One of the things I didn’t really know how to do when I started designing websites was communicate about them. This was a threefold lack: a lack of vocabulary, a lack of understanding, and a lack of experience. Rectifying these problems has been one of the things that I’ve come to value most about working in this field, and it was an unexpected challenge: the problems I saw when I started out were my lack of technical skills, and lack of an overall understanding of the field. I wasn’t wrong about these—they were problems—but they weren’t the biggest ones I faced.
As it turned out, I was pretty good at the technical side; prior experience with Photoshop, an analytic mind with good visualisation abilities and an appreciation of the abstract meant that learning how to code (and, eventually, learning how to code well) weren’t that difficult. The lack of an overview became less important once I became immersed in the subject; basically, I just stopped worrying about it. A tendency to be unconfident unless I know a field inside-out often hampers me, but usually it’s best just to jump into learning—the big picture comes later.
Learning how to handle myself with clients, to value my work, and perhaps most importantly of all, how to explain the design process and its results to those I worked with, took much longer. I’d done three commercial websites, I think, before I even had a handle on my lack of understanding. Fortunately I was articulate and managed to muddle through on technical nous. Best of all, I had some understanding clients. Ultimately they seemed pleased with my work, and even recommended me to others, so I must have got something right.
By the end of those first few jobs, I was beginning to get a handle on what I’d been missing, on what was making the job so hard. Meetings were a strain, as I struggled with my lack of understanding of the process. Once I’d started to get to grips with that, my lack of vocabulary became the defining problem: I knew how things were supposed to work, but not how to put that into words. Time passed; I made more websites, talked to more clients, read articles on the subject, thought more about how it all worked. What follows is an account of my (perhaps tenuous) grasp of the issue.
Communication isn’t just a design concern
The creation of a website for commercial purposes entails an interaction between the designer and the client. The client knows their business, and their customers; the designer knows design. The best work will result when both parties respect that relationship and their part in it.
In practice, this means that a designer shouldn’t seek to tell their client how to run their business, and a client shouldn’t seek to tell their designer how to design. Some people labour under the unfortunate misapprehension that the coding is the hard part of web design; that that’s what you hire someone for, to put your vision into code (or Photoshop graphics, or Flash animations; there are a number of variations on this particular theme). This is quite some way away from the truth of the matter; the code is, in fact, likely the easiest part of the whole business.
A designer considers how best to present the informational content and services offered by the client. They think about usability, accessibility, standards. They seek to present things in an effective manner, deploying graphics, typography, space and texture as appropriate. They are not there simply to realise a client’s vision, but to create the website most suited to the purpose at hand, and they are, as a professional designer, better equipped to design it than the client is (if this isn’t the case, then you’ve hired the wrong person).
In a recent project, I took care to have thorough discussions with the client throughout the development process. Our decisions on the content to include and the way to present that content were based on our agreement that what mattered was to tell a coherent story: to give explanations at various levels, ranging from highly accessible introductions to developed portraits of specific applications of their work, and geared to the different concerns that different visitors might have.
What I’m really saying is that structure and content arise from communication. They depend on working out what site visitors (whether they are readers, users or potential customers) want to know or do, and what the client wants to tell them or let them do. It is the uncovering and matching up of these concerns that forms the core of a designer’s work.
Footnotes
This post was the culmination of a few thoughts I’ve been having lately; its inspiration was a few articles I’ve read in recent months on this topic and those surrounding it, as well as recent interactions with clients. The drafting process it went through meant that parts of it were posted in other places before the article was complete; hopefully the finished piece reflects a more rounded and less combative story than the component parts did.
As someone who wants to create the best work I can, within the constraints all projects have, I now take the time to explain our mutual roles to clients. Our relationship is then based on an understanding of where we both stand. From there we can work together far more effectively, deploying our individual expertise to the places where it can be the most productive. Design is about communication; to be a good designer one has to learn to communicate not only with one’s audience but with the people one works with.
A funnier, better-written introduction to dealing with web designers can be found in Eris Free’s series of articles, “How to Care for Your Web Designer”. I highly recommend it to both those who are working with a web designer for the first time, and to designers looking for more insight into their own natures.
