Mark Boulton

7 Responses to “What’s missing from DIF?”

1. 
   Andy Arikawa said on: January 11th, 2005 at 12:34 pm

   Mark,

   Thanks for the com­ments and con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism on DIF. I’m glad that you’ve enjoyed it for the most part. 

   That said, I would wel­come any and all art­icles that you might come up with. Feel free to writeon the­ory and design practices—they are what is missing! 

   Best,
   
   Andy Arikawa

   Editor, Design In-Flight

2. 
   Mark Boulton said on: January 11th, 2005 at 1:43 pm

   Wow, I didn’t expect a com­ment from the editor! 

   Thanks for the com­ment Andy. I was actu­ally about to reph­rase it slightly as I thought it might seem a little harsh in address­ing a poten­tial gap in the content. 

   I was think­ing about this a little more this after­noon and have come up with some ideas for some art­icles. I’ll be get­ting some rough drafts together in the next week or two. 

   I guess the danger with design the­ory and prac­tice pieces is they gen­er­ally aren’t very inclus­ive. They also have a habit of being a bit dull. I try and address this!

   Hmmmm… This is def­in­itely got me thinking.

3. 
   Steph said on: January 17th, 2005 at 1:26 pm

   I’m a big fan of DIF too, par­tic­u­larly some of the earlier issues, actually. 

   I’ve not been clas­sic­ally trained as a designer, so I’d wel­come some of those the­or­et­ical art­icles, and per­haps slightly fewer op-ed pieces from ‘the designer’s per­spect­ive’ — but then I guess the read­er­ship may have a dif­fer­ent view! I’ve also felt a little bit as though the web stand­ards side is per­haps a bit ele­ment­ary, but again, the read­er­ship may just be dip­ping its toes in the water of XHTML/CSS.

   To help bal­ance the the­or­et­ical art­icles, how about some art­icles or how-tos in Illustrator/Photoshop, some more about pro­ject man­age­ment and cli­ent hand­ling, and some more in the vein of Jason Santa Maria’s great art­icle on creativity?

4. 
   Mark Boulton said on: January 18th, 2005 at 3:17 am

   Hi Steph,

   I’ve been giv­ing this some more thought and I cur­rently under­way with an art­icle which hope­fully DIF will pub­lish, if they don’t it will be here anyway. 

   The art­icles will be in 2 parts — 1. Grids, Form and Bal­ance and 2. Typo­graphy, Heir­achy and Access struc­ture. They will both address using and con­struc­tion of these ele­ments from a tra­di­tional ‘craft’ point of view. They will include his­tor­ical and mod­ern day examples as well as tutori­als to work through. Hope­fully i’ll com­bine the art­icles with a tutorial or two online here for people who want to delve a little deeper.

   Any thoughts you may have on this would be appreciated. 

   Thanks,
   
   Mark

5. 
   Andy Arikawa said on: January 18th, 2005 at 6:43 am

   Agree with Steph that it’s hard to find a bal­ance that suits the entire read­er­ship. In our recent reader sur­vey, when asked the ques­tion “Would you like more tutori­als, or more design the­ory?” the res­ults were nearly 50/50. 

   Mark, your art­icle idea sounds won­der­ful. We can con­sider it penciled in for the April issue, if you’re will­ing (Mar 1 dead­line). If you need any help flesh­ing it out, feel free to con­tact me.

6. 
   Mark Boulton said on: January 18th, 2005 at 7:07 am

   with aim­ing a magazine at such a broad spec­trum within the industry, as well as cross-overs into the more tra­di­tional design industry, I guess it will always be a dif­fi­cult bal­an­cing act for you Andy. But, so far, you’re doing a great job. 

   I’d be well up for includ­ing it in the April issue, thanks! I’ll get together a more detailed over­view for you over the next week and email you dir­ect. Cheers!

7. 
   Nigel Duckworth said on: January 20th, 2005 at 4:58 pm

   I agree, some design the­ory would fill in a big hole in an oth­er­wise excel­lent publication. 

   Speak­ing for myself, I find an explan­a­tion of the­or­et­ical prin­ciples rein­forced with examples is the best way to grasp such concepts.

   I really enjoyed Nate Steiner’s “Soup to Nuts” (DIF Jan 05) where he explains how he builds his sites from the ground up. I would like to see some­thing like that from a designer’s per­spect­ive, where each step in the evol­u­tion of the design is explained with ref­er­ence to the design prin­ciples that drove the changes. Yum. 

   Look­ing for­ward to what you come up with, Mark. I can hardly wait until April.