Design Industry

Watch any news pro­gram and you’ll hear sta­tis­tics about Amer­ica hav­ing fallen behind most other indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries in mat­ters of heath, edu­ca­tion, and tech­nol­ogy. But I can think of one area in which we excel—creative services.

Pitch to enough clients of a cer­tain size and even­tu­ally you’re going to be asked to sign a stan­dard­ized con­tract or NDA. Usu­ally it comes from a large client with a team of lawyers who burry you in page after page of terms which are so one-​​​​sided it’s becomes laughable.

A new year and new prices are in full effect. With tax sea­son gear­ing up and the econ­omy slowly on the mend—or still in the toi­let depend­ing your point of view—it’s a good time to take one last look back at 2010 and see how well you fared and use what you learned to plan how you want to end 2011.

It’s been a cou­ple months since the Apple/​​HTML 5 vs Adobe/​​Flash wars began and I am con­tin­u­ally amazed how much atten­tion this topic receives. While the tech­nol­ogy dri­ving the media we con­sume is an impor­tant dis­cus­sion, it’s not the con­ver­sa­tion which needs to be tak­ing place. What’s being glossed over is this; why, in 2010, are we still dis­cussing code instead of content?

I think the best thing to come out of the web design/​​development move­ment is the recent trend towards research-​​​​driven design. While noth­ing new to the big dogs on Madi­son Ave, it gen­er­ally is over­looked in the print world—especially on such a gran­u­lar level and rapid level. This is cer­tainly a trick more print design­ers need keep up their sleeves. At its core, A/​​B test­ing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two ver­sions of an ele­ment (A…