Fortunately, the theme this year was “resilience”, which is a new word that we’ve all heard less often. Speakers did their best to pin down exactly what it meant, deftly exploring sub-themes like connectivity, redundancy, simplicity, learning, and adaptability. Trying to summarize the day’s message, John Thackara hit the nail on the head.

Resilience is the ability to take a punch in the face.

If there’s a more visceral way to describe the issues facing the world today, I can’t think of one. Though experts may disagree on exactly how far away the fist is or how much it will hurt or what we did to deserve it, all of humanity is currently taking a punch to the face.

How to take a punch to the face

I have to admit, I immediately googled “how to take a punch to the face.” Turns out there are a lot of people on the Internet with strong opinions on the subject. Here’s the basic advice that everyone agreed on:

• Relax. If you focus on the pain, it will hurt more. Keep your head in the game and stay focused on protecting yourself.
• Roll with the blow. It’s not just a cliché. Moving in the direction of the punch reduces effective velocity and spreads out impact out time.
• Practice. Nothing beats already knowing how it feels to take a punch to the face.

There’s a lot there that can be applied to sustainability, but a big question remains: how do we practice taking a punch to the face?

Getting stronger requires failure

I joined a gym this year. I’ve never been a gym person—preferring a neighborhood jog to the clanking of weight machines—but I recently turned 35, started feeling “old” for the first time, and decided to do something about it. I’ve also never been the kind of person who just does something about it without researching and overanalyzing first.

The way muscle is built really fascinated me. I had always assumed that lifting weights just made you stronger. The truth is more interesting.

1. When we push ourselves to lift heavy objects, we make tiny tears in our muscle fiber. The technical term is microtrauma.
2. In healing this microtrauma, our body gets huffy and decides to build the muscle back a little stronger so it doesn’t get injured next time, resulting in increased muscle mass (technical term: hypertrophy).
3. Next time, we add a little more weight (technical term: progressive overload) so we’re constantly failing and getting stronger.

We don’t get better to avoid failure. We fail in order to get better.

That’s not an aphorism, it’s a physiological truth. I’ll admit it sounds suspiciously like, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” or “Second place is the first loser.” or “No fear.” or a number of other slogans on t-shirts you’d see around a trailer park. Or Silicon Valley.

Failure is the path to success

If you’re familiar with startup culture, you may be aware of how it glamorizes failure. There are stories embracing failure, articles celebrating failure, even conferences about failure. Failure is a badge of honor.

While fear of failure can cause stagnation, I’ve never fully believed that raising millions of dollars in venture capital and then watching it all go down in flames deserved a party. Ideally, we’d find a way that allows us to practice failure without breaking the bank.

The second day of Compostmodern was a workshop facilitated by Future Partners. They called it a Future Blitz, which evidently has a Blitz Cycle or some such. There are multiple principles, but the one that jumped out at me was:

Bet Small.
Based on what we learn from prototyping, we help you make small bets with the people and communities who are important to the positive change you are pursuing. These small bets minimize your losses and produce insights you can gain only by going live. Ultimately small bets allow you to fail fast so you can win bigger.

Structure your work so you’re constantly trying things of which you’re not entirely capable. That cycle of constantly trying and failing (or succeeding!) seems like perfect advice on practicing taking a punch to the face.

The post Build resilience by practicing failure appeared first on Diligent Creative.

Web designers have been late to the conversation

Five years ago, sustainability was everywhere. You couldn’t toss a baby polar bear without hitting a magazine rack full of Green Issues. The design community hotly debated what materials and practices were and weren’t “sustainable”. Except web designers. I’m not sure if we weren’t invited or if we declined, but the reason was the same: we didn’t have those problems. We made virtual stuff.

A couple years later, somebody calculated the web’s energy use and carbon footprint. It was bad. In some contexts, reading an article online consumed more resources than the same article on paper.

The alarm was sounded. Trade mags released articles like “Guidelines for Green Web Design” and “Saving the planet through sustainable web design.” There were more, but these two sum up the conventional wisdom—the designer’s role is to reduce the site’s carbon footprint.

