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For all non-Web-designers out there, Web design has become more of a science and less of a trial-and-error exercise in patience in the recent years due to Web standards. Web standards, put out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), dictated the way HTML and CSS were to be interpreted by browsers. So all of the sudden, it wasn’t up to browsers to figure this out—there was a standard that all browsers should adhere to. Well, that was the thought.

Internet Explorer has been around far longer than Internet standards have been popular. Microsoft was used to making up their own rules and figuring out how to best display websites. In their defense, they actually did a pretty good job—they had one of the best browsers around, pre-standards, and they’re still the most popular browser. But once standards caught on, those proprietary rules made Web design a nightmare. This was due to other popular browsers—namely Mozilla Firefox—being almost completely standards-compliant. Internet Explorer 6 was mostly standards-compliant, but still missed the mark considerably. Those little quirks in Internet Explorer 6 often made us re-code perfectly coded websites, and, in some cases, provide entirely separate code for Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 7 was a mixed blessing when it came out (for us, anyway). It was much more standards-compliant, and Microsoft actually saw the error of their IE6 ways and made Internet Explorer 7 a priority Windows update for all Windows users. So why a mixed blessing? Websites that had separate code for IE6 were suddenly “broken” in IE7. This was mostly due to websites not being built properly in the first place, but that didn’t stop the flood of hate-mail that Microsoft probably received on their new baby.

(I should also point out that IE7 had its own quirks that did cause standards-compliant Web designers some headaches. But the problems solved by IE7 greatly outweighed the problems caused.)

“Don’t break the Web.” That became Microsoft’s mantra during the initial development of IE8. In early 2008, they announced something called Version Targeting that would be implemented in IE8. Although IE8 was being developed for further adherence to standards, IE8 would interpret websites exactly like IE7 unless the website specifically asked to be interpreted by updated rules. This would also apply to IE9, IE10, and IE32—they would all interpret websites just the same as IE7 unless asked not to.

While this may have seemed like a good idea to the development team, which likely received a plethora of negative content about the latest incarnation of their browser, and to Web designers who built to browser standards rather than Web standards, it angered standards-compliant designers who wanted to see even more adherence to standards on the Web. Some of us came to see why Microsoft made the decision; others (like myself) remained angry about it, seeing it as a hindrance to progress toward a standards-compliant Web.

On March 3, Microsoft announced that they have reversed this decision. IE8 will now, by default, interpret pages in the most standard compliant way it can. The good news for designers worried about IE8 “breaking the Web” is that they can actually set their pages to request to be interpreted using IE7 standards. So version targeting is still around—only now, it’s the opt-in rather than the default. This is good news for the industry, and even better news for “standardistas” like myself.

So what does this mean for you, the non-Web-designer? Make sure your websites are being built to standards. Ask that your websites be built in XHTML 1.0 rather than HTML 4.01, and ask to make sure your code validates against the rules set forth by the W3C. As browsers move in that direction, compliance to Web standards is going to be more and more important, and early work will reduce the amount of adjustment needed whenever a new browser comes out. As an added bonus, it also gives you bragging rights in Web designer circles.

The last part of this series has to do with feedback, from both the client and users as well as the creative and business types. This should go without saying, but gathering accurate and meaningful feedback is one of the most important aspects of continuing to please clients and effectively meet their needs. Making sure nothing is “lost in the translation” between the client and the creative department is of the utmost importance when delivering feedback.

But the need for feedback is deeper than that. You have to understand that these Web sites are our babies. We put a lot of tender love and care into them. And, as discussed in the last article, we care (or should care, at least) as much about the results of our work as their aesthetic appeal. We care about perfecting our craft and will take as much information as you can provide in making our services and product better for the clients and their clients. Getting feedback is important to us both professionally and personally.

