#but! in short it’s design/software development. some ux (which I love<3) but a lot of it is working with already existing software :)

[maiteo]

what do you do for your internship?

this💕

[mattyunijourneybrief13]

An Investigation into Potential Job Roles & Agencies - Part 1

Geographically, I would like to stay in the area of Leeds and Manchester. My family are in this area and I get homesick so at this moment in time it is not negotiable. 

In terms of a dream career if I wasn’t tied down anywhere, working for Apple in California would be the ultimate aim but for now I would like to stay in England.

I also enjoy working from home; this pandemic has made me realise that it isn’t necessary to rush into an office 5 days a week, however I would like to have a mix to stay sane! I understand that at first this may not be possible however once I am established in my career this is my goal.

What would my perfect job look like?

To get a feel for what my perfect job would look like I decided to collate some imagery and create a list of what I’d like to do (I’m aware life isn’t like this but I can dream! and it will help me in my job search).

1. Laid-back office

I love laid back offices where people are dressed in their own clothes, with an aesthetically pleasing office space. Being creative helps when you are in a creative environment with art on the walls and comfy furniture, rather than offices which make you feel like a number on a payslip rather than an employee who is cared for. It is vital to get some down time and to not feel like work is na chore, so an office with a table tennis or snooker table in for example would be fantastic.

I am aware however that this is unrealistic at the moment.

2. Enthusiastic employees who are on the same page as me

I know this is asking for the virtually impossible, but I love the feeling of being in an environment with other like-minded creatives. It helps to bring everyones creativeness out of them. It would also be nice to make some new friends and socialise with them outside of work and in work too.

3. Fun UX design projects to get my teeth into

I love doing projects I love. I mean that sounds obvious, right? What I mean by that is I love doing a project on a subject that I care for or I’m interested in, or that means a great deal to people. 

For example, I love the app called Be My Eyes. It is an app that has enabled blind people to get help from volunteers to ‘borrow’ their eyes and be assisted when trying to read something. For example I helped a blind person who was trying to read what was on a can. That simple gesture by me costed nothing and it helped that person. To work on a project like that would be a dream come true.

There needs to be a desire to design for someone otherwise there is no point in being a designer.

4. I want to get to the point where I don’t mind Mondays

Life is too short and living for the weekend is not what I would like to do. 

5. Most if not all of the jobs I find need to be an entry level/junior role

I want to do the best job possible and I don’t feel like I am ready to take a regular role just yet due to my coding skills.

Job Role Investigation

To gain a bigger understanding the career path I can go down, I will investigate existing job roles using various websites.

1. UX/UI Designer

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/ux-designer

UX Design stands for User Experience Design, and UI Design stands for User Interface Design. UX/UI Designers are responsible for the design and development of digital applications such as smartphone applications or websites. The experience that the user has when interacting with the product is down to you. As a user of many apps, I always strive for better experiences, and I get frustrated when applications don’t deliver.

UX Designers work alongside UX researchers, who look into target users and their needs and frustrations, which the UX Designer uses to mould the experience. UX researcher is a job role that doesn’t interest me, as I like to focus on the design of the products rather than solely the research side by going out to speak to users. I would compare it to being a football referee; as a big football fan I could never become one as the urge to kick the ball would be too great for me to handle! 

UX Designers work as part of a team, with their own digital team and the wider business to ensure that their products meet the needs of the clients. 

Digital products are part of our everyday life now, and I would like to create services that benefit lives in some way, even if it is to save someone 10 minutes of their day by tapping on their screen instead of physically having to do something. That 10 minutes saved in their day could end up being time for them to spend doing more meaningful tasks or spending quality time with family.

UX Designers can also work with User Interface Designers, who are responsible for the design of the visual graphic user interface and its elements, such as menus, tabs and widgets. UX designers however are usually responsible for both jobs, so it comes under the same bracket.

The positive aspect of becoming a UX Designer is that coding isn’t a requirement sometimes, however it can be necessary in the long run as a lot of employers prefer their UX designers to have coding experience. The fact that I plan to learn how to code alongside my UX design job if and when I get one will work in my favour as I can start without knowing how to code as of yet.

Responsibilities

meet with clients to gather information about their requirements

propose and sketch out a range of visual concepts both on paper and using software applications

create user personas, user journeys and site maps

translate concepts into wireframes, prototypes and user flows using specialist tools such as Axure, InVision, Marvel, OmniGraffle, Visio and Sketch, as well as the Adobe product suite

work on cross-platform applications to develop user experiences covering mobile phones, tablets and computers

work collaboratively with other designers, product design and development teams, business analysts, engineers and project managers

liaise regularly with clients to ensure that designs meet their requirements and core business objectives

attend meetings to discuss and review progress on the project

run workshops for clients and internal stakeholders

work with the research team to plan and conduct remote and on-site user research and usability testing with real users to ensure the end-product design provides users with the optimum experience in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and engagement

write reports and communicate the results of your work

identify areas for improvement

redesign websites to make them more responsive

redesign or create mobile apps that are easy to use and configured appropriately for smartphones and tablets

keep up to date with technological innovations and new tools.

In a senior role that I could aim for in the future, I will need to:

ensure design standards, guidelines and best practices are adhered to

oversee research and insight projects to understand user needs

manage, mentor and support more junior members of the UX design team

ensure that all colleagues in the organisation have an understanding of UX design practices.

Salary

Starting salaries for graduate junior UX designers are typically between £19,000 and £25,000, depending on your experience and location.

Experienced UX designers can earn between £30,000 and £50,000.

Senior UX designers and consultants can earn salaries of £40,000 to £65,000 or more.

Salaries can vary depending on the sector of work, the type of employer (e.g. public or private sector), skills and experience, and the location. Salaries in London and the surrounding areas are usually higher, due to the higher cost of living there. 

Salary at this moment in time is not much of an issue to me, as long as I can live from it. My main aim at this moment is to gain work experience and move up the ladder.

Working hours

The working week is (like many jobs) usually 37 to 39 hours a week, Monday to Friday. Occasionally, I will be required to work evenings and weekends to attend events, or when working on a special project with short deadlines.

Skills

To become a UX Designer, you need to have:

excellent problem-solving skills

to be a concept thinker with a keen visual awareness and willingness to learn specialist programmes

an interest in, and knowledge of, coding and design principles

effective communication skills to liaise with team members and clients to ensure that high quality end-user designs meet customer requirements

empathy with the customer so that you can understand what they want from the website/app

excellent written communication skills, with an eye for detail

design and spatial skills to gauge the usability of the website or application

an aptitude for using a logical, step-by-step approach to ensure designs are user friendly and simple for end users

a high level of concentration and resilience to stay focused on a project to the end and meet client deadlines

an open, flexible and adaptable mindset to cope with a rapidly changing set of tasks in an area of emerging, new technologies

the ability to relate well to other professionals and work in a specialist team

a willingness to keep up to date with software applications and new techniques in a rapidly changing profession.

Qualifications

Usually, to become a UX Designer I will need a degree, as well as a strong interest in the subject.

Relevant degree subjects include:

computer science

digital design/media

digital marketing

graphic design

media technology

web design.

However, having a degree isn't the only path into this field of work. It is possible to self-teach yourself the skills needed and the relevant software. It would still be beneficial and the best option for me to have a degree, though.

Career prospects

To begin, I will start as a junior, trainee or graduate UX designer. Hopefully, I can expect to be promoted to UX designer roles within two years. 

After around five years' experience, I should be eligible for a role as a senior UX designer. Something I could do in the future is relocate to enhance my work opportunities, as UX is a worldwide career. For now though, I would like to stay in England.

2. Graphic Designer

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/graphic-designer

If I can not find a UX or UI design job, I have experience as a graphic designer and currently have a job as one, so this is something that I can fall back on hopefully. 

A graphic designer is responsible for creating digital and printed visuals for clients. Work can vary from layout design such as posters, magazines, websites etc. to branding, illustration, packaging design etc.

A designer works to a brief set by the client, and will have set deadlines to meet. The job responsibilities will involve making more than one idea for the client to choose from. The job demands someone with creative talent that can come up with a design instantly, as well as being organised by sticking to deadlines.

Responsibilities

meeting clients or account managers to discuss the business objectives and requirements of the job

estimating the time required to complete a job and providing quotes for clients

developing design briefs that suit the client's purpose

thinking creatively to produce new ideas and concepts and developing interactive design

using innovation to redefine a design brief within time and cost constraints

presenting finalised ideas and concepts to clients or account managers

working with a range of media, including computer-aided design (CAD), and keeping up to date with emerging technologies

proofreading to produce accurate and high-quality work

demonstrating illustrative skills with rough sketches and working on layouts ready for print

commissioning illustrators and photographers

working as part of a team with printers, copywriters, photographers, stylists, illustrators, other designers, account executives, web developers and marketing specialists.

Salary

Starting salaries for junior graphic designers are in the region of £15,000 to £19,000. Once you've gained some experience, salaries can rise to £27,000.

At a middle level, you can expect to earn £25,000 to £35,000.

Salaries for senior graphic designers or creative leads range from £35,000 to £55,000. A creative director can make £60,000+.

As a freelancer, you can earn between £200 and £400 a day with experience. You'll be able to charge more once you have an impressive track record and recommendations.

Again, salary doesn’t mean much to me at this stage, however looking at my long term future, I would be better off becoming a UX Designer as that is what I am aiming to do.

Working hours

Working hours are typically 37 hours a week, usually with some flexibility around start and finish times. Like most design jobs, I would have to work extra hours when deadlines are approaching. This isn’t a problem, as I am interested in design so I would most likely be doing something design related at home anyway.

What to expect

It's likely you'll be based in a shared studio as some jobs involve working in teams, although you may also work alone on occasions. If you're a freelancer you could share offices, rent studio space or work from home.

Design work often involves sitting and working at a computer for long periods of time.

Job satisfaction comes from creating high-quality artwork and building a reputation.

Jobs are available in major cities and towns, with advertising agencies predominantly based in London, the South East, Manchester and Leeds. There's also a demand for British graphic designers internationally with opportunities in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA, but it's advisable to work in the UK for a year before seeking work abroad.

