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Three Questions for Jeff Croft
Published 2 years ago, at the end of April under Design, Software, Three Questions
This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Croft for my ongoing interview series Three Questions. Jeff is the Senior Designer at World Online, he’s an evangelist for Django—a popular web application framework developed at World Online, and he publishes his thoughts and writings on jeffcroft.com—which has quickly become a must-read for web designers.
Jeff is also an adept speaker—he recently ran a workshop on Web typography for Carson System’s Future of Web Design 2007 and was on a very interesting panel at South by Southwest on design workflows. His SXSW panel produced some amazing interviews on design workflows—I highly recommend checking them out.
Keep reading for Jeff on programming vs. design, web standards education, and justifying design decisions.
Three Questions for Jeff Croft
Rob Goodlatte
You’re an accomplished designer with some pretty impressive forays into programming. Do you find transitioning between design and programming a difficult task? Does each require its own mindset and workflow?
Jeff Croft
Yes and no. To me, creative work requires a different mindset and workflow than implementation work. But, “creative” and “implementation” don’t map directly to “designing” and “programming,” in my mind.
In web design, there is a creative aspect wherein you are planning, mocking up, laying out, and crafting the pixels of a site or app, often in Photoshop or similar. Then, there’s an implementation aspect wherein your are writing HTML and CSS, chopping up Photoshop documents into smaller images for use in a web page, and so forth.
The basic logic and concepts of how you’re going to do a specific task is actually quite creative
Likewise, programming has both creative and implementation dimensions. The basic logic and concepts of how you’re going to do a specific task is actually quite creative (which was a bit of a surprise to me, when I started doing it). Then, the actual process of writing that code and conforming to the syntax of whatever language you’ve chosen is basically implementation — just kind of grunt work that is, in many ways, mindless.
For creative work, whether it’s in programming or design, I am ideally in a very relaxed, thoughtful, and kind of abstract mindset. It helps me connect with the goals and problems of a particular project and come up with the most interesting possible solutions. For implementation, I prefer to be in a more hyper-stimulated, over-caffeinated, super-focused state, letting me bang out that grunt work without getting too burnt out.
Rob
As an undergraduate, your work bringing web standards to higher education piques my interest. What are your thoughts on the current state of web standards education in universities?
Jeff
I worked at Universities for several years before getting into the journalism world, so I’d like to think I have a bit of an “inside understanding” on this topic. However, I don’t think any special knowledge is required to see just how pathetic the state of web standards education—and just web design education in general—is at most universities (at least in America—not sure if other countries are better). There are a few basic reasons for this, as I see it:
Our industry simply moves faster than the institutional education system can keep up with.
1.Our industry simply moves faster than the institutional education system can keep up with. I honestly don’t know how a school would go about establishing and maintaining a really good curriculum. It would need to be re-certified every year—and perhaps even more often than this, and this is just out of the realm of possibility for most schools.
2.Universities have all the wrong people teaching web design. I was recently approach by a college here in Kansas about teaching a web design class. When I expressed interest, they informed me that I would only be able to teach if I had at least a master’s degree—in computer science. I have no degree at all, and never studied computer science. Frankly, having a computer science degree doesn’t make you any more qualified to teach web design than having a music degree, and there’s no almost such thing as a person who has a master’s degree in web design. Good master’s programs were only recently created and still don’t exist at most schools. Those that do exist are new enough that it’s not likely many people have graduated. The result of these stringent and absurd professor requirements is that most schools have some defunct COBAL programmer who is burnt out on teaching showing kids how to use Dreamweaver—starting with the “insert table” command—and calling it “web design.” Many of the top names in the web design industry never graduated college (usually because there was no good program available for them to participate in), and those who did usually didn’t study computer science. Which leads me to…
the multi-disciplinary nature of web design really makes it not a very good fit for the typical university situation.
3.Web design—at least good web design—is an incredibly multi-disciplinary thing. In order to design the next great social web app, you probably need at least some understanding of graphic design, front-end web technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Flash), copy writing, human behavior psychology, sociology, accessibility, information architecture, and maybe back-end web technologies (server-side scripting of some sort, relational databases, etc.). The problem for schools is that these skills are spread out all over their campuses, rather than being handled by just one college. A really good program would almost certainly need to be one that uses resources from many different colleges. And I can say, from my experience working at universities, that they really, really suck at working cross-department. Departments largely hate each other, because they’re fighting with each other for funding. It’s a bummer, but the multi-disciplinary nature of web design really makes it not a very good fit for the typical university situation.
Rob
Often I find myself playing with a design until it just looks right. Other times I’ll try to construct designs based on the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers (which rarely works out for me). Do you find it important to have justifications for your design—logical, mathematical, or otherwise? What about designing on emotion or impulse?
Jeff
I’m different than you, as I tend to be a bit more tied to the structural tools we have for design: grids, rules of thumb, ratios, etc. But that’s not because I think you have to be. That’s because it’s what works best for me. I’m probably less artistic by nature than a lot of designers. Because of that, these tools are a great crutch, and also a great starting or jumping off point for me. A more artistic person may find their starting off points are more emotional, and that’s great too.
Mark said, “I just eyeball it.” I loved that.
Ultimately, only the end result matters. Everybody’s process is different, and other than as an interesting topic for designers to discuss, process is largely irrelevant. I recall a point in Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton’s SXSW 2007 presentation on grids when Khoi had just went on for several minutes about some complex math he used to calculate the size of his grid units. He said, “How do you do it, Mark?,” and Mark said, “I just eyeball it.” I loved that.
I don’t think you need to have justifications for you design in order for them to be quality work. If you have a good eye and know what you’re going for, chances are when it “just looks right,” it probably is right.
It is important to be able to articulate why you did what you did — even if what you have to say is utter bullshit.
However, once you get out in the real world, you’ll likely be confronted with creative directors, clients, or other bosses who do want to hear your justifications. So it is important to be able to articulate why you did what you did — even if what you have to say is utter bullshit. Learning to bullshit about your designs really is an important skill. I often times spend an hour or so before showing someone my design just thinking about how I can justify my decisions. If you can convince people you are doing what you do for a reason, you usually won’t get much push back from your boss or armchair designing from your client. If your reason is, “I liked the way it looked,” then you set yourself up for a client to respond with, “Yeah? Well I like the way it looks this other way better.”
Bottom line: you don’t need to be able to justify your decisions to be a good designer, but you might need to in order to keep your job.
Out with it!
Your question about teaching web design in schools reminded me of a scene from the movie Art School Confidential (which was really good until it stopped being about Art School).
John Malcovich:
“Now I don’t have any particular wisdom to impart to you people, except to say this, these four words – don’t have unrealistic expectations. If you want to make money, you might as well drop out right now, go to banking school, or website school – anywhere but art school.”
Heheh. Website school.
At any rate — great interview — even if it’s the longest three question interview in the history of three question interviews.
:)
He sure kicked my ass when it came to length, and I thought I was long-winded. Definitely the nature of the questions though. Great interview, I expect nothing less from Croft. :)
Kicking your ass, Veloso, was my primary motivation for doing this. And if you don’t believe me, ask Rob. :)
Yep, when I was talking to Croftie before the interview he had a rather one track mind—kicking Bryan’s ass.
[...] I asked Mark Boulton, Andy Budd, and Jeff Croft, three designers I deeply respect, about designing on impulse versus intention. They each had something different to say, but they each presented a design process far more rationalized and justified than my own. Andy said something particularly interesting — I think it’s the kernal I’ve been looking for: [...]
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mukesh
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