(Source: yimmyayo)
My latest article for Smashing Magazine is out now…
How Disregarding Design Limits The Power Of Content
It appears to be a reader’s market. More written content is freely available than ever before, accessible in just about every format you could imagine. If you want it on paper, you’ve got it. On screen? What size, friend? We can shrink, stretch and stitch it all together every which way because, really, we’re just talking about words here… Or are we?
As soon as I ask that question, several others quickly follow:
-Is content so flexible?
-Is content’s most basic unit the word? Or is it, perhaps, the message?
-In today’s reader’s market, what of the writers and the designers who make reading possible?
-And are we building tools that honor their work, too?
These questions didn’t randomly pop into my head one day. Nor did a design problem get me thinking along these lines. It was while reading — for pleasure — that I noticed something was wrong. After experimenting with a few different services that let me save articles to read later in a much more reader-friendly format (what I’ve come to call “reading advocacy” tools) it occurred to me that in the process of extracting content from its original context and accessing it elsewhere, I might be losing some information along the way.
I decided to see for myself by examining several pieces of content and comparing how they look and function in a variety of incarnations: the printed page, the Web and eReaders. What I found was both encouraging and, for a designer who loves to read and write, slightly troubling. I’ll warn you in advance: there are many examples below, but I think they’re all necessary in order to convey an accurate picture of just what happens to content when we start moving it around. To properly set it up, let’s first briefly look back in history…
You can read the rest here >
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“Shepherd”
by John Stark
Harmony and Discord, by James Benjamin Franklin
We all walk around with alternate versions of ourselves in tow.
My latest article for Newfangled is up today…
Webpage Speed Dating
Ten seconds. That’s how long you have to get their attention.
They’ve got plenty of other options, you know. Millions of them.
Seriously, ten seconds at most. After all, ten seconds can be a long time.
Just so we’re all clear on how long this really is, here’s ten seconds:
…and here’s ten seconds:
Does the second clip feel longer to you? The first clip has an order to it. In fact, you probably recognized the song after just a couple of seconds. And even if you didn’t, its rhythmic structure was clear right away, which gave you a sense for where it was going. But in the second clip, there was no structure—no sense for what was happening or what might happen. You’re just left hanging, which, even for just ten seconds, can feel like a long time.
Or maybe you prefer ambient drone sounds over 80’s new wave, in which case you’re probably thinking, “this dude’s so wrong.”
The point is that even though ten seconds sounds like a insignificant amount of time, it’s more than enough to grab a visitor’s attention, or—if they’re impatient, already bored, especially skeptical or just plain confused—lose it completely…
Nicholas Agar
(Source: Slate)
“
I think the most interesting and pressing current questions about human enhancement are philosophical. They address human nature and values tied to human nature. These questions can be frustrating partly because the values associated with our humanity are complex. And the notion of turning ourselves into nonhuman beings—transhumans, posthumans, various types of cyborgs—is new, something explored up till now only in the most speculative science fiction. Some people think we’ve been headed down this path for a long while. We’re certainly a technological species. But this means that we’re a species that uses technology—not a species that’s destined (as Ray Kurzweil seems to think) to become technology. I don’t see how we signed up for posthumanity the minute one of us picked up a jaw bone and bashed another one of us on the head, a la Brad’s 2001: A Space Odyssey example. You can renounce a technology that hasn’t been integrated into your brain or body. If you decide that life’s better without a smartphone, you can toss it. When we start technologically upgrading our brains and bodies, renunciation’s much harder. Not all ways of applying technology to human brains and bodies are bad. But they are dangerous in a distinctive kind of way.
”
…or, as I originally titled it, “Designing the Unseen.” But, this title plus Tim Lahan’s awesome illustration make me very happy. Cyborg’s? Holodeck? You’ve made this nerd’s day.
Anyway. My latest Interaction column for Print Magazine is now out in the October issue!
I’ve reposted it here, though you’ll soon be able to read it over at Print, or, for the best possible experience, pick it up in its native yet ephemeral dead-tree format ;-)
In the future, you will design the unseen. You will design with sounds, textures, vibrations, smells, and temperature, along with the media you already know so well—text, color, and light. You will design environments and interactions that are immersive. You will once again create things that do more than match eyeballs with ads. I promise.
We’ve already begun stumbling in this direction. In fact, today we have the technology needed to cohere this vision—technology that enhances device awareness by sensing, analyzing, and predicting—yet our old ways of seeing and doing remain a barrier to using it at its full potential.
Dan Hill
(Source: cityofsound.com)
“
The local independent store is far more useful, from the point-of-view of urbanists, than the national chain. Research from the US indicates that between 54 and 58 cents of every dollar spent at a locally-owned retailer stays in that local environment, as they tend to employ a local accountant, a local delivery service, local web designer, local graphic designer, advertise in the local paper, and so on. A national store contributes only 15 cents to the local environment for every dollar spent, as they tend to centralise those same functions in order to induce greater efficiency.
