Christopher Butler

9:01 am • 27 March 2010

I traveled to Providence on Tuesday to visit RISD and participate as a reviewer for the Graphic Design department’s annual portfolio reviews. I had some time before the event started, so I poked around campus a bit and visited one of my favorite spots from when I was a student there—the Nature Lab.

10:17 am • 18 March 2010

The Unfinished Nature of the Blog Format

In my last post about mad scientist bloggers, I was exploring the idea of a way to approach blog writing that is true to form for some people, and also true to the format of a blog. This one continues the idea a bit…

In terms of being true to form, some people are going to be more inclined to the mad scientist approach—particularly those who naturally process their thinking by writing and who’s thinking influences their surrounding community (whether a corporate one or not). This kind of person is probably already inclined to keep a personal journal, a sketchbook, have a pen pal, tack up inspirational stuff in their workspace, and the like. These things, in and of themselves, are never finished, but represent a process of thinking; the most recent entry being a manifestation of their creator’s most current thinking.

This inspiration board used to hang in the main room of our office in Carrboro. We called it the “paper internet.”

Format, on the other hand, is different consideration. The word “blog” itself is a mashup of “web” and “log”—a log being a sequentially written record of events. Theoretically, you could open a written log to the last page and see the most current event.

This “Diary for the South Seas” was kept in 1839.

Similarly, the blog format tends to place the most recent entry at the top, with previous entries cascading in reverse chronological order. This format places emphasis on the current and, by preserving the previous entries, enables a retrospective reader to trace threads of thought backward. Those that follow the blog can experience the forward-moving threads of thought in real-time, as they are posted by the author.

The idea of a blog tracing thought processes brought the scene from Donnie Darko in which he follows those 4th dimensional time paths that protrude from his chest to mind. I couldn’t find the specific clip, but it’s briefly shown in this trailer at 0:29.

I really think that the blog format itself benefits from the unfinished. Though some blogs may have set periods of activity for various reasons, the format naturally assumes that one post will follow another, or, in other words, that posts could be figuratively separated by commas, rather than periods. Of course, this is only one way of handling a blog, but it happens to be the way that most of the writers I pay closest attention to do it.

11:03 am • 12 March 2010 • 1 note

The “Mad Scientist” Blogger

Many of our agency friends have been blogging for a few years now, but it’s been about as effective a strategy as attending a networking mixer; most companies know instinctively that they need to be there, but they just don’t know exactly why, what they will bring to the conversation, or what they’ll do with the experience. As a result, many agency blogs are pretty unfocused. Some are mostly “neat stuff” aggregators, while others are “innovationspeak” engines running on the Taco Bell model—you know, same words, different combinations. Few actually know what they’re about.

This month’s upcoming newsletter is going to be about how to improve your blog—make it accurately represent your firm, educate your prospects, and generate new interest in what you offer. In the meantime though, I’ve been thinking about a way that some agencies have used their blog that I call the “mad scientist” strategy. Let me explain…

The Iceberg Theory

This image comes from my presentation on writing for business called Professional Writing
for the Unprofessional Writer.

First, I need to apply the iceberg theory—the idea that good writing should only reveal about one eighth of a writer’s knowledge of the subject—to your blogging strategy. Peter Turchi, in his book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, quotes Hemingway on the concept of the “literary” iceberg:

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows… If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of all those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them… [But] if a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A corporate blog should reinforce this idea. I believe that the value of a blog is in the long-term relationship that is built between it’s author and readers. Blogs take a cumulative approach to tell an ongoing story with many short posts. They are relational. When someone subscribes to a blog, they are making a commitment to getting to know you—one they can break at any point (and are likely to) when a blog loses or never develops focus. The story that is told by a blog, though, is one that, when looked at in retrospect, leaves an impression of the writer’s interest and expertise on the reader. At any point in time, I can look at some of the blogs I read regularly and have a sense for who the authors are and what they’re about. The seven eighths of the “iceberg” are in that impression, while the one eighth is in each individual post. This is why a blog that is focused tightly by a firm’s positioning will be more effective that a “generalist” blog. It will slowly describe that positioning through posts that cover thoughts about practice, new ideas, application of expertise, and the like.

But What About…?

There is an exception to this; you may already be thinking of one. What about those bloggers that write so often that their blog is more of a written document of their thinking—as expansive of or peripheral to their core discipline as it may be—than a deliberately considered marketing tool? There are many, many bloggers like this; you might describe their blogs as “unfocused.” In fact, the blogs I look forward to reading most are blogs of this kind. But that’s because they arefocused, just not in an immediately discernible way. I call the authors of these blogs “mad scientists” because their creative license, freedom to experiment and ask “dumb” questions, latitude, and diversity of content reinforce my perception of them as profound thinkers, which in turn reinforces my trust in the quality of their firm’s work. They probably don’t talk about work they’ve done as much as work they want to do. They probably talk about tomorrow more than yesterday. They don’t use much marketing language. And they never try to sell “innovation.”

Design is one of those disciplines that must aggregate knowledge from a wide range of other disciplines in order to properly inform its execution. In turn, good designers are deep thinkers and lifelong students of other areas of knowledge. So it tends to be the case that every good firm has a “mad scientist” on staff, either in a particular person or personified by a stated and supported core value of practice. This person’s thinking influence the kind of client a firm attracts, the kind of work it does, and the kind of people that come there to work. A person who fits this description should probably be one of your active bloggers because the ongoing story they tell will be an extremely valuable one to the perception of your firm as a thoughtful, cutting edge practice with a vision to guide its clients into the future.

Examples

Here are a few people I read that fit in with the “mad scientist” description (in no particular order other than how they come up in my feed reader): David Sherwin, Jack Cheng, Paul Isakson,Russell Davies, Jonathan Harris, Michael Babwahsingh, Steven Frank, and Craig Mod.

11:39 am • 10 March 2010 • 1 note

"I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?"

— Steve Portigal, from a fascinating discussion transposed here.

1:03 pm • 6 March 2010 • 5 notes

The web—the entire web, including every individual website in it, even yours—is a work in progress. Once the initial planning, design, development and testing of a website is complete, there’s actually plenty more to be done. So before you schedule that vacation, make sure you’ve taken into account the content entry and go-live process, as well as the schedule you plan to follow moving forward with your website content strategy. Content entry? Go live? Content Strategy? If you’re hearing this for the first time, then stick around. This article is for you.

Last month, I began our short series on How a Website is Built by covering those initial planning and production phases, describing in detail how we prototype, design, build and test a website. This month, I’ll finish up the series by covering the last steps that occur before a site is launched and then some thoughts on the ongoing life of your website. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get right to it…