I found this story quite interesting irritating. After being in the business of creating visual communication for over 15 years, I have never been a proponent of producing spec work.

The problem here is larger than spec work; it’s ethics -- as the post points out with its reference to the AIGA. Spec work, low-balling, plagiarism, bait and switch, work for hire, and flat-out lying are all related in my book and shouldn’t be done. They ruin the playing field and cheapen the services that are so difficult to keep priced appropriately.

The elimination of these practices has to come from the top, just as any example is set and the little guy always pays the price for such business practices.

It’s simple. Get paid for your work. Do your best job. Be respected. Everyone wins.

Unfortunately, It's not a utopia and you gotta do what you gotta do, but be prepared for the consequences of your actions and don't bitch when your working for half of what is appropriate.

There have been locator services available for sites for various fees, but just a couple years the only way to build an inexpensive store locator application was using zip code longitude and latitude data. This data was available from a variety of sources, but it is all the same data from the United States Postal Service and US Census Bureau. This data worked well, but lacked street level detail. Each zip code had a center-point (long. & lat.) based on population and as a result, distances of locations close to each other were inaccurate and the data was only for the US.

Recently released scientific data allows us to simply create very accurate and detailed world-wide, store locators by using new technologies:

Google Maps API  - This cool API is a free service that allows one to easily embed Google Maps into web pages with JavaScript. It’s still in beta and has a few bugs, but generally works very well.

MapQuest Open API - This API also uses JavaScript to easily integrate routing, geocoding and mapping into your website.

Maybe it's time to upgrade that old store locator.

Here's a shop that knows how to build a site.

With Flash 8 came new and improved Flash detection. Adobe has a nice article/tutorial on their best solution yet.

Establishing a schedule during planning and getting agreement from all parties is an important part of any project. Once the schedule is accepted, maintaining it during production goes a long way to prevent issues that can jeopardize a project’s success.

Momentum
A great deal of effort is consumed during the start-up of any activity. Having stops and starts in production is costly and can ruin a budget very quickly. When a project is moving along smoothly and work is getting completed, effort is directed to the resources doing the work while administration is minimal.

Continuity
Continuity is an essential part of any creative process. Once a designer, or programmer is in their “zone” they are very productive and the quality of work is at its peak. After a long break, it may be impossible for a designer to get back into the same mind-set to finish their work as intended. Technical people also loose their perspective and have to spend time and effort to pick up where they left off.

Risk
The longer a project takes to complete the higher the probability of failure. This risk is often overlooked, especially by the client, since it’s the supplier’s responsibility to complete the project successfully. Business needs, creative direction, financials, technology, and resources change over time. The project may be affected by any of these changes and require a change in scope.

Cash Flow
Delays affect cash flow in several ways. Billing may be delayed if it’s contingent on milestones, or deliverables and expenses my be higher because of availability, or market rates. Available funding may no longer be available.

Take Precautions

Although work stoppages may not be preventable, there are some ways to plan and create incentives to keep a project on schedule, or minimize the impact they have:

• Have clauses in your contract that address how delays will be handled.

• Do not have your billing contingent on deliverables or milestones. Get paid on schedule even though work may be stopped.

• Only guarantee rates and/or expenses for a specific time period.

• Designate desirable stopping points at milestones so productive stretches in the schedule won’t be interrupted unnecessarily.

• Check resource availability for worst case scenarios, have back-ups and include this extra expense in the project cost.

• Don’t begin work until the schedule is agreed upon.

• Work in short cycles that naturally create stopping points.

I haven't found many sites about designing. Sure there's hundreds of sites that showcase work and have information on the act of producing the work or the author's experience, but not many that have information on designing from a academic or intellectual perspective.

Design Observer is just that

It’s very difficult to estimate time to complete work even for experienced people. As a project manager, I often have to rely on developers and designers to provide estimates on how long it will take them to complete their assigned tasks. I am surprised at the inaccuracy of the results, but have found some commonalities.

People usually underestimate time required to complete work, and not just by a little, often as much as 50%. After some discussion with team members, it became apparent that unless people had a previous example on which to base their estimating, they had difficulty imagining how the new work will happen. People generally just run through the core activity and estimate how long it should take, not would take.

Rework is also not considered. Sometimes it is because they assume it will make them look bad when they have to justify their estimate if they have included rework. Other times it is because they think they won’t make mistakes this time. Having an inaccurate estimate is far worse than doing something twice. Nothing is accomplished in a straight line.

Start-up time and close time are also not included. Discussing issues, looking for resources, reading documentation, configuring software, installing updates, obtaining permissions, refreshing one’s memory and getting “in the zone” are all part of the task at hand and must be included.

One technique I use that has been very successful is to estimate how long it will take to do the core task with no rework, then double it.

Another situation that adds complexity to estimating time is when the person who will actually end up doing the work is not the one estimating the time to do it. Even two people with comparable skill sets may take quite a different amount of time to complete the same work. Some people are more detailed and double-check everything; some are more organized and have less start-up time, while others are just faster. If the lowest common denominator is used there is risk of the estimate being excessive. How does one find the average or better yet a weighted average? I’ve used:

Weighted Average = (longest time estimate * .75) * 2

I like to err on the high side.

A project I’m working on now requires an accurate time estimate. To achieve the desired level of accuracy I’m going to try a few techniques.

Bottom Up - Considered an accurate method, bottom up sums small activities into larger units of work. Risks here are bad estimating of activities and too small of activities causing bloat.

Top Down - Estimate time for larger units of work, divide the time into the smaller activities that make up the larger units, and make any adjustments.

Analogous - Compare the Bottom Up and the Top Down estimate to completed, similar projects for accuracy. Risks here are differences in teams and forgotten issues that affected the project.

Hopefully by approaching the estimating process using three techniques accuracy will improve and validate the results. We’ll see.

Microsoft has launched a suite of new products geared towards the interface design and development market - ala Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects and the like. I don’t think Adobe is too worried at this point. Microsoft’s reputation on developing good graphics software is far from exemplary and FrontPage and the Visual Studio IDE editor are barely usable.

The three Expression products are Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. Each has its own specialty, but they are made to work together and work with Visual Studio rounding out a full design-build environment.

Hopefully the usability and general attractiveness of Microsoft built software will improve because of the increased exposure and access to this type of software in PC-land. Not that design products are Mac only, but there is a huge rift between developers that are visually sensitive and those that live on function alone.

A new underlying technology that is integrated into these products is XAML. Similar to how SVG works, XAML is going to allow graphics to be applied and transported in new ways not really possible today. Another new technology is WPF a direct competitor to Flash's format.

Maybe stodgy Microsoft can give cool Adobe a little competition, but I won’t hold my breath. However, they are bringing new technologies to market; making a big effort towards web standards, interoperability, compatibility and open source initiatives; and bridging the gap between them and everyone else.

I have a peeve and need to rant.

I don't know how many times I've seen companies with a positioning statement that begins "The Art and Science of..."

Business is not art, or science. Business is business and most companies do "something" to make money and "something" is perceived as a necessary evil.

Another phrase beat to death is "Exceeding customer expectations".

No kidding. Who strives to disappoint?

Advice to corporate marketing gurus: Be specific. What makes your company unique? If you can't think of something, don't say anything.

Before the ActiveX patch came out that changed how IE displays Flash and other objects, Microsoft wrote how the browser would behave differently. When I installed the fix, my browser does not display the prompt.

Instead it outlines the object when moused over and displays a tool tip that states "Click to activate control." This is far less annoying and, as far as I'm concerned, acceptable. I'm glad it's not the other way, but why wouldn't they describe the effect correctly?

ADDED 5/18/2006:
I experienced this pop-up today for the first time on a page with a Shockwave object and a page with QuickTime.

I just took a look at the newly designed Yahoo! homepage. While there are a few glitches and the design is not site wide, one can see what they are trying to achieve.  An opinion is worth want it costs and everybody has one, but I’ll offer a few anyway.

Goodbye 800x600 - The new design has been widened to fit in a 1024 pixel wide screen. Last I heard, web user’s monitor resolutions were about 50/50, 800x600/1024x768. I guess they are trying to appeal to those who have the latter – the cool people. One would think they would stick with the lowest common denominator for a site that is trying to appeal to everyone. At least they are providing an option to view the old design at the 800 pixel width. MSN and Google have the narrower format.

Web 2.0 Look - They’ve adopted some of the trendy web 2.0 design elements like gradients, 3-D icons and modular page architecture, but they didn’t go all the way by using nice font selection – not a serif on the page. This could have been pushed a bit farther.

DHTML – I like the DHTML used in the upper right box containing mail, weather, messenger…, but the tabs in the new areas are pretty weak.

Navigation – I question the order of the primary nav menu. Alphabetical is logical, but is it usable? They should have ordered items by traffic with the highest at the top. The small links at the very top of the page are useless. Most people won’t see them. The Small Business menu looks neglected. Business users need love too. I think more attention should have been put into that menu.

Image Use – The thumbnails are too small.

Advertising – I like the limited ad space, but I’m sure that will change.

Standards and Validation – Here’s the biggest question. If you are going to redesign a site like this, why is it not compliant to today’s web standards and have valid mark-up? Most of the layout is done using CSS and DIVs, but the architecture is not remotely semantic. I validated the old design using the W3C HTML validator. It had 158 errors, while the new design had only 114. I guess you can call this an improvement. (MSN had 24 validation errors) A portal for the masses that needs maximum accessibility should validate and have semantic mark-up. I’m sure they have tested the new design in a wide variety of devices, so it must display properly, or acceptably, but this is certainly not a case study for web standards. It would be interesting to learn the details on how they arrived here.

Overall, it’s a big improvement from the days when they didn’t have any design, just a logo, form and text links. They have a balance and it’s a much better site than MSN.