the best way is to just note down some thoughts and then open up for questions and discussion in the comments? I’m happy to answer anything, try out apps, take screenshots or check your websites are rendering properly.

So in no particular order, my thoughts on the Lumia 800.

The hardware is a stroke of genius – after every generation of the iPhone it’s surely the nicest phone on the market. It’s actually comfier to hold that an iPhone without the bargain-bin tackiness of Android devices. Really sensational, and I’ve been getting a lot of comments about it. One of the only bad bits about the hardware is the screen – it’s an AMOLED PenTile and every bit as bad as the Androids with similar panels. It warps colours and distorts images, and really puts me off developing for the device.

The other thing is battery. The majority of my second day with the Lumia was spent without it – I forgot to charge it overnight and apparently my MacBook Pro doesn’t provide enough juice to charge it. Neither does a 240V iPad wall charger. So I had to wait until I got home to use the Nokia charger. Sidenote – but in the intervening hours (not realising what was wrong with it) I’d tried hard resetting the phone to get it to boot up. So I lost all my data because of the shitty power management. Oops!

Describing what’s great about this device keeps coming back to Metro though. Metro – Microsoft’s new visual language – is absolutely breathtaking. Metro makes almost all apps look fantastic, not just those by A-list developers. The UI elements are gorgeous, the animations are gorgeous and the icons are gorgeous. The phone, as I’ve mentioned before and as everyone who sees it remarks is also gorgeous.

The Twitter app is beautiful. The Spotify app is beautiful. All of the apps are beautiful. Perhaps I’m overly keen to like Metro, but it seems like a solid framework for good apps. With the trend towards skeuomorphism I’m more worried about the legacy of apps designed outside the still-talented towers of Cupertino. With UI guidelines as strong as Metro I’d hope everyone will be producing aesthetically beautiful apps. Time will tell.

The scroll physics are generally great – not as perfect as iOS, but infinitely better than the jarring, jerky, strobe physics of Android. This is a huge coup for Nokia – if only because it kills dead Android’s argument that fragmentation means you can’t optimise for smooth scrolling. Nokia have done, and it makes the device a pleasure to use.

What lets it down is ecosystem. Not the Zune/Xbox Live ecosystem—I’ve only ever had bad experiences buying media through the iTunes Store—rather just the feeling of using the device. Matthew Panzarino points to the lack of quality apps in his review, which is definitely something I noticed. Everything you’d expect (Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, 1Password, WordPress etc) is there, but there are none of the gems that make iOS a delight to use. TweetBot, Reeder, Instapaper, OmniFocus are sorely missed, and I could never consider giving up my iPhone without decent replacements for them. Pretty typography in apps seemingly doesn’t make them good. D’oh!

Bing Maps is awful and unreadable. It’s a shame, especially considering how much richer Android is as a platform for its superior maps. But that’s not a WP7 problem – it’s a Microsoft problem.

There’s no way to take screenshots on this device. There’s no way to take screenshots on this device. Seriously? There’s this hack, but it seems like a bit of a cludge. Come on guys, I have a blog full of people I want to show the beautiful interface to!

Having all of your social media accounts baked into the phone is a nice touch – the system level integration with Facebook that lets me see my girlfriend’s photos on the same card as her phone number and email address is great.

The Lumia seems to support the latest and greatest in web standards – one painful example for designers is the lack of Helvetica on the device, so either embed it with @font-face or get used to seeing lots of Arial! Media queries have been fine in my testing – as with web fonts, if you want me to test anything please let me know in the comments.

When asked how I like the device I keep catching myself prefixing the review with ‘actually, surprisingly, it’s really nice!’. Not ‘it’s really nice’. But a patronising semi-excuse. And this is the problem with Microsoft and Nokia. They might have produced a fantastic product but at least on this occasion it will not be viewed on a level playing field. Remember rooting for the underdog North Korean football (soccer) team during the 2010 World Cup? That’s this.

