The words of media prophet Marshall McLuhan: "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

Well, our newfangled tools are becoming... thoughty. Or perhaps a better word: impressionistic.

*

The intellectual currency of plane travel consists of articles of intermediate length. On my trip to Japan, my wife and I had packed The Brothers Karamazoff, The Jew in the Lotus, and a few other slender volumes of poetry. Yet upon arriving at the international terminal of Seattle-Tacoma Airport, we found ourselves inexorably drawn to the kiosk-sized Borders to pilfer a stack of magazines: The Atlantic fiction Issue, a copy of Uncut about the history of Pink Floyd, a crossword-only edition of Games. Even while I was writing this sentence in my journal, my wife dropped into my lap a copy of Fast Company. (Try doing that with a Nook, and imagine the virtual thump it would require.)

As consumers of information, we've ceased to differentiate between content from a mainstream media source and the words of Everyday Joe down the street commenting on the quality of various coffees. The only difference between the two is that one writer receives a salary to produce well-formed prose within a certain set period of time (a deadline), while the other can come from anyone with an Internet connection, a point of view, and dedicated time.

Throw into the mix tools that let you broadcast not only longer-form pieces of prose, audio, and video, and a delicate tapestry emerges around everyday topics of interest, a swirl of bits surrounding our hunting and pecking for more cogently formed data, which we most often find pre-processed and embedded in arguments that wrestle with higher-order problems.

The overload from so many blog posts woven into the fabric of corporate-produced content has become a pure reflection of what percolates through our mass consciousness on a minute-by-minute basis. As this trend accelerates, we will see a growing divide between simply expressed ideas and complex ideas, and how they are consumed and iterated by individuals out in the wild.

Consider the way we constantly switch between different modes of consuming content (i.e. stories). Our pattern recognition skills are being leveraged to make connections more quickly between disparate kinds of content. This is cognitively demanding in a different kind of way than reading Moby Dick.

A long telephone chat with a good friend who's moving to Pennsylvania. A postcard from your co-worker, who's trekking his way through the Swiss Alps. A box of wedding portraits shared by your Aunt Ethel. By comparison, newer web technologies seem more like knives than sewing needles. The clippings lie flat on the virtual table in neat piles and stacks, and we expend the energy necessary to make the mental scrapbook of our day. This "processing time" to sew information together bleeds over into World 1.0, when we are eating, sleeping, and taking care of our dirty business. The shape of the story isn't so readily apparent. We fumble our way towards it, and can only articulate those emergent stories through the artifacts we've gathered together. It defies words. Our language is our curse, and we find ourselves shackled to the dictionary whenever we wish to summarize these new kinds of ideas. We weren't designed to speak in pictures.

Now, I'm not suggesting that our newfound tools are reducing our intelligence. They're just making it harder for us to sustain an argument with ourselves about how we live our lives in the physical world. As my colleague Eleanor Davies said, "The sheer amount of Online presence and updates contradicts the very content we spend our Online time creating—confirmations via the virtual world that we are busy living in the real."

I'm also not posing that activities like reading books and watching movies and any other type of long-form media can help us to live more firmly in the real world (if they're poorly formed)—but they can allow us to think in stories that map to the length of our lives.

Besides... the individual words in every story always vanish, as we struggle to remember the plot.

Rock climbing is physical problem solving, a process of continually resisting of gravity (and physical harm). In a way, it's a kind of controlled falling. Similarly, design is a kind of controlled failing, ever climbing towards a "certain" goal without any certainty at the start of the process of how the end product will really look.

In both sports, there is a dollop of artistic Yin in our risk-filled Yang, and a similar level of required focus in how you fulfill the work without harming yourself—whether through willful distraction or negligence.

*

When I was first hauled out to a mountain pass and handed a climbing harness, I remember tapping the dangling bag clipped to the back. "What's this for?"

"That's the chalk bag," one of my friends said, placing white tape around his second knuckle. "You use it to keep your grip when you start sweating."

During that first fateful climb, which consisted of clutching at the rock face in abject fear, I reached my hands back into the chalk bag frequently to keep them powder-white. I left a trail of dust visible for miles around on that rock face. My assumption at the time was that if I began to sweat, the chalk would immediately protect me from losing my weak, precarious grip. Also, I'd noticed that my friends were using their chalk bags to mark the most efficient route that I couldn't yet "read" on the rock with my limited experience.

That was 15 years ago. Nowadays, I watch closely when people expend the energy to chalk their hands every few feet up a face—not only because it's something I recall from my first days as a rock climber, but also because it makes me think about efficiency and focus in both design and in life.

Unless you're a sweaty person, the time necessary to remove a hand off the rock face and drop it back to your chalk bag to "chalk up" is energy stolen from your motion upwards—that is, if you aren't resting or scanning the rock face for possible angles on how to flow further towards the peak. As climber John Long says in his very well-written book Sport Climbing,

"Focus on the CLIMBING, not on FALLING. Realize that a thought can determine how you approach and deal with everything. Choose and use your thoughts and emotions to your advantage.... A common pitfall is tunnel vision, where a climber will only see what is just under his nose. Open your eyes and mind to possibilities, and you'll likely find a solution—like a foothold to the left or right. Always scan the rock for options. The wall will reveal secrets providing you stay open and receptive to sometimes improbable answers."

Climbers that are just learning the ropes often clench up when they're stuck. Within a few minutes, their clenched arms and legs begin to shake—what's called "the sewing machine." This shaking happens to expert climbers too, when they're climbing hardcore routes that require a lot of nuance and strength... it doesn't always mean you're about to fall, but it's a major warning signal if you don't have much stamina.

When caught into these types of scenarios, using the chalk bag can yield a quick refresh for tired arms and an unfocused mind. You bring your hand back to the chalk bag in what is called a "shake out." This forces blood to flow back into your pumped arms, as you wiggle your hand downwards, then dip into the chalk bag to dry out your fingers. At this point, you have the energy to groove upwards through another set of holds, until you're expended again and need to take another rest.

I find that when I consider my habits in my first few years as a designer, I spent a great deal of time "chalking my hands" when trying to deal with design problems that were outside my experience or comfort level.

I would sit at the computer and doodle a logo or take a stab at a web page layout. Then, I would go through the CD collection at the studio to try and find just the right soundtrack for the next hour of Photoshop comping. Tack onto that a quest for a decent cup of coffee, chatting with my studio-mates, checking my Yahoo email, and leafing through CommArts for some form of inspiration, and a good two hours of the day was burned up in trying to distract my mind from the active work at hand—to loosen up those ideas that happened to be lodged in my subconscious, I believed at the time.

