I go into detail about what to do before, during, and after your web design project in order to maintain a good working relationship with your web designer. Here is a short excerpt:

Getting a successful website design can be tricky business. But, what many people new to the Web design process don’t know is that a successful project is very much the result of a good collaborative effort between both Web designer and client.

Read More…

Here in the studio, we’ve also applied a lot of changes this year, personally and professionally. Probably all of the changes have to do with the idea of being an active participant in the world rather than going with the flow. Just taking conscious action seems to catalyze change. This can be applied to all areas in life; from environmental and health issues, to family and other personal issues.

Just going with the flow often contributes to a problem itself. A lot of issues really are that black and white. Either you help fix the problem or you contribute to it. There is no way to stand on the sidelines and watch. We’re all players, all of us.

For this reason, we’ve decided to be more active in choosing the type of work we’ll accept. We’ve consciously decided to take on fewer projects in general reserve more of our time for projects that we feel passionate about and less for others we don’t. For us, these types of projects might be concerning environmental issues, global poverty issues, human rights issues, or on a smaller scale, projects for small businesses that we want to support. Yes, this might be less profitable for us or it might not. But, I don’t think a business should be all about maximizing profits anyway. That’s not really why we are doing this.

As designers, we are responsible for what we are putting out and we need to keep this in mind when accepting new work. We are directly affecting people’s perceptions about the subject we are working on, probably more than we even realize.

What do you think?

Illustration by Koldo Barroso

Koldo and I have talked extensively about why things just don’t feel right with the world these last few years. What happened to people’s sense of community? And does it feel lately like each person is their own island? Some days that best thing that happens to me is a nice friendly smile. True, things have to do a lot with your own perspective, but doesn’t it feel like things have changed?

A few weeks ago I came across this article, “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable” by David Wong. I felt everything it said on so many levels. It was thinking, “Wow, we’re not crazy after all. All these things we’ve been talking about and feeling are not just our imagination.”. Point #3 in the article talks about how bad text messaging is as a form of communication.

I moved to Spain over 6 years ago from the U.S. Since talking over the phone can be expensive for international calls, I’ve done a fair share of the communication with family and friends over the internet. I can’t even begin to imagine how many things got lost or misunderstood in transit on both sides.

We also do about 99% of our communication with clients by email. I spend a lot of time trying to communicate in a clear and positive way, but I’m sure a lot of things just haven’t gotten to the recipient how they intended and vice versa. It’s regrettable sometimes because when things go wrong, it’s hard to pinpoint where it started. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the person on the other end is like and how they think of you as well.

I have thought the last few years that the world feels somewhat more lonely. Online friends and communication by email, chat, and social networking just can’t replace a good social life and meeting people you love face to face. I decided that I needed a break from the internet and some more time just being in the “real world”. Not just to regain real contact with people, but also to tune out all of the negative news and constant barge of information for awhile.

So, I decided to take a mini-internet sabbatical last week. It’s a small step, but it helped put things in perspective for me. I decided that I would check and reply to emails, visit web sites needed for client work, and check job postings. The rest was out. No rss feed reading, no news, no twitter, no mindless surfing. I kept a small journal of my experience each day as a reference.

Day 1:

It was strange not checking my feedreader and several sites this morning. Found it really hard to ignore the orange notification icon for my feedreader. What am I supposed to read while I have my morning tea if I can’t have my news? Curiously, I only drank 1 cup of tea rather than my usual 2. I did get a lot of work done before 10:30 am. That’s refreshing!

2pm: Watching the unread feed number go slowly up….30. Still not looking at them!

4pm: 48 unread feeds. *whimper! I think I’m going to just shut down the feed reader.

8pm: Finished work for the day and had walk and dinner. Really really would love to check the news, but I’m not gonna do it!

Day 2:

Woke up more relaxed than usual, but still really miss reading my morning news. Opened up my feed reader to check job listings. It took forever to update it. 120 unread feeds, I am simultaneously excited and scared to see what the final count will be.

3pm: Missed reading the news again after lunch, habits are hard to break!

8pm: It’s after dinner, need to read something…I think I have an old e-book I never finished.

Day 3:

2pm: Ok, I broke down and checked the weather. It had to be done! How else would I know that it’s supposed to rain the rest of the week?