Business types, this might mean you have to get pro-active about gathering feedback. Learn about the types of creative decisions that are made and ask specifically about them—things like color schemes, fonts, white space, navigation schemes, and picture choice. The client may not always know to discuss these, or even give them full attention, but they can have a strong effect on how the client actually feels about the product.

Usability testing is another way to gather feedback from the end users of the product—potentially, the clients’ clients. In reality, though, user testing isn’t limited to a single client’s actual clientele. Anyone can be used for client testing. There’s focus group testing, where you gather people that match the demographic you’re trying to reach and get their thoughts on it; there’s usability expert testing, where you get opinions from people who know usability; there’s even hallway testing (I’m making these up), where you just grab the first person who walks down the hallway and ask them to use the Web site. The important thing is to get someone other than the designer to use the site and give feedback on it.

Feedback isn’t limited to creative considerations, either—sometimes there’s some feedback on the business side of things. There’s a phrase in the creative professional world: “Shut up and color.” It’s what business types sometimes wish creative types would do. I cringe as I write this, but sometimes that’s what we need to do. Creative types may soar to new heights of imagination, but business types get crap done. Creative types need to be allowed creativity, but they sometimes need to be respectfully reminded of the bottom line: results delivered.

But business types have to be willing to hear feedback from the creative types as well. If a feature was added because it was thought of as a small add-on, but ended up being a ten-hour deviation from the main work, that’s useful information to share with the people who pitch creative services to clients. We’ve had a few cases where a service was sold to the client for the equivalent of four hours of work when the actual work took sixteen or more. That’s bad business, it sets a bad precedent, and it’s a waste of the creative team’s time.

Let’s say a client requests message boards to be placed on their Web site. This could just get translated into a work order for Web Design to install some message boards, in which case the client would get their message boards. But it turns out that the client is totally unprepared for the amount of work that goes into managing and promoting message boards, and doesn’t have a strong enough community to keep the message boards going. After two months, the message boards die a long, slow, painful death, and all involved parties are frustrated. Even though the client requested message boards, what they wanted would have been much better accomplished with a blog. The Web Design department could have determined this in a simple conversation with the client.

The feedback should not be interpreted solely by either the creative or business types, as both types will have an incomplete grasp on what’s really going on with the request. That’s not to say that either one will consistently get it wrong—but if you could get two expert opinions on something, why wouldn’t you?

So the third tip for getting the business types and the creative types to play nice: gather as much feedback as possible and keep the lines of communication open. Schedule some cross-training so each department learns what makes the others tick. This makes it easier for us to understand each other’s goals, but also to gather meaningful feedback from the client to improve the current project and make future projects more effective.

I know I said I’d write something on putting constraints on creativity without hampering it. That’s not exactly what this is about, but I still have some good things to say, so bear with me.

This article has a lot to say on the true nature of creativity in the business world. One very important point that it makes is that creativity in the business world is not about self-expression. It’s about business. Creative professionals in advertising aren’t artists (at least, not professionally)—we’re commercial artists. That’s not to say that our artistry is any less creative than that of pure artists—only that our intent is different.

Pure artists use their artistry to communicate ideas, thoughts, or feelings. Oftentimes, there is no “message” to the work—most of the time, it’s just a general feeling or emotion that’s conveyed. Pure art pieces are judged on how well they convey those feelings and how aesthetically pleasing they are. Unlike commercial art, widespread appeal isn’t necessarily what pure artists go for; in fact, they often take great pride in how only a select few really “get” their work.

Commercial art is the marriage between business and fine art; however, most commercial artists secretly (or not so secretly) want to be fine artists. Understanding this will help business types understand what makes us tick. But commercial artists also have to understand that they were not necessarily hired to be fine artists—they were hired to produce quantifiable results.

