When I first learned to make websites, design didn’t even cross my mind. I made it up as I went along, writing HTML in a stream of consciousness. Like a kid playing with Legos, these seemingly limited building blocks let me rapidly express the impulses of my imagination.

Eventually, that playfulness is forced to contend with “real world” concerns. We become more sophisticated, involuntarily defining our trademark sensibilities based on whatever details we’re drawn to. We learn to appraise the success of our work in the hands of the user, our subjectivity waning as our experience deepens. We adopt creative processes so that we’ll be more reliable and prolific. If we’re smart, we change them often.

I had dinner the other night with Erik Jung, a designer I work with who I’ve known since college. We talked about all that’s changed in just a few short years, particularly how exhaustive our visual design process used to be. Every detail of every page would be rendered in Photoshop before a single line of HTML was written. The goal was always “pixel perfection.”

Perhaps arrogantly, and often in defiance of our aspirations, we treated our browsers like printed pages. We celebrated our progress as we widened our minimum design widths from 750 pixels to 960. Websites were often judged on their consistency browser-to-browser.

We were way off. The “purity” of our designs was a distraction. The web is most beautiful when it tolerates the diversity of its audience more than the whims of its creator.

This redesign is the first public iteration of my effort to embrace that fluidity. It was designed almost entirely in-browser. It uses CSS media queries to respond to different resolutions. Visual touches that rely on certain browser capabilities have not been suppressed for the sake of consistency. Internet Explorer 6 is no longer supported. Sections have been trimmed, consolidated and simplified, and font sizes have been boosted to promote readability.

I’m sure I’ve gotten some stuff wrong. Mobile First arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I very nearly halted progress to re-factor everything (again). Luckily, I was in the middle of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography at the time, so the “real artists ship” mantra ended up winning out.

The truth is, it will never be perfect… the web moves too quickly for that. Our assumptions will always misfire. All we can do is observe, iterate and learn.

I think playfulness is making a comeback.

This one’s a bit painful for me to watch, for a few reasons.

First, my talk had a lot of time-based elements (audio and video), which meant I really needed my 45 minutes, but I started late, and I was the last talk of the day, so I had very little wiggle room. In the future, I’ll definitely insist on speaking earlier if this is the case. I’m a fast talker anyway, but it sounds like I’m trying to break a vocal cord land speed record to get the event wrapped up on time.

Secondly, every piece of technology that could fail did fail in the course of the talk, including the projection screen, audio playback, microphone and presentation wand. I’d never attempted a talk that relied so heavily on tech, and I doubt I’ll do so again for a long while. There are way too many unknown variables, any of which can completely derail your message if it goes awry.

Lastly, I packed way too much into a single talk. I neglected the fact that I’ve spent the last decade thinking about the convergence of my varying interests, and it’s unfair to expect an audience to catch up in under an hour. Attendees who talked to me afterwards tended to gravitate toward one portion of the talk or another, which tells me I would have been more successful if I had exercised a bit more restraint.

Problems aside, I still believe in the ease and control scale I proposed, and that idea is probably presented better here than in the presentation materials alone.

Watch the recording on blip.tv

This may have been my most eclectic year ever.

It kicked off nicely with the publication of Designing for the Greater Good, my Luceo logo featured therein.

January through April were exclusively devoted to my Waggener Edstrom Studio D design duties. I experienced a renewed appreciation for sketching, sticky notes and paper prototyping.

In May, my team and I were thrilled to collaborate with Bing for the launch of a campaign commemorating Teacher Appreciation Day. Thousands of users contributed stories in exchange for a five dollar credit to donate to any Donors Choose project. Coverage from Jimmy Fallon, USA Today and many other sources amplified the impact of the campaign.

That same month, Peter Wooley and I launched our very sporadic (but very fun) Friends Electric podcast. Brizzly adopted my favicon design and my Twitter/RSS mashup TweetPlus won a WebVisionary Award. Ironically, Portwiture lost in the same category the previous year to Twendz, which was created by Tim Sears, with whom I later co-founded Backabit. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

July saw the introduction of Fragments, a print-on-demand comic book benefiting Save the Children. Forrst and Streakly followed Brizzly’s example and had me redesign their favicons. I began teaching my ten-week Web Standards course at the Art Institute of Portland for the second year in a row, devoting half the curriculum to HTML5 and CSS3. I was honored to have Amber Case, Aaron Parecki, Chris Kalani and Jason Grigsby accept my invitations to guest speak.

My promotion to Lead Experience Designer in August was the welcome actualization of my longtime leadership aspirations. It’s been a blast directing the output and development of such a talented crop of designers.

As Summer came to a close, I submitted Surf by Osmosis to the 10K Apart competition. I lost to some amazing apps like Sinuous and Matchuppps, which are humbling in their polish and creativity.

2010 became the year of logo publications when Logolicious featured my KolorID logo in October.

In contrast to the docile nature of a paperback book, technology turned against me as I attempt to present The Uncanny Valley of Interaction Design at CyborgCamp Portland. The microphone, projector, speakers and presentation wand failed independently and unpredictably, which would have been merely bothersome had audio and video not been essential to the talk. Either the audience was extremely kind or I managed to rescue some semblance of meaning from the wreckage. I’m thankful regardless.

In November I was thrilled to meet so many inspired designers and developers while attending An Event Apart San Diego with my good friend, Erik Jung. Beforehand, I got to watch Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones front a live Gorillaz band, monkeys and river otters play together and pandas eat bamboo. Regrettably, not all at the same time. Best trip ever.

I was thrilled to announce the availability of Ramps for the iPhone and iPod Touch just a week ago. By the way, Ramps is on sale right now as part of the New Year’s App Blowout. If you haven’t already done so, you should definitely go buy it!

Here are the four design revelations I plan to heed most doggedly in 2011.

Clever solutions differentiate, straightforward solutions succeed

Pizazz! Pop! Razzle-dazzle! The “wow” factor! There is no shortage of descriptors for giving users something they’ve never seen before. That’s a fun and understandable aspiration, but it can also cripple your chance of success. The web’s rate of innovation increases exponentially, with 125 million domains and a trillion unique URLs already in use. In this environment, “wow” has a regrettably short lifespan. Focus on creating intuitive, well-executed work that people will want to use every day. Then follow Aarron Walter’s example and inject some humanity into it. Cleverness should be a happy accident, a byproduct of solid design thinking.

Experiment swiftly, then iterate rapidly

Ambition is priceless, but only when managed appropriately. Unbridled enthusiasm can quickly inflate the scope of even the simplest notion. Before weighing your idea down with extraneous features, kludge together a quick proof-of-concept. Worst-case scenario, you’ll learn the idea isn’t worth your time to pursue. Otherwise, you’ll be able to develop it more quickly with a clearer understanding of its real-world application.

You are suffocating your work if you keep it to yourself

Many designers are artists at heart. Consciously or not, we project our insecurities into our work. Soliciting feedback for designs that have yet to crystallize makes us uniquely vulnerable. Contrary to this behavior, design is usually intended for an audience greater than ourselves. Crafting it in solitude contradicts this intention, and robs you of countless “why didn’t I think of that?” moments you’ll gain from quickly pinging your colleagues, friends and family for feedback.

Consensus can be wonderful, but not without a single, guiding vision

“A camel is a horse designed by committee.” Although the originator is disputed, this maxim holds true. Purely democratic design may start out peachy, but a single irreconcilable difference of opinion will bring your work to a grinding halt. Even worse, the resulting compromise may be too obtuse to satisfy any audience. Dissent should be acknowledged, appraised and acted upon where appropriate, but these opinions must always defer to the unifying vision. Democracy sure sounds nice, but you’re better off choosing a benevolent dictator.

2010 was remarkable, but 2011 will be even better. I can’t wait for you to see what we’re cooking up at Studio D. Tim and I are hard at work improving and expanding Ramps. Peter and I have started tinkering with a couple apps we think you might dig. Believe me when I say I couldn’t be more excited.

Thanks to all of you who continue to encourage and support my work. The best is yet to come!

Today is the Fourth Annual International Blue Beanie Day, a time to show one’s support for Web Standards while paying tribute to one of its most vocal supporters, Jeffrey Zeldman (perhaps more specifically, to the cover of Designing with Web Standards).

While attending An Event Apart San Diego, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Jeremy Keith for a brief period of time, during which he expressed surprise (and maybe a hint of disbelief) that I had been writing HTML since I was ten years old. Despite my early exposure to the building blocks of the web, it took me quite a while to understand not simply how the web works, but how it should work.

As a freshman in high school I secured an internship at the nearest Intel campus, which quickly evolved into my first interaction design gig. My primary task was to design and develop CD-ROM interfaces using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Having never been formally trained in these languages, my designs were a tangled mess of tables and inline styles, until another intern named Kevin joined the team and gave me my first lesson in the separation of form and content.

Like many web designers, I was initially apprehensive. Abandoning the warmth and familiarity of table-based grids seemed completely foolhardy at the time. But the more I forced myself to wrap my mind around this new way of thinking, the more it inspired and emboldened me to grow as a designer, a journey I’m still happily engrossed in today.

It’s liberating to recall how quickly these techniques proved themselves. While the majority of my college experience was great, I recall frequent arguments with professors over standards versus table-based layouts. Who knew within a few short years I’d be teaching a dedicated Web Standards course at the very same school?

If you’re an active web designer or developer, you have no excuse not to be passionate for this industry. With recent advances in semantics, web type and richer interactions, our creative arsenal has never been more abundant. I donned a blue beanie today not solely to raise awareness. This is personal. Web Standards helped me define my identity and passion as a designer, and in doing so, deserves my continued acknowledgment.

My Blue Beanie Day haiku:

Now my users smile
The experience is good
I’m validated

This is the cliché, inevitable “sorry I haven’t been updating very much” post.  I still adore blogging and am not quite ready to become a Tumblr convert or anything. I’ve just been engrossed in some pretty exciting stuff!

This Summer I was promoted to Lead Experience Designer at Waggener Edstrom Studio D, where I manage an awesome team of designers creating web sites, infographics, branding and more. While I can’t share any of the cool stuff we’re working on yet, I can share my team’s blog where we post all manner of strange things.

Visitors of this site are probably familiar with Ramps, the game I made as a student project back in 2007 (according to my analytics, it’s still by far the most popular thing on this domain). I’m excited to say I’m finally building a follow-up in collaboration with developer Tim Sears. It’ll be for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and we’re aiming for a December release, right in time for the holidays. Stay tuned!

I was thrilled to attend An Event Apart San Diego this year, where I had the chance to meet and briefly chat with Jeffrey Zeldman (picture above), Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte and Andy Clarke. It was an amazingly insightful and well-rounded event, I highly recommend it.

I went down to San Diego early so I could see Gorillaz live (great seats, huh?), followed by a trip to the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld. I captured some of the lively critters on video:

A redesign of this site has been in the works for a while, but is progressing slowly amongst other projects. Forrst members are welcome to take a peek and offer feedback.

I’ve collected and organized the data I captured from the live audience at CyborgCamp Portland. I have a mostly finished interface that uses HTML5 video and canvas to show a live timeline of points of feedback in sync with the original montage, but am struggling with performance on a live server. As soon as I resolve that, it’ll be published for your enjoyment and consumption.

This blog is near and dear to me, and will surely be more lively following the redesign, which I hope to complete early next year. Until then, watch this space for updates to the above projects, and remember you can always follow me on Twitter for frequent, bite-size snippets of goodness.