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As much as having multiple job offers can stroke the ego, it can also cause great anxiety.  Reasons vary for the root of this stress. People will often court a variety of job-seeking sources on the down low. A person might want to hold out for something better instead of settling on the first offer that comes. A fear of commitment might stall a person from taking pro-active action. Being sought after is a good problem to have, but if you don’t know how to play the field appropriately, your reputation could end up in the dog house and you might just let the best opportunity get away from you. Here is Part One with talent Manager, Trish Chua, who offers advice on how to best navigate the waters when there are plenty of fish trying to bite your line.

Question: Where are you specifically seeing that there is not enough talent to meet demand?

Trish Chua: Since we focus on the creative and everything that touches it, we are seeing an uptick in demand for usability — user experience designer, information architect, and even in some cases, user research. We are also experiencing a big demand for developers. Mobile is really hot right now. Everyone has a cell phone or a smart phone. A person who can design for mobile, the UI designer, or can code for iOS or Android is really in demand. The demand continues to grow in this city while the pool of talent gets narrower. 

Q: How should one juggle potential job offers versus actual written job offers? Meaning, you’ve been offered one job, but the one you really want says they’ll get back to you in another week.

Trish: What we tend to have happen with our candidates is that they may be juggling a couple opportunities, but haven’t actually interviewed for them yet. For example, when a hiring manager has expressed interest in the candidate and the candidate is considering the position. Or, when they are working with an agency in addition to searching independently for work. It’s in this space where things can get complicated. It feels counterintuitive, but when a candidate is looking at a couple of opportunities, or in the interviewing process, or close to accepting an offer — it’s really important that you keep in touch with your Talent Manager. Transparency is really important when working with an agency like ours.

Q: What if a person has accepted a job offer, but the job they really wanted finally reaches out with a job offer. How should this be handled?

Trish: Once you’ve accepted a job offer, you need to honor that commitment. If you are at that stage where you receive an offer, but you know there’s an opportunity you are waiting to hear back from — you should be honest about that, especially if you are working with an agency. The Talent Manager could actually help communicate to hiring managers for you if you are still interviewing for other jobs. Don’t accept an offer unless you are completely sure you want that gig. A candidate should never accept a job offer and then go back on it because it could come back to haunt you. Even if you handled the situation gracefully, hiring managers remember those experiences and could impact that company’s decision to work with you in the future. You also never know where that hiring manager could go next, so you could burn bridges because you didn’t have honest communication.

Q: Would the outcome be different if a person accepted an outside job offer, gave notice to their current company, to which they counter offered in order to keep that person. Is it understandable to back out of the outside job offer, or could you suffer the same repercussions?

Trish: We’ve run into that before where a candidate decides where they currently work is no longer a good fit for them, or that they want to look for a higher rate. They start looking for a new job, and then a counter offer will come through. It happens, and depending on how honest you’ve been through the process, you could possibly leave that situation unscathed. The key is to be forthcoming. Being able to communicate is the most important factor in your job search. Whether it’s a specific company, job function, company culture, or salary — it’s really important to share that information with a recruiter or Talent Manager you are working with so that you don’t find yourself in this situation to begin with. It’s important to weigh the factors when you are considering a move so that you make the right moves, and stick with your commitment. 

Stay tuned next week for Part Two as we cover some of the more common mistakes candidates make in juggling multiple job offers, and how best to turn an offer down without burning a bridge.  

One of my favorite courses in college was (no kidding) Operations Management 230.  I was fascinated by the challenge of gleaning efficiency from various systems.  Little did I realize that much of what I learned in that class would be useful during my design career.

No seriously.  The rules and theories I learned in OM230 were very specific to the world of tangible supply and demand, but they can easily be applied to other areas.

Take one of the most well-known:  the Law of Diminishing Returns.

The Law of Diminishing Returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower returns. While it does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production — a condition known as negative return — this condition is in fact quite common.

“But how does this apply to the design discipline?”  I hear you ask…

Well, let’s take a look at a classic paradigm:  the client/designer relationship.  At the beginning, everything’s great.  We dive in and start work based on the kickoff meeting and as much information as we’ve been able to glean.  Things are running along smoothly at first, but as the project progresses creativity and productivity can often hit a peak and then taper off — this is most often caused by designers working too long without input/feedback from the client.  This is universal among all designers, regardless of their level of experience.  “Working in a vacuum” is one of the main causes of designers missing the mark when it comes to client expectations.