It’s a worthy goal (and luckily consistent with improving user experience as fewer, smaller files increase site performance) but it feels like asking industrial designers to use less plastic: square one.

Sustainability is a moving target

Meanwhile, the concept of sustainable design deepened and matured. The Designer’s Accord completed their 5-year mission “to mainstream sustainability in the global creative community.” The Living Principles provided a framework for “the four streams of sustainability – environment, people, economy, and culture.”

Culture? Back the truck up. I thought we were saving the planet.

We still are, but modern measurements of sustainability examine multiple categories (environmental, social, economic) over multiple stages (extraction, production, distribution, operation/maintenance, and eventually disposal). The environmental impacts of data delivery is a particularly narrow slice of sustainable web design.

Makes sense. Isn’t a site is more likely to disappear due to the social impacts of maintenance (i.e. the over-worked staff have no time to update the blog) than a webserver’s energy use?

If you visited the above link to the Designer’s Accord, you’ll see that they’re shutting down because “continuing to build on a solution formulated in 2007 is not the right answer anymore.” It took only five years for the site to go from cutting-edge to irrelevant. In the same time span, a corkscrew I bought my wife went from functional to essential (related: we had a kid).

The impermanence of the web irks me because it is—more than any medium to date—naturally suited to evolve and adapt. If we loathe the planned obsolescence of electronic devices as unsustainable, why do we keep launching sites we know we’ll completely redo in three to five years? Why do clients keep buying them?

That is the real question—how do we create digital assets that are, in a word, sustainable?

The web is more property than product

The typical life-cycle stages like extraction and disposal don’t make much sense applied to the web. Are there pixel mines? Pixel landfills?

Information architecture is not a misnomer. We are creating the structure that information will inhabit for a long time, just like a building. You may paint the walls and swap out the furniture, but knocking down a wall or remodeling the kitchen shouldn’t be a commonplace activity. That cost isn’t negated by virtuality. If you constantly change your site’s URL structure, you’ll either hemorrhage traffic or have to set up lots of redirects.

A website is more of a property than a product. We develop it, maintain it, renovate it. Sustainable web design is really more like land use. So let’s talk permaculture. Permaculture is a branch of design that specializes in sustainable architecture and agriculture. They have their own Design Principles.

1. Observe & interact
2. Catch & store energy
3. Obtain a yield
4. Apply self-regulation & accept feedback
5. Use & value renewable resources & services
6. Produce no waste
7. Design from patterns to details
8. Integrate rather than segregate
9. Use small & slow solutions
10. Use & value diversity
11. Use edges & value the marginal
12. Creatively use & respond to change

I challenge you to read these and not get excited about how they could be incorporated into web design. Many of them sound like lessons we’ve already learned going from table layouts to web standards and responsive grids, from slicing up mock-ups to pattern libraries and symbol fonts, or from waterfall to agile and A/B testing.

Others recommend solutions for challenges we continue to face.

“Obtain a yield” captures something Diligent tells all of our clients. Your website should be a positive endeavor, providing value to your organization and not sucking up time and money. In the end, it needs to be worth it.

“Catch & store energy” and “Integrate rather than segregate” answers the question of whether to launch a new site or build out the current one. It seldom makes sense for the hot new thing to exist completely on its own. It’s an uphill climb for search rankings and the parent site sees no benefit if it’s a smashing success.

“Use small & slow solutions” is about making changes easy, simple, and constant. This applies to optimizing buttons or headlines using multivariate testing, but also streamlining content curation. No one should need $500 design software to update a menu.

“Use & value diversity” and “Use edges & value the marginal” are blowing my mind a little bit. In an ecosystem, biodiversity increases resilience (think potato famine) and edge effects of adjacent habitats like coastlines or clearings increase biodiversity and ease migration. I’m loving trying to imagine some examples for the web… maybe content delivery networks as a defense against denial-of-service attacks?