The flip side is I have to keep questioning myself and what I believe in. Cellphones should not prompt an existential crisis. It’s just a phone. But I keep having to ask myself whether I want Apple to win, or I want better to win. As a designer I hope I always go for better. Metro is undeniably gorgeous but I still can’t form an objective opinion about whether the phone as a whole is good enough to replace my iPhone.

The facts say it’s good enough. My heart says no.

I just can’t rationalise living outside of the Apple safety net. 80% of the population probably can, and will love a phone that smokes Android.

I’m going to be auctioning off the Lumia when I’ve finished having a play with it, with any profits going to Movember. If you’re interested, get in touch.

They’re a great case study in contrast. Contrast is the differentiating factor in turning otherwise good work to great – from typography and grid systems to whole product lines. I’ll get back to the design and tech in a minute, but first, burgers.

Burgers and Choice Paralysis

For those who haven’t visited, In-N-Out Burger sell three burgers – the hamburger, the cheeseburger, and the double cheeseburger. No vegetarian burger, no chicken burger, no fish burger. No Texas BBQ burger, no Angus Bacon Double Whopper Extreme burger.

Just a burger, a burger with cheese, and a burger with cheese and more meat. Easy to pick, easy for the franchise to make, easy product line to maintain. Better by less.

Let’s compare that to McDonalds’ menu. I count 57 burgers, main salads and wraps; that’s before we get to sides and desserts.

Perhaps three burgers is too spartan a menu. That’s fine – I’m partial to some chili and guacamole on my burgers from time to time, and vegetarian friends felt alienated when the rest of the group suggested eating at In-N-Out. But that doesn’t mean that we should go back to the McDonalds option of having several dozen shitty products instead of three great ones though. Five options? Six? Seven? Some kind of reasonable compromise before descending into fast food choice paralysis hell.

Of course I’m not suggesting that we make a habit of eating fast food (or offering business advice to McDonalds), so let’s look further afield. Where else do we have no product differentiation and ridiculous naming strategies? Technology, of course!

The elephant in the phone store

If I was going to buy an Android phone I’d have a hard time making up my mind. “A Galaxy? A Nexus? A Nexus S? A Galaxy Nexus Droid Extreme SII Ace? Wait, a Galaxy Nexus is a thing? I thought they were separate products? Gah, sod it, I’ll buy an iPhone”

This choice isn’t empowering the consumer; it’s not being kind and giving them options. It’s two things – overpowering them with choice to scare them into buying something, and releasing a string of mediocre, expendable and replaceable products. Not cool.

Apple sell the new iPhone, the slightly older iPhone, and the old-but-still-better-than-any-Android iPhone. The three hamburgers.

Size matters

Why won’t Apple release a 4″ iPhone and a 7″ iPad? The In-N-Out Principle at work again. A 7″ iPad would dilute the value of the 9.7″ iPad. Different sizes suggest different use cases – a 7″ iPad wouldn’t be different enough to the 9.7″ iPad to warrant different applications, context and mindset. It would just be a slightly squised 9.7″ iPad.

Samsung have released or announced 5.4″, 7″, 7.7″, 8.9″ & 10.1″ tablets (with multiple models of some); in addition to a range of phones which goes up to the 4.65″ Galaxy Nexus. With such small gaps between products, Samsung has ruled out the possibility of unique and innovative uses. Fast food technology.

For more on choice paralysis and watered-down product lines, Peter Bright’s article on Ars Technica about Ultrabooks nails it – again compare Dell, HP or Toshiba’s lineups to Apple’s computers…wait, haven’t I seen this somewhere before?

There it is.

iMac, PowerMac, iBook, PowerBook.

Hamburger, Cheeseburger, Double Cheeseburger.

Cut the shit – it increases the value of the sum of the parts.

I’m bored of reading about Android and PCs, Jon

Good, I’m bored of writing about them! Let’s go back to graphic design. I’ve been meaning to write an article about the principles behind good grid systems for a while now.

In the same way as fewer burgers to choose from helps us make a decision and fill our stomach with meaty goodness, fewer possible combinations of grid units make each one stronger.

The simplified layouts below take the same basic shape  - using a more rigid grid with less flexibility makes for a more tense layout; increasing options makes the whole thing more sloppy.

