Sarah Parmenter, a web and UI designer.

I have had my fair share of interesting moments with clients over the years. One that particularly stands out was when I was heading on a trip to Spain with some pals one Summer, my fight left at 9pm and I was still in my office in Leigh-on-Sea at 5pm with a client who had barged (barged being the best descriptive word actually after I failed to intercom him into the building) into the office and sat down demanding changes to his website before I left. He’d sent me an email and already got my auto-responder back, panicked that he hadn’t told me he needed something before a 9 day holiday, and came up the office.

What then occurred was what can only be described as pixel pushing hell. On the fly updates, rushed and terrible work, all because he thought he would need something while I was away. What I was doing was based on the back of a print run of leaflets he would be doing in my 9 days holiday, and guess what? I came back 9 days later and the print run hadn’t happened. The graphic design for the print run was not even started by the company tasked to complete it.

A similar thing happened before I went on honeymoon. I was away for three weeks this time. Determined not to let anything spoil the week leading up to our wedding, I took the week off work. The week prior to that, despite warning clients I would be away months in advance, was hell. Again, another website, determined they needed to launch while I would be away, thickly laying on deadlines and emails practically every hour in the week before I went away. I leave for honeymoon safe in the knowledge that yes, I managed to do a good job of covering up the bags under my eyes on my wedding day, but my work was safely completed. Back from honeymoon (September), no website. Merry Christmas all. No website. Happy New Year! Again, no website. It didn’t launch until February of 2011, my honeymoon was in September 2010.

Something along the same lines has cropped up recently as well, and it’s made me decide that the only way to determine whether a rush job is truly necessary is to charge a premium. I would say 80% of projects that have come to me saying they need something urgently, have rarely been truly urgent. They might have been a priority in one department of the business you are dealing with, but inevitably, when the work is complete, it’s reliant on other departments or individuals to do something with it. That rarely tallies up with you wrapping up and them becoming available. So your “rush” work sits in a folder, gathering virtual dust until the relevant person decides to pick up on it, sometimes, many months later.

It does beg a question though, what would you consider a rush job? Something that needs completion in under a month or less? Or even something small that causes you to drop whatever you are doing that day, and pick up on something else? I think it’s about time we became like photography labs, ok – we might not have 1 hour processing, but charging a premium for express services should come far more naturally to our industry than they seem to currently.

blog |bläg|
noun
a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis.

The “regular basis” part of the above description from the dictionary, is the part I struggle with the most. I adore writing and I equally love reading the blogs of people I respect and learn from, but the time in my schedule to write blog posts regularly, is time that often doesn’t exist or gets pushed deep at the bottom of my list of priorities for that week.

I’m an over thinker in some ways, I worry about whether what I’m writing could be perceived as helpful or just plain rambling. I’ve lost my roots and the fearlessness I had when I was younger. Back in the early 2000′s (on LiveJournal), I would blog about everything and anything, mainly my failures and weaknesses, and not worry about what the audience thought. I wasn’t blogging for the audience, I was blogging to record details I could learn from, in the future. I’ve lost that free-blogging spirit, instead sometimes worrying about not inciting trolls, gender arguments or being over sensitive. That worrying ends up in many posts in the “drafts” section, and not many actually posted.

I’ve realised this week, I’ve lost my fearlessness in other ways, actually by reading a blog post of a friend, Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew and I both have our own design studios, we both started out around a similar time and are of a similar age. Many years ago, Andrew and I would chat, and he would often encourage me to grow You Know Who and start hiring. I was cautious, nervous and decided instead that no one could do what I did, after having terrible experiences with various freelancers early on, and I’ve stayed as a one person, with reliable freelancers pulled in on various projects, up until that point. Andrew did the opposite, aggressively expanded and hired, I hugely admire his fearlessness. I’m now feeling the urge to change.

Various things have happened over the last few weeks, I was waiting on some news which would significantly change the business, whilst waiting on other news which would…significantly change the business. I won’t go into them here, they are/were both very exciting but would take You Know Who in two entirely different directions. I guess, a real crossroad in life presented itself, loud and clear.

Andrew’s blog post resonated at just the right time this week, while many things have been swilling around my mind, despite it being written in March of last year. It was a huge reminder that although tweets give you a general overview; a glimpse at someones life that day, a blog post is different, generally written from the heart, holding a treasure trove of thoughts and feelings between the lines. This is my pledge that this month, you’ll see more blogging, less worrying and perhaps a sprinkling of exciting news to boot.

I asked my fantastic twitter followers for advice on the best sites/services that help with recurring subscriptions, as normal, you all didn’t disappoint. Here’s the collated list, for those of you also interested.

In order of popularity:
Recurly
Stripe - US ONLY
Spreedly
GoCardless - UK ONLY
Chargify
Cheddar Getter
Dwolla
Fusebill

Here’s an excellent comparison tool for the most popular.
Billing Savvy

It’s a guilty secret I’ve been harbouring for about a year, I cannot design directly into the browser. My creative brain switches at the point when I open my html/css editor (Espresso), and starts thinking in terms of structure and how to achieve the look of my design using as much native CSS as possible. If I don’t have my design to follow, the whole process breaks down for me. I’ve tried, goodness knows I’ve tried, but my designs end up suffering, looking boxy, bland and uninspiring.

