I’d like to thank Wufoo for sponsoring the Elezea RSS feed this week. I use Wufoo as the contact form on Elezea, and it works great.

Wufoo? Who? It’s a web application that lets you build amazing online forms for your websites.

We host everything. We build the backend. You get an easy, fun and fast way to collect and analyze data, and it even integrates with many payment systems.

With Wufoo you get…

• Over 200 pre-made templates & themes from our form gallery
• Ability to customize branding with your own logo and themes to match
• Integration with over 50 web apps including WordPress, MailChimp, Basecamp, Stripe, etc.
• Support for beautiful typography with custom fonts and Typekit integration

Just because you’re working with forms and data doesn’t mean you have to do it without personality or style. Gathering information from your users is exciting, why shouldn’t your tools be exciting too?

Experience the difference. Sign up for Free and get started with Wufoo today.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

Mark Boulton wrote a forceful counter-argument to the common mantra that collaboration results in better design. From Quietly working:

I see plenty of banner waving for collaborative working. Co-designing, pair programming, brainstorming, collaborative workshops. The overwhelming message is that these tools are better for reaching consensus, sharing work, and, ultimately, lead to better work. Well, I’m not so sure that’s the truth. Given my introverted nature, sometimes these activities can rush the process too much. They allow no time for me to think. […]

Personally speaking, a lot of the time, I’d rather listen to what you have to say and go and have a good think.

Mark makes some very good points, and as an introvert myself, his message really resonates with me. But I don’t think it’s an either/or situation. It’s not that we either collaborate, or work alone. Collaboration that doesn’t allow time and space for working alone is ineffective collaboration.

There are two illustrations about the collaboration process that summarize this idea well. The first is from Trent Walton’s Being Prepared To Contribute:

An idea, followed by discussion, often results in better ideas. But the “Better idea” step doesn’t happen in a meeting room — it happens at the designer’s desk, when they have time to reflect and focus on the problem without interruption.

The second illustration is from Stefan Klocek’s excellent post Better together; the practice of successful creative collaboration:

It shows how collaboration doesn’t mean that everyone should do everything together. Important decisions are made together, but the production details (the “better ideas”) happen while working alone.

So I’m definitely with Mark on his call for having more time to think and work alone. But that isn’t an alternative to collaborative working. It’s just a necessary — and too often ignored — part of the collaboration process.

(link via @ChrisFerdinandi)

Jared Spool looks at different redesign strategies in Extraordinarily Radical Redesign Strategies. Whenever time and budget allow it, I believe the “realign” strategy — what Jared calls “The Glacial-Speed Approach” — works best. This strategy relies on continuous, incremental change to reach your site goals:

The beauty of making small changes means that you never have high risk. A menu item here, a new form field there. Slowly the interface morphs, and if you make a mistake, well, you change it back.

But here’s the kicker — the reality that makes most product teams opt for a different strategy:

This type of redesign takes patience. It also takes humility, especially from those organizations who think people want to hear that they’ve made it better. Unfortunately, to most people, those proclamations sound like the web equivalent of “Our menus have changed so please listen carefully.”

To pull this off, the team needs a solid vision of where the design should eventually go. Then, one small change at a time, they start. Make the change and watch what happens, proceeding slowly to the next. The team will know it’s succeeded when they hear a user insist that a new addition has been in the design all along.

Patience isn’t a word most people would use to describe their leadership teams when it comes to site redesigns. But the reality is that most other strategies involve much higher risks than the internal frustration of waiting a few extra months using the realignment approach. Risks like losing the majority of your customer base to a competitor (as Digg found out the hard way).

Read Jared’s article for a good overview of the pros and cons of different redesign strategies.

You may have seen a sponsored post here last Monday, and wondered what’s going on… Well, that was a test we ran with the good folks at The Syndicate ad network. And I can now announce that as of this week I’m officially joining the network, which includes many sites I read every day — like Shawn Blanc, TightWind, and Behind Companies.

What this means is that you’ll see one sponsored post per week, usually on a Tuesday. These posts will be clearly marked with the [Sponsor] signifier so you can tell ad content from other articles. They are high quality ads, so I also hope that you’ll find the sponsored posts useful, and visit their sites when you find something that interests you. For example, the sponsor this coming week is Wufoo — the company that I already happen to use as the contact form on Elezea.