And an example with more representative content – again the beauty of a grid (unity, contrast and tension) is lost with an increasing number of decreasingly significant options for content placement.

Again, I’m not suggesting that we should always stick to 4 column grids, but when you start your next project make sure you consider the implications and relevance of the grid you’re working with. Less is often more.

Surely you can’t make typography about burgers too?

You bet! This is the big one. I’ve been offering little tidbits of design advice to early-stage startups and aspiring designers recently, and one thing that keeps coming up is refining typography. Not a huge overhaul, not the Swiss ‘kerning tiny bits of paper by hand’ exercises we were forced to do in design school (more on that another time) – just little tweaks and principles that make a world of difference. How? Limiting options, of course!

Creating and sticking to a strict type scale is a great first step. Limit the options of typefaces and weights. One typeface in one weight in one size can be effective; two weights, typefaces and sizes is fine. But using 5 typefaces on a site, in an inconsistent range of sizes and every weight they come in? You’re back to McDonalds again.

In Josef Müller-Brockmann’s seminal book ‘Grid Systems in Graphic Design‘ there’s a brilliant illustration of this concept – if you don’t own the book then I highly recommend it.

Of course this principle isn’t just applicable to graphic design, tablet computers and beefburgers – in almost any field or application, limiting choice makes each option stronger by itself and stronger as the sum of parts.

And next time you’re in California, stop by In-N-Out.

A skeuomorph is a design feature found on an imitation, pastiche or homage that was necessary only to the original. Often used for the sake of familiarity, they are details that have moved from function to form. —Tom Petty

Often tacky, I’ll grudgingly admit skeuomorphic interfaces can be useful. Occasionally. Whilst not the most refined graphic solutions, there’s something to be said for familiarity. In moderation (and depending on context) I often go for the beautiful-but-dated Calculator app over the more progressive Soulver. For more complicated needs the flexibility of Soulver is invaluable, but for quick additions the familiar metaphor of a Braun calculator is passable.

When the metaphor isn’t referencing anything.

Calendar, Notes and Contacts are all explainable — they reference real world things (even if they shouldn’t). My Mum likes that her calendar looks more like a Filofax than Outlook 2003. Fair enough. A Filofax is a thing. I get it. And the Compass app is based on a compass. Another thing.

But I’m pretty sure there’s not a thing in my physical living room called a ‘Find My Friends’. The metaphor is empty. It’s not referring to anything. It’s just a leather texture.

Paper doesn’t scroll; much less so a digital map debossed into a bevelled Corinthian leather surround. It can’t be a thing.

It’s when we’ve transcended reference to lazily base new interfaces on inconsistent real-world materials that things become dangerous.

We risk rooting ourselves in the past.

I always wanted a leather bound stalking tool. Google Latitude was way too professional looking. —@jazzpazz

So what do we do with no metaphor to go for?

A logical conclusion might be that skeuomorphism is so ingrained in Apple’s visual language now that moving past it is impossible. That every new Apple app should be doused in texture. That the brand-new iTunes Movie Trailers app should be draped in red velvet curtains, with crushed popcorn scattered around.

That would be nice and familiar for users, wouldn’t it?

Of course not.

Apple can and did build a better application in this case by avoiding the obvious metaphors and just making a good app.

It can be done.

Neat! What other metaphors are broken?

Newspapers and magazines. The first wave of iPad newspaper apps was a skeuomorphic shitstorm. Accidentally picking up the print edition of The Metro ruins my morning commute, but the iPad version is infinitely worse. I get it. You like your columns and smudged ink. You don’t want to put any design thought into this newfangled iPad business. Laziness won’t win you any friends.

In contrast, the newly released Guardian app is brilliantly un-skeuomorphic. There are no for-the-sake-of-it columns, no blackletter mastheads, just a clean grid and perfect typography. I think it’s a huge improvement over the vast majority of iOS news-delivery apps. As a vehicle for branded periodical content (as opposed to an aggregator such as Reeder) it might be the most forward-thinking app period.

The Guardian get it.

And then Apple fuck it all up.

Newsstand is a problem. Having a single collection for all branded periodical content is awesome and useful. Having a single location for purchasing those apps is also awesome. Forcing that content into another outdated metaphor—in this case a wooden shelf of printed media—is wrong. Especially when lots of the content (e.g. the Guardian) is pushing past that metaphor to create new, unique, and appropriate experiences.

The Guardian app breaks past the page/paper/column metaphor. Newsstand tries to neatly shovel it back into the days of print. For familiarity. Familiarity that won’t be present in the very near future. It completely ignores the design direction the Guardian team have taken.

It takes the easy way out, and as designers we don’t believe in easy.

Yesterday’s News

The transition from daily print newspapers to daily iPad news(~papers) has been uninspired. In the age of Twitter it seems ridiculous to wait for your news – breaking news is now instant; confirmed reporting and reaction comes within minutes and hours. By the time print newspapers report on the story it seems quaint and backwards. Old news.

Over the past few days there’s been great discussion on Twitter about the place of the Guardian app – whether it is a step backwards or forwards, and whether we need daily editions of yesterday’s news at all. Miles Cheverton hits some great points in The Last Spasms of a Dying Business Model

[The Guardian] is trying to fit an old media paradigm (the daily print) into a world where days don’t really exist, into a world where we can update things as they happen, in a world where you can write an article about a terrorist attack as soon as it happens in 6 words, extend it to 6 paragraphs an hour later and extend that to a 6 section in depth analysis. None of the possibilities and advantages of working with a fast, constantly connected smart media device are used, even when doing so would be cheaper.

And I absolutely agree with this. I agreed with it so much that I wrote 10 000 words arguing the same thing for my dissertation a year ago. But then the Saturday edition of the paper landed (automatically) in my Newsstand this morning. And then I changed my mind about this particular metaphor. Kind of.

Branded content is nice.

It’s nice reading content by the Guardian. They’re a brand I trust, whether in print, on the web or online.

A curated collection of content is nice.

I appreciate the Guardian’s curation of content – being able to flick through relevant things that I might otherwise miss on my strict diet of only reading articles linked to by John Gruber. Whilst they have everything on their website, it’s nice to just be shown some things. Just the things that matter today.

It doesn’t have to compete with instant.

In the same way that the weekend newspapers are a more leisurely, editorial discussion rather than break-neck to-the-minute reporting, I see a future in ‘trusted news sources’ providing that editorial discussion. Realtime is great, but if you’re adamant that a daily edition is good then make it interesting stuff we haven’t read rather than what we read as it happened yesterday.

Cognitive dissonance, Jon?

Not really. Two different metaphors. The visual metaphor and the daily edition metaphor. The issue I care most about is ridding the world of me-too skeumorphic monstrosities. I care that future apps for finding my friends don’t look like a thrifted leather jacket, and I care that future digital content delivery mechanisms don’t look like print newspapers.

The Guardian app doesn’t look like print, it looks like the future. The content could do with either being realtime or focussing more on editorials, but for now the fact that it specifically doesn’t look like its print edition is enough for me.

The priority for us as visual designers should be to out-innovate skeuomorphism – not just for ourselves, but for the next generation.

The ones who will never pick up a printed newspaper or magazine.

I’ll see how it goes and tweak as necessary, but for now if you’re a pre-money startup, or a (prospective?) design school student feel free to RSVP to one of these slots with your Skype or iChat username and we’ll go from there!

My availability on Google Calendar

The thing is, Windows 8 is a very impressive operating system. Shockingly good, if you consider the low standard we expect from Microsoft. Metro is utterly gorgeous. I fundamentally disagree with Apple’s descent into skeumorphism. I disagree with the principles behind it and the way I see their interfaces going in the next 5-10 years. On the other hand Metro is fresh and bold, but most importantly it looks like something one of my favourite designers would have created. It’s straight out of 1960s Switzerland, but rather than falling into the trap of being too flat and too rigid an interpretation of 60s Modernism, the whole thing feels clickable, touchable and interactable. It’s a balance I’ve struggled with for as long as I’ve been designing interfaces, so I can appreciate the solution they’ve presented.

