northtemple (+ comments)

This post makes me very sad. I...

This post makes me very sad. I am an active Latter-Day Saint and cherish my religion. But I understand some of both sides of this. I have many gay friends, and my father is is gay. I am certainly sympathetic towards many of the concerns expressed as of late by the gay community at large. I love my father and my gay friends because of who they are as people. I guess that’s really how I view them: as people that I love who happen to be gay. While I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse some of their behaviors I can say that of most people I know and love.

That being said, I just don’t get how people think that members of our Church are “spewing hate” by upholding our values. And I really really don’t get how you think a boycott of anything – this site in particular – helps your cause.

I am not a professional designer – I just dabble a little bit for fun. But I learn things here and mostly appreciate how random some of the posts are. Knowing how much I enjoy the blog, it makes me sad to see you go, Sean.

I really just wish we could all get along.

comment by TARA to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

Sean, I'm sorry. I really am...

Sean,

I’m sorry. I really am. As a member of the LDS Church I am frustrated with this whole episode and wished the Church hadn’t been involved. I lived in CA during Prop 22 in 2000 and it was an absolute nightmare for me as a Faith that has blessed my life so abundantly took and stand against a cause that I fully embrace.

I appreciate that you are taking a stand but I want you to know that by so doing you are losing critical support for this cause. If you really wish to be seen “valuable” to society then may I suggest that the movement act valuable to a society. The violence, threats of boycotts, terror and such are pushing sympathetic Mormons like myself away. Quite frankly, if there is to be acceptance than this cause needs people like me.

Personally I could care less what blog you read, I just want you to understand that your actions aren’t doing what you think they are doing but rather the opposite. You are marginalizing and generalizing which I’m confident will be more harmful than good.

Again, I’m really really sorry. I wish more than anything that we could get over this and move on.

comment by patrick campbell to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

@Pete - nope, I don't think of ...

@Pete – nope, I don’t think of all Mormons as enemies – but until I see a group of vocal Mormons stand up for what they believe (to be fair, they might be, we just don’t hear about it) even though it might be contrary to church teachings, then I have to assume that as a member of a religion/organization, you subscribe to their values, beliefs, and creed.

But, to be honest, this is one of the most rational and clear-headed discussions on this topic I’ve seen in a while.

Must be us creatives.

comment by Sean to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

Oh, didn't mean to imply that g...

Oh, didn’t mean to imply that generalists are some sort of compromise at all. I think there’s real value to having them on the team and that most teams will benefit from their presence.

Sorry for the confusion!

comment by Jared M. Spool to Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

one thing i don't want to happe...

one thing i don’t want to happen, is for our readers to feel inferior or less important when they read our site. i regret terribly that this association makes some of our friends feel this way, especially when what we wanted to create here was just a simple design forum. one thing i love about the community around this site is i don’t know what people look like, what religion they are, or what political beliefs they have. it’s just design, and people. it sucks that Sean is in a place where outside forces prevent that.

comment by Jason Lynes to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

Sean, thanks for your comment. ...

Sean, thanks for your comment. I hope that in the same way you would not like to be categorized, and labeled, you would not entertain the idea of automatically assuming any/all mormons as being your mortal enemies.

We’re all individuals. Please consider us as such.

comment by Pete Lasko to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

As the "concerned subscriber" m...

As the “concerned subscriber” mentioned, I do happen to understand everything stated here.

But, desperate times call for desperate thinking. This is my life – my very being we are talking about here. The Church has decided to wage war against a particular group of people – and we need to wage war back. Fair? Probably not. Does it all fit into a nice package that makes perfect sense? Nope.

But we have to do what we have to do to get some affirmation – and to help ourselves believe that we are indeed just as valuable as humans as anyone else.

Nope – it might not make a lot of sense, and might not be completely logical. But neither is Prop 8, and neither is the amount of hate the church (your particular “client”) is spewing.

You guys might not be affiliated, but are indeed associated, and to a very serious degree so.

This isn’t about “punishing” anyone – but a recognition that we just cannot stand by as others degrade us. People need to know and understand we see what is happening to us, and we refuse to just sit by and let them.

comment by Sean to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

@Reed: Why “Tambuli”? ...

@Reed:

Why “Tambuli”?

comment by Mark to It's so hard to find things. ...

WORD. You should add Napolea...

WORD.

You should add Napolean Dynamite & Nacho Libre to the list as well.

Plus the church is not responsible for Prop 8 NOT passing, instead it is the people who voted who are responsible.

comment by Shane to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

That was an excellent, pointed ...

That was an excellent, pointed response to a growing sentiment. Nicely said!

comment by Jeff Claeson to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

Well put Jason....

