The Ruby Freelancers Show 007 – Designing and Working with the Designers
Show Notes
Panel
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog)
Discussion
Wordpress Templates Designers Branding and Design Referrals from Clients Referrals from your network Client supplied designers Designers in the family ThemeForest WooThemes oDesk eLance iPhone App design 99designs Rails Rumble Requires a ton of feedback API interviews Use a subcontractor Accountability Photoshop PSD files PDF files HTML & CSS jQuery Animations Have a designer break it up into assets Using existing design (Redmine, Chiliproject) Twitter Bootstrap UI/UX designers User testing A/B testing Should you manage designers? Website layouts Logo nerds oswd.org medialoot.com micropreneur academy elegant themes
Picks
Eon (Jeff) Freshbooks (Jeff) How Designers can help Developers by Matt Gemmell (Jeff) How Developers can help Designers by Matt Gemmell (Jeff) Freelancing Weekly (Jeff) Chop Chop (Jeff) Compass (Evan) First Class (Evan) Bootstrapping Design by Jared Drysdale (Eric) Font Deck (Eric) Stylate (Eric) Acorn (Chuck) GIMP (Chuck) Pixelmator (Evan)
Transcript
JEFF:
Let me get my headphones. [zipper sound]
EVAN: Your headphones is [unintelligible]? [Laughter]
JEFF: If it was, that’s the world’s longest zipper.
CHUCK: [Chuckles] Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Ruby Freelancers Show. This is episode 7. And this week, we are going to be talking about Design and Working With Designers. This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis.
ERIC: Hi.
CHUCK: We also have Evan Light.
EVAN: Hello.
CHUCK: And Jeff Schoolcraft.
JEFF: What's up?
CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from teachmetocode.com. One thing I wanna point out before we get too far into this is that next week is Mountain West Ruby Conference. We are discussing whether or not to do a live episode there, just with some folks maybe over lunch or dinner. But there may not be an episode next week, so just be aware. If it doesn’t come through, it's… our fault. It's actually out here in my hometown. Well, sort of. It’s up at Salt Lake City. Anyway, so let’s talk about design and designing -- working with designers. I can tell you that my design skills are pretty sad. However, if somebody gives me a design in Photoshop or PDF or something like that, I can usually tear it apart and duplicate it with almost 100% accuracy. So are we talking about… I guess we are talking about both; if we get something from a designer or we do the design ourselves. Do any of you guys actually do any of the design for any of your websites on your own?
EVAN: Hell no.
ERIC: It kind of depends. Like I can't draw. I can't use Photoshop or any of that, but if someone hands HTML or if they have,… in HTML/CSS, I'm pretty good. I kind of go in and tweak it and adjusting stuff, but I'm not that good at coming up from scratch at all.
CHUCK: Right. That’s kind of the same place I'm at.
EVAN: Yeah, same here. We all need to hear about Jeff though, Jeff’s got a good one, right?
JEFF: A good what? I don’t do any design.
EVAN: But we've heard your opinion on designers before, that’s why I was expecting the…
JEFF: I have opinion on designers. I'll make this disclaimer though. I'll probably piss off every designer in our audience in this episode.
CHUCK: I think there are different layers to design and designers. I mean, if you are just putting up some cheap little site that you threw together, that you are not looking to make a whole lot of money on, and you don’t really need a strong brand around, I mean, the layout doesn’t matter as long as it looks nice.
EVAN: You mean like most of business sites? [Chuckles]
CHUCK: Yeah, you know. They go out, they get a WordPress theme and that’s it. And that’s totally fine. If you are trying to build a strong brand around something or something like that, then you may want to get a designer that really understands the considerations that go into something like that, and then pay them to build your something good or something unique -- something that kind of ties everything together. But for the most part, the generic designs I think are perfectly fine.
ERIC: I mean it also depends, like you said like it's what you are doing with it. Because my website, for my consulting business, when I launched it, I paid a designer to come in. She made like from scratch like 3-4 like different pages with designs on it. And I've gone from a custom CMS to some static site engine, to a couple other things, to WordPress. And each time, I keep carrying the design along; taking the CSS, changing the selectors a little bit just based on a template. And I actually ported that design and all the color she used over to atleast half a dozen other sites. So yeah, I
mean, I paid I think $1,000 -- maybe $1,500 -- for my custom design, but I've used it all over the place. So it actually turns out that it's probably about the same cost as buying a theme for each site now.
CHUCK: Right.
ERIC: So if your brand is you are going to build products or build lots of these extra sites on the side, it might actually be worth it to sit down and really think about what you are doing, and getting a good job done first off, and then trying to reuse that across the board.
CHUCK: Right. So where do you go to find a good designer if you are going to hire one?
EVAN: The internet.
CHUCK: [Chuckles] Oh, there you go.
ERIC: So one of my clients, they do a lot of design, and the designer I used, I talked with her just offline and then through the client... And so, this is pretty much kind of a personal recommendation, like, “She’s in your price range. She does really good work. Here's samples of her stuff.” Other than that, I mean, you can get templates from a bunch of sites. I think Jeff knows most of them. And it's mostly just word of mouth, and talking to people and looking at sites you like and asking who actually was behind the design of them.
CHUCK: Right. So I wanna jump in here real quick, because I've actually had a site designed recently, and I paid the full boutique price to get it done. And it is for devchat.tv, which is where I'm going to be consolidating all of my podcasting to. And so I'm going to custom build the site; I'm going to use this design to put it all together. And the thing for me is that it's very cohesive, it has a pretty strong themed element to it. It's kind of a western, rugged theme to it. Anyway, it looks really nice. And for me, I want to create a strong brand, and I want something that people can see and go, “Yeah, that's devchat.tv,” and not have it look like these generic sites. In fact, there are some websites out there that I think their brand could really be strengthen by having a strong, cohesive, somewhat unique flavor and brand on their website. And so, I'm pretty happy with what I got for the money I paid. It did cost me a few thousand dollars, but at the same time, it really does depend. I mean, for RubyFreelancers.com -- I've said this before -- I'm working on a membership site there, and I just went and bought the theme off of a website, because I didn’t feel like I really needed that kind of cohesive thing. Where with the other, I really feel like that's kind of the major direction that I'm going, and I want people to identify it – and identify with it. The person that I found, I actually found through the Ruby Users Group out here. People were asking around who are the design chaps that you use. And so that’s what I've done. I just contacted a few of them, got some quotes, and went with the one that I thought would do the best job for the amount of money I was willing to spend.
EVAN: I worked with a couple. The way that I found the one that I liked to work with was actually just kind of” a friend of a friend” sort of thing, because he's a guy who say who can get something done and who’ll actually get it done -- and look really darn good. Before that though, I had the pleasure of working on a project where the client supplied the designer. And the clientsupplied designer was some fancy boutique in San Francisco who shall remain nameless. And they were full of fluff, and they delivered everything late, and delivered a lot of cred that no one really asked for, or wanted, or needed. And the client actually got rid of them and started using his own family -- using his daughter specifically -- to do design work.
CHUCK: Oh no.
EVAN: Yeah, and of course, no one can really tell him at that point that this site just wasn’t looking as good, once he started using his daughter. So more like an amusing anecdote there, but not particularly useful. A friend of a friend really is in a nutshell that I think a good way networking, which is what the other two guys have said -- and Jeff hasn’t commented on yet.
CHUCK: Right. Well, the other thing is it's usually somebody who is referring you can say, “This is what they did for me,” and then you can kind of get a feel for what they can do for you. Yeah, so anyway. Jeff, what do you think?
JEFF: I found a designer all over the place. I mean, I've bought designs from theme forest. I've used designs from Ruby Themes, I've had designs bought from ThemeForest, edited by folks on oDesk and Elance. I've hired people directly from oDesk and Elance. And sometimes, that’s a crap shoot. I mean, oDesk and Elance are tough. I mean, you get a ton of people to apply, and you have to filter out really good in the beginning. And sometimes you hit big, and sometimes you don’t. And people go away or just can't communicate with them or whatever. The guy that did all my iPhone app design, I found on oDesk. And he's just awesome. And I would keep going back to him for more stuff, but I found him through oDesk. I've used 99 designs. That will piss off our developers. I've bought cheap logos for $27, that will piss off our designers.
CHUCK: [Chuckles]
EVAN: I used 99 Designs once.
CHUCK: I did too, and then I asked for my money back. [Chuckles] I didn’t get a single thing that I liked.
JEFF: 99 Designs is tough. I used it right after they came out, and they made a splash like right around 3-4 years ago, it was had some promotion going on with the Rails Rumble, and I use them actually for design, for the Rails Rumble. I had to pay more to get it done like over the weekend so I can use it. But in the beginning it was easy, it requires a lot of feedback to go through all that. And again, pisses the designers off because it's spec work and…
EVAN: it's a big race to the bottom.
JEFF: Yeah, I mean I understand that. But at the same token, I mean, who’s the… these are two, maybe three companies in the last two weeks that have had basically API interviews. So if you want a job, you sign up, you apply through an API --which is a clever idea -- I'm not saying it's the same thing as 99 designs. They are probably doesn’t take as much effort. Who knows, I don’t know how much effort design takes. It's all magic to me. I mean it's the same type of thing, so I understand where people are coming from. But on the same token, I'm not going to spend $25,000 on a two-character icon hash rocket, but I don’t know.
EVAN: The role of Evan Light is played by Jeff Schoolcraft. [Laughter]
CHUCK: Right. So I think there are a couple different levels of ways that we deal with designers. I mean, one is the designer that are client has found, that they are paying to put the site together. And in some cases, it turns out that it is the daughter or some firm that may or may not work out. What do you usually do if the firm isn't working out or won’t work with you? I mean, do you just tell the clients? I mean, that's what I would do. I would just point out, “These are the issues, these are what we are dealing with.”
JEFF: The design firm?
CHUCK: Yeah.
JEFF: That’s a tough one. I've only worked with a few companies. I have had designers on staff or on contract or whatever. And one of them was probably similar to Evan’s experience; I mean, the dude was super qualified, high-end designer like crazy awesome, but the roles are so defined in that job when I was doing it, there was… I didn’t have a problem with them, but I mean there was so many times when you wanna make a tweak or some of the design maybe doesn’t… to implement the design will add a ton of time in development, because of how they want to do something, and so that would be a back and forth. And it's basically something that I’d throw back over that fence to the designer, and the main customer and let them work it out and give them feedback. I mean, their designer was pretty good about working with me. I don’t know if that answers the question at all, no I think it probably doesn’t.
EVAN: So my part, I think it depends what the relationship is with the designer. When I heard this topic, I instantly had one thought and that is ideally, you get that designer to be a sub-contractor to you, on whatever project is you’re working on, so you are working for you, and not the client. And that’s not to snub the client at all; it's to ensure that relationships are well understood that you are not going to end up in a combative relationship with the designer. Because what this design shop that I mentioned, the client had engaged them, and the client had engaged me and the team I was working with -- and we were bunch of freelancers too -- and so, well, we answered to the client but not to each other in any clear way. So, when it was clear that they weren’t getting done what we needed or what the client needed, well, we talked to the client about it.
CHUCK: Yeah, that makes sense.
EVAN: And when I've had someone subcontracting to me, then it's easy; I just have a conversation with them and there's really no problem.
CHUCK: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I actually have a client right now that has engaged design firm, and he asked them to give me the design for the landing page, so that the people can start putting their emails in and stuff. And that was the middle of last week, and I still haven’t seen anything. So there's that too…
EVAN: The lack for transparency because there are separate entity, and they are not accountable to you.
CHUCK: Right.
JEFF: And you get to stupid accountability documentation games; a bunch of emails CC’d to everybody, “Still waiting on this. It's been three weeks since you were supposed to give it to me. It's been four weeks, blah, blah, blah.”
EVAN: Yeah, if you are a small team and you are operating like a large company, you know you are doing it wrong.
CHUCK: Yeah. So when you do have a designer engaged, either through the client or through your own company, to what level do you usually get stuff back? I mean, do you just have them put together a design in Photoshop and then send you the PSD file? Or do you have them export it to a PDF? Or do you actually have them code up HTML and CSS? I
know some designers that will go so far as to actually do some of the jQuery animations, so that stuff hides and shows in the right way, with the proper fade times and all kinds of stuff where they get more into the UI design. Where are you comfortable usually getting the information from them?
JEFF: More often than not, any designer I've ever worked with will give me PSD or Illustrator files and stuff and I mean, I don’t wanna get… not blanket statement, but they don’t want to get into the HTML CSS nightmare that is all the browsers you have to support. Most of the time, I'll take that PSD and throw it over to one of these chop shops that do it, and they do an amazing job for a couple hundred bucks. I mean, semantic markups, CSS -- all that stuff – and they test it on a ton of browsers, so that’s generally how I handle it.
CHUCK: Right. Do you have any recommendations for chop shops or do you just usually find somebody on oDesk or something?
JEFF: I'll find it and…
EVAN: Links for the show notes.
CHUCK: Yeah. I usually get the PSD, and then I'll break it down. I usually actually pick apart the PSD myself, and put it together. There are a few tools in Photoshop that makes it pretty easy to have the rulers and you can zoom in and out. And if they have it layered properly, then it's also pretty easy to just isolate the different shapes, and use those to get your border radiuses and things like that.
EVAN: And the minimum, I usually try to get a
designers to break the in the assets for me. And if I have to, I can do the CSS, but it's not my forte. I’d rather someone else do it. But at the very least, I don’t wanna have to be in the position of breaking their PSDs down into individual assets, because well, I don’t have Photoshop. I haven’t spent a bajillion dollars on it. And it would just be way too much of a pain in the butt, and I don’t wanna be charging the clients for that kind of time when I can be doing something more useful.