Once upon a time this would not have been a problem, as much as it is today. With the rise of responsive/adaptive design (I still prefer adaptive but hey, tomato tomatoe) but it’s just not doable to produce endless Photoshop comps for every breakpoint. Photoshop comps have been a pain in the bottom at the best of times. A client saying “Can I just change that blue, to a slightly different shade” invoking fear amongst Photoshoppers, whilst designers-in-the-browser laugh at our stone-age tools. Aside- Why Adobe have never implemented global changes a’la InDesign, I’ll never know. Seconds later, they have a new blue, across an entire site while we sit changing manually. It’s a labor intensive process at times.

So what’s the answer? I’m still trying to find it. For some projects, a hybrid method of producing a type of scratch file, with a general overview of the style and colours of the app/website, then going straight into HTML/CSS has worked, in others, I still need to produce full-scale visuals. Visuals that are slowly becoming less and less useful as they adhere to a fixed canvas size.

Designing straight into the browser isn’t an option for me though, I still need to go through that creative process in my graphics editor away from the structure of div’s and presentational code, but after getting some initial designs down on paper. Thankfully, I know I’m not alone, I’ve spoken to various others in the industry who all feel the same. Frustrated creatives with no real answers.

It’s that time of year, when employers/clients are squeezing every last ounce of creativity from us, deadlines seem to get shorter and our days get longer. We’re probably not at our best to be conversing with others. Just yesterday, I snapped at my Dad who called and asked a very simple question about eBay just because I was dealing with some work stresses. I then spent the next 3 hours feeling terrible and texting him to apologise. We’re certainly not at our most patient.

Twitter has been rife with snarkiness and generally an underlying tone of unfriendliness recently, uncommon in our industry but sadly becoming more so. This has come at a time when I’m trying to encourage two very bright, young and wonderful individuals into our industry, both of whom follow closely what has been happening on Twitter, and I can’t help but wonder if Rachel Andrew is right in her most recent blog post – Be Kind to one another. Should I warn them that they need thick skins and sometimes need to be a little aggressive in order to succeed and be heard? As Rachel says, I sincerely hope not, however from my personal experiences over the years, I’ve most certainly had to toughen up.

Going backwards slightly, I remember our industry pre-twitter. When your only access to the community was through those who wrote for blogs, books or magazines. I vividly remember flicking through the pages of .net magazine in early 2003, and Googling those who had written tutorials, then bookmarking their sites and visiting regularly. As I got more experienced I didn’t always agree with some of the things I read, and the discussions that took place in the comments were actually helpful, and normally, an alternative method to that which the author originally posted – everyone would learn something. Of course, there have always been haters, people happy to sit behind a keyboard and remain anonymous and faceless, but I strongly believe social media has bought out a dark side of us, as a community, that needs to be buried, and fast.

The influx of the community onto Twitter was a wonderful thing, suddenly being able to converse, in real-time with someone over the other side of the world who wrote one of your favourite books, or who’s work you find inspiring, was a truly magical time. A group of “webbies” (myself included) were very early adopters of Twitter, naturally, and so as others from the community joined these users appeared to already have a large following, and became exponentially, more popular. It was like a catalyst. A lot of the snark on twitter seems to be directed at “popular” webbies who, through no fault of their own, in a way, found themselves at the spearhead of the community on Twitter.

If you spent time with any of these popular “web celebs” (FYI – I hate that term) – you’ll be surprised to find little to no ego’s at all, just a bunch of creative people who enjoy what they do and haven’t been afraid to tell people about it, but all of whom sadly have war stories about their negative experiences of the community, or a select group of people, on Twitter. Within a group, we all laugh and joke and brush them off, but behind closed doors, I know deep down, we’re not laughing. Even worse, the same names of individuals causing problems and bad feeling appear to crop up again and again.

Have we all become so used to sharing that we feel it’s perfectly acceptable to throw etiquette out of the window and direct nasty comments at one another? I’ve never seen this happen at a web conference, so why be a keyboard warrior and let it happen online? Maybe it’s easy to forget these are real people behind the avatars. I don’t know. Perhaps we’ve been spoilt with the speed at which we can now chime in on anything that we read, rather than taking a considered approach to what we say?

It slightly crosses with a theory I’ve had for a while that we’re going to reach an “over-sharing peak” – we’ll start to see value in pulling back the amount of people we share with, and resort to close-knit friendship groups. It’s a theory I’m trialing myself with the new app Path. Instead of sharing with every person that adds me, I’m keeping it exclusively for people I know, trust, and have a real-life friendship with. These people could tell me what I like, dislike, what upsets me, and know all the little nuances of my personality, so I don’t need to watch whether what I say could be misinterpreted. I’m quite enjoying it and have found real value to me, in keeping it that way. I sincerely hope as a community though, that we don’t feel the need to revoke sharing from a wider audience, simply because resistance against what we put out there, is getting less friendly.

I’d love for us as an industry to be more tolerant, to encourage others and get rid of that underlying tone, that has crept in recently, of one-upmanship. I don’t expect everyone to get on, or even share the same opinion, but before making a snarky comment, ask yourself what real value it’s adding to the community? Personally, snarky comments on twitter remind me of one of a saying…

“Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength”.