Well put Jason.

comment by Mike Metcalf to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

I fully agree with this post. I...

I fully agree with this post. Ironically, it was reported that 389 shows of Twilight are already sold out as of 12 pm yesterday and expected to make anywhere between $30 – $70+ million . . . I guess we pick and choose our battles – right?!

comment by Zach to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

I have a harder time understand...

I have a harder time understanding the other side of the coin. If I were to state that I cannot listen music by people that are not heterosexual then I would be considered a bigot and a long list of denigrating adjectives. Since an early age I learned to separate the artist from the art. It is tiring to hear people asking for tolerance and rights while they deny the same to others. Honestly it is getting very old.

comment by aemadrid to I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

I'm going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren't talking about politics

Today we received an email from a concerned subscriber:

It’s a very sad day – I have always found NorthTemple a great, entertaining, and informative read.

But, today I am removing you from my feed, and will no longer be sharing with my team.

I cannot reconcile the Mormon church’s views and directives on Prop 8 with my own, and refuse to support anything associated.

Good luck to all of you – you have a great team.

Northtemple is made up of 30 someodd designers who do work for the LDS Church, yes. But our About page has said for 2 years:

Northtemple.com is not an official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The websites linked, opinions expressed, quotes cited, and articles written do not necessarily express the views of the Church. We bear sole responsibility for, and firmly stand behind, the content featured here.

A few points I wanted to make clear this morning:

This is a design blog. We write about design.
We rarely, if ever, talk about politics. The occasional Obama link has always had a design or tech element to it. We have never voiced an opinion on Proposition 8.
The Church does not own Northtemple.com, and has no control over what we post. The site is not an approved publication of the Church, and is hosted and owned privately. We just all happen to work here.
To reject Northtemple because of the Church’s stance on Prop 8 is like refusing to watch the Utah Jazz because a Mormon owns it, or stay in a Marriott hotel because a Mormon owns it, read any of the Twilight books (or watch the movie this weekend) because a Mormon wrote it, listen to Glenn Beck or Gladys Knight, or watch any of the many professional sports teams that LDS members play for.

While we respect the political views of our readers, we just don’t care about them on this blog. If you care about design, read us. If not, don’t. It’s a design point, not a political one.

Yeah, I was wondering the same ...

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. This makes a lot more sense.

comment by Rob Foster to Google further cements its over...

Amen. Virtually every week I co...

Amen. Virtually every week I complain about how broken the search is—-just changing the label to “search gospel library” or something would help with the expectation that it should be able to find pages on the site. Also, I’ve begun to get used to the information architecture, but it was by no-means immediately intuitive.

comment by Jason to It's so hard to find things. ...

Thanks for the comment Jared --...

Thanks for the comment Jared—I agree there are some problems that a specialist can be useful for, assuming money is there. I have frequently leaned on the visual design skills of my peers to help fill my own deficiencies on a project.

But your article seemed to suggest that a generalist was something you had to “put up with” if you couldn’t afford a specialist. To John’s point above, I believe there are actually benefits to having the same person fill multiple roles, as long as they are sufficiently capable, the size of the project allows it, etc. There are fewer transitions of knowledge, deeper opportunities to build domain expertise, and fewer conflicts of opinion.

This last is of course also a potential problem—that you don’t think critically about your own ideas and always drink your own Kool-Aid. That’s got to be mitigated with peer reviews, user & team feedback, and a heavy does of humility.

Thanks again for chiming in!

comment by Ted Boren to Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

I've been wondering how Matthew...

I’ve been wondering how Matthew Barney got access to the Mormon Tabernacle for Cremaster. It’s only a model.

comment by Pete Lasko to Google further cements its over...

LDS.org is >>great<< resource, ...

LDS.org is >>great<< resource, however I understand your wife’s comment. The site’s seach capabilities have improved immensely, but I have difficulty making sense of how they’re organized (BTW, what’s “Tambuli”?). For example, searching on “Mexico City temple dedication” this morning, I got back results from (in the order of appearance) 1998, something from institute.lds.org, 1984, &c. Nothing about this weekend’s dedication.

Most of the time, my wife and I use Google to find things on lds.org.

comment by Reed to It's so hard to find things. ...

Nice work guys. Something to re...

Nice work guys. Something to remember though: accessibility is not just about screen reader users. While screen readers users have features that allow them to navigate a web page by element type (e.g. from heading to heading), sighted keyboard users do not. As a result, elements that fire events should be focusable (a link, button, etc) or made focusable.

There is a way to make the standard non-focusable elements focusable: set tabindex="0" on it. However, my own testing shows that this currently has its problems.