Classic example: contact forms. The aesthetic temptation for Web designers (and sometimes clients too) is to make contact forms look much more robust and pretty than the standard solid-background, operating system-generated inputs and select boxes contact forms. We may even want to add crazy gradients and decorative text and lots of pictures. But research has shown that plain forms with standard inputs and select boxes get a higher click-through rate. Creating contact forms is a large part of my job, and I have to say, it’s not as fun as designing Web sites, banner ads or e-mail marketing pieces; but it makes a much bigger difference for the schools. In fact, without effective contact forms, I wouldn’t really have much of a reason to make Web sites and banner ads and e-mail marketing pieces for our clients.

So, as the above linked article states, commercial creativity is not about self-expression. It is, in fact, very technical and analytical. Now don’t get me wrong—commercial creativity requires real, innovative creativity. But that raw creativity gets processed through a business filter and harnessed for the ultimate purpose of commercial creativity: results.

So, designers, even though you’re fine artists at heart, resist the urge to re-invent the wheel creatively every time you design a site. Sometimes that’s what the job requires; but oftentimes, you’re better off just sticking with what you know works. There’s always room for improvement, but there’s scarcely time for wild experimentation. That ability to get results is a skill in its own right. It’s a skill that sets us apart from fine artists. So take some pride in that skill and develop it as you would your more artistic skills.

I realize there are probably some differing opinions out there on the role of creativity in commercial art and exactly what the differences are between commercial art and fine art. So I want to hear them. Click that comment link below and make your thoughts known.

The next and final article in this series will be about gathering feedback to make improvements and define exactly what makes creative efforts effective.

Imagine the Vice President of Client Services of an ad agency walking into an office and finding a man in ripped jeans, sandals, and a Ghostbusters t-shirt on the phone with one of the clients.

“What are you doing?” she might ask.

“I’m talking to a client about the best marketing strategy for their product,” the man replies.

“But Jim, you’re not on our business team. You’re a network administrator,” she says.

“I know, but I took a business class in high school. Also, my son has a small business selling lemonade on the sidewalk, so you could say I have some experience as well.”

Sound ridiculous? Well, it is. But this is what creative professionals have to deal with on an almost weekly basis. Consider some of the comments we’ve heard throughout the years:

“My secretary drew up a design for our new Web site in Microsoft Paint. Could you show that to your design team?”

“Let’s make all of the headers into images. I know that violates accessibility standards and borders on discrimination, but I really like that font.”

“Maybe we could put bright red text on a bright yellow background. You know, the hot dog palette.”

We’re taught in grade school that everyone is creative, and we’re taught later in life that creativity is present in everyone, lying dormant in some but waiting to be awakened gloriously and applied brilliantly. And, to some degree, this is true. But, in reality, some people are more creative than others. Part of this has to do with the way some people think, but part of this also has to do with experience. Writers who read and write often are almost always better than writers who don’t, and the same holds just as true in other applications of creativity as well.

On top of that, creativity is only half of what goes into conceiving a great Web site. There are also things like readability, accessibility, usability, color psychology, cross-browser differences, file sizes, and server technology, to name a few. For instance, did you know that reading text over a yellow background is extremely hard on the eyes and, over time, can lead to vision loss? Did you know that designing Web sites that are accessible to those with visual disabilities isn’t just a nice idea—it’s the law? These are things Web designers grapple with every day.

Now, I’m not saying that designers should run wild and do whatever they want. I fully realize that the only reason we have the jobs we do is because of clients and that our whole job is to meet our clients’ needs—and trust me when I say that creative types need some constraints to actually get any work done. All I’m trying to say is that we’ve worked hard to develop an expertise in our area. We cater to client needs, but sometimes the clients don’t fully understand the issues involved in their needs.

Oftentimes, creative teams are handed tasks that have been determined by earlier conversations between client service representatives and clients. While this works, projects could potentially be much more effective if experts from the creative team were present for the discussion of the client’s needs and the actual formation of their solutions. (Please note that this is something that PlattForm actually does. I’m not trying to call out anyone in our company.)

So step one to making the creative types and the business types play nice together: play to each of their strengths. Let the business people be the experts in the business side of things and let the creative people be the experts in the creative side of things, and integrate both types into decision-making processes with clients. Next article: putting constraints on creativity without hampering it.