CHUCK: Yeah, that's true. It can be more cost-effective to have the designer break it up for you. So you get the PSD, you get it broken down into HTML and CSS, and then you just kind of code in the backend in JavaScript from there. Do you approach getting a designer differently if it's your own project versus a client project?
ERIC: So most of my client projects, I'm doing with like existing design. Like for like RedMine or Chili Project, there's already like this is your base design and base layout, and you kind of have to put in your own stuff around it. Well, I've been working on a product that's basically brand new and all that. So for me, I don’t even own Photoshop. I have Linux. So like I'm using Twitter Bootstrap and then from there, adding on the layers, removing stuff I don’t need.
And all of my “design” is basically in HTML. And it's actually the HTML is coming out of erb. And I'm finding that’s fast and nice. Like yesterday, I was playing with different fonts, trying to figure out like what fonts to use, and I mean, it only took like half an hour to go through about half a dozen fonts and actually compare and contrast how they are going to look. And then when that’s done, I just delete the ones I didn’t need and move on. So I didn’t have to like put it into Photoshop, slice it up, export it, deal with all those steps. I just put it right in the project and then let it go. But once again, this is a new product; the code base is really small, there's not a lot of stuff going on, so I
have that flexibility. But I'm going to take advantage of it.
EVAN: Yeah, kind of like what Eric was saying that when I'm working on my own stuff -- at least anything remotely design related -- I'm not dogfooding it a good way, I mean this stuff that I'll use... I'll put up a crap that I would never give to a client [chuckles] because I'm more concerned about, well, I guess getting that work or getting something simple out there, and getting it out quickly. Where in clients, often when it comes to design stuff, they know what they want. So well, you got to give it to them.
CHUCK: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense too. I do like some of the frameworks out there like Twitter Bootstrap because you can get decent looking site up pretty fast, and you don’t need to involve a designer – atleast initially. But you know, at the same time, again, depending on what your level is and where things are at, as far as your branding and what you are trying to do with marketing, you may actually go all the way up to hiring a designer. But I do like that there are options, there are tiers all the way up and down the line. So I mean, you can go to something like 99 Designs and you know, pay for a website design. And you are not going to spend several thousand dollars on the design. You can also go the next level down, and just buy and existing theme and then tweak it; you can get something off of ThemeForest or WooThemes like Jeff said, or you can kind of use twitter bootstrap or something else, and just do it yourself. And so there are definitely a lot of options. I wanna ask another question about UI designers or User Experience designers, because they kind of do a little bit different things than your graphic designers that get in and make you a pretty site. They actually focus on the usability of your website and things like that. Have you had much opportunity to work with them and what's been your experience?
EVAN: The designer that I talked about that when I worked on 101, he also was basically user experience guy too, and did a pretty good job of it. The design shop, I never got to find out.
ERIC: I haven’t worked with any like “I'm a UX person only” type stuff. Most of the people and designers I've worked with, they might do like mostly the design, but then they have UX experience. I mean, really UX is like if you've been using the internet for a few years, you kind of have some intuition about how UX should work. So all you'll have to do is kind of know… you have your basic usage and you do a little bit of the research and find out like, “Okay, here’s the patterns. Here’s the standard.” And there's not really that much needed for UX, I think for most sites. If you are doing like a lot of heavy stuff, then yeah, you might need a lot of like, if you have a wizard workflow or stuff like that, you might need a UX person that’s specialized to come in, but mostly if you know the patterns and kind of know what a good, functioning website looks like and you actually take mental notes when you are just browsing the web, I think that’s good enough to atleast get started. I mean like with design, you can change a layer; you can come back and tweak it and all that stuff.
CHUCK: Yeah, I found that depending on how complicated whatever you are doing is, you don’t necessarily really need it. But when you are building a really complicated layout, with a lot of moving parts, a lot of times if you get somebody in there, they can point things out that you didn’t notice. And the other thing is sometimes they'll point things out and then you'll realize that it really was awkward, but you are close enough to the problem to where you just kind of adapted to it and you don’t deal with it on that level. And so, it's really handy sometimes to have them. I have a client that hired one, and he actually did a lot of tweaking on the overall design. And some of the things that he brought up were pretty handy and pretty useful, and some of the things he brought up were just kind of, I thought they were kind of silly. But you know, it really depends on the level of experience and what their philosophy is.