”
My latest article for Newfangled is up today…
Ten Things You Should *Definitely* Know about Ecommerce
Imagine you decide to quit your job, move to a cozy, small town, and set up a shop of your own. It’d be great. Nothing flashy, of course; something nice, like a fine hats shop. Yeah, that’s the ticket. You’ve always liked hats, and really, there aren’t enough hat shops out there. Your new community will thank you for bringing hats back, not to mention a little slice of the good old-fashioned American dream. Of course, you’ll make new friends. They’ll stop by your shop to shoot the breeze over coffee around the hat counter and you’ll join them for weekend picnics in their back yards. Hats all around, of course. That’d be the life…
That is, after you wrote up a plan, registered your business, opened a merchant account, secured funding of some kind—whether that means draining your saving or convincing some other hat-enthusiast to invest—found a location, signed a lease, found and purchased furniture, storage, shelving, counters, a cash register, and all kinds of other materials, picked up inventory, worked out your schedule, hired some help, did some advertising, and then, you know, sold some hats. Phew! By then, if you still could stand the sight of a hat, you would certainly know you made the right decision.
Ok, so maybe you’ll start small. Something online. That would definitely be easier, right?
Wrong. It turns out that setting up an online business can be just as complicated as setting up a traditional bricks-and-mortar store. There sure are just as many details, and since many of them are technical, they’re often misunderstood—which, of course, leads to the misconception that ecommerce is easy. Well, that’s what this article is all about. I’d like to give you a survey of ecommerce, from the details—the checkout process, data security, calculating sales tax and shipping, discount codes, etc.—to the big picture. Let’s get started…
Russell Davies (who thinks he stole this from John Grant)
(Source: russelldavies.typepad.com)
“
I think we’re only a few years away from casual air travel being as socially acceptable as wearing fur.
”
My latest article for Newfangled is up today…
Choose a Developer, Not a CMS
As I listened to one of the last panel sessions at this years HOW Design Live conference, I was surprised by how many questions were asked by the audience about content management systems (CMS). They ranged from the easily answerable—Do I need to use one?—to the not-so-easily-answerable—How do I choose the right one? As the questions kept coming up, I couldn’t help but feel that the discussion was veering off into the wrong territory. It wasn’t just that the question of which tool to use lacks a simple answer—most experienced developers have a preferred platform and will be able to make a good case for using it—but it seemed to me to be the wrong question to ask in the first place. The more important question is, How do I choose the right developer? I believe that if you choose the right developer, you will also choose the right CMS.
For many organizations and individuals, the choice of CMS is representative of far more than just a tool; it is often seen as a much more existentially defining decision, life altering in the way we think of geography or ethnicity. But honestly, folks, it’s not nearly so grandiose. If you only built your website once, perhaps such a grand view of its inception might be merited. The mundane reality, of course, is that the lifecycle of the average active website is 2-4 years, often continually adapted to the changing technology of the ecosystem of the web. If you want to take a long-view at the beginning and make decisions accordingly, you’re better off making a choice of relationship—aligning with a person or firm that will bring wisdom and stability to that changing environment—not one of technology.
Marshall McLuhan
“
Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.
”
My second Interaction column for Print Magazine is now out in the August issue! (June issue column here.) My original title was “Post-Desk Content,” but the editors reframed it as an interesting question: “How Should We Contain the Cloud?”
I’ve reposted it here, though you can read it over at Print, or, for the best possible experience, pick it up in its native yet ephemeral dead-tree format ;-) The illustration was created by Timothy Goodman, who has lots of other good work on his site.
Post-Desk Content
What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind that says more about when I came of age than about the content itself. When I think of books, my mind retrieves an image of my grandparents’ bookshelves, which I used to browse after school as a child. Records? I see the CD stacks of my teenage years, collected from local music shops and trading with friends. And somehow, thinking about movies still produces images of VHS tapes and memories of frustratedly fixing the tracking on my VCR. No doubt, future generations will have very different associations. (Or, more disturbingly, some readers of this column won’t even know what a VCR is. Just Google it.)
Words, music, and films are all content experiences that we’ve come to know just as much by their containers as by their substance. I might say I watched a movie, or screened a film, or caught a flick, each of which may actually mean that I streamed a video from Netflix with my tablet while laying on my bed at home. The particular words I use—which all harken back to the distant past of motion pictures—still convey meaning today, even though we’ve mostly forgotten the film we translated into bits. Of course, the same thing could be said for many other forms of content. Books are no longer always bound volumes of printed paper, nor are records packaged discs. Content has undergone an evolution from the physical to the invisible, from contained to portable.
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