This process wasn't working for me... the work I was generating was just middling to good.

*

At the same time, I was spending more and more time climbing, and starting to progress into the 5.10+ to 5.11- range. Each climb became exponentially harder, as my partners and I were struggling with sketchy routes, many seeming to lack critical holds and other types of information that could be read off the rock.

One particular route in Great Falls, I just could not surmount; at one key point that seemed impossible, I would freeze and scan for foot placement options, and in that second I would lose my grip and slip right off the rock face.

"You're not being efficient," I recall one of my partners scolding me when I floated free the third time in a single climbing session. With her belay device, she was holding me up in the air so I could shake out my arms out and try to recover from the first third of the route, which was exceptionally pinchy. ("Pinchy" = consisting of tiny holds that require using only a finger or two to sustain a greater portion of your body weight.)

"I can't figure out where to move next," I said back, scanning the face from my position in the air.

"You should have looked first from the ground," she said. "You can't be efficient if you're making these kinds of decisions while you're on the route."

"I didn't know it would be so hard until I was up here!" I said, laughing. Then: "Hey!" She started lowering me to the ground without asking. (Big climber faux pas.)

"You know what?" she said to me. "You should start over. And before you start climbing again, you should spend a few minutes plotting your whole route up the rock."

I did what she said, and within a few minutes, I was at the top of the pitch.

That day was very formative for me, both as a climber and as a designer. The route you're imagining in your head might be wrong, and you'll have to adjust it as you go. But what's most important here is that you have a mental map in your head to begin with. Sure, you might need to improvise while you're flowing through the route, and end up scrapping the whole plan due to new information.

But if you don't have any understanding of what it takes to get from the ground to the top of the pitch, and you haven't climbed a few thousand pitches before, chances are it's going to be a struggle to even understand what problems exist through the climb before you. The more you climb, the more apparent the most effective route becomes as part of your muscle memory. You expend less time pre-planning the climb and more time moving through it via pattern recognition. You can start to cheat.

But even in those situations, you need to be focused 100% on the rock. Each steady, sustained movement leads to another movement. You can't be taking constant, minute breaks to chalk up your hands—that should be a byproduct of being tapped out or emerge from a need to assess how the problem has changed while your work is in progress. When you're in the midst of a well-formed flow, the chalk breaks serve the purpose of planning the next flow, rather than as distractions.

In 1998, I remember catching up with one of my former classmates from college and hearing about their experiences of working at their first design studio as an intern. She related to me the following story (which I hope wasn't mangled by my faulty memory banks):

"All of the designers were really busy, so one of the owners gave me an identity project to work on over a week. I worked on a few concepts, but the one that I was really excited about had the last letter of the logo (a T) working like a construction crane picking up the letter to the left of it.

My boss showed the logos to the client and they immediately fell in love with my favorite. With just a little bit of further work, we delivered the logo and invoiced the client their standard fee for the logo. At the time, it seemed like a robbery for the amount of time I put into it.

My boss was really happy, they didn't have to spend much time art directing me, and they offered me a job when my internship was up."

As I asked her further questions about how the project went, then did the math:

One logo. One intern with minimal oversight. One week. $8,000 flat rate fee for just the mark.

Those who have spent a good amount of time in the world of designing websites and/or applications understand the importance of creating time-based estimates for client deliverables. But designers that work in the print design world often short-change the real-world value of their work by focusing exclusively on the billable time necessary to complete the project deliverables. When estimating projects that yield any kind of tangible business asset, you may need to factor into your fee the impact that said asset has on your client's overall business value.

As an example, we often drag out of the closet the story of Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student that created the Nike swoosh in 1971 for $35. (Even then, a paltry sum.) Yes, Carolyn couldn't have predicted how large Nike would become over time—but it's part of our tap-dance with the client in the early proposal stage to gauge their business direction and estimate the long-term value of our efforts for our clients. We then use that knowledge to craft an appropriate estimate, just as a photographer would charge a client for rights usage. "Well, how long will that take you? You can just charge me that," just isn't a valid rebuttal from a client. (Neither is, "I'll go hire one of those $50 for a logo outfits.") There are good resources that help with fulfilling this type of estimating task, such as the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook.

To see how things work nowadays in a design studio that handles a high number of brand development projects, I emailed my friend Wendy. She's a principal at Quesinberry and Associates in Seattle. She wrote back the following, which added important nuance to these thoughts:

"Some items, such as a logo, I can’t estimate because I’ve done a logo in 1 hour, and then I’ve done some that take 100 hours. I charge based on the value a logo is to their business its long-term branding.

Then take something like a white paper. From concept design through delivery, a job like that will take us 25-35 hours. A large company doesn’t blink an eye at a budget like that, but smaller companies can’t afford it. If it’s for a good client who sends a lot of business to us, I consider the value that white paper will be for their business and estimate accordingly. If it’s a one-time client, or a client with perpetually small budgets, I refer them to a designer who can work within smaller budgets."

"There are of course a number of projects that fall into a predictable pattern and can only be determined by a history of careful tracking of hours. Each day, everyone in our office completes their timesheet. Because every project is different and seems to introduce a new chaos factor, we are constantly refining the budget range for these type of projects. If it’s a new client, we lean towards the high-end to allow for bumps incurred building the new relationship. If it’s a long-term client, we can determine their patterns and whether most of their projects are quick and smooth, or not."

Even if you begin to produce blended estimates (time and materials + asset value), you need to meticulously track the actual time spent on projects to ensure that if you are spending those 100 hours on a logo, you aren't blowing your overall studio budget over time.

Ah, timesheets. Sorry. You'll never escape them.

*

Interested in learning more about project estimating? I'll be covering it as part of the AIGA Seattle's "Design Business for Breakfast" series, January–March 2010.

Tape this to your monitor:

"We'll be more than happy to make the changes that you've noted to this most recent round of [name of deliverable]. However, to accommodate your request, there will be an impact on the project schedule and overall scope, which may result in a change order. We'll get back to you within [X number of hours] with an idea of what kind of impact, if any, these changes may have."

Painting a clear picture of what deliverables and edits are included as part of your overall service offering, and then being just as clear about what client-desired changes are outside the boundary of that offering, are a fundamental attribute of running any service-oriented business.

