Rob Goodlatte  

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Croft for my ongoing interview series Three Questions. Jeff is the Senior Designer at World Online, he’s an evangelist for Django—a popular web application framework developed at World Online, and he publishes his thoughts and writings on jeffcroft.com—which has quickly become a must-read for web designers.

Jeff is also an adept speaker—he recently ran a workshop on Web typography for Carson System’s Future of Web Design 2007 and was on a very interesting panel at South by Southwest on design workflows. His SXSW panel produced some amazing interviews on design workflows—I highly recommend checking them out.

Keep reading for Jeff on programming vs. design, web standards education, and justifying design decisions.

There is an interesting relationship between the usefulness of a product and its quantity of features. Too few features—your product fails to accomplish the set of tasks your core audience demands. Too many—you risk confusing your users with intimidating interfaces.

I’ve just built a cool new print feature into Workout Week—the ability to print foldable pocket guides that list your entire workout schedule for the week. It’s a pocketmod–inspired idea, and it makes a lot of sense to provide a workout schedule you can realistically take with you to the gym. I’ll continue to refine the pocket guides as I develop the site, but it’s nice to throw up a quick 1.0. Check out the guide for the cross-training schedule here, or click the print button on any workout schedule. Below I’ll talk a bit on the implementation details, and what could be done to speed things up.

I recently fell out of my regular exercise routine - in part due to spring break and South by Southwest, and in part due to endless freelance and school work. To motivate myself to return to the gym and workout, I decided to pen an actual workout schedule - a list of all the exercises I’m planning for every day of the week. So, largely to scratch my own itch, I’ve built a simple service called Workout Week that serves up workout schedules. Every week the workouts change, and day-to-day I’ve designed schedules that changes things up to prevent your body becoming accustomed to a routine. You can subscribe via RSS, we’ve got print-friendly versions, and all the information is 100% free.