If I sell out, I may just get another print run done. We’ll see.

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I’m a little tired of justifying my position and opinions on Twitter, so I thought I’d pen a few thoughts here and explain my personal viewpoint and hopefully spark some considered, intelligent debate (see my paragraph citing Matt Henderson for an example of this).

I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time defining this here. I think most people understand what spec work is and why it’s damaging. Speculative work (or spec), can be defined by the AIGA as:

‘work done without compensation, for the client’s speculation’

Spec work, in my view, leads to a number of things:

1. Sub-standard work.
2. It undermines and devalues design.
3. It harms the design industry.
4. Exploitation.

Are Design Competitions Spec Work?

If you’re in the UK, you probably know of Blue Peter. Blue Peter is a long-running childrens TV series that has been going for, oh I don’t know, maybe 500 years on the BBC. Up until recently, Blue Peter ran many, many design competitions for children across the UK to enter. Kids would send in drawings of their wild and wonderful designs for all many of things. Now, is this spec work? Is it unethical? No, I don’t think so.

Children aren’t designers. It’s not their profession, and they’re not submitting professional work.

There was a great comment on the thread yesterday regarding Threadless. People submit designs to threadless, get paid if their design is picked, and get the glory of seeing it printed on t-shirts. Is this spec work? Even though Threadless are making money from this? No, I don’t think it is.

Designers and Illustrators want to be part of the Threadless brand. They have a lot of pull, so much so that professionals are willing to contribute to that brand. In the same way that if Apple were to do something similar, I’m sure many people (probably myself included) would contribute. Wanting to contribute to something you feel part of, or want to be part of, even if money is being made as a result is not spec work. It’s about wanting to belong.

Personally, I see a competition that targets a profession and solicits entries for a prize as exploitative and professionally unethical. For some, it may just be a bit of fun, but for me, it’s pretty reprehensible. I feel rather strongly about it.

The Personal Cost

I’ve worked in two industries where spec work is the norm: advertising and print design, and I’ve a close relationship with another: architecture.

I used to work for a reasonably sized design agency. We would spend maybe 30% of our time on unpaid, creative pitch work. We would also spend perhaps 10% of our time on design competitions, which I believe is spec work. That’s right, 40% of our time was spent working for the potential of winning one project that would pay for all of that speculative time. Now, if you’re starting out in business, or feeling the pinch as many companies are during these difficult times, your time, and the way you spend it, becomes critical. If 40% is spent doing stuff your not paid for that is potentially damaging.

The practice of spec work is the industry norm in architecture.

My father’s an architect. He runs a small practice and spends an extraordinary amount of time producing spec work. Unfortunately, the industry demands it. The spec work is conducted on the hope that one of the projects will be awarded to the practice and that will pay for the time lost on the other projects. Architecture is also an industry that is rife with design competitions. Some would argue that this is worse than spec work to a shortlisted field. Architects are invited to submit bids, proposals and designs for prestigious competitions. The winner gets the contract and the glory. The losers get nothing; the work is conducted speculatively.

I believe the practice of spec work harms business. It can be crippling, for both suppliers and consumers. Businesses fold, and consumers get sub-standard work.

A Free Market

In amongst the usual trolling on Ryan’s blog, I had a very interesting discussion with Matt Henderson regarding spec work. Matt is a guy I admire tremendously. I’ve worked with him in the past out of his Marbella office on some fascinating projects and he’s a smart bloke.

Matt’s take on spec work, if I understood this correctly, was that the market will dictate the practice. If both sides of the market – the supplier (the designers), and the consumer (the client) – find that speculative work is mutually beneficial, then the practice would become an industry norm. This view sidelines personal opinion, and presents spec work as a consequence of market conditions, which is fine, it is. But does that mean that the creative profession should shrug their shoulders and accept it as such despite ethical misgivings?

For The Record

For the record, Ryan is a good guy. My intention wasn’t to target Ryan personally, or to claim that Carsonified was unethical, they’re not. He doesn’t deserve the lambasting he receives on his blog for genuinely trying to do the right thing; for doing something he believes in. But all of those designers who commented on that growing thread were also doing that – commenting on an issue they believe in. The debate wasn’t personal, or unprofessional, it was a raw nerve.

I’m hoping this post sheds some more light beyond 140 characters on my own personal relationship with spec work and how I’ve seen first hand the damage it causes. I for one welcome an industry that debates these issues. An industry where you’re free to make a mistake, to openly question motivations and to do something you believe in. As Matt said, ‘let the market run its course’, but if you don’t agree with where it’s headed, push back and fight for what you believe in.

