Unfortunately I am not confident enough to take on those projects. Why? I am a web designer not a graphic designer.

People tend to think graphic designer can do web and web designer can do print. It is a mistake and it will cost you a fortune if you try to mix both.

Graphic designer and web designer came from the same foundation. We all have to learn about composition, typography, color and layout. At the end, we make the product look functional and pretty.

However, with graphic designer, their specialty is with paper and print material. While web designer, we manipulate pixels within the browser space.

Now why can’t graphic designer do web?

Because most graphic designer lack of the web programming knowledge. Web is content centric and it changes all the time. A web page size could shrink and expand depends on the size of the content. A web programmer usually takes a web designer’s design and turn it into a functional website. A graphic designer will design a web site as if it’s on a paper that provides a fixed width and height to work with. A web designer will understand the technology constrain and design around the programming.

A website usually gets updated frequently, a good web designer will make it easy to update for future date. A graphic designer lacks the vision to look further than current date.

Now why can’t web designer do print?

Because most web designer lacks the understanding of print material capacity. Graphic designer understand the texture, size and the surface material of a print material, so they design the best out of the provided material.  Web designer won’t be able to provide the best result with print compare to a graphic designer.

Graphic designer are also the ones who designs logo and stationary. They understand the scale of a branding from small to large and from black/white to color. Web designer usually gets the logo and stationary from graphic designer and then transform the identity into a web space.

Now you know why I don’t do print? Because I might not be able to provide you a best result for your buck, hiring a professional graphic designer to do your print will worth a lot more for your money!

My first major task was to redesign HGTV.ca. I had a great meeting with all the content people to find out what they want to see on the new site.

I also had another meeting with our technology director to go through our existing technology that we had used on our properties.

There’s few things I learned about designing corporate site especially the ones on CMS system.

1. Be Flexible with layout

Modular design has definitely become a trend in recent years. Why? because designer don’t get to put the content on the website, but editors or content coordinators do. As designer, we have to provide a easy solution for editors to arrange the content however and whatever they want on the website.

Modular design should allow content editors to remove or add content pieces without asking designer to do further customization.

Designer will be the one who is determine the look and feel of the content ‘container’. However, we should NOT design around specific content. It’s best to avoid using image for a content title. Let it be dynamic so it can be easily changed.

It is important to design a layout that can fit maximum and minimum contents and make the content easy to relocate.

2. Creating opportunities for monetization

Today, major corporate website is all about making money off traffics. Marketing will try to sell any potential advertising placement on the site.

It is important to keep in mind that we need to leave space for a sponsor logo or any custom sponsored header.

I also love beautiful backgrounds but I also have to design it in a way that it can be changed from time to time. Advertiser loves buying your website’s entire background. So make it easy to change!

3. Don’t re-invent the wheel

I guess being a designer is that we tend to customize our design and make it unique. However, design is easy, but when you hand it over to developers, they will probably want to stab you while you are sleeping because you are causing them losing their sleeps because they had to build it from scratch. So if your developers had developed a widget, but it might not be 100% the way you wanted, seriously, for the time being, just take it and skin the widget.

4. Keep the cropped image on the same ratio

If there’s CMS system behind a corporate site, the ideal way is to upload a large resolution photo once without further cropping. The CMS will do the work cropping down for you. The trick is to keep all the cropping ratio the same.

Beautiful photos are the bread and butter of HGTV. However, the image comes in with vertical and horizontal display. It needs to find a common cropping size that will keep the essence of the photo. I personally find the ratio of width 6: height 5 is the best when displaying thumbnails.

Some people prefer to use square ratio but I think it lacks of contrast.

5. Keep the design consistent, and keep it simple

With corporate website, the common problem we found that there’s too many design elements and too many information all at once. User won’t know where to read or what to read.

The design should support the content but not the other way around.

Take a look of CNN’s recent redesign deconstructed article, it gives a really good breakdown on CNN’s recent redesign, and how they approach it in a pro and con way.

It is important to keep the same design treatment through out the website. The includes usage of color, border, divider,  font family, font size, content header styling, thumbnail size, navigation styling..etc.

6. Finally…

Reading and keep up with current design trend. I often visit patterntap.com for design pattern inspiration. This is a  web2.0 era, make the user engaging your site instead of limiting it.

