No matter where you go in the known universe, there is design-by-committee. It has become a pecking order of disaster for the society that used to pride itself on being a mover and shaker and that allowed its mavericks and dreamers to innovate their way to success.
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Too many designers work alone. Even though the Web allows us to work from home, the downside of the digital revolution is isolation. Humans, by nature work best in groups, and you are no exception.
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In Part II I started a list of some personal process-oriented thoughts on illustration—more specifically about some ways to help broaden the creative process and make its execution more effective. In this Part III, I’ll wrap up the list in the same vein as Part II’s, with a few more of my thoughts on the subject.
Once again, while I hope these tips strike the right chord with readers from all creative fields and levels, I share them partially because many of them are still so freshly new in my head, and I can recall vividly their having planted themselves there during my time as a student. That said, there’s plenty more learning to be done on my end as well, and I invite you to share your responses and your own additions to the list in the comments, no matter what corner of the creative world you are from.
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A/B testing isn’t a buzz term. A lot of savvy marketers and designs are using it right now to gain insight into visitor behavior and to increase conversion rate. And yet A/B testing is still not as common as such Internet marketing subjects as SEO, Web analytics and usability.
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When was the last time you made a decision? A big one. What was the outcome? Was it good, and how did you get to that outcome? Every day we all make plenty of decisions without a thought to how we structure them or the basis on which we make them. We simply make them. We’re lucky that we work in an industry in which erroneous decisions may have serious financial consequences but rarely, if ever, costs lives.
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In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn’t very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.
In this second part of the article, I’d like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones that I will carry with me for a long time to come.
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Hacker attacks across the web are getting more sophisticated every day – after all, they have to. With the increased sophistication of anti-virus protection, firewalls, and application-based updates, hackers who want to stay in business have needed to get more creative. And they have, responding with increasingly sophisticated attacks that have forced the online security industry to scramble to keep up.
So how do the hackers stay ahead of the security experts? One reason is obvious – if they didn’t, they’d be out of a job. Another reason is institutional – a lone hacker working in a basement will be more innovative and faster moving than a large software company, thus more likely to come up with effective hacks.
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“Art” is something philosophers have spent centuries trying to define, sadly with no satisfactory result (a debate that is far beyond the scope of this article). But illustration, while it covers a broad range of image-making, does have very distinct meanings, and it is very different from just artwork.
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When I left my job almost 2 years ago to start my own graphic design business, there were a few, let’s say, surprises. The biggest of which was that the majority of my time was being spent running the business, and not actually designing. It is quite difficult to put a number to it, but as a rough guess, I spend around 30% of my time designing. The remaining 70% is spent on other activities such as; advertising, sending emails, tracking expenses, invoicing clients, having phone conversations, writing articles, solving problems, etc.
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Why the Lucky Stiff was one of the brightest and most inspiring programmers in activity. He became famous through a series of blogs and through the incredible amount of open-source projects that he maintained over the course of more than seven years.
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