in which Sarah attempts to be less snarky and more complex
After three weekends away and too many late nights at work, I finally decided tonight was the night for watering the garden. It was starting to look extremely droopy, full of unhappy flowers and healthy weeds instead of the other way around. I’m uncertain how the weeds thrive while everything else suffocates in this heat. [...]
In a previous post I talked about an example of technology constraining us in ways that don’t conform to the way we speak or write. We let the format dictate our attention span. For instance, I’ve broken this article into two posts because I was concerned it was getting too long for my (imaginary) readers. [...]
A week or two ago, a BBC News headline popped up on my RSS reader. The title said, “Ancient cave women ‘left home’.” Typical, I thought and sniffed in disgust at my monitor. I stared at the headline a moment longer, pondering an unhappy, dirty, hunched-over woman with bad hair sweeping a cave, tending a [...]
I had a chat recently with a long-time colleague and content strategist, Margot Bloomstein. She was doing some writing on IA and wanted to pick my brain about how I use that term and why. I referred her to my blog post and we had a humorous chat that seemed worth expanding on here. First, [...]
In recent weeks I suffered what I consider to be the most grievous insult ever spoken by a client to a designer. A client of mine said, “Thanks for the work you did. Don’t worry about the revisions. Our IT guy will take it from here.” All manner of expletives popped into my mouth. I [...]
We had a client once who defied all of our efforts to please her. No matter how hard we tried, no matter how many brand and design workshops we did, we could not get her to articulate her expectations regarding her site’s visual design. And as a result, we completed iteration upon iteration before gaining [...]
As the lone woman in an office full of men, I often find myself the loser in the War of the Toilet Seat. This war is made up of a series of battles. Each battle brings a new reversal. It’s up. It’s down. It’s up again. No wait, there are five of them and one [...]
I’m often a tad dishonest when people ask me what I do. I don’t fib to deceive them. I fib for their own good. When people ask what I do, I say, “I’m a Web designer.” Usually they go, “Oh, okay,” and change the subject. They think they get it. It’s not that interesting. We [...]
As a designer, or designer-type-person, running a design shop without in-house technical capabilities, I’ve worked with a lot of different developers and technical type guys (usually guys) over the years. I’ve used different guys for different work. Some of them are better at front end stuff, and some of them are better at back end [...]
This post is something I wrote years ago at BigBad. One of our clients, Rhodes College, asked me to help them sort out their academic department and administrative subsites. I’m amazed to discover that, six years later, I am still getting this question from my higher ed clients. And even more amazed that my answer [...]
