The line up of speakers was top-notch as always. Topics ranged from Luke Williams’ “How to Spark Disruptive Innovation” (opening keynote), to Shashi Bellamkonda’s “Personal Branding”, to nuts and bolts stuff like “Designing Our Way Through Web Forms” with Kimberly Blessing and Christopher Schmitt.

I came away from this conference smarter, more connected and more inspired to keep learning, and keep building awesome stuff for the web!

(photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

I am a fairly linear person, especially considering that I’m a designer (we tend to lean toward the creative and quirky). It has been my habit to want to jump in on a new design project, open Photoshop and bang out the design template straight away. I have a pretty good idea up front what will work in HTML/CSS and what wont, so I usually feel confident that I can come up with a good, usable design on the first couple of attempts. This approach has worked well for me for the most part, up to this point.

There is that inevitable moment however, when I’m finished with the draft of the template and I’m ready to post it for the client. I invariably think to myself, “What if they don’t like it? What if it’s not what they had in mind? Will I have to re-do this whole thing from scratch? Should I defend it? (I am the designer after all.)” At this point, I’m already too far along in the prototyping process to afford starting over.

I realize now that by keeping the client out of the process between the initial meeting and the reveal of the first comp, I’m really doing both of us a disservice. The client potentially can feel left out at this point and if the design is a departure from their initial vision, it can shake their confidence in me as a designer. It also means that I am ignoring some potentially great creative input from the client.

I have always tried, in the early stages of a project, to get as much input as I can from the client about the look and feel of a project, asking about other sites that they like or don’t like, talking about colors, logos, etc. But I’ve come to realize that most clients don’t have a clear vision of what they want from the beginning. It’s all too common to spend hours on a finished Photoshop comp only to have the client realize that it’s not what they want (even though they may not know what they want in the beginning).

A mood board is a quickly thrown together collage of photos, colors, typography elements, scraps torn from magazines, etc. that together, give an overall feel for the visual direction of a design.

Mood boards accomplish several things all at once:

• They are a useful tool for the designer to very quickly put down visual ideas for the design.
• They separate the overall “mood” of the design from the interface elements and content. This effectively removes potential distractions for the client at this early stage.
• They allow the client to give creative input very early in the process, thereby avoiding back-tracking after the design comps are viewed.
• Mood boards speed up the visual prototyping process because the style has already been established.

I will definitely be including mood boards in my methodology for all future design projects.

“Thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group … watch for more information coming soon.

Tweetups and Beanie-ups are being planned all over the globe … watch for more information coming soon…

see also http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2009/ ”

I always wear a blue hat (beanie?) but this one is special.

Here’s a great article by Scott Stratten at UnMarketing which sheds some light on how you can use Twitter to help engage a local market.

Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts. Best of all, it’s 100% FREE!

There is a full review at Fuel Your Creativity.

I’ve just had my second look at Umbraco, an ASP.Net content management system (CMS). When I first stumbled on Umbraco about a year ago, I misunderstood the license agreement to mean that in order to use the open source version of the software, you were required to put “Powered by Umbraco” on the home page of the site.  After a closer look, reveals that this is not true. The only Umbraco branding that you’re stuck with is in the control panel. This works just fine for my purpose which is to give my clients a framework within which they can edit their own content.

The main feature of Umbraco that has me excited is the text editor. It uses TinyMCE as do many CMS packages. The difference I’ve found from some of the others (such as InsiteCreation) is that Umbraco gives you full control over the editor in terms of what buttons are displayed to the person doing the editing. This way, you can completely hide the Font and Font Size buttons which will effectively eliminate the problem of people inserting Font Size inline styles or worse, font attributes directly into the markup.  As an example, the editor within InsiteCreation will actually insert “<span style=“font-style:italic”>” instead of simple <em> tags.

The other factor which I LOVE is that the designer has full control over the markup that the editor outputs. This makes it easy to maintain the standards compliance of the markup of the site without the need to coach your client in the nuances of editing standards based html using the editor.

I’ll post more on Umbraco as I get more deeply involved, but my initial response is extremely positive. If you call and talk to me about content management in the near future, we’ll likely be discussing Umbraco.

Creative burnout happens to all of us. As a creature of habit, I tend to get into a routine and stick to it. After several weeks of sitting in the same chair in the same office day after day, I can feel the creativity slowly ebb.

The answer is to get out of the office (or wherever it is you usually work). It doesn’t matter if it’s for a few hours or a few days, but a regular change of environment is essential to keeping your creative edge.

Regularly getting away from your familiar routine can pay big dividends by refreshing your perspective. If you sit in the same chair every day, your eyes tend to rest on comfortable, familiar objects. As soon as you move out to the back garden, or the coffee shop, your eyes will have a whole new palette of stimulus. It’s not only visual; that rose bush in the garden, or the low hum of conversation and music in the coffee shop can give your nose and ears a fresh perspective as well.

In the case of public spaces, you have the added advantage of possibly meeting and talking with new people. Sometimes, just being near enough to overhear some conversation can give you new perspective on a design problem.

I came into design from a photography background, so one of my favorite things to do to spark creativity is to take my camera out and seek out patterns, textures, colors, interface elements, or whatever strikes my fancy. Doing this in the real world instead of on the web gives the whole process a much more organic feel.

I like to plan several trips with my wife during the year where we go find a small town, stay in a bed and breakfast or hotel (an Internet connection reduces stress for me on these trips). Then, we just spend two or three days either hiking local trails, or walking the streets and browsing shops in the town. During these trips, I always try to see things as much as possible through  the lens of my camera. It narrows my focus and helps me isolate interesting design elements. Invariably, I return from a weekend trip with a fresh perspective and a recharged creative battery.