Agency Structures

I'm very interested in how an interactive agency should be structured and how the different roles and responsibilities should be assigned to best suit the both the business and the client.

The obvious answer to the question is that it related to the size of the agency and the type of work they undertake and for whom, but I’d like to explore beyond this simple answer and evaluate the traditional roles within agency structures.

How do flat organizations vary from tall organisations? How do roles sometimes merge and to what extent is that successful or unsuccessful?

To be continued…

What is an interactive designer

Can interactive designers be effective if they’ve never coded?

This question come up almost every time a recruitment drive hots up and depending on the candidates you see you come to a different conclusion.

The main question comes down to how you define what an interactive designs brings to a project and how they contribute to a wider interactive design team.

Designers that have never coded to generally have exceptionally crisp graphic design skills and generally have been educated on old school graphics communication degrees. Designers that have never coded at all occasionally carry along an attitude that coding is dirty and they’d never be interested in doing it.

However designers that have coded can sometimes be very immature with respect to typography and layout. They can produce great graphics and produce designs you know won’t have CSS/HTML developers tearing their hair out, but their designs can sometimes lack soul.

And here’s the moment you realise that if you very rarely get the best of both worlds but in actual fact need the best of both worlds.

Some of the best web designers have coded before. They certainly don’t see it as their main craft and might not still write but it’s there in the back of the minds. They also have huge respect for typography and layout but as a skill that sits between the two conflicting forces that have an extra ability to understand the user and the technology their designing for.

It’s this middle ground that I think marks out the very best interactive designers and it one that breeds from marriage of creative and technical backgrounds.