Honestly, “Creatively use & respond to change” should be the guiding light of every web project. It’s what the web does best and any site not considering how to change over time is sword fighting left-handed.

If these ideas are something you want to talk more about with us, we will be at Compostmodern this Friday and Saturday. We’ve been going since 2008 and Stanley and Martha met for the first time at one. Or you can always reach out to us via email or Twitter.

The post Sustainable web design is permaculture appeared first on Diligent Creative.

Launch what you’ve got, when you’ve got it

It’s not enough to plan out the project in three phases. When you’re finished with the work of Phase 1, it’s time to launch Phase 1. Ship it. Publish it. Promote it. Do whatever it takes to get it out the door and in front of people.

There are more than a couple reasons to launch as you go.

• A launch creates momentum. It’s a moment to celebrate, which is good for morale. It’s also not a delay, which would be bad for morale. Chances are your team has put in a lot of time and energy to reach the finish line. Don’t be that parent that swims away from their kid in the swimming pool while saying, “I’m right here, Stanley. Just a little farther! You can do it!” A delay does not typically create a better end product. It just… delays.
• A launch forces you to make decisions. When you launch after each Phase, instead of waiting for everything to be complete, then each Phase has to make sense as a standalone product. That means deciding on priorities. You can’t have everything in Phase 1, so what’s the most important feature you’re building? What creates the most good in the world? What can’t you launch without? Getting clear about these priorities will be healthy not just for Phase 1, but for the life of the site.
• A launch invites feedback. The brainstorms, sketches, wireframes, and prototypes you’ve done so far are full of hidden assumptions. User-testing can discover some of them, but there’s nothing like real users operating in a non-clinical environment. Maybe that comment system you thought was “innovative” will drive people nuts. Maybe that animated rabbit logo you made as lark will drive social sharing through the roof. You never know. And because you never know…

Learn from your successes and failures

There’s an understandable temptation, as you’re planning a project that will take multiple people working for multiple months and require multiple dollars, to get everything written down ahead of time. Believe me, I get that. A good plan needs to be clear on the problem that is being solved, the scope of work that will be accomplished, and a sensible timeline.

What it shouldn’t have—whether it’s the RFP or the whiteboard at the kick-off meeting—is a master list of feature requirements. Features come and go fast on the web and best practices are still being formed. Today’s “Must integrate with Pinterest” quickly becomes yesterday’s “Must integrate with MySpace.” And let’s not forget those eighteen months in the mid ’00s when everyone needed a Tag Cloud.

Instead, you should leave plenty of room in both the plan and in your own imagination, to adapt to the lessons you will inevitably learn from what you’ve already launched.

Here are some things to look out for:

• Your visitors use features in an unexpected way. I was once a member of an online community that only let you send three message a month to strangers, but you could tag strangers and they could see who tagged them. People got tagged with valuable metadata like, “hey-sexy” and “omg-im-from-new-jersey-too”.
• Your visitors ignore features that take significant resources to maintain. When I worked at a non-profit, we’d fight every week over which campaign was featured in the homepage banner. When we finally looked at the traffic data, barely 2% of homepage visitors even clicked on that damn banner. We eventually replaced it with a static image that reinforced the overall brand of the organization and gave the campaigns constant representation in the sidebar.
• Your visitors do a lot of searching. Logging your local search queries will show what your visitors want but can’t find, revealing how your site has failed them. Maybe it’s easy to fix, like your navigation labels say “Support” and people search for “Donate.” Maybe it’s harder, like your brand involves a clever metaphor (e.g. “BigShoesToFill.org — Leadership training for kids.”) and people search for “shoes.” Uh oh.

If any of these things happen to you, they’re going to feel like a problem.

And, if you had waited until every phase was complete and launched all at one without any resources to learn from your visitors’ feedback, they would be a huge problem.

But, since you launched each phase as it was ready and then stayed nimble and open to suggestions in subsequent phases, they’re each a clear indication of immediate steps you can take to improve your site, increase the value you’re providing to your visitors, and ultimately increase the impact of your organization.

