I’ve been sitting here this rainy Saturday morning, sipping my coffee (shoutout Messenger Coffee Co.), and thinking random thoughts about my career to date. Not just the wild, winding path it has taken, but about little moments along the way that built up into big moments for work that would come. And I began to notice a pattern.

So much of what I do now—my approach to certain challenges, my method for completing given tasks, the “way” I do things, generally—is shaped by having done those things a different way in the past, regretting it, and making changes accordingly.

A quick aside here. You may be thinking to yourself, Yeah, that’s called “learning from your mistakes,” dude. But I think there’s a subtle difference in what I’m getting at, which is that we don’t have to wait for mistakes to drive change and (hopefully) improvement.

Sometimes we don’t screw something up. Sometimes we don’t receive negative client feedback. Sometimes things work out, despite our suboptimal process. But we can’t allow results to cover up gaps in how we got there.

…And sometimes we do screw something up. That’s true, too.

So much of what I do now is shaped by having done those things a different way in the past, regretting it, and making changes accordingly.

OK, so my aside wasn’t so quick after all. I’ll get back on track by providing some stream-of-conscience examples of moments in my own professional past that drove the review-regret-adjust cycle:

Skipping wireframes in the web design process

Once upon a time, in my role as a digital designer, we decided to run through a web design project for a client without doing wireframes—you know, to speed things up. We did a sitemap, got client approval on the pages and general outline of the content, and barreled ahead to high-fidelity mockups.

How did that go? Did it save time? Of course not. Our questions about general layout and page composition were met with concerns about font face and the stock photo we chose for the fourth image down on a page three levels deep in the navigation. And on. And on. And on.

So when the project was done, I looked back on it, evaluated our experience, and formally introduced low-fi, clickable wireframes (via Sketch and InVision) into our official web design process.

Going full lorem ipsum in our wireframes

Speaking of wireframes, I initially went hardcore minimalist for our approach. All grayscale, a standardized font across clients, no imagery or iconography of any kind…and no content. All copy was comprised of our old, mysterious friend, lorem ipsum.

Well, after a few rounds of client reviews, I realized the relentless nothingness was a lot for clients from non-design walks of life to take in and navigate. So, while I stood fast on the other aspects of our wireframe design, I tweaked our content approach to something I lovingly call “ pseudo-lorem.” I had us use real copy for headers throughout the wireframes, to act as signposts of sorts and help the client understand at a very high level the context of each section across the site. Body copy was still lorem ipsum, so that we didn’t get sucked into involving our copywriters and putting the content cart way, way ahead of the cart.

The slight change had a massive impact. Our wireframe revisions were sliced in half, and the client was far more bought-in to our direction as we moved on to mockups.

Introducing brand marks to clients in full-color digital form

In a similar vein, I structured our brand development process as creative director based largely on a couple early experiences I faced with clients prior to that process being in place. In those times, we spent all kinds of time in the early part of the process sketching, iterating, whittling down, digitizing, messing with type and layout of the lockups, and then replicating with different color combinations…before the client saw anything.

As you could probably guess, the result was generally a mess. We got feedback about spacing, font, color—everything…except the mark itself. That came when we thought we were almost finished.

Naturally.

So from that point on, we had a deliverable-based process in which we first showed actual raw sketches to get sign-off on our direction, followed by black-and-white digital versions of the finalists, color options, and lockups. All deliverables required client approval before we’d proceed to the next milestone.

The power of the post-mortem

I could go on, but this little write-up turned into a long ramble. So what’s my point here? I told you, I’m just sitting here, drinking coffee, and thinking, so what makes you think I had a point? 🤔

…Alright, I do have a point. My point is this:

Don’t skip the post-mortem. 👈

We’re in marketing, advertising, creative services, what have you. We move quickly. Our clients want things quickly. But more than that, they want things done well. And we’re doing a disservice to them, and to ourselves and the quality of our work, if we don’t take the time at the end of a project to look back on how things went—particularly at the pain points of the process. Focus on those points, and use your undoubtedly powerful and creative mind to diagnose the source of the pain so that you don’t experience it again and again.

Don’t skip the post-mortem.

If the idea of a post-mortem makes you imagine a corporate hellscape, designer, just think of it as a how-it-started-how-it’s-going Instagram post.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

Don’t ever skip the post-mortem was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I sat down a few weeks ago to design a couple pictures for my kid’s play room. It occurred to me as I picked up my pen that I hadn’t sketched anything by hand in quite some time. The pen felt almost foreign, as if my fingers were now conditioned to drape across a mouse, and didn’t know how to wrap around a pen or pencil anymore.

My task was simple: I wanted a couple clean, colorful, playful images that fit in the room for which they were destined.

But for such a simple task, the effect it had on me was borderline profound. I grew up sketching constantly. I imagined monsters or mythical creatures and gave them statistics like a video game to see which ones would (theoretically) emerge victorious in battle. I came up with stories and sketched anime-esque characters (poorly) to accompany them. The sports stars I idolized at the time—Ken Griffey, Jr., anyone? How about Mitch Richmond?—found their way onto my pages frequently.

Then, somewhere along the way, the sketchbooks gave way to computers; the sketches to files; the pens, pencils, and markers to a mouse and keyboard. “Photoshop” became a verb, and when I needed design elements to accompany the words of a story, I turned to even more words…in the form of CSS.

And that’s all okay, of course. I’m certainly not advocating we rid ourselves of these tools. I love them.

My little play room project has just reminded me that I loved sketching once too. And that these two facets of design, if you will, probably go hand in hand more than I’ve allowed them to recently.

I’m not sure I have a point with all of this, other than to point out that, if you’re like me, maybe you should consider breaking out that old sketchbook—or, in my case nowadays, a Rocketbook Wave—and doodle something, silly or otherwise. It might just get your creative juices flowing again, even if you didn’t realize they’d been a bit stopped up.

And when you stare at that first blank page, don’t think about the oft-referenced “tyranny.” Think about the opportunity.

In the meantime, enjoy some whimsical, pointless-by-design play room art.

Because what kid wouldn’t want a robot dog, or to sit down and read a story to some engrossed zoo animals, am I right?

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

The opportunity of the blank page was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building a portfolio site can be an interesting proposition, to say the least. I can’t speak for everyone, but most of us don’t love talking about ourselves. (I’m doing it right now, and, well, I’m just a tad uncomfortable about it.) We like broadcasting our creative work to the world for scrutiny and judgment even less.

So when it comes to portfolio sites, many designers go the out-of-the-box route. Sites like behance.net offer plug ’n’ play solutions for designers looking to showcase their work quickly and effortlessly.

But if you’re a digital designer or front-end developer, ask yourself: is “quick and without effort” how you really want people describing your work?

Your portfolio IS your work, not just a container for it.

When I set out to build—or rebuild, technically—my own site, https://ryanhannebaum.com, I first asked myself, What do I want this site to say about me as a creative individual? A few answers came to mind pretty immediately, in terms of my preferred style: minimalist design, a mostly grayscale palette, and intentional micro-animations. (Is that a term? I’m making that a term.)

But as I continued to plan, a broader realization started to take shape in my mind: I was building my own site from scratch, not just because I’m a control freak when it comes to UI (though that’s true), but because utilizing a prebuilt platform would, in and of itself, defy what I hoped to convey about myself and my work.

You see, I’m what some might call a “generalist,” in the sense that my creative talents and interests make up for, in sheer breadth of capabilities, what they lack in loftiness of peaks within specific—but sparse—categories. Now, this is by my design (no pun intended), yet that fact has made it extremely important that I tell my story in such a way that highlights that personal attribute as a feature, rather than a bug, of my employability.

And that’s how everything came into sharp focus for me as it pertains to my portfolio.

Before anyone browsed the projects I chose to promote, they would be browsing my portfolio site itself, building judgment and assumptions in their minds prior to any conscious attempts to judge my showcased work. So I went all in, from scratch. I sketched wireframes; I organized my available content; I built up my code environment—using Laravel, if you were curious; and I designed the UI on top of the layout I’d wireframed.

But the through-line of all that work was that I was telling my story, using the very tools I wanted to show off in my various works. I used the copy to speak in my conversational, satirical style. I put my animation skills to work making my graphical elements move in a very intentional way, to act as interactive guideposts for users as they browse. I laid the content out in the strict order I wanted said users to navigate the site, leaning on my UX experience. Even some of the invisible aspects of the project were done in a way I could enthusiastically advocate for—such as my choice to control all my content in a CMS (content management system; in this particular case, I went with Contentful), to embody my belief in taking the long view when it comes to design and development, future-proofing as much as possible to maximize client impact. Even when my client…is me.

And I say this to you not just because I just got done with my own site; I say this to you as someone who has hired numerous designers. And I (clearly) have a somewhat different perspective than, say, Jamal Nichols, who made a very reasonable counterargument about the worth and impact—or lack thereof—of portfolio construction. While I don’t dismiss designers out-of-hand who have stagnant or otherwise lackluster portfolio sites or documents, if the projects they promoted met a certain threshold, it certainly raises my levels of skepticism about their levels of give-a-shit when it comes to design intentionality. As Mr. Nichols rightly points out, there are valid reasons for unimpressive portfolios—most notably time constraints on already-overworked designers. But I can throw a dart and hit a designer who can make things look good. I care far more, as a creative director, about finding designers who know how to make things look right for a given purpose. And in that sense, a portfolio’s design tells me just as much as the work within it.

Your portfolio isn’t an image gallery; it’s a portfolio.

With all of this said, I obviously am able to build a website because I have the technical background and chops to do so, which is not common for many of you designers out there. I get that. But my perspective isn’t restricted to custom sites; you can apply the core of my realizations from my own experiences even if you choose a boilerplate (no offense intended) platform to house your work.

In fact, there are good reasons to lean on those platforms, such as leveraging built-in discoverability advantages, as Melinda Crow points out.

My core realization, stripped of any commentary about form or technology, is to treat your portfolio, wherever it lives, with the intentionality and care you undoubtedly want people to see in all of your work. Use the tools at your disposal to customize what you can, the way you want, and take the time to do it the right way: your unique way.

And don’t just plaster screenshots of your stuff on a wall and call it good. Provide context, and use assets intentionally in order to craft a narrative about your progression as a designer, your methods for executing client projects, or whatever else you want users to take away.

Because no matter where or how you put together your portfolio, the very first entry in it is going to be your portfolio itself. And it is always going to be, for better or worse, one thing for certain…

Yours.

Designers, remember: your portfolio is a part of your portfolio was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Don’t get me wrong, thosequestions and their resultant actions are extremely important, and I’m certainly not advocating that you don’t go through those exercises.

But the focus on what a website can do for a company’s customers can’t come at the expense of how it makes customers feel about the company.

Websites evoke emotion whether you want them to or not.

The temptation is to think of websites as purely transactional. Your client needs something from its customers—money, leads, increased awareness about a topic, and the customers need something from the client—products, opportunities, knowledge. The website is the middle-person (figuratively speaking) satisfying both sides of that equation.

Simple, right?

It’s that seeming simplicity that drives some digital agencies to focus almost maniacally on the deliverables themselves. Check all the prebuilt boxes, ship the site out the door, boom! Success.

…Then the site doesn’t perform.

Why? Because those agencies lost sight of what a website truly is.

Just focus on that feeling along with getting all those boxes checked.

Websites are movie trailers. They’re the first glimpses for many at the products, companies, brands, fill-in-the-blank things they represent. The movie? That’s your client’s company itself. That movie documents a rich history: an early spark of an idea, failures, learnings from those failures, resultant successes, a ready and receptive audience, and a deep cast of actors playing out their roles, each with stories of his or her own.

A website cannot capture that entire plot, with all its twists and turns. In fact, it should not. Try, and you’ll build a behemoth of a thing with every box checked and no results to brag about whatsoever. The site’s visitors aren’t going to feel satisfied because this site has everything they could ever want; they’re going to feel frustrated they can’t find anything, confused by the site’s messaging, annoyed at its busy navigation, and ultimately relieved—when they click away from the site.

Just because your website is devoid of emotion doesn’t mean its visitors are going to be. Your job isn’t to pretend otherwise and hammer out those checkboxes. Your job is to build a site that drives users to the exact emotions that will register the right calls to action in the end.

Movie trailers aren’t Cliff’s Notes for the movie. They’re advertisements.

Think back to the last awesome trailer you saw. Did you think it was awesome because it covered every single plot point the movie contained? Did it showcase the entire arcs of every character? Did it spell out in exhausting detail exactly what you as a moviegoer were going to see when you went to the theater (y’know, pre-COVID, when theaters were a thing)? Of course not. At least, I hope not, or we need to have a chat about your taste in movie trailers.

You undoubtedly found that trailer awesome because it stirred up a feeling in you that led to one invariable conclusion: I have got to go see that movie when it comes out! It teased insane action sequences with hardly any space given to plot exposition or dialogue of any kind. Or maybe it showcased two hapless souls on a crash course toward endless love without bothering to explain who those people are and why you should give a damn about their love lives. It brought to vivid life some beloved source material you read as a kid and could only picture in your mind.

Whatever it was, whatever the genre, it targeted specific reactions from its audience, and it was that reaction, not the trailer itself, that drove people to see the movie weeks or months later. They remembered how they felt about the trailer, and they projected that feeling onto the movie excitedly (and sometimes…quite…mistakenly).

Build a website that delivers the feels along with the goods.

A company’s website needs to feel like it belongs to the company it…well, belongs to. It can be jarring and off-putting to a user if not. And remember: emotion doesn’t have to imply soaring excitement or heartwarming nostalgia. Depending on the client in question, the right emotions might be ones of comfort and confidence in a trustworthy brand—financial companies, law firms, educational campaigns, and so on. It might be a certain “cool factor” a brand exudes and the user subsequently feels.

Just focus on that feeling along with getting all those boxes checked. After all, your websites have to make certain tantalizing promises about the brands behind them in order to deliver on those promises. As a counterpoint to the above movies that—in my humble opinion (but I’m right)—were terrible, yet propped up by really good trailers, Hollywood is littered with really good movies torpedoed at the box office because their trailers completely sucked.

And if people describe your sites with one phrase, you could do a whole lot worse than “they deliver on their promises.”

Design websites like you’re making a movie trailer was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.