Common Information Architecture Documents

What’s in a web page design, anyway?  If you abstract away the colors, textures, imagery — all of the elements we call the “look and feel” — what’s left?

• Words
• Links
• Buttons
• Input fields
• Columns
• Boxes
• Scroll bars

Mmm, boring list.  That’s good, though: this should not be the exciting part.  The exciting parts should be the purpose and content of the web site, and the look and feel that give it life — the struggle and the glory of web design. The elements in the list above should be the basic tools, not the wheels you’re going to reinvent in order to make your site the greatest thing ever to happen to the web.

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Dangerous Phrases: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Now, we at Helen Marie think the web is very cool. That’s why we’re in this business.  We get excited on a daily basis about all manner of new design and interface ideas and technology.  (Personally, I discover a new way to love jQuery almost every day, and that’s exciting.)  It’s this constant fascination that energizes each one of our projects, and that we hope to find reflected in our clients.

Part of our job is to focus this enthusiasm into disciplined decisions about how best to serve a particular client and a particular project.  We have a lot of healthy arguments that start with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”  The question is often followed by, “I agree, but we shouldn’t do that in this case because….”  Or, just as often: “That’s great — but let’s consider that for phase 2.”

We go through this in order to avoid three big pitfalls: building more than the client needs or can immediately use, rejecting new approaches or techniques because we’re unfamiliar, and committing to unreliable approaches or techniques because the coolness factor affects our judgment.  We wrestle with these issues so you don’t have to.

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Buddy, You Need an Agent

Let’s say you enter the real estate market as a first-time buyer.  The process at first seems to be a matter of identifying your budget and wish list (must: open kitchen; maybe: wood-fired brick oven), getting pre-qualified for a mortgage, looking at listings, pursuing your favorites, making an offer, etc.  As you start, though, you realize that with all this money at stake, so many variables in the process, and nobody interested in getting you the best deal, you could use an advocate on your side — a seasoned hand who can help guide you past serious mistakes, act as a sounding board to your evolving ideas, and help you optimize negotiations with the selling agent.

This is a broker.  The good ones are worth their weight in gold (especially the smaller good ones).  You can get them to clear an enormous amount of brush for you — weeding out the bad listings, giving you a sales history of any property on the market, speaking the secret language of brokers with the other side.  They save you time and ultimately money.

It occurred to us at Helen Marie, after many years of working with clients of all stripes and sizes, that this is desperately needed in the design and interactive industry: a kind of creative broker.  Clients often need to commit large amounts of funding, human capital, and time to a project with an outside agency. Ironically, while this is the stage where they most need expertise, they’re often unaware of, or resistant to, the option to bring in an outside specialist right from the beginning.  We want to change this.

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