Welcome back.

In my last post, I wrote about buying design. That was mostly for potential clients, but a designer might learn a thing or two from it as well. Now, let’s imagine that you’ve been lucky and good enough (It takes both, chum.) to sell your services to someone. You’re now in the position to solve some design problems and present those solutions like you’re getting paid for it (which you are).

I’ve been presenting design to clients and internal teams for a long time (Bush senior in the White House when I started), and I still get anxious about it. It may have been a while since I’ve thrown up in a client’s bathroom and washed off next to the person I’d eventually be presenting to, sure, but I still get nerves. The only thing that’s changed is I’ve gotten through enough presentations to I know I can do it.

Along the way I’ve picked up a few helpful tips that may help designers as well as clients to know what to expect during a presentation. Bear in mind that this works for me. It’s A way and not THE way, and all dogmatic systems that suggest the contrary are bullshit. Happy place.

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Written by Mike Monteiro on August 30, 2010 with 0 comments |

Why We Don’t Deliver Photoshop Files

Ceci n'est pas une site

Occasionally a potential client will ask us to give them Photoshop comps as the final deliverable, to be coded either by an internal implementation team or a technical partner. We don’t do that. Here’s why.

A website is code. Sure, it’s images and copy, too, and those images and copy are placed in the code only after careful consideration of the client’s strategy for the site. But a website is code. Even if you just saved all the comps as JPGs and made image maps out of them (funny story there, but later), you still need code to make those image maps work.

Our design process is not short and it is not simple. We spend significant time and effort doing research and visual design before we even get to the code. That process results in a set of sample pages that demonstrate all the pieces of the visual system for the new design. Depending on the project, we’ll either create all of those pages in Photoshop or do a few in Photoshop and build out the rest in code. But all the comps are delivered as code.

That code is two things:

It is the final culmination and proof of all the work that we’ve done with and on behalf of the client.
It is the basis of a design system that will be used by the implementation team to build the rest of of the site.

When we take a website’s design all the way through code, it means that we have spent the time to test the solutions proposed by our strategy, IA, and visual design work. We have made some potentially difficult decisions about whether a particular aspect illustrated in the PSD can actually be implemented in a way that benefits the site, not just code something because it’s in the PSDs.

Finally, it ensures that the code that forms the basis of the entire design system and website is clean, conformant, and tested. We don’t just slice up our PSDs and export them through ImageReady. We code our final pages by hand. What goes in the code is only what should be in the code.

As Mike is fond of saying, “A PSD is a painting of a website.” We don’t spend weeks or months understanding a client’s complex needs and issues to make them paintings. We spend all that time to solve problems, and paintings don’t solve problems. They may illustrate potential solutions, but there’s a lot of room left for interpretation, and that poor interpretation of a solution is often what has led the client to our office in the first place. So we don’t do it.

Written by David McCreath on August 26, 2010 with 27 comments |

“Working Hours” Unsucked

I love what I do for a living, and I love the people I work with. We strive to maintain the environment that allows us to have the best time doing the best work.

However, every single day a bitter resource war rages in our office. At stake is our precious, finite time.

We each have our own responsibilities and deadlines. It is also essential that we collaborate and communicate with each other throughout the day. Let’s call these opposing claimants “work” and “meetings”.

This battle plays out on Google Calendar. When I opened it this morning to assess the state of things, a chipper new feature announcement greeted me:

At first I was confused, then super annoyed. My “working hours” are the times it’s OK for other people to invite me to events? Oh, heck no. To a person on deadline, a calendar invitation is a hostile land grab.

Even though we do work with a lot of folks in other time zones which can be tricky to track, this is solving the opposite of our thorniest problem. In fact, it is enshrining in the interface just the attitude we are trying to combat, that work is defined by meetings—or, euphemistically, “events.” Events are what I attend outside of work.

My working time should belong to me. Please Google, don’t strip me of that illusion.

A simple change in nomenclature to “Available to meet” would feel way more respectful and accurate, and this is the direction we entreat business communication to go.

Written by Erika Hall on August 26, 2010 with 0 comments |

Strong Voice, Engaged Newsmaking

ColorLines is a publication that deals with racial justice; they analyze race from a political and structural perspective, making news out of elements and forces of society too frequently taken for granted.

Saving journalism has been a hot topic for a while now. And rightly so: newspapers are closing. Magazines are halting the presses, and people are scrambling to find ways to move traditional publications online. At Mule we have been working in many different industries to explore some new publishing models, and on the face of it, ColorLines came to us simply to move from a print publication to an online publication. But since ColorLines works to reframe social issues and uncover the nuances and structures that affect all of our lives, I will be precise. The ColorLines staff came to Mule to create a website that more actively embodies their strategy for making social change.

As an advocacy focused media maker myself, I have received calls and blasts and bursts about nonprofits and activist groups launching new websites and inviting people to collaboration campaigns. On more than one occasion, these new initiatives do not support the organization’s mission well or end up looking like little more than thinly veiled requests for other people to make content for them and to increase their traffic.

When first speaking with ColorLines, I was excited not only by their insightful writing grounded in solid research, but also the passion they had for being conversation starters. ColorLines wants to raise issues and focus discussions on high level structural racism that journalists, filmmakers, and other people with ideas can take to examine further.

It was clear from the beginning that the motivation for this website redesign was not simply to take their writing to a place where the articles would get more readers, but to raise awareness about the structural injustice that many organizations cannot or do not take the time and care to report on.

We needed ColorLines to have the freedom to work in a strong voice and design system that is as authoritative and more insistent than the entrenched forces they are working to uncover. And we wanted to create a website that does not simply encourage commenting or contribution to the ColorLines website but to build a site with tools that allow readers to make connections to other media outlets or add their own take while keeping the context of racial justice at the forefront. To focus on those active newsmakers that ColorLines partners with, we focused on understanding the writers so we could design a site that can inform and galvanize people but is also just a really attractive place to have your work published.

The subtle developments on the publishing and community-building model made working with ColorLines an interesting design problem, but it was the importance of communicating their specific mission to reset the dialogue about racial justice from the level of the personal to the structural that made me so excited about the project and turned me into an enthusiastic regular reader and community member. We take projects like this not only because we are excited by the challenges they provide; we were inspired to create an online strategy that complements and extends the ColorLines mission that has them researching and publishing the most comprehensive coverage of a critical trial like Oscar Grant as well as the most insightful analysis of chronic injustices that we all deal with silently everyday.

Written by Katie Gillum on August 18, 2010 with 0 comments |

Breaking News: Douche is Down 300%

It’s been quite a busy week here at Mule. When we launched Unsuck It on Wednesday afternoon, we were expecting excitement, intrigue, snark, and even some opposition. But, we were not expecting the incredible response we received in less than two days!

Within the last 48 hours, we’ve received over 1300 submissions. Some of them are hilarious, and some of them are clever. Some of them are duplicates, and some of them are perverted spam. We have a lot of unsucking to do over the next few weeks, but we’re thrilled to know you like the site, you’re using it, and you want to contribute to our war on suck.

Please enjoy this fan art from Fernando Espinoza at Slide about the Social Media Guru entry.

Wow. Thank you, Internet! Especially these folks:

Written by Nicole Jones on August 13, 2010 with 3 comments |

Unsuck It

A couple of months ago, Jason Santa Maria called upon the Internet for assistance:

Can one of you wonderful content strategists start a Tumblr site, post awful business speak (“boil the ocean”), and provide alternatives?

Shortly thereafter, we set up a Tumblr account for translating douchey business jargon into understandable English. That started well, but we wanted to do more than Tumblr allows. We want Unsuck It to reflect our passion for clear, direct language, using words to communicate rather than obscure. We also wanted to add enough space to entries for sample sentences, and better pagination for the archives.

So we built it ourselves. Here it is, ready for you to play with: unsuck-it.com.

The new site lets you share a term on Twitter, e-mail a douchebag who used it, or suggest a new term we have yet to unsuck. Enjoy.

Written by Nicole Jones on August 12, 2010 with 2 comments |

Tips On Buying Design

I sell design for a living. I also design things, but right now that’s beside the point except inasmuch that if I can’t sell it, there’s really no need for me to make it. As with all transactions, you need a seller and a buyer. And because I enjoy selling design, I really want you to enjoy buying. (I also want you to buy it from me, but let’s not focus on that right now.)

Some people we talk to are nervous about the process because they aren’t designers themselves. This makes them feel as though they are at a disadvantage. We want to help with this. We want clients to feel terrific about having an opportunity to work on a design project with skilled professionals (even if they are skilled professionals other than us).

By the end of this piece you should know enough to be reasonably good at buying design (especially from me) because I’m going to show you that you already know how to do it. You probably make purchase decisions several times a day. Design doesn’t have to be a great mystery. Those same tools you use to buy other things can be used to buy design.

Let’s start at the top:

Continue reading "Tips On Buying Design" »

Written by Mike Monteiro on August 12, 2010 with 14 comments |

Serious Eats Recipes

Anytime I need a good, solid recipe, I turn to Serious Eats. Their recipes are always carefully chosen, nitpicked over, and written with a serious love for food. They’re never afraid to experiment, whether they’re making something they’ve invented themselves or a dish that we’ve all made at home a hundred times before. The important thing is that they test, and retest—Alton Brown and Cook’s Illustrated style—to make sure their readers get the best possible recipe.

But the best thing about Serious Eats is that they keep it real. Their style of writing makes recipes, even ones that take hours slaving in the kitchen, approachable to cooks of all levels. Their articles, all accompanied by photos taken outside of a studio, show glorious result at the end, but only after going through the same failure after failure that we’ve all experienced at home. Their directions are honest, and unlike most food bloggers that only harp about the joys of cooking with ramps and organic eggs, they’re totally OK testing supermarket kettle chip brands or recreating the In-N-Out Double Double burger, Animal Style. Needless to say, Serious Eats rocks my world.

Serious Eats started out with a strong focus on food writing, and occasionally added on recipes to their articles. As time went on, more and more readers turned to Serious Eats as a resource for recipes, but had a difficult time finding them. So, they called us up to help them build a recipes section from the ground up, as well as redesign their individual recipe pages.

As a big Serious Eats fan, I couldn’t be more excited about the new Recipes section that launched this week.

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Written by Paula Chang on July 29, 2010 with 1 comment |

A Peek Inside The Stable

One of the best things about coming into the studio every morning is walking into a place where the last thing it feels like is a workplace. The walls are covered in vibrant artwork, and every inch of surface area is taken up by a quirky, plastic action figure. The first time I stepped into the office, I thought, “With all of these toys, how does anyone get work done around here?”

As a newcomer at Mule, I learned that despite all of the colorful distractions, great work gets done by the hardworking, passionate mules that call this place home. Our small but colorful studio is an inspiring place to be, and a warm welcome to people who haven’t been here before. The studio never gets old either; there’s always a new story to tell, an interesting toy that comes in the mail, or another odd knickknack I haven’t noticed before. Oh, and there’s usually a hungry office puppy following you around, waiting for that slight chance that you might drop a morsel from your morning bagel.

Ever wonder what our offline world looks like? Here’s your chance.

Our main conference room.

We have a cardboard table.

Eating lunch.

Continue reading "A Peek Inside The Stable" »

Written by Paula Chang on July 14, 2010 with 3 comments |

Content Strategy, Animal-style

I finally watched Fantastic Mr. Fox. I love Wes Anderson like any other liberal arts kid from Texas, but I missed this soft epic in theaters. The delightful George Clooney needs no elaboration.

Everything is executed perfectly. Anderson has a plan, but edits himself. The film is dreamy and imaginative without being forced. It is relatable, engaging, and satisfying.

Since watching the film, I’ve been focusing on work. Some of that work includes reading and attending events about content strategy.

The most popular question this week was, “How does a content strategist fit on a Web team?”

People are really asking:

“Why do we need a content strategist?”
“How am I supposed to do my job with another person involved?”

When you get a bunch of different animals in a room, there will be confusion and conflict. But, with a mission and flexibility, great things can happen.

Wes Anderson gets this, and is optimistic. When Mr. Fox looks at his misfit gang of colleagues and friends, he says he sees them in their roles. He adds:

I also see a room full of wild animals. Wild animals with true natures and pure talents.

Wild animals with scientific sounding Latin names… that mean something about our DNA.

Wild animals, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses due to his or her species.

Anyway, I think it may very well be all the beautiful differences among us that just might give us the tiniest glimmer of a chance…

It’s like content strategy, animal-style. Well, more like how an optimistic content strategist envisions Web teams working. We do it here at Mule. (I’ll talk more about our process in a later post.)

Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses; our differences make it possible for us to collaborate, disagree, contribute, create, and do good work for our clients.

We’re all designers; we’re all different. But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?

As Mr. Fox says, “It’s just a thought.”

Written by Nicole Jones on July 2, 2010 with 2 comments |