About the How-To Guides for Designers
The How To Guides are created and maintained by Fresh Tilled Soil, a privately-held Boston-based design firm. We created the How To Guides out of frustration with the lack of real-world guidance provided to designers. We are committed to creating a full range of guides that help designers do everything from market themselves to do great designs. We've been building websites and marketing them since the earliest days of the web.
Fresh Tilled Soil is a living example of how our principles can be put into action. With only $2,500 in startup capital we have created a million dollar design firm serving clients from Fortune 50 to startups. We’d like to teach you to do the same. We are passionate about design and helping other designers find success. Hope this helps.
Current Guides
- The Lens: How to Sell Without Selling
- Rapid Prototyping: Building Web Apps Without a Spec
3 Myths of Specs
Myth 1: Always write a technical spec
Technical specs are relevant and necessary when you have a huge project with lots of teams involved. In today's design and teams are much smaller and agile. Writing a spec before sketching out the work-flow is very often a waste of everyone's time.
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Myth 2: Technical Specs have to be long and complex to be worthwhile
This is one of those quantity vs. quality issues that designers face all the time. A 100 page document is not better than a 20 page document. Additionally, a document that contains only sketches and wireframes is not less important that the document with spreadsheets and heatmaps.
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Myth 3: Requirements need to be gathered by a project manager.
Disenfranchising the very people that will be working on the design project by excluding them from the early requirements gathering process is insane. Systems work best when the people that are using them are involved in building them to.
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