I’m pleased to announce that I’ve moved into my new office!

Address:
Coal Design Studio,
749B Ecclesall Road,
Sheffield,
South Yorkshire,
S11 8TG
UK

Wouldn’t you rather have one that did this?

If the code is working properly (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t), the first option in the selection box will be the country you are currently in.

I suspect the vast majority of the time that anyone fills out such a form the person will be in the country they want to select. In those situations the person won’t have to make any changes, saving them a few seconds, and in any other situation they would just select their country as usual.

It’s a minor thing, but it’s one of those small things that could make filling out a form that little bit easier.

The Code

In case you’re interested the PHP code is below:

function find_country()
{
	$ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
	$country = '';

	if (!empty($ip)) {
		$country = file_get_contents('http://ip2.cc/?api=cname&ip='.$ip);
	}

	if ($country != "") { return $country; }
	else { return "Please select your country"; }
}

A call to find_country() should be placed as the first option in a select input with the selected value set. It will either return the country name or the text “Please select your country” – that way if no result is returned the default option will still be helpful.

Note: The user will not always be in their home country, so make sure you give them the option of changing the country.

Designing for Other People

I’m a perfectionist, which means that given unlimited time I’d never get anything finished: nothing’s ever perfect, so I would spend the rest of eternity tweaking things. Luckily, when you’re doing work for a client there is always a fixed time-span in which you must work. Having this known end-point means that you have to accept that the work you do, no matter how high quality, will never be quite perfect. But you can put up with that because, unlike you, the client is most likely not a perfectionist, and the designer’s job is to please the client, not themselves. Deadlines make perfectionists productive.

Designing for Myself

But the problem with deadlines is that they don’t really work if you set them for yourself: you know it’s just an arbitrary date and that if you went over it by a few days no one’s going to get upset. So you keep on tweaking. And the thing with tweaking is that you eventually get tired of tweaking the same thing: you’ve been tweaking it for days and it’s still not quite perfect. So you do a whole new design, one that can surely be made to be perfect. And then you tweak that for days. But it still doesn’t quite reach perfection. So you do another new design…

And that, to answer the question I started with, is what I’ve been doing with the last 558 days: I’ve been tweaking.

Some of the Designs

So, without further a do, here are some of the designs I’ve come up with in the last 558 days (you can click on the images for larger versions).

How Did I Do It?

So, how did I finally escape the endless tweaking? I’m not really sure. But I did, and that’s the important thing.