WM Web Team Attends AIGA/Happy Cog Talk

Wednesday September 22nd, 2010

Last week Bryan and Peter attended a web design seminar in the city. Today I’m handing the blog over to them, so they can share what they learned.

-Asad

As the two members of the web department here at Wonderful Machine, Peter Clark and I spend most of our days bathed in the warm glow of the computer monitor, pushing pixels around in Photoshop or judiciously hacking away at code. So it was a nice change of pace last Thursday night when we got to attend an event at the nearby Tyler School of Art in Temple University, and commune with others who share a love of websites and funny pictures of cats.

The event, Pencil 2 Pixel, sponsored by the Philadelphia chapter of AIGA, is an ongoing series of discussions with prominent web design creatives about the practice and process of digital design. The guest speakers for this installment were a senior designer, developer and UE director from Happy Cog, a New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco-based design agency that has long been at the forefront in the industry. They not only craft beautiful and functional websites, but they also take the time to inform and educate their peers in the process. In fact, I often credit much of my early education in web development to a certain book written by Jeffrey Zeldman, the founder of Happy Cog.

The topic of the night was the process of developing design systems, which are basically guidelines one should follow to create a fully functional and well-designed website. The talk dealt with a lot of stuff on information architecture, hierarchy, typography and grid-based design. While it was a presentation aimed squarely for professionals working in the web field, it was also a great insight into the multi-disciplinary approach that modern web agencies take.

Often, the perception of what a designer does is centered around aesthetics, or just making things look good. In reality, when you hire someone to design a website or brand, what you are asking them to do is solve communication problems and decrease the amount of friction between your message and an audience.

If you work with your designer on a design system for your brand or website, you should be creating something that can withstand the test of time. Designers can’t read minds or see the future, but they can hand you a solid set of rules, conventions and layouts that meet not only your immediate needs, but also needs you are likely to develop down the road.

It might be worth taking a few minutes to peruse the slides from Happy Cog’s presentation, and the next time you find yourself needing to re-design your website, talk to your designer/developer about their approach to creating a design system. They’ll probably get excited you even thought to ask.

-Bryan Mills