Before I start to talk about this tool, it’s probably better if you just watch this video Leisa and I recorded a week or so ago.

This is the tool we’re using, but at this stage, it was pretty rough around the edges. So, we’ve spent a little more time defining the various tasks and definitions for each different user type, site type, and number of users. Combining this detail, in various different combinations, gives us a list of requirements for that type of user, using a particular type of site, with a certain amount of users.

Sweating the details

Yesterday, we spent some time fleshing out the various tasks and definitions for each ‘paddle’.

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

Roles

• Content Creator: a user who primarily creates, reviews, and edits content for a site. Key tasks: Add content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks.
• Site Editor: a user who has authority to approve, edit or reject content and who may be able to manage some editorial workflow and user permissions. Key tasks: Add content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks, review content, reject/feedback on content to original author, schedule content
• Site Admin: manage user permissions, manage site structure, adding new content types, create and review reports and manage some site settings (RSS Publishing, IP Address Blocking). Key tasks: Manage user permissions, Add / Edit / Delete Content Types, Manage Information Architecture (site sections, sub-sections, taxonomy (as in, vocabulary), Create a report, Review a report.
• Site Builder: creates site from scratch by choosing, writing, customising modules and/or themes, manages setup and maintenance. Is a developer (for the purposes of audience definition, themers are considered developers). Key Tasks: Develop site functionality, implement site design.

Type of site

• Brochureware Site: hierarchical structure of relatively static content, often includes forms (eg. contact/feedback), may be multi-author
• Blog: sequence of chronological posts that may be assigned to categories, may also include ‘fixed’ pages, often includes comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, most often single author
• News: a categorical/hierarchical grouping of content usually ordered chronologically but often ‘curated’ by an editorial team, may also include comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, often multi-author, often requires multiple templates
• Events: a combination of content supporting an event, including content about the event, a schedule/calendar of events, list of participants, online registration, may also require online submissions, social networking functionality, news, email update list
• Social Site: comprises member profiles and communication between those member in the form of discussion forums, wikis, events, blogs, require member signup, subscription, RSS,

No. of users

• 1: no permissions, no workflow, that user does everything (one stop shop) BUT most like to have simple requirements (how manage giving access to all functionality when the mostly won’t need it). Likely to generate small amounts of content.
• 2-5 : multiple authors, may require permissions, may require workflow (simple approval process), may require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks but usually not overly complicated requirements.
• 6-15: multiple authors and editors, likely to require permissions, likely to require workflow, likely to require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks may have some complex requirements, will have significant amount of content generated.
• 15+ : requires permission management (several permission profiles), probably requires workflow (content review/approval), likely to generate a lot of content to be managed and require content scheduling - it’s a complicated machine and it needs a whole section around managing the machine, let alone making the content to feed the machine. Involves a lot of content and likely complex taxonomy.

And also, as you saw in the video, we’ve looked at using this tool now as we begin sketching out some ideas and concepts for how the admin may work.

An evolving concept

The Audience Matrix is work in progress and it’s going to be an instrumental tool for us in the coming months as we start fleshing out some of the design concepts. As Leisa says on her blog:

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be inviting you to submit your ideas for revisions to the Drupal7 Admin interface and overall user experience. It will be very helpful for us all to use this document to help make sure that we’re designing for the 80% and not necessarily just for ourselves! And it is also a really great way to expose missing elements and possible flaws in our concepts. Using the document to test the example we show in the video above helped us to realise that we needed things like a close button on the dashboard (I know, d’uh!), a place to hold the user generated content from things like comment as well as contact forms, and got us thinking about a whole host of thorny permissions and workflow issues.

We need your help. We’ve produced a PDF for you to download so you can use it in some of the upcoming crowdsourcing activities we have planned. (like the one’s we did for the Drupal.org redesign project).

There will be more from me

It’s a fair cop. I’ve not been as active blogging about this stuff as I could have been. Both the Drupal.org redesign, and now the Drupal 7 UX work, are both breaking ground on a process thought to be difficult, if not impossible. So, as of today, I’m going to be talking about it all a hell of lot more because, well, what other projects can you talk about as you’re doing it? We’re in an incredibly fortunate position.