Although work is mostly studio-based, travel within the working day to meet clients may be required. Working away is rare.

Qualifications

Relevant subjects for graphic design work include those that involve visual arts. In particular, a degree or HND in the following subjects may increase your chances:

3D design

communication design

film and television

fine art

graphic design

illustration

photography

visual art.

A large majority of graphic designers have degrees, so it is beneficial to have one. It isn’t essential however it is better to have one in terms of getting your foot in the door with agencies.

Skills

passion and enthusiasm for design, with a creative flair

a flexible approach when working in a team

excellent communication skills to interpret and negotiate briefs with clients

good presentation skills and the confidence to explain and sell ideas to clients and colleagues

time management skills and the ability to cope with several projects at once

accuracy and attention to detail when finalising designs

being open to feedback and willing to make changes to your designs

effective networking skills to build contacts.

Work experience

When starting out in Graphic Design, an internship or work placement experience is really useful. It can give you the experience you need to then move onto a paid job, as well as gathering a reference who can recommend you to future employers.

Career prospects

Initial progression from a junior graphic designer usually happens in two or three years. You can progress if you network and grow your reputation through your social media channels and your portfolio. 

I may be eligible to apply for a senior design position after three to five years. Another positive of this career is that with my design degree and design experience, I will be able to transfer between graphic and UX Design if needed/possible as the two career paths are linked.

To gain more insight into how to become a UX Designer, I looked at a case study that I found interesting:

UX Design Case Study: Senior UX Designer, Polly Fullerton

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/case-studies/senior-ux-designer-polly-fullerton

Polly studied English Language at University, which is interesting as it shows there is another route that can be taken; you don’t necessarily have to study the subject at university. 

Her degree benefitted her by giving her the communication skills needed to meet designers. Combined with independent learning, she moved into UX Design.

Her path began at a company called THG as an SEO manager. She began this job after graduating, and after 6 months she decided that she didn’t want to continue, and instead become a UX Designer.

Luckily for her, she was inside a company so she had the opportunity to move within it. It is crucial to get your foot in the door somewhere; everything gets easier once that first step is made.

To learn UX, she used online courses and went to meet-ups to improve her design skills and climb up the ladder. Once she got up to speed, she made a pitch to the UX manager at her company, and she was taken on as a junior UX designer. Since then, she has gone on to work for comparethemarket.com, firstly as a mid-weight UX designer and now as a senior UX designer.

She says that her typical work day is starting at 8:30am, and finishing at 5pm. However, her company is flexible with deciding work hours or working from home. Usually her day consists of design work such as sketching and making prototypes, as well as being in stakeholder meetings and design reviews.

Her degree is relevant because using clear language is crucial in UX design, when presenting to stakeholders and clients.

Her role as a junior and mid-weight designer consisted of her supporting more senior team members on their projects. As a senior designer she now takes on her own projects, which makes sense as a natural progression. Being a senior designer she says brings more responsibility but more freedom.

Here is the advice she has given to others who want to get into UX design:

Don't be put off if you don't have a technical background - some of the most brilliant UX designers I know transitioned into the industry from something totally different.

Make the most of free UX resources before committing to a paid course - it's amazing what you can learn on your own.

Try and get in touch with established UX designers, especially via local meet-ups

I will ensure that I (when possible) can engage in meet-ups, as this is what I feel I personally lack; I am quite a shy person so I need to get out there and network. 

Job Opportunities & Design Agencies I like the look of

1. UX Design Graduate Trainee Scheme

https://www.bbc.co.uk/careers/trainee-schemes-and-apprenticeships/trainee-schemes/ux-design

This opportunity sounds perfect for me, as although I feel confident enough in designing user experiences, I don’t know a coding language and the fact that this role is a trainee scheme I feel like I can network as well as work at such a reputable institution as the BBC. If they don’t offer coding help however, I will still have the time to use a Udemy course outside of work to gain the skillset that way.

First of all, the location is perfect. I like the professionalism and aesthetic of MediaCity; it is an attractive place to work. The scheme starts in September 2021 which I am accustomed to after doing 3 years of university so it would give me a summer break which I would like to have to rest mentally and prepare.

I would like to join a team of people like me who are just starting out in their UX career, rather than with more experienced people and being the only one who is beginning their journey. What I mean by that is that there will be more than one trainee there (it looks like a group of 6 from their instagram account) so I can work alongside them as well as with the more experienced people at the BBC, rather than jumping in at the deep end.

I like to work in teams of people who are just as passionate as me in the subject, and I don’t feel like there is a better opportunity than to work at the BBC. The BBC as an institution is seen as the pinnacle in the UK amongst many British people, so I am aware it will be tough to gain a place. However, I am optimistic and I believe in my ability to get where I want to get to, whether that be at the BBC on this trainee scheme or another pathway.

The UX Design Graduate Trainee Scheme is a one year programme, where on successful completion you will automatically move into a role in the UX&D team.

They like people who are:

enthusiastic about what they do, and a delight to work with

motivated and full of ideas

geeky about design

geeky about technology

I tick every box!

The job involves rotating across a range of products – from iPlayer to News, from Sport to CBeebies.

I will be working on real projects with senior members of UX, as well as technical and editorial teams from across the BBC. Along the way I will gain unparalleled experience with user research, information architecture, content analysis, interaction design, visual design, prototyping and much more.

The job application requires a portfolio as will every other design job, so I will need to make sure mine is the best it can possibly be.

2. Bolser Design Agency

https://bolser.co.uk

Bolser are a digital design agency based in Leeds that have been in business since 2001. They have developed from a direct-response marketing business to a digital agency. 

They build websites, apps and content management systems for clients such as Microsoft, Xbox, McDonald’s, EE, Discovery, AIG, Taco Bell, Jet2, Battersea Power Station and KFC.

What I like about Bolser is that their ethos is putting the customer first. I know that sounds simple but when I design the user is the most important person.

Also, the perks are incredible. It sounds like a close-knit team environment:

The office itself looks industrial and spacey which is what I like too:

My favourite projects of theirs are:

McDonald’s App

Bolser helped to increase awareness and utilisation of the My McDonald’s app in the UK, through app store optimisation. In a three month period they were able to impact massively on the utilisation of the app. 

App Store ratings for the app increased from 3 stars to 4.8 stars.

EE App Redesign

They used the latest usability software, including eye tracking. They also removed any unnecessary content, creating a visual hierarchy that mapped with the user priorities.

Sadly they don’t have any jobs at this moment in time but they will be hearing from me in the future there is no doubt about that. As it says in the text below, they want to hear from enthusiastic digital people, and I certainly would class myself as that. It is better to try than not to try. The fact that it is in the heart of Leeds is hugely attractive to me, as Leeds is my home where I grew up.

3. Lucky Duck

To look for some more agencies in and around the Leeds area, I looked at a website called clutch:

 https://clutch.co/uk/agencies/ui-ux/leeds

I like the fact that they include service focus, and put percentages to show you if the role you want to do is important to them. For example, Lucky Duck are an agency that have full focus on UI/UX Design, which would be ideal for me. 

I decided to look at Lucky Duck first, and the website was fantastic on first viewing. The user experience was slick and easy to use. 

If an agency has a sufficient website it tells me that they are a serious agency that has high standards, which is attractive to me as a designer and potential future employee.

I love the simple layout of their portfolio. The main reason I love it so much is the simple fact that the work is parallel to each other but lower on the right hand side, as we read from left to right. This is a something I would like to add in my own personal portfolio. It may seem like a small difference, but it really helps me when I am reading each piece of work.

The project that stuck out to me was the app they did for SOLUS+. They were responsible for creating the user experience for a smart heating mobile companion app, and the design and build of an eCommerce store.

The app includes a lot of smart features, which helps the user to manage their heating more effectively, and to save money as well as reducing their impact on the environment, which is a very important aspect of life in 2020.

Like many agencies, jobs are hard to come by, but they have a contact us page that looks simple and friendly. I will certainly get in touch in the near future for a job opportunity whenever one comes available.

[workfromhomeyoutuber]

Delicious Brains Inc: Product Developer (React & PHP)

Headquarters: Nova Scotia, Canada URL: https://deliciousbrains.com

Hi, my name is Brad Touesnard. I’m the founder of Delicious Brains Inc. We make high quality products for WordPress.

The “we” is currently Ian Jones, Iain Poulson, Ashley Rich, Gilbert Pellegrom, Matt Shaw, Peter Tasker, Caillie West, Lewis Warren and myself. Caillie works on marketing and support, Lewis handles all things design, and the rest of the crew develop our products and support our customers. I primarily wear the CEO and Product Manager hats at the moment. I’m currently in the process of hiring a marketer, a writer, two developers, and helping Iain transition to a Product Manager role. Exciting times!

We put a lot of effort into making sure our products are a pleasure to use, which means very few bugs and all the details are just right. We’re looking for someone who recognizes the value in this and is passionate about building an awesome product and owning the little big details. If this piques your interest, you should consider this opportunity

I personally review all applications myself.

THE JOB

About a year ago, I laid out a detailed roadmap for our flagship product, WP Migrate DB Pro. We’re in the process of rebuilding the airplane while it’s in flight. With each release we aim to modernize a chunk of the codebase while at the same time delivering some new value to our customers. Over the past year Peter has been rewriting the entire frontend in React and implementing a new design. We’re about a month away from a first beta release.

You will work with Peter on fixing up WP Migrate DB Pro and building long overdue features. You’ll open pull requests for him to review and he’ll open pull requests for you to review. You’ll push each other to be better developers. You will ramp up quickly and will be ready to take over lead development of the plugin within six months

From day one, you will also handle support requests from our customers. You’ll start by drafting replies and having Peter review them before sending, but in short order you will reply directly to customers.

You’ll also join the rest of our team in writing articles and tutorials for the 17k subscribers to our blog

Although this is how you’ll start, I’ve shuffled people around lots in the past and we’ll certainly be building new products in the future, so your role is certainly not set in stone.

