Left Brain Right Brain

Wherever I’ve worked in the past, there’s always been ‘issues’ about structuring client data to make it easy for the Design team to get at and share. An example: Back in the 90’s, I worked for an agency where one of my colleagues method of storing client data was to save everything to his desktop then, when his desktop was covered in icons, save the contents of the desktop in a directory called ‘desktop’ which he’d then keep on his (you guessed it) desktop! When he was away it was a fucking nightmare trying to find stuff if an old client called up.

The rest of us therefore took it upon ourselves to formulate a client drive directory structure which we’d adhere to for every client. Its proved so easy to implement and use I’ve suggested its implementation at every place I’ve worked at since and I thought I’d share it with you and maybe get your suggestions on ways to tweak it or better it.

First of all is to get a private share setup to lock off the rest of the company – you don’t want Chardonnay from HR stumbling into your carefully organised structure and dropping files off left right and centre. Obviously, if you’re implementing this as a freelancer then you’re pretty much safe.

The first level of directories should be the names of your clients. Simply that, nothing else.

Within each client directory you create a new directory for every seperate project you’ve done/are doing/are about to start for that client.

So far, so pretty obvious I suspect. I’d be surprised if most designers didn’t do this. However, the next stage is where the difference lies. A lot of design teams and freelance designers I’ve worked with in the past simply chuck everything to do with that project in the project directory and hence are making life more tricky than it needs to be.

My next level is comprised of four directories; first is the Production directory. In fact, most of the time this isn’t even a directory its actually a shortcut to a corresponding directory on my local web server. As its a production directory, this is obviously where all files that make up the resultant website live.

Next up is a directory called Documentation. In this directory I have a number of sub-directories:

1. Content. This is where I place all the textual content that pertains to the project. I also keep a very simple spreadsheet file that I use to track versions of the same file. I would recommend making the date and a number part of the file name e.g. homepagecontent_23_3_05_v1.doc and then if the client sent an update to the content for that section I would create another file like so: homepagecontent_28_3_05_v2.doc
2. Technical. In this directory I keep all the details of the technical info I may need for this project such as FTP details, database connection string usernames, passwords etc. I also keep wireframes, workflows and any usability reports in this directory, possibly in sub-directories of their own.
3. Correspondance. This is where I keep all formal correspondance such as job spec, the completed brief, client sign-off sheets, invoices, colour specs, font specs etc

Next up is the Source directory. In this directory I create a sub-directory that corresponds to every single source filetype created during the course of the project. So typical sub-directories may be: PSD, EPS, FLA. NB: No outputted flat files must be in here. If they’re outputted files they should be somewhere else, probably the Production directory. Really, the sub-directories in this directory are completley dependant on the project you’re working on e.g. you won’t need a FLA directory if you’re not going to use Flash. The only constant for this directory is the Concepts directory where you store the source files that are used to create the design concepts.

Lastly is the Imagery directory. In this directory there are three sub-directories:

1. Stock. In here (obviously) I put all the stock imagery I get whether it comes from the client or whether I’ve sourced it myself. I also maintain a file naming system for my files in this directory e.g. sxc_800_600_72_100891234.jpg which to me indicates that the file came from stock.xchng that its dimensions are 800×600 and its resolution is 72. The long string of numbers is simply the filename as it was on the site I got it from. I also maintain a simple spreadsheet that lists the exact URI of the file on the originating stock site (if applicable).
2. Flat_logo. I keep all the flattened versions of any logos associated with the projcet in this directory, whether this is a logo I helped with or whether it comes from an external source.
3. Flat_concepts. Similar to the above except these are flattened versions of any design concepts associated with the project. I also insist on a good file naming structure for this directory e.g. aboutus_kl_v1.png which lists the name of the section the design concept relates to, the initials of the designer and the version of this concept.

This structure meets my needs very well and always has. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts, how you do things, what improvements you would make etc. And of course I’m well aware I’ve either told you what you already know, or helped you or simply revealed myself as an obsessive control freak.

Here’s a link to an example directory structure based on this document.

Trampolining! Or at least they do if its Megan! We’d long heard about the positive calming effect of bouncing that some autistics reported so last year we bought a bloody great trampoline, replete with safety cage and she loved it. Today is the first day she can use it since last year as the weather has suddenly broken into Spring one week early.

Supposedly, as the parent of a autistic child I should fall to my knees and sob uncontrollably when I consider the ‘personal tradgedy’ of how ‘the disease’ of autism has ‘blighted’ my life. Excuse me if I don’t won’t you? This generation has more than its fair share of ‘pity-poor-me’s’ a lot of whom reside in the parental movement to cure autism. A movement driven by the greed of snake oil salesmen and fed on the ignorance of parents looking for a way out of what society tells them is a terrible plight.

