Little lessons I’ve learned… and opinions I hold

Website sliders are stupid
When it comes to websites, home page sliders are a poor idea. First of all, it shows that you don’t know what the priorities of your site are. What makes you stand out? What is the biggest reason people are visiting your site? What is the most important product/service you offer? This thing should be loud and clear on your home page. Sliders allow you to be wishy washy about the important aspects of your site. The result? You add more pictures and descriptions and suddenly, your website is the equivalent of a Cheesecake Factory menu. (I refuse to eat there because of their over-extensive menu.) Customers – and your site visitors – should be faced with as few decisions as possible. Secondly, sliders require a viewer’s time and often, when people are browsing the web, they couldn’t care less about staying 5 seconds and waiting for the slider to change. And if it changes before they’ve read all the information, they’ll give up. It’s that simple. Think about it. When was the last time you sat on a homepage and clicked through to see all the images in the slider? Likely never. Finally, everyone is doing sliders. I’m going to blame it on WordPress templates (and don’t get me wrong – WordPress can be great!), but if everyone is doing it, what makes you think you’ll stand out? That’s what marketing is: making yourself stand out above the rest of the competition. And website sliders? Frankly, they don’t make the cut.

Don’t make bad design. And especially, don’t offer it to customers.
If you don’t want it in your portfolio, don’t lay it out on the table in front of a client. If you offer a client a beautiful design and a bad design, they’ll most likely choose the bad design. (*note: this isn’t because clients are stupid. It’s actually just karma, coming back to bite you for offering them bad design in the first place.) Now maybe you’ll disagree with me on this, but if you explain to a client why the design they’ve sketched doesn’t quite work when in execution and they still want what they want, there are plenty of other firms willing to make bad design for them. And you? Don’t cave. It’s better to lose customers than have your name attached to ugly work. Now, I’m not saying to never please your customers and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take their opinions and inspirations into consideration as you do the work. I’m simply saying that there’s a reason they hired a designer to design their logo/website/business cards and if they wanted to do it their way, they could easily have done it themselves.

Design quote —Vasari

“I know it is an opinion commonly accepted among almost all writers that sculpture, as well as painting, was first discovered in nature by the peoples of Egypt; and that some others attribute to the Chaldeans the first rough carvings in marble and the first figures in relief; just as still others assign to the Greeks the invention of the brush and the use of colour. But I would say that design, the basis of both arts, or rather the very soul which conceives and nourishes within itself all the aspects of the intellect, existed in absolute perfection at the origin of all other things when God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting.”

—Vasari in ‘Preface to the Lives’ from the book, The Lives of the Artists