Introduction
Today’s interview victim is Mike Rohde. I’ve followed Mike’s
blog for a number of years, and I had the good
fortune to meet him at the inaugural SEED conference (see his coverage
here and mine
here).
Mike has gained fame recently for his Sketchnotes - notes and hand-drawn
pictures from events such as An Event Apart,
SEED, and the upcoming SXSW
2009, but apart from that he is a talented writer and
designer with a large portfolio of websites, logos, and other impressive
work.
:http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/2152486744/in/set-72157603590093912/
Thanks for agreeing to do this interview Mike. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Thanks for the invitation Larry!
About me? I’m a kid from Chicago who loves to draw. I’ve managed to find
a profession that allows for and encourages drawing and sketching
skills.
I’m a designer and art director, with experience in print and the web,
with a passion for usable, practical and good-looking design solutions.
I’ve always had a technical side, being fascinated with computers and
technology since I was a young kid.
Fortunately for me, web design and working with technical people in my
work is a great fit, because I can share my design skills but also
relate well to the technical nature of projects and technical people.
I’m also a blogger since 2003 at
Rohdesign.com where I share my thoughts on
life, design, technology, visual thinking, music, cycling and whatever
else I feel is worth of sharing with the world.
I’m a husband and father, follower of Jesus and a coffee fan.
Design
Funny you should ask because your question reminded me of a A List Apart
article on this very subject by Stephen Hay:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/artdirweb
I liked this quote from the article, showing how subjective the role of
an art director can be, based on the discipline they’re in:
“In the movies, art directors are usually responsible for creating the
“look and feel†of the film. In advertising and print work, art
directors (often teamed up with a copywriter) come up with
“concepts,†the creative ideas which communicate with us on a gut
level through such devices as theme, metaphor, and symbolism. Some art
directors do little more than dream up these ideas and present them to
clients, while some oversee almost all aspects of the design and
production process. Surprisingly, art direction is seldom taught in
schools and there is very little formal information on the subject; it
is often learned in practice.”
In my view, an “Art Director†is a designer with a 50,000 foot meta
view of design projects they work on. They are involved all the way from
listening to the client and stakeholders on a project, through the
conception of an idea to the design, development and production the
idea.
The art director is responsible for maintaining the vision of a design
idea, as much as is possible (or reasonable), to achieve the final
result. This means maintaining consistency in the project design,
structure, usability, colors, brand or identity and anything else
related to the design.
It also means working with the client to maintain these goals as well as
any team members producing the work, in my case developers who would
code the sites and back-ends for web applications. As an art director, I
feel I represent the user. I’m responsible for making sure whatever I’m
directing — a logo, an icon, a website or printed item — is
communicating the message my client wishes to send, effectively and
simply.
After many years as a senior designer I began to realize that while I
enjoyed the design aspect (and still do), I especially enjoy guiding a
project’s consistency between concept and completion, and continuity
between multiple items a company produces (website, business cards,
brochures, etc.). That’s when I felt comfortable calling myself an art
director.
You have blogged about the process you follow to develop. Can you summarize what you do to get from a concept to a finished product?
First, I ask lots of questions, like “What are my client’s goals? What
is my client trying to achieve with this project?” and so on. I want to
know the ultimate reasons for what we’re about to do, because sometimes
what a client proposes may not be the right solution for the underlying
challenge.
Once I understand the challenge, I read my notes, and synthesize the
goals for sketching. I use pencil sketches to help work out ideas that
can solve the challenges I’m facing. These sketches are presented to
clients with what I call “rationale notes” explaining the whys of my
design concepts.
I’ve found sketches invaluable to solving problems before I ever get to
the computer to produce my designs. Some designers may be afraid to show
clients their conceptual sketches. I’ve found that showing my sketches
to clients is an effective way to share my process, while leveraging my
client’s knowledge in solving the problem. Showing sketches draws the
client in, making them a part of the solution
While computer tools like Adobe Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop are
important, I feel my most important tools are my pens, pencils and
sketchbooks. I have several sketchbooks I use to solve design challenges
with pencil or pen, before I even get to the Mac.
On the Mac, I’m a big fan of Adobe Fireworks for web design and icon
design, since it offers very useful vector tools. I’ve been an Adobe
Illustrator user for many years as well, which I think makes Fireworks a
natural choice.