From what we learned on the Drupal.org project, both in terms of process, but also some of the stumbling blocks that Drupal has, we’re confident we can make some changes that will make it easier to use for people who are new to Drupal, but also experienced users.

Leisa and I are going to be at DrupalCon DC in March. We’ll be kick-starting our research, presenting on the redesign of drupal.org, and doing a lot of listening. if you’re going please tap me on the shoulder and say hi.

PS. If you signed up for a coupon, they’re trickling out over the course of today and tomorrow. We’ve had some mail server issues (typical!).

My book is a little of both, but purposefully unlike either.

I wanted more of a conversation. More informal, more of me. The content is still practical, but it’s not a lesson plan. Weaving through the book is a strong sense of traditional graphic design and how I think it applies to the web today. There are tips and tools to support the theories, but it’s not a ‘for dummies’ book. I’d like to think it’s written in plain english, and not magic-designer-speak. It’s about the practicalities of designing for the web, but only represents some approaches that I feel work.

So, it’s not meant to be a definitive guide to all that is ‘designing for the web’. As I say in the introduction to the book:

...it’s a little book about graphic design and how it applies to the modern web. It’s not a book about CSS or usability… it’s aimed at people who want to learn some basics of graphic design and apply them to their web designs - producing more effective, polished, detailed and professional sites.

There. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Robert Mills is our Project Manager. He comes from a media research and journalism background, so is not scared of the written word. It was his job to really push the publication over the past four months or so. I asked him to pen a few words on our approach, and this is what he came up with…

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web started out as a few blog posts. Though it has evolved significantly since then, those blog posts provided a great stepping-stone for Mark to write the book, and proved early on that people were interested in this subject and Mark’s thoughts on it.

The main thing was just to write, to get the majority of the copy down on the page. Until draft one is done there is nothing to edit, delete, proof read and add to. The key to writing is time and location, forming a timetable and isolating yourself may be useful, whatever works for you, but it takes dedication, sacrifice and many, many hours.

There were many hours spent researching and planning the book before pen could be put to paper or finger could be put to keyboard. Beyond the initial planning and discovery it was a case of writing, writing some more and then writing even more.

Design

Mark had written the chapters. Next we were to turn them from bland word documents to impressive, visually stunning pages in a design book. Nick, the designer at MBD with a fair amount of publishing experience, was tasked with typesetting the copy under Mark’s art direction. This immediately created an issue as Nick was working out of Manchester and we were working out of Cardiff. Skype proved to be an invaluable tool at this stage of the process, not only for keeping each other in the loop with the latest developments but in order to design via webcam!

Some elements of the design were agreed early on before the process had even started (it was always going to be A5 and in full colour), but naturally it was a case of putting into practice the work method we adopt with clients – iteration and refinement. Some of the pages in the final copy are original versions, some have changed dramatically throughout the design process – it has been painstakingly tough at times as a book about design clearly had to be a visual feast.

Publicity

Having an author who happens to be well known within his field, and a book that has been promised for the last two years, all helps build the publicity momentum.

We created a Flickr account. Throughout the process we uploaded sneak peeks of the various pages to give people a taster of the finished book but also to document some of the initial sketches and behind the scenes process.

A Five Simple Steps Twitter account was also set up. As I write this we have 874 followers! (Thanks to you if you are amongst that group) Again the purpose of tweeting was to publicise the book but also to connect to the potential readers. Our tweets ranged from quotes lifted straight from the pages of the book, links to the Flickr group, to more general news updates and countdowns to launch day.

Blogging was also a fundamental part of the process simply because the book idea evolved from one of Mark’s blog posts about five simple steps to better typography so we took the book right back to where it originated from and Mark has blogged about why he chose to self publish, and about the technical requirements involved in writing and distributing your own book.

Logistics

Thankfully some elements were straightforward, all the information we needed on purchasing ISBN numbers was readily available online and it was nothing more than a simple application form outlining the content and specification of the book. Having to buy them in blocks of ten also ensured we have ISBN numbers for nine future publications (if we decide the publish more that is!).

Getting to grids with the process, and our first of 10 allocated ISBN numbers together with the bar code

Although not a necessity, there is the option of submitting a copy of the book to the British Library. For printed books this is a legal requirement, whilst they agree on the policy for electronic books, they recommend depositing the book in the interim.

Many hours also went into researching print on demand offerings, Amazon fulfillment, and other printing and distribution methods. There are many options and it is a case of finding one that meets all your needs. For us it was self publishing (please see Mark’s other blog posts for more information on this).

