(Republished from Carsonified’s Think Vitamin)
Beautiful profile illustrations by Kyle Steed
Stories that begin with, “It all started at SXSWi . . . .” always seem to end in something appropriately best describe in webtalk as “EPIC.” It’s true, in spite of excessive commercialization, long lines, and the frenetic schedule of panels and parties, magical stuff happens in Austin.
Tools like Twitter, Dribbble, and newcomer Forrst have further accelerated and facilitated serendipitous meetings between designers. Suddenly we’ve become a lot more connected to one another, and by connected I mean a variety of things; we’re connected by:
- Conversation
- Content
- Conferences
- Web standards
- New technologies
All of these exciting interactions have led to an explosion in tech culture camaraderie, which brings me to the story of “Design Swap,” a new experiment dreamed up and piped out by designers Trent Walton, Austin, TX, and Yaron Schoen, NY, NY.
Design Swap – The Origin Story
It began at SXSWi 2010, when a group of designers gathered together and bailed on afternoon panels in favor of impromptu drinks and discussion at the Iron Cactus. On the brief walk, Trent and Yaron (their first time meeting in person), engaged in a rant about how designers, in spite of all these new tools and talk of collaboration, still really don’t join up and work together all that much (at least not as much as marketers and developers do with open source code projects, code audits, barcamps, hackathons, and O’Reilly Ignites).
Yaron’s Design-Swap on Trent’s site
The two shared a theory, designers need an engagement activity that can go deeper than 140 characters, a link share, or a screen capture. Turns out both Trent and Yaron also share a love for music and so they contemplated how cool it would be if designers could collaborate like musicians who do guest appearances or come together in single-show/venue bands (such as the new Thom Yorke Group Atoms For Peace).
Designers are doers, talking about design isn’t enough, and practicing techniques alone isn’t as challenging or nearly as fun. For a moment, how many times have you heard “stop talking about design, start doing design”? (waves hand!)
Trent and Yaron describe it best:
While client projects don’t always allow for design collaboration & exploration, we can take matters into our own hands by designing on each other’s websites.
Rather than just talking about design, we want to transform conversation into action, being inspired by actually designing. With someone else’s webspace comes a unique set of constraints as well as a unique style to consider and learn from.
DesignSwap hopes to provide an opportunity to expand their skill sets, spreading camaraderie and friendship throughout the design community one swap at a time.
By the time Yaron and Trent reached the restaurant, Trent had purchased the domain and Yaron sealed the deal purchasing the gin and tonics. DesignSwap would be built, it would be an experiment, and together they’d extend the fun they had at SXSWi.
Trent’s designswap on Yaron’s site
Trading CSS & PSDs – The DesignSwap Process
By doing a design-swap it’s inevitable that you will learn something you didn’t know before. It’s not that you’ll dive into someone else’s design or code with the takeaway being that you learned how to “copy” an element.
Instead, by blending your style into your DesignSwap partner’s style you’ll be expanding your own style and doing something new that represents a little bit of you both. Instead of searching for inspiration throughout the web, DesignSwap helps you gain inspiration from the actual doing.
Undoubtedly you may learn about individual elements in the process and see things you love on your partners site, but you will have a better understanding of why these elements were put to use.
You’ll also get the chance to have created something entirely original, for yourself, and out of the common ground of a love for design that you and your design swap partner share. It will actually be a literal demonstration of play!
We are encouraging people to find partners and start swapping.
Note: Be sure to drop the DesignSwap logo in your swaps, Trent and Yaron will promote it on DesignSwap!
The Founders Own Words
Yaron:
We kept the rules very vague since we realized that as designers people were bound to surprise us in their creativity and think of ways to swap that were way cooler than what Trent and I could ever imagine.
To us, it’s more about the swappers collaborating without getting bogged down too much by details. We both discovered that the best part of this is building friendships and learning from experience.
Trent:
The way I see DesignSwap is that designing on a designer’s website is the ultimate experiment: When designing for a client, you have set goals and defined limitations, but the pride and excitement of releasing your work on a different platform.
When designing on your person site, you can experiment and go wild, but you don’t get to enjoy the thrill of releasing something on a different platform.
DesignSwap takes both scenarios and blends them; you have that thrill of releasing a project on another platform, but with spirit of fun experimentation that you enjoy designing on your own site.
Peak Into the Near Future
Since Design Swap started as a fun and playful experiment between Yaron and Trent and their designer friends, it wasn’t built as a platform. As a result of positive responses received and the interest in participating, they’ve already begun building a platform to facilitate and promote swaps. They may just become the best-looking matchmakers on the interwebs!
6 Ways to do a DesignSwap
Ranging from a full site takeover to a smaller graphic dispatch into a blog post. Here are the options:
- Full Custom Blog Post—write & design
- Section Graphics—Header, Footer, Anything
- Supporting Graphics—On a regular blog post
- Graphic Volley—On a Topic, summarized in a post
- Captain Insan-o—CSS Files, Logos, The Works
- Phil Coffman Martian—view example here
Swaps on the Schedule
- Dan Mall & Brian Hoff
- Darren Hoyt & Paddy Donnelly
- Chris Meeks & Luciano Pouzada
- Phil Coffman & Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain
- Mark Boulton & Joshua Brewer
- Matthew Smith & Elliot Jay Stocks
The Inaugural Swap
- Trent on Yaron’s site: a friendly photo-inspired retro play
- Yaron on Trent’s site: a truly fun play with a bit of sci-fi Orsen Wells
It sounds like they both had a lot of fun and challenge putting their styles into one another’s sites. It’s not only fun to see the swap, but to learn what the guys experienced in their own words:
Yaron:
The thing I learned most from designing on Trent’s blog is his use of white space. His width column is perfect. I was always told that there is a specific width that makes reading easy, but I never really paid too much attention to that until I designed on Trent’s blog. This is a lesson I learned from experience and not from being told or seeing on another website.
Trent:
Yaron’s post format provided tons of low impact areas I could add graphic touches to the post design. All of the subtle spots where I could add a drop cap or change the background color gave the post and extra level of polish while giving me an insight into what a detail oriented talent Yaron is!
