Development Is Design

I attended Brooklyn Beta last week. While there, I must have introduced myself a hundred times, which of course required me to explain what I do. My stock answer was that I was a designer and developer. Both. And each time it felt weird, as if I was either claiming to be a wunderkind who can do it all, or that I didn’t know the difference between the two enough to pick one.

So when Brad Frost makes the argument that development is design, I nod my head in agreement. I know why we generally think of them as separate, it's just that it is becoming increasingly difficult to define where design ends and development begins. Some front-end work is only translation from comp to code, as in how it looks, but so much more involves how a site works. So much gray area in there.

And so now, when people ask, I’ll just say I’m a designer.

Free Time

I used to read almost 50 books a year. Now I get through maybe a few a year. In the last two years, how I spend my time has completely changed, my priorities rearranged. This is what happens when you make a dedicated effort towards a new ambition. Life takes off in new directions. The time you used to have for fun, random stuff shrinks away.

I have no regrets, because I love what I’m doing now. These days, I have a Career, but my entire life I had always been a dabbler. I’d be obsessed with piano for a month, then literature, then drawing, then philosophy, then soccer, then guitar, then piano again, then studying art, then something else, and then drawing again, and on and on. I love all the things. It was so hard for me to dedicate myself to just one subject for more than a month or so. I always had my paws in so many jars. My free time was quite literally free, unbounded by any promises.

But at 29, I was a barista in New York, playing in a band, designing things for friends sometimes, doing some writing but ignoring a half-finished novel I had sitting at home. There was nothing central to my life, except for activity. I was never able to sit still. I had so much free time that I floated from hobby to hobby with no end purpose in mind, and it started to feel empty.

Free time is a strange thing. For one, it’s a lucky benefit of first-world, modern life. We must be thankful for the hours in the day we have for doing whatever we want. We don’t deserve them. We don’t have a right to them. But we have them. How we spend those hours is important. The hours we spend at work defines who we are at present. The hours we have to do what we want defines who we will be in the future. We are so fortunate to have this, and it can be so easy to waste them.

In 2011 I made a decision: I would finally dedicate my free time to one hobby and make it a career. I began to think of myself as a designer. Not just a person who sometimes designs things, but someone who is a designer. I began spending all my time reading design and dev blogs, building my own websites, playing around in photoshop with purpose. It was exciting and new. For the first time in my life, I was sticking to one project, becoming a designer.

And then, somewhat surprisingly, it happened; I became a designer (maybe more of a developer professionally, but that’s a minor difference, right?). How I spent my free time turned into how I spent my daylight working hours. It was an amazing feeling. And, of course, I owe so much to friends and colleagues for helping my get here. I couldn’t have done it alone.

Now I’m starting to think about free time again. I still have plenty of it, but by habit those hours are still stuffed with design and dev industry blogs, and my freelance design work. I’m unable to draw a distinct line between my job and my hobbies. They’ve blended together and started to feel a bit muddy. It feels a little wrong, a little bit wreckless, like building a tall skyscraper but neglecting to give it windows. I’m growing as a person, but in one direction, up, and not looking out enough at the world around me.

There are things I miss that I need to get back: finishing novels again, and other books that have nothing to do with design; playing music; taking photos; studying philosophy and religion. These were all things that once defined me. They still do, but it's all in the past. I need to pull them back up to the present. I need to make time for new stuff again, to round out my life with more variety. It’s as important as anything.

Parents in Dublin

Katz

Toronto Has Architecture

The Gowanus

Melted M&Ms Mug

Car Wash on 4th Ave

Content Strategy for the Non Content Strategist

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.

Ubiquity

In his self-interview, Should You Buy Facebook Stock?, Jonah Peretti gives this short story of the Web:

When the world shifted from portals to search, Google was the big winner. Now the shift is from search to social, with Facebook as the big winner. The mega-trend is Portals → Search → Social. That's the big defining shift on the web and we are at the very beginning of the transition to social.

I'll hazard to claim the next mega-trend will be Ubiquity. And it will probably slide into being before we've become fully accustomed to Social. I think about what's next for the Web and I see a transition from needing a phone in your pocket to connect to being able to connect everywhere on most anything: watches (like Pebble), car-dashboards, mirrors . . . but not glasses. People want the internet in their glasses like they want flies landing on their noses. Sorry Google. Obviously, this is the future of Minority Report, and I think we're all collectively leaning into it.

One of my most pressing first-world problems is having to pull my phone out of my pocket every time I get a text, or I want to check the weather. If I had a car, I'm sure I'd want all my notifications to appear on my dash so I wouldn't need to fish for my phone wherever it might be resting. I also want everything connected to the Web to control from my devices: the coffee maker, the thermostat (ahem, Nest), lights, etc.

It seems only Apple is really in position to make this happen. But I would hope that others are working on it, and I'm sure they are. There are extra problems involved, like log-ins and security concerns. So it won't be simple. I just think it's inevitable; the Web will be everywhere.