Looking forward

At the moment we don’t know if all the hard work, blood, sweat and tears has paid off. We hope so as we are immensely proud of the book but all we can do now is sit back and wait for the feedback and reviews to roll in.

This isn’t a particularly complex bit of software, but Steven’s done a fantastic job in simplifying it to a number of core user and system flows:

The Requirements

So, I wanted to sell a PDF. Ideally, I wanted the following functionality:

• Have a discount coupon, so people could redeem them for, say, £3 off
• A discount period. For example, over the Christmas period.
• Multiple licenses. From single user, to ten.
• The delivery of the PDF itself.

The user flow

The user flow through the system is this:

• User selects book, and fills in license details - they enter a code here if they have one.
• The user is directed to Paypal where they part with their hard-earned cash
• Upon a successful transaction, the user is redirected to a ‘thanks very much’ page.
• The user receives an email from Five Simple Steps whereby they can download their PDF for up to 72 hours.

The system flow

The system does this:

• Upon receiving an ‘order’, the system checks to see if the Paypal purchase is valid.
• The system to generate a unique code for that sale
• This all sits in a queue that is set up on a CRON to send every 10 minutes
• The code is emailed, along with a handy link, so the user can download the book
• Upon clicking, the code is checked against the user, license, and to see if they sale is valid
• The code triggers a PDF stamper to dynamically stamp the PDF on every page

A large majority of initial sales will come from the money-off coupon that has been running on the site for a while. The coupon system works thusly:

• I can create one-off coupons, or bulk import from a comma separated file
• The coupons are queued up and processed every 10 minutes by a CRON job
• A user is sent an email with a unique coupon code.
• The user clicks a link which directs them to the purchase page and populates the coupon field.

That’s probably about it. The system is small, trim and effective for my needs. As time goes on, I’m hoping to add further functionality to support shipping physical books in addition to (possibly) more titles. We’ll see. Being involved in building a bespoke bit of software for the delivery of the book has been very interesting over the past six months or so. Not only has it shown what a flexible framework Code Igniter is, but also how important it is, as a (soon-to-be) publisher, to be in-touch with your distribution software and process.

My Voice

Several of my good friends have written books, and I’ve design reviewed a couple, and written a a chapter in one. Not a massive amount of experience, granted, but enough to sour the taste of traditional publishing in my mouth. The biggest concern of mine was losing my ‘voice’. I want a book I’ve written to sound like me. Not some watered down, ‘internationally-toned’ amalgam of me, my editor, a proof-reader, and tech reviewers. I want it to sound like me, and I’m hoping, my readers do too.

The Process

Writing this book has been really difficult. Luckily, I’ve got a good team around me - a designer, a project manager, a proof-reader, and an editor to shape the book (that was particularly helpful early on). But, there’s just no way I could’ve written a book in the last two years if it hadn’t had been on my terms alone. My wife and I had a daughter, we built an extension on our house, and I’ve been building a business in challenging times. To fit a book around this has been tricky, and I needed to have the flexibility imposed by my own schedule, not someone elses.

The Design

Most web design books are terribly designed. I mean, really bad. If I was going to write a book, I was going to design it too. As it turned out, I’ve art directed the production of this book, rather than designed every single page and diagram. But, the point is, it will be a design I’m happy with. I know several designers who have written books who ended up doing the design for them for free!

Financially

Although not the motivation for the book, the financial potential of just one PDF book far outweighs the traditional process (if you have an audience that is). Most author royalties are miniscule compared to the profit the publisher makes. With a PDF distribution my only costs are the time taken to write the book, and the ongoing hosting and Paypal fees.

A Printed Book

Luckily we have the skills in-house at Mark Boulton Design to design, produce and distribute a hard copy book. Currently, we’re looking at producing a limited edition case bound (hard back), high-quality book. BUT, this will only be if the sales of the PDF can support the initial outlay in getting a print run done.

Of course, there are advantages for a more traditional approach. As much as the process of writing and editing is painful, you can be assured of a good product at the end of it – even if it doesn’t sound like you. You don’t have to design it, typeset, proof (again, and again), artwork, production, delivery, customer service. There’s a lot that goes into publishing and I’m learning the hard way. But, it’s fun. The book is coming along nicely, and two weeks today, will finally be released.

It may not be a work of beautifully crafted prose. But it will be me. Warts and all.