:http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/247103592/in/set-72157594290438895/
Where do you look for inspiration? Do you have favorite sites or books, or do you just observe things around you?
I have lately been looking in a variety of places for inspiration. As a
web and UI designer and art director by day, the applications and sites
I use daily provide inspiration to me.
I’ve found friends on Twitter suggesting great articles and design
inspiration, which is one of the reasons I find Twitter so valuable as a
designer. I’m happy to see so many design professionals tweeting.
http://twitter.com/rohdesign
Even everyday items and design solutions provide insight and inspiration
for me. I love hand-painted signs and am always aware of packaging in
stores, and other design elements I encounter in my everyday life.
Some sites I enjoy checking out for inspiration include:
http://ffffound.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.designobserver.com/
http://design.alltop.com/
http://logopond.com/
http://delicious.com/tag/design
http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/
I find inspiration to be best when it’s random and not too planned. :-)
Sketchnotes
You’ve gained some fame lately for your Sketchnotes. 37Signals linked to your sketches of the Seed conference (which I covered as well, though not nearly as graphically), and your notes from SXSW have been ever more widely covered – including Boing Boing). Where did the idea for Sketchnotes originate?
They’ve been brewing for some years now. I’ve always been one who
sketches and doodles, as well as being a long-time note taker, but back
in 2007, I made a decision to intentionally combine the two at the
Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive workshop in Chicago:
:http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/sets/72157604109069527/
It was well received and I enjoyed the process — so I kept doing
“sketchnotes” at other events like SEED 1 and 3, SXSW Interactive and An
Event Apart just this past October. Sketchnotes seem to be very well
received by attendees and non-attendees alike.
Now I’m being brought on at events as an official “sketchnoter” to
capture the event from a different perspective. I’m very excited about
this opportunity to become a resource. In fact I’ll be at SXSW
Interactive 2009 as an official sketchnoter this March.
I’ve found that taking copious amounts of notes helps me stay engaged in whatever I’m listening to or else my mind tends to wander. Do the Sketchnotes serve a similar purpose for you?
Yes. I find taking notes and sketching really reinforce what I’m
capturing in my head as a speaker talks. Sketchnotes are not meant to be
word-for-word stenographer notes, but interpretive. I capture what I
feel is important, which makes sketchnotes personal.
However, because someone is actively listening, processing and selecting
important ideas, sketchnotes have personality. What they maye lose in
fine detail is replaced with a concise, personal way of capturing the
moment.
Sketchnotes were intended for myself, but as I began posting them on
Flickr, I found others who had attended the same event connecting with
them. Even more surprising for me were those who hadn’t attended the
events seemed to enjoy reading my sketchnotes. Very cool stuff.
Right now I’ve focused on the Sketchtoon Coffee Calendar, producing
another edition of the same calendar for 2009:
:http://www.cafepress.com/rohde.40227192
I’m contemplating several different ideas that would create other
products for my and sketchtoons, but I’ve been so busy with work and
otheractivities, new product development has been on the backburner.
Thanks again for the opportunity to share about my work and thoughts
Larry - I especially appreciate your interest in my sketchnotes and
sketchtoons!
This article is the second in a series of interviews that I will be
conducting over the next few months. For the other interviews, please
visit the
archives
Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Can you start by telling everyone a little bit about yourself?
I live in Seattle, home of the world’s most pretentious Ruby
brigade. I’ve been doing
professional development for almost 10 years.
Do you consider yourself a developer who happens to be an entrepreneur, or is it the other way around?
Definitely a developer first. I love solving problems and reading about
other people’s approaches to software development. However, I’ve worked
for many startups and it was probably inevitable that I would eventually
ask the question “Could I run a business of my own?”
I had wanted to start my own business since high school but didn’t
pursue it until recently. In 2002, I wrote a shareware RSS reader and
started selling it for \$15 online. Cory
Doctorow even bought a copy and gave me some
feedback, which I unfortunately never implemented.
I only sold a couple hundred copies, but it was a good lesson in
developing a product, getting feedback, and advertising. One lesson I
should have learned is that there are no overnight successes. Even a
good idea often needs 6 months or a year of development and promotion to
get off the ground. Unfortunately, I promoted the RSS reader for only a
few months and then let it slowly die.
I also started an online todo list that has
accidentally resulted in almost 10,000 signups. I haven’t figured out
what to do with it yet, but it taught me a lot about deploying Rails
applications.
When did you first discover Ruby on Rails?
