Foie Gras, most right minded people agree, is a barbaric practice that should be outlawed. Quite how we’ve got to the 21st century without being horrified that it ever existed, let alone still exists, I can’t understand.

However – that’s not the point of this post. The point is that my personal brand, and my business brand is very closely interlinked. I’m a “Passionate Vegetarian” as my Twitter profile says, I could no more work for a business that sold Foie Gras than I could work for a slaughter house. My personal beliefs blur across to my business life (they go in the other direction too).

I’m proud to say that when we were approached by a German online food shop to do some work on their site, we checked their ethical standing and immediately found it wanting. We refused the work, as we’d refuse it from anyone with questionable ethics.

This stance isn’t just about Foie Gras, or indeed about the meat industry. Although as a vegetarian of course I’d rather nobody ate meat, I understand that I live in a world where plenty of people do, and that there are ethical approaches to the selling of meat products that do not include cruel and unusual treatment of livestock.

This stance is actually about ethical businesses. By refusing to work with businesses with poor animal welfare policies, unethical business practices, “dark Pattern” interfaces, sub standard products, or anything else, we can hold our heads up high and say:

“We’re proud of who we are, what we do, and who we do it for”.

You know I even keep a list of blog subjects and have a weekly reminder to post? Do I do a weekly blog post? No. Suppose I should be glad of being so busy.

Anyway – “Inbox 0″ a noble aim and one that in my own way, I achieve every day. This is how I do it, you may want to change things to fit. It works very well with Dave Allen’s GTD process and perfectly fits the sweep process of bin it, file it, do it if it takes less than 2 minutes or put it in your task inbox.

Requirements:

• A Mac using Mail.app with a “Smartfolder” set up to filter in all unread mail.
• Omnifocus for Mac
• Omnifocus for iPad
• Omnifocus for iPhone

My wife, who is far better at writing than me (good job as she’s our copy writer and content strategist), wrote about our standard client questionnaire which we ask clients to complete when they come to us to talk about a project.

I should have written about it myself but as I say, she’s much better at it than me – tell us your thoughts, both clients and fellow designers opinions welcomed!

A short blog this week, but I am trying to force myself to write more so instead of just clicking “complete” and not actually posting – I’ll tell you quickly about Pomodoro Technique (PT) for concentrating your time and getting better at planning.

I’m terrible at staying focussed – I don’t seem to be able to fix the problem so instead I use tools to help me better deal with it. The best tool I have come across is Getting Things Done by David Allen, you all already know and practice good GTD though right? The PT however is a simple mind trick you can learn in a day, that helps you really focus on the actual things you need to get done. You don’t need any shiny software, all you need is a kitchen timer (or other timing device) and a pen and paper. I use an app I got from the App Store, but you really could use anything.

At it’s heart, PD divides your day into 25 minute work sessions and 5 minute break periods, along with larger breaks throughout the day (and lunch ofc!) concentrating, uninterrupted on a given task for that entire 25 minutes and being very strict about keeping distraction clear from your minds eye view.

The PT has genuinely helped me map my days out better, and to be realistic about what I can and can’t get done in a given time, try it out, at most you have 25 minutes to lose

I hear that some people read their entire twitter stream. The whole thing. Without ever giving up and saying “sod this for a game of soldiers” and scrolling to the top.

I know I “need” twitter, like it or loathe it, it’s taken over from mailing lists and RSS feeds as the fastest way to stay up to date with the web dev world, after all we invented the web, not surprising we use it more than anyone else.

I currently follow 227 people, after one of my monthly culls. I estimate I read/skim about 10% of the stream, and from what I do read, 1% is relevant, 99% is crap. And I really mean crap. Insights into the personal lives of people I don’t know is just noise, the link to the interesting and helpful article about responsive design? That’s signal.

The day someone invents a usefulness filter and sticks it on Twitter I’ll be a happy man.

Oh and if I could figure out how to remove all the spammy followers, I’d probably follow more people, as I’d follow back the interesting people who follow me, but who get lost in a sea of media drones, marketing bots and special deal tweeting machines for countries I don;t even live in.

Sort it out Twitter

One of the big projects I have on right now is a Shopify based shop  for a client who sells hand made baby clothes, crystals and other related items. She was in fact the impetus for my HTML5 Boilerplate for Shopify site.

My client, and she won’t mind me describing her as this as she’s an old friend – is terrified of computers. Where I spend 8-10 hours a day directly online, and never further than 5 feet from a connected device, she checks her email once a week. Where I use a top of the range Macbook Pro linked to a 27inch screen, she has a basic version of Windows 7 on a 12inch sub notebook. Our experience of computers & the internet is totally and utterly different.

Learning to empathise with your clients is essential, it’s the same skill you should be using to empathise with the users of the sites that you create. Presuming the same level, or even a similar level of technical experience and know how will lead to disaster. I have worked in many a team where we trot out the old “Users are stupid” line. But it’s not true is it? They aren’t “stupid” they just aren’t as knowledgable in our field as we are. It is our job as good designers, as good UX creators to think how other people feel and to design to fit them not to fit us.