ABOUT YOU

You’re thrilled to work with the latest hotness JavaScript library (React) but also thrive working on a “fixer-upper” project. You respect old code, no matter how ugly it looks. You truly enjoy figuring out how old code works, refactoring it, and tackling the challenges that come with that process. You have extensive experience doing this type of work.

Although you might not have a ton of experience with React, you’re an expert JavaScript developer as well as PHP. Your HTML & CSS skills are solid too.

You’re curious and love to learn. You look forward to meetings with fellow developers and are energized by technical conversations. Although you often need people to help you generate ideas and formulate a plan of attack on a project, you do your best work in isolation without interruption. You’re proactive in tackling things that need to be done without direction.

You embrace the opportunity to level up, learn something new and really dig into it. You’re a disciplined worker and have no trouble getting work done at home on any given day.

You’re exceptional at communicating in writing via instant message, email, etc. You’re ok on the phone and video chat too. You understand that excellent communication is part of what makes a team work better together and clear, concise written communication is how remote teams thrive. Putting a pull request up for review without explaining its context or what you need from the team is unheard of in your world.

You own both your successes and your failures. You practice Extreme Ownership. When a project you’re leading turns into a disaster, you own it and you learn from it. You never point the finger at others.

You invite criticism and genuinely want to grow as a professional. We’re big on pushing each other to be better. That’s how we grow as individuals and a team. It’s one thing to accept criticism and another to ask for it and use it to level up.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Collaborate with Peter working on the WP Migrate DB Pro plugin for WordPress

Help handle support requests from customers

Write articles and tutorials for our blog

Attend company retreats (see details below)

REQUIREMENTS

Excellent English communication skills (spoken and written)

Work hours that overlap with the EST/EDT (Ottawa) timezone

Expert PHP & JavaScript development skills

Great HTML & CSS skills

Some experience writing React code

Self-motivated and work well independently

Comfortable working remotely (we don’t have an office)

Experience using git

Invites criticism and genuinely wants to grow as a developer

Values consistency above “my way” and is willing to adopt new coding styles, standards, and tools

NICE-TO-HAVE

Open source contributions

Experience developing WordPress plugins

Experience working on software products

System administration skills

UX and design skills

Computer Science degree or equivalent

BENEFITS

What’s an attractive benefits package? Well, it really depends on the person. What do you value? Maybe a competitive salary is what you’re after. Or maybe you really value vacation time and would rather less pay and more vacation days. Maybe health coverage is important to you, or maybe you’re already covered.

Because everyone values things differently, I’m leaving this wide open. Carte blanche. I’m certain we can work out an arrangement you’ll be happy with.

Here are some of the benefits everyone gets:

Location Independent

In the beginning, it will be important that your work hours overlap with Peter’s work hours: 8am – 4pm Ottawa time Monday to Friday. But after the first few months, we can relax this and as long as you overlap with half Peter’s hours, it should be fine. Work from wherever you’re happiest. We’re distributed across the globe, working from our homes in Nova Scotia, Ontario, California, Pennsylvania, Scotland and England. As long as you continue to overlap with Peter’s work hours, your specific location doesn’t matter to us. You Choose Your Schedule

Most companies claim to have flexible hours these days, but the reality is often very different. We flex our hours for real. 💪 Some of us work a typical 9 to 5 schedule while others work 4 hours one day and 8 hours the next. Some of us put in time in the evenings and weekends, while others fiercely protect their evenings and weekend. Some of us work 37.5 hours per week, others 32 hours per week, while others surf between 28 and 34 hours depending on the week. It really doesn’t matter as long as it’s 30+ hours per week on average and you do what you say you’ll do.

No one on the team works more than 37.5 hours per week. I forbid it.

Company Retreats

As a remote company, it’s important that we meet up at least once per year to get some face time. For these events, the company covers food/drink, flights/trains/cars, and accommodations. Check out our past company retreats:

2019 Berlin

2018 Negril, Jamaica

2017 Nova Scotia

2016 Vienna

2015 Miami

We’re headed to Portugal in June 2020. Will you be joining us?

Personal Development

If there’s a conference or event that will help you level up, the company will pay for your ticket, travel, accommodation, and meals. In addition, you are allotted 3 hours per month to learn something for your career but that’s not necessarily required for your work, participate in community discussions, and/or contribute to an open source project. Totally optional though.

Profit Sharing

Every quarter I share a Profit & Loss report with the team so that everyone knows the breakdown of income and expenses and can have an understanding of the health of the business. In October I look at the profit for the past four quarters, plug it into a formula, and it spits out numbers for everyone on the team. When the company does well, the team does well.

Company Holidays

Things get pretty quiet in late December / early January, so we always take a couple of weeks off as a company during this time. Most of us take the whole time off while others work a day here or there and bank it as a day off for the future.

Paid Leave

For the birth or adoption of a child, the company offers 100% paid leave of 8 weeks for primary caregivers and 3 weeks leave for secondary caregivers. In the event of the death of an immediate family member, the company offers 3 days paid leave. Every member of the team gets five paid sick days per anniversary year as well.

Competitive Salaries

The company pays salaries that are competitive with the market where the person resides. We don’t use the benefits of remote as leverage to negotiate lower salaries.

Equal Opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer. Application information that is prone to unconscious biases is hidden during the review process whenever possible. We judge the content of the applications on their own without knowledge of the applicant’s race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, or age. We support workplace diversity, but not at the expense of equal opportunity and meritocracy. We’re looking for talented and empathetic people no matter their other attributes. I look forward to personally reviewing your application.

Best of luck,

Brad Touesnard Founder & CEO Delicious Brains Inc.

To apply: https://deliciousbrains.com/product-developer-apply

from We Work Remotely: Remote jobs in design, programming, marketing and more https://ift.tt/2RL4AVj from Work From Home YouTuber Job Board Blog https://ift.tt/2EoeYux

[faizrashis1995]

How to become an Android developer - Android development basics

As a beginner, one of the hardest things is just knowing what you need to learn. Besides taking a look at how to become an Android developer, we will also discuss why you should learn Android development. Here at CodeBrainer, we come across students who ask us what kind of topics they need to learn before they become proficient in Android development. The checklist isn’t short; nevertheless, we have decided to list most of the points that beginners should check-off.

 First I must emphasise that this is a checklist but you can skip a step and you don’t need to learn it all in one week. It will take quite a bit of your time, but in the end, you will have enough skills to start a project of your own or start asking for internships, help a friend or acquaintance or even start applying for jobs.

 We will try to explain a little bit about every topic. But some things you will have to research on your own, nevertheless let us know if you think we should add something to the list.

  How to become an Android developer - Checklist

In our opinion, these are the skills and Android development basics you should conquer:

 Android Studio

Layout Editor

Emulator and running apps

Android SDK and API version

UI Components and UX

Storing Data locally within the app

Calling REST APIs

Material design, styling and themes

Java or Kotlin and Objective programming

Debugging

Learn how you can start creating apps with Flutter.

 How to become an Android developer -  WHY?

As I said, before we can talk about what to learn and how to become an Android developer, we have to talk about why you should learn it in the first place. A lot of students wonder where to start and to be perfectly honest; Android Development is an excellent place to start. There are a lot of reasons; I like Android because it is accessible to anyone and you can install development tools on most operating systems. For example, I run Android studio on my MacBook Pro :D

  Great IDE (Integrated development environment)

We will talk about Android Studio later, but for now, let me just tell you since it has grown to version 3, the IDE is excellent. With every version, we get more help in so many logical ways, that you will not even notice you are using artificial support.

  Easier to start than web development

I like web development, but I still like to promote mobile development to beginners. Why? With mobile development, you get a friendly environment from the start. The thing that makes mobile development better for beginners is that we all use mobile phones all the time. You get a feeling of how an app should look like and what kind of functionalities you will need. With web development, it is harder to get a feel for the whole website, since you are looking at only one page at a time and then doing another google search. Most of the time, you already own a device, and you can install an app directly to your device and show it to your friends. In fact, I guarantee they will be amazed at what you can do.

  Huge market size and mobile usage is still growing

The mobile application market has an excellent projection: by 2021, it is expected that the number of mobile app downloads worldwide will reach 352 billion. Android has a 76% market share compared to iOS, with 19%. We do have to be fair and admit that iOS is a better earner. Google Play earned $20,1B in revenue, while the App Store made a revenue of $38,5B. Google Play grew about 30 percent over 2016. And without doing any precise calculations, you can clearly see that this is a great market to work on.

  New technologies are coming fast

Google is favourite to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time. No to mention, more and more of it is available for developers to use. Google is opening its knowledge about machine learning and artificial intelligence with development kits. And these improvements are available to Android developers very quickly. This will keep you on the edge of curiosity and keep you in touch with the ever-evolving world of IT.

  Wide range of services for developers

Apart from new and cutting edge technologies, Google offers a lot of services to us out of the box. Maps, Analytics, Places for location awareness apps. A Great place to start is Firebase that offers notifications, analytics, crashlytics, real-time database (develop apps without the need for servers). Additionally, for launching apps all around the world, Test Lab could be a great partner, since you can test your app on a bunch of different devices.

  “Android developer” is a great job to have

There are now 2,5 billion monthly active Android devices globally, and it’s the largest reach of any computing platform of its kind. Globally speaking, between 70 to 80% of all mobile devices are Androids. There is a massive demand for new Android developers out there. And because the market is growing, there is a lack of Android developers all around the world. All in all, it is hard to determine an average salary for the whole world, but the fact is that you will get a decent salary for your knowledge no matter where you live. In the light of what has been said, let's take a look at how to become an Android developer.

  Android Studio

Since Android Studio is the best IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Android development, this is the first thing you must conquer. For the most part, our content focuses on explaining about Android Studio as we explain development for Android. This goes the same for the Layout editor and the Code Editor.

  Android Studio - Layout Editor

The Layout Editor is part of Android Studio. In fact, this is the place where you design the UI (User Interface) for your app. The main parts of an Android project are XMLs for designing activities, drawables and other resources and Java (or Kotlin) files for all the code you will write. Of course, on your path on how to become an Android developer, you will encounter more advanced projects where you will also learn about the structure of a project in detail.

 But what I love most is that with the layout editor you are using a drag&drop approach and you can immediately see what you have done. You can place elements on the layout. You can group them into containers or views all using just your mouse. And this is great for beginners because you can get familiar with the code while already using a development environment. Even for mature developers, using visual tools helps when setting up screens, and in the layout editor, you can simulate the size of devices so that you can check if your design will work on all device sizes.

 In addition, we have added a more in-depth look into Layout Editor as well. Check our Layout Editor blog post, learn about it and also find out a little bit about a few hidden features, so that you will develop your activities (screens) with ease.

  Android Studio - Emulator and running apps

As we are creating apps for Android, and we want to run them to see how they look. One of the first things we need for that is an emulator. In fact, Android Studio has the ability to run an emulator out of the box. It has a lot of features. It runs fast and looks nice. All in all, it is a perfect tool to have. Generally speaking, this is just like going to the store and picking the best specs for your device, but in our case, it will be a virtual one.

 Unfortunately, sometimes you have to prepare your computer to run an emulator. Here is an extended manual on how to configure hardware acceleration for an emulator or read our blog post on how to run an emulator.

 You can also run an app on your mobile phone. This a good approach as well, as you check the touch and feel on a real device as you develop your app.

 Here is an explanation on how to install drivers to run an app on your device.

   Android SDK and API version

This is really a broad topic since it contains all that Android is about, all its functionalities. But as a beginner when you are starting to learn how to become an android developer, all you need to know is where to look for a new version, how to install it and a few pointers on which one to use.

 A simple explanation would be: SDK (Software Development Kit) is a bunch of tools, documentation, examples and code for us, developers to use. API (Application Programming Interface) is an actual collection of Android functionalities, from showing screens, pop-ups, notifications… everything. We will give you a hint, use the API above 21 since this will get enough of devices to work with. And for a new project always aim for the last three major versions.

  UI Components and UX

User interface components will link your app together, all the code, knowledge and data will be presented with some form of UI. UI means “user interface”, and this is what a user sees. UX means “user experience”, and this is the flow through the app, interactions, reactions to a users input, the whole story that happens within the app.

 Of course, the best source of getting familiar with UI components would be our Calculator course since it explains most of them in great detail.

    We have a few more blog posts explaining other UI Components, like a spinner, radio button and mail performing checks in our registration form blog post.

   Storing Data locally within the app

Storing data is essential for every app. It can be as simple as storing emails for a login to a full-blown database with tables, relations, filters… Moreover, we think you must go step by step on this topic and learn a little bit about what data is, what are entities, and where to store them.

 The first topic we cover is in our blog post about storing data within sharedPreferences, and you should read it. The next issue is storing even more data by using Room, which is a great implementation of ORM (object-relational mapping) and is part of Android. In fact, ORM lets us work with data as classes in our code, this is a more modern approach, but Room still allows us to use SQL statements if we want to.

    Calling REST APIs

All the mature apps use some kind of REST (Representational State Transfer) calls. For example, if an app wants to know what is the temperature outside, in some city, it would use a REST API to get the data. If we want to login into a social network and get the list of friends we would use a REST API. This is a topic strongly linked with storing data since we are storing and reading data just not within an app but on a server. In short, the main topic to learn is how to transform data from a REST API to local data structures and classes. And be sure to learn how to react if an error occurs and how to send data to a server.

  Material design, styling and themes

If you are thinking about how to become an Android developer, you have to learn how to create a nice app easily. For beginners, it is best to use material design and the Android Support library, which can help us make an app that will look great even without using a designer. All things considered, for mature apps, we will still use a designer to prepare a UI and UX, but for Android, it will be based on some variant of material design anyway. To summarize, on your path of how to become an Android developer, learning material design is essential.

  Java or Kotlin and Objective programming

Both Java and Kotlin are excellent languages to start learning. Java has more structure to it. But Kotlin is more modern in style. And both are good choices. Java is the right choice if you want to broaden your skills with back-end development since developers for Java back-end are in very high demand. Kotlin has a shorter implementation; this means you see less code, and more things are done for you.

 We are still teaching Java since it can be used elsewhere as well (Java backend for example), but Kotlin is a great choice as well. No matter what we choose for our language, we will have to learn some basics about it. In our courses, you will learn about Primitive Data types, Strings Control Structures (If, switch…), what are methods and of course all about classes (Inheritance, Interfaces and Abstract Classes). Arrays, sets, maps and other extended data types help us when working with a lot of data. For example, storing a list of people, list of cars, TODO tasks…

 Why is it important to dive deep into essentials? Having a good foundation on essentials and Java basics will help you develop more complex applications while keeping them simple and organised at the same time.

   Debugging

Debugging is an important part of programming since a lot of unpredictable flows will happen in our apps and we need a way of figuring out what went wrong, what was the source of an error and find a code that produced that error. When learning how to become an Android developer this might look like a tough topic, but at the core, it is something that will help you learn more advanced topics with ease since you will know how to track what the application is doing behind the scenes.

  Making your app ready for Google Play

Equally important to all the skills mentioned above on how to become an android developer is, opening your app to users all around the globe. All things considered, this is one of the primary motivators for building apps in the first place. We must have knowledge about signing our apps, how to upload them to Google Play, what kind of text descriptions we need, screenshots we will show in the store... We need icons, designs and texts. All in all, this knowledge will come in handy a lot. In the first place, it will help you distribute an app to the first test users in the alpha store and then move to a more broad audience with beta and the final step with the public release.

  How to become an Android developer - Conclusion

This is just a short list of topics we here at CodeBrainer think that you need when you think about how to become an Android developer. And we all want for you to be a great developer and make us proud. We will add advanced topics as we go. Advanced topics will just make you stand out from the crowd and give you comprehensive knowledge about Android. In the long run, what you need is experience, and this means practice, and then more practice.[Source]-https://www.codebrainer.com/blog/what-to-learn-checklist-for-android-beginners

Enroll for Android Certification in Mumbai at Asterix Solution to develop your career in Android. Make your own android app after Android Developer Training provides under the guidance of expert Trainers.                        

[rabbitowl97-blog]

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web · An A List Apart Article



A List Apart

by Mark Bernstein August 16, 2002 Published in Writing

Some parts of the web are finished, unchanging creations – as polished and as fixed as books or posters. But many parts change all the time:

news sites bring up-to-the-minute developments, ranging from breaking news and sports scores to reports on specific industries, markets, and technical fields

weblogs, journals, and other personal sites provide a window on the interests and opinions of their creators

corporate weblogs, wikis, knowledge banks, community sites, and workgroup journals provide share news and knowledge among co-workers and supply-chain stakeholders

Share this on

Prepare for leadership roles at the intersection of design and technology in Northwestern’s online MS in Information Design & Strategy program.

A Book Apart: Brief books for people who make websites.

An Event Apart: 3 days of design, code, and content for web & UX designers & devs.

https://response-essay.com of these sites change every week; many change every day; a few change every few minutes. Daypop’s Dan Chan calls this the Living Web, the part of the web that is always changing.

Every revision requires new writing, new words that become the essence of the site. Living sites are only as good as today’s update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren’t there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.

Writing for the Living Web is a tremendous challenge. Here are ten tips that can help.

1. Write for a reason

Write for a reason, and know why you write. Whether your daily updates concern your work life, your hobbies, or your innermost feelings, write passionately about things that matter.

To an artist, the smallest grace note and the tiniest flourish may be matters of great importance. Show us the details, teach us why they matter. People are fascinated by detail and enthralled by passion; explain to us why it matters to you, and no detail is too small, no technical question too arcane.

Bad personal sites bore us by telling us about trivial events and casual encounters about which we have no reason to care. Don’t tell us what happened: tell us why it matters. Don’t tell us your opinion: tell us why the question is important.

If you don’t really care, don’t write. If you are a student and everybody is talking about exams and papers and you simply don’t care, let it be. If your job bores you, it will bore us. (If you despise your job with a rich, enduring passion, that’s another thing entirely!) Write for yourself; you are, in the end, your most important reader.

If your site belongs to a product, a project, or an enterprise, you must still find a way to represent its passion and excitement. If you do not understand why your product is compelling or comprehend the beauty of your enterprise, find the reason or find a new writer.

Write honestly. Don’t hide, and don’t stop short. When writing about things that matter, you may be tempted to flee to safe, familiar havens: the familiar, the sentimental, the fashionable. Try to find the strength to be honest, to avoid starting the journey with passion and ending it with someone else’s tired formula. The work may be hard, it may be embarrassing, but it will be true – and it will be you, not a tired formula or an empty design. And if you can be satisfied with that tired formula, you aren’t writing for a reason.

Never, for any consideration, publish a statement you know to be false.

Though you write with passion about things that matter greatly, always remember that it’s a big world, filled with people and stories. Don’t expect the world to stop and listen. Never expect any individual (or, worse, any quantity of individuals) to read your work, for they may have other things to do. At the same time, steel yourself to expect the unexpected visitor and the uninvited guest; the most unlikely people may read your work. Your mother, who never uses a computer, may read your intimate weblog one day in the library. To be honest with the world, you may need to be honest with your mother; if you cannot face your mother, perhaps you are not ready to write for the world.

2. Write often

If you are writing for the Living Web, you must write consistently. You need not write constantly, and you need not write long, but you must write often. One afternoon in grad school, I heard B. F. Skinner remark that fifteen minutes a day, every day, adds up to about book every year, which he suggested was as much writing as anyone should indulge. You don’t need to write much, but you must write, and write often.

If you don’t write for a few days, you are unfaithful to the readers who come to visit. Missing an update is a small thing – rudeness, not betrayal – and readers will excuse the occasional lapse.

If you are inconsistent, readers will conclude you are untrustworthy. If you are absent, readers will conclude you are gone. It’s better to keep religiously to a once-a-week, or once-a-fortnight schedule, than to go dark mysteriously.

If you cannot write for a time, and the reason for your absence is interesting, write about it. Your honeymoon, your kidney transplant, your sister’s gubernatorial inauguration – all these can be predicted and worked into the fabric of your writing so that the interruption, when it comes, seems natural. But avoid, if you can, sudden cryptic pronouncements: “I’ll be unable to post for a while” gives us nothing we can use or learn from.

Don’t assume that you will find something to say every morning. The day will come, sooner or later, when you need inspiration and find you have none. Store topics, news items, entire articles for slow times. Carry a notebook or a PDA and jot down reminders. You cannot have too many notes saved up, but you can easily find yourself with too few.

Since you write often, use good tools. Select them to fit your hand and voice. Learn to use them well.

3. Write tight

Omit unnecessary words.

Choose a visual design that fits your voice. Unless the design is the point of your site, select colors and visual elements that support without dominating. Resist the temptation to add features, for it is often best to use only those few technical and design elements that support your mission. Don’t rush to replace a good design: you will grow bored with it long before your readers do.

Read your work. Revise it. Don’t worry about being correct, but take a moment now and then to think about the craft. Can you choose a better word – one that is clearer, richer, more precise? Can you do without a word entirely?

Omit unnecessary words.

4. Make good friends

Read widely and well, on the web and off, and in your web writing take special care to acknowledge the good work and good ideas of other writers. Show them at their best, pointing with grace and respect to issues where you and they differ. Take special care to be generous to good ideas from those who are less well known, less powerful, and less influential than you.

Weblog writers and other participants in the Living Web gain readers by exchanging links and ideas. Seeking to exchange links without ideas is vulgarly known as blogrolling. Begging high-traffic pages or famous writers to mention you is bothersome and unproductive

Instead of begging, find ways to be a good friend. All writers thrive on ideas; distribute them generously and always share the credit. Be generous with links. Be generous, too, with your time and effort; A-list sites may not need your traffic, but everyone can use a hand.

Many prominent web writers travel a lot – to conferences, meetings, trade shows. Sooner or later, they’ll come to your corner of the world. Offer to feed them. Invite them to parties. Offer to introduce them to interesting people. They might be too busy. They might be too shy. But the road can be a lonely place, and it’s always interesting to meet thinking people.

Small, thoughtful gifts are nice. Share books you love, or that you’ve written. If you’re a photographer or an artist, prints and sketches can be unique and memorable. (Include permission to reproduce them on the web.) Join their cause. Donate to their charity.

Friends are vital for business sites as well, but business and friendship can be a volatile mix. Your prospects, customers and vendors are obvious friends, but both they and your readers will understand that your friendship is not disinterested. Unlikely friends, including your competitors, may prove more convincing.

5. Find good enemies

Readers love controversy and learn from debate. Disagreement is exciting. Everyone loves a fight, and by witnessing the contest of competing ideas we can better understand what they imply.

Dramatic conflict is an especially potent tool for illuminating abstract and technical issues, whether in software engineering or business planning. At times, choosing a communications protocol or adopting an employee benefits plan may seem an abstract task, barely related to the human crises that daily confront us. If each alternative has a determined, effective advocate, however, it may reveal the source of the conflict and to remind us of the consequences of the choice.

To make an abstract or difficult point more real, identify and respond to an advocate who holds a different position. Choose your opponent with care. If you choose a rival who is much less powerful than you, readers may see you as a bully. If your rival is a business competitor, you may seem unscrupulous. The best enemy, in fact, is often a friend – a writer you cite frequently and who often cites you, but with whom you disagree on a specific questions.

A handful of individuals seemingly live for controversy and seek out ways to create and inflame disputes. These so-called trolls are chiefly the bane of discussion groups but occasionally find their way into the Living Web. Never engage them; you cannot win. (Trolls, when ignored, will usually retire. If they cause danger or damage that cannot be ignored, the police and the courts will assist you.)

When beginning a debate, always have in mind a plan for ending it. Ill-planned arguments can drag on, lost in a mass of boring detail or irrelevant side-issues. Worse, the personalities of the advocates may become more engaging than the issues, obscuring your purpose entirely. Have in mind, from the outset, an idea of how long you want to engage the issue and how you expect the exercise to end (or reach a resting point). Plan a conclusion before firing the first salvo. You might devise an event – a final meeting, a live debate or online poll – that will provide a sense of closure. Write a joint communique for your readers or your management, summarizing the outstanding issues and highlighting progress. Then archive both sides of the exchange – perhaps with annotation from a neutral authority – so future readers may enjoy and benefit from the conflict.

When it’s over, try to make good friends with good enemies.

6. Let the story unfold

The Living Web unfolds in time, and as we see each daily revelation we experience its growth as a story. Your arguments and rivalries, your ideas and your passions: all of these grow and shift in time, and these changes become the dramatic arc of your website.

Understand the storyteller’s art and use the technique of narrative to shape the emerging structure of your living site. Foreshadowing hints at future events and expected interests: your vacation, the election campaign, the endless midnight hours at work in the days before the new product ships. Surprise, an unexpected flash of humor or a sudden change of direction, refreshes and delights. Use links within your work to build depth, for today’s update will someday be your own back story.

People are endlessly fascinating. Write about them with care and feeling and precision. Invented characters, long a staple of newspaper columnists, are rarely seen on the Living Web; creating a fascinating (but imaginary) friend could balance your own character on your site.

When the star of the site is a product or an organization, temper the temptation to reduce the narrative to a series of triumphs. Although you don’t usually want to advertise bad news, your readers know that every enterprise faces challenges and obstacles. Consider sharing a glimpse of your organization’s problems: having seen the challenge, your readers will experience your success more vividly.

Interweave topics and find ways to vary your pacing and tone. Piling tension on tension, anger on rage, is ultimately self-defeating; sooner or later, the writing will demand more from you than you can give and the whole edifice will collapse in boredom or farce. When one topic, however important, overshadows everything else in your site, stop. Change the subject; go somewhere new, if only for a moment. When you return, you and your reader will be fresher and better prepared.

7. Stand up, speak out

If you know your facts and have done your homework, you have a right to your opinion. State it clearly. Never waffle, whine, or weasel.

If you are not sure you are right, ask yourself why you are writing. If you are seeking information or guidance from your readers, ask them. Don’t bore them (and discredit yourself) with a hesitant, unformed opinion. If you are writing in order to discover your mind or to try out a new stance, continue by all means– but file the note in your desk drawer, not on your website.

If you believe you are right, say so. Explain why. It doesn’t matter that you are young, or unknown, or lack credentials, or that crowds of famous people disagree. Don’t hesitate or muddy the water. The truth matters; show us the right answer, and get out of the way.

Never lie about your competitors, and never exult in your rival’s bad news.

Try, if you can, to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain and humiliation on those who have the misfortune to be mistaken. People err, and you too will be wrong tomorrow. Civility is not mere stuffiness; it can be the glue that lets us fight for our ideas and, once we recognize the right answer, sit down together for drinks and dinner.

8. Be sexy

You are a sexual being. So are all of your readers (except the Google robot). Sex is interesting. Sex is life, and life is interesting. The more of yourself you put into your writing, the more human and engaging your work will be.

If your writing is a personal journal, and if it is honest, you will have to write about things that you find embarrassing to describe, feelings you might not want to share, events that you wouldn’t mention to strangers (or, perhaps, to anyone). Decide now what you will do, before it happens.

Undressing, literally, figuratively, or emotionally, has always been a powerful force in personal sites and web logs. Pictures don’t matter in the long run; what matters is the trajectory of your relationship with the reader, the gradual growth of intimacy and knowledge between you.

9. Use your archives

When you add something to the Living Web and invite others to link to your ideas, you promise to keep your words available online, in their appointed place, indefinitely. Always provide a permanent location (a “permalink”) where each item can be found. Do your best to ensure that these locations don’t change, breaking links in other people’s websites and disrupting the community of ideas.

The promise to keep your words available need not mean that you must preserve them unchanged. In time, you may find errors you want to correct. The world changes, and things that once seemed clear may require explanation.

Today, this permanent location is often a chronological archive, a long list of entries for a particular week or month. These archives are useful and easy to make. Many popular tools build chronological archives automatically. But chronological archives are limited: you might someday want to know what you wrote in May of 1999, but why would anyone else care? Topical summaries and overviews are much more helpful to new readers and to regulars alike, and if they require a modest additional effort every day, that effort pays dividends that grow as your archives expand.

New tools like Six Degrees and Eastgate’s Tinderbox can make it easier to keep track of categories, to find where new things fit and to find old things that need new links. Topical archives are Google’s natural friend. Remember that your old pages will often be read by visitors from search engines; introduce yourself on every page, and be sure that every page, however obscure, has links to tell people:

who you are, what you want, and why you’re writing

your email address

where to find your latest writing

Link to work you’ve already written – especially to good work that you wrote long ago. Don’t be shy about linking to yourself: linking to your own work is a service, not self-promotion.

10. Relax!

Don’t worry too much about correctness: Find a voice and use it. Most readers will overlook, and nearly all will forgive, errors in punctuation and spelling. Leave Fowler and Roget on the shelf, unless they’re your old friends. Write clearly and simply and write quickly, for if you are to write often you must neither hesitate or quibble.

Don’t worry about the size of your audience. If you write with energy and wit about things that matter, your audience will find you. Do tell people about your writing, through short personal email notes and through postcards and business cards and search engines. Enjoy the audience you have, and don’t try to figure out why some people aren’t reading your work.

Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Do let your work on the Living Web flow from your passion and your play, your work life and your life at home. Establish a rhythm, so your writing comes naturally and your readers experience it as a natural part of their day or their week. But if the rhythm grows onerous, if you find yourself dreading your next update or resenting the demands of your readers, if you no longer relish your morning web routine or your evening note-taking, find a new rhythm or try something else. Change the schedule, or voice, or tone. Switch topics. Try, if you can, to resist the temptation to drop things entirely, to simply stop.

Don’t worry about those who disagree with you, and don’t take bad reviews to heart. The web is filled with caring and kindness, but thoughtless cruelty can and does cloud every writer’s spirit from time to time. Ideas matter, but name-calling doesn’t, and petulant critics wrap tomorrow’s virtual fish.