It neatly avoids the trap that Apple and Android UIs have fallen into – hinting at depth is fine, but descending into a clusterfuck of of faux-leather textures, glossy buttons and redundant metaphors is taking it too far.

But wasn’t Windows Phone 7 a bit shit?

Yup. I’ve admired Metro for a while, but found it to be too ambitious for a smartphone. It just feels cluttered on a 4″ screen. Or maybe it was just badly implemented. There was a huge disparity from looking at the beautiful screenshots and actually using it. What does this mean for WP7? That’s not within the scope of this blogpost. On a 10″ tablet though, with more room to let the design breathe? This could be a serious competitor for the ‘lounging on the sofa checking Twitter’ category.

What about Aero?

I can appreciate a juggernaut like Microsoft being afraid of alienating users with a rapid change of direction. I don’t like it, but I can appreciate their business goals. I think there will have to be some future iteration of Windows with Aero in it. But I don’t see the dual-interface thing working out well for them – it presents too many compromises in hardware performance and interface usability. It shows that Microsoft didn’t learn from a decade of unsellable ‘tablet’ devices. With that said, Aero does look a little nicer than on Windows 7. Perhaps they should release an updated Aero as Windows 7.5.

Bi-interfacing ≠ #winning.

Switching between two interfaces just isn’t going to work. Not for a tablet OS. Click targets and tap targets are too different.

Gruber made an interesting point the other day – perhaps on desktop you’ll have both Metro and Aero; on tablet devices just Metro. That would be fantastic. I wouldn’t use a desktop version of Windows any time soon, but in the event that they really nailed the tablet ecosystem I could see myself trading my iPad for a Windows tablet for casual use.

If they get rid of Aero on tablets they’ll have a shot at producing cheap, light tablets with modest hardware and excellent battery life.

So you think Microsoft is going to whoop Apple’s ass?

Nope. My spidey-sense is telling me Microsoft is organisationally incapable of doing anything exceptional. They’ve hired some fantastic designers but I just don’t see them working as a team to create a great product. The design teams are only a tiny blip in MSFT’s organisational structure, and there are too many potential conflicts of interest that will prevent them from creating a beautiful and pure OS. Godforbid they make a Metro-style Ribbon…

The other reason is fragmentation. Without a full-stack offering to compete with Apple (or soon, Google-Motorola) it will still be Windowsy. Things will still break. Asian OEMs will still release shitty hardware, and that shitty hardware will work like shit with Windows 8.

Let’s not forget why we made (and enjoyed) the switch to Macs - it wasn’t that OS9/X was prettier than Windows (arguably the first few iterations of OSX were ugly as sin compared to the more restrained XP) – it was that Macs just worked, and we were sick of .dll files, registry entries and things breaking on PCs.

And that’s the most important thing Apple still has going for it, because they can’t rely on their interfaces any more.

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If you have Windows 8 installed I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments!

So, London has just been burnt and looted to shit. I’m 6000 miles away right now, so I can’t be in the streets helping the clean-up efforts, but I want to find a way to help those with their homes and businesses destroyed. Perhaps you’re not from London, or the UK – maybe you are. It doesn’t matter; we all want to help rebuild the city we love.

The design community’s response to the Tōhoku Earthquake was inspiring. I don’t have figures on the amount raised by various designers (selling posters etc), but it was touching to see our industry figuring out ways to contribute other than donating to charity.

Let’s do the same thing for London. Some quick thoughts:

I don’t think donating to charity—whether direct or through things like poster sales—is the best option. It might be an option but with so much destroyed we should try to rebuild first. We’re good at building stuff, right?

I don’t know how we can help those who have lost their homes. Maybe you do? Let’s brainstorm ways to help in the comments and on Twitter.

I have an idea for helping small businesses. I’m not sure if it’s too little, or too corny, but hear me out:

Over the coming weeks and months we’ll have lots of small/independent/family/local businesses trying to rebuild themselves. I can’t imagine the challenges they’re facing, but one thing we’re good at as an industry is marketing those businesses, and helping them get recognised (in real life, and via social media).

How about we find willing shops that are in need of a little bit of help, and help them build a website (assuming they don’t have one already), get word of mouth going online, and whatever else it is we usually do for clients? Hopefully it would help them kickstart business? Perhaps this could eventually turn into a directory of affected businesses and designers willing to spend some time helping?

I don’t know. Just a thought.

I don’t have an answer, but I’m convinced we can do something as an industry and as a community to help. It would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments and on Twitter; hopefully we can get the ball rolling as soon as possible.

So I’ve been in, around, and thinking about Design Education for a long time; I’m just really shit at finishing blog posts. But I have a shiny new blog urging me to write on. So here we go, stream of conciousness style.

Before I start, it’s been difficult over the years to restrain public ranting about Ravensbourne. What follows is a completely objective post about my experience there, after the dust has had sufficient time to settle; it’s more rational and less emotional than the drafts I’ve written over the years.

The Good.

Learning typography in a traditional setting, from people who have been there (Basel/Zurich), done that, and kerned the t-shirt. Typesetting by hand, on paper. Learning about grids, 1-on-1, from actual Modernists who actually knew Muller-Brockmann. Having Wim fucking Crouwel come in for an intimate lecture on your birthday.

Spending three years in a studio with classmates— laughing, joking, kerning, stressing out, sticking in, cutting out, learning together and teaching each other. Having older students to look up to, and having younger students to (hopefully) pass things on to. Just being in that environment for that amount of time is incredibly valuable.

You can’t replicate that learning from home (due to the internet not being the greatest setting for learning design), or at an internship/apprenticeship/etc (due to time constraints), but I’m not sure it’s valuable enough to justify the investment.

The Bad.

Feeling like The Good Ship Web Design is sailing off without you. Thinking you’ve had enough learning and want to start doing. Right now. Before another amazing site gets launched that you didn’t have the chance to work on. Because you’re sat in a classroom meeting unproductive assessment criteria when you could be doing meaningful work. Seeing younger designers (who haven’t committed to years of education) achieve great things, and curse yourself for being stuck in this situation.

On Sketchbooks, and ticking boxes: of course we have to learn to design on paper. No one disputes that. Going straight to the Mac is a mistake we’re all guilty of in the early stages of our careers, and we could all stand to keep better visual scrapbooks. Sketchbooks are brilliant.

But not when they’re a key component of assessment. I’m dyspraxic and, to cut to the chase, when I’m in the zone I can’t slow down, print out what I’m doing, neatly cut it out and stick it into a sketchbook, then annotate it just to show the assessors my thought process. Not without ruining my work and focus.

Just one example.

Outdated assessment styles and disability discrimination combining to make for mediocre outcomes; just one example of how inappropriate and self-serving design education has become. Nice. If a degree has to be compromised to be shoehorned in to the national education framework then it’s not appropriate anymore. 

Education can’t do digital.

The problem is BA (Hons) degrees need to be validated. They need to have a set curriculum, with set projects and assessment criteria for those projects. Web design is moving so fast that just taking an hour out to write this post has caused me to fall behind(!). There’s no way that something as fast moving as web design can be shoehorned into a 3-year validation cycle. Ish.

Front-end code can’t be taught in universities. Period. It’s moving too fast. C++ and Java can be taught, but they’re not moving at breakneck pace. Let’s forget the idea of web design education requiring a code component. I just can’t see a way it can be done. I still passionately believe that every graduating designer should know how to write HTML and CSS, but the classroom isn’t the place for it.

What the classroom can teach is design for the web. User Experience design. How to think like a web designer, rather than a print designer doing a website. Big difference. And that’s not being taught properly because the staff aren’t in place. With such a high demand for good web designers at the moment who would choose to teach? What you get is tutors who honed their skills as print designers being told by management to ‘make things digital’. It doesn’t work.

But that’s the only hope I can see for design education – have relevant tutors teaching relevant design, or die.

The Outcome.

Things worked out for me in the end, but I wonder if it was directly a result of design education as a system, or a combination of chances on the side. One example is if Ravensbourne hadn’t scrapped its analog facilities (screenprinting, letterpress, darkroom) I would have been content making posters. Without these facilities I became jaded with print design which led me to web design. In a roundabout, unintentional way, my education made me a web designer.

But that’s just my story – knowing what I know now, I don’t think I could recommend any design course apart from Hyper Island. Possibly some of the UAL colleges if you’re intent on being a print designer at the end of it but so was I.

‘But I want to be a print designer!’

In 3 years I’m sure the web will be even a more attractive prospect than it is today, and I think you’d be foolish to not pursue a career in digital design. Seriously. It’s awesome.

What are the other options?

Try to find a job somewhere that will teach you the ropes. Not an agency still creating Flash or tables. Apprenticeships like Mark Boulton was offering are a great idea. I don’t have the answers yet, but I do know that design school shouldn’t be the best one. I really hope some day we can solve this problem, because there are positives to formal design education. I’m just incredibley jaded by my experiences.

Conclusion

Urgh, dissertation flashback. No one should be tripping on Night Nurse trying to write about the ontological connundrums of eBooks. It hurts. I didn’t mean for this post to make any sense, but I have felt the need to share my experiences. It’s been cathartic. Maybe I helped a prospective design school student. Probably not. Thanks for reading, would be great if you left a comment letting me know your take on it!

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If you got this far you deserve a picture of a very young looking James Alegria. He’s going to kill me for this.

Why are you in San Francisco, Jon?

I’m making some awesome pixels with the guys at Prismatic. We haven’t nailed our elevator pitch yet (and I want to do the product justice), so I’ll just say it will involve an app in the sphere of content curation/sharing/consumption. Kind of.

I’m working with some insanely talented engineers, and doing the most challenging IxD of my career so far; let’s just say it won’t be your run-of-the-mill RSS Reader. Stay in touch on Dribbble and Twitter to be the first to see and hear what we’re getting up to.

Here’s the splash page I put up whilst we focus on actually building the product. We’re not looking for signups or anything right now (hence the lack of content), but everyone’s been asking to see what I’ve been working on so…

How does San Francisco compare to London?

I’ve lived in London for 22 years, I love it more than anything in the world and I will always be a Londoner at heart. But this place is next level. I don’t want to descend into clichés but there’s an awesome buzz here.

• I walked past Jack Dorsey in the street on the day I arrived.
• I’ve met loads of amazing people at great startups (there are startup events every night of the week here).
• I’ve learnt so much about Venture Capital that I’m finally not letting down my Jewish roots!

Maybe I didn’t make enough of an effort in London; maybe I socialised too much with the design scene and not enough with the startup scene (they’re relatively fragmented in London); in any case I see San Francisco as a massive boost to my career — and I think it should be to yours too.

My career? Really?

Sure, move out here. If nothing else it will give you an amazing experience to take back to London, Lisbon, Lagos, or whereever you currently work.

Jump

A few years ago a classmate at uni who’d worked at a big agency in New York mentioned I should stay in London, that the American design scene is too much of a culture shock to be productive. I now realise that that’s exactly why you should throw yourself into new experiences. He said that in New York people worked till 8pm(!). It’s 3am on a Sunday night and we’ve just finished work. Suck it.

Maybe it’s a startup thing – that if you have some vague notion that you’re trying to make the world a better place it becomes fun; if you’re rebranding a nothingy corporate client you want to end your life a minute past 5pm. But anyway.

Come to California, build awesome stuff.

Everyone is looking for designers here. Here’s a huge thread on Quora talking about the shortage of designers. If you have a portfolio, send it to me and I can pass it on. If you want advice, email me. Seeing Luke Beard’s blog about working at Zerply earlier this year really inspired me to find work in America after dreaming about it for years; if I can return the favour and help another designer make that leap of faith it would be awesome.

If in doubt

Say you’re creating ‘the Airbnb for geosocial hyperlocal Instagram-esque vertically-integrated metastartups’. I don’t know what that means but presumably someone in the Valley does.