From a perspective of sheer design labor, the most difficult part of bringing a new Web site to life is production. At that point where the major design challenges have been resolved (what the home page and a few other key pages look like, how the site feels) and when those resolutions have been approved by the stakeholders, designers then apply that solution across all the constituent parts of the site: marketing pages, content pages, forms, search interfaces, etc. Typically, this is done with Adobe Photoshop or, recently for me, Macromedia Fireworks, in a fairly painful process of rendering “flat comps”; creating static, visually accurate representations of what the XHTML should render while also suggesting, rather awkwardly, how the interface will respond to user interactions.

Does this sound like a drag? It is, especially for sites with dozens of pages, like the ones we often do at Behavior. It’s not so much that the work itself is drudgery. It’s not; in fact, this work is the crucial evolution between concept and reality, when the design ideas put forward in early comps are expanded and embellished upon to create a fully-fledged system of interrelated parts. In production, the design becomes real. What’s a drag is how much effort it takes to build all of these flat comps; you could spend weeks trying to address all of the design problems that a site presents and iterating on those solutions continuously before even getting to the first line of XHTML. I’ve done that.

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After trying many times to regulate the manner in which Web site production is organized on the many design teams I’ve led, I’m still not at peace with the amount of control that should be imposed on other designers. On the one hand, everyone works in a unique manner, and it’s counter-productive to shoehorn a single, unified and overly detailed process on designers, who are typically free-thinkers when it comes to this working style. This I accept readily, but there are some things, admittedly low-level things, that I find it hard not to at least want to control.

There are more profound — and touchier — examples than this, but the one that has me preoccupied lately is the relatively trivial matter of organizing Photoshop documents. By and large, most designers approach the construction of a Photoshop document in an ad hoc manner, creating new layers as they are needed, not always naming them properly, or defaulting to Photoshop’s automated, serial numbering scheme, which happens to be generally devoid of meaning. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of Photoshop documents are created in this way, and more often than not without negative consequence.

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I’ve always worked at design studios rather than within design departments. That is, at shops (usually small) that deal with lots of different kinds of projects for different clients, rather than on a company’s internal design team, working on projects for in-house clients. Those studio jobs haven’t always been glamorous, especially when I was just getting started, but I’ve always enjoyed the varied exposure to different businesses and challenges that kind of environment affords me. It’s been a kind of an education in itself, and I’ve become familiar with lots of industries that otherwise I never would have known much about at all. It’s no accident that, at the last crossroads of my career, I helped found Behavior, rather than looking for work inside a corporate entity.

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