It is easy for clients, I have noticed, to mistakenly conflate adding widgets, effects and acronyms — Sliders, Sorters, Expanding-Menus, Oh My! — with implementing an idea. The client talks excitedly, rattling off a Rube Goldberg chain of widget-to-widget interactions, their voices rising, the importance of each and every widget in the chain perceived critical to the achievement of the Internet Holy Grail: Angel Investment. Or at least, a really slick site.

Don’t get me wrong. I think everyone is in favor of a well-placed widget.

They can be so smooth and beautiful that you gasp. They can glow yellow for just the correct duration before fading to white (”where has that beautiful apparition gone?”, you wonder, before drunkenly clicking again. And again. And again.). They can add an item to a list almost magically: never was it so fun to have so many things To Do. They can save you clicks, keep you in one place, slide items into carts with almost illicit ease.

In short, they can make things so simple that a tear comes to your eye, and you rush off, hat in hand, in the quest of The Holy Spinner to deliver your payload.

But stop.

What are you looking for? Forget the elevator pitch, as it can be intoxicating: the sound of your voice, people nodding enthusiastically, the doors shut blocking their escape (especially if you are stuck between floors). Instead, do the quiet room test. You alone. Your idea. Naked. A convergence of souls.

“What do you need, Idea”, you ask, “in order to fully manifest your glorious Idea-ness?”

If your idea is quiet, do not rush to speak for it. If your idea speaks but is simple, do not scoff. Do not dress your idea up in Widget Drag, so it looks like a teenager searching for their identity at the Web 2.0 Store. If your idea does not need a Yellow Fade or slider, that is OK. If you remove the slider and yellow fade and find there is no idea underneath, that’s OK, too. Go for a walk. Another idea will come.

Think about building a UI like listening to the ones that you love. You observe them. You listen to their likes and dislikes so your gifts will please them, not reflect your tastes. It’s not about the shiny present: it’s about the connection, the need anticipated and met, a little bit of the edge taken off. Brush cleared, the path made simpler.

If you’re tempted to drive up to your date in the red corvette of ideas — or wow your user with the accordian navigation ’cause it like, opens and closes! — remember that you might be saying more about yourself than anything else.

And then ask yourself: Do you need that rainbow-colored slider on your site?

Emergence of the blog —
Nola hooked us up a few months back and devChix members are now entitled to post and share ideas with the world via this blog using the Word Press blogging engine. This was our very first intro post from Liz, one of our Perl girls, and then everything came rolling in. Yay! The initial theme was screaming pink (Leone by Andiz) and served its purpose well. But surely, back in everyone’s mind was the wish to have a look and feel that we can call our own.

The beginnings –
Back in September of 2006 immediately after the launch of the devChix blog, one of our lovable members, Victoria proposed some logo ideas for devChix. We all picked the girl with the beaming radio glow. Four days later, I helped enhance Victoria’s great idea with this devChix logo set using funny lip spoofs. We were all excited, threw in all our ideas and concerns like too much red lipstick, or not enough girlishness or too much of it. Of course this was a back and forth dialog with women! Then majority wanted a code/programming element within the logo so here came another set. In this last set, we have four variations: the matrix-adapted 1s and 0s feel, the radio beaming glow effect, the simple #hash element and the vertical numerics. Suffice it to say, Neo’s camp won.

After the holidays –
We’re all awol due to the holidays. That’s fully understandable. We nudged and chugged with a few post for events and things some of our talented folks have been getting into. It’s different now. About a week ago, everyone is pitching in and volunteering to post on allotted scheduled times. Thanks to this rekindled enthusiasm, I was engaged and prompted to contribute. I have the devChix logo, which I’ll use to influence the design of the theme.

Theme in early stages —
Using the logo, I tried to get a simple look. This was the beginning of my first comp/mock-up. It didn’t feel right. It had the look of “a cotton-candy-sky-world met screaming blue”. Oh no! from screaming pink to screaming blue! I stopped cause this is not the path I want. I took a break and leveled my hunter. Wow is a good distraction for me at least. While I was riding the gryph, it hit me that I was seeing a lot of different colors. Colors! I came back to the drawing board. The first comp was missing contrast. I could use bold colors with a subtle presentation. Err! Yah! Now I have the colors dealt with. Then came rounded or edged? (That’s such a 2003 question). The quick addition to outdated things of sorts was swirls and warping and an illustration feel. From simple to funky, spicy and hot - my second comp.

Get friends/or not friends to critique your work –
I am by no means a full time designer (nor great) but I know my way around Photoshop and I am very handy with CSS. I do coding most of the time too with Coldfusion and PHP. I love doing both design and code! But I learned that in order to make pretty things useful, you need to have someone ruthlessly nitpick the design. Feedback, good or bad, is your best friend. Listen to the points raised and evaluate it by trade if they’re valid. The feedback I got was that my colors are now too dark and readability is an issue. With a simple color swap - this is my third comp. A total of 26.9 KB for 15 image files, a 2kb css file and this skeleton mark-up, that last comp is now converted to fit a new Word Press template to get the same look.

I hope I also achieved an easy way finding route for our navigation versus our old category set up that looked so clunky. I look forward to the days when we’re able to work on code and design our own apps here at devChix. Cross-fingers!

Work on validations –
It occurs to me that the site can’t validate when content is mashed into the template. That’ll be the tweaking part I hope to smooth in the following days.

***

Thanks to devChix for the opportunity to play. I had fun putting the theme together and thank you for stopping by! /rockon

2/20 8:25 am
Fixed known OmniWeb, Safari and Camino Search Box render issues. Thanks to J. Rentzsch for the screen shots!