Many designers are afraid of bringing up that a change in project scope—from an extra round of creative tweaks, to additional features added to a website—will cost them their client relationship. Designers dread having to charge for an extra round of changes when a client says that their design work didn't cut it, even after an excessive number of edits.

Well, I'm here to tell you that in those situations, there is a shared responsibility between you and your client to negotiate the appropriate outcome—to make both parties satisfied with the results of your design efforts. If you spend all of your time working to please the client, you may be delivering exceptional client service, but it may not be in your best interest as a business professional. And in those situations, it is completely within your rights to read what I'd noted above to make both parties aware that you are verging outside the boundaries of your existing agreement.

Of course, none of this will help if your client had signed off on a scope of work that didn't delineate the amount of time, discrete deliverables, or quantity of changes necessary to complete a project in an effective manner. And you must always include in your client agreement that additional changes beyond scope may result in an additional fee (by dollars per hour or by round of deliverable edits), allowed by client approval in writing.

If you haven't done that… then you won't have any recourse if either party is dissatisfied with the outcome of a project. (After drowning in dozens of rounds of changes.)

And while you might be tempted to blame it on your client, it's actually your fault.

On a daily basis, I am bombarded by hello.

Outside my office, there are solicitors associated with a wide variety of nonprofits—Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Save the Children, and other organizations that are licensed by the city of Seattle to ask for charity support.

Some of these men and women are direct employees of said nonprofits, while others are hired by third-party firms to stand on street corners with three-ring binders emblazoned with representative logo and/or matching jacket and cap. In both cases, they are paid in an admixture of time-based salary and percentage commissions for money earned over the course of each day's work.

Life as a solicitor on the street is purely a numbers game. Having worked in the sales-hardened worlds of direct marketing, I can tell you that the average response rate for a direct-to-sale solicitation is 0.5%—meaning that you can talk to an average of 200 people via a printed sheet of paper and receive back one response in return. When dealing with emails or advertisements, the throughput can drop even lower, to mere tenths of a percent. And when dealing with telemarketing, the likelihood that you'll even be able to get a warm body on a land line to answer the phone is slim.

To see the amount of sustained effort it would require to engage an everyday person with a nonprofit solicitor, I sat outside during a busy lunch day and watched the solicitors working in the field.

A particularly effective fellow danced for the crowd, smiled and greeted each passerby directly, and then, with a forthright finishing move, stuck out one or both of his palms to create a direct, human connection with a tourist couple who couldn't help but chuckle at his firm grip. After being dismissed or shrugged at by about thirty people, he was finally able to start a conversation about Greenpeace.

For ten minutes on the street, that isn't a terrible ratio. He may look silly to dozens of passersby, but he was able to make people smile in return and take a moment of their day to at least stop and chat. He had stratagems and mechanisms that seemed to work.

I compared his activities to another woman who waved, smiled, and spoke to passersby on the other side of the street for the same time period. In the same time period, no one stopped to talk with her. (This isn't to say that she wasn't effective... we're aiming for average donations across a day, right? So she could have reeled in half as many people and earned twice as much in donations.)

Sitting and eating my banana and sandwich, half-shivering in the cold, I began to muse on this strange dichotomy. I'd been approached by both people, and it felt like the woman was more serious about the cause she was supporting than the man. She felt like someone who would give me straight answers about how I could help.

However, the man drew my attention and made me smile immediately—but I didn't feel comfortable shaking his hand. It felt like he was selling me on the experience of connecting over a cause.

Plus, it didn't help that he said (and I quote) "Would you deign to stop and converse with me?" Not hello. It implied that there was some form of importance to what I was doing (walking to my office), while what he was doing was of little to no significance unless he could initiate some form of interaction with me. By bringing (a somewhat servile) power dynamic into his question, he implied that I was the one who had the power to actually do something about the cause he was aiming to support. All of this, in a matter of microseconds. Word, image, sound, touch/sense: all adding up to a gut mistrust from the monkey mind, and all but keeping me from saving a dying whale.

*

Hello is just the first line in a long chain of words meant to afford personhood. This is why the use of new communication technology always starts with the ever-so-tenative "hi" and then stumbles onwards. It's a pleasantry. It's meant to linger on the cusp of good morals and upbringing and what you said to your mum when you came in from the big yellow bus.

Trying to create a sense of connection, trying to encourage the next communication, always moving one forward towards the inexorable goal of extracting money towards an implied, described result: this sounds like advertising more so than soliciting meaning.

In what ways can this paradigm be reversed? Perhaps in feeling like the solicitation is just for me (and not you million other important people). That there is a real, emotive connection happening between one person and another. This connection is additive, not just a jumble of bits. Is this stagecraft, storytelling, sincerity, or some kind of mash-up of the three?

How many times can we repeat the word "Hello" and still coax new meaning from it? What are the shared attributes of hello? What makes one hello more powerful than another hello?

I have a feeling that we will continue to apply bold and italics and whatever other typographic tricks we can muster to try and tart up our written words to fall short of that verbal handshake that only emerges from two people actually staring each other in the eye.

No amount of technology is going to rewire our brain chemistry to subsist sans physical contact. (Not until the aliens arrive, that is.) The word "Hello" is just the first blinking pixel in the interface of a conversational tapestry made up of real-world connections.

*

Besides, there are more important words than hello, that denote baser human needs—and that carve away at the illusions we use to disguise the lies we tell ourselves and others.

I sometimes carry an extra banana or apple in my bag, and whenever I pass a homeless person asking for change for food, I offer him or her the piece of fruit.

In all my years of doing this, not once has someone taken the food—even with me starting brief conversations regarding why I think they should take the fruit and eat it. In almost every case, the homeless person told me that they were actually seeking money for liquor. Edge cases included a man who professed allergies to said type of proffered fruit—which was followed by an offer of me going back into the supermarket they were standing in front of and purchasing them fruit that they wanted, which they also demurred. Another recent case also included a panhandler who not only asked me for money (not food), but when I said that I truly didn't have any on me, that he'd escort me to a cash machine to withdraw some to aid him. And let's not even mention the man who wouldn't take a ClifBar from me because he said they tasted gross... couldn't I get him some real food?

My wife and I often talk about what compassion really looks like—both in our daily lives, and in these situations on the street.