Why did I mention this client? Well – she had to copy a lot of data into Shopify when she started adding her products. Shopify does have a CSV upload option but given the technical nature of the upload – we decided to go with the straight web interface instead. When we did the training to show her how to insert copy, well let’s just say even I was surprised.

Apparently the best thing I have taught her so far is that CMD-C copies whatever you selected, CMD-V pastes it and CMD-Z is a magic undo. She’s now very very happy.

Do not treat your clients or users as stupid, they are not. They are just not you. We spend our lives so deep inside Twitter, or Facebook or Tumblr or any one of a dozen other places, we have smart phones, iPads, Kindels and the sort of technology that ten years ago would have looked like magic, most people do not.

Be kind, be understanding, do not get frustrated. lacking experience is not stupidity.

I think it’s one of those natural laws. They spend all that time crafting awesome hair cuts for people that when it comes to their own they either procrastinate so much they look like an extra from The Mighty Boosh, or they have a self applied buzz cut and look like a skin head.

The same applies to web designers portfolios – having procrastinated for so long that I have the web version of Noel Fielding’s haircut, yesterday I gave myself a digital buzz cut, threw out the old design, and put up some text, slightly prettified with some nice fonts from TypeKit. I had half an hour to kill whilst waiting around at WP-Brighton (great conference BTW), so I deleted the site, kept the blog, got @CharleeSays to write me some nifty new copy and I’m away.

Good points

• No more dead links
• Latest portfolio pieces are on there

Bad Points

• No more graphics
• None of the extra features I have been musing about for years
• Portfolio looks smaller, as I have taken older sites off

All in all – I’m pleased, at the very least it will motivate me to take some time out of my paid client work to work on my own site. Difficult as I don’t get paid to do my own.

I’ll be moving the entire site to be WordPress based in the next few weeks, integrating this blog ( the /blog/ part ) in tot he root of the site and using WP as a CMS.

Hope you like it.

Which is nice, quite surprised I have managed to do so much on it already.

This release covered the reworking of the blog.liquid and the article.liquid, which is the blog front page and blog story pages respectively. I spent a long time trying to make sure that the <time> elements had the correct date time attributes in them, pretty sure they’re right but I’d appreciate any feedback.

I also spent quite a lot of time struggling with the nesting of article, heading and section on article.liquid. I settled for something that looks like this:


<article>
<header>
<h1></h1>
<p>Posted by <span rel="author">Miles Cheverton</span> on <time datetime="2011-09-01T13:52:32EDT" pubdate>Thursday, September 01</time></p>
</header>
<section id ="article_content">
<h1 hidden>Article content</h1>
<p>article content</p>
</section>
<section id="comments">
<h1>Comments</h1>
<dl>
<dt><span rel="author">Author Name</span> said on <time datetime="2011-09-01T13:52:32EDT" pubdate></time></dt>
<dd><p>comment comment comment</p></dd>
</dl>
</section>
<section id="comment_form">
<h1>Add your comments</h1>
<form method='post' action='/blogs/news/3944982-first-post/comments' id='article-3944982-comment-form' class='comment-form'>
<label for="comment_author">Name</label>
<input type="text" id="comment_author" name="comment[author]" size="40" value="" class="" />
<label for="comment_email">Email</label>
<input type="text" id="comment_email" name="comment[email]" size="40" value="" class="" />
<label for="comment_body">Comment</label>
<textarea
id="comment_body"
name="comment[body]"
cols="40"
rows="5"
class=""></textarea>
<input type="submit" value="Post comment" id="comment_submit" />
</form>
</section>
</article>


I attended my fourth dConstruct yesterday, looking forward to the usual encouraging, stimulating and inspirational ideas. Instead, what I left with was a new set of bathroom scales (the Withings set of WiFi scales mentioned in Kelly Goto‘s talk), keen motivation to steal the typographical style of two presentations and the vague feeling that some over paid speakers had stood on stage, barking buzz words and sound bites at me for a day. (I had paid the reasonable sum of £125 to be there, by the way, plus the less reasonable sum of a day’s lost pay.)

It was good to see from the #dConstruct Twitter stream that I certainly wasn’t on my own in thinking this (the stream isn’t particularly clear, since any positive comment about dConstruct has been immediately retweeted by @dconstruct themselves). The stream was pretty revealing; the most popular Tweet on there is:

Don Norman: “Don’t design for the user experience: design for the memory. Memories last for years.”

Well that’s a stunning insight. I’m not sure what it means but it certainly has all the key ingredients for a popular Tweet. This comes from the same man who stood on stage and announced to us, as if he was revealing a secret hitherto known only to the monks half way up a mountain who trained Batman, that “Google’s product is [wait for it...] you. And their customers are the advertisers”.

I can tell you, it was a good job I was sitting down.

There seems to be a smell of The Emperor’s New Clothes about this year’s dConstruct. You might notice that it’s got no substance, but woe betide you if you say so; it’s the underdog, the upstart, it’s cheap, it’s in achingly-cool-Brighton, it’s run by Clearleft…you don’t say bad things about dConstruct.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed previous dConstructs enormously. Sadly, this one was content free and a waste of my time.