8pm: 302 unread feeds. I think I will be deleting many when I finally check them.

Day 4:

Did some apartment searching this morning. I am really missing my feeds at this point. Starting to wonder if this experiment was worthwhile. I suppose to make it worthwhile, you need to replace the feeds and internet with something else besides work.

6pm: Cheated and read a bunch of scientific health studies.

Day 5:

Wow, 415 unread feeds this morning. I’m scanning over my feed folders to see which are the most full. I’m seeing that the largest group are fashion blogs (205). I think that will be the first folder to clean up. I am very much looking forward to reading my feeds and news again.

—-

I think I’ve learned a few things from this. Here are some of the things I took away from it all.

1. I spend a whole lot more time reading feeds than I thought I did. I am an information junkie and I think that’s not a bad thing, but I realized that there are a lot of things I just don’t need. Today, I deleted several feeds and automatically reduced my unread feed count from 550 to 350.
2. I used to mainly read feeds in between tasks and in the morning and evening before and after work times. I think from now on, I’m going to read work related feeds before work to get in the mind set and entertainment feeds later at night after work.
3. I thought I would be more productive, but it didn’t really work out that way. The times that I used to read feeds, I just replaced by taking a break and doing something else like spending a few extra minutes cooking or doing bits of housework.
4. I missed the feeds and news a whole lot more than I thought I would. I didn’t realize how much I depended on these things to be informed about the world. I am not a big tv fan and definitely felt a hole.
5. There are too many other things to do than be stuck at the computer all day. I think I will try this experiment again some time, but replace the internet with some real social interaction. That could be very interesting.

So, in general I didn’t have the results I expected and I think I would call the general experience both good and bad. I guess the main question that comes to me from all this is “Is the internet really helping or hurting our social life?”.

I very much look forward to hearing your comments.

Photo by Ralph Dagza

We are flattered! Our Intuitive Designs site has been featured in the 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites ranking by Vandelay Website Design. The ranking post has selected 25 sites that effectively utilize illustration and other types of very artistic design. It’s an honor to see our work displayed amongst many other great works in web design and illustration that we’ve been admiring ourselves for a long time.

We are really glad because that’s exactly one of the things we were looking for when doing the new design for the site: using illustration as one of the main features to communicate our idea. Thank you very much Vandelay!

We are happy to announce that Koldobarroso.com, a web site dedicated to Koldo’s illustration and art work, is now online after several months of meticulous work.

We have been designing and developing web sites together for the last 5 years including more than 50 projects, created and maintained, two big music web sites and Koldo needed to have a web site for his illustration and art work and now it’s done. We believe this is the most complex and elaborate web project we have done so far.

The web web site originally started in November 2007 as a mere blog. Because we knew building the site would take a few months, Koldo decided to start a simple blog because he just had the urge to write. For the temporary version, we used a template that we originally designed a couple of years back. For the last few months, Koldo have been showing the development of the final design that you can see today in order to demonstrate the creative process. He will still be posting more about it in the forthcoming weeks, and he will also be updating the portfolio and blog regularly.

We wanted to add that it was our intention from the very first day to do this web site the most personal we could. The whole design and illustration is full of important and influential things in Koldo’s life and work. Nothing here is circumstantial. The main illustration in the top header, for instance, it’s full of references to his own life and persona. This web site makes him feel like home. We hope we can reach other hearts, make good friends and know all the beautiful and creative people floating around this world like us.

To be very sincere, probably the biggest issue both of us have ever had in my life is having to deal with a lack of self-confidence. It’s a handicap that comes from family issues and the way we’ve been raised, but looking for guilty parties and complaining won’t solve anything. That’s why we feel than one of our main goals in life is to get rid of the feeling of lack of confidence and to learn to love and accept ourselves better. It is just part of our own path in this school of life in order to become free human beings and be in tune with life. But it’s a hard task.

People like us very often work very hard to please other people just to be accepted. It never works because they are never really accepting us, but someone else we pretend to be. That happens all of the time in art and design. It takes maturity for an artist to forget about everyone else’s opinions and just be oneself. Sometimes we are not self-confident and we try to adopt other people’s styles instead of standing up for what we really are. This is very often tagged as “lack of originality”, but I believe is just lack of self-confidence.

