Checking out Twitter’s new feature @anywhere.

I haven’t even opened the MacBook Pro.

… have a good design sense and understand the fundamentals / design principals.
… know all the major design software including the entire Adobe Creative Suite.
… have some basic video editing skills.
… know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
… know enough about server-side languages (PHP, ASP, Ruby, Python, etc) to understand how they work, what they do, and the possibilities of their use.
… know about servers, hosting, domain registrants, DNS, etc. Setting it up, and fixing it when it breaks.
… know OS X really well (and enough Windows to get by) or know Windows really well (and enough OS X to get by) and know a huge variety of utility software that goes with.
… are good photographers.
… can color correct photos and work in RAW.
… can cut clipping paths or otherwise extract objects from photos.
… have a killer online portfolio.
… are a personable, nice people that are good with clients.
… can help clients with anything even vaguely computer-related.
… are quick to adapt to new software and new technologies.
… can train fellow employees.
… can train clients on the use of their websites.
… are good communicators.
… are team players.
… have good taste in art, music and movies.
… are up to date on social media.
… are good at logic and deduction.
… are good at user experience and user testing.
… are SEO experts.
… know about and how to handle web accessibility (and the laws surrounding it)
… understand copyright laws.
… do progressive enhancement and graceful degradation techniques.
… can debug cross-browser problems and older browser bugs.
… can bring your own client base.
… are healthy, well groomed, and wear fancy t-shirts.
… can be on-call at all times for emergencies.
… have college degrees in design-related fields.
… own very nice and expensive computers full of expensive software.
… can design for mobile devices.
… are good typographers.

(via Chris Coyier - http://css-tricks.com/designers-these-days)

In this internet age, it is so easy to create content that just about everyone does it. Over 100,000 iPhone apps in the App Store, WordPress themes available from hundreds of different sites, and the “Links Lists” type blogs that seem to be growing in number every day. Is this really a good thing?

Quality over quantity.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” -Steve Jobs

Good content takes time - there is no way around it. Poor content does not. I have great respect for bloggers like Dustin Curtis  or Jason Santa Maria  that put a lot of time into every article. Granted, they don’t crank out 7 articles a day, but when they do post a new article, it will be worth reading. On the other hand, if you do a Google search for “Graphic design blog” you will get about 49,800,000 results. Many of these blogs post things like “Top 100 logo design tutorials” and then have a list of links to other people’s content. This is a way to appear to be an expert on almost any topic, even if you have no proficiency in this area. When you are reading one of these posts, you have no way of knowing the quality or accuracy of the posts they are linking to. When they link to poor quality content, it has a way of giving you a bad taste for that blog.

This lack of quality is also very evident in the iPhone App Store. The number of poorly designed and/or implemented apps that are in the App Store is astounding. Apple has tried to address this issue, first by making the SDK proprietary and now by requiring each app to be approved by a human before it was listed on the store. Both of these have had limited success - Not being able to develop apps at all made people mad, but having to wait to have your app approved wasn’t much better. Good apps have been rejected without much explanation, bad apps have slipped through and the process has been a pretty big pain for devs overall. On the other hand, there are many, many well designed and beautiful apps out there as well, proving that good designers and coders still do exist.

So, good content is out there, but you have to find it. No matter how many shoddy imitations there are, there will always be room for original, well thought out articles, themes and apps. Have an answer to this problem or other comments? I’d love to hear you thoughts.