Mark Boulton

We’re learn­ing as we go. Pub­lish­ing itself is a cre­at­ive pro­cess for us, too. We’re pro­fes­sional, but we’re indie pub­lish­ers, too. We plan to be very flex­ible, per­haps even hav­ing a ‘crew­ing’ model for each book, bring­ing in a little help from dif­fer­ent people out­side of the team for each book, depend­ing on its sub­ject. We’ll see—we haven’t planned it all out yet.

We’ve primar­ily used Twit­ter to announce offers, launch dates, etc. This was so suc­cess­ful that on the first day of the PDF launch, we sold over 1000 in 48 hours—but the server crashed, caus­ing PayPal prob­lems that took days to sort out! The prin­ted book is only avail­able as a lim­ited edi­tion (for now). We won’t print end­less sup­plies of these, as we just can’t jus­tify sit­ting on large amounts of stock, espe­cially if we add more titles. Print on demand might be an option at some point. The pro­cess is excit­ing, com­plic­ated, scary, and reward­ing, all at the same time. I heart­ily recom­mend that if you have an idea for a book, and have the people around to help you real­ise it—as well as an eager audience—there is little reason to go to a ‘nor­mal’ publisher.

CW: Our lives inter­sec­ted again at the begin­ning of the open source/open design Drupal pro­ject, when I worked on the style guides. I admit I felt for­tu­nate to be off in the corner in a lim­ited role. You’ve been in the thick of things. What is the status of that pro­ject? Tell us: Is design­ing in the open more or less pain­ful than stick­ing a fork in your eye?

MB: Design­ing in the open is more pain­ful than stick­ing a fork in your eye, but it’s also more pro­duct­ive and rewarding!

Mark Boulton Design, Leisa Reichelt, and you were ini­tially asked to work on aspects of the redesign of drupal.org, and Phase One of that pro­ject was com­pleted last Decem­ber. August to Decem­ber were prob­ably the most chal­len­ging months of my career.

After our usual period of dis­cov­ery, we launched head­long into a twelve-week iter­at­ive sched­ule with pro­to­type releases, user test­ing, and eval­u­ation, and a new design released every week. It was a killer sched­ule, but with that pace came great engage­ment from the Drupal com­munity. Dur­ing Phase One we’d done broad brush­strokes in terms of design, inform­a­tion archi­tec­ture, brand­ing, etc.

CW: What hap­pens in Phase Two? I wish you the best with that! 

There’s still much to be done: the copy­writ­ing and also more UX work—specifically doc­u­ment­a­tion and many social aspects of the site. We simply ran out of time on most of this. How­ever, as with Phase One, the major­ity of the work will be com­pleted by the com­munity, in the com­munity. The biggest chal­lenge has been to become com­fort­able with the fact that what we pro­duce will be scru­tin­ised, decon­struc­ted, mod­i­fied, and remod­elled, all for the greater good. I’m still get­ting used to it!

CW:What promp­ted the com­plete redesign of your blog and your decisions along the way? 

MB: Three years is a bloody long time in web design and in the per­sonal growth of a designer. While I wanted the blog to be a reflec­tion of the cur­rent qual­ity of my work, I was even hap­pier to break free from what people usu­ally expect of me and cre­ate some­thing that more accur­ately rep­res­ents who I am as a designer.

I star­ted the pro­cess with a simple but chal­len­ging con­straint: What can I do with Geor­gia? Just Georgia.

With all the talk of font-embedding, I could have used one of the mid­dle­ware products crop­ping up, such as Font­deck or Typekit, along with some great cus­tom typefaces. But, I wanted to really get to know Georgia—as well as I know Hel­vetica. So far, Geor­gia hasn’t dis­ap­poin­ted. It’s a won­der­ful typeface. Gen­er­al­ising here, serif typefaces have more char­ac­ter than sans serif typefaces. Yet, Geor­gia man­ages to mold itself really well to the con­tent. WordPress.org, Guardian.co.uk, this site all use Geor­gia, but appear very dif­fer­ent due to the vary­ing weights and styles. I also wanted a dif­fer­ent grid, a greater focus on writ­ing, and a sim­pler lay­out designed for reading.

Per­haps the biggest change isn’t the design but the move from Expres­sion­En­gine to Word­Press. I’ve used EE since 2005, con­tinue to use it almost weekly, and still recom­mend it to cli­ents for cer­tain pro­jects. I’m an advoc­ate for using the best tool for the job. Whilst EE is a very com­pet­ent blog­ging engine, lately I’ve felt it (and Drupal, as well) much more suited to content-managed web­sites for cli­ents. If you have a blog, Word­Press is pretty hard to beat; it was the best tool for this job. That said, the redevel­op­ment of this site hasn’t been without its difficulties.

Hav­ing used EE for so many years, I was used to its template-based them­ing approach, designed to neatly fit with a standards-based designer’s men­tal mod­els. HTML tem­plates can be simply slot­ted into place. PHP is extrac­ted and replaced with a simple tag­ging lan­guage to hook in the site’s dynamic data.  Word­Press and Drupal could do with hav­ing a look at the strength of this because, to be hon­est, I feel a lot of design­ers will take one glance at the PHP in their them­ing sys­tems and run a mile. EE still has this in the bag, in my opinion.

CW: Please give us a peek at the next book and other MBD projects.

MB: It’s a busy time for us; here’s a taste:

• We’re work­ing with some excit­ing cli­ents. We’re design­ing an app based on Adobe Air for a lead­ing film stu­dio. I can’t talk about some work, but we’re heads-down on pro­jects like arts council-funded web apps and a major redesign for an eth­ics organisation.
• The Drupal 7 UX pro­ject is draw­ing to a close, and it’s been a fas­cin­at­ing seven months’ work. Drupal has great poten­tial and I’m excited to help shape its future from a UX per­spect­ive and ded­ic­ated to con­tinu­ing my involve­ment with the community.
• We’re pub­lish­ing two more titles this year. Design­ing Grid Sys­tems will be avail­able this autumn, and Design­ing the Invis­ible later this year, pos­sibly early next. I’ve wanted to write the first one since 2006. I have tons of mater­ial to chal­lenge cur­rent think­ing in the web design com­munity about sub­jects like grid sys­tems, their appro­pri­ate use, and the advis­ab­il­ity of using 16-column grids for web­site layouts.
• We’re ramp­ing up to run prob­ably three work­shops in three cit­ies in the UK in Novem­ber and Decem­ber. They’ll be based on the book: prac­tical design advice that people can imme­di­ately apply to their work.
• I’ll be doing more speak­ing too, which I love. I’ll speak at the won­der­ful Web Dir­ec­tions South in Sydney, Aus­tralia in Octo­ber on font embed­ding and CSS. In Novem­ber, I’m speak­ing in Bel­fast at the Build Con­fer­ence.

CW: Your wife Emma is now part of MBD. Is it dif­fi­cult to have a nor­mal home life? When you both drag yourselves in the door, who makes dinner? 

MB: That last ques­tion is prob­ably the biggest issue of each day! Ser­i­ously though, Emma and I have received great advice on suc­cess­fully work­ing together. It’s been such a pleasure—she’s a smart cookie. She keeps my feet on the ground when I go off on one of my dreamy ‘let’s do this!’ ideas. With seven years in a stra­tegic role at the BBC, she has a real vis­ion for where our stu­dio should be head­ing. But, let’s face it, Emma has always been part of the com­pany; it’s just that now she sits in the same room as me.

Related Posts:

• Announcing: Five Simple Steps the Book
• Why Self Publish?
• Announcing Project Verity
• Design By Community
• Designing for the Web. On the Web.