Which is why Diligent prefers to work iteratively.

The post What we mean when we say “iterative” appeared first on Diligent Creative.

The difference between velocity and acceleration

When your location changes, we call that distance. You were in the garage, now you’re at the curb, and the difference is 10 feet. When your distance is changing, we call that velocity (or speed if you’re on a bus with Keanu). The garage was 10 feet away, now it’s 20 feet a second later, so you’re traveling at 10 feet per second (or about 6 mph). When your velocity is changing, we call that acceleration. You were traveling at 6 mph, then you floor the accelerator and quickly ramp up to 90 mph. Vroom!

The biggest difference between velocity and acceleration is how we perceive them. Specifically, that we don’t really perceive velocity at all and perceive acceleration quite acutely. An elevator feels like just a tiny room except for when you’re pressed into the floor as it begins its ascent and your moment of flight as you jump right at the apex. #YOLO

This sensitivity to acceleration means a lot of things in our everyday life. We can sleep on planes, despite traveling over 500 mph. We hate start-and-go traffic, despite never exceeding 10 mph. So why treat the web like something you hate?

In your workplace, beginning a new web project is an increase in acceleration. Before you can take off, you’ve got to clear the runaway by taking other projects off your plate. You’ve got to assign people to the project and get them “up to speed”. Even our metaphors acknowledge acceleration. Then, when the project is complete, you “wind down” and everyone goes back to what they were doing.

Until the next, inevitable web project starts.

It’s a disruptive way to work and ends up causing delayed starts, long gaps between necessary changes, and lost momentum.

Finding your momentum

One more physics term: momentum. It’s your velocity multiplied by your mass, and it conveys—among other things—how hard it is to stop you once you’ve started. Sounds like a good model for managing your web presence. So how do you do it?

Have a destination in mind. Ever been lost? How fast did you go? You stopped, or slowed to a crawl while trying to decide where to go next. Or worse, you wander aimlessly, like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

You should be able to articulate what you’re trying to do online with simple words, like “Help interested customers find Fair Trade products.” or “Show citizens how corporate money affects legislation.” Having a clear purpose will let you measure progress and measuring progress will let you know where to go next.

Make course corrections easy. When making changes are a big deal, those changes require meetings to discuss them. Those meetings have to be scheduled, which increases the time between changes. That time between changes means that changes become a bigger deal. You end up spinning your wheels (another car metaphor!) and nothing gets done.

The alternative is to make constant small improvements at regular intervals. Instead of bundling changes into big “redesigns” every two years, try every two weeks. Two things happen:

1. You receive the benefit of the change immediately.
2. These constant changes foster a culture of innovation—you’re more likely to try something if you can change it back in two weeks instead of being stuck with it for another two years.

Wait, did I just say to redesign your website every two weeks? Yes, I did. But remember you’re making small changes in service to measurable results. We’re not talking about full redesigns. We’re talking about making your resources section more visible or removing the “Latest News” section because no one ever clicks on it.

Keep your foot off the brakes. The web is not going away any time soon. Maintaining your web presence on it isn’t a traditional project with a start, middle, and end. If you treat it like one and take a breather once you’re “done”, you’ll inevitably just have to start back up again at some point, having lost all of your momentum.

Instead, it’s time to look at everything from your website to your social media engagement to your email marketing as a permanent commitment to the health of your organization. You give your car (or bike!) tune-ups regularly to avoid costly and painful visits to the mechanic. You brush your teeth regularly to avoid costly and painful dentist appointments. And now, you give time and attention to your web presence regularly to avoid costly and painful web redesigns.

So put your website in gear, keep your hands on the wheel, and your foot off the brakes. You’ll be amazed what you can accomplish thanks to physics.

The post Don’t treat the web like stop-and-go traffic appeared first on Diligent Creative.

The web is inherently social

At its core, the web is your ability to read files on someone else’s computer. Before all the other things that we lay on top of it, it is about sharing. It is communal.