Sometimes, it's the yielding softness of a gracious hello, spoken by a relative you haven't seen in an eternity. It's the thank you from a volunteer coordinator at the AIDS clinic, after your session counseling those who have just been found HIV positive. It's the firm hello accompanied by handshakes all around the room, as you prepare to present a set of research findings that are going to shake everyone to their emotional core—both due to the data you've uncovered, and the raw honesty that you bring to your work.

But the compassion that I struggle with most is knowing that, when often confronted with a bold and provocative hello from a spirit that is clearly in need, you think you can see and feel through the guise of their immediate action into the tenor of the spirit that guides them, and the patterns of behavior that they fit into, support, or deny. What you feel glimmering beneath their hello is a destructive, terrifying need.

And in moving with that alleged, perceived pattern—and denying them the help they profess to desire—you may have cast aside that one person out of two hundred that was truly suffering, and could have used your help.

'Tis the season to give books—and read a few yourself!

Here are fourteen books that I recommend purchasing for your designer friends and/or yourself to enjoy in this upcoming year. You can also check out last year's holiday bookshelf.

In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, by Matthew May
I'm a bit obsessed with the notion of elegance in design, so I was thrilled to read this book. Written with passionate intelligence, this set of interlocking stories about the scientific and artistic foundations of elegance—addressing a diversity of subjects, including Toyota, Jackson Pollock, Favi, and Mandelbrot—provides a set of well-reasoned rules regarding elegance that you can apply in work and life. This is one of my favorite books that I read this year.

Emigre No. 70 the Look Back Issue: Selections from Emigre Magazine 1-69. Celebrating 25 Years of Graphic Design, edited by Rudy VanderLans
Emigre, I have always loved thee. I was one of your subscribers all through high school and college, and lugged my collection of back issues and catalogues from design firm to design firm all through the late nineties and early naughts. A few years back when I quit an agency and packed up all of my issues to take home on my last day, the cleaning service thought the boxes were trash and threw them out. I was in so much shock that I couldn't speak. Ever since, I've mourned that loss and been unable to reclaim those back issues (without expending a vast quantity of my personal capital. So I was thrilled to see Rudy VanderLans and his crew put forward this beautiful tome, which was well worth the investment. Now I can go back and re-read many of the essays that helped form my understanding of the graphic design world—both critically and professionally.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton
This book was my first introduction to the oeuvre of Alain de Botton, a professor of philosophy and author of many fiction and nonfiction books, including The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life. In this delightful ethnographic odyssey, the author (with a photographer in tow) follows a host of people from around Britain to understand fully the meaning of work in their lives and the world at large. From biscuit-making to tuna-clubbing to landscape painting, even the most mundane details of people's lives are exploded under Alain de Botton's microscope, with wit and emotional intelligence. It's also rare to read a book where you read lavish descriptive prose, then turn a page to see artful photographs of the subject matter at hand. It definitely grounds our understanding of the people's he has observed so mindfully.

The Red Book, by Carl Jung
"…for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance." My wife and I read this article in the New York Times Magazine about Carl Jung's long-hidden illuminated manuscript, and became fascinated in what it might hold. We just ordered our copy and are excited to delve into its mysteries.

Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World, by Warren Berger
I recently wrote a glowing review of this book, not only because it's a killer introduction to what's happening in the discipline of design (with a capital "D"), but also because it's the best gift for those people who don't quite understand the importance of what we do on a daily basis. I've been passing it around the office for my colleagues to read, and so far it's been all thumbs up.

Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking, by Robert Bringhurst
Robert Bringhurst is best known in our industry as the author of the indispensable The Elements of Typographic Style, but in the first industry I explored deeply in college (poetry), Bringhurst is better known as a poet, translator, and essayist of the highest order. In this stunning collection of erudite essays on poetry, philosophy, and typography, he packs enough thinking into a few hundred pages to cause endless days of rumination. When I'm done with this text, I'll be diving into the companion volume to this book, The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by Matthew Frederick
It's rare that you find a writer that manages to pack the accumulated learnings of a career as an architect and teacher into one slender volume. I love the simplicity of the illustrations and the balance of philosophical and personal content that makes this book both a quick read and a book to return to and ponder. This book also inspired me and my co-worker Matt to start a list of 101 things we've learned as user experience designers... so far, we're only on #7. (Give us a few months, we'll make some headway.)

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, by Bill Buxton
This book falls under the category of Must Own for Any Interactive Designer. Just saying.

Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable, by Nathan Shedroff
I'm currently reviewing this book for The Designer's Review of Books, and I can tell you that (so far) it's the best book I've seen on the issue of sustainability for designers.

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young
I'm also in the middle of reviewing this book. Rosenfeld Media has has been putting out great books, and this one is no exception. If you've wondered how to move beyond personas and build stronger models of your client's user segments, read this.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki
"To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of the mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body…" Shunryu Suzuki was a celebrated Zen monk and founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. I keep pulling this classic down from the shelf and re-reading key passages.

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, by Morten T. Hansen
This book has been on my to-read list for much too long. The author spent many, many years researching the effects of different types of collaboration within large-scale organizations, and what he learned has implications for both the boardroom and how we work in teams—both designer to designer and designer to client.

Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson
Lordy, it's about time someone put out a book this good about managing the most critical part of any web design project: the actual creation of the content to go on the site! Kristina's writing is concise, considered, and effective. Snag yourself a copy of this.

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, by Hugh MacLeod
The cartoonist and writer behind Gaping Void shares his point of view on how he became successful, one business-card doodle at a time. I started leafing through this book in the store and ended up reading the whole damn thing on the spot.

*

Have any favorites that you'd like to share? Add them in the comments!

Whether you’re a freelancer, an in-house designer, or working at an agency or studio, you can never know too much about the business side of design. And in today’s tough economy, you need that business edge even more.

In "Design Business for Breakfast," a three-part series presented by AIGA Seattle, David Sherwin of frog design will host professionals from the Seattle design community—each of whom has deep experience in client service, project management, and design studio management. David and his co-presenters will give you a fresh perspective on professional practices and provide you with tips and tools that you can start using right away.

Each month's event will take place at Il Fornaio, Pacific Place, 600 Pine Street, Seattle.

Connect With Your Clients
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 | 7:30 - 9 a.m.
How to develop and sustain strong relationships with clients, whether you manage them directly or work through an account manager. Led by Erica Goldsmith, former Account Director at both Hornall Anderson Design Works and Cole and Weber United, and Executive Producer at Worktank.

Registration
Single Event | includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials
AIGA Members: $25 | Register
Nonmembers: $35 | Register

Structure Your Projects and Process
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 | 7:30 - 9 a.m.
Heighten your project management skills and build stable business processes that support your creative work. Led by Fiona Robertson Remley, who has built processes and managed projects at many Seattle agencies and corporations, including Worktank, Big Fish Games, Martini Design, Methodologie, Nordstrom, and Microsoft.

Registration
Structure Your Projects and Processes | includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials
AIGA Members: $25 | Register
Nonmembers: $35 | Register

Follow the Green
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | 7:30 - 9 a.m.
Learn how design businesses make money: follow a designer’s earned income for a project, for a month, and over the course of an entire working year. Aimed at working designers and agency professionals. Led by David Conrad, Partner/Studio Director of Design Commission, an interactive design agency in Pioneer Square.

Registration
Follow the Green | includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials
AIGA Members: $25 | Register
Nonmembers: $35 | Register (link coming soon)

Full Breakfast Series | all three events
Connect With Your Clients (1/13)
Structure Your Projects and Process (2/10)
and Follow the Green (3/10)

includes presentation, light breakfast, and materials

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I spent time over the past three months with IDEO's Human-Centered Design (HCD) toolkit, which is derived from the daily practices used within their firm as well as by design practitioners around the globe. In answering a recent survey they'd sent out to solicit input for a future edition, I couldn't help but observe that the chart below seemed to be missing a few crucial points in the realm of innovation fulfillment. I'm dubbing the chunk I added to IDEO's chart "The Long Ow." The original chart:

My thinking here is meant to extend the empathy we solicit through observation and design—and which makes human-centered design possible—and extend it fully through the process of producing the desired change. We are very good at thinking in deliverables, within process boxes, but the ideal process for HCD is more like a heartbeat. Being a designer can feel painful, but the real pain begins when the planning becomes reality, and the tangled mess of sticky complexity that our clients are struggling with begins to unravel in finite degrees through brute-force effort. We can only ease that pain slightly, and help them bear it as they aim to create a meaningful impact.

Whether you're aiding a governmental task force, a local homeless shelter, an ailing nonprofit, or a corporate client wanting to lessen their negative influence on the world at large, working to effect major positive change across thousands of people—maybe even millions of souls—takes a level of sustained effort that is often buried, implicit, in the root of any design concept. And from researcher to artifact-maker to those people who are tasked through their communities and corporations to effect positive change, it's critical to surface those heavy physical investments and inevitable compromises that are part of any implementation of a human-centered innovation. (Read: Looking to fulfill systemic change, along with the behavioral impacts that cascade down through communities and into people's lives in ways that can't even be comprehended as part of any design exercise.)

We often gloss over is the army it takes—both figuratively and literally—to effect considered change beyond the design process. If we're working within a social context, we also need to be prepared if we have the latitude, culturally, to advise and/or join that army in helping to support the necessary artifacts, observe the progress of systemic change, help to troubleshoot the inevitable compromises that will adjust or dilute your overall understanding of the observed problem(s), and consider how the cycle can begin anew with fresh observations to iterate the initial foray you've attempted.

In the world of commerce, this kind of dialogue is often considered under the umbrella of change management, business transformation, and other domains littered with MBAs. In the nonprofit sector, as well as with initiatives spearheaded by various governmental departments and/or NGOs, these discussions are also often considered outside the range of the humble designer. But as we begin to expend more energy in rejiggering systems and services as opposed to focusing on aesthetics, we will bleed over into these spaces currently occupied by the McKinseys and the USAIDs of the world. And hopefully they will want to solicit our help in a partnership to make our concepts real.

Hell is not other people. Hell is being surrounded by free candy.

Much as a child is forced to smoke a carton of cigarettes when caught out on the back porch with a Marlboro Light, my avoidance of any and all forms of sweets came from sheer overkill—that is, working in a candy store.

If you needed a strawberry-flavored white chocolate chips to melt into a ganache, Fran's Cake and Candy was your kind of establishment. Tucked into a dark corner of a strip mall in the heart of suburban Fairfax, Virginia, the store was lined with an infinite geometry of cake pans, what seemed like two thousand pastry bag attachments, chintzy plastic presentation stands you could rent for your upcoming wedding or bar mitzvah, and spun-sugar flowers that crunched in your mouth like sand if you attempted to consume them.

My job consisted of standing in the storeroom and shoveling the contents of 40-pound boxes of baker's candy and chocolate into 1-pound bags. "Have as much as you'd like to eat," Fran said on my first day. So I did my best to prove that if you let a kid loose in a candy shop, all hell will completely break loose.

For one week, I blasted Guns 'n' Roses and Cinderella on my Sanyo tape deck while hoovering up samples of at least forty different kinds of chocolate and baker's candy, from butterscotch to bittersweet. Out of 2,000 pounds of candy, I probably shaved off a good 4 pounds, which isn't shabby.

And at first, it was completely liberating. Until those fateful weeks, I had thought Halloween was not only the best holiday in the history of mankind. I had also designed in its honor a comprehensive system intended to net the highest volume of candy possible with the least amount of effort. Before going to sleep, I would dump the hundreds of candy pieces on my bed, sort them by type into little piles, drop them back into my little plastic pumpkin, and lie in bed, fantasizing about where I would start in the morning. With proper planning I could make that stash last for 6 weeks, even with a daily intake of three to five little bars.

But the uniform opinion I generated from eating so much candy so quickly at Fran's was the following: candy is awful. I shifted my focus to the infinite variety of baked goods, and lived a happy, candy-free life.

Until four years ago. In a stroke of extraordinary bad luck, I was felled by a very rare food-borne infection for a series of weeks.

Ravaged by bacteria that was being traced back to a downtown salad bar, unable to keep down solid food or water, I was essentially a couch-ridden wreck. (Though I did catch up on my extracurricular reading, when I wasn't napping in a half-awake daze or trying to keep down lukewarm vegetable broth.) After dropping ten pounds, tearing my way through two bushels of saltines, and becoming all too familiar with the various flavors of medical technology available for viewing our messy interior parts, I couldn't wait to eat real food again.

While pawing through the food cabinet for a can of more substantial soup, I came upon one of my wife's semisweet chocolate bars, which was tentatively sampled and then immediately devoured. Neurons fired like cannons in my brain. Opiates flooded the appropriate receptors. Ever since, each measured bite of chocolate—just a nibble or two a day, at maximum—recalls the bliss of that moment.