I started working with it in January, 2005. There weren’t any books, so
I started by reading the entire online documentation, method by method.
Everything just seemed to fit together and I loved the way that common
web development tasks were wrapped up into simple methods.
I still recommend reading through the entire API documentation. It’s the
most thorough source available.
What was it about Rails that appealed to you?
At first, I appreciated the high-level completeness of the API. Most of
the common things that a web developer would need to do were all there,
from database relationship definition to form building. While reading
through the documentation, I kept thinking “Yes…I could use that
feature!” or “That’s so useful…why didn’t I think of that?” I had
built my own MVC framework in Perl, but it was a chore to keep it
consistent and bug-free. With Rails, I found a framework that was
already capable and was also being constantly improved.
Currently, I appreciate the inventiveness of the Ruby community. Most of
the software I rely on day to day isn’t part of the Rails framework at
all. I use Haml templates exclusively
(I hate having to type all those angle brackets and end tags!), Haml’s
Sass templates for my CSS, and
make_resourceful whenever I need a REST
controller.
I received a copy of the Django book earlier this month (which was very
well written), but I cringe at the thought of doing web development
without Haml. I’ll probably need to write a few demo projects just to
become familiar with it.
I have a pretty standard Rails setup with a Mac, TextMate, FireFox with
the web developer and FireBug plugins. For everyday browsing, I find
Camino to be a bit faster.
I use the tcsh and the standard Apple
terminal. MailPlane for email, though I’m
probably going to switch back to mutt now that
Gmail offers IMAP. I try to reduce distractions, so I run with a solid
black desktop picture and the
MenuShade utility to hide the
menubar. Sometimes I also use Spirited
Away to hide background applications.
I’ve got a great desk from Anthro
Cart that can be used sitting
down or standing up. Plus, there are attachments for all my audio gear,
speakers, etc. A comfortable keyboard from
TypeMatrix and the Freedom
chair.
autotest and
rstakeout
for running tests or other commands automatically. In addition to the
Rails plugins mentioned above, I use
memcached and
acts_as_state_machine
in most of my web applications. The
Hodel
logger is a must for viewing the real-world performance of a web
application.
I’ve been experimenting with dtrace and hope to learn how to use it.
You started PeepCode several years ago. What drove you to do that?
I had wanted to do something with teaching and digital distribution. I
read many books and they are often out of date by the time they hit the
shelf. I saw how popular the original 10-minute Rails blog screencast
was and I also noticed that many other people were doing screencasts.
However, they often had distracting quirks, such as being shot
fullscreen and delivered at gigantic resolutions. So I figured that I
could do a really polished screencast that would be more informative
than many books and cover timely topics. It started with one and has
turned into a full time business not only for me, but also for a few
other authors who are writing PDF books.
I’m currently using Final Cut Pro for editing and
iShowU for screen
capture. I also use
OmniGraffle for
diagrams and other utilities such as
XScope and
OmniDazzle.
In fact, I’m working on a screencast right now that shows how I create a
screencast.
How long does it take to create one screencast?
Technically, it only takes about a week to film, dub, edit, and release.
But often, I’ll do a few weeks of research about a new topic, or I’ll
re-film a screencast after receiving feedback. For the
git screencast, I created an entire
hour-long screencast and then started again from scratch after receiving
technical feedback from Junio Hamano, the maintainer of git.
Peepcode originally started as screencasts, but recently you’ve started branching out into publishing. What drove you to do that?
The information that developers need is increasingly time sensitive. I
don’t scale very well as a single author, so I was looking for ways to
work with other authors to produce relevant content on topics that
developers want to learn about. PDFs are a great way to do that, and are
even preferred by developers because of the ability to search the text
or copy and paste code snippets.
A printed book usually takes 9 months or more to write, and authors
often end up exhausted, discouraged, and poorly compensated.
So I built a system that works with standard Textile-formatted text. So
far, authors have responded very favorably and it has even made
translation very easy. I have a half-dozen authors working on some great
topics that will be released over the next few months.
There are many important topics that aren’t very well documented. I want
to make those topics accessible to developers at an affordable price.
Originally, PeepCode focused solely on Rails, but with the latest screencast on the Git SCM, you seem to be branching out a bit. Was this a one-time occurance, or will we be seeing more screencasts like this?
Rails developers have supported my business from the beginning, so I’ll
definitely continue to publish Rails-related content.