My very first exposure to the web was through my friend Chris. His dad ran a computer lab for the university and would let us in on weekends to play games. We were mostly content playing head-to-head over the local network. One day he casually offered, “You guys want to see the Internet?” and fired up what in retrospect must have been Mosaic.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Germany,” we said.

With a few clicks, we were on the website for the University of Göttingen. We stared blankly at the crude bitmap graphics and black Times New Roman with blue links on a grey background. Finally, Chris broke the silence.

“How do we talk to them?”

It was not enough that we were pulling data across oceans to render another computers files on our monitor. We needed to talk to someone in Germany.

Conventional wisdom pretends the social aspect of the web appeared suddenly in the mid ’00s with MySpace and Facebook, but this history forgets Friendster (’02), LiveJournal (’99), AOL (’91), IRC (’88), the Well (’85), and so on all the way back to ARPAnet (’69). The web has always been social and likely always will be. It’s made of people sharing things.

The web is inherently democratic

If the web is just people sharing things on their computers, that puts a lot of power into the hands of anyone with a computer.

I’m hardly the first to notice that the web levels the playing field for mass communication so I won’t dwell on it. Historians have compared the web to the printing press for disrupting the traditional dissemination of knowledge even journalists have blamed it for destroying the print industry. For every snarky article criticizing the “clicktivism” of online petitions as meaningless, there’s another uncovering those same technologies as fueling organized resistance against oppression.

Clay Shirky, researcher on how the Internet affects societies, states plainly:

Freedom of speech is inimical to autocratic control, both as cause and effect.

What’s clearly true is that owning your own web server is much cheaper than owning your own television or radio station and that renting a slice of a web server is much cheaper monthly than a smoking habit. Above all, access to almost every media platform running on these servers (e.g. Blogger, WordPress, or YouTube) is free. The web lets you broadcast to more people than at any point in human history.

Mobile devices take all of these observations and raise them by an order of magnitude. There are roughly 2.2 billion desktop Internet users and 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. I’ll remind you that there are only 6.9 billion people on the whole planet. So when mobile-enabled media platforms (which Twitter has had from their very beginning), it’s no longer hyperbole to say that anyone in the world can broadcast to anyone else. It’s literally true. Okay, 95% of the anyone.

The web is inherently adaptive

In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr proclaimed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Thirty years later, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Gilmore stated that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Both men acknowledge setbacks and injustice as inevitable, but place their faith in a self-correcting system, humanity and the Internet respectively.

The cutting edge of web design—from responsive design where a site adapts to the device viewing it to agile development with rapid prototyping, nimble version control, and feedback loops—is all about managing change. Imagine a filmmaker creating a film where the actors could be replaced at any moment, script rewritten between viewings, or scenes watched in any order and you begin to understand the challenges that web designers grapple. Good web designers design for change.

A client recently asked if it was possible to come back to her site in a few months and add a few new features. My colleague told her a story about traveling in Mexico and seeing rebar sticking out of the tops of buildings everywhere he went. Finally, he asked someone and they said that was in case they ever wanted to build a second story to their house. The optimism of the story had always stuck with him. He said that he builds sites like that, except—y’know—without the rebar sticking out of the roof.

The web is inherently social, democratic, and adaptive. It strives to connect people, give them a voice, and then do it again better tomorrow. That’s the kind of technology I can get behind and one I can proudly build a business on.

The post The web is inherently aligned with social change appeared first on Diligent Creative.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.

Burnham’s concept of “no little plans” is nothing short of the city of Chicago—a city well acquainted with grand projects (let’s not forget that time in the 1860s when entire city blocks were elevated by engineers to make room for sewers). His quote is repeated as motivation to reach for the stars, put a dent in the universe, or other astronomical metaphors for success. The melancholy “and probably will not themselves be realized,” is often omitted but contains just as much wisdom.

Making little plans in 2005

In 2005, I was the newly hired Web Designer/Developer at a small environmental advocacy organization. In devising my workplan for the coming year, I was encouraged to think big.

The original introduction.

