A couple big news items, yesterday: a new pope was elected and a sunset date for Google Reader was announced. I want to talk about the important one.

RSS is a system that hugely shapes the way I read online, and, unsurprisingly, Google Reader has been my app of choice. Other info flows I use include Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. But only Reader gives me good, functional, time-based control. I can easily separate out the important blogs from the less important. I’ve filtered them down (all 265 of them) into a handful of sedimentary layers that allows me to read only what I have time for. If I get through the top priority blogs, I move on to the next. At this moment, the third level has 416 unread posts and the fourth has 1000+, most of which I’ll never read, which is fine by me since I know I’ve already read what’s important to me. I delete anything over two weeks I haven’t yet read. It’s a wonderful system for sorting the best from the good from the so-so.

At the moment, nothing else gives me this kind of control. RSS allows me to create a very personalized magazine for myself in a way that nothing else can. Facebook wants to be my online magazine, but it never will be; it’s a friendship circle, not a professional one. My Google Reader setup is literally my professional trade mag. As a designer and developer, I get most of my industry news and information from that feed. It’s very very important to me in this regard.

The news that Google is finally shutting down Reader (on July 1st) was not unexpected. But it will have big, exciting repercussions in the Web industry. Suddenly, there is a big open space for innovation to happen, innovation that is sorely needed. I wouldn’t be surprised if something rises out of this and fundamentally changes how we use the Web, something big like browsers, or Twitter, or the iPhone. I hope so, at least. RSS is a 14 year old thing, but it still has a lot of unused potential. I’m really looking forward to all the smart discussion that will be happening around this in the next few months. Smarter people than me will come up with some great ideas.

It’s been less than a year since the last redesign, but nevertheless, here we are again. As someone who spends a lot of time learning new tricks and keeping up with new design patterns, this is going to keep happening. I want brianfeeney.us to always feel fresh and clean.

My goal with the new site was to remove a few of the unnecessary elements and pare down the code. It was already simple and mostly unadorned, but I was interested in seeing how far I could take it. So the color boxes are gone — turned into borders in the navigation — and the date circle removed. There were a few instances of repeated linking that I wanted to take away. I like a big footer, but that wasn’t in the cards this time around.

I learned how to use LESS and preprocessors recently, which is where the majority of the code reduction comes from. It’s amazing how much simpler it is to write clear, purposeful code with the nesting rules of LESS. I doubt I’ll ever go back to writing regular CSS, at least by choice. I also built the site fluidly and used only one media query (at 600px wide).

Next up: a new portfolio site for better promoting my work. I love a simple site, but I think a portfolio should maybe show a touch more flash than what I’ve built here.

I am happy to announce I’ve been hired by the awesome Brooklyn design studio, Familiar. They do excellent work in both print and Web and I’m very excited to be working with them on new projects. This last June, I was hired by them on contract to do the front-end styling of a site, and the relationship then turned into a permanent one. I will be the fourth member of the studio, working for the principles Ian, Carl, and Keith. Nice guys all around. And talented.

They’ve also agreed to allow me to work on freelance work, as well, so there should be plenty of new, personal work to highlight here at brianfeeney.us.

This is a great move for me as I’ll be working closely with smart, fun, talented people who have a lot to teach me and a lot of work lined-up for 2013. I’m ecstatic.

Onwards.

It feels so good to be working. My week is filling up with paying design jobs and I have little time to tinker with personal projects. This is new and it’s exciting. It’s a new phase of my career. For the better part of last year, I was highly focused on reading design blogs and designer’s twitter feeds, plowing through the A Book Apart books, and testing out all the newest Web design tools and techniques. It was a huge growth year for me. And now, I’m still growing as a designer, but the majority of my learning is coming from on-the-job experience and less from reading.

Something tells me this isn’t just my own personal point of view. I’ve noticed a sharp decrease in the amount of designers’ personal blog posts and Twitter/Instagram usage in the last 6mo. or so. At the same time, I’m hearing and seeing new projects shipping more often. I don’t think it’s just me working more. I think everyone is working more. This is awesome.

It’s a common refrain that it’s a great time to be a designer, that there is a never-ending line of work out there to be done. It’s undoubtedly true. I suspect (and hope) that 2013 will be a banner year for everyone, and I’m not at all ashamed of my unrelenting optimism.

I am not a content strategist. I am a freelance designer who also develops all of my own work. All aspects of each project fall on me; I have 100% of the responsibility. This means I also have to handle the content strategy. But I am not a content strategist. Or am I?

Web design has grown into a big business, and as it has grown it has splintered into a half-dozen hazily-defined fields: User Experience, User Interface, Information Architecture, Front-End / Back-End Development, and Content Strategy. (These, in addition to non-design jobs like SEO Specialists, Marketers, and Copywriters.) When designing a site for a large enterprise, it’s likely there will be a budget for hiring dedicated staff for each role, a full team of people. When designing for small businesses (small-scope), the budget may only allow for one — just a single person. That’s a lot of responsibility for one person.

