Critique: YourPlayTherapy.com

YourPlayTherapy.com

There's a wonderful site called Coding Horror. It sounds worse than it is, really. It celebrates badly written code, or obliquely designed interfaces, and the thinking behind them. While it sounds extremely harsh (and it can be), it does frequently remind its readers that we are all walking coding horrors. We've all made stupid mistakes, reinvented the wheel, and occasionally done something so dumb, we print it out, tape it up next to our monitors, and write Never Do This Again in big red letters on it.

Designers have their own horrors, too. This time, I'm sharing one of mine. It's a fairly stereotypical story of a designer given complete control over something for the first time in his (or her) career.

Background Information

YourPlayTherapy.com was part of a wider strategy promoting tourism to the Jersey Shore. It has a reputation (not entirely undeserved) as a little dirty, a little crowded, and very gaudy. Sometimes that's the charm, but for many people in NYC, Philadelphia, and DC (the target area/audience boundaries) it's not always the case. There was a push in include not just the usual towns of Cape May, Atlantic City, and Wildwood.

Promotions and ads all revolved around the idea of a short vacation to the shore as Play Therapy - a time away from home that's only a couple hour drive away, helping you relax and maybe keep from flipping out. There was a sand dollar-coupon drop, newspaper and magazine ads, tv ads, banner ads, Mini Coopers dressed up as bumper cars and, of course, the website.

Our clients were a board of businesspeople and local government officials (and a couple state government people) - if you are cringing now, it's understandable. While our direct client was pretty good, you can imagine how some conversations went.

Moving on.

I was let go from my previous full time job right after Thanksgiving. Since then, I've been freelancing at MRM Worldwide. Well, that will change after this Friday.

Say hello to Deep Focus.

Also, I will be moving danielboyle.net over to my Dreamhost account. Is Dreamhost perfect? Hell no. But, for $6 a month, it does what I need. It'll be nice to have all of my hosting in one place.

Two upcoming lost posts planned: Organization & design. A site critique (of something I made 2 years or so ago, but there's a very good reason behind it).

Framing Finished.

Want.

Just to annoy John Gruber... you can't change the battery?

To be honest, that does annoy me. I understand why but it doesn't mean I have to like it. This is a notebook built for lightweight travel - you've got a home machine, and you'll have access to a machine where you're going, but you need something on the train/bus/airplane/car. You've got only minimal ports. It's not a speed demon - but you'll be able to get your work done... as long as the battery lasts, at least.

Laptop batteries don't last forever. After 2 years, your battery is probably on its way out. On my Powerbook, new, my battery lasted for about 3 hours. After 2 years, 1 hour. After 3 years, I got about 30 minutes of battery life, typing in MS Word. I currently get about 20 minutes of battery life.

When I buy a laptop, it's not like a cellphone or MP3 player - something I half expect to break, or replace, in a year or two. It's an investment in mobility. And for mobility, I need good battery life (or at least the ability to swap batteries) when an outlet isn't available. And let's face it - Apple sucks at providing peripherals for their own laptops - they never provided a car/airplane power adapter for Powerbooks, and the car/airplane adapter for current Macbooks/Macbook Pros is supposedly a rather unreliable piece of hardware. So, batteries are where it's at, and where the Mackbook Air falls short.

The Sleeping Bag Under the Desk

David Perry is a comedian.

How on earth are you managing to split your time between so many projects?

I work till about one or two every night. I've been 25 years in the business, and that's the hours I put in. I literally couldn't get it all done otherwise.

You see this sentiment quite a bit in the ad/design industry. After all, when you're competing for work and awards against the likes of Big Spaceship, R/GA, or Crispin Porter Bogusky, or any other number of large, famous shops, wouldn't you go all out?

Walls

One of the upsides of being a designer who also codes is the ability to envision a framework as you build something. In the case of a building a wall, it's the ability to see how it should look, and how it's going to come together.

More pics after the jump.

Good, Cheap, Fast.

When it comes to design, development, and pretty much anything else, you can quantify your work in a project by picking 2 of the 3 adjectives in the title.

But, if you're eating on a budget, you can find plenty of ways to stretch that. Idea #1: Pasta alla Puttanesca, a.k.a. Whore's Pasta. Sounds nicer in Italian.

Cooking for Nerds.

The title is a bit misleading. Really, it's cooking for people who haven't cooked before, and are just starting out on their own, or are getting sick of microwaving meals and getting takeout.

Cooking isn't hard - you simply need to be able to follow instructions and plan ahead of time.

Before you find a recipe though, take stock of your kitchen.

The Joy of Building.

One of the things I love most about design is the actual act of building a site. Well, I'm finally building something physical - walls! The attic remodelling is underway. We actually removed the old vinyl tile a while back, to discover that is was glued to tarpaper.

Now, tarpaper is a totally legitimate moisture barrier. After all, that's why they put it under roofing shingles. But not on a floor! It wasn't too bad - most of the spots where it stuck are no thicker than a piece of construction paper. But some places, tar had melted and accumulated.

That's the pile of wood in the finished half (which will be remodeled later, plus some leftover drywall from the initial round of remodeling we did upon moving in.

More pictures in the full post...

The New Year

So, while everyone has sworn that, this time, they're sticking by their New Year's resolutions and improving their lives, I admit I suck and there's no hope that I'll actually finish mine. Will I make it to the gym regularly? Probably not. But, there's plenty of other things to do.