The post Dreaming big means getting more done appeared first on Diligent Creative.

This was the late ’80s—five years before the first web browser and a good ten before the concept of a “web designer” began to emerge. Even once it had been invented, it was still evolving—everything from the tools to the rules to the goals are constantly changing.

A shared education

By the time I got to college there still wasn’t a Web Design major at Carnegie Mellon, so I doubled in Fine Art and Philosophy while taking as many Computer Science classes I could. I had great teachers, but none of them taught me web design. For that, I’d stay late in the computer lab and peel back the skin of Zeldman.com (and Jason Kottke’s 0sil8.com) to scrutinize the underlying HTML.

Like my entire generation, I learned web design from the web itself.

Imagine you work at Ford Motor Company, tasked with capturing energy from the brakes to charge the battery. It sounds silly to call up Toyota and ask them how they do it. That’s what web folk do, every day. We have a problem, we find a solution, we blog about it, other people learn from our mistakes. Some days, I literally paste the error code into search and find a solution.

The path to mastery

Jeffrey Zeldman confesses in his interview for The Great Discontent:

I made a million mistakes and didn’t always know what I was doing, but I was in a transitional period of my life and had a lot of time to devote to learning. … The other part of my path is that I started teaching and writing right away. I loved writing and I was good at it. Plus, I thought that HTML was so easy that everyone in the world could learn it.

Mike Monteiro, explaining why he’ll be answering design student’s questions on Mule’s Off the Hoof blog, admits:

So my own design education is spotty. I know precious little about theory, and I still have to look up the names of different letterforms and such. … When I started my career as a designer I was terrified that people would find out how much I didn’t know. Then I realized everyone else was terrified of the same thing. So I muddled and plowed my way through years and years of mistakes, all the while tucking the lessons away for later so I wouldn’t forget.

If you asked me who I’d consider masters of web design, I’d quickly name these two men.

When I stop to consider why, it’s not because they’re the “best” at web design. It’s because they’ve taught me the most about how to be a web designer. Their mastery is a direct result of their learning and sharing. Deeper than that, they recognize the responsibility that we shoulder as the first generation of creators working in a new medium and their potential impact on future generations.

Looking forward, looking back

Some part of me will always think, “but I still have so much to learn!” Despite over fifteen years designing websites and entering my fifth year running a (profitable!) web design business, the voice in the back of my head is whining that I have to learn this or that new technology before anyone would consider me an expert.

As Jeffrey Way writes in Don’t Worry, We All Feel Overwhelmed, his advice to new web developers:

You don’t master HTML, and then master CSS, and so on. If only it was that easy! The reality is that our web development training is similar to an RPG; you slowly level up in each category, as you gain more experience. … Your peers, your teachers, your developer heroes—they’re all still learning new things every day. That’s what makes this industry so exciting.

At some point in your journey for knowledge, you realize that you’ve been concentrating on reaching the ever-advancing finish line and ignoring the distance you’ve already traveled. I’ve come a long way since those late nights in the college computer lab and it’s time to share some of what I’ve learned.

I think I’ll start a blog.

The post Sharing your journey is the heart of mastery appeared first on Diligent Creative.

The artist is hunched over a table top of sketches stained with coffee rings, deadline looming, until an “A-ha” moment—where the dark clouds part and a solitary ray of inspiration shines through—and everything falls into place. It’s great drama, just like the witness breaking down on the stand and tearfully crying, “Yes! I did it!” or the bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam to win the big game. All of these things actually happen from time to time, but seldom mark the end of the journey. Tomorrow, the lawyer will file paperwork, the baseball team will practice for the next big game, and the artist will endeavor to turn that perfect sketch into valid XHTML.

It’s one thing to remind ourselves that great works take great work. After all, Thomas Edison was famously quoted, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” almost 100 years ago. Or you could look to Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, and passage 94 from Art of Peace.

Progress comes
To those who
Train and train;
Reliance on secret techniques
Will get you nowhere.

These are lessons that, despite those among us always looking for a short-cut, reside deep in our hearts.

