Everyone needs to read, but I think we designers tend to overlook reading physical books.  As such, I want to point to a few resources that I’ve particularly enjoyed reading/looking at over the years.

Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist – This book details some of Tibor Kalman’s work and life as a designer.  The man was brilliant creatively and pushed the edges of commercial design to be accountable to the greater good.  His most famous works include some products carried in the MOMA store and work with COLORS Magazine.

Life Style – By Bruce Mau.  Bruce Mau came up with an incomplete manifesto for growth and published it, along with a lot of work, etc in a book called Life Style.  The hardcover edition of this book is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen – bound in a number of different fabrics.  Mine is a shimmering pink (by chance).  Mau’s work is brilliant and highly influential, intelligent, and challenging.  He also has a good interview with Charlie Rose.

The Art of Looking Sideways – This one is by Alan Fletcher and is just amazing.  I don’t know much about Fletcher other than what I know from this book.  But this book is thick, cheap, and wonderful.  Each page is packed with information and ideas to explore.  It’s not a book you sit and read, but a book that you flip through every once in a while to garner some bit of inspiration.  It’s an amalgamation of quotes, images, thoughts and colors divided up into small sections.  A perfect coffee table, discussion starting book.

The End of Print, etc – I say etc, because I’ve enjoyed any of David Carson‘s books.  I think he’s a little uppity as an individual, but his work was revolutionary.  He’s the reason I started paying attention to type and had a huge influence on the way I’ve done my photography.  A brilliant designer as evidenced by the books he created.

MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice of a New Media Designer – This is a book by Hillman Curtis.  It’s an older book, but one I really enjoyed.  It details the process Hillman Curtis takes at his small design firm.  Very interesting.

Problem solving is the core of any project a web designer will ever tackle.  In fact, most jobs any person might hold will involve some sort of problem solve, though we often don’t think of it in those terms.

Because all of life, all of work is really centered around problem solving, knowing how to see a problem and find a solution is extremely important.  Being skilled as a problem solver will make you highly sought-after.  In my Programming Logic class here at the Art Institute of Dallas we specifically address a problem-solving process the first week of class.  That basic process is as follows:

1. Identify the Problem

In other words, what problem are you really trying to solve?  When someone comes to me asking for a website saying “I just need a one page site with my contact information,” my question to them is “What are you trying to convey to your customers?”  If their answer is more than just “contact information” and “professionalism”, they probably need more than what they’re asking for.  The real problem is “I want to communicate to potential customers that I will spend time with them, help understand what they’re like, and give them a solution based on that.”  If that’s the real problem, the solution will look much different from the original solution asked for.  So know your problem, even if you have to dig a bit.

2. Understand the Problem

If you’re trying to understand a problem for a person you must be able to get into a person’s head.  There is a field devoted to this – “Human Factors Engineering.”  For instance if the person has limited experience with say – a computer – it wouldn’t be helpful to tell them “oh, just open the browser” when they’re trying to connect to the internet.  You have to understand what the problem is, who is involved, their experiences, etc.

3. Identify alternative ways to solve the problem

Chances are the first solution you think of won’t be the best solution. You’ll have to take time to think through, list out different possible ways of solving a given problem.  In my class we talk about all the different ways I can get home – by car, helicopter, skateboard, foot, etc.

4. Select the best way to solve the problem from the list of alternative solutions

First you need to figure out your criteria.  Critirion is defined by dictionary.com as a standard of judgment or criticism; a rule or principle for evaluating or testing something.  So for my in-class example, what would my criteria be?  Total Distance, Time, Danger, Cost?  We list each solution along with a rating in each of the criteria.  Then we weigh the resulting table and choose the best.

5. List instructions that enable you to solve the problem using the selected solution

So we have a general solution, but not the specific steps.  In this stage we list out exactly what we need to complete the task, in detail.