We’ve all had an experience like this: at some point during your work effort, you hit this feeling that you’ve spent all your creative fuel and continuing to bang away at this particular problem space in a vacuum will not be as productive.  It’s at this point when we seek out our peers, team members, or mentors to get “a gut check” or solicit feedback.  This effectively refuels us creatively by injecting new thoughts and ideas or a different perspective on the problem space.

But this is only temporary, and is no substitute for direct client interaction.  It is far more valuable to “bring the client along on the journey” of the project.  While the goal is certainly to surprise and delight the client, the surprise should come from exceeding their quality and creativity expectations rather than springing something on them after three weeks of no interaction.

The same can be said for other activities like brainstorming, color explorations — even image searches.  In our experience managing the stock and news imagery needs for MSN over the years, we have found that the vast majority of “suitable image choices” are found within the first few minutes of a search (if the search criteria are clear and accurate).  We realized this because when we reviewed the choices to make a final selection, the image chosen most often by the stakeholder (a.k.a. the “client”) was one of the first 3-5 offered.  And the occasions where none of the images where deemed “suitable” at the time (often due to the feeling that “something better must be out there”), a subsequent image search rarely produced a superior result (except in cases where the search criteria was altered).

So how do we “bring the client along on the journey”, so to speak?  The easiest way is to establish a series of regular interactions where the client is invited to share their thoughts and feedback as a part of the creative team.  These interactions should be frequent and early enough in the project to glean the most benefit — doing so introduces a compounding factor, thus increasing the marginal return of each effort-curve, and by extension, the overall return of the collective effort.  As with any relationship, interaction encourages intimacy.  As designers become more intimate with the needs and preferences of the client, the interactions may become less frequent but more productive as trust is built.

The effect of these interactions is that they reset the effort-curve, and any effort applied to the project after each interaction point builds on the effort before — thus elevating the project progressively closer to the client’s level of expectation.  Additionally, subsequent effort-curves have a longer span — more “staying power” if you will — due to increased clarity on the part of the designers (and increased comfort on the part of the client).  Interactions can take many forms — be they face-to-face, remote, or email-based— but the key is to interact and do so as often as possible over the course of the project. 

So how will we know when we have met or exceeded the client’s expectation?  More often than not, the client will tell us — often enthusiastically.  And over time, reaching that level of expectation becomes quicker and easier because of your collective shared journey with the client.

The Law of Diminishing Returns as it relates to the creative process is much more subtle and much harder to quantify than in a tangible process like manufacturing, so it is important to “design consciously” — staying aware of how you feel as you progress through various phases, and knowing when to “refuel” will help you avoid designing in a vacuum.  It will make the best use of your time, and ensure that your work yields the optimal return.

As many of you may already know, Microsoft has a rather large, and talented, design community.  Their latest offering is public-facing version of the Toolbox site, a repository of training and resources for creating Silverlight applications in Expression Studio.  Their online courses are totally free, and even include the ability for you to "gain street cred" by completing tutorials and earning badges. For more details, go here:  http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/about/

Recently, Microsoft has started to dabble with a new tagline, “Be What’s Next”.  Intended as an inspirational call-to-action for consumers and developers alike, this resonates with us at Filter.

We know you have to build and deliver what’s next, whether you are a company or a team member supporting the efforts to deliver a product, service or the next big idea.  The very essence of our business is to support you in this mandate and help you get it done.

Companies today are innovating, innovating fast, and looking for ways to get the job done with excellence, expertise and with speed.  Gone are the days of assembling a team over a long period of time as your competition may get to market before your team is assembled.  Markets leaders are extending the enterprise by using outside resources and integrating their supply chains.    This capability is critical if companies are to avoid capacity issues (workload stacking up) and expertise issues (lacking the needed skill for the job).

How do you extend the enterprise to avoid capacity and expertise issues and ultimately gain a speed advantage?  The model for this has changed significantly in the past few years. Some may use a design and development agency when they have a need, another may use contracted staff or consulting services to balance their teams, and others may outsource production services to handle high-volume tasks.  The most sophisticated companies use a strategic mix of all of the above.