Why did I decide to leave Torstar Digital?

I had a career goal to be a conceptual designer. I love design. Design makes me happy. However, right now what I do at Torstar Digital is mostly front end production work. 90% of my time are dedicated to making online banner ads, skinning sponsored site components, deploy newsletter and making contests.

My team has restructured 4 times since I started 2 years ago. There’s only one or two people left in the team who actually know my skills and my potential. The rest probably assume I am just ‘another’ designer who does productions. This signals me that it’s time for me to move on.

It took me over 6 months to find something suitable. I love Canwest’s property such as HGTV, Slice and Food Network. When I saw they have a job opening for Senior Web Designer, I did not hesitate to apply it.

Apparently my primary focus will be redesigning HGTV.ca, hopefully the promises won’t fell through like I was promised to redesign toronto.com. We’ll see how it goes and indeed it’s another brand new adventure again!

This is often the compliment I got from my manager and the people I work with. They are referring that I always turn over the work so quickly that I work just as fast as a machine.

I am not a machine but I try to work efficiently.

1. Setup a design resource library

One of the reason that I can create a design so fast is that I always have my design library with me. Half of the time you will get those clients who want something out of nothing. They are also often due within short timeline. So what do you do? Dig out your library and put stuff together.

So what stuff you put in the design resource? And how do you organize it?

I create folders that named by the nature of the assets. For example, fonts, texture, pattern, icons, vector shapes..etc. Anything you want. You are ultimately responsible for your own library and be organized with it. The more organized you are the faster you can find your assets.

Here’s some site where I often visit to grab  ‘free design resources’

• Bittbox.com
• Dezignus.com
• Webresourcesdepot.com
• Tutorialblog.org
• Adobe Exchange
  

Most of the sites often link to other free resources as well, so feel free to dig in!

2. Juggling small task and big task in an efficient way

I guess it’s annoying when you are in the middle of work and suddenly there are small projects show up and they are due the next day. Yes, I know you can’t avoid those, but that’s the ‘time management’ skill comes in.

I usually will take a look at the time line of the project and decide what to work on first. However, I always tackle small projects first (for example, banner ads ). I get them out of the way first so I can concentrate on bigger project later.

It’s unavoidable that people always come back with more changes, but that’s the life of web designer, you just have to deal with changes and not to stress about it.

Oh, another thing I do is, I work on the project as soon as it was hand down to me. I don’t wait for 2 days after I decided to be brain-dead for a while. I work with momentum and I keep it that way.

3. Continue reading and researching

Sometimes I get those ‘downtime’ where I finish my projects and nothing new comes in. I use those downtime to do more reading and collecting design resources. I read about technology and design patterns. You can’t be a web designer if you don’t know CSS. That’s just wrong.

Also, people often mistake print designer as web designer, which is sad but it’s reality. The way we use typography is for screen reader. We design for legibility while practicing the foundation of typography. A practical guide to web typography is a good guide for those who wants to read into type setting for web readers. Another awesome post from Smashing Magazine – Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices, it gives a very good consensus of the typography practices that web designers use these days.

Smashing Magazine is probably the best place for me to read about design trends, typography, idea and tips.

4. Do ‘other stuff ‘

Have you ever come across ‘creative block’ sometimes? I get that from time to time. It’s often because I am staring at the same project for too long. I lost the ‘creative’ sight of it. Therefore I stop working and just do something else instead. It could be just chat with friends on MSN, go for a walk or simply just look at sites that is totally irrelavant with design.

After I have taken 5 min break or 30min ‘mental’ break, I usually can come back with abit more refreshed mind to do my work.

5. Lastly…

# 1 rule to become a kickass designer is don’t think about work and talk about work after you get home.

# 2 rule to become a kickass designer is don’t think about work and talk about work after you get home.

Cuz literally you will just annoy the crap out of your family and your friends. No matter how frustrate your work is, just don’t talk about it. Leave it behind till you come back the next day. You will be less stressed and live longer.

Cheers!

Now I am the only person in the household working now. Alex had decided to complete his goal to finish his forever part time school to full time school at Ryerson for his information technology management degree.

Financially, I was abit concerned. It’s not like we don’t have money saved up, in fact, we have been saving since the recession hits, and we had a goal to take at least one year off to do full time travel sometimes down the road.

I tried to explain to him that perhaps he can take some time to start a blog now or to ‘make’ some widget or application to get some passive income. Passive income is a great way generating revenue without actually working full time on it everyday!

For example, a flash developer can always submit their flash files or components to Active Den for people to download. The more people downloading the more money you make! That goes the same to photographer who submit their work to istockphoto or any stock photography sites!

There are also a lot of bloggers out there just living off the online ad revenue  and ebook sales. I explained to him there’s a reason why you can’t always depend on the company you work for! Cuz shit happens all the time, who knows if you have a job the next day?

In fact, my goal for us is to have a location independent career. I want to build enough portfolio and connections to make sure I can have projects on the go in the future. I want to be a rockstar designer who works internationally. I literally hate being trapped inside the corporate box.

But for now on, I’ll get to make the money and he cleans the house!

Often print designer did not understand the differences between print and web typography. Typography in web needs a consistency of sizes so that people can connect to the content. Often as web designer, part of our job was to create a “style guide”. It’s a guide that states the font usage and sizing for headers, titles, body text, captions..etc.

In corporate design, we can’t really be ‘too’ creative with the font choices. Instead, we try to make the content to be more legible for reading, we also have to make sure the content flows so users won’t miss out any important content that we want to send across.

I just came across this awesome article from Smashing Magazine, it did a bunch of survey of average font sizes an choices for all web typography practices.

Take a look at Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices.

This is how the story begins..  I woke up late and then I realize that I had a meeting at 9:30. I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it. Therefore I msg my buddy at work and ask him to tell my manager that I will be very late for it. So I rush out of my door and then try the best I can to get to work.

When I was about to get off the streetcar and saw my buddy walking out of the door with his backpack and a white envelope. Something comes up to me says “Oh NO! Dave is gone!”.  I went to work and saw his stuff is still there therefore I thought he went for a doc appointment or something.

And then the news come to me, my manager had to pull me aside and told me that they have to let him go because they want someone who’s a “full developer”.

I was shocked.  I knew they were looking for a new developer, but I didn’t know they were looking for a new developer to replace an existing one. Apparently he was let go due to skillset incompetence.

I just couldn’t’ justify the fact that he was “not good enough”. He was such a personable guy and a hardworker. All I knew is that everyone in the team had kept him so buzy that he barely have time to learn anything new or to breathe new air.

He blog about the timeline of getting let go. So I wonder when is my turn?  Letting go and restructuring had happen from time to time at my work.  I am sure everyone’s work as well. I think it’s inevitable, but you get severance pack if you were told to leave. So take it and use it!

I love technology. Now this Google Swine Flu Map will tell me where NOT to travel these days..

10 retarded way to save money

Sleep in the airport if you are cheapen out on accomodation. Not eat on monday will save you money? And make you r own Feminine Hygiene? K. I love saving money, but I am not that retarded.

Currently my company is doing a revamp on our biggest news site – thestar.com. With the new design, I can see that we are trying to de-clutter our information display. However, we still can’t get away from our traditional ways of display information.

When I saw this Google newsmap post from Information Aesthetics

It gives the “control” to the users to “discover” the stories vs our traditional ways of controlling the output.

Jeff Veen from Small Batch, Inc., who is also known from WikiRank gave this excellent speech on designing for big data. He clearly stated that giving the control to the users over data is definately the trend and the future of the web. He stated couple important rules about data visualization.

• We are always storytelling our contents, now it’s time to give user control to have them to discover the story
• We provides visual cues for users, now it’s time to make it into tools so that the users can interact and control their cues.
• We provide editing features but now it’s time to give the filtering control to the user to manage the output
  

And this is truly the manner of web 2.0 approach. We are giving the control to the users in a less response time and more interactive way.

Free Coffee from McDonalds

I like the fact they are using Facebook to track their Ads. This is definately very effective and accurate to know how many people have actually seen the ad.

Add patterns and “wow” factor to your IKEA furnitures

I was just snooping around ikeahacker and saw this product from Grippiks.com. It’s a stick on and easy to remove pattern that you can put on your IKEA furniture. It’s actually made for IKEA sizes. It’s cute and funky!