Creating and Designing Your Own Personal Disaster

17 November 2003

In the BBC article Creating and Designing Your Own Print Ads, the author suggests that

With the wide availability of computers and design programs, it is now possible to be your own design agency. With attention to detail you, too, can produce your own professional-looking advertisements.

With the wide availability of building materials I could build my own house, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t fall down. The suggestion that someone should try and produce their own print ads instead of focusing on their business and what they do best is absurd. Not only do you have the expense of buying additional software, you then have to learn how to use it and finally hope to goodness that you have a thimble of talent somewhere in your body. After much expense, several headaches and many many hours of hard work you might just get lucky and come out with something good. If your business doesn’t go bust in the mean time, you might just get away with it.

Alternatively, you could pay a modest amount to a professional designer or agency with years of study, experience and skill under their belts to spend just a couple of hours doing it for you. Whilst they’re doing that, you can concentrate on running your business and looking after your own customers.

Unless design happens to be your business, the choice is obvious. Design agencies don’t exist for fun – they serve a valuable purpose in an image-driven world. Trying to do your own design is not only daft, it’s a false economy. With the purchases, the hours and the better work your are neglecting, it simply has to end up costing more than just having the work done professionally. You wouldn’t want me to come and build you a house.

I feel like I’m on an article bitch-trip today. Ho hum.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Jesse: Totally agree.. bitch-trip alright ;)

But ya, this is a common problem with anything that has to do with computers. Sure anyone can design and build a professional webpage.. but should they?

Marketting engines for software companies do not help.. look at Macromedia or Adobe. They promise the world..
§ Rachel: You wouldn’t want Drew to come and put up a picture ... never mind build you a house.
§ monkimo destructimo: That’s the proble with design, becuase it’s a visual thing, everyone thinks they can do it. I work at a design agency, and I feel sorry for the designers who have to put up with clueless acount bods going ’what about if it was pinker, and we used times new roman in 20pt?’.

At least us tech spods can get away with just doing the job as most sane people fear the code!

:)
§ Dysfunksional.Monkey: You see this type of attitude everywhere nowadays. Its terrible. Being a web designer/developer 5 years ago was a good thing. People would look at you with awe, like you were a guru. Now my ex gf’s dad is doing it as a way ”to make a bit of cash when not lorry-driving”.

Give someone a copy of dreamweaver and they think they can do anything.
§ Mark Walmsley: ”It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the things it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot... it cannot be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder it is well to add something for the risk you run; and if you do that you will have enough to pay for the something better. There is hardly anything in the world that some men cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only, are this man’s lawful prey.”
—John Ruskin (1819-1900)
§ Buzz: A corollary to what monkimo said:

It often seemed to me that clients felt they were being negligent in their duty if they didn’t ask for at least one change/mod to a design. Rarely did I hear a client say, ”Perfect! Let’s go with it.”

My fellow designers and I distilled this tendency down to the following directive:

”Make it more...um...shite. And change the font.”

To follow on Drew’s analogy:

The difference between designers and carpenters is that carpenters aren’t usually asked to remove a supporting column so that the light and color in the front room will be better. Or if they are, the ”account bods” don’t compel them to comply.

NOTE: My web site is, ironically, missing a few supporting columns.
§ k: Just went through that the other day - designing a web site for some legal folks who wanted a ”warm” site with some ”warm colors”. Created a nice, ”warm” site with ”warm” fall tones and they then said, ”we like blues & greens”. Huh??? People don’t know what they want.

Unfortunately, this is the norm. And color is just one, small aspect of web/ design. Like a lot of things, if it’s on a computer, then their little cousin can just pick up a copy (stolen) of DW and Photoshop, and then, by golly, should be able to do the job, right? Good grief!
§ jixor: Heh, one would be forgiven for thinking most smes already design their own. Either that or there are a lot of rather unskilled people out there producing junk ;) I know that clients too often forget that you are the professional designer, ignoring what you say and asking for things to be made more, well, shit. But still...

Also...
”Quark is the most powerful desktop publishing program available”
Heh, I am not saying bad things about quark, but I would like to get my hands on a version of quark that could be described as ”most powerful”.

Otherwise I would pick on more, but if I picked on everything this would be an essay.

All in the <head>