But the process I went through—from avowed hater of candy to devoted fanboy of the single-varietal 72% bar handmade in Madagascar by cacao plantation owners—is something I keep thinking about, mainly because I continue to question (intellectually) the immediate pendulum swing from hate to love with the placement of one bit of chocolate on my tongue. In the years since that experience, I've started to recognize similar obsessions, those dazzling glimmers of recalled delightful days reflected in the eyes of young toddlers greedily clinging to a talking doll, and CEOs obsessing over the bounce at the end of an iPhone list. We are trained by those dramatic reversals of emotion, regardless of age or station in life.

And these emotional attachments rule and define us. Just as I know that I could easily continue to the end of my days without taking another bite of the sweet stuff, I can't help but drop an extra Scharffen Berger 70% bittersweet bar into my shopping cart while meandering through the corner store—for later, says my monkey mind. (The ride home equals later.)

We are exceedingly talented at norming the most odd and outlandish behaviors, with the assumption that other people are just as tangled up in their obsessions as we are. One of the reasons I love sitting down and talking with people—any person, really, whether for work or for pleasure—is to share those sublime moments that afford us the opportunity to transcend how things are textually described and thought in the mind, and wade deeply into how they feel in the gut, which has its own "enteric" nervous system that governs our moods in tandem with our (top-heavy) brain. And part of what I get paid to do at my day job is discover which of those shared, learned behaviors go beyond the irrational considerations of a (fully justified) chocolate obsession and dig much deeper into what emotional patterns weave through whole masses of the human population—and which designers can tap most deeply into with what we realize tangibly.

*

It never ceases to amaze me how many things that I consider personal revelations, such as an hour and a half in the yoga studio exploring the nuances of a set of standing poses, triggers the same sense of self-awareness and release in millions of other people around the globe simultaneously holding their hands above their hearts and uttering, "Namaste." The same could also be said for spending time at the NASCAR racetrack with your family cheering on their favorite driver; or listening to a woman's grown daughter performing her first Bach concerto on the cello, intently working her way up and down the second and third strings with a furrowed brow.

If you told my 14-year-old self, disgusted by candy overload, that I would be a hopeless slave to the taste of a rare fermented fruit, I would have said, "That's crazy. I hate chocolate."

Well, David, tastes change over time—sometimes slowly, often in a flash of irrational exuberance. What truly delights and dazzles us is rarely presented as an absolute—that is, until it has dissolved on our tongue with satisfaction, or we have spat it out in disgust. What lives between those two moments is satisfactory at the time, but only a current in the weather system of our unconscious, barely registering as a tick on the Richter Scale. And the words we use to describe those experiences are either flat and lacking affect, or charged with power and portent.

My friends and co-workers wonder how I exist without coffee or tea, and my only response is that they aren't effective if I can't enjoy them separate of a pattern of dependence. A cup of coffee free of attachment is a godsend, since I live in a town of self-avowed addicts with a pusher at every street corner, homestead, and office. Also, those two beverages do not cause me to spout great affection. And I then tell them: chocolate is a (little) caffeine source. I think I'll stick to that.

In a few years, my joy of chocolate may wane... but I doubt it. That much should be clear from what I've said here. So much of what we describe and share in words, and the associations that form from them, are a dance that makes a mockery of the emotional mind, while our other senses are aquiver for the next moment to break through everyday eye-glazed gaze. We wax eloquent to evoke what can only be experienced in a few seconds of time, then digested slowly, ever composing a portion of our selves.

Many thanks to my friend Ric Ewing, who was a co-author of this piece.

Pick a card from the deck that I've fanned out before you. Memorize the card, then place it on top of the deck. I'll let you cut it a few times, before I reveal that it's… the Six of Spades!

What's the secret behind this magic trick? If I told you, then it wouldn't be a trick anymore—and you wouldn't have been delighted in the process.

As a magician, I can't reveal my methods. But as a UX designer, I have an obligation to point out that the trick isn't really magic. "Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat," says a character in the movie The Red Shoes. UX designers are ever seeking to identify, define, refine, and otherwise clarify what people expect to see and do when they visit a website or use a web application. The best sites fulfill these core user expectations, but the very best sites deliver an extra layer of "magic" that transcends those expectations through how data is surfaced through their site experience.

So how do you make sites that provide this extra bit of magic? Here's a few common-sense notions on the subject.

I was sure the Ace of Spades was your card…

Any system operation that feels like magic must provide a meaningful pattern to a user over time.

Users are great at finding patterns in any kind of system behavior. As Chuck Palahniuk said: "What we call chaos is just patterns that we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns that we can't decipher."

Matthew E. May, in his fascinating book In Pursuit of Elegance, illustrates this point beautifully with regard to how this winnowing effect occurs:

"Suppose I tell you that a sequence of letters has been written on a slip of paper, that the sequence has exactly three occurrences of the letter y… if I give you no more clues, there's no reliable way for you to determine the sequence… But now suppose that I give you two further hints. First the hidden sequence of letters is an actual word in the English language; second, it contains the smallest number of letters possible having exactly three ys."

Per Matthew's thought experiment, the only possible solution becomes the word syzygy—after he's constrained the provided pattern from an infinite possibility of made-up words to the finite probability of a set amount of data. As humans, we are hardwired to detect these patterns and exceptions to them—we literally sniff the scent of the information out over time.

And the best magic tricks function in a similar manner: moving from a set of 52 possible cards to a result that the audience finds meaningful. Magicians regularly manipulate this effect in card tricks by intentionally showing cards to the audience that aren't a direct match. Then the third card is revealed in a dramatic flourish—pinned to the ceiling, stowed in a manila envelope underneath Seat 12 in Aisle F, and so forth. The audience knows that, based on having observed a magic show before, the chances are high that the correct card will be revealed in due course. There's nothing random about this activity—unless the magician fails to reveal the correct card, over and over again.

You must determine the pattern for the user in advance. Chances are that clicking a button or initiating an interaction that is meant to be fun needs to have repeatable, consistent results. Users may initially feel that something on the screen before them is random (meaning: unexpected), but based on the provided information they will always establish patterns to explain the behavior. And these patterns emerge from every design decision that you make, whether you intend them or not.

I will now make this coin disappear…

The more context you withhold from a user, the greater the perception of gain on their part if they receive meaningful information in response.