ERIC: Yeah, I found like user testing, whether it's formal or informal is best for that. Like I've actually run a lot of stuff by my wife. Like I'll say, “Hey, can you look at this and use it and tell me what you think.” And I'll watch her as she’s using it, and I'll notice like she's not noticing the big button over here that I wanted everyone to see right away, or this or that. And one of my clients, they actually will send out like a design or like a prototype to their team of like 20 people or so, and say, “Hey, everyone take five minutes and play with this. Write down anything you can think off about it.” And I mean that matter of opinion in people who haven’t been living in it for the past three weeks, that’s invaluable and that kind of gets the big UX problems. And then once you take care of the big ones, the little ones are usually easy to do, or you can do later on. Here’s kind of a question I was wondering. Like, when you guys do brand new apps for clients, do you advise them like on a
branding and try to get them like, “Let’s pick your company colors and logo,” and all that. Or do you just try to like let them run off and do it on their own and you just kind of give advice, as far as getting that integrated into the code.
EVAN: I get too many rescue projects. [Chuckles] They’ve already got a lot of that stuff by the time I get there.
CHUCK: I have tended to let them find their own design experts. I'm not sure if I'm going to continue to do that. I mean if they want to, they can, but I really like the idea of subcontracting the design workout. And the reason for that is really then I can find companies or people that I can work with, so I can really kind of define that relationship, and I can manage it so that the client A. doesn’t have to, and B. doesn't find somebody that I just can't deal with. But yeah, in the past I've just said, you know, “I don’t do design. If you find a design company that can put together a PSD, then I can chop it up, put it together and make it work.” And you know, I think I gave one client and actual example of like, “Here's the PSD and here's the HTML,” and I mean they looked pretty much the same. I mean, within a few pixels here or there. And you know, they were happy enough with that to where they just found their own person. But I think you also have to realize that if the client is kind of hands off person, they are not going to be super involved, then their feedback loop between you and the designer isn't going to be super terrific. I mean, because they are going to be still getting back to the designer, and getting back to you. And if that’s the case, then the cycles between having a design done, and getting it implemented in the app is going to be really tricky. But yeah, I have another client that we're doing some work for. And right now, his stuff is still using the basic scaffold CSS that you get when you generate stuff in Rails. And the functionalities there, it works, stuff is probably going to get moved around. But yeah, we're waiting on some design elements from the designer before we really get going on that. But you know, he has the basic functionality, he can test it out, it works as advertised, and yeah, we really are just waiting to figure out where everything is going to live in the layout on the application. And he’s managing that designer – which is why I haven’t heard from him in a week.
JEFF: I've never been in a position -- I don’t think I ever wanna be in a position -- to be responsible for any sort of design direction for a customer. I mean, there are some shops that do that, right? I mean, ThoughtBot, I think they are pretty big into that when they start with their… I mean they have a lot of startup customers, like it looks like they do the whole process. And my stuff like Evan, I'm brownfield some of it is blacked, decayed, field stuff I'm getting on a regular basis. [Laughter] I mean, I'm not doing anything. I would love to be able to have a designer on staff that was just able to make myself look a tiny bit more professional than the crap I can churn out with like Twitter Bootstrap or whatever I find. I mean, I don’t think I ever want to get into the details of, “You should be blue or green,” or any of that stuff. I mean, that’s just not interesting at all to me.
EVAN: What color is my customer? [Laughter]
CHUCK: You can get into trouble asking those kinds of questions.
EVAN: I wasn’t meaning that.
CHUCK: But yeah, one other thing that I really like about the designer that I hired for devchat.tv is that they really do kind of the cohesive brand thing, which is a little outside of just making a pretty website, but at the same time, it really does kind of pay off. So that’s one other thing to consider is getting a designer that understands branding and stuff. I mean, if you understand that kind of thing, and you can give them enough direction to do that, then by all means, just hire somebody that knows how to use Photoshop and pick colors and make things look good. But I'll tell you right now, that’s really hard to do, unless you are kind of building the whole package. So yeah, just be aware of that. So, somebody brought up 99 Designs, I'm a little curious as to what your experience has been with them.
JEFF: I had a fairly decent experience with them. It was I guess right after they launched or right after they got popular enough for a lot of people to notice. I mean, I use them to build a website layout. So there were design… I don’t think I ever used them for logos. I might be wrong there, but made fairly good description of the app I was trying to build for Rails Rumble, it was like a kid’s birthday party or RSVP thing. So if you have little kids that are in day care, you'll know you'll get invited to a party a month, two parties a month, and you have no idea what this person’s kid you are going to party for wants as a toy, and you have to listen to your four year old tell you that they want this thing because they just know they do. So, it was to solve that problem. And I mean as a fairly well defined site and give a ton of feedback. I mean I was on a time crunch anyways because it was during Rails Rumble, but I think I got like 30 or 40 designs. I think there was some promotion going on during the Rumble, they got out to be featured for free or something like that. But I had a decent experience with it. I've not used it since. I'd rather just trust a designer who I think stuff looks pretty, and in my world, pretty as much as I know about design. So, I find somebody who’s stuff I think looks pretty, and ask them to do something, and I try not to tweak it a whole bunch.
EVAN: They love it when you do that.
CHUCK: [Chuckles]
JEFF: Yeah, I mean we love it too when people do that to us.
EVAN: Oh yeah, they are going to check your code because they think they know how to? Well that’s great.
JEFF: Well, not even that; it's more, “I want you to do this.” It shouldn’t be that hard, right? It's just some flag in a database or something. [Laughter]
EVAN: How many times have you heard that?
CHUCK: Yeah.
JEFF: Enough that I've got a picture of me and two middle fingers to send back every time I do, but…
CHUCK: [Laughs] “Here's the end of the string. Start pulling on it.”
JEFF: And I've been an asshole client, I know because I talked to the design friend of mine and asked him for questions and he's talking about kerning. And I have to go look that shit up in the internet. I have no idea what kerning is. I still don’t care what kerning is, but he says, “I need more kern between the G and something else, blah, blah, blah”
CHUCK: I was going to say I know it has something to do with typography, but that’s about it.
JEFF: Yeah, that's what I know too.
CHUCK: So when I went to 99 Designs, I was actually looking for a logo design. And the problem is that you put the company name up and you say, “Make me a logo for this.” And they all do the same thing; and so you've got some fancy shmancy font that’s got your words and it's got some dumbass looking picture [laughs] and you are just like, “Come on! I want something different. I want something that’s interesting.”
JEFF: It's all gaming for them too, right? I mean Evan said it, but I mean, there's going to be a few people that design up first, there's going to be a few people that get the same design out like ten different ways, ten different pictures, ten different fonts, ten different font sizing, word spacing, all that stuff, and then they are going to wait to see you give feedback, and then everybody is going to basically dog pile this one design that you like and give you a couple minor iterations on that one.
CHUCK: Yeah, that’s exactly what I saw. And the problem was that, in the end, I wanted a logo that I really kind of loved, and I just didn’t… I mean, there were few that I sort of liked, but none of them that I liked enough to actually pay for. And the deal was, it was my first time on 99 Designs, and so I can get a refund. So I went back to them and said, “Look, all of these are crap. I really appreciate the efforts these folks put in but…”
JEFF: Not enough to reward one of them with the money for the effort.
CHUCK: Right, exactly. So yeah, I mean, really the experience varies depending on who you are using and what you are looking for.
JEFF: But there's also… not to beat this horse anymore, I mean there's also the whole paradox of choice. You have 34 designs to look at, and 34 designs to say which one you want, then you start doing the Chinese menu; “I want the font from this one, the letter spacing from this one, I like the color from this one, I sort of like the picture from that one.”
EVAN: Yeah, I've done that on 99 Designs.
JEFF: So I mean, I've had a bunch of logos done for me -- probably more than I ever should have done. But I would go to like Logo Nerds or The Logo Company. All these places that offer you like a logo for $50 or $100, they'll give you three choices to start, and then unlimited revisions -- within reason. And if I can’t find something out of those first three to like, then it's probably not a good fit. But 9 times out of 10, there's something that’s good enough. I mean, I'm not trying to be featured in like… I don’t even know how to say that blog or any designer world, I
mean, I just want a logo that looks ALRIGHT to me.
CHUCK: So one other question I have for you is if you are just going to go buy like a normal theme, like something off of ThemeForest, are there other sites, other good places to get themes? I've been referred to WooThemes and ThemeForest by you guys.
JEFF: There are bazillion. I don’t know if any of them are any good anymore. I mean they used to be, back in the day OSWG, and I think that stood for Open Source Web Designs and something. And that was all free stuff. I don’t know if they even exist anymore. ThemeForest seems to have taken over. Certainly if I'm looking for… I mean, they have a ton of stuff. I mean it's not just ThemeForest; they’ve got like 12 web properties, so graphics and audio and video effects and all these stuff. I mean, they sort of taken over for me. You'll see a couple copycats come in like Media Loot, which does some stuff. And so they are on sort of that. You buy one and then you get one type thing. The Media Loot has some subscription. WooThemes is sort of one of the first big WordPress theme providers that I've used. Eric and I, I think both found them through the same place, Micropreneur Academy. And it's subscription; they have like 120 themes or something for WordPress and they keep them up to date fairly regularly, and there's been some copies after that like in elegant themes or… I mean, those are probably the two places I’d hit first if I was looking for sort of a cookie cutter site that looked good enough to do so, I mean, even if you look at ThemeForest, you can look at their sales numbers and that’s normally how I rank what I'm going to buy, how many other people have bought it. But you'll see something that’s sold 1,500 and oh well, you'll be just like everybody else in the internet. But who cares? I mean, 1,500 websites on the internet have this theme. I could care less.
CHUCK: Alright, well we need to get into the picks because I've got to get off this call in about 10-15 minutes.
EVAN: That's why we have to get into the picks because you have to get off the call? [Chuckles]
CHUCK: That right. [Chuckles]
JEFF: I don’t know if 10 minutes is enough for all the picks.
CHUCK: Well, let’s see how quickly we can go.
JEFF: I dropped off during the middle. Karma’s a bitch. I just have to say that. Karma is a bitch.
EVAN: [Chuckles] That sounds like the opener right there.
CHUCK: [Chuckles]
JEFF: Is it daily stand up, I'm doing daily stand up. 16 people stand up team to team start playing until there's one guy complaining about spending 13 Or 18 hours having to rebuild his windows machine. And of course, I said some snark comment about why he should be using a Mac.
CHUCK: [Laughs]
JEFF: And of course, right when I said I'm going to look up that thing for the quick tip, my whole Mac beach balls everything beach balled. I had to force quit a bunch of stuff. I really wanna rename that dialog to “force choke” by the way, so if anyone from apple is listening, let’s call that “force choke.”
CHUCK: [Chuckles]
JEFF: But I couldn’t even force kill everything; I end up having to do a hard shut down of my Mac Pro.
EVAN: You'd make a really bad [unintelligible].
JEFF: I know. This is licensed now. I'm going to get a Mac Pro. So when I don’t show up in a few weeks because my wife has murdered me for upgrading my Mac Pro, that’s why.
CHUCK: [Chuckles] Alright.
JEFF: Anyways, karma’s a bitch.
CHUCK: So what are your picks?
JEFF: Eon. It's a time tracking client for the Mac. Its $30. Took on a new clients have a ton of work to do for them, and so I'm stubbing some stuff out and Fresh Books is just so much nicer for subs and basically anybody else. And they have an add on, it’s like an extra dollar a month to use some widget they had. Cash board had a dashboard widget that was really cool, but Eon basically supports everybody; they support like 40 different time tracking apps. It looks really cool. And so, that's pick one for me. Pick two and three are a series by Matt Gemmell. It's How Developers Can Help Designers and How Designers Can Help Developers. I've linked to both of them in Freelancing Weekly -- which can be picked four. And they are really good. And finally chopchop.org, it's a PSD to XHTML shop. They are awesome. I've used them for a ton of stuff. And they really, really, really good. Can't recommend them enough.
CHUCK: Alright, Evan what are your picks?
EVAN: Design, frankly I got nothing. But when it comes to doing CSS… because I really hate it, I would have to recommend the library the Ruby gem Compass, because Compass has made CSS remotely even attractive and fun for me to work in because I'm not working in CSS, I'm working in SASS with a bunch of super awesome mixins that just make my life a whole lot easier. And because I've been traveling so much lately, I don’t have other picks other than first class.
CHUCK: First class?
EVAN: Yeah, if you can travel first class [Chuckles]. Get upgrades.
CHUCK: How much does it usually cost to upgrade to first class? Because I've never even looked.
EVAN: If you fly enough, it doesn’t really cost you anything. And I've been flying a lot last year.
JEFF: If you don’t fly enough, you can't afford it.
EVAN: Yeah, if you don’t fly enough, you really don’t wanna do it.
CHUCK: [Chuckles] Right.
JEFF: I mean it's order of magnitude at least more expensive than coach tickets.
EVAN: No, it's not always that, but usually it's pretty bad. But hey, being able to work on the plane as opposed to not – it can almost pay for itself. I've actually done the math on it before.
CHUCK: Yeah, you pay the ten bucks for the inflight wireless?
EVAN: Or if you have everything you need on a plane. But yeah, inflight wireless. Airbus 8320, 100 200, at least in US airways, the crappy airline that I have. I could curse about them at the end of this podcast, which will be fun.
CHUCK: [Chuckles]
EVAN: [Chuckles] But they have WiFi. So Wi-Fi + first class = several hours of productive work, if you want – which is nice.
CHUCK: Eric, what are your picks?
ERIC: Okay, I have a couple that are design related. First one, there's a book coming out called Bootstrapping Design by Jared Drysdale. He's still working on it, but he gave me like an advanced early copy of it. It's pretty awesome. Like it's targeted towards developers like Evan said, hate CSS, can't really figure it out, doesn’t like working in it. But it's targeted to the people like him and me, where it's like, when can bumble our way through it, but this kind of gives you higher level topics of like, “Here’s how you make a way out, here’s why typography matters.” And one of the big things he talked about is like, “Don’t really ever worry about color theory.” Like color theory is useless if you are not intermediate to advanced designer. And for me, that’s great because I've spend probably days trying to figure out what colors to pick for different things. I just pick the standards and move on. So that’s Bootstrapping Design. I guess it's not out yet. I think he has two, maybe three chapters you can get, so you can get some good ones from that. He recommended an app called Font Deck, which was to basically web fonts. Really, really good. Like you don’t really realize how good it is to use a high quality font on an app. And like I said, I played with it yesterday, and I think I'm going to end up paying like $12/year. And my site looks completely different. So that’s Font Deck. It's really easy to use. It's like one link tag in Rails, and you are good to go. And my third pick. I haven’t used them yet, but it's interesting. It's called Stylate or something. But it's basically for $250, you get a domain name and you get a logo that’s made for that domain name. So it's a pretty good little idea. And the whole premise is that if you are building a startup, you are going to be renaming, you are going to be changing your brand, doing all these things, all these pivots, and you don’t wanna spend a week to kind of figure out what name to get, spend $10,000 on a name and then change your name two weeks later. So I looked at it. I didn’t actually use them for the app I'm building, but there was two choices on there that I was like really thinking about getting, but it's good to take a look at it. They get a little bit of inventory every few weeks it looks, and there might be something you can get. Throw it in your app and then there, you have a logo, you have a domain name, you can move on, build it, and actually have something useful.
CHUCK: Alright, so I have a couple of picks. The first one is I actually have Photoshop. I have a friend that works at Adobe. So anyway, I really like it. But if you wanna do things kind of cheap and you are on a Mac, Acorn is a good alternative to Photoshop. And it works really well. It will actually open the PSDs. It's not 100%, but for most designs, it worked really well for me before I had Photoshop. If you are on another system like on Linux, you can also use Gimp. Not the most beautiful interface in the world, but it will work.
ERIC: Correction: it is probably the worst interface I the world, but it will work.
EVAN: It is terrible. I was going to say, I used Pixel Maker, but that’s how much I know about it. I've never used it on a PSD before, so I don’t even know if it will work, but I suspect it will.
CHUCK: Most of these programs can open them, so it's pretty straightforward. I've also used a lot of the other things that Jeff mentioned, a lot of the other sites – and a lot of those are pretty good. I like Media Loot because it doesn’t just give you designs, but it will give you elements and images. So I've actually purchased a few elements off of there that I'm going to use on different websites like icons. I think I got off of app sumo; I got a subscription deal there and I actually wound up getting like countdown timer images and stuff.
JEFF: With the year-end special, they were doing it's like $50 for 800 credits or some ridiculous thing.
CHUCK: Yeah, so that worked out pretty well. And then one other thing that I'm excited about Mountain West and the opportunity to network with people, and so, if you are coming to MOUNTAIN west, I just wanna let you know that we'll be out there, we'll be looking for folks, so if you…
EVAN: Feel free to talk to Chuck and me! Yay!
CHUCK: Yeah, the two of us.
JEFF: Evan is the one you wanna punch in the face.
EVAN: [Sighs] I love you, Jeff.
CHUCK: [Chuckles]
ERIC: Yeah, just ask him about object-oriented design and all that. EVAN: No, no, no, I'm not one of those.
CHUCK: Yeah, that’s what we were talking about on Ruby Rogues next week. Anyway, with all that being said, if you are at Mountain West, look us up. I'm actually a local at Mountain West – I'm from Utah – so if you wanna go see some of the cool stuff in Salt Lake City, then by all means, let me know and we'll figure out how we can get around the Temple Square or some of the other stuff that's out there. And beyond that, thanks for listening. You can catch as on iTunes, leave us a review, we really appreciate that. We also have an RSS subscribe link up. I've had quite a few people asking about that because they are listening on something other than an Apple device -- an iTunes device – so you can definitely pick that up.
EVAN: People do that? Listen to us on anything other than an Apple device.
CHUCK: You'll be surprised how many people are listening to us on their android phone.
EVAN: Oh, good lord. I feel sorry for them.
CHUCK: Yeah, I haven’t found a good pod catcher yet that I like on my android phone. But if you have one that you like, let me know what it is. And you can also leave us a comment on the blog. And I do try and respond to some of those. I don’t check it every day just because I don’t have time. If you have any feedback, click the feedback link. If you have ideas, you can also put that up by going to RubyFreelancers.com and just clicking on the feedback link, and we'll get that, and we will take it into consideration for topics on the show. So, thanks for listening and we'll catch you next week!
The Ruby Freelancers Show 007 – Designing and Working with the Designers
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