Okay so what is more polite and encouraging of engagement to you?

1: “Hi how can I help you? Now if you let us know how we can get back in touch with you and we will see what we can do.”

or the more adopted standard of

2: “Who are you? How can we contact you? What did you want to say?”

Now if your anything like as human as I aspire to be the former is going to engage you more then the latter, the first understands that you have navigated to the page in order to engage and offers you that chance to engage first before asking you to qualify your message with the mundane contact details. The second asks you for the mundane before engaging with the reason for your navigating there. There may well be some benefits in placing a distraction between the driver of the requirement to converse and the facilitation of the conversation, but I wager they are more of an exception then a rule.

Just to clarify I propose that the layout of a generic contact / feedback form should be:

ASK THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO SAY

then

ASK THEM FOR THERE DETAILS

Quite simple isn’t it and a damned site friendlier and appears more interested in what the user has to say then garnering contact details for your databases.

Go on give it a try, and let us know how it went or simply just add your thoughts in the comments.

1. You shall not make for yourself an idol

   There are many rock start designers, many are very good, many are just good self publicists, acknowledge and read there blogs them but but don’t worship them, or emulate them or use there ramblings as design gospel.

2. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God

   Like so many of these texts this is open to many interpretations, so far I can surmise that it means, Use semantic markup when building a web site, call a heading a heading a list a list so on and so forth. Another interpretation could be, and this is one I wish some people I have worked with would heed – don’t call your self a Designer if your not one.

3. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy

   This is one I am most guilty of, you’ve got to stop working at some point, just because the client gives you the assets on Friday evening and ‘Absolutely must have the work done by Monday morning’ its okay to push back and explain that its not achievable, and that you need to take some time to rest and do other stuff, if you don’t then you whole week could be whacked out of joint and the quality of the work you deliver will suffer.

4. Honor your father and mother

   We all have influences in our work, honor and acknowledge them, people who’s work we saw as a child, mine are Vaughan Oliver, Simon Larbalestier, Dave Mackaen, Hans Belmer, Egon Schiele & Ralph Steadman, who are yours?

5. You shall not murder

   Don’t fluff it up, if your going to do something to kill the design like ‘Making the logo bigger’ then don’t do it, even if the client tells you to and you know it will kill the design, just explain that you love your client and you don’t want them to be accessory to murder, they might be understanding, if they are intent on this cold blooded act, hand them the knife and report them to the authorities.

6. You shall not commit adultery

   On occasion I’ve been given another designers work by a client and asked to improve it or change things or something else unspeakable, sometimes I’ve done it, sometimes I’ve not it all depends on how pretty the design is, but I’ve always regretted it and felt guilty that I’ve not spent the time and love on my own design’s and ended up hiding the bastard children of my affairs by not putting them in my portfolio.

7. You shall not steal

   Pretty self evident, in design its often regarded as a large crime to rip off another designers work, but behind closed doors we all whisper average designers borrow, good designers steal, but it could also be stated that Average designers steal and get caught, good designers are so good at stealing that they don’t, or they are open about her influences (see commandment 4).

8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor

   If a design sucks its YOUR fault, don’t blame the client for making you do something that broke it, if your in that position, push back explain why it wont work, if your unable to convince the client try two things, the first is try and make there suggestion work, the second is book your self on a assertiveness training or hypnosis course (I’m looking to book one myself as I’m far to accommodating). If neither of these work then just shut up, finish the job and don’t put it in your portfolio, just don’t slag the client off, they had there reasons no matter how bad you thought they where.

9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

   I’ve once or twice taken on what where in my perception lesser jobs in order to get a slice of a clients bigger pie, don’t do this, because I found that I was always thinking about the clients metaphorical wife rather then the job in hand ‘so to speak’ and you never end up servicing the current project with any great satisfaction and as a result you’ll probably do a bellow par effort and never get invited to that party where your invited to covet the neighbor’s wife with permission.

10. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor

    This was a hard on to differentiate from the previous commandment as once I had that picture in my head it was hard to shift, but I think it could be interpreted into this… Don’t be tempted to shoe horn a clients design asset in to a Design if it doesn’t fit, no matter how cool you think it is, if it isn’t going to gel well then leave it out, if you don’t there is a good chance that you’ll make everything involved all grubby.

So are you a sinner, go on confess?

So they guy got tired of working for a company where design decisions ” lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” … No shit Google has always been an ugly son of a bitch, always will be, unfortunately it isn’t not about design with google, it is about data, admittedly that data has to be presented back to its users in as easy a comprehensible manner as possible, but not necessarily the most attractive way possible. Google is a company that is lead by its technical innovation, not its design flair, just look at that logo for christ sake. However in terms of design effectiveness for purpose the google homepage was revolutionary, but I certainly would never accuse it as being an aesthetic masterpiece.

He also states “Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. ” I can’t help but take that with a pinch of salt, not that I believe or don’t believe it to be the case, I just think that if I had witnessed that particular performance it would have raised such an chuckle from me, and I wouldn’t help but think that the techies and what nots where taking the piss out of the sensitive designer and paused for some self reflection. I know us creatives can be arses about details at times, just as techies can be equally entertaining and frustrating at times, but its these personality types that just come with territory and are there to be enjoyed.

“When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Okay, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.” Lets be honest with our selves here Google is no more likely to make daring design decisions then a tree will dance a waltz, its just not in its nature.

Now I’ve never met Douglas Bowman, not knowingly any way and I’m sure he’s a swell guy, I’ve also not worked at Google, nearly but not quite and I’m sure they are swell folk, and I have respect for both parties, however the thing that bothers me is the gravity that is being imbued on the situation by the twittering design folks.

I’ve parted company with a fair few employers, some on perfectly positive grounds and sometimes not, but I’ve never been tempted to document publicly my reasons for leaving a I figured that when two parties part its generally because of an incompatibility and its best just to accept that, anything else just comes across as sour grapes, and that’s what the story between Douglas Bowman and Google really is and all the attention in my opinion doesn’t really lend a positive light on Douglas or the perception of design professionals.

I suppose in summary I think that it all comes across a bit silly for the guy to publicly grumble so much about a mismact between what he wanted to do and what was the big G nature, it is possiby quite arrogant to assume that he could have changed anything in google’s nature, and it would probably have been best just to move on without comment or embarasing himself in this way by playing to the ‘Creative’ stereotype. I also think that all the rallying to his side by many of my peers is a little disapointing as I would have hoped that they would have been able to see past many of the more simplistic issues raised, but well sensationalism’s just human nature like data fetisism is just googlenature.