The magician is holding a silver dollar. He waves his magic wand at his left fist—and now it's empty. He opens his hand, and a silver dollar appears out of nowhere. Cue applause.

Actually, that isn't what happened. This classic sleight-of-hand trick relies on misdirection for its success. If we were staring at his wand while the coin was being palmed, we would have seen the mechanism that made the trick possible.

Liken this to search engines. We regularly and willingly fill in a search query and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" on Google, having no idea exactly what page will mysteriously appear in our browser window. This is a direct manifestation of Google's belief that their results are so good, the first hit will be the best result for your search.

This doesn't mean that the result returned on your search will be directly meaningful to you. But chances are they're more likely to be useful. This is the pattern that users come to expect when using the feature. There's a kind of magic in the yielded result—even if Google doesn't nail it the first time. The Google search box is correct often enough that it creates the correct perception of gain.

Contrast the Google experience with the "Random article" feature on Wikipedia.org. There is a pattern here as well: Users know they'll be directed to an article created and edited by site visitors. You'll click the provided link and load a page regarding "Democratic Party of Japan" or "Hummingbird" or one of three million articles across a site whose overall volume of content cannot otherwise be summarized without making your head explode. Clicking on this link is the only way you could ever randomly access a piece of content on Wikipedia without first thinking of a search term or clicking on a keyword that points to a more relevant article.

There is much less magic in this feature than in Google's feature. For Wikipedia, the lack of (direct) utility is intentional. Their "random article" feature fosters discovery and learning, much like throwing a dart at a three-story tall map of the United States. No matter where the dart lands, you'd find something of passing interest—as each article was written and edited by people who felt said article was important enough to include in the encyclopedia.

Companies like Google are so interested in fostering this kind of delight that they're willing to lose millions of dollars in advertising revenue simply to create this impression of magic. And other websites take this tack as well. Look at Flickr's "Interestingness" feature:

"The photos you see here are a random selection of some of the interesting things discovered on Flickr within the last 7 days. If you click the RELOAD! button you'll get another set of random sprinkles."

Sorry, Flickr—the provided photo results aren't random. Per Flickr's proprietary algorithm, the user is being presented with a range of images and associated metadata that matches search criteria that's invisible to the user. By all appearances, however, it's random to the user—meaning that for any user that loads this page or conducts a search filtered by "interestingness" across the site, there is no reason for it to appear other than the images having been of interest to others.

This feature is just as much of a black box as Wikipedia's "Random article" or Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky." Much like those two other sites, the chances are that these images will entice you to click and view more information about the photograph, the photographer, associated tags, groups, people, and so forth.

Will someone from the audience please step forward…

In all the cases that I've provided so far, the most desirable result—on the part of both the user experience designer and business stakeholder—is that the user continues to explore content by walking through various tags and/or related links to more content of interest. We are more emotional than rational in our behavior, and these features cater more to our whim than our desire to fulfill a task-based activity. As a result, the website feels capable of fulfilling our inarticulate desires. We're not sure what to expect, except that it will feel magical.

Making any elements of your user experience contingent on "magic" requires you to provide stringently controlled contextual information around said activity. At each place in the "world" of your website, users need to expect the result of what will emerge—or at least be cued to its impact on their browsing experience.

As I noted above, users seek implicit symmetry across any web experience: in information integrity and consistency, in the kinds of data that we are provided upon visiting a Web site or app, and in how websites behave over time. And as designers and developers, we often find ways to simplify how those complex patterns are rendered so that they don't overwhelm our users and send them spinning into confusion—usually in some form of a black box feature.

Both Google and Wikipedia are exploiting what Jakob Nielsen noted in a post on Useit.com as "informavore navigation behavior." When users are confronted with links, navigation, or other elements that imply a potential pattern, they have to make

"…tradeoffs based on two questions:

• What gain can I expect from a specific information nugget (such as a Web page)?
• What is the likely cost to discover and consume that information? (Cost is typically measured in time and effort…

Both questions involve estimates, which users can make either from experience or from design cues. Website designers can thus influence the analysis by designing to enhance user expectations of gains and reduce their expectations of costs. Ultimately, of course, what the site actually delivers is more important, but you'll never get experienced repeat visitors unless their first encounter is fruitful."

I would place emphasis on Nielsen's use of the word fruitful. Both "I'm Feeling Lucky" and "Random article" imply through their behavior that there is a very low cost to discover and consume information of potential interest. If I was searching for the best camera under $200 for my best friend's birthday, I might utilize "I'm Feeling Lucky." I save the cost of having to wade through search results, but I also have lower expectations regarding the most relevant result.

In an article on Johnny Holland called "Applying Curiosity to Interaction Design: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know," Stephen Anderson outlined three principles for how patterns of information are formed in the eyes of the user confronted with a mystery:

1. Some tiny bit of information makes us aware of something that is unknown.
2. Context provides some relevance.
3. Enough clues are given to help us make a judgement about the personal value of that unknown information.

This isn't a simple, linear process we go through. We continually re-calculate and re-judge information, sometimes within microseconds, to determine the correct path forward through a website. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in the book Fooled by Randomness,

"…just like the helical propulsion of an actor into stardom, people patronize what other people like to do. Forcing rational dynamics on the process would be superfluous, nay, impossible. This is called a path dependent outcome, and has thwarted many mathematical attempts at modeling behavior."

When you add in the input of other users as part of the provided information—like the Flickr feature I'd noted above, whose data is derived from community activity—even more emotion influences the user's behavior as they progress through their site experience.

 

And for my final trick, I will now vanish…

I've been mulling over the content in this piece for almost a year, and I'm starting to suspect that after all of this thinking about making sites feel more magical, this is the most important principle of all:

Users perceive the most magic in what seems physically impossible and personally relevant. If I watch a woman being sawn in half, I squirm in my seat because I'm imagining myself being hacked apart. And thankfully, I can hit the Back button if things start to get too messy.

]]> Interaction Design User Experience David Sherwin Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:50:08 -0800 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/data-delight-and-user-experience-design.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/4qMegw53xTo/overpromise-and-underdeliver.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/overpromise-and-underdeliver.html If you want to break a client's heart, sell what you don't know how to produce. Bill your client the time necessary to learn the tools you need to make them happy. Wow them with your big thinking and static comps, but be coy about how your ideas can be realized in the appropriate delivery technology. * "Hello. We're from [client name redacted] and we're looking for a design firm to create a sales presentation for us. We've been hearing good things about Flash and we were wondering if we could get a quote from you to create a ten-minute movie." "Hold on… let me put you through to the creative director," I said. The year was 1999, the heyday...