I’ve been freelancing for a year now, and if there’s one thing I know I did correctly at the beginning, it was accepting this fact. Being both designer and developer meant I needed to think deeply about everything when starting a new project. If I ignored my duties as a UX designer, users might leave client’s sites with bad impressions. If I didn’t prepare for the IA, users might get lost and frustrated. If I didn’t consider the CS, the client might not know how to use their own site, or the importance of copy clarity over flashy style.

I didn’t expect this, but I’ve come to regard content strategy as the most important aspect of my job. It snuck up on me. Once I started considering content first, making it the priority, it shaped how I did everything else. Organization and aesthetics and typographic treatment and CMS customization, all these things suddenly seemed much much easier. Any time I felt I was against a wall with the design I would take a step back, reflect on my content strategy, and that wall would disappear. There is something about the panoramic view I get from Mount CS that clarifies all the mystery of Web design.

For all the great resources out there for content strategy, the numerous blogs and magazines, I can’t recall anyone explaining how freelancers like me should approach content strategy. I think there’s a distinction between what a Content Strategist does, and what a Design/Developer does when doing content strategy. The specifics of that distinction might be better defined by someone more experienced than me, but I’m sure they’re there.  I’m thinking there is a market for educating small-scope designers how they might properly include content strategy into their workflow. I would like to read it. Maybe I’ll write it.

Frank Chimero — And in a world riddled with a feeling of inertia, I want to find a verb and hold on to it for dear life.

Louis C.K. — The verb of my life is learning.

You can always count on Louis C.K. for a great quote. Here he is from a must-read A. V. Club interview:

LCK: I don’t know. I’d be afraid to call myself that. I think I’m more just very curious. I do have a lot of energy, so I will try stuff. Doing stuff like this is really, really hard work. Putting this tour together was a huge amount of work, and it did mean being a little bit brave, because it’s scary. I don’t want to upset any of these people who do this shit. [Laughs.] You know what I mean? So some of it that’s not just practical is that I will try to do stuff that can be a little scary but feels right to me, even if it’s harder. So that’s what I would identify as feeling like that. Outside of just trying to get it done. It’s worth it. And also, it’s exhilarating.

This is exactly what Web design feels like for me, particularly as I’m at the very beginning of my career.

I am very close to subscribing wholeheartedly to this manifesto of sorts by Jared Erondu, writing at The Industry.

Design can’t be turned off, and contrary to popular belief, it’s not a job. It’s simply problem solving. When we design, it’s either to build something that doesn’t exist yet, or to make something that does better communicate its message. There are no office hours for this. It just happens. Design isn’t only making icons for a new iOS app, or creating fancy buttons for a marketing landing page. It can also be the simple changes you make to your living room. The slight adjustments to the placement of your sofa and coffee table to give off a better vibe. It could be the arrangement of your office space to make you as productive as possible.

It never stops.

The snag, for me, is that design is a job, as Mike Monteiro has very impressively described in his book (which I suspect everyone has read by now). The job part of design, Monteiro points out, is everything that goes into creating the professional interpersonal relationships necessary for professional design work to begin at all, otherwise we’d all be working for free.

What I love about Erondu’s post is the stuff about how designing never stops, which is absolutely true. Life is one long chain of problems to be solved. All day everyday, I’m designing more efficient workflows for making coffee, cleaning the apartment, grocery shopping, etc. But this isn’t just true for Designers; it’s true for everyone. The difference for designers is that we take a little more care into learning from our daily actions and habits and implementing that knowledge into our work.

So, no, design isn’t work if you view it as a natural extension of your everyday living. But design is a job when it comes time to pay the bills and be a professional.

In Addition: There’s a great companion piece that I think could be paired with this in the NYT’s Opinionator blog called The ‘Busy’ Trap, by Tim Kreider. Kreider noticed how his life was being negatively impacted by instinctively telling everyone how “busy” he was, even when it wasn’t necessarily true that he didn’t also have time to see his friends. Apparently it’s a pandemic — not just affecting Kreider and I — that we’ve all placed such an importance on seeming/feeling/acting busy when in fact we’re really not. Like Erondu, I’m thinking about design all the time, even while I’m quote unquote off the clock. While that’s good for maintaining consistency, it doesn’t actually mean there isn’t time in my schedule for my friends, even though they might interpret it that way.

So then there must be a pragmatic synthesis between Erudo’s and Kreider’s pieces. We should consider everything we do to be an act of design (problem solving), including spending time with friends and not talking about work, but this also means we should stop assuming this way of thinking actually eats up all of our time. We are designers every hour of the day. And, if we love our jobs, the work will get done. No need to tell everyone about it.

Harry Roberts suggests always applying margins in one direction only — a good idea — and also writing it in universally at the top of your style sheet — an even better idea:

I’m not sure how I arrived at this rule, but I’m really glad I did and I would likely never ever change it. The basic premise is that you should try and define all your margins in one direction. This means always use margin-bottom to push items down the page, and margin-left to push them across the page. I’m going to focus mainly on margin-bottom throughout this article as it’s the most obvious to explain, but this can be applied to both directions (top/bottom, right/left).

So if I know that all my margins are consistently in the same direction then I can be a lot more confident that if I add, move or remove an element my spacing won’t mess up. This isn’t just about something as pretentious as vertical rhythm, this is about spacing in general. If everything is the same then it doesn’t really matter what is where, it all behaves similarly.