6. Evaluate the solution

Does the solution really work?  If it doesn’t we may have to re-evaluate our solution list or our criteria and find a better way of solving our problem.

The most important skill a web designer can posess is the ability to learn quickly from a variety of resources.  As the web is ever-changing, ever-growing, a web designer must keep up.  Additionally, to be truly rounded a designer/developer must keep current on many subjects, not just one.  I want to take a couple moments and highlight a few of my favorite resources.

Ted.com – TED started out as a Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference back in the eighties but has since broadened into an idea spreading machine.  Their tagline is “Ideas Worth Spreading” and that’s their focus.  Every day they release a new video from a speaker, artist, intertainer, politician, scientist, etc that contains the latest ideas from that particular field.  They always get the top people, and the ideas are usually worth listening to.  TED is available as a podcast through iTunes as well as through their website.

ETL – The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar at Stanford is an amazing lecture series.  The series is set up by a class and speakers are booked as guest lecturers of the class.  Most of the speakers are high-ranking business people who eaither started their own companies, or run technology-centric companies in or around Silicon Valley.  For wisdom in setting up, running, or selling a technology based company, ETL from Stanford is about as good as it gets.  A couple other related podcasts: iinnovate & Venture Voice.

For news I cycle through a few sites periodically:

Wired.com has some interesting news articles in technology related fields and most of their magazine is available online.

Slashdot.org totes itself as “News for Nerds” and they’re right on.  Slashdot is much more technical than Wired.

K10K.net is known as the “Designer’s Lunchbox”.  K10K has been around for years and has slowed down a bit, but they still have good resources from time to time.  Be sure to check out their pixel pattern archive.

NYTimes – every once in a while I go look around.  The op-eds are usually interesting and thought-provoking.

Twitter is emerging as a great place to get news and information, ask questions and get instant feedback.  Who knew it would blow up like this?

Beyond those resources, most of the other sites I go are niché – specific to my individual interests.  I would tell anyone to keep a book library that is ever expanding, print articles that are important and put them in binders, and keep up with digital resources such as the ones I’ve mentioned above.  If you can do those things you’ll be much more relevant in 5-10 years as a designer and developer than if you don’t.  It takes some time and effort, but I think it’s worth it in the long run.

In order to succeed you must take risk.  If you take risks, you’re going to fail.  The question is not if you’ll fail at some point in your life, but when?  And when you fail, what will you do?

Over and over I hear this concept from great men and women in business and in life.  The most successful are always the ones that have endured failure and still kept going.  But I would also say, the fastest to success are the quickest to recognize failure.  Speed of iteration is really important, not just the fact that you do iterate.

I listened to a talk recently that basically said this: “If you have an idea, identify the failure points as best you can.  Once you’ve identified those points, get to those points as soon as you can – because if you can overcome those your idea will work.  If you can’t overcome those points, your idea will not work.  And the faster you know your idea won’t work, the quicker you can move on to the next idea.”

If we were being honest most of us would be forced to admit that we run from failure.  We try to ignore the ways in which a thing will not work out because we all want to be successful.  But the most successful people don’t avoid failure, they just fail more quickly.  They don’t hold on to the things that won’t work, they move on quickly to the next idea.

Think of it this way: Let’s say 1 in 20 ideas succeed.  The problem is, you don’t know whether it’s number 1, 17 or 20.  So the quicker you try the first and figure out if it will fail, the quicker you can move on to the next idea.  And if that great idea is number 15, the first person to 15 wins.  The first person to chalk all those ideas up as failures, admit they were wrong, show some humility and move on, wins.

So fail fast, fail often.  Learn to recognize the breaking points and test those as quickly as possible.  Be humble and admit when something doesn’t/won’t work.  Learn from your mistakes and know when to move on.  Thomas Edison, commenting on his light bulb experiments, said “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.”

Here are some interesting talks having to do with risk and failure.  All of these are from Stanford:

Tom Kelly

Judy Estrin

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