Blogging And All That Malarkey

Walls Come Tumbling Down

As I’m putting together Walls Come Tumbling Down, the talk that I am giving this year at @media 2009 London and An Event Apart, I wanted to share some of my notes on how the current recession will affect the way that web designers and developers work.

Back in the mid-nineties, I helped to bring digital photography to Europe. I know that it probably seems odd today, but then, despite how exciting the technologies were, no one wanted digital photography.

Photographers clung to the idea that digital cameras were not up to the quality of large-format film cameras, despite clear evidence to the contrary. This was reinforced by colour reproduction houses and advertising agencies who told their clients that digital could not replace film, at least not for a while. In the face of overwhelming evidence, they clung to their familiar workflow processes, backwards and forwards, trial and error. No one, not even Kodak, was selling digital cameras.

(When I was writing this talk, I remembered an annual report from the mid-nineties where Kodak insisted that instead of pushing forward with digital, they would make more by selling one roll of film to everybody living in China — true undoubtedly, but ultimately short-sighted.)

There were two individuals, I was lucky enough to work with both of them, who made professional digital photography in Europe possible. In doing that they didn't just sell cameras, they changed several industries in the process.

One of those people, Jo Simons, saw the bigger picture and realized that no-one would benefit from digital cameras eliminating film processing times and costs, it was fast and cheap. For the same reasons, little would be gained by eliminating scanning. (These were the two main sales arguments for digital cameras at the time).

Jo realized before anyone else, that it was the moving of responsibility and control of colour from the end of the repro process to the beginning, in the photo studio, combined with emerging digital proof printers that could be calibrated to match a printing press, that offered clients the financial and other incentives to insist on digital from their suppliers.

Clients saw that the status quo workflow, where photographers, scanner operators, colour specialists and separators all had their defined roles and worked separately was too inefficient, too costly and gave less quality than a new digital workflow could offer them.

The long-standing backwards and forwards, trial and error workflow that had been commonplace in the industry, changed in just a few years — largely as a result of just a handful of people. (I'm proud I was one of them.)

I can now see several parallels with commonplace web design and development workflows today.

Designers and developers often work separately from each-other.
Designers work on static look and feel visuals.
Clients are shown and asked to sign-off on static comps.
Developers work with markup, CSS and JavaScript to translate those visuals into the browser.
Back-end developers work on back-end systems.
Testing, by users and for browsers and accessibility comes last.

Changes and corrections often mean going back to the drawing board and there is often tension between those involved in the process.

I don't know how to express this plainly enough.

This workflow, the workflow that most us continue to work inside is overly time-consuming, inefficient and wasteful. It is also history, period.

When this recession is over, we will look back at how we work today with the same sense of disbelief that I remember from the mid-nineties.

Leave your comment

Jason Armstrong

May 29 2009 @ 11:01am #

I agree completely. I’ve thought more and more lately that building websites is hard. Certainly not digging ditch hard, but mentally very taxing and yes, quite time consuming. I can’t imagine that at some point building cleanly coded, accessible and yes, beautiful (grid-based I’m sure) websites will have to get easier. The tools are sure to be developed at some point that will allow drag and drop simplicity to what is now such an arduous task.

I also think that many of us designers and developers will be kicking and screaming all the way like the Kodak people as our jobs evolve and a lot of what we do (at least with regard to actually building the sites) will evolve to the point that we will say, “Wow, were working in the stone ages back then. We may as well have used hammer and chisel!”

Krys

May 29 2009 @ 01:25pm #

Thank you for posting this. I feel the same way. In fact, my role (designer) is already evolving in my workplace—I’ve had to wear some development hats for buyoff and work with our developers from the very beginning of a product cycle. Our clients’ timelines are just too compressed to work in individual silos. Though it has been (and will continue to be) hard to break those walls down, I really do feel like we’re working more like an integrated machine instead of a series of disparate, floating satellites.

Kevin Mears

May 29 2009 @ 05:39pm #

I’m not sure, but the notion of a sign-off point seems anachronistic these days. As we know websites are never really finished - they just go through different stages of development.

I guess someone has to call it at some point. In an ideal world the website is the healthy offspring of a beautiful relationship between client and the design/development team.

Robin Jakobsson

May 29 2009 @ 07:32pm #

Yes, I completely agree. It’s a total waste of time.
The best would be if they were the same persons, or if they sit beside each other throughout the whole process.

Barney

May 29 2009 @ 07:58pm #

I’m not sure exactly what you’re saying will happen. Are we looking at a paradigm-shift in deselopment (the word has been around) studios?

