After lots of thought about weather or not I wanted to put the time and effort into blogging, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge. Lots of different ideas have been tossed around, but I need to first say that I haven’t the slightest clue what I’m doing! So, I’m going to give it my best shot, and figure things out as I go along.
While I was at FOWD last month, one of the speakers talked about the importance of web designers to be an active member of the [web] community, as opposed to being detached designers. Being active means participating and giving back, instead of just passively observing. This is something that I’ve been thinking about over the past year, but hearing the topic addressed only solidified it for me. I’m not going to go crazy and sign up for every web 2.0 community based service out there, but I might do some Virb or some Twitter, just to figure out the craze. We shall see.
The Topics
I’ll primarily be keeping this site a professional blog; writing about the design, usability, best practices, markup, CSS, and possibly some mini tutorials. As far as frequency, I’d like to post something worth reading every week, but realistically I’ll probably post once or twice a month.
The Design
Designing for yourself is one of the toughest things to do since you are your own client and you want things to be perfect. So after countless hours experimenting in Photoshop with clean looks, dirty/grungy looks, and photo realistic looks, I realized, “I’m never going to be finished with this!” So I put on the brakes, and decided to launch a simple, no-frills, minimalistic design just to get me going with the initial site, and design something better in the near future.
The Name
I’d love to have a catchy name for this blog, but the right strike of inspiration for a name just hasn’t hit me yet. So until that happens, we’re stuck with first name last name!
I’m interested to hear what you think. What topics would you like read about? Have any great ideas for a name for this site?
2 Comments
Found your blog here from a comment on the Cameron Moll site, and I understand what you are talking about (even though I am not a designer). I don’t go posting about the web (two posts in one night is a big deal for me)…but since I’ve been on this big “web audience” focus project (work related) and also, working out my own little corner of the web (a personal effort), I’ve been able to see things from different sides of the fence. I am definitely NOT “cool, technical, or informed” (just to make that clear), but, still a person that is potentially part of “an overall audience” - like anyone else. From that standpoint, some things observed in viewing design oriented sites maybe be useful at least from a “user/visitor/ reader perspective”. (can’t help on the execution side lol).
1) If you choose a professional tone and subject of design, stick with it, be informed (informative) and no hyping/flaming. (Observation about sites intended to discuss design, but ended up way off topic w/ either headline hype or flame wars about best practice- useless to the reader.)
2) Tutorials, practical help. Anyone reading a design and web standards blog isn’t doing so because they know everything. They do it because they DON’T KNOW and want to learn - even pro designers are evolving. Practical working knowledge always helpful. (The worst blogs/sites were the ones lacking audience context; ie: if tutorial geared with assumption of expert photoshop knowledge, categorize or denote this so readers can quickly identify context and usability of information at whatever level.)
TOPICS OF INTEREST:
WEB CULTURE: IE: CRAZE — Twitter, facebook, VIRB etc. etc. Is this useful? If so, talk about to whom and WHY. Social networking is definitely a part of the future of the web - but is often overwhelming, and ultimately ineffective for a majority. How do you see it evolving? And what’s next (future trend)? Give examples, comparisons, observations on what may work, what may not, and why in context of the “everevolvingweb” :)
WEB STANDARDS — This is always a confusing subject to someone who is not a designer. Please clarify this. Perhaps your audience will be folks that already have a background. Ok. Disregard this point. But if it intends to include regular people simplify it. Can you translate what “standards” means into words a regular person can understand/implement and find useful? Can you do that without making them feel totally stupid so they are afraid/distrustful of you (the exact opposite response of what any site wants to evoke) When do standards change? Who makes the rules?
RETENTION: Anyone building anything on anything is seeking an audience or market of some kind to share/use/view etc. And they want to KEEP their audience too. How does your topic relate? Can you explain this in laymen’s terms? Good use/ineffective use of design etc. Even an academic doesn’t want “help tips” written by an academic. :) One practical purpose of design and standards is: to support audience objectives isn’t it? So maybe this relates to your subject too.
RESOURCES: USEFUL resources for design and standards etc..”hey, that’s a cool tip/tool/snippet- thanks for the head’s up frank :)”
SITE NAME IDEAS: something with the word FRANK (as in frank talk, candid, truthful, honest, useful, bottom line) could be appropriate. Unless you want your personal name to be propagated (some folks have regretted using their own names well after site recognition).
Thanks Sibyl for your input. All good advice.
Comments are closed for this post.