It’s another thing to fully embrace what many creative professionals consider the ultimate enemy: the revision. Yes, the dilution of pristine output into stuff barely recognizable as art, fit only for lowest common denominator mass consumption. That’s certainly one way to look at it, but if that’s what is happening to your work, I have to say “Ur doin it wrong“.

For the last four years, I’ve served as a webmaster for a non-profit organization. A good definition of webmaster is a web designer that has to live with the consequences. My organization had big intentions online and my first few years were spent sewing a patchwork of beautiful but disparate designs we’d commissioned from multiple agencies into a quilt that provided some sort of comfort to the people actually visiting our site. Before long, I took the reigns myself, started saying “no” to a lot of otherwise enticing ideas, and focused on traffic stats and user behavior while re-crafting our online presence. In a year, the Web Team had decreased our bounce rate by almost 20% and dramatically increased conversion to both our email list and online donations.

I don’t fault the agencies. They each danced the dance that all designers do, partnering stated client needs with personal choices both informed and intuitive. That is the ultimate role of an expert, listening carefully and then leaping forward with confidence and experience.

But they only did it once.

Briefing, brainstorming, delivery, invoice, goodbye. What made the in-house designs more successful (if the goals were objective visitor conversion and not subjective aesthetics) was each day’s attention to the previous day’s decisions. “Living with the consequences” was ultimately the fast path to good design.

Creative work is at a crossroads, struggling with what it means to be an expert in the face of the wisdom of crowds. I believe a path has presented itself and, by not taking it, we are missing a chance to fully engage the interactive nature of today’s culture.

The first books were oral traditions written down; it would be centuries before the chapter was invented. The first films were plays with a camera aimed in their direction; the innovation of the close-up caused hysteria. The web, even as it manages to wriggle out from under the book’s metaphors of pages and authors to achieve its destiny as a mode of communication, still labors under an obsolete model for its design process.

What would a better model look like? Consider regular check-ups with your doctor, “Looks like we’ve made some progress on your cholesterol, let’s keep working on that. How’s your back feeling, any better?” Good designers do this already. They form plans with their patients, earnestly listening to their ailments before writing any prescriptions, and providing supplemental education when important… but why stop there? Why not have the same conversation with the data?

I love the duck-billed platypus. Besides being a web-footed, duck-billed, egg-laying mammal, they also have poisonous claws and can sense electromagnetic fields. No designer, no matter how inspired, would have presented the duck-billed platypus and no client, however savvy, would have approved it. Yet, after generations upon generations of adapting to fit its environment, here it is.

It’s not hard to imagine a design process that places evolution at its center. Instead of projects guided by hunches and filled with pre-determined deliverables, we would have extended engagements guided by research with more milestones after a launch than before it. Client and designer both would sit down with statistics and decide which numbers should go up and which down, leading to either subtle or radical redesigns on a weekly basis. All of this would result in a final product quite different than anyone had expected at the onset, but evolved to fit its environment.

This kind of process requires a certain kind of designer and a certain kind of client. Both have to be willing to try new things but temper their own enthusiasm with the cold hard facts. It would require a creativity that can maintain its vitality when mixed with reality, a confidence that expertise still has a place in a world filled with data. It would require a faith that putting process over product ultimately yields a better product.

And it would require diligence.

For what better a word than diligence to describe the act of enthusiastically doing your best each day and soberly evaluating the fruits of that effort the next day, knowing that this behavior—and not any “secret technique”—is the character of great work?

It is my experience that designers and clients such as these are bountiful. My last five years in the non-profit and responsible business communities have introduced me to a great number of people and organizations that pick big fights, take on insurmountable odds, and somehow get up each morning with the same devotion. They are guided by a trust that victory, while in some circumstances a long way off, is inevitable in the face of diligence.

Maybe you are one of these people. To work with me, please visit DiligentCreative.com.

Originally posted October 9th, 2008 on the Stanifesto.

The post Diligence appeared first on Diligent Creative.