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[illustir]

Reading 2017

Most unexpectedly I read 52 books in 2017. These last couple of months I’d been gunning for it but nothing about the first half of this year indicated that I would even hit my challenge of 26 books.

The first half of the year was marked by some decidedly slow reading as well as becoming a twin dad. The long and regular naps of young babies along with my parental leave made that a period where I caught up on watching a lot of movies (see the 50 movies in my Letterboxd diary).

Then halfway through the year, a shift happened where the kids underwent sleep regressions and we went through figurative hell. Watching video became impossible. The sleepless nights sitting up for 30-45 minutes at a stretch with a baby falling into deep sleep turned out to be a catalyst for reading.

I wanted to see how dramatic this shift was so I retrieved my year’s reading from Goodreads, filled in the page counts and made a bar chart of pages racked up per month.

That is indeed more or less where the kids started to become difficult sleepers (month 4-5) where my first peak starts and from there on it’s a steady pace until the end of the year bang.

What this has taught me more than anything is how relative reading velocity is and how with a bit of time and a slight change in attitude you can easily read 2-5x more than you normally thought possible. One of my tricks is to read about five books simultaneously and to cycle through those to keep up the energy.

For a normal month 1500 pages seems sustainable which would be about five books per month or sixty a year if I’d kept that up from the start. And 1500 pages per month is only 50 a day something that anybody with a bit of dedicated time should be able to do.

The books are listed per category below and the recommended ones are marked bold.

Engineering

A meagre year but I feel that in my current engineering practice I know mostly what I want to know and I’m looking more to branch out. I’m still open to reading books about engineering, but the bar is rather high since both of the UX books below did not add much to my knowledge. Alexander’s Notes… is seminal and should be a required exercise for anybody designing anything.

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience

Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher W. Alexander

Advanced Swift

UX for Lean Startups

Leadership

This has been one area where I branched out and tore through a decent stack of standard works. I’ve enjoyed most of the things I read here a lot. Some books did not teach me that much as much as reinforce and recontextualize things that I already knew. It’s nice to be confirmed about things you found out yourself, but let’s hope my reading prevents me from making as many mistakes as well.

Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership is simple but extremely (!) effective. Reinertsen’s is a seminal tome that formalizes a lot of (what I think to be) common sense when it comes to product development and project management. Never split the Difference is a thrilling read and I’m already looking forward to applying the haggling it taught. The Coaching Habit is a laser precision book that teaches you exactly what you need to know and when/how to apply it. More books should do that.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, Jocko Willink

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work Navigating Life

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, Donald G. Reinertsen

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

Financial Strategy for Public Managers

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, Chris Voss

The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier

Literature

Seven out of nine (78%) of these authors are non-white/non-male and that is a worse score than I was hoping for. Toer’s book on life in the Dutch East Indies should be essential reading for all Dutch people. Nelson has shown me parenting from a non-cis/-male perspective and for that I’m grateful.

Água Viva

Open City

The Name Of The Rose

Aarde der Mensen, Pramoedya Ananta Toer

The Goldfinch

The God of Small Things

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

The Underground Railroad

Genre fiction

Five out of nine (56%) books here are by non-white/non-males which is somewhat better than one could hope for in speculative fiction. Blue Mars was a lovely end to a huge journey and both the trilogy and the planet did grow on me. The second Inheritance book was the best of the lot which does not mean the series is bad in any way.

The Lathe of Heaven

Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3), Kim Stanley Robinson

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy, #1)

The Broken Kingdoms (Inheritance, #2), N.K. Jemisin

The Kingdom of Gods (Inheritance, #3)

The Forever War (The Forever War, #1)

The Dispossessed

Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

Echopraxia (Firefall, #2)

Non-fiction

Not that much outstanding here other than Scott’s book about Zomia. Reading a lot of the other books here felt like work even if they were short.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

We Have Never Been Modern

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott

Homage to Catalonia

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

Metaphors We Live By

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Kids

Kids’ books are terrible and Karp’s book on kids was one of the few I read that wasn’t totally useless.

Mann Und Vater Sein

Babys brauchen Väter

The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block 2-Book Bundle, Dr. Harvey Karp

The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems: Sleeping, Feeding, and Behavior–Beyond the Basics from Infancy Through Toddlerhood

Was machst du kleiner Bagger?

Wie kleine Tiere schlafen gehen

Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt

Mein erstes Buch vom Körper

Schlaf gut, Baby

Poetry

A very slim year with Darwish the sole representant of this category, lovely but overly long in this selection.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Mahmoud Darwish

Spirituality

Trungpa’s style is highly accessible while maintaining a lot of jargon. This is one of the first times things have clicked for me.

The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation, Chögyam Trungpa

via English – alper.nl http://ift.tt/2Chl3tL

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How to Become a T-Shaped Marketer: What Marketing Career Growth Looks Like at Buffer

Before becoming a marketer, Brian sold insurance.

Alfred was in the army.

Arielle was a health coach.

I was a sports reporter.

And now look at us! We’re a team of eight Buffer marketers, with vastly distinct backgrounds and educations, who collectively bring in 20,000 Buffer signups each week. Many of us fell into marketing, accidentally or on purpose. We’ve been learning as we go.

And where exactly are we headed?

Good question! We benefit a lot from free marketing courses and great educational content. However, it’s not often the case that we have a specific vision for the skills we gain or the path we’re on.

Does this resonate with your marketing experience? Do you have an easy way to answer, “What does it mean when we’re asked to become ‘T-shaped’ marketers?”

Since I’ve stepped into a leadership role on the marketing team, I’ve become the one posing the T-shaped question to others, so it seemed time to figure out what T-shaped means for us at Buffer and what it might mean for digital marketers beyond Buffer. Here’s what I came up with. I’d love your thoughts!

(Caveat: This is all verrrry much specific to the way we do marketing at Buffer. YMMV, though hopefully it’s a good starting point for you and your team. Feel free to copy and edit!)

The Diagram of a T-Shaped Marketer at Buffer

This is how we view a T-shaped marketer at Buffer. Feel free to grab a download of the Sketch file or Canva template we used to build this, if you’d like to customize it for your company.

Generally-speaking, everyone on the Buffer marketing team will have all the base knowledge and marketing foundation skills listed in the diagram; plus, each teammate will have chosen at least one main channel in which they are an expert.

Much more on this below, but first, I’d love to explain more about the idea of T-shaped people in general.

The concept of a T-shaped person comes from the world of hiring, and it describes the abilities that someone brings to a job — their depth and breadth of ability. The vertical, up-and-down stem of the “T” represents one’s depth in one or more areas, and the horizontal, side-to-side stem of the “T” represents one’s breadth.

The vertical bar on the T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.

Often times the word “generalist” is used to apply to a T-shaped person; though in our case at Buffer, a generalist would be someone with a relatively short vertical T stem and a very broad horizontal T stem.

Our T-shaped marketer diagram relies heavily on the foundation that Brian Balfour laid with his T-shaped description back in 2014. In his post on becoming a customer acquisition expert, Brian laid out a blueprint for how someone could grow their marketing skills. Brian based his research on an article from Distilled. Both Brian’s and Distilled’s articles are great places to start if you’re keen to learn more about T-shaped marketers.

How To Become A Customer Acquisition Expert by Brian Balfour

Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set by Distilled

The 3 Components of a T-Shaped Marketer

As you can see in the diagram, the abilities of a T-shaped marketer fit into three different components:

Base Knowledge

Marketing Foundation

Channel Expertise

Base knowledge is the non-marketing-specific areas that will suit you well no matter your job.

In theory, anyone who applies for a marketing role at Buffer would have competence with these abilities, and anyone on the current marketing team would focus on leveling up in these areas first and foremost. These basic abilities really do trickle down and inform the other skills you need.

Everyone on the marketing team should feel comfortable with all base knowledge boxes.

Marketing foundation is the marketing-specific subjects that are useful across most all marketing channels.

Our list is an incomplete one. For instance, Brian Balfour’s 2014 model includes conversion rate optimization (CRO) as a foundational skill. We don’t expect everyone on the team to have foundational skills in CRO (in fact, we view it as its own channel in which you can become an expert). Also, Brian mentions database querying. That’s not as important to us. The marketing foundation at your company is likely to entail some unique skills of its own.

Everyone on the marketing team should feel comfortable with all marketing foundation boxes.

Channel expertise refers to audience and acquisition channels.

There are soooo many of these, and we’re constantly finding new ones. For instance, product marketing wasn’t a channel for us a couple years ago. Now, it would serve us well. And on the flip side, there are areas, like sales, that we don’t do at Buffer.

The idea with channel expertise is that someone will have one or more channels for which they have great depth of knowledge.

When a T looks like an M: Variety within channel expertise

As you might experience for yourself, it’s not always the case that your skills fit a neat and tidy T shape, especially as you keep evolving as a marketer.

The T shape is definitely just a framework. On our team, we have a variety of people with a variety of skills, all at different depth and breadth.

In some cases, the T might have three vertical stems of different lengths. (An “M.”)

For others, it might have one really, really deep stem.

If it helps, here’s a quick view of how our current team looks within the T-shaped marketer model.

Alfred, Content Crafter

Arielle, Community Strategist

Ash, Managing Editor

Bonnie, Loyalty Marketer

Brian, Digital Marketing Strategist

Hailley, PR and Communications Strategist

Mike, Product Marketer

Spencer, Growth Marketer

How to level up your T-shaped marketer skills

Of course, once you know where to head with your growth as a marketer, one of the next questions to ask would be how to get there. Fortunately, there are a ton of resources on most any marketing skill you could hope to achieve. Here’re a few of the resources we’ve found helpful as we’ve leveled up in all the different areas of a Buffer T-shaped marketer.

Base knowledge

Behavior Psychology

Knowledge in this area helps you better understand why people do what they do —  a handy skill in most any job, particularly so when you’re eager to understand why people click, like, share, and buy.