But I hope to branch out into other topics, especially where it’s of
interest to the Rails community as well as the greater web development
community. The Prototype.js
Javascript
screencasts were quite popular but didn’t require knowledge of Ruby
code. I’m hoping to do a series on CSS that will be useful to
developers, no matter what framework they are using.
Your website says you are no longer doing consulting work, does that mean you are doing PeepCode full time?
I’ve been fortunate to have been working on PeepCode full-time since
May, 2007. It was a big decision to make, but it has definitely been the
right decision. Overall business has more than doubled since then and
I’ve been able to collaborate with many intelligent developers.
The other thing you are well known for is the Ruby on Rails Podcast. You have been doing that for some time now, but I seem to recall that you weren’t the original host of that podcast. How did you come to be the voice of Ruby on Rails?
Scott Barron started it, thanks to encouragement from David Heinemeier
Hansson. I contributed a few shaky interviews starting in July of 2005
and have done almost all of the subsequent 60+ shows.
I just bought a ticket to San Francisco for the sole purpose of
interviewing Rails startups for the podcast. It will be right around the
time of the MacWorld expo, and I hope to post the first interview almost
as soon as it is recorded.
You seem to have a lot of irons in the fire, is there anything coming that you can talk about?
Right now it’s all PeepCode! There will be a book on ActiveMerchant that
I’m excited to see published this spring. I also have an idea for a
series that will compare Rails to other popular web frameworks.
Note: This is the first in a series of interviews I will be doing
over the coming months.
Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I’m Peter Cooper, a Ruby developer and author from the wild, barren
north of England. I’m probably best known in the Ruby community for
being the author of Beginning
Ruby,
published by Apress, as well as the editor of Ruby
Inside, the most popular Ruby related weblog.
Your website lists you as a serial entrepreneur. Do you consider yourself a developer who happens to be an entrepreneur, or is it the other way around?
It tends to vary year by year! I’ll go through periods where I’ll happen
to be developing more for other people, and others when I focus on my
own projects. Having made a successful exit with two businesses in 2007,
however, I’ve been leaning towards doing more for myself. I’m likely to
drop the “enterpreneur” stick soon though, as it tends to be that I
merely follow my nose and the business side of it just falls into place
by itself. I’m more of a curious bumbler by nature.
When did you first discover Ruby on Rails?
Rails first came onto my radar in October 2004. It was reasonably
primitive then but will still appealing. As such a nascent technology
based on a relatively unheard-of language, I was more interested in
poaching the ideas for my favorite language of the time, Perl, and began
developing my own equivalent. I developed a whole application on my
framework, but it was shaky and I decided to give Rails a try, while
promising not to get too bothered about learning Ruby itself.
My first Rails application was for a client and I developed a whole
photography site for them in perhaps a quarter of the time it would have
taken me with Perl. At that point I was hooked, and I also began to
venture into the Ruby on Rails IRC channel on irc.freenode.net which, at
the time, was great fun.
What was it about Rails that appealed to you?
The biggest selling points were the abstraction and the speed / ease of
development. I pride simplicity and economy above all, so developing Web
applications in Rails was an eye opener compared to the clumsiness of
Perl (I mean, take a look at mod_perl sometime!).
Up till now, my development environment has been under OS X. I’ve stuck
with MySQL for a database engine throughout, merely because I know it so
well by now. Firefox was my browser of choice on OS X until Leopard, but
now I mostly use Safari as it’s come on in leaps and bounds. I use
Textmate as my primary editor, although I don’t know how to use any of
the macro / snippet features.. it’s really just a text editor with
syntax coloring and a file list down the side for me. I like to keep
things really simple with little to remember.
At the deployment end of the chain, I use Linux, nearly always Red Hat
Enterprise or CentOS.
As with most Ruby and Rails developers, my applications all end up
deployed on Linux machines. While open source technologies make it easy
to jump between different flavors of UNIX, something about OS X’s
“everything for everyone” approach irks me when it comes to doing
development work. It’d be like taking my city car on the track or
putting a race car on the streets.. you can do it, but it feels better
to have separate cars for different situations. While I don’t find Linux
particularly useful for graphics work and general day to day use, it
feels like a more natural operating system for developing on at the
command line level. With the minimalist dwm window manager, you can even
get all of the GUI control at keyboard level, meaning you can focus on
work rather than moving pretty windows about.