Filter has pioneered a hybrid model that enables companies to access these offerings in any combination, using a flexible system.   Ultimately, it takes talented individuals to create What’s Next, and companies need to be free to access that talent on a flexible basis using the vendor model best suited to the need at hand.  Filter’s strategy is to offer the best platform for connecting the companies with a need to the talent with the expertise and capacity.

We have been on the forefront of the creative and technology industries and have participated in the boom of demand for user experience design, prototyping, mobile, cross platform application development,  Our service offering includes staffing of onsite resource, staff augmentation service for onsite or offsite consulting, and digital services for projects and production services.  In essence, these are all talent delivery services, each using a different structure and pricing model.  If our clients want to hire an agency that already has the expertise assembled, we can provide that solution, or if they need to augment their team with staffing solutions onsite at their location, Filter can supply that talent.  Each solution is fashioned to fit the needs and requirements of our customer.

It’s a new world of work today, and with thousands of creative and innovative minds under one virtual roof, we help our customers get it done.  We exist to help you “Be What’s Next” so that you don’t “Be What’s Late to Market”.

If you’re ever uncertain about how much uncertainty impacts business, just talk to someone who creates content for a living.  In the last decade, no sector of the economy has been disrupted more. And the reason the recorded music and print publication businesses have virtually collapsed is well documented – they failed to adapt to sweeping technological change. 

The creative services business, by contrast, has a long history of adapting well to change.  Media as a delivery mechanism has been in flux for the better part of a century.  This has forced purveyors of creative services to innovate and develop new methods, techniques and procedures to deliver creative products for new media.  Their success may be because the nature of the creative endeavor requires a certain skill – the ability to assimilate inherent conflict, uncertainty and ambiguity.

Creativity and Ambiguity

If you’re a creative professional, you’ve likely been confronted by ambiguity often.  Sometimes your goal has been to extinguish this ambiguity.  But more and more, ambiguity is an unavoidable part of design. Things just move too quickly, and are too complex, for full certainty in the practice of design. 

Ambiguity may be a condition that persists during the design process, or it may be manifest in design itself. Let’s talk about the former first. 

Ambiguity in the design process can take many, many forms.  It can arise from a deficit of requirements, a lack of clarity in defining requirements or lack of consensus on what requirements ought to be.  It can arise from flawed communication between the customer and the designer, or among different functional groups within a design team.  It can arise from project realities, such as lack of time or access to critical information about the project.  It can arise from a lack of preparation or research.  It can arise from technical complexity.  It can arise from choices and tradeoffs designers must make where there’s no clear or obvious solution.  It can even arise from process itself, for instance when design iteration introduces ambiguity about requirements that were previously thought to be clear.

Ambiguity in this context is almost always considered a risk that threatens success.  But it’s also common and nearly impossible to avoid. 

Teams that confront ambiguity must ask themselves how best to manage it, how the negative effects of ambiguity should be mitigated, and if it’s possible to use it to their advantage.  Without inevitable ambiguities, if every project were managed as a rigid march to inalienable requirements, the discovery that’s inherent in design wouldn’t have an opportunity to flourish.  Innovation can be uncomfortable, but if the end result is a better product, users of the product will benefit.

Now let’s talk about ambiguity that’s manifest in the design itself.  This kind of ambiguity actually has much more potential to be positive. 

Almost no digital product is created entirely to serve machines.  There’s almost always a human end user, even when there are layers of machine interactions between the provider and consumer of a product.  And humans are notoriously imprecise.  Ambiguity, both of thought and of purpose, is a fundamental facet of the human condition. 

Designers of digital products and services increasingly must confront this reality by accommodating human ambiguity in the design itself.  This is not just a question of acknowledging the impossibility of predicting all possible use cases.  Designing for ambiguity means creating dynamic systems that adapt.

An Example of Designing for Ambiguity

There’s an instructive recent example of designing for ambiguity that could have a profound impact on a common behavior that has become an integral part of most people’s lives – Internet search.

Google recently introduced a product they call Instant.  Before Instant, every Internet search engine featured a common basic interface – enter text into a form field and click a button.  But what if you didn’t know what you wanted?  What if you thought you knew but weren’t sure?  In other words, what if your goal was ambiguous?

With a seemingly minor interface tweak – results now populate with each character typed - Google has made the search interaction model profoundly more dynamic. If you goal is ambiguous, no problem, just start typing, and the predictive search engine will start guessing what you want.

This design accommodates ambiguity much more efficiently and holistically than the standard but aging design it replaced.  Users can explore the meaning space around what they are seeking instead of having to guess what will produce the correct result.  You might find something you didn’t know you were looking for.  You might find many things closely related to your original thought that deepen your understanding of it. 

Strategies for Accommodating Ambiguity

As a design professional, or an organization that practices design, it pays to embrace ambiguity, or at least confront it head-on.   Here are some tips:

• Focus on goals.  As a precision discipline, task analysis is comfortingly scientific.  But goal-directed design is a better way to accommodate and provide for ambiguities in execution and implementation.
• Iterate a lot.  Iterative design surfaces both ambiguities and the design solutions that can accommodate them.
• Launch and layer. As Google Instant shows, there’s always room for innovation – even with the most successful and mature products and services.  Incorporate that philosophy into the launch process by getting the product in front of users early so they can show you how to refine it.  Expect that the design will not be perfect at launch, provide for continuous improvement.
• Build adaptable systems that don’t force users down a single path.
• What happens offline is just as important as what happens online.  When designing, think about the entirety of the interaction, not just the part that the system or application facilitates.
• Design for ecosystems that are composed of many different applications and subsystems.  Users don’t always perceive themselves interacting with a specific system as much as they perceive themselves as agents within an ecosystem.

Ambiguity is inevitable and it’s not going away.  In fact, it will very likely increase as technology evolves.  Innovations like Google Instant will introduce their own new ambiguities that will require adjustment and adaptation.  So the cycle continues; innovations will spawn myriad new design challenges, each of which represents an opportunity for a designer comfortable with ambiguity.

How does your organization address ambiguity?  We’d love to compare notes, hear feedback or exchange tips in the comments, or on twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Khoi Vinh has been touting Grid Layouts for years. From his efforts there have been many, many solutions to helping people use Grid layouts successfully. Thanks to a brilliant idea of Jon Hicks and code execution by Teevio, Grid Layout JS is now available.

The Grid Layout Javascript enables web-developers to stick to a Grid Layout quickly and simply by including the Grid Layouts Javascript file and simple XHTML code. Currently, the Grid Layouts Javascript relies on jQuery.

Additional resources for grid layouts:

• The Grid System : an ever-growing resource where graphic designers can learn about grid systems, the golden ratio and baseline grids.
• Myths and Misconceptions about Grid Systems

As marketing is increasingly dominated by digital delivery channels – and as the separation between marketing, product management, customer communication and content continues to blur – businesses are skill-challenged.  Most initiatives now have a strong digital component.  Yet top digital talent is truly difficult to find.

“Hire an expert” is the clarion call of some enterprises, which are typically dominated by boomer-generation managers who came into this world before television was invented.  Try as they might, many of these leaders do not have the digital DNA to adapt quickly to developing technologies and digital opportunities.  When Twitter broke onto the scene in 2007, there were no Twitter experts to hire!  When Microsoft developed and launched the now-defunct Kin mobile phone, presumably they hired nothing but mobile experts.  Yet they still failed to bring a successful product to market.

Hiring an expert is not a solution to the digital conundrum.  Instead, organizations must focus on their process and the efficacy of their talent and their teams.

Digital is Difficult! 

As if the pace of change in technology and resultant marketing channels is not enough of a challenge, the world of work is changing too.  How, when and where work is done has changed dramatically in the last ten years.  We have four generations working together who bring a vastly different and wide range of values and expectations. Millennials have grown up digital, with productivity tools, social and mobile communication a central part of their lives nearly from birth. Their expectations about work and the way they blend work, life, personal interests, and learning are unprecedented.

The brains of these so-called Digital Natives are well-adapted to these technological and social changes.  But the organizational structures of the companies they work for are not so well adapted. Herein lies the challenge and the opportunity.

Being Digital: Critical Success Factors

Hard work, brains, maturity and luck still play major roles in the successful digital professional as they have through the ages.  But, in my experience, there are certain key skills that top digital talent has, and these skills enable them to thrive and be successful almost regardless of the team they are playing on or the product they are supporting.  Hire more of these talented dynamos, and you will magnify your success – overlook them because they lack “expertise” and you may doom yourself to a series of failures.

These skills include multidisciplinarianism, true collaboration skills, and the willingness to fail.  Let’s focus on Multidisciplinarianism for the remainder of this article, and we’ll cover other key skills in future editions. 

Dubbed the Digital M.D., this person has a variety of skills and interests.  They have a well-balanced perspective on problems (and solutions). They are grounded in a strong customer-centric sensibility, and have strong enough people skills that they are able to articulate goals and ideas in a common sense, practical fashion.  The Digital M.D. probably also has a variety of interesting outside interests, perhaps in the arts or volunteer groups, since they are constantly learning.

In fact, the single, strongest asset of the Digital M.D. is that they constantly seek to learn new things and are really, really, good at learning.  Thus armed, they are prepared to meet the technological challenge of each changing day without stress, fear or trepidation.  In fact, they look forward to change because it presents the opportunity to learn new things!

The Multidisciplinarian probably has been a designer at some point.  They are visually oriented – they pay attention to the visual presentation of things and are familiar with the tools used in the design trade.  But the Digital M.D. has also probably done some light programming or scripting and is familiar with development methodologies and tools.  Many of them have lots of experience bringing new software products through development and to market, so they’ve been exposed to marketing principles, channels and tactics.  Because of this, they’ve also learned the basics about SEO/SEM, especially as it informs site architecture and information design.  If you are lucky, the Digital M.D. might also be a subject matter expert in one or more content areas or industry verticals, just for good measure.

Put this Designer-Developer (“Devigner”) on a team for one of your key initiatives, and you will likely find that they are able to help streamline the development process and avoid a lot of landmines.  Without a Digital M.D, on the team, you may find the UX designer can’t communicate with the Developer, and neither of them can communicate effectively with the end-user customer to quickly identify the need and a successful solution.

In short, having a team of strong contributors in each discipline is still a fine way to go, but they will be even more effective if they have strong inter-disciplinary skills or, ideally, are led by a true Digital M.D.

Five years ago, what was then known as a “graphic designer” could succeed by building even one set of skills in one industry, for example doing newsletter design in the financial services industry.  Today, even the term “graphic designer” connotes an unduly limited skill set, even without that singular industry focus.  Today, even that newsletter designer (who is now doing electronic newsletters rather than print), must know a little bit about user experience principles, opt-in/opt-out methodologies and the federal spam laws, SEO/SEM and analytics, development challenges in getting newsletters to render properly in various email clients and browsers, mobile design for users viewing the newsletter on their mobile phone, the list goes on.

The designer having solely these newsletter skills would not qualify as a Digital M.D.  They would qualify as a good digital designer in the newsletter space.  The Digital M.D. would have these skills plus experience and skills to address all the other marketing channels of which the newsletter campaign is but one part.

Learning to Learn

This skill shift is about more than just “broadening your skills”.  It’s about learning to learn.  Technology changes constantly.  That changes our jobs.  The ability to learn, and to embrace the change that comes with learning, is core for the digital professional.

Millennials have this skill natively, so they have an inside track toward success.  If they can combine this advantage with professional dedication and proficiency, they have the potential to become Multidisciplinarians.  But the outcome is not a given.

In the marketing and design space, there has always been a role for “creativity”.  Thinking outside of the box, coming up with the killer idea ...  This need still exists and there is still a shortage of true creativity.  But it’s not enough to have a killer idea.  In digital, it’s about rapid, clever and successful execution.  Money can’t buy success.  People – the talent within the enterprise – bring about success.

In the Digital Renaissance, the Digital M.D. is king.  They can go anywhere, add value and gain job security because of their wide-ranging skills.    

The Swiss style of graphic design (also known as the International Typographic Style) was made famous through the work of talented Swiss graphic designers such as Armin Hofmann and Josef Müller-Brockman. The Swiss design style was pioneered during the 1920s and 1930s through projects for engineering, pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies in Switzerland — which required very basic instructional form factors for their technical materials, and therefore extremely simple and streamlined visual treatments. Thus, the style was born from a need for function over fashion.

Hallmarks of this minimalist functional style are the use of:

• a tightly-controlled, mathematically-driven grid to provide an overall orderly and unified structure for information
• sans-serif typefaces (such as Akzidenz Grotesk and, later, Helvetica) in a flush-left/rag-right format
• black/white (sometimes with a single accent color), or no more than two primary colors (instead of black/white)
• use of clean black/white photography (rather than illustration) in most cases
• a fierce reduction/subtraction of elements, to encourage legibility and protection of whitespace

The overall impression is simple and rational, tightly structured and serious, clear, objective, and harmonious.

At its surface, it’s all too easy for today’s design professional to dismiss the Swiss style as rudimentary, outdated and constricting – as a purely visual framework (and a limited one at that). However, upon deeper study, Swiss is more than just the art of placing and aligning elements; there’s a subtext of semantic organization of information, which is an integral part of the style’s essence.  The online world alone is rife with examples where too much information is haphazardly crammed into a single space – often because that space needs to serve multiple masters (content, navigation, social, brand, advertising, etc…) all of which insist on having equal emphasis.  Embracing the Swiss style forces everyone involved to make tough but necessary choices on what the true purpose of each space should be for the audience, and distilling the related elements down to a level of elegant simplicity – of minimalism.  Swiss is about removing the unnecessary and emphasizing the necessary; it’s about a functional and simple use of fundamental elements of style for the purpose of the primary objective; which infers that said objectives of any space must be given a hierarchy of importance, and that hierarchy be adhered to throughout the experience.  In short, Swiss is not just visual organization, Swiss is visual storytelling.

Some have even gone so far as to infer that the principles of Swiss design have no place in the world of “new media” – after all, we now have technology that allows us to do things in the design-space that those in the ‘20s and ‘30s could not even imagine, and that we should be free to express ourselves creatively without limitation or “rules”.  I would contest that now, more than ever – in this “new media” world of instant access, information overshare, and supersizing – that we have a duty to embrace our inner “Swiss” and encourage a return to a more rational and sane methodology for information delivery.  In many ways, the Design discipline is still trying to find its way in this online world.  I see this as an ideal opportunity for us to rise up as a collective voice and evangelize the Swiss style as the “sanity check” for online user experiences.

How can you help?

• Read and explore what Swiss means to you (online or offline).
• Share your thoughts (here or elsewhere).
• Post your favorite examples of Swiss design in the comments (especially if they are your own work).
• Spread the word!

I stumbled across this article today, Serif Fonts and Their Peculiarities, which outlines the wide variety of serif fonts, from the old and transitional styles to modern, slab, Clarendon and freeform serifs.  While I’m definitely no type designer, I find it fascinating to trace how a style evolves over time and how the evolution of typography reflects other cultural and societal shifts. And I just love looking at typefaces, whether it’s a beautiful drop cap in a classic hardbound novel or the type on an underground subway map.

Reading the article on serifs led me on a bit of an archeological dig for other interesting ideas on typography. Here are a few of the gems I uncovered for serious typographic junkies, designers and casual onlookers alike. Enjoy!

• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface: In this article on designobserver.com, Michael Bierut reflects on his movement from typographic monogamy to an over-indulgent typographic promiscuity, ultimately sharing how he finally settled somewhere in the middle. He provides thirteen reasons for choosing a particular typeface. 
• Typography articles on A List Apart: A List Apart, which explores the design, development and meaning of web content while focusing on web standards and best practices, has a tempting selection of articles on typography and the web.
• Thinking with Type: The online companion to Ellen Lupton’s book Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students, this site covers some of the basics and provides a great appendix of links plus tools, exercises and resources for teachers.
• Know Your Type: Starting points for typographic inspiration: This article by small design shop Red Labor offers just that, a starting point. They discuss the “voice” of a typeface, the issue of scalability and even give suggestions on what subjects to search for in the library to find the most thought-provoking, interesting old posters (like 1930s American boxing posters or communist propaganda pieces) for typographic inspiration.
• Open Type: A blog from German designer and author Ralf Herrmann covering everything from webfonts on the iPad to display ampersands.
• Typography articles on AIGA: And of course, AIGA has an enticing array of articles like Lettering Grows in Brooklyn and Lights, Camera, Helvetica.

As a web designer, are you a strict adherent to the school of “above the fold,” or more of a rebel (with a cause)? What about your clients? What side of the fold do they stand on?

Signal vs. Noise (the blog from 37signals), posted this great image and conversation starter from Paddy Donnelly, a user experience designer, information architect and blogger:

What’s your take? Is the ‘above the fold’ rule still one to live by, or is this one rule that’s made to be broken?