Blog: Cognitive Lode

Book: Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath

Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

Blog post: Putting Behavioral Psychology to Work to Improve the Customer Experience by McKinsey

Blog post: 15 Psychological Studies That Will Boost Your Social Media Marketing by Buffer

E-book: Hubspot’s Marketing Psychology Guide

Storytelling

We see storytelling and copywriting as different things. Storytelling is about knowing how to put together a narrative. Copywriting is about knowing the right words to use to express that narrative.

Blog post: 11 Storytelling Formulas to Supercharge Your Marketing by Buffer

Blog post: Master This Storytelling Technique to Create an Irresistible Content Series by Copyblogger

Video: Pixar’s approach to storytelling (embedded above)

Content series: Pixar in a Box from Khan Academy

Blog post: The 6 Main Arcs in Storytelling by the Atlantic

Data and Analytics

Before you get into the weeds of Excel, Looker, SQL, etc., it’s essential to have a foundation in the general concept of data and analytics so that you know what’s possible to learn data and what makes for good data analysis.

Video: Data-Driven Product Changes by Heavybit

Book: Winning with Data by Tom Tunguz and Frank Bien

Book: Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan

Research

We were lucky to get in early with customer development at Buffer, which helped us cultivate a research culture. In specific marketing terms, research means checking with your audience to learn their experience, their problems, and their wishes. In more general terms, research is about putting a process to one’s curiosity.

Book: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

Blog: Cindy Alvarez

Design and UX

We don’t expect Buffer marketers to be design pros (we’ve written several articles admitting we’re far from professionals). What we look for instead is a cultivated design eye: Do you have good taste? Can you identify the elements of design that lead to high quality?

Blog: Canva’s Design School

Email course: Making a Product Designer by Invision

Branding and positioning

This one could possibly also fit in “marketing foundation,” but I see branding as a bigger concept. We all have personal brands (whether we actively cultivate it or not). We position ourselves for new jobs and opportunities. There’s a basic knowledge here that transcends marketing.

Resource: Skype’s brand book

Blog post: Gist’s guide to branding

Resource: Ubuntu’s brand guidelines

Blog: Brand New (example above)

Blog post: Building Your Brand by Aaron Beashel

Marketing foundation

Copywriting

As I mentioned above, copywriting is about knowing the best words to use in order to get a message across.

Blog: Copyhackers

Blog: Copyblogger

Book: Ogilvy on Advertising

Blog post: If Don Draper Tweeted: The 27 Copywriting Formulas That Will Drive Clicks and Engagement on Social Media by Buffer

Sketch, Canva, and Wireframing

This is a step up from the base knowledge of “Design and UX.” Once you know the principles of design, how far can you get with creating something yourself? Sketch and Canva just so happen to be our tools of choice. Photoshop or another software might make sense for your marketing team.

Content series: Getting Started with Sketch by Megumi Tanaka

Email course: Design Workflow with Sketch

My Canva profile (if you want to grab any templates)

Blog post: A Beginner’s Guide to Wireframing by Envato

A/B testing

A/B testing can somewhat share a line with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), but we split it out on its own because we want all our marketing team to understand the basic principles behind A/B testing. First, do you have a testing mindset? (Which, put another way, could be “do you have a data and growth mindset?) Then second, if you think about testing, do you have the ability to bring basic scientific tests into your area of expertise? A/B testing is like our default setting for scientific tests.

Blog post: 50 A/B Split Tests to Optimize Your Site by Sujan Patel

Resource: The Complete Guide to A/B Testing by VWO

Resource: A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing by KISSmetrics

Blog post: How we lost (and found) millions by not A/B testing by Basecamp

Video

For many companies, video is a channel all its own. For us, video is such a big part of the social media marketing we do that it just makes sense for us all to be well-versed with what it takes to create a compelling video and be confident on camera.

The Down and Dirty DIY Lighting Kit | Wistia Learning Center

Blog: Animoto

Resource: The Wistia Library

Statistics and Excel

This is the next step beyond data and analytics. We’d love for everyone on the team to be able to put together a solid spreadsheet to track numbers and goals.

Blog post: 10 Useful Google Spreadsheet Formulas You Must Know by Woorkup

Blog post: Take Back Your Time With These 10 Ready-Made Spreadsheet Templates (And Our Top Tips and Time-Savers) by Buffer

Blog post: 9 Free Microsoft Excel Templates to Make Marketing Easier by HubSpot

Website: Stack Overflow’s “Excel” tag

Funnel marketing

How does a customer become a customer? This feels like something it’d be great for all on the marketing team to know, even if they only have a particular impact on one portion of the funnel.

Video: Building a Growth Machine by Brian Balfour

Blog post: The consumer decision journey by McKinsey (see image above)

Blog post: The Steps You Need to Define the Stages of Your Sales & Marketing Funnel by HubSpot

HTML and CSS

This level of code knowledge can come in handy in so many places: blog posts, landing pages, email design, just to name a few.

Community: Stack Overflow

Website: Treehouse

Tip: Right-click and choose “View Source” or “Inspect Element” to see how any website is built

Customer experience (CX)

CX is a big part of Buffer as a company, which is why we emphasize it for our marketing team. This can look a number of different ways: for instance, hopping into the inbox to answer support tickets or thinking through the potential customer impact on launches, content, etc.

Podcast: Support Ops

Blog: HelpScout

Channel expertise

Biz Dev

Business development is the strategic relationship-building of key people and companies. For instance, at Buffer, if you were in Biz Dev you’d probably network with folks at Twitter, Facebook, Apple’s iOS store, etc.

Biz Dev 101 – An Interactive Workshop on How Deals Get Done from Scott Pollack

Book: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Blog post: Corporate Development 101: What Every Startup Should Know by OnStartups

Slidedeck: Biz Dev 101: An Interactive Workshop on How to Get Deals Done

Community

Community is the process of connecting people with people, with the common denominator being Buffer.

Blog: CMX Hub

Book: Buzzing Communities by Richard Millington

CRO

This can also be classified as bottom-of-the-funnel marketing. The goal here is to improve conversion rates by lots of different avenues: landing pages, CTAs, ads, content, and more.

Blog: ConversionXL

Blog post: Conversion: The Most Important Internet Metric of All (Revisited) by Above the Crowd

Email

Email marketing may include one-off campaigns, daily newsletters, lifecycle campaigns, and a lot more. In addition to being good at the content and conversion of emails, an email expert also knows the ins and outs of deliverability, ESPs, and a lot of other technical bits that are unique to email.

Blog and podcast: Litmus

Ebooks: Mailchimp library (seen above)

Events

An events expert can do everything from a meetup to a conference and tie back the event efforts to business impact.

Ebook: 9 Simple Steps to Master Social Media for Events by Eventbrite

Blog post: The Disneyland Effect: How to Plan a Successful Conference by Marketing Insider Group

Podcast episode: Top Strategies for Taking Your Online Community Offline with Marketing Events – w/ Stefanie Grieser of Unbounce

Content marketing

Content marketing is primarily about blogging, though the true definition of content extends to anything you might create. More and more, the “anything” seems to fit on the blog as well: video, audio, slideshows, etc.

Why Content Marketing Fails from Rand Fishkin

Blog: Grow and Convert

Blog post: The All-in-One Content Marketing Playbook for Startups by Copyhackers

Slidedeck: Content Marketing Lessons from 10 Years and 41 Million Visits

Slidedeck: Why Content Marketing Fails

Blog post: The 51 Best Writing Articles I’ve Ever Read by Buffer

SEO

This is anything to do with search engine optimization, both the content/strategy side and the technical side.

Blog: Moz

Videos: Whiteboard Friday

Blog post: This SEO Checklist = 48.7% More Organic Traffic [Case Study] by Backlinko

Blog post: Rand Fishkin’s 5 Simple Experiments for Improving SEO Health by Unbounce

Multimedia

For us, a multimedia channel expert shows a deep skill with podcasting and video production. They can create both types of media as well as put together a multimedia strategy based on business goals and existing content.

Blog post: How I Built a #1-Ranked Podcast With 60M+ Downloads by Tim Ferriss

Blog post: Podcasting for the Creative-Minded: How to Avoid Yet Another Talking Head Show by Jay Acunzo

Blog post: Podcast is the New Blog by 500 Startups

Inspiration: Gary Vaynerchuk’s Facebook page

Paid ads

Most often when we talk about paid ads, we refer to social media advertising — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. However, a paid ads expert may also be adept at search engine marketing (SEM), media sponsorships, and banner and display ads.

Resources: Adspresso Guide

Blog post: 7 Advanced Tactics Pro Facebook Marketers Use to Boost Conversions by Copyhackers

Podcast: Perpetual Traffic

Partnerships

For partnerships, we define this as someone who builds mutually beneficial relationships with peer companies, in order to drive a marketing objective. It’s a different flavor of biz dev: Biz dev is more focused on necessary networking for business growth, whereas partnership marketing is more focused on ad hoc collaborations for marketing objectives.

Blog post: Co-Marketing: How to Reach New Customers With Strategic Partnerships by Shopify

Blog post: What Is Co-Marketing? A Guide to Co-Branding Marketing Campaigns by HubSpot

Podcast episode: Marketing Partnerships: How to Expand Your Reach with Content Collaboration by Social Media Examiner

PR

PR is accountable for driving interest and mentions for the brand. At Buffer, this includes press outreach, inbound PR, syndication, and communications.

Blog post: 22 PR Tools and Resources by Brandwatch

Social media

I like the way Gary Vaynerchuk describes his work as the clouds and the dirt. He wants to be comfortable both at the highest strategic level and at the most tactical, on-the-ground level. This is true of someone who shows social media expertise.

Blog: Buffer

Blog: Social Media Examiner

Book: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk

Viral marketing

The outcome of viral marketing is that customers are selling your brand for you. There are a lot of different levers that can make this happen, not the least of which is a referral or loyalty program, as well as a deep understanding of virality, psychology, and network effects.

Book: Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Other: International marketing, product marketing, mobile marketing.

The list of channels could go on and on. A couple others that come to mind include international marketing (strategically reaching an audience beyond your primary audience) and mobile marketing (iOS, Android, apps, etc.).