Here are some of the latest design trends in the graphic design industry (backed by a little research and my own biased opinions).

Dark grey is the new brown (which was, until recently, the new black).
For a while, black was the dirty, grungy, cutting-edge color to use—and I’m not just talking about black text. Black backgrounds usually meant “cool site” (or at least, “I’m trying to look like a cool site”). As the market got saturated with cool sites with black backgrounds, brown and earthy, natural tones started taking over as the edgy, grungy colors. They were dirtier, more organic.

Now, dark grey (and, by proxy, a little bit of black) is creeping into the market, with some of the more trendy sites choosing a less-harsh-than-black shade of grey as their main design element. The result is a background that makes colors and white pop as much as black did, but isn’t as harsh to look at.

Orange is out. Pink is in.
Orange used to be the quintessential high-tech color. (I think before that, it was bright green.) It’s been that way since the turn of the millennium. Orange is finally on its way out, after years of market saturation. That isn’t to say that it’s completely gone, though—it’s still being used sparingly, but not to denote forward-thinking philosophies.

Pink began to take on a less-feminine denotation a few years back, with some t-shirts half-jokingly suggesting that pink is actually the new black. Well, the t-shirts were wrong—pink is the new orange. Bold shades of pink, magenta, and fuchsia are showing up in newer designs more and more, and usually in a cutting-edge, artistic context.

Primaries are in, too.
Bold, primary colors—specifically, blue and red—have been getting a lot of use lately too, and not for patriotic reasons. Red has been used in combination with black for some time, but it’s now seeing widespread use with all sorts of other colors.

Yellow is sneaking onto the scene too, but has yet to see widespread use. Yellow has been shown to be the most eye-catching color, but also the most agitating color and the hardest for the eye to take in. So I don’t think we’ll see very many overwhelmingly-yellow designs (or, at least, I hope we don’t); but I think we’ll start seeing more of it in logos and ads, at the very least.

Whitespace is good.
This is more prevalent in Web design than traditional graphic design (where white space has always been more prevalent), but we’re seeing more and more whitespace surrounding elements. Gaps between elements are getting bigger, and more and more sites are adopting the very eye-catching concept of surrounding a bold element with a lot of whitespace.

In the last couple of years, even the space between lines of text has been slowly increasing, going up from the standard 1.25 em to somewhere around 1.5 em to aid in readability. (This is equivalent to the 1.5 line-spacing in Microsoft Word, for reference.)

Part of this could have to do with the realization that online users will now scroll down a page, whereas twelve years ago, they wouldn’t. The freedom to take up more space has allowed for greater readability and aesthetic design than previously thought possible.

The swoosh needs to go.
Seriously, someone needs to shoot that swoosh. The market is saturated. The once dynamic shape has lost its flair. And yet, corporations still choose to make it a part of their logos. Word on the street is that a major credit card company will soon be changing their logo to incorporate the swoosh . That’s the equivalent of playing the Macarena in your car commercial in the year 2008.

I can’t say that the swoosh is out; only that it needs to be. Don’t worry if a logo you’ve had for years has a swoosh—brand recognition trumps swoosh saturation any day—but please don’t request to have your logo re-designed to incorporate the swoosh.

Serif logos are dying off.
More and more logos are being updated to sans-serif fonts, and I’m not talking about the tech- and art-related companies—brands like Excedrin, the LPGA, Business Week magazine, and Reader’s Digest are making the plunge. Now, this is by no means a new phenomenon—sans-serif fonts have been more modern-looking ever since they came about—but older, more traditional companies are starting to give in to the trend.

Serif fonts will never disappear—they’ve proven to be more readable in print, and even on screen at larger sizes—but they just don’t have the modern look that sans-serif fonts provide. Brands or companies wishing to update the look of their companies’ logos usually start there.