These movements usually centre around what caused their childs autism and how they can fix it. In the eyes of society who tells them autism is ‘an epidemic’ they don’t see their child, they see the difference and they only see it negatively. The two main targets of parental ire these days are vaccines and mercury, mostly linked together.

Time to be honest : I don’t know that vaccines are definitely safe. I do however think that the evidence is conclusive against vaccines causing autism. Of course, these modern day crusaders in the cure camp aren’t interested in evidence. Without vaccines, without Mercury they have no enemy to rail against, no foe to overcome – except their own children of course. Personally I don’t believe that anything other than single vaccines are safe myself. Triple jabs are, in my opinion, too much for some kids. I think the DTP jab may have triggered Megans autism. Note that ‘trigger’ is not the same as ’caused’. We believe Megans potential for autism was always there. I believe the same is true for any autistic child.

And so, it was with interest I read a piece in The Spectator by Rod Liddle that explains his belief that the increase in autism may be a partial result of modern breeding habits. Its a fascinating theory and apparently one which Simon Baron-Cohen is actively pursuing:

I believe that the cause of autism will turn out to be assortative mating of two hyper-systemisers…(strands of research have not yet proved the case of assortative mating theory, but)…they simply point to it being highly likely. I will give up the idea if it is proven wrong …but I won’t give up the idea simply because it will be unpopular to certain groups, such as those who want to believe that the cause of autism is purely environmental.

Basically, Baron-Cohen is saying that people with a propensity for autism are producing autistic children. Sounds obvious but if it turns out to be true then its the death knell for the cure groups and their constant clamouring against environmental agents being the sole cause.

Liddle then goes on to propound his own, admittedly unscientific theory, to account for why the factors Baron-Cohen is investigating may lead directly to the so called autism ‘epidemic’.

If we are marrying and having our children later, and men are much, much more likely to be working alongside women, because of a greater degree of equality within the job market and a decline of those jobs traditionally associated with women, is it not possible that these days our partners would tend to be drawn from the sphere of work rather than, as before, in a rather more random fashion from within our home communities? In other words, are we not more likely to be marrying partners who, through their choice of field of work, are similar to us? And if that is the case, might this rather crude definition of assortative mating be contributing to the rise in cases of children with one or another autism spectrum disorder?

I don’t know but its an intriguing idea. It would certainly have some darkly comic value for the cure camp to learn once and for all that its their genetic inheritance coupled with their mating habits that have ’caused’ the ‘epidemic’ that they so regularly beat their breasts about.

As per the title – issue 2 of Project: New is now live. Head over and have a read at your leisure.

Another day and another ‘cure’ group springs up. This one is called Generation Rescue and centres its efforts around the removal of Mercury.

EDIT: This edit is in place for all the people coming over from the Evidence of Harm mail list.

I become aware of your groups existence after checking my referral logs and finding a reference to this blog entry on the EoH mail list. On that group I was referred to as an ‘idiot’ and ‘stupid’ and characterised as a bad parent because of my belief that Generation Rescue were wrong to state that autism was mercury poisoning.

I was very annoyed by the misrepresentation of my beliefs and responded in kind. In hindsight it would’ve been better to calm down first, then respond. Also, thanks to the 7 or 8 people from EoH list who’ve mailed me privately to express their suspicions that I’m right or who’ve been willing to conduct the debate on a more sensible, adult level. Anyone and everyone is free to post here but if anyone gets openly abusive then an abuse mail will be sent to your ISP and your IP will be banned from here.

They claim that its the Mercury in our everyday lives that has caused autism and that its removal from the body will cure autism.

They have a big section on facts and claim support from thousands of parents/doctors etc etc. It goes without saying of course that all the Doctors who suppoprt tham are, according to them ‘world renowned’ or ‘experts in their field’.

However, they are wrong. If they were right then there would be no genetic evidence that autism exists. This is not to say that they are wrong about how bad Mercury is as they are not. Its also not to say that some autistics may be suffering from Mercury poisoning, as they may well be. What they fail to say though is that its possible to suffer Mercury poisoning and not be autistic. They fail to explain the concept of comorbidity and what it means for their argument.

Some autistic people have comorbid conditions such as ADHD, Tourettes etc. If an autistic person is proven to be suffering from Mercury poisoning and subsequently treated, they have been successfuly treated and cured of their poisoning – not their autism.

A telling point in the argument used by these kind of groups is the convoluted phrases used such as:

When you know cause, you can focus on cure.Thousands of parents are curing their children by removing the mercury from their children’s bodies. We want you, the parent, to know the truth.

Note how they carefully omit what they’re curing. The truth is, the fact is that they are not curing autism – it is incurable as it is not a disease – what they are curing is Mercury poisoning. A good thing of course, but very misleadingly described.

However, where groups like this get very dangerous is when they make claims such as:

There is no evidence to suggest that autism is genetic. No autism gene has ever been found and the search will be endless – how can you have a gene for a mythical condition? Autism is mercury poisoning.

Firstly, they are incorrect to infer no genetic basis for autism, there are freely available stories that establish genetic evidence for autism all over the internet. The one linked to above is just one single report. Feel free to search Google or Yahoo for hundreds of other reports. Claims like this do the actual autism movement a grave disservice in their irresponsible dissemination of misinformation. Secondly they claim baldly that autism is mercury poisoning with no evidence whatsoever to back up that claim. Let me be clear: there may be evidence that some autistics have mercury poisoning and these people may respond very well to the subsequent treatment, but this treatment is not a cure for autism. Mercury poisoning, at best, is a comorbid condition of some autistics.

It worries me so much that this kind of spin-doctoring of the facts goes on. Not only is entirely disrespectful to allude to a whole subsection of society as the result of an epidemic, or to be a disease, or to need a cure it also puts false hope into those parents who are desperately trying to help their children. Not help them to be ‘cured’ but help them to find a place in society being proud of who and what they are. Can you imagine how it must feel to be constantly told that your existence is nothing more than a disease?

Autistics do not need, nor will there ever be, a cure. What they need from us is our respect and our help. By all means intervene in your childrens lives to find a way to alleviate their debilitating comorbid conditions but if you’re after a cure you need to know that there is none and that by doing so you are giving your child the message that who they are is wrong.

Before Xmas, I wrote a post about how autistics use interfaces. I noted in that article that the things I had seen so far couldn’t be representative as they were only what I haad observed in my daughter Megan.

To that end I have recently been chatting online to a couple of groups of people who are autistic in order to try and get a sense of how we as web designers could better meet their needs and to develop a rounder picture of the nature of the interface related problems an autistic may face.

Firstly some definitions. The people I have most recently spoken to are mainly Aspergers (please note: they do not have Aspergers – ‘having’ implies illness/disease neither of which Aspergers is), whilst some (and my daughter) are classically autistic. There are differences in these two states of being but the basic underlying issues are the same – they are both Autistic Spectrum Disorders which are rooted in the same set of root difference.

During our discussions, the main issues raised were:

1. Short Line length
2. Colour combinations (light on dark is very bad)
3. Imagery/Animation
4. White space (rivers of white)
5. Small text blocks
6. Backgrounds must be solid, not patterned
7. Single, long pages broken into small sections rather than lots of individual pages

You have to be careful in these circumstances to differentiate between personal preference and a genuine trait for all people who follow a certain diagnostic criteria. The above list is comprised of things that were mentioned by more than 2 different people.

First of all is my piece of humble pie – imagery and animation. Autistic people have no great preference for graphical interfaces with a few indicating a definite preference for textual interfaces and the majority indicating they are happy with either. At this time then I’d say that my observations of my daughter and subsequent conclusions are more relevant to her age rather than her autism – kids like pictures and animation.

Colour combinations for autistics can be tricky. Autism is heavily based around sensory difference and hence some autistics actually ‘hear’ colour (or smell sounds etc etc) and hence some colour combinations can in some circumstances be actually physically painful to some autistics. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any one colour combination that is espcially bad (or good) as, like all of us, autistics have personal preferences regarding colours. I do think though that more research in this area may reveal an autisitc ‘swatch’. This would require a more structured program of investigation though.

Autistics by and large follow NT (neurotypical) preferences in the area of line length, hence the following would be applicable to autistics as well:

Both children and adults had definite preferences. No adults chose the full length as their favorite. Most chose medium length, and narrow length was not far behind. For the children the full length was also the least preferred, with a strong preference for the narrow length.

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb03.asp

Autstics indicated a definite preference for strong, wide margins preferably in white to any areas where there was textual content and textual content on one subject should be on one (long if neccessary) page broken into small paragrpahs rather than long unbroken blocks of text spread across many pages.

Backgrounds should be solid – even a slight pattern in a background causes the page to ‘swim’ badly – remember, autism is primarily a perceptual and emotional disorder.

One of the most interesting aspects of my discussions with autistic people is their opinions on branding. Simply, they all acknowledge its there but make no emotional link with it at all. In a lot of cases autistic users find it distracting and puzzling. Especially where (for example) a logo carries a device as well as the name of the company. Most autistics struggle with metaphor and seem to find it offputting in this setting.

So what can we do to make our autistic users browsing easier? Firstly it seems we can apply a lot of the rules of good design backed up with both WCAG (although AAA may not be possible bearing the desire for smaller line length and hence a probable fixed width) and standards compliant markup. The two areas of potential difficulty that I think need more investigation are branding and developing an autistic swatch (swatches). It should be straightfoward to provide technical solutions to these issues using CSS but firstly we need to further develop these two areas with more focussed investigation.

Superb idea over at Benjamin Adam.

The May 1st reboot is usually swamped by Flash designs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some standarsd based CSS designs in there? I thought so, so I signed up. Better get working on some concepts after the next issue of Project: New I guess!

I posted here recently that Dean had made comment on the IE blog that they would soon be addressing once and for all what the new version of IE (IE7) would do in terms of supporting web standards, in particular CSS 2 and XHTML 1.0.

There’s been nothing explicitly said so far but there have been one or two just-below-the-surface mutterings in slightly related postings.

Today, for example, Dean made a post about the new Netscape beta and paid particular attention to its ability to switch rendering engines which he thinks is a good thing.

Here’s his closing statement:

I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. I’m happy to see another browser built on top of the IE platform to go along with NetCaptor, Maxthon,

Now, is it just me being over-paranoid or does the phrase I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. sound worrying in relation to what a new IE might do to anyone else? It read to me like a warning shot that this dual-rendering ability was going to absolve the IE team from making their rendering engine conform to web standards. At the very least its a disappointing solution on Netscapes part to cater for a browser that doesn’t work very well. At worst it could be the excuse the IE team need to not fix the IE rendering engine.

Or am I being overly paranoid here?

There exists a group called CAN (Cure Autism Now) whose primary aim must be fairly self evident from their name!

They’ve recently started a section on their site where parents can upload images of their autistic kids with a little bit of text attached. here’s a sample.

Aaron is the light of our life, we are so lucky to have him.

Huh? They are lucky to have him? Then why do they want to ‘cure’ him? Seems a more accurate statement would’ve been:

‘We are lucky to have him’ so we want you to donate money to CAN so we can help make sure people like him aren’t born in future.

I’d rather see parents channelling their efforts into raising awareness and tolerance. Not this. This, to me, verges on eugenics.

First, take note, this isn’t about a method for how autistics learn but more about the differences in the difficulty of learning for both NT and autistic people.

Michelle Dawson recently pointed me to a thread where a discussion was taking place on the nature of ‘learnability’ (is that even a word?). And an NT parent asked Michelle for advice on how to help her child who was self-harming. As part of her incredibly helpful answer she linked to an essay on autistics.org on how autistics aquire (and maintain) skills. Its a truly fascinating piece of writing and an insight on how hard autistics fight to try and conform to how the general public feels they should behave.

Some autistic people…. have to do things like decide to look at something, see a garble of shapes, start differentiating individual shapes, focus in on one of the shapes, figure out that the shape is a Thing, figure out what the Thing is, and figure out what the Thing does. And that’s all just to get to the bare minimum of what NTs do automatically, and it’s leaving out things like differentiating one sense from another and doing this in a non-passive setting.

As Megan’s parents we’re aware of how hard she finds certain things but we also felt, as most NT’s do, that once a skill is learnt it stays learnt. Thats why when Megan forgets to use the toilet sometimes its frustrating for us – but we forget about how difficult it is for Megan to keep up the semblance of normality that even beginnig to make such a decision entails.

Back to Michelle’s post, she says:

Most autistics are very, very patient. We will communicate a basic need ten, twelve times. This may happen over a long span of time, as the basic need we are trying to communicate gets more and more pressing and becomes complicated by more recent difficulties. At some point, we will blow up…….This then becomes the *one* behaviour everyone notices (and also the one behaviour a behaviour analyst will analyze). Then everyone looks for what happened just right before this unacceptable and unexpected (where on earth did that come from??) behaviour. Then they decide what the kid wants, or what he means, according to the one and only behaviour they have noticed. They then work to have the child communicate appropriately what they have decided the child was communicating at the point the child blew up.

We are sometimes guilty of this – you can sometimes see the frustration on Megans face as she tries to let us know what it is she wants and its the singe most helpless feeling in the world to see your child trying to tell you something important to her and you not being able to decipher it. Sometimes we have to end up guessing and its wrong a lot of the time and Megans has a tantrum borne out of pure frustration. Its our biggest wish for Megan that we or her could find a way to each other so we can meet her needs better. She has speech therapy and is beginning to use a pictoral timetable at school and to a lesser extent at home but other than that – its guesswork.

So, thats our holy grail. Its also a large part of the reason why I started listening to autistics in these matters as oppose to ‘experts’.