Advice on building your skills and choosing an expertise

For anyone new to marketing or excited to grow as a marketer, I feel there’s a lot of potential in a framework like this, no matter the specific boxes or stems.

Here’s how I tend to think about career growth.

1. Career planning for digital marketers is really hard.

Things change. Needs arise. Channels come and go. The most valuable skill to have is probably not anything like writing or video or networking but rather plain ol’ flexibility!

2. Balance what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and what your team needs.

We use this Venn diagram to speak about how Buffer teammates move between roles on the team. Often, we’ve found there to be a varying combination of these three factors pulling someone to do a job. I’d suggest factoring in each of these when choosing a channel to grow into.

3. Go deep on two or more channels. 

A single skill at a very deep level can be really valuable to have. The tricky thing I’ve observed is that depth is more highly valued at larger companies. A five-person marketing team likely won’t have the need for an SEO expert whose primary contribution is SEO. A five-person marketing team will need someone who can do two or more channels well (and can do lots more well enough).

Figure out the size of team you want to be part of, then build your skills accordingly.

4. Aim for rare and unusual combinations.

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix…

This is a Marc Andreessen quote I love (there’s a bunch more in his book of blog posts, which you can download for free).

Have you ever met someone who’s great at paid ads and events? What about content and business development? Those are rare combos. Combining these somewhat disparate skills can make for a really attractive resume as you search out jobs in the future.

5. Choose an emerging channel.

From Brian Balfour:

If you are just starting your digital marketing career and have many years ahead of you, I highly suggest leaning towards emerging channels. Four years ago the emerging channels would have been Facebook and content marketing.

Emerging channels today would likely be data, artificial intelligence, customer experience, and engineering-as-marketing. If you can get in on the ground floor of these, you’ll be well positioned when they become more widely recognized.

Over to you

I hope this overview of T-shaped marketers can help you find your next skill to learn or direction to grow. It’d be fantastic to hear your thoughts!

What do you see your marketing career path looking like?

Anything you’d add to our T-shaped list?

Image sources: Unsplash

Thank How to Become a T-Shaped Marketer: What Marketing Career Growth Looks Like at Buffer for first publishing this post.

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7 design predictions for 2017, that might actually happen

Every year, blogs like this one try to predict what’s going to happen in our industry over the next 12 months. Design is a product of its environment and good design reflects the world that it exists in; no one has a crystal ball, so unsurprisingly design predictions are wrong as often as they are right.

However, there are clear emerging trends on the web. Sometimes we see developments happen in front of us. Sometimes they keep coming up in conversation. Sometimes one solid idea unites a set of related trends. More often than not, we’re just following the age-old pattern of revolution and counter-revolution.

Here are seven developments I think we’ll see this year, together with a score on how confident I am that I’m right…

1. 2017 will not be the year of VR

VR is amazing. The ability to disconnect from your context and immerse yourself in a more flexible reality is genuinely world-changing. What’s more, the technology is finally mature enough to deliver on its promise. But VR will not be a mainstay of web design in the next 12 months.

The common objection to VR is the cost of the kit, but actually a VR headset is relatively cheap. A smartphone costs in the region of $850 (and only lasts a month less than the contract you sign to get it) and the mobile web is still growing at pace. (What’s more, you can use that self-same smartphone and some cardboard to create a rudimentary VR setup.)

Most people are too lazy to put on a VR headset just to order pizza

What’s holding up VR is our laziness. If you look at your web stats, you’ll see that most mobile browsing occurs via wifi; in other words, we’re browsing the web on portable devices when we’re not mobile. We know that we’ll get a better experience on desktop, but the desk is all the way over there, and my phone’s already on, and it’s in my pocket…

The biggest challenge to VR is that it can’t be used casually. VR is an event, an experience. Most people are too lazy to put on a VR headset just to order pizza. So we’ll play games, watch movies, tour vacation spots, but we won’t browse Vice, or flick through Facebook, or just kill time. Until we do, VR will always be a supplementary technology.

 Confidence: 8/10

2. We’ll be obsessed with security, but forget passwords

For many people, 2016 was a bit of a gut-punch, and there’s inevitable fallout from that. In industry terms, it doesn’t actually matter if Russian hackers put Trump in the Whitehouse, what matters is that the issues of hacking, privacy, and security have entered the public consciousness.

It’s very likely that over the next 12 months we’ll see an increase in the use of browsers like Vivaldi. It’s very likely that many more sites will be using SSL certificates. It’s very likely that every client you meet this year is going to have at least some questions about security.

One potential benefit of our renewed obsession with privacy is the end of passwords. Passwords have never been secure, because humans aren’t good at remembering long strings of random characters, and computers are. Passwords have always been a least-worst solution. The last few years have seen numerous attempts to move beyond them, ranging from master password applications, to social media sign-ins, to email-based logins. Finally, we have a great alternative in the form of fingerprint ID.

In 2017, the option to sign into sites using your fingerprint will become commonplace. The ubiquitous nature of mobile devices, and the steady decline of desktop browsing, coupled with the obvious benefits of a unique identifier that you don’t need to remember, will be the tipping point for simple security on the web.

Confidence: 6/10

3. Someone will finally make AI work

Obviously it won’t pass the Turing test, it won’t even try to. But provided that the marketing department agrees to call it “AI”, then machine learning and pattern recognition will make 2017 year zero for widespread artificial intelligence.

…it’s a short hop from A/B testing, to collaborative A/B testing where results from multiple sites are pooled into a single AI

At the core of this AI revolution, will be an enhanced approach to A/B testing; A/B testing only produces reliable results when you have many thousands of sessions to gather feedback from—more than most sites can muster. With the continued growth of design patterns, and the acceptance of design convergence over the last couple of years, countless designers are working with comparable UI elements. All of which means it’s a short hop from A/B testing, to collaborative A/B testing where results from multiple sites are pooled into a single AI. Complex design problems can then be solved using feedback from millions of users across thousands of sites.

In 2017 someone will release a cloud-based solution that will gather data from across the web, and interpret it intelligently so users can design from an informed point of view. This process won’t replace designers, because insights will, by necessity, be broad and work on a design pattern level. How to implement those insights will be a key talent for designers over the next decade.

Confidence: 3/10

4. The death of the web(site) and an end to online advertising

Designing sites as component-based systems, rather than as individual pages has been a popular approach for a number of years. The latest formalised version of the approach is Brad Frost’s Atomic Design. The value this methodology brings is an increased flexibility, greater consistency, and a more responsive approach across different media.

In 2017 we’ll take the next step by detaching components from sites, and delivering content as brands, rather than distinct websites. A travel service for example, might have hotel listings, flight listings, venue reviews, currency conversion, weather reports, all displayed in a single browser window, and all syndicated from different content providers. We’ll effectively be browsing as we do now using multiple tabs, but on a single screen.

Initially these services will be web apps, eventually we may see them evolve into distinct browser-like applications.

The side-effect of this new approach to syndication will be the final nail in the coffin of the floundering advertising revenue model. Advertising has always been a flawed method for funding the web: adverts are intrusive, unpopular, and impact content.

There are now two distinct webs forming, the traditional web that is locked in to single providers, and a SaaS model in which micro-payments buy access to select content. As 2017 progresses we’ll see the growth of the payment model, not in the form of paywalls, but in tiny micro-payments, enabled in the browser, that pay for syndicated content as we consume it.

Confidence: 2/10

5. The web will be beautiful

Utilitarian design has been the de facto approach for five years or more. We talk about design being “invisible”, as if a user being aware of design is somehow harmful.

Through 2016 there was an increasing interest in “delightful” design. Companies like WeTransfer enhanced their value with conspicuous design. Leading design thinkers like Stefan Sagmeister were advocating for beauty. The austerity of flat design has already been supplanted by a rediscovered love of gradients.

A reaction against the over-reliance on frameworks has lead to designers exploring more expressive ways of communicating

As human beings we’re attracted to beauty. If a product is beautiful, the experience of using it is more enjoyable. A product that is enjoyable, will be used more.

The drive for beauty is tied up in a number of ongoing trends. A reaction against the over-reliance on frameworks has lead to designers exploring more expressive ways of communicating. Hand-lettering and illustration are amongst the most in-demand design skills.

Even a clunky 2017-style AI can follow a set of rules to make type legible, to make colors inclusive, to make layouts responsive; those skills have all been mastered. In 2017, each designer’s strength will be their own craft skill, a unique vision of what is beautiful.

Confidence: 9/10

6. Design tools will explode

It’s a common misconception that there are a lot of design tools available. In actuality, there are a few key areas that receive all the attention, while the bulk of our processes are under-served. If you need a color picker, you have almost too much choice. If you’re looking for a prototyping tool there are a dozen or more professional-grade options available. If on the other hand you’re looking at vector graphics, you realistically have three options. For Bitmap artwork, it’s more like two.

There is clearly an appetite for new solutions to new problems. Web professionals, by our nature, are the first to dive into new technology. We think nothing of working with applications that are still in beta. The growth of prototyping tools demonstrates that there’s also a generation of software developers out there, ready to create innovative, exciting, and affordable design applications.

At the very least, in-app tooling will dramatically evolve this year. Adobe is reportedly working on AI additions to Creative Cloud as it tries to re-establish its dominance in the market, and it’s likely that other major players will follow suit.

Automation is the key word for software in 2017, and it will all be aimed at freeing up your time for more creativity.

Confidence: 7/10

7. The unstoppable rise of VX Design

Right now, someone somewhere is writing a Medium post in which they coin the latest industry buzz word. It’s probably very similar to “UX” only more-so. It’s probably “VX”; “VX” is one step along the alphabet, and still includes the cool sounding “X”. “VX” could be a reference to “VR”, it probably stands for “Virtual Experience”.

The term “VX Designer” will be virtually meaningless, but eight out of ten designers will be using it on their social media profiles by December. Several new design blogs will pop up, dedicated to “All things VX”. At this year’s MAX, Adobe will announce a specialist version of Creative Cloud, targeting “VX Designers”.

By the end of the year we’ll all be pontificating on “VX” as the only legitimate approach to design in 2018.

Confidence: 10/10

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