design (3)
When is “good enough” not good enough?
Thursday, January 6, 2022
We all know the process. We think we are moving in the right direction, gathering the right tools to finish the job and when we see the results we think, “it’s okay. It’s good enough.” Too many times, this is how some people approach web design. Perhaps the platform you chose promised the fabled combination of fast-cheap-good, perhaps you saw a template that looked exactly right when you saw the demo but less than great when you put it together. Perhaps you hired someone who promised that the results would be customized to your [...] more
Don't Get Trapped In A Box: The Pitfalls of Design by Template.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
There is a reason we recommend custom web design for our clients. We have worked with templates extensively in WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, and others and we know the actual ups and downs of a pre-formatted design for your online identity. Yes. Templates have become more flexible. The promise is you see in advertising lately is: “We offer thousands of professionally designed templates that are so flexible that you won't even know it's a template.” So, you upload your logo, fill in the forms, select a template and bam! [...] more
Crowdsourcing & Design, not NEW, not HIP, not ETHICAL, not SMART.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Recently, I've been made aware of some designs coming from sites set up to crowdsource tasks that would otherwise be done by a professional. Crowdsourcing is essentially outsourcing to distributed groups of people, tasks that would have been done by a single person or shop. The motivation in the past for these multiple talented people was to volunteer their time to be part of something cool, such as finding life on other planets, or writing a group novel, or improving some open source code ... however, recently some very [...] more