I’m also attracted by the ability to run a single X11 server in my
house, then be able to access the same development environment from
different machines around the house without needing to sync up. OS X can
be used as an X client quite easily, so I can be developing in the same
environment anywhere and on any machine. I’m still in the process of
setting all of this up though and working out the pros and cons for day
to day use.
I don’t tend to have many libraries or tools installed. I’m a big fan of
the command line clients for things like MySQL, Subversion, and Git, and
I don’t run my IRB with any elaborations. The only gems I tend to
install are Rails, Mongrel, Daemons, Hpricot, and RMagick, although
installing OS X Leopard has updated this somewhat. Mongrel and Daemons
are my “favorite” gems. Mongrel because it makes building super-fast
HTTP daemons so easy, and Daemons because it means I can forget all of
the dull process involved in daemonizing and controlling applications
and services I build.
There’s no escaping the fact that big businesses move slowly. Their
technology departments can be frighteningly conservative and there’s
often only one “approved” way to do things. This is especially true of
deployment. Even medium sized companies freak out when you talk about
installing Linux and putting your own Ruby / Rails stack on top. They
need everything documented, centralized, and consistent. As such, the
Java platform has become a real bedrock for servers and application
deployment in the enterprise, and JRuby gives us the opportunity to
target all of those established enterprise ecosystems by making Rails
applications easy to deploy on JBoss, Tomcat, and other Java application
servers.
JRuby is definitely the key to getting Ruby and Rails applications
deployed inside most major companies whose ecosystems have no time for
alternatives just yet. JRuby is definitely the direction you should be
heading for these sorts of deployments, and I think this area is going
to become significant to most profit-driven Rails developers very soon.
<a
href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597664?ie=UTF8&tag=approachingno-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1590597664">
You wrote a book on Ruby (which I recently reviewed). What books on Ruby/Rails do you recommend, aside from your own of course :)
My book is for people who either have a reasonable understanding of
programming, even if they’re not that good at it, or people who have
experience with languages other than Ruby and want to move across. For
people with absolutely zero programming experience I’d recommend Chris
Pine’s Learn to
Program.
For already experienced Ruby developers who want to become real hotshots
and delve into the deeper mechanics of the language, I’d recommend Hal
Fulton’s The Ruby
Way.
Both of these books cover totally different ground than Beginning
Ruby
and even complement it, depending on your skill level.
Most programmers have a list of programming languages they want to learn. What is the next programming language you are hoping to learn?
I’m an opportunist developer who tries to use the right tool for the job
in order to quickly capitalize on some untapped market or niche. As
such, I don’t tend to learn languages for fun, at least not to a deep
level. I’ve taken a look at languages like Erlang, Haskell, Io, and even
written a little Lisp, but don’t see any immediate reasons to learn
these languages to a professional level. It’s certainly worth
understanding their paradigms and styles, however, to take something
useful back to your more productive environments. Lisp has certainly
given me a big appreciation for a lot of oblique programming techniques.
You’ve sold two of your sites this past year. Were those opportunistic sales, or was this something you had planned to do all along?
Opportunistic sales. In the first case, with Code Snippets, I was
approached by a friend who was interested in buying the site, but after
checking with my network of contacts it turned out Rick Ross of DZone
was also interested and the site made a great fit with DZone, the “Digg
for developers” as I call it.
Now that you’ve sold these sites, what’s next for you?
Ay, there’s the rub! Most of the projects I’ve had success with have
been tools or services that I’ve desperately wanted to use myself, so
I’ve had a lot of motivation to see them through. When you don’t have
any nagging wants, however, you have to really dig deep to come up with
the ideas. I’m currently in a bit of a low gear, with it being the end
of the year, as well as having sold two businesses this year, but I hope
to get back on the saddle really soon and release some more projects
next year. For the meantime, however, I’m keeping Ruby Inside updated as
best I can and keeping my nose to the ground!
Beginning tomorrow, I’m going to be publishing a series of interviews.
I’m going to start with notable people from the Rails community, but
over time I would like to branch out into other areas. The first
interview will be with Peter Cooper,
whose book Beginning
Ruby
I reviewed
recently.
In the coming weeks I will be publishing interviews with Geoffrey
Grosenbach and Robby
Russell, with more to follow.
If you have suggestions for other people I should interview, please
leave a comment or send me an email (my email address can be found on my
about page:http://larrywright.me/about).