Good Stuff Happens in 1:1 Meetings: Why you need them and how to do them well
Editor's Notes
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Hello, hashtag #noexcuse\n\nTweetable moments, or violently disagree, please use the hashtag.\n
* Q&A can be the best part, and it can be not the best part\n* There will be Q&A at the end\n* 30 seconds per question\n* Timer, no mercy\n* 30 seconds enough to ask a good question\n* Not:six-part question, pitch your product, life story\n
Ominous title. Fox News/HuffPost headline. Glad you’re here. Whether rallying cry or throwdown, different perspective on how we work.\n
This actually came from a tweet, about a year ago, from Elliot Jay Stocks.\n
This got a lot of attention.\n
Followup, also got a lot of attention, positive and negative. Lot of strong opinions. ON THE INTERNET! Shocking.\n
A few months earlier, Zeldman tweeted this from An Event Apart in Chicago.\n
This also got a lot of attention, from a lot of people...\n
...including me! So we care about this idea. Agree or disagree, strikes a chord/nerve with a lot of people. Quora question.\n\n
But what is it about code that so many of us who call ourselves web designers would rally around this idea, or against it? If we all care this much about it one way or the other, I think it’s worth spending some time talking about it, and about some of the questions it raises.\n\nBut first, let's find out who I tricked into joining me on stage today.\n\nIntroduce themselves. Origin stories. Motivation.\n\nDifferent places, different paths. Interesting and relevant to see how we got here.\n
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Print designer. That’s generous. T-shirts, postcard mailers. Internship with a designer in town. $20 bills and cheap cigars.\n\nI didn’t know anything about design, but nobody knew anything about the web, so I knew as much as anybody else. And I was the one in the room most willing to go learn all this new stuff. So I was a web designer. I did some terrible designs, and nobody knew any better, because nobody knew yet what belonged there on the web and what didn’t. I copied what Veen was doing at Hotwired, I copied David Siegel, Lynda Weinman. \n\nSo I did these designs, and nobody was going to build them for me, so I learned that too. I tried all the software, I used PageMill 1.0, NetObjects Fusion, I remember getting so excited about downloading the first Dreamweaver beta. But along the way, the tools would always fall short - always something I wanted to do that I couldn’t, so I’d have to write the code myself. “Code” I’m talking about HTML 3, this was not programming. But it was all new to me. \n\nAs a kid I had gotten really into HyperCard. I had a friend and the two of us would make these “games” with our own art, sort of choose your own adventure, just stitching together HyperCard stacks and mail them back and forth to each other on floppy disks. The web was the first time since then that I could have an idea, draw something out, and actually make it work and share it with other people all by myself. That’s how the web won me over. That’s how I got here.\n
Big topic, could go a lot of ways. Break it up into sections, I’ll do setup and we’ll try to focus the conversation. If you’re a fan of This American Life, you’ll feel right at home.\n
So back to these tweets, this one in particular...\n
This one got to me at the time, I favorited it. Talk in 2010 basically built around it. But coming back to it there's something that jumps out at me...\n
There’s something very delineative, there’s a line being drawn, now and forever, and we stand on this side of history, and the rest of you on the other side and god will sort the dead. Also empowering, inclusive. The message is for us, by us, it’s a rallying cry. But what... exactly... is a *real* web designer? \n
What’s a “real american”. Subjective, different for everybody. Not here to debate semantics, but something meaningful in how we talk about what we do. Not lines in the sand, who’s in and who’s out. How we all define what we do, and how that rolls up into collective identity as a community. How we talk about the way we work becomes the way we work.\n
We really care about it. Fiercely protective what is “real” - real means “you and me, but not them”. We identify as a community, we bond on shared values. All of these people would have a different answer about what makes a “real” web designer. And everybody else up here, and out there. But we identify really strongly around certain points, on one side or the other, that’s a sign that those are really important things to understand our industry. There is important information encoded there. \n
So, what makes a real web designer? Everybody’s answers are different, learn something by asking, so I asked these smart people, and we asked you, in a little survey. But first, from somebody who isn’t here today, Jim Coudal. Jim has a rule about hiring designers. All other things being equal, he says "hire the one who can write."\n\n
Not because he’s necessarily hiring designers to write copy, not interested in your grammar and syntax. Can you organize your thoughts and communicate clearly. Important skill for design, hard to fake it in writing. Sign of an organized mind.\n\nI like that rule, but I have another one.\n\n
Not a language or spec, and not because I want to hire you to even write code. I want to know if you can think systematically. Can you understand the form and structure of the system you’re designing for. Can you hold all these variables in your head as you go and can you go from planning to improvising to a working product without completely losing the thread. Important skill for web design. As designers we’re very good at faking it, we learn to post-rationalize. Can’t fake it in code.\n
So, if “real” means something different to everybody, let’s find out from these smart people. What makes a real web designer?\n
As web designers, what are the tools of our trade? I said I wasn’t here to talk about semantics, but maybe I lied. Because there’s another distinction I want to parse: between tools and materials. Tools are what we use to manipulate our materials. The writer’s tools are pen and paper, or a typewriter, or a word processor, but the material is language. The painter’s tools are brushes and knives, but the material is paint and canvas.\n\nIf software, if computers are the tools of our trade as web designers, code is the material. Code is our language and our paint. It is the basic material we manipulate to realize our ideas.\n\nIt’s easy to get caught up in mastering the tools - we do this all the time. How long have we spent in Photoshop, and how many tricks have we learned to make it do what we want faster and better. And we master our text editors, all the snippets and commands and shortcuts and particular finesse that we develop with that one tool, our favorite hammer. Tools are important, but the tools will not save us. We have been doing this for 10, 15 years, the tool has not come along that can keep up with the web like smart people writing code, who are invested in understanding the materials, pushing the code to do things we didn’t think was possible.\n\nThere's a quote from Jonathan Ive that I put in the proposal for this panel, because I think it gets to the heart of this.\n
He's talking about product design, and physical materials, like aluminum and plastics. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to apply his point to thinking about why our material - the code - is so important to us. \n\nHe goes on with this: "The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material--the material informs the form.... Because when an object's materials, the materials' processes and the form are all perfectly aligned.... People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way."\n\nI think that's what we're talking about when we identify with this idea that "real web designers write code". There is something that comes through in the end result that is different, that is natural to the medium, when the design comes from a place that understands the material.\n\nDo you guys find that to be true? Is there a different kind of design that comes from designers who can code? Is it better?\n\n--\n\n> "Designing for web is like having sex in a bathtub. It's no good knowing a lot about bathtubs if you know nothing about sex." -Twitter\n\n> Some of the most important design decisions happen in code. I don't necessarily mean that designers are making those decisions, it also means that developers make a lot of decisions that significantly impact the design. I think we can all vouch for this. So does that mean designers must write code, or that designers must rule over all things, like an old-school agency? Or does it mean we all need to communicate and learn each other's territory? If designers should write code, shouldn't developers understand design, user experience, etc.?\n\n> Ethan: responsive design?\n\n> Jenn: different perspective to what you want from a designer\n
When you're a designer working solo, it makes sense to write code. That's how a lot of us got started. Nobody else is going to build this, if I want it to exist I need to learn. And in small teams, generalists tend to be more valuable - everybody needs to be able to help everywhere, so code skills are highly valued for designers. \n\nOrganizations get bigger, roles more specialized, becomes a liability to be mess around outside job description. Designers are responsible for design, hand off to engineers who answer for the code. If a designer breaks the code, it's the engineer's problem, very messy.\n\nThis is real, and it's valid and it's the way things work. But I think there are counterexamples, and also ways to work within that kind of environment, where code skills are still valuable.\n\n--\n\n> Prototypes for building trust...\n\n> [Apple] At Apple, when we moved all the code into version control, the designers, and even the writers were committing code. Not sure how that's working out now, but it’s not impossible even in these big places, if everybody is on board and the support is there.\n\n> [Etsy] A friend of mine, Randy Hunt was telling me about where he works, at Etsy. Every designer at Etsy has commit access. Every designer writes production code. Even the illustrator who does icon design checks his work into trunk himself. This isn't just a tiny startup, this is a Serious Professional Internet Website. And they're rolling out production code every day that designers have had their dirty hands all over.\n\n> Not every company can work like this, you can't pull this off everywhere, it takes a particular attitude and cooperation from everybody, engineers writing tests, accommodating testing and staging environments, etc.\n\n
So let’s acknowledge a truth here: you don't have to write code to design web sites. There are lots of jobs in web design that don't require you to code at all. \n\nAnd as a designer sometimes you get promoted away from it. I haven't written any really substantial code for a while.\n\nSo as our industry grows up and our roles get more specialized, and we’re focused on other things, like content strategy and user experience, and just design, something has to give - we can’t all wear all the hats. So where does code fit in?\n\n--\n\n> What about mobile? Desktop? I don't know Objective-C, am I a "real" app designer? Maybe not. I know I design differently for platforms I can't code for. But I also know I design differently for those platforms than I would if I didn't know how to code *somewhere*.\n\nImportant for starting out, esp. for education. When we started out, nobody knew anything. Everybody was new at this, we were all just learning as we went. If I were starting out today, I think I would have a really hard time getting hired if I didn't know any code at all. As a designer just starting out, you're essentially saying "I haven't made a website, but I'm asking you to trust me that I can." This is already a hard enough sell. If you're up against a bunch of other resumes with real sites or apps that they've designed and built, they're going to be making that case a lot more strongly than you are.\n\nHowever you get the experience, once you have it, you have something to show for it. I can look at what Ryan has done, and I can see that he understands the nuances, I don’t need to look at his code. \n\n--\n\n> I know it’s a challenge for me sometimes to be interested in the latest CSS tricks. At the same time, I think keeping up with advances in web technology shows a necessary curiosity and interest in adapting, in learning, not just applying old mastery.\n\n> Some designers starting will put a bunch of comps in their portfolio to show what they can do. Comps are great, but by themselves they don't cut it for me. A comp only shows me one thing, that you can design a comp. There are a million ways for a design to go wrong, and what matters isn't your ability to have an idea and make a pretty picture, but the ability to execute on that idea and make it real. Code is how web designs are realized. Without it, no matter how you get around it, all you have is a pretty picture and 100 ways it can go wrong. The real skill, the job of a web designer isn't about the idea, it's about the implementation and the ability, dedication and determination to carry it through to something people actually can use without losing the personality and the coherence of the design. I will always ignore the portfolio full of pretty comps in favor of the one with links to real working code.\n
I don't want people to leave today with the idea that we said, or that I said "good designers have to write code". A lot of great designers don't write code. My wife is a great designer, and she designed her site, Pictory, which is a great website that fits its medium. She designed every inch of it, and didn't write the code. But she's built websites, she knows how, and she had a pretty... ehm... close working relationship with one of the developers. And she has a different crossover, she's an editor - part of her materials is the content, words and stories and people, and this is very delicate material. That's an important crossover too, between design and content - we can't all cover all the bases. But she's making things, and that's important. So however you come at that, however you get that experience, that's valid. But know your materials, and master your tools, use them to make real things. People will recognize that.\n
