laura j. rinaldi

Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) when designing websites

When I first started in graphic design, printers told me to "keep it simple stupid" when designing things (also known as KISS). I was recently reminded of this when a client came to me, lamenting the designer of her shiny new website.

It seems he had set up the website so that it was quite nice, but every time she wanted to ad a section, a page, or more to the page, he had to jump over hopes, because he had not designed the site to expand. Granted, she had never told him that. I'm sure she didn't even know what she wanted, but in building a very nice site that was made for just a certain amount of pages and words on the site, he made a fatal blunder. It was not easy to expand.

And thus he has lost this client, at least for updates.

It's a hard choice. I too have designed sites that could not be expanded without a lot of work, but in doing so, I have also learned that it is easier to make a nice looking site that is easy to update, than a complicated site that takes as much time to update as it did to build it originally.

And this is not the first, and will probably not be the last site that I have gained because the original designer made it too hard to update. I got one about year ago, done all in Flash. It was quite lovely, and when I asked why the client wanted me to redo it, she said it was too expensive to keep updating in Flash. Keep it simple, she told me. Make it easy to update.

And so I did, and I have kept her happy with her site updates ever since.

Doing something simple, a mailto link

I have been working with forms and "mail to a friend" forms, and those are all well and good, but sometimes you just need to do a simple mailto link, such as I had to do the other day.

I knew how to do the basic code, such as a subject line or a contents line, but not much more. Good thing the web has a site for just about everything.  So, with no further ado, here is the site. One thing they don't mention is that you need to use an ampersand. Without that, you won't get to do more than one thing.

And this is what the code looked like "mailto:test@mtest.com?subject=
Send%20more%20information%20on%20SmartPay&body=Yes,%20I%27d%20like%20to%20
learn%20more%20about%20SmartPay%20from%20Financing.%20"

Isn't that cool? Isn't that so much easier then doing a form, when you can use the clients' email program to do all the work?

The answer is yes.

Favorite writier leaves Newspaper

Dean Takahashi is leaving the San Jose Mercury News. The good news is that he is going to Venture Beat, so, unlike the old days, when a writer left, you couldn't read him, I will still be able to. Cool deal.

I find I am becoming more and more a fan of the blogs, though i still love newsprint. I love reading at the table with my breakfast, but i find, as I said before, that I have to carry my paper to my computer to get the whole gist of the article. It is nice, when reading on the web, that all I have to do is open up a new tab to get the rest of the story.

So now, that just leaves Gary Richards. If he leave, then I will drop my subscription and only read that paper on-line, as I can get all the comics, and news on the web now, and without good-writers, it is just wire stories anyway.

A site for logos

I am glad I do not make my living doing logos. It is tight out there. People don't want to pay for a fully designed, concepted logo. They want something quick. They want something cheap. Twice now, one of my clients has gotten her logos from a website, and she has been happy with them.

So, what sort of website does that sort of think. Years ago, Rick Tharp, may he rest in peace, did a story on trying to get a logo from one such place. It was very funny, and showed how you really do need a live person, schooled in art, with experience, to get what you want.

Well, I guess that is what they have these days.  I was reading Adreas newsletter the other day, and he recommended this site for getting your logo designed. I expected to find something akin to grade-schoolers putting up slock, but was surprised to find some very nice logos.

The site, owned by hp, specializes logos. Interesting concept. They even have a web page where you can see the person who is designing the logo and what other logos they did. Not that I really believe these people exist, but interesting none the less.

Illustrator in 1987

I just viewed a video about the first version of Illustrator at Vector Art.  We may mock that it was just in gray scale, and that the Mac in the video is very odd looking (unless you used Macs back then, but we forget that desktop publishing, as it was called, was just taking off in 1986, with laser printers that only printed in black and white.

In fact, i remember when the first color monitors on Macs came out, and people said, well, that's all well and good to create things in color, but not if you can't print in color. Seems odd.

I remember those heady days, and don't regret learning Illustrator back then. It really was the best thing out there.

Client meetings

I'm in a client meeting right now.

Well, no, not really. I don't really blog while I am in meetings. Rather, I am waiting for a client meeting to start. The thing I hate about client meetings is the before and after. I hate taking time out of my day to go to them, and I hate waiting around for them to begin, and finally I hate trying to get back into my work mode after going to the meeting.

