People pleasing seems to be an epidemic in today’s world. We live in a society that gives tolerance the highest honor in the personality trait category. Unfortunately the industry of design and user experience is not exempt from this issue. It is multi-faceted, affecting how the client treats the designer, how the client deals within it internally, and how the designer responds to all of it.

I’ve been working in the industry of design for roughly 12 years now. During some of my early experiences in doing it as a professional I was let in on a dirty little secret… the client doesn’t always like what you present. I can hear graphic design students everywhere as they shudder at the thought. It’s true, you might think what your presenting is the best work in the world and 9 times out of 10 there is going to be some criticism and feedback from the client.

I’ve been thinking a lot about edge cases recently. Not so much along the lines of “we don’t need to worry about that because its an ‘edge case’” but instead the small details that pop up when you least expect them.

So today on chat a friend of mine ping’d me with this: “Have you seen the new redesigned wired.com?” Oh, man I got to see this, I thought. “Oh, wow” was the first thought in my head, and not the kind of “oh wow” you would think, it was more like “oh crap what did they do!” The new wired site is hideous (only my opinion, I’m sure there will be some that love it), its a lot of things that could have gone right, gone wrong.

Certain designers (most actually) have what I call a “signature-style.” Many times you can look at their designs without knowing who did it and guess the author. For illustration purposes I can think of three incredible designers that have very distinct styles. You could bring out an example of their work that is completely new and I could probably cite it as theirs.

My first example is Michael Schwab. Schwab is a distinguished illustrator that has created amazing work for over 20 years. Once you have seen a piece of work by Michael Schwab it becomes fairly easy to identify it when you encounter it again. He is recognized for depicting complex messages using a style of simplicity. He calls our attention to his subjects by his incredible use of positive and negative space. If you don’t have a poster by Schwab I encourage you to pick one up.

Several months ago I decided I would finally enter the world of weblogs. I’ve had a list of ideas going for sometime and it was finally time to take the plunge and develop them. Like many others I looked at the usual suspects: Moveable Type, Wordpress, Expression Engine, etc. One thing that started to influence my choice was Ruby on Rails. In the last 9 months or so I’ve had lots of opportunity to work inside of the MVC model so it eventually became a criteria that the solution rely on rails. At the time I knew of only two players within the rails world, Typo and Mephisto. Many were making the move to Mephisto and the plugin architecture was growing with the community, I thought it was a no brainer. Then Garrett Dimon wrote his post titled ”A Closer Look at SimpleLog”. It completely changed my perspective, I was faced with a choice between a blogging solution that clearly had more features and a solution that at the time looked like a stripped down but very elegant tool. I tried a version a friend had installed and over the next few days really wrestled with making the choice, I wanted the tool that would ideally help me to write more often and flesh out my ideas faster. In the end user experience won me over and I installed Simplelog as my blogging solution.

I have a son, that in June will be 3 years old. About 5 months ago we decided it was time to introduce him to every boy’s (and girl’s) favorite past time… LEGOs. He took right to them, building, tearing down, building, tearing down, well you get the idea. After awhile I started to get sucked in and before I knew it I was a 6 year old again in LEGO world, or what we called back then a “LEGO maniac”. While working with my son, building airplanes, helicopters, cars, I started to realize something… the object you build is good until you find that next piece and then it becomes better, well that is until you find another piece that could even make it better than the last.