Photography is an established craft & profession with a century of popular respect behind it and institutions to account for that. ‘if-it-ain’t-broke’ and ‘not-invented-here’ are easily seen in such a situation. I hadn’t heard this story before, but I can believe the anecdote where an institution like that would require a consultant like yourself to tell it ‘no look here’s some new technology with possibilities to match’.

Web is extremely young. The web designers and developers with credibility are those that have embraced new philosophies, techniques, & technologies faster than the institutions can. It’s in its nature. You can’t accuse these professionals of failing to embrace new possibilities.

I concede the point (if you’re making it — I’m not quite sure) that there are plenty of people who are prematurely dividing an as-yet-unformed web into dangerously restrictive and uncommunicative competencies: My CV reads ‘web designer & front-end developer’, but in interviews I’m often asked to ‘admit’ which of the two I ‘really’ am. My standard response goes along the lines of ‘you can’t devise a front-end without designing it; you can’t design a web interface that doesn’t have a front-end’, and this seems fairly obvious to me but the reaction is generally suspicious.

If you’re saying that the web currently makes use of deep and highly specific expertise inherited from necessarily different environments, and a linear working process from non-perpetual or non-interactive mediums I agree with that too; and I can see that changing as the basics of web interaction and presentation become more standardised and grow to become supported by stronger technologies.

But if you’re saying that web professionals are the photographers of the nineties — steeped in traditionalism, cynicism, fear, uncertainty and doubt — and we need you to show us how a new device revolutionises our world, I disagree. Besides, when making the analogy you forgot to mention what accounts for the digital camera in this situation.

What you did for the photographers was great, judging by the state of the profession today — but what exactly are you proposing now?

Steven

May 29 2009 @ 08:34pm #

But unlike your pioneering digital photography argument, you don’t give any alternatives.

John Lyons

May 29 2009 @ 09:31pm #

I can understand the need to make processes/workflow more efficient, I spend significant amounts of time looking at how we can make our business model more efficient.

What I can’t see yet is how you can change the model.

The graphic designers we use are head and shoulders better than anyone else in the office at what they do.

The guys doing php/javascript/css work do that quickly and efficiently. I wouldn’t want them doing anything else.

Where I do see the current process failing is that designers are consistently short of one key person. An Analyst! I’m an accountant so my brain works in a particular way when it comes to business processes and work flow. I can look at a business and understand how everything hangs together. I can visualise their stock control, accounting, sales and logistics and give then a solution that fits with everything else they do or which in some cases replaces all of their existing system with one coherent system.

How many times have you seen sites developed that have no relationship whatsoever with the rest of the business. Staff downloading orders via email to then type into their existing accounts system etc etc.

Companies like Sage, Navision, and Cybertill have software that supports every element of a business in one package, what they don’t have is the faintest idea of what a real web site is, despite the fact that they all offer the one click web shop solution.

Barney

May 29 2009 @ 09:39pm #

Maybe we’re talking about extreme programming here? Just a thought.

John Lyons

May 29 2009 @ 10:03pm #

Extreme as in taking your laptop half way up a cliff face while carrying a flaming torch in your teeth?

Barney

May 29 2009 @ 10:15pm #

In a way. The developer would be doing the climbing and making sure nobody fell off, the designer would be biting the torch and making sure it didn’t go out. As a team that regularly works on the same stuff by manner of continuous communication, you’d get snatches of ‘holding the torch near my head is going to cause me to let go as a pain reflex’, ‘stop making sudden movements, the flame’s flickering’, etc etc. FYI: http://tinyurl.com/dz2pze

Andrew

May 30 2009 @ 12:13am #

I agree with Steven, you don’t provide any alternatives in this post (perhaps you are saving them for another I would hope). I know you have been an advocate for full xhtml/css prototypes and having clients sign off on those, but that concept still does not address the complaints you have here between the roles of designers and developers.

Looking forward to your future thoughts on the subject.

Ian

May 30 2009 @ 06:21am #

Have you seen Adobe’s Catalyst product?

Al Stevens

June 5 2009 @ 12:40am #

There is a great deal of truth here. But I am not sure about the core assumptions as listed in your numbers 1 to 6. There are a great deal of teams out there that collaborate on these tasks effectively, or even individuals who are able to cross those boundaries. If you’ll pardon the pun I don’t think it’s that black and white.

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Walls Come Tumbling Down

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Krys

Steven

Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke