Who Is Nikki Jeske?

Nikki Jeske, AKA Design Coyote, is an illustrator and designer/developer living in “the great hill country” of Austin, Texas. Nikki has had a hand in building websites for all manner of animal rescue and adoption shelters, and regularly contributes to the coding community – either through her writing or through her twitterstream where she shares design and development insights. Her work is greatly appreciated not only within the design industry but by many, many animals lovers (and animals!) she helps.

The Interview

ThisIsInspired
You’re a web designer, obviously. How did you settle on design for the web in place of design for collateral or for advertising?

Nikki Jeske
I’ve been creating my own websites since 1999, but it was never something I saw myself doing as a “grown-up.” I went to college to be a naturalist and a writer, but ended up paying my way through by getting jobs as a web assistant and graphic designer and doing my own freelancing gigs on the side. I’ve done print work for t-shirts and postcards and brochures, and I’ve even taken classes for fun on advertising, but there’s something about the web that never gets old. Code is constantly changing, standards are consistently moving forward, and there’s always something new to learn. When I graduated I discovered that there was a lot more work for someone with web skills than for a creative writing naturalist, and because I loved how accessible and functional the web had become, I ended up going that route instead. I sometimes think people don’t understand how important good design is – it makes a difference for even the smallest of sites. I feel that my skills as a web designer has already helped make the web a prettier place to be. :)

ThisIsInspired
Anyone who follows you on Twitter knows you’re very (very!) supportive of pet adoption, animal rights and related issues. How does this influence you socially and/or creatively?

Nikki Jeske
It’s good to hear that my followers take notice of this as it’s a very very important part of my life.  There are so many animals in need, so many cats and dogs and rats and other critters that need help finding their forever homes and getting off the streets, and twitter has become a fantastic way to bring awareness to their needs. In the rescue network and shelter communities, social media has become key to sharing information about individual pets that need to find families. While I do as much as I can on my own twitter account designcoyote, the majority of animal tweets that I do are in line with the website I co-founded I Love Rescue Animals and its twitter account rescueanimals.

ThisIsInspired
To you, what is the most important thing involved in a project when you’re doing it at low- or no-cost for an animal shelter or for a similar project?

Nikki Jeske
Making sure that it’s not only a good design, but that it is functional, easy to navigation, and easy to read. Most blog projects I do I focus more on the design, but with animal-shelter or rescue projects that I do, I focus more on how the content will be and the navigation. To be honest, the majority of people working with shelters or animal rescues (at least the ones I have worked with) don’t have a lot of web knowledge, so not only does the design have to be simple and put all its focus on the animals, but the website itself has to be simple and easy to use. The designs should not distract from the importance of the content, and while this is usually a good thing to have in the back of your head for all sites, for animal shelters, it’s even more key.

ThisIsInspired
To you, is there a separation between inspiration for such a project as opposed to a regular design project?

Nikki Jeske
Yes. While I’m passionate about design as a whole, bringing in a project that has to do with saving the lives of animals is something that I can’t help but bring ahead of the rest. Most of the projects (so far all) have been done pro-bono, but despite that, they are some of my biggest projects because I know how very important it is for a shelter or organization to have a good website. It’s true that despite the saying, people do judge books by their covers, and the same goes for websites. If a shelter’s site is hard to navigate, built on geocities with little to know fluid content, even if they have a real need for donations and adopters, they aren’t going to get a lot because of their bad site. Sad, but true. My inspiration for an animal site is the mission behind it – the faces of all the animals that could be saved with my help. I can’t say I get that inspiration from other design projects.

ThisIsInspired
So if you have a project – imagine you’ll be doing it for a local animal shelter or the like – how would you start that day when you take the big first step? Imagine the day is all your own, you have this project to get underway… how do you start the day? Coffee, a bagel, yoga…?

Nikki Jeske
I’m a morning person so if I have the whole day to work on something, I’ll be up at 7 and at my computer with a cup of coffee (and if I’m hungry, a slice of zucchini bread topped with cream cheese). Generally the very first thing I’ll do before anything is turn on my iTunes (lately I’ve been listening to Jonsi or Enya in the morning), pop onto twitter for a quick good morning tweet, and then stare out the window. :) It’s my way of relaxing and getting into a good mindset for the rest of the day. Sometimes I do get up and do some yoga or I’ll spend a little time meditating. Whatever it takes to put my mind at ease. After that I open my inbox and try not to feel overwhelmed before diving head-first into photoshop. ;)

ThisIsInspired
If you were to visit an animal shelter website and see it’s horribly developed, and then visit another and see it’s very slick and well thought-out, would this influence your opinion for good or bad? (eg: would you think they were using their donations for flashy exterior stuff rather than where it really matters, etc.)

Nikki Jeske
No, not at all. Actually, whenever I see a really nicely designed animal site, I more often than not simply assume that it’s been done by a volunteer. All the organizations that I’ve worked with have all had volunteers create their sites and logos and there’s only one or two non-profits that I know that are big enough to actually have hired someone. So as for influencing my opinion and thinking they’re spending money on things that don’t matter, it doesn’t make me think badly about them at all.

ThisIsInspired
You’ve mentioned also that you develop for WordPress. On a slightly different note, what are the differences between *designing* for WordPress versus designing for a regular CMS or as static pages? Obviously, developing uses different methods altogether, but what about design?

Nikki Jeske
It’s easier. ;) I love designing for WordPress pretty much because I simply love WordPress. I’ve used many different blog platforms and content management systems, and WordPress has always come out on top for me and it’s what I recommend to all my clients as well because it is so easy to use and quick to learn. Creating WordPress Themes is fun because you’re not just creating a design, you’re creating a design that will be interactive and functional with the actual content of the site. My day job calls for me to create designs based on template structures in a certain CMS, and while the design aspect is still good, the mobility and functionality of the site is not as integrated into the design. It isn’t connected and is merely a covering for the site. WordPress combines a functional site base with a theme structure that creates a beautiful, one-of-a-kind site. As for static pages, well that can either be super fun with its complete free-reign of both code and design, or it can also get messy and disorganized fast.

ThisIsInspired
Can you point to one thing that typifies your work? For example, that one thing that makes it uniquely *you*, a certain feature or quality that would otherwise be lacking had the client gone elsewhere?

Nikki Jeske
Design is art, there’s no question, but I have a background as a traditional artist and that comes into play in my designs. I love to draw and I love to paint and when I discovered drawing tablets, it was a done deal. Most of my designs are heavily illustrated and I think that brings a touch of uniqueness to what I do. None are the same, and most designs you see online follow some great trends, but they don’t rely on artwork. I love illustrating designs and using bright colors to make them pop. I bring a lot of fun and creativity and color to each illustrated design and that’s not something clients will get elsewhere.

ThisIsInspired
When you find inspiration – via music, going for a walk, talking with friends, flipping through an art book, etc – how do you “solidify” that idea in your head? Sketching, Photoshop, etc?

Nikki Jeske
I sketch. A lot. When I see something I like, I tend to doodle it on whatever is handy – and that will somehow find its way into a photoshop document that ends up getting used for a design or for an illustration. Music influences me heavily – most often whatever color I’m working with at the time is the color I “sense” from whatever song is playing. If you’ve seen any of my personal designs you’ll know I’m also greatly inspired by nature. As I mentioned earlier, I went to school to become a naturalist, and I tend to incorporate trees and grass and sky and anything from the natural world into whatever project I’m working on for myself.

ThisIsInspired
Last question: On any given day, as you sit at you computer to design and/or develop, how many cats (or dogs) are right there, making sure you do your best?

Nikki Jeske
At this moment, I’ve got three dogs and a cat sitting in the same room as me, listening to me type. In the entire household, we’ve got twenty-three animals that make sure we do our very best every day. Here’s a quick run-down of who keeps us on our toes: three dogs (Spunky, Snarf, Rufus), seven cats (Zane, Akima, Merlin, Cleo, Satsuki, Jacob, Storm), two ferrets (Drake, Nate), seven rats (Meetu, Chunky, Tumtum, Toodles, Twinby, Artemis, Athena), a ball python (Kendi), a leopard gecko (Phoebe), and two bettas (Galileo, Aristotle). Of all of those, only three are not rescues/adopted/picked up off the streets. They make life more exciting. If you’re interested, you can check out their antics in comic form over at The Family Menagerie, my webcomic.

…

I’d like to thank to Nikki for her patience and collaboration in bringing this interview to publication. Thank you for your time and conversation!

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Pen & Paper

Everything starts with a pen and paper. Okay, not everything but just about everything. We jot, we doodle, we sketch, and out of these little creative ramblings we figure out what direction to take with a design and what we’ll work up for a client.

We all have our favourites tools for this part of the project. I prefer a blank pad and a fine G2 Rollerball, but I’ve seen designers use fountain pens and artists’ pencils. Some of us get pretty involved in this phase and bring in a collection of writing and doodling tools that to everyone else might make us look like a professional sketch artist or painter (well, I guess we are professional sketchers, in a sense).

Some of our sketches are so in-depth we can show them to the client and get some initial feedback before we ever even turn on the computer, but mostly, it’s these little first sketches that help us work out the problems with certain designs and put together the pros & cons of each one. As the saying goes, “The Journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step” we could say “The launch of a major website begins with the first sketch.” It’s kind of cool, and also at the same time kind of humbling, to realize that no matter what the scale of the project is – from Nike and Starbucks – each one starts off as a little sketch on someone’s pad. From what small acorns, eh?

Photoshop or Fireworks (or both)

Okay, maybe Photoshop isn’t what you use – maybe you prefer Fireworks (which is experiencing a bit of an upswing among certain designers) – but the second step, after finalizing a design on paper is to turn to software. We’ve worked out a design, put it on paper, identified key areas, buckets, possible problems to work around, etcetera, and now we need to turn it in a living visual creation.

So we open Photoshop or Fireworks and get to work taking those final sketches we came up with in the first phase and making it a workable, codable design. In this part of the project we might identify what areas would be harder (or close to impossible) to develop, and work out ways around it. The Photoshop Phase works very closely with the Coda Phase because because as we create the design in the software we have to constantly keep in mind what’s possible, what’s pushing the envelope, what’s not possible and what we know is possible but we might have trouble with. Sticking to the grid makes our Photoshop Phase lives a bit easier, but even then we can jump and dance in creativity and have fun working out what problems we might foresee.

We mark out content buckets, identify any area that will use AJAX or some other script-heavy dynamic (if such exists in the given project), and get everything sliceable and diceable for Phase Three.

It’s funny to think that some designers choose to stay in the Pen & Paper period even while they mock up the design graphically and develop it. They use handwriting fonts, torn-paper edges, and all sorts of visual tricks to keep the design looking like it’s still on the desk of the designer. We’ve all seen websites that aren’t so smooth and polished (in the strictest, most class-conscious sense of the word) and we enjoy these because they break from the monotony of bevels, buttons and all-caps Helvetica.

The Photoshop Phase is kind of like making an origami balloon – in the Sketch Phase we picked the paper and made our first creases in that paper. Now, we get to work folding it up. Then, as we develop it and make it workable, navigable and accessible it’s like breathing life into it and filling it out.

Coda or Textmate

I prefer Coda (as you may know), but both Coda and Textmate are very popular, and very worthy, apps for taking our little folded origami balloon and blowing it up into a 3D object we can actually play with.

In the prior phases, we’ve identified what scripting will be involved and we’ve got in mind how we’ll start cutting up the layout. Here’s where all that thinking and cudgeling of the brain pays off. We start with a blank document – a simple XHTML layout with key areas defined or, literally, a blank document. Some of us type our DOCTYPES by hand, most don’t. Most of us work with a shell document with all the basics right there waiting and we tailor it to suit our project.

But into this shell we build, bit by bit, what will be the foundation of the website. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t ever even see all the stuff we code behind the scenes, but slowly, slowly in the Coda Phase we inject a bit of CSS here, an additional HTML element there until we’ve got it together. Gone are the days when we think in terms of spacer GIFs (thank goodness) and empty table cells.

From a blank document springs something that can capture the eye, engage the hand, and spark the brain.

As we develop, we learn and we teach ourselves. Every time I’ve cut up a design I’ve found a better way to do something – to accomplish a certain task more easily, to get a certain aspect of it more streamlined. Little fine-tuning things we ourselves learn from and benefit from.

Sometimes we might be proactive and find Sketch Phase or Photoshop Phase ways to make this final one a bit easier. We teach ourselves, through experience and through repetition, how to become better designers and developers.

From our initial little sketch we can teach the viewer.

That little doodle we started with way back there can inspire the viewer to take action and to learn.

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