Technology, Digital Art, and Expertise
Author: Becky Bruso
Coming up with a great design, whether for an editorial calendar for social media, and email marketing design, or website design takes skill. It means the creator must understand the tools used to create this digital media as well as have a keen understanding of how to work the visual elements into an eye appealing arrangement to capture your client’s attention. One thing I have learned for sure is that expertise always costs more. Sometimes this is difficult to grasp since most design and planning projects involve services which cannot be touched and felt.Quality always trumps price For Sure! Expertise will deliver quality results!These projects are products too, but not like those which you go to the store to buy and take home with you in a tangible form like a new laptop or ipad. One thing proves true time and time again; no matter what it is I am buying, I always find that you do get what you pay for! Quality always trumps price for Sure! Expertise will deliver quality results. Especially with website design elements. I was reminded of this when I found this really great TED talk which addresses some of the reasons why great design really costs a lot of elbow grease and the money to move the grease to the right places. Sure, the TED talk is from a giant with vast resources, Facebook. But that doesn’t change the need for small businesses to tackle the same problems and meet the same needs. Take a look and see what you think.
Watch a Mini-Case Study of What it Took to Re-Design the Facebook Like Button
[ted id=2039] It took 280 hours to re-design the Facebook like button! Wow! This involves the seen and the unseen elements. What you see visually is the artistic element to designing digital media. At first glance we think what a waste, but realistically think about your experience when you use this button. First let us just brush the surface and ask a few questions on the subject of the visual of the Facebook like button itself. Here are just a sampling of some of these: Does it always behave the same way? Did they get it right in every language? Does the color, scale, and form match the Facebook branding and story line? Does it display in an acceptable fashion on all smart devices and laptops and desktops? Now, consider what needs to happen with the unseen. By this I mean the software coding that needs to happen to make the Facebook Like Button behave the same way no matter what device your are on: your laptop, desktop, iphone, ipad, or other smart phones and tablets! As consumers we take all this computer science for granted. It is good to know that the really smart teams who create our digital media don’t! Did you catch that this one element of Facebook where it took 280 hours to re-design?! I hope this TED Talk gave you some insight into why what seems so simple to accomplish really needs a lot of action and work behind the scenes to make it so! While Facebook has a massive team large enough to devote a lot of time to each individual design element, smaller organizations are held to the same standards and expected to produce quality results in less time with fewer people and at a lower cost. I think this short article and the TED talk by Margaret Gould Stewart, User Experience Expert at Facebook and formerly YouTube, will help you see how much expertise and attention to detail plays into the final price tag for a digital design project.
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