I’m happy to answer any questions or comments you might have about this. I can assure you that being part of this network will push me to work even harder to produce good content throughout the week, to make it all worth your while.

As always, thank you for reading, and enabling my writing habit.

Jason Kottke once said that The Onion is often the most emotionally honest media source we have, and that was proven once again with David Ferguson’s recent article there called Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life:

Because when you get right down to it, everyone has dreams, and you deserve the chance—hell, you owe it to yourself—to pursue those dreams when you only have enough energy to change out of your work clothes and make yourself a half-assed dinner before passing out.

But what I really want to talk about is Kevin Fanning’s excellent follow-up post where he tries to figure out why that Onion article struck a chord with so many people:

I think the reason this article is painful is because culturally we define success in such a weird and outdated way. There’s this idea that if you’re not doing what you’re most passionate about all the time, you’re a failure. If you aren’t making a living at it, you’re a failure. If you’re not Stephen King or Christina Aguilera, you’re a failure.

Kevin’s conclusion (among other things, that “maybe eventually we get to a place where we see that books and music and art are created by us, people who have school and day jobs and other shit we care about”) is a call to relax a bit, and be much less hard on ourselves. Read it and feel better!

Frank Chimero talks about the misuse of the word “timeless” as it relates to design in Let’s talk about timeless design. Here’s one of his complaints:

Why is timeless design always the goal? What’s wrong with making something look like it was made when it was made? Why do designers all of a sudden want to exist outside of time, like Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap? […]

Other people: can you help me understand what is happening in this world of ours? I want to know what technology is doing to my brain. How do I stay human in a digital world? I want to understand what all this technology does to my expectations of myself, other people, and the world. None of this is timeless. These problems are right now.

I agree with Frank on this point (and the others), so it’s a little embarrassing to admit that I wrote in favour of timeless design about a year ago in The elusive goal of lasting beauty in web design. But having just read that post again, and in keeping with Frank’s point that words matter, I think it’s important to make a distinction between design that is timeless and design that lasts. I concluded my piece with the following:

I wonder what would happen if we felt the weight of responsibility a little more when we’re designing. What if we go into each project as if the design will be around for 100 years or more? Would we make it fit into the web environment better, aim to give it a timeless aesthetic, and spend more time considering the consequences of our design decisions? Would we try to design something that “makes life worth living”?

Sure, I use the word “timeless” there (probably incorrectly), but the point I’m trying to make is slightly different. I’m trying to say that the ephemeral and fickle nature of digital products shouldn’t be used as an excuse to put out unconsidered, throwaway work. Our designs don’t have to be timeless — and they should solve the problems we have now — but we should go into each project with the care and attention needed to make things last for a long time.

I recently wrote about the value of exposing kids to technology, so I really enjoyed reading Hanna Rosin’s The touch-screen generation:

To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

Articles about how technology affects child development generally tend to take extreme views on the topic — it’s either horrible to let kids use iPads, or it doesn’t matter. In contrast, Hanna has a very thoughtful, measured approach to the topic. She discusses a bunch of research, looks at all the pros and cons, and ends with the conclusion that most parents have already realized: it depends, because no one knows your child as well as you do. It’s a long article, but well worth your time.

(link via Kottke)

I know there are more important things in the world to get annoyed with, but I completely agree with Matthew J.X. Malady’s rant about email signoffs:

After 10 or 15 more “Regards” of varying magnitudes, I could take no more. I finally realized the ridiculousness of spending even one second thinking about the totally unnecessary words that we tack on to the end of emails. And I came to the following conclusion: It’s time to eliminate email signoffs completely. Henceforth, I do not want—nay, I will not accept—any manner of regards. Nor will I offer any. And I urge you to do the same.

And while I’m complaining about things that shouldn’t bother me, is there a way to make airlines stop telling us to “disembark the plane” instead of just asking us to get off the thing? Here’s an idea: the next time an airline announcer asks you to “commence boarding procedures”, launch into the following speech: