Interview with Brad Frost
The web designer on cutting out showmanship, turning traditional publishing on its head, and why the big agency model is shifting
Brad Frost is not a man for fancy job descriptions. “I’m a web designer, I leave it simply like that, ” he smiles. “I don’t like getting too far into the weeds with titles.” These days he specialises in helping clients move to a responsive way of working. This, he’s keen to point out, isn’t just about making web pages jump, morph and fold as the viewport changes size. That’s the easy bit. Any web designer worth their salt, he reckons, can knock a responsive site together in a few days.
The difficult bit is what goes on behind the scenes. As such, these days Brad Frost is more involved in helping companies adapt their workflows, sales, processes and structure so they can work responsively. Add that to his writing and speaking commitments, and he’s a busy man. “I keep my dance card pretty full, ” he laughs.
First dates
Frost has established an impressive roster of big-name clients, including TechCrunch, Entertainment Weekly and Mastercard, to name a few. Happily, the industry has now got to the point where, at that all-important first meeting, Frost doesn’t feel the need to explain responsive design any more. Many of his clients have already dipped their toes into the water and embraced the technology.
“The traditional model of contractors and agencies working with clients is an awkward dance, ” Frost says of the mechanics of that first meeting. “It’s about impressing people and wowing them into hiring you. That’s not how I think it should be.”
Frost is emphatic that if you’re a web design shop, this meeting should “go deeper than splashy pitches and showreels” , and instead focus on having open and honest discussions. It should be about facts, and taking the time to have an honest discussion.
Sadly though, he says, the desire to impress the client can sometimes get in the way of more important conversations. Those conversations should include, he says, discussing where the client feels they are now, and where they want to be.
So what kinds of things does Frost look to uncover? “Very often you have an idea about their goals, ” he says. “Maybe the client has a six-year-old website that’s crusty and hard to maintain and, increasingly, they’re seeing more numbers coming from mobile.”
In such situations, having an objective outsider present can help bring clarity to the situation. “Those can be difficult conversations to have, ” Frost explains, “and I feel like as an outsider I’m sometimes able to play the role of therapist, to get people to open up.”
“I feel like as an outsider I’m sometimes able to play the role of therapist, to get people to open up”
Nailing deliverables
At this early stage, there also needs to be a discussion about deliverables. “You really need to set people’s expectations about what it means to build a site in 2015, ” Frost says. “And that means talking through processes.”
One of the biggest challenges he faces is helping people understand that it’s OK to proceed without a hifidelity image of what the final site will look like. That leads to unrealistic expectations because, at the end of the day, a picture of a website isn’t a website.
Frost laughs: “Stephen Hay has a great line where he says, when you show a client a full comp, what you’re actually saying is: ‘Here’s a picture of what your website will never look like!’ And it’s entirely true.”
Once more, Frost returns to the temptation, when working with big agencies, to add and element of showmanship during these early meetings. “I’ve seen people paint these dramatic, blue-sky comps and put them in front of a client with a grand Don Draper reveal. It’s like: ‘Wow! Aren’t you impressed?’ Sure, they might be impressed. But, at the end of the day, it’s dishonest to design things in that way. It’s not a smart idea to produce high-fidelity comps too early in the process.”
The reason being that the web is fluid. It has 100,000 viewport sizes and static comps don’t give a holistic impression of any proposed site. “This is something I’ve been talking about for a long time, ” Frost continues. “Historically, we’ve equated design with aesthetics. Sure that’s important, obviously. Colour, typography, things like that — I’m not discounting them. But often, people paint a very myopic picture of what the design actually is.”
What’s more, a static comp fails to represent critical considerations like performance and ergonomics — which have a huge impact on how users perceive a client’s brand.
Meeting client 2.0
The success — or failure — of the sign-off process, Frost maintains, can be traced back to those early client conversations. At that stage it’s good practice to set expectations about how you intend to present incremental work. The key is to agree on an iterative, as opposed to a waterfall, approach.
The process, Frost says, “shouldn’t be based on call and response — ‘we present something to you, you react to it’. It’s meant to be a conversation.”
Agile aspiration
Surely though, clients who are fully conversant with the subtleties of responsive design are rare. Aren’t more traditional art directors hard-wired to ask for comps to sign off? According to Frost, these days clients tend to aspire to a more iterative, collaborative and agile way of working.
The reason is, partly, an economic one: it’s simply a waste of time burning huge numbers of deliverables. However, there are certain pressures on agencies that can mean they don’t always deliver that in practice.
“I’m working with a big client right now whose history is pretty entrenched in their catalogue, ” Frost admits. “So, historically, their process has very much been: ‘Here’s a picture of the website, sign off on it, Mr Main Creative Director’.”
“Historically, big agencies have felt a lot of pressure to ‘prove’ themselves to clients, which can lead to those grandiose pitches and blue-sky design explorations, ” he continues. “But in order to truly address clients’ needs, both clients and agencies need to evolve their processes to work more collaboratively and efficiently.”
Call for unicorns
So, what’s Frost idea of a perfect team and structure? “In an ideal world everyone is a unicorn, ” he quips. “They magically traverse between Ruby, Photoshop and PHP.” In the real world, Frost says he’s seeing a shift toward small teams that are doing incredibly good work.
“You have people like Paravel out of Austin, Cloud Four from Portland, yiibu from Scotland and Dan Mall’s SuperFriendly in Philadelphia, ” Frost explains. “That’s why I’m curious about the monolithic agency model. It doesn’t require 1,000 people to make a 1,000 page website.”
All you need, he says, is time and a small group of cross-disciplinary, ‘T-shaped’ crafts-people. And to make best use of them within a big organisation, Frost advises, you need to set them free on a pilot project.
“Let them — your A-Team, your Navy SEALs — set the pace. Don’t shackle them, ” he says. “That’s the most effective, most realistic way to get an entire organisation on-board. Just let them do their stuff. See if it works — and when it does, roll that success out across the whole organisation.”
From a strategic point of view, Frost says the roll-out should be done by the client’s own people. This approach ensures everyone is on-board with the changes, and helps people feel invested in the new site.
Iteration
There’s another trend that’s shaking up the way sites are being managed. Firms such as Airbnb, Amazon and Etsy are embracing small, data-driven, iterative changes. They may never again need redesigning because they’re being constantly improved and refined. In Frost’s opinion, the days of the blanket redesign may well be a thing of the past.
“Back to the big agency model: that’s their bread and butter. ‘So, you’ve got a crappy old Flash site? HTML5 is all the rage’. And, in three years’ time they come back and do it again.”
He explains that some of the firms adopting a more iterative model are seeing huge commercial gains coming from small improvements. “I’m not saying companies shouldn’t rebrand and move forward, ” he says. “People are just realising it’s stupid to spend a million dollars on a redesign when they could be making subtle changes and seeing benefits.”
Of course, there are times when a full-blown redesign is the only option. To help make things more straightforward, Frost suggests thinking strategically and embracing pattern libraries. This way, the process will be much less painful because there’s already a good system in place. “By embracing patterns, you’re setting the stage for future redesigns, ” he says.
“It’s stupid to spend a million dollars on a redesign when you could be making subtle changes and seeing benefits”
Taking on publishing
Finally, we touch on the other project taking up Frost’s time. He is writing a book — and it’s a unique one. Called Atomic Design, it focuses on how to craft effective interface design systems. What’s really special is the book is being written live on his site, with the code hosted on GitHub.
“I’m trying to be as open as possible with the book’s creation, ” he explains. “I have a mailing list and I’m writing about the progress and process, amongst other things.” This means the community can comment on the work as its being made. More importantly, the readers can learn from the book straight away. It seems publishing — like that big agency model — is facing some exciting changes, and becoming more flexible to meet the needs of modern audiences.
Words by Martin Cooper. Photography by Noah Purdy
This article originally appeared in issue 265 (April 2015) of net magazine.
