Cameron Moll gave a great presentation to the Webmaster Jam Session in September in Dallas, Texas entitled Nine Skills That Separate Good and Great Designers. His presentation is filled with great observations about how to think of design as problem solving rather than making attractive things, and is great for budding web desginers. His examples illustrating each of his points find connections both within and outside of the web world, but always creatively support his key ideas. A podcast and PDF of his presentation are available for download. I advise following along in the presentation as you listen to the podcast as the images are important to the talk.
The Webmaster Jam Session conference had a number of speakers worth listening to including Andy Budd, and Eric Meyer. Podcasts of all talks can be downloaded, but the production quality is spotty on some.
Here are my thoughts on the Cameron Moll part of the Jam Session.
One of the things that I took from this is to really and truly be more cautious. Do not over use things. Something he mentioned that I constantly find myself doing is preaching over and over to myself that “less is more”. Yet Cameron goes one step beyond that to say great design is both. It is both less and more. This I found completely staggering because it is completely opposite as to how I have been thinking for a while now. He says that they can coexist in any of our work.
He gives a great example of this with the News Cloud Site versus Google. Its weird cause I like both. At first the news cloud can be over powering, but not really because of the solid color blocks that you see.
Great designers prevent problems. Evidently I am a long ways from being a great designer, cause I constantly run into problems, with every project. I really liked his example of us as designers dealing with the problems though and preventing the users from running into problems by preventing them. For instance he used the idea of instantly letting someone know when a site is being registered for if it is available. This is smart thinking, why would you wait till the end on a separate page to try and relay this and then the user has to click the back button, then their browser doesn’t save the form, and WOW you have to start all over. That is frustrating enough to make you just quit.
Being influenced by everything around you instead of just one thing is something that I have heard filmmakers and
Starting with the homepage, why do we do that? Start on the page that is the core. Micro-design, is the term he used in stating that when designing concentrate on a particular part of a page at a particular time. Multitasking seems to be a no no. So choosing a particular part of the website to start creating, should be the part of the site that is the central ingredient. It is the part of the site that everything is built around. Most of the time, that is not the homepage.
The idea that type stands own its own is great. What is so great about this is that he made an observation that if you take away every picture, does the typography work? This is a concept I plan to start applying.
He starts talking about Bulletproof Webdesign, which is a book that really opened my eyes to creating sites that can just about work anywhere for anyone. His demonstration of using different languages in the same design without breaking it was a good one. this actually goes back to what he talked about earlier, where he said a great designers prevent problems. In this case preventing problems from either the user or the creators standpoint. Bulletproof webdesign seems to be a great preventative.
Re-design vs. Re-align. He says Re-align is purpose driven, so the redesigns scale needs to be decided by what is needed by the user and client. For some sites you need an even fresher design and not just a typical re-design. All in all it depends on the core purpose of the site, what it is being built for.
The most helpful of all is the idea of concentrating on the central purpose of a site and building it around that. All of these are great, but I think that one will be the most helpful. I plan to try and implement all of these though.