Beth Dillon at our sister blog Notes on Game Dev wrote a very personal post yesterday about her frustration with the subtly chauvinist attitudes in the game industry and issued a call for other women in her business to share their experiences. Beth recounted how, again and again, she would hear the same line from by recruiters at industry events: “You should come work for us, we could really use a woman on the team”.

“They don’t care what I actually do, what my credentials are, what genres I’d like to work in or what audiences I know best.” Beth writes, “I’m a woman, therefore I know what all women want, and I can give them the secret key into awhole new market of money. Oh, that and it looks good for them to have a woman on the team if they’re going to make games for women.

If we’re so precious and have some special knowledge, why aren’t we getting paid as much as men? On average, we get about 10k less per salary, although this changes relative to the position.”

The post immediately elicited a slew of passionate and eloquent responses. Which made us think that women in the game industry are probably not the only ones that feel stereotyped by a male-dominated tech industry. So we would love to hear what women
in the web design and design business have to say. Please join the game dev women and post your comments here

Inspired by Kate Andrews’ recent related post on sustainable typography

In my typography course project at Maryland Institute College of Art, sophomore students are designing packages for eco-friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs. Not surprisingly, eco-asethetics have inspired their work and became active parts of class discussion. We debated hotly the role that design plays in creating expectations for the quality of the product.

Many “green” products are relatively under-designed with simple typography and color palettes. This tissue box for Seventh Generation downplays the use of packaging to sell the product, but rather emphasizes the integrity of the product’s manufacturing process. Other pared-down samples utilized hand generated-typography, visuals lacking uniformity, recycled paper, low-saturation colors, broken typographic rules, outdated typefaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Findability and Search Engine Optimization have been on my mind lately (and on everyone else’s I suppose). Some SEO experts seem to look at the whole thing as a game that you win by getting your page ranked number one on a search result with particular keywords.

I do appreciate that search engine ranking is a concrete result (for that moment in time, at least) and it’s easy to point to (look, we rank number 2 for this keyword). I feel a certain satisfaction when a client’s site ranks high on the keywords we are targeting.

But it seems like the SEO experts (and their clients) often see the search engine (most usually Google) as the enemy, something to beat or trick.

There’s one big problem with this view. Read the rest of this entry »

You asked your usability questions, and Mike has answered! We invite you to ask more questions here

Hi Mike,

I work for a small web design company, and have been arguing with one of the designers about when we should do usability tests for our projects. I think we should do them close to the beginning, after we have a few main pages done, so we can make changes if there are big usability problems. But he thinks we should wait until the site is considered final so the test covers everything. Which is better? (Keep in mind, I owe him lunch if I’m wrong.) Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, amidst the feline army, I curled up to finally finish reading Lucienne Roberts’ book GOOD: An Introduction to Ethics in Graphic Design.” This is possibly the only book I have found and read that directly discusses ethics in Contemporary Graphic Design. Gathering a selection of opinions, from the likes of Ken Garland, Thomas Matthews, Deborah Szebeko, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Daniel Eatock, the book starts at the beginning of ‘Early Civilisation’ (p.21), and later discusses aspects of History, Philosophy (p.34), Law (p.44) and Politics (p.58). In conclusion the book presents a series of discussions with a collection of credible designers (p.113-192) - ultimately asking what it means to be a “good” designer. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, really I mean when users’ needs conflict. How do you design a site that meets the needs of two different groups of users? Mostly I run into this with the sites I create for non-profit organizations.

Who are the two groups of users?

One group is the people that the organization helps. These are the ones I think of first and foremost and I try to design an easy to navigate site with lots of good information for them. This group often has some technology limitations (face it, most non-profits aren’t helping the folks in Beverly Hills with fios internet connections and the latest desktop computer). So, I make my pages lightweight and fast loading, I try to limit the graphics, and I keep in mind older computers and monitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Magazine covers usually aim to please. The idea seems to be that if a cover image offends as few people as possible, as many people as possible will buy the magazine. MOMA’s current exhibition of George Lois’s legendary Esquire covers proves the opposite to be true. Between 1962 and 1972, Lois’s provocative, opinionated, funny and sometimes even angry work boosted the magazine’s sales figures to hit record highs. The small but eloquent exhibition is a celebration of his vision. As in a strong, uncompromising vision imagined and executed by one person who was left alone by marketing departments and anxious editors. The covers are clean and simple graphically, often featuring a powerful photograph or photo montage against a white background. “There is no design,” said Lois, a sharp and ebullient 77-year-old native New Yorker, at the press viewing last week, “It’s the architecture of an idea.” Read the rest of this entry »

You asked your legal, copyright, and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are culled from the comments section attached to the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Kelly says:
Hi Jean,
I asked a question awhile back that didn’t get answered - I’m wondering what to do in situations where an author wants to maintain copyright, but needs to remain anonymous. I am working on a blog and book that are being done under a pseudonym, and I don’t know how to go about protecting the material while not publishing my legal name.
Kelly Read the rest of this entry »

The concept of “green” typography may seem ridiculous to non-type-nerds and, yes OK, perhaps typography can’t conquer climate change, but it can certainly help communicate it! With these thoughts in mind, I thought it would be interesting to share some recent examples I’ve found of contemporary typography that truly redefine those terrifying visions of green (and tree-shaped) logos! Read the rest of this entry »

‘Synergy’ is one of those words I hate: a business buzzword that’s so ubiquitous as to be meaningless. Trouble is, the word pretty much describes what we try to do with HOW as a brand. Speakers at the HOW Design Conference write for the magazine or are sources for articles. Feature stories become conference sessions. Conference speakers author HOW Books and vice versa. Read the rest of this entry »