This is not a work of art, and that’s entirely the point.

I’m a designer. It’s my job to stay fresh, to keep my creative capabilities from growing tired. I love my role at The Barbarian Group, a company in which our motto is to find the bleeding edge of the internet, and see how far and how successfully we can bring out clients towards it. I am proud of every project that has gone out the door that I have worked on, but there is always room to improve. That’s where bitchin’ times that have nothing to do with a paycheck come in. Sometimes, you need to be able to step away from the task at hand and tap into something that client work cannot supply: a lack of purpose.

New rule: Take some time out of every day to step back and create a quick sketch. Experiment. Rock and roll. Open my mind. Keep it fun. Love every minute of it. It’s never going to be a work of art, but it’s always going to be worth it. Hitting reset on your brain from time to time, no matter what it is you do, can be a pretty good idea.

Interested in seeing more? Follow the rest of my daily sketches  here

I’ve been designing for the web for the better part of 7 years, professionally for 4, so while I’m no expert, I have made about eleventy billion mistakes over the years. Each of which I have learned from. Here’s some bad-ass tips that I wish someone had told me:

Have you guys heard of this event, Pecha Kucha? It’s kind of an informal artist lecture night, hosted in cities all around the world. It draws a shockingly large crowd from all walks of the “creative” landscape, and offers them a series of presentations from a pretty wide range of fields. This last Wednesday’s gathering at Mantra collected architects, visual artists, scientific visualizers, and… well, people like us. But not just “us” – people like Phil Stockton.

Phil and I were up to make the same sort of presentation that everyone else did. 20 slides, shown for 20 seconds each. And so I yammered on for a couple minutes about our creative process, brainstorming, and so on and on. But Phil, man. That guy took things to another level. He cruised along with the audience on a guided tour of the CNN T-Shirt campaign and I swear, he might as well have been doing it from the audience’s collective living room while massaging their feet and soothing all their pets and children. It was so comfy. He walked through where the idea came from, where it went, and tied it all up in a nice little bow that did nothing short of planting the image in each audience member’s head that detailed just how damn fine they’d look in a new shirt from CNN.

Just look at this bastard.

Here’s Phil in a photo taken by Jason over at Common-Content.com, where we see him in the midst of some sort of transcendental trance, most likely channeling a distillation of the entire creative process. Straight to the brain. And the audience is totally enthralled. The guy to the right? He’s looking for a halo. The girl on the left? Looking for her future. It was an amazing thing to behold on such an impressive night.

Been plowing through the back catalog of my RSS feeds, trying to catch up after SXSW, and I found a great discussion over at Alley Insider about 15 roles every startup needs filled.

The most fascinating part is the back and forth, I think. The original post posits many of the 15 are unneeded or can be combined – we started with six, and I think to some extant that it was true that you can combine some in the short term. But very rapidly, most of those positions need to be expanded out into individuals. If anything, I think the 15 roles (plus the obvious omission of biz dev, called out in the comments) is a great map for scaling your organization from whatever it is you start out with.

Also, the discussion in the comments is really interesting – gives a lot of insight into some of the key challenges, debates, and viewpoints about team size and startups. Lately, personally, I’ve been landing on the side of larger teams – experts who aren’t torn between divided loyalties, and each important aspect of a job having a dedicated advocate. There’s a TON of internal debate about such things, though, and no shortage of people here at the company that feel smaller teams are more effective.

Personally, I think sometimes we let our nostalgia and our personal enjoyment get into this conversation a bit. It’s easy to look back on “the good old days” when we were all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, making a great project. But sometimes I look at our work now, an old project that I remember fondly as being a great project, side-by-side with a new project done via a process, and the work is almost always better now. And people have personal lives here, which I think is a pretty great accomplishment. Really, a lot of the times process probably gets a bad rap, as it has to compete in comparison with our nostalgia.

Nut that’s a whole different topic. Look at the roles, and tell me what you think – I think UX designer and biz dev are the obvious omissions. I also have a hunch toolsmith, lead developers and CSS coder could be combined, but I’m sure that’s probably a bit contentious.

Recently at the office, we had a group of students visit us from Carnegie Mellon. Our relentless leader, Rick Webb, lead one of the more enjoyable Q&A sessions that I have sat through in quite some time. Afterwards I sat thinking: what do I wish I had heard years ago had I been in their shoes?

There is no better advice I can give someone. I could spend hours explaining what books or blogs to read, what methods work for myself for the creation of concepts, and blah blah blah. This is all personal and highly subjective. What works for myself is radically different than that of my peers. I will not bore you with the details, for we all have our own process. NO DUH! There is one thing though all successful designers share: the ability to understand what lies at the heart of the project, the ability to find what makes the client special and to fall in love with it.

It’s a tough business working for clients. There is always a more exciting client than the one you are currently tied to. It’s a lot like dating someone and seeing a cuter/younger/more exciting person than your boyfriend or girlfriend. On the surface of things, there is always something better, but you stick with your mate (unless you’re a total douche!) because you have seen something wonderful about them that makes them so damned beautiful. Working with a client is no different in this respect in that we need to find makes the client amazing, even if it’s the smallest detail. It’s our job to find that voice that perfectly sums up what makes them special, and to use that voice to guide us through the obstacles and evolution of the project. You need to really appreciate what makes your client beautiful, for if you don’t, your work is a waste. It will seem hallow and without meaning.

You will complain at some point on any client you work for just like you will hear your peers and co-workers in the office complain about the client they are working for. Every project takes it toll on you, for it’s not a simple task to read the minds of the client, and it’s always frustrating when you don’t get it right. Just know that with every risk you take, and you should be taking LOTS of risks in your work, will bring one step closer to understand what the voice of the client is.

In the end, it is your job to make something that you would really love to see using their voice as your guide. Care deeply about passion, vision, determination, and optimism. They a without a doubt the most useful tools any designer has at their disposal. It’s a tough job, but in the end you gotta do what you love and the trick is finding a way to love something about the client. That love will make amazing work.

p.s. Also, use tons of sweet lasers in all of your work, every client ever will think you are totally brilliant. You’re welcome in advance.

I’ll be doing an awesome workshop and 2 presentations at the HOW Design Conference in Austin, TX from June 24th to the 27th. I’ll be posting more information on my talks as time gets closer but for now I’ve included the descriptions of the talks below. One thing to note is that, even though I talk about business, my presentations are never boring. Be prepared to have some fun and talk candidly about the topics at hand. Oh, and you’ll also receive tons of handouts from me that I’ve found to help other designers get the most out of their business. Hope to see you there!

There comes a point in every project where the team enters a fun little time called Quality Assurance. One may think that such a process could be frustrating, especially when conducting a QA across multiple satellite offices, but I have found the solution! Bullet points and screen grabs! No joke. These two simple steps make conducting a successful QA via email a cinch!

Bullet Points are helpful because you can separate out your steps, clearly showing the developers where one thought ends and the next begins! How novel. I’ve also found its helpful to include a bit of background about what you were doing when you ran into your bug or error (browser type, previous steps, what you were trying to accomplish, etc).

Screen grabs are equally as wonderful because you can visually display what went wrong. Rather than saying “something’s looking weird” and following it with an incoherent explanation of what you see on your screen, you can simply say “something’s looking weird” and drop a screen grab of the error you encountered right into the email. Now the developer doesn’t have to decipher your rambling, descriptive paragraph – they can just SEE it.

Follow this simple steps and the QA process will be simpler for all parties involved. You’ll be happy because you won’t receive emails back from the dev team asking you to clarify points of your email, and the dev team will be happy because they won’t have to guess what you were trying to explain. Do a really succinct job, and someone on the dev team may just send you a fancy blue ribbon… similar to this one I received from Mr. Adam Miller and proceeded to print, cut out, and proudly display on my monitor. Blue ribbons all around!

Good lord, have we had a lot of requests for iPhone Apps lately.

And who can blame these companies? With the iPhone fast becoming one of the most prolific and exciting new developments in mobile computing, with the App Store seeing stratospheric download rates and profits, who wouldn’t want a piece of the action? If you’ve got a brand, you need an iPhone App.

Except, really, you don’t.