The meetings themselves are fine. In fact, I love the meetings. I love learning about the client, thinking up new things, getting my creative juices flowing. I love trying out ideas. I love the idea that something is being created. In fact, sometimes I am so stoked I can't wait to begin, and in the drive back to my office, all I can think about is how cool this particular project is going to be, how it will look so good in my portfolio, and how the client is just going to love it to bits.

So, it isn't the meeting itself. No. It's all the other stuff that gets me down.

But, at least I have access to a computer, and at least I can write in my blog. I suppose that makes things different from the old days when I used to go to client meetings, and wait around, and have no access to the outside world.

Tearing up the New Yorker, and other publications

Am I supposed to only read where I have access to a pen? Or to the Internet? Or am I supposed to read all publications on-line? I ask this, because, in the last few years, I have found that there is a link for more information in everything I read. This would be fine if I were reading the publication on-line, or if I were reading it where I had immediate internet access.

I have taken to tearing out pages from the New Yorker, so that I can refer to them later when I am near a computer. I have been taking the business section of the newspaper into my office, so I can check out things that are mentioned. But sometimes, since I read in more rooms in the house than I have the computer, the pieces that I have taken out of the New Yorker or the San Jose Mercury News doesn't make it into my office. They sit on my nightstand in my bedroom, or in the bathroom, or in the living room, waiting to make their way to the device that will tell me what more I could learn, if I only went on-line.

When i complained about this, to two collegues, they said they just read all the news and magazines on-line, and that solves the problem. But I don't like to do that. I enjoy reading the New Yorker at night, as I go to sleep, and the newspaper in the morning at breakfast.

Ah well, just another problem to be solved by carrying a wireless device with me at all times.

Reviews that do me no good

Oh, I supposed I should call  this Reviews that frustrate me more than do me no good, because, I suppose, in the long run they do. And the column, in the Mercury News, in all fairness, is called "First Look", meaning that it is the first time you would be looking at something. But what is the most annoying is that the last few times I have seen something on First Look, it is not available to the general public yet. So, what is the point? What is the point of showing something that is still hidden?

The latest example was for flip. It is a product from Lunarr that sounded quite cool, but when I went to the home page, it asked fro a login, although there were links tot he rest of the site, which I found rather off-putting. When I finally wandered around the site, I finally discovered the part where they say, oh, we gave previews to members of the press, and if you ask really nicely we might let you in.

Forget it. i would rather come back when you were letting everyone in.

When to say you know how

I was trying to think of what I wanted to call this post. The first title I wrote down was 'When to say ou are experienced", but that doesn't quite have the meaning I am looking for. What I am looking for is the notion that you can't apply for a job unless you know how to do the job.

They say that women, as a whole, don't say they know how to do the job unless they have close to all the job skills, and know them well, while men figure they can wing it if they can get in the door. I go with the way that they way that men think (and this may have changed, since I read this study), because since the first job I got, I have said I have skills that I don't have...or have very little of. But, and this is a big but, I am very good at learning on the job, and for my first job, I had enough knowledge to get the job done.

My first job was for an advertising firm who needed someone know knew Illustrator (this was back in 1986, just a bit since it had come out, because they needed someone to transfer bit mapped logos into scalable logos. I had fooled around with the program, and not much more, but I knew I could learn by doing, and so I did. My boss later said, that all the new software that came out, she learned by doing a real project on it, and I have done the same ever since.

And in the this world, sometimes that is the only way to really learn a program, or get a job, especially with new and changing software coming out all the time. I made the mistake of saying I didn't know "WordPress" for a prospect, when I should have said I was familiar with it, because I knew others who had used it, and I could have gotten a book on it, which i did. After that, the next time I was asked, I said that I did know the program, got the job, and learned by doing.

On the other hand, I do get work from one of my colleagues simply because she doesn't want to learn new software, so perhaps it doesn't work for everyone.

RSS Feed on your website

A colleague of mine has one of those problems so many of us who do design and other types of creative services have, we don't have time to promote ourselves when we are busy.  (Although, as I mentioned the other day, another one of my clients is making it a priority to keep their portfolio up to date, so it is a matter of taking the time, sometimes.)

Rick has been busy with stuff other than his website, but the other day, he updated it, and I took a look. I was surprised to see an RSS feeds on it. I had seen RSS feeds on blogs, but never on a regular website, but that is rather cool, really, especially if you are in the process of building it. It is much more fun to be informed that things have changed then to have to keep going back and looking to see how the progress was getting along. It is the equivalent of getting a newsletter, but with a much smaller message.