If you want to break a client's heart, sell what you don't know how to produce. Bill your client the time necessary to learn the tools you need to make them happy. Wow them with your big thinking and static comps, but be coy about how your ideas can be realized in the appropriate delivery technology.

*

"Hello. We're from [client name redacted] and we're looking for a design firm to create a sales presentation for us. We've been hearing good things about Flash and we were wondering if we could get a quote from you to create a ten-minute movie."

"Hold on… let me put you through to the creative director," I said.

The year was 1999, the heyday of the web animation revolution, and I was working at a small design firm on the East Coast still swimming in print design and production. We'd just finished an annual report, we were knee-deep in some collateral and a logo or two. This request was a new one to my ears. Everyone wanted a Flash splash page for their website or a Director presentation extolling the virtues of their products through slick, interactive animation—or at least, that's what you'd think from the many sites larded with heavy interactive content.

A few minutes later, the creative director came into my office. "So, what exactly would it take for us to make this presentation thing?" he said. knowing I was the only person in the office that knew HTML, or anything vaguely web-like.

I was at a loss for words. Or, rather, I was at a loss for telling the truth: I'd done two Flash tutorial exercises. I had absolutely no idea where to begin with creating what the client wanted. And I was at a point in my career where I feared that being honest about my level of familiarity with Flash could potentially jeopardize my job—even though there'd been nothing in my job description about such skills.

"Let me look into it," I said. After he left, I opened up our trial copy of Flash 4 and stared at the timeline view, wondering what exactly it would cost to create what the client wanted—both in the money we would earn, and in the blood we would need to donate in order to actually produce a quality product.

*

Part and parcel of our trade is managing client expectations. They want to hear us say, "Sure, we're great at [X deliverable], and we can do it for [low amount of $]." However, what we often end up saying is: "Sure, we can do that for you," hang up the phone, and take a swift gap analysis of our lack of hard skills to get the job done. Thus the sprint begins, for us to try to become experts in a foreign computer program or domain of design in a finite amount of time.

Dealing with these technology gaps is a big problem. When we're desperate for work—whether for want of cash flow or killer portfolio material—we should never promise to carry out a client-desired deliverable without acknowledging our level of familiarity with the technology at hand. Our clients can't know or expect to understand the nuances of said technology—they're looking to us to be experts. If we're still learning how to produce the work, then we're expending time where we should be doing the work.

If you want to overpromise and underdeliver, go right ahead. But you're doing all designers a disservice.

*

After spending a day exposing great areas of ignorance in my knowledge of Flash, I put together an estimate for my creative director, padding it with an extra two weeks of time to fumble around. Then my CD padded the estimate by a factor of two. We delivered the estimate to the client, and they chose not to hire us, because the cost was too high.

After that experience, our entire agency huddled to discuss how that experience would never happen again. We set up a plan to learn Flash and HTML across the appropriate resources, and identify who we could tap to help design and execute the interactive work that was starting to trickle into our workflow.

*

I'm not a gambler. When I'm in casinos, you'll generally see me at the penny slots, losing dollars as opposed to paychecks in pursuit of the big payout.

When I'm working on a design project, the opposite is true. I give myself time to explore options that seem outside the realm of possibility, often verging into the surreal. Most of those ideas perish on the cutting room floor, but one or two often straggle their way into the final design concepts. But that is just conceptual thinking—selling the dream of what the final result should be.

Then the work actually begins. And your concepts will only be easy to execute within the domains that you have already mastered. Once you move from flat media, such as print designs, wireframes, or storyboards, and start getting down and dirty in a program that requires multiple animated states—or enters into the realm of back-end—the time cost for any designer to execute an idea increases by an order of magnitude.

A good analogy is from the world of music production. When you're laying down tracks in a recording studio with a band, the average rule of thumb is that any well-rehearsed band will spend one hour per recorded minute of music per instrument. I use the same rule of thumb when designers work in Flash, AfterEffects, Blend, and so forth—but it's more like one hour per couple of seconds per major element.

This is the divide between the soft aspects of the designer's work—the big creative thinking that solves the client's higher-order needs in theory—and the execution and production of those ideas to manfiest that initial concept in the real world in practice. The latter is where design actually becomes real, and the client's expectations are fulfilled.

]]> Account Management Business Design David Sherwin Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:05:46 -0800 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/overpromise-and-underdeliver.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/YY1VLifkjDc/review-of-glimmer-in-the-designers-review-of-books.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/review-of-glimmer-in-the-designers-review-of-books.html The further I’ve progressed in my career as designer, the harder it’s become to share with others exactly what I do. First, I managed layout at a magazine and bootstrapped a few websites in thrilling Adobe PageMill. Then, within a design studio, I was responsible for creating brands and annual reports—with little to no formal training to the otherwise. Add in a number of years in advertising and marketing, leaven it with a few more of user research and wireframing, and set to “Puree”. When I try to describe to my family what I do nowadays as an interaction designer, the confusion level continues to increase. Now I don’t need to try and explain anymore. I can just send them...

The further I’ve progressed in my career as designer, the harder it’s become to share with others exactly what I do.

First, I managed layout at a magazine and bootstrapped a few websites in thrilling Adobe PageMill. Then, within a design studio, I was responsible for creating brands and annual reports—with little to no formal training to the otherwise. Add in a number of years in advertising and marketing, leaven it with a few more of user research and wireframing, and set to “Puree”. When I try to describe to my family what I do nowadays as an interaction designer, the confusion level continues to increase.

Now I don’t need to try and explain anymore. I can just send them a copy of Warren Berger’s extraordinarily well-written book, Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World.

This is the first book about the process of design as it’s practiced at its highest levels in our profession, written by an expert journalist for the layperson, that describes exactly how designers think about and view the world. It is the product of hundreds of interviews with today’s top designers, across all major disciplines of design, cross-referenced with deep reading into the texts that have informed the growth of our profession, then distilled into plain English that anyone can easily understand. Along the way, stories regarding OXO Good Grips, the One Laptop Per Child program, the Truth anti-smoking campaign, Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibit, Architecture for Humanity, Proctor & Gamble, TOMS Shoes, and many others are woