Nov 05
An Event Apart 2008, Day 2, 9:45am – 10:45am
Read the previous talk in this series, Live Code Workshop with Eric Meyer, or view An Event Apart’s Table of Contents
Design Lessons in Chess
- Chess is cool.
- Rob Weychert really likes chess.
- Strategy: overarching, long-term plan. Tactics: Short-term, small things to support the strategy and make it happen.
- Visual design is a tactic.
- Keep your endgame in mind.
- Opponent as user: In Chess, you do your move and your opponent’s move, you are moving them to defeat. Limit your user’s options so that they can only do what you want them to do. Make the path to completion obvious
- Opponent as client: You make a move, say “I have this problem for you to solve” and client responds, on and on until the game ends.
- Opponent as colleague: You don’t want to play against someone who can’t challenge you, is boring.
- Lessons in Chess
- Content is king
- The king needs to be the center of everything you do
- You may weave this complex strategy with getting the queen, that you don’t even notice that the king is vulnerable and you lose sight of the end goal.
- Get caught up in various solution, you’ve overshot and you’re missing out that content is king.
- A slide from Jeremy Keith: Style/CSS & Behavior(Javascript) = Structure(HTML) = Content ( King!) “Thank you Jeremy!”
- Know your history
- 2 Things to know about Bobby Fischer: 1) Brilliant chess player 2) Real meaniehead. A difficult person.
- He arrives at the world championship and he makes all these demands: first 7 rows of chairs must be gone, TV cameras must go, etc, etc. Even before the game started, he’s working on his opponent by just being himself.
- It wasn’t just about the Chess game, it was all a bunch of KGB breathing down their necks and drama in the room and Fischer being a jerk and blah blah blah.
- So Fischer’s opponent cracked and lost. Awww :/
- Know what your client likes, look into the history of that information, and go from there.
- Album cover for his friend making an album in honor of Tesla. Yeah, the electricity guy.
- Friend loved Tesla’s overcoming the typical views of his work at the time, especially in the face of the “advertising” being done by Edison.
- Decided to pretend to make it an advertisement that Tesla might make offering his services today.
- So Weychert looked into the ads of the time period of Tesla, including making sure the typefaces he used were authentic, and built it and designed it from there
- Think ahead
- http://www.epitonic.com/ - Never more than three things. Silly. Not thinking ahead.
- Jason Santa Maria’s site – beautiful, art, builds, forward-thinking
- Don’t get too attached
- Don’t get too attached to the queen! People will protect the queen even more than the king. No.
- Act with purpose
- A sister lesson to “Content is king”
- The king is your world. Every move has to be focused on capturing opponent’s king or defending your own.
- Obey circumstance – you have to act in line with the things in front of you and adapt if something throws you a curveball.
- Principles are your friends, except when they’re not.
- “The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- We may tend to be too pedantic or not pedantic enough regarding our principles.
- “I ran your site through the validator and there were 6 errors and I think you could be doing a more to justify your existence.” – Rob Weychert, imitating lame pedantic people on the web.
- The Journey is as important as the goal
- “What I do is not play, but struggle.” -Alexander Alekhine
- We go through and we see what doesn’t work and struggle through, and it may never see the light of day. But we struggle through, learn, and progress.
- What we know it “the stuff we learned in not getting there.”
- On a comp for a company named Philebrity, he learned “The most important freelance lesson of all: Get half the money up front.”
- Businessdk – he learned that he really doesn’t want to do a newspaper site. Important lesson! Mountains of failure!
- If you take away one lesson: love your failures.
- “I had a client where the site was predominantly in yellow, and they told me that yellow is the favorite color of crazy people” – An apartnik’s comment
- “Nothing is ever wasted.” That time and energy may not pay off immediately but perhaps down the line.
- “Yellow is the color of intelligence because it takes the most energy to see it.” – another apartnik
View the next talk in this series: Implementing Design: Bulletproof A–Z by Dan Cederholm, or skip to An Event Apart’s Table of Contents
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