If you hear the words from the most renowned artists, painters, musicians, actors, etc… most of all they will tell you they dislike themselves. Many of the most acclaimed actors don’t ever watch their movies because they hate to hear their own voice and look at their own face; singers never listen to their most acclaimed albums because they don’t like to hear their own voice, and so on. The difference between them and the artists who never get any recognition is probably that they just place their ego apart and do their work the best they can because they realize they have a gift to make other people happy and on top of that, they can make a living with it.

So, even if they won’t watch the bloody movie in their life, they just do it and try to get the most they can from the experience. And they do it just being themselves with all of the consequences. You ask any of these reputed artists for an advice to young artists and most of them will tell you the same: “be yourself”.

How do we know we are being ourselves as creative people? It’s something you can tell when things come naturally. When we try to be someone else things get hard, tedious, and frustrating. Imagine that you do a wonderful imitation of someone else’s work. If people had to choose between your copy and the original they would pick the real one, no matter how good the copy is. Just because it has the original spirit and you can sense it!

On the other hand, sometimes we refuse to use the things that come easy and in a natural way just because they don’t fit our expectations of what the work should be after looking at someone else’s style or doing some specific work. Then, we end up trashing the best from ourselves and we don’t realize that probably that’s exactly what people really want to see. It’s not a matter of being commercial. It just has to do with letting your inner self come out in a natural way because that is always going to be what will connect with the rest of the people. They won’t like it more or less because it was easy, but because it came easy from you. It flowed. They can tell there’s something really personal there that came from your true self.

Of all the advices I have ever received from other artists, this is the one I always try to keep in mind: “Be yourself, no matter what they say”.

Personally, I don’t think this is a responsible attitude for several reasons. First of all, it’s about honesty. We, as designers need to realize that when we work on a project, we are directly supporting it, not indirectly. It doesn’t really matter if it’s behind the scenes, we are still helping shape the public’s perception about the subject we are working on.

The second thing we need to realize is that when we work on something that we don’t want to support, we are doing the client a disservice. We aren’t really into the project and as a consequence, aren’t putting in our best work. We’re just in it for the money and it shows.

Wouldn’t it be more honest to say to a potential client, “I’m sorry, I just can’t take this on because it’s against my values.” They might be surprised, but at least you held on to your integrity, were honest, and later slept like a baby.

What do you think?

The story starts when I re-discovered a song from my childhood by chance: “T.S.O.P” by Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. It’s a song that became very popular in 1974 and was nicknamed as “The Sound of Philadelphia”. In the U.S. it was the soundtrack for the TV show Soul Train. OK, so I remember how much I used to like this song and how wonderful these kings of funk and groove themes with trumpets used to be. So this morning I googled the soundtrack for Lou Grant, one of my favorite TV shows ever, and I arrived at this web site: www.televisiontunes.com.

I spent about five minutes on the site, they have a list of lots of popular TV series, and all the way through I have a funny feeling, some kind of Deja Vu like, “I’ve been here before”. So Naomi looks at my screen and she says, “But… OMG, they totally ripped our design!”

These people stole our design shamelessly. Our first reaction was to laugh really hard because I was in front of this design for five minutes which was literally stolen from us and I didn’t figure it out. OK, I admit I can be really dense in the morning. So we looked at it carefully and we noticed that they basically copied the CSS coding and just took out the parts they didn’t need. They ripped off the menu bar, they ripped off the background, they ripped off the font style, and they even dared to rip off the image of the arrow button that I created for Intuitive Designs!

This is the old design of our web site, since we changed it just a few days ago as you may know. Lucky for us. But it gets pretty disgusting to browse the internet and find people who steal your work. It happens more often than we would like. I wonder how yucky must be for famous people to turn on the TV or read a magazine every morning and find crap about themselves…

Once again we have to say what our philosophy is about being ripped off: life is an unique opportunity to celebrate our own individual identity. Each and everyone one of us are one of a kind. Each and everyone one of us can create our own print and that is a gift that shouldn’t be underestimated. By being ourselves and leaving our own footprint we make this world richer. It’s a celebration of life. Everyone should enjoy taking part of it and sharing their own goods with the rest of the world.

Here I leave an idea for their next design in case they want to have a different version of their most presumably ripped of illustration.