Sankho Mallik's Web Log.

Just read the latest article at Fuel your Interface entitled “Three Big Mistakes that Can Make or Break your Design Career.” Super informative; one of the three tips were to never sit around waiting for work to come – go find it! In this day of social media, personal branding, and transparency, there’s no reason to wait for anything. Go out and get it!

The third tip was to not stretch yourself thin. I’ve personally committed this foul many a time. And everytime, it results in me stressing out, having a lesser quality of life (dramatic, but serious), and most importantly, my work suffers in one of two ways: It’s either terribly late or not as good as it can be. And both of those are unacceptable flaws; so don’t ever take more work than you personally can handle! Try to find someone who you can outsource work to; they may come back to you with work just when you need and don’t expect it.

But the second tip really interested me. Jokingly, it’s referred to as the “Garmon principle” – Garmon being some friend of the author (sorry to belittle your existence, dude named Garmon). From the article:

The first thing you should do is close your laptop, put away your cool bag of tricks, and think. Think, “What would be the perfect site for this? What would it look like? If there were no boundaries, what is the coolest thing, or the most functional way, to make this happen?” Also think, “What will make this worth existing as much or more than the next guy’s interface?” Once you have decided what the best possible solution would be, figure out how to do it. If there is something in your original idea that just simply isn’t possible, then amend it. “Re-idea,” if you will. But never, ever, EVER sit down and start doing things simply because you know how to do them. Because the truth is, no one really cares how much you know about coding or development. The people who are looking at this site aren’t thinking about what it took to make it, or how many advanced lines of code you wrote. They’re thinking about how it is now, as a whole.

So much sense! My feedback after the jump.

A lot of the time I’ve entered projects without knowing what they’d need. I just got my coding knives out, implement some framework or CMS, and made up things as I coded along. They’red be a lot gadgetry, animations, cool shit here and there – but absolutely no focus.

When it comes to web development & design, always think about what you’re doing before you do it! Here’s what happens when you don’t:

1. Ok, here’s a cool navigation feature I saw on the web. Let me make a header and implement that.
2. Ahh, I could use text shadow here. That’d be cool, I don’t use that too often in my CSS.
3. Hmmm lemme get a PHP script up real quick so this search field can have an autocompleter…
4. Hey an ajax updater would be a nice way to pull in fresh content…
5. Hey *client name here*, check this sh*t out. See that sh*t fade in and out? Smooth ass sh*t right there, right?
6. What’s that? You don’t know how to use it?
7. You know, now that I look at this site I just made… none of this stuff works together. Nothing’s very obvious. There’s some flash and pizazz here and there, but no continuity.
8. Ok, that’s fine… I’ll just fix… everything…
9. Fuck. I wish I had thought of what I was coding before I started coding; then I woudn’t have to REDO 50% of a project.

The bold part is to emphasize the cost of just fucking around and making a site without sitting down and giving yourself some direction to follow. The less structured your projects become, it’s all the easier for it not be a “project”: it’ll just be a collage of some cool shit you know how to do.

And you may impress your friends, but whenever traffic comes into your client’s site… it leaves. And you have an upset client who demands changes, and it’s then you realize you’re going to have to recode a bulk portion of your project. All because you didn’t take the time beforehand to figure out what this project needs to do, and how it’s user will interact with it.

So padawan? Big picture first, then slowly drill down to the details. And the details only come together to make… one big picture. Make a goal in light of your client’s need, figure out what would be successful and what wouldn’t, and then achieve it through your design and it’s implementation. Or just fuck around. The choice is yours; are you a hobbyist or a professional?