I’m in the process of testing click events in different browsers and assistive technology. Perhaps if I publish my methodology and results as a starting point, others may like to help with testing?

comment by Jon Gibbins to JavaScript and screen readers

It's so hard to find things. ...

"It’s so hard to find things.
I’m finding it hard to not blame you." ~ My wife Caryn, experiencing the joys of using lds.org.

Hi Ted, I didn't mean to imp...

Hi Ted,

I didn’t mean to imply that if your economics said you COULD afford a specialist, that you HAD TO hire one.

What I meant was that if you wanted one, the economic support has to be there.

Generalists aren’t always the optimal choice. There are some problems that can benefit from someone with deep experience and finely honed skills in a specific area or discipline.

Jared

comment by Jared Spool to Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

Nobody wants to be known as a c...

Nobody wants to be known as a compartmentalist, but you’ve seen the “not my job” or “that’s your problem” mentality before.

comment by Ted Boren to Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

Google further cements its over...

Google further cements its overlord status by making millions of LIFE magazine photos available for search. How about those Mormons?

Jason, as I read your comments,...

Jason, as I read your comments, I can’t help but think of Max Kerning.

comment by Kaleb Tracy to Are Designers also Marketers? ...

Take black and white photos on ...

Take black and white photos on your iPhone with Vint. Via ISO50.

Looking forward to seeing lds.o...

Looking forward to seeing lds.org utilize CSS as much as possible. I keep seeing little things I would correct if I could but it sounds like you’re all aware of those things too.

comment by Christian to Finally able to use CSS child a...

Does anyone ever want to be kno...

Does anyone ever want to be known as a compartmentalist?

I agree with you on this point, economics are not the only reason to hire a specialist. I think that the time to hire a specialists, is when you can clearly define the problem you need them to tackle. If you are hiring them for a full time position, you’d best be sure that you have enough of their specialty work to keep them busy.

I like to believe that you are always better off if you can hire a generalist. A generalist isn’t a specialist at everything, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be very good (maybe even specialists) at several things.

comment by John Dilworth to Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

We might think that we are excl...

We might think that we are excluded from making decisions based on outward things but we have all been influenced by them. That doesn’t mean that we discriminate. It does mean that outward expressions do influences our decisions in some positive or negative way. It is up to us to make the best of those decisions and not engage in “shallow” judging.

When time is short and we need to make quick decisions using little to no information, subtle clues can hold vast amounts of information that can be very valuable. I think that is the point of the post. Read the book “Blink.” It describes this very well.

Designers are several things. If we all only did what a narrow job description told us to do then we would be cheating ourselves of exciting opportunities to learn, and influence our co-workers, companies, and guests that enjoy our work.

comment by Chris Mayfield to Are Designers also Marketers? ...

is it different? big has been ...

is it different? big has been done. hand drawn has been done. big and bulky has been done. what is brave with this design? is it the combination of those elements? i’m not seeing the balls.

i do love their light-heartedness with it all. their style is almost whimsical, and is pretty refreshing.

comment by Jason Lynes to Carsonified launches their site...

personal appearance, including ...

personal appearance, including hygiene and your choice of apparel for an interview, says quite a lot about you as a professional – especially when your profession is based on appearance. it’s not whether you are beautiful or attractive, it’s whether you sweat the details.

if an interviewee dresses sloppy to an interview, how should i trust him with General Authorities or C-level meetings? if someone’s tie doesn’t match his suit, can i trust him to put colors together on a website? if his shoes aren’t shined, can i trust him to put the right amount of polish on a web application?

my judgments have nothing to do with a cookie-cutter notion, as i’m not really sure what a designer is supposed to look like. but i will judge him/her on their appearance, just like i will continue to judge books by their covers and food by their labels. it matters.

appearance is what we do. every day. and since i can’t look on the heart of our interviewees, appearance is one thing i do have. yes, experience and communication matter. but appearance is the most basic form of communication, and if you don’t understand that, you will fail as a designer.

comment by Jason Lynes to Are Designers also Marketers? ...

"I’ve said no to many an inte...

“I’ve said no to many an interviewee (and hire) based on bad ties, hair, shoes”

Wow. I seriously hope this is out of context, because this statement is one of the most shallow things I’ve read in a long time.

You’re a “designer”, not an “anthropologist”, “strategist”, “annalist” or any other over-inflated idea suggested by the comment above. I’m a developer, but I don’t consider myself a “change agent”, “social engineer”, or “creator-of-the-future-of-the-world”....

Suggesting someone daren’t work in the same organisation, or – heaven forbid – team as you because they don’t fit your cookie-cutter notion of what a designer should ‘look like’ is shameful. Please mature and judge people based on their communication, their work and their experience – not on whether they wear shoes you happen to like the look of.

Representing the organisation you work for, I expect a lot more than such vacuous, self-important drivel.

man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.

comment by Paul to Are Designers also Marketers? ...

I'm not a massive fan of their ...

I’m not a massive fan of their style with these sites, but I admire their bravado. It’s too easy to work within trends and conventions but takes real balls to be different and make something new.

comment by Eoghan McCabe to Carsonified launches their site...

Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

Jared Spool just posted an interesting article on the ideal makeup of a UX team . He makes a useful distinction between a specialist and a compartmentalist:

While the former is about having the majority of your experience in a single discipline, the latter is about only having experience in that discipline… . A compartmentalist isolates themselves from the other disciplines around them, not really learning what they do or how they do it. Compartmentalism is bad for teams, because it means you have to have enough work to keep that individual busy within that discipline, and if needs shift or emergencies crop up, their value is dramatically diminished.

I would also add that a compartmentalist tends to make decisions that cause problems for other team members—the compartmentalized user researcher makes design recommendations that don’t meet the needs the business analyst identified previously; the designer designs something that will take $5 million to implement; the HTML coder who transforms those ultra-accessible semantic forms into screen-reader nightmares for the blind.

So I agree with Spool that compartmentalism is bad. But he also says that the main reason to choose a specialist over a generalist is economic; if a specialist is available and affordable, you would hire a specialist, according to the article. But aren’t there times when specialization is a negative for the project? Even if I could afford a specialist HTML coder, business analyst, interaction designer, and user researcher… isn’t there some inherent value in having the same person play one or more of those roles, depending on project size, complexity, or a host of other factors?

I don’t think economics is the only factor.

Leaders inspire. Managers requi...

"Leaders inspire. Managers require." ~ A participant at the George Wythe University Statesmanship Retreat last weekend, commenting on the difference between leadership and management. Not to say that good managers can’t also inspire—but when they do, that is when they Lead instead of merely Manage. Also, you can lead without being a manager—something good designers do every day.

Motrin provokes mommy bloggers ...

Motrin provokes mommy bloggers with an insensitive ad, gets nailed on twitter, removes the ad and issues and apology, and it all happened over the weekend. The best part – when a few bloggers contacted the advertising company, they had never heard of twitter and were totally clueless as to the online backlash.

Sounds eerily similar to a few of the ad agencies we’ve worked with..

His show at Saltair a couple we...

His show at Saltair a couple weeks ago was off the charts excellent.

comment by Paul to You'd do yourself right to pick...

Power to the Poster impresses i...

Power to the Poster impresses in its restraint.

I put together a few chronotebo...

I put together a few chronotebook-like templates on my website, for folks who can’t get to a Muji store:

http://www.chronoNotebook.com

They work great with round stickers and a plain notebook. I’ve been using the stickers in a Rhodia notepad for a few weeks now and I love it!

comment by Nigel Hall to The chronotebook is an entirely...

Thanks for the recommendation! ...

Thanks for the recommendation! It’s hard to find such a unique voice.

comment by Tye (wtyerogers) to You'd do yourself right to pick...

Shane, this is top secret. Tad...

Shane, this is top secret. Tadd’s account will soon be deleted for sharing this unauthorized code.

Actually yes, we are redesigning General Conference. And LDS.org. And about 100 other things. We need to start sharing more of our work, don’t we..

comment by Jason Lynes to Finally able to use CSS child a...

You'd do yourself right to pick...

You’d do yourself right to pick up this new offering from mountain folkster Ray LaMontagne, called Gossip in the Grain. It’s the 3rd CD of his in high rotation around here, following Trouble and Till the Sun Turns Back.

He’s packed this thing full of his trademark raspy soul, with some upbeat funk thrown in (“You are the best thing”), a full out confession of love to Meg White (“Meg White”), a little banjo plucking action (“Hey me, hey mama”), and some heel-tappin’ blues, complete with reverb’d harmonica (“Henry nearly killed me [It’s a shame]”).

You need this. Buy now and save yourself future embarassment.

So where can this be found? Doe...

So where can this be found? Does this mean ya’ll are working on updating the General Confrence area of LDS.org? That will be nice, I’ve been wondering when the other parts of the site where going to take on a facelift to be more in tune with the home page.

comment by Shane to Finally able to use CSS child a...

Jason, I think the point is, an...

Jason, I think the point is, and you communicate this in your article, is that the solution, and the reasoning for the solution often come independent of one another. Usually in that order, too.

comment by Pete Lasko to The Designer's Sixth Sense

@Andrew please no more ninjas o...

@Andrew please no more ninjas or rockstars.

I like Designer. Or User Experience Designer, if you need added intrigue. When people ask me what I do, I say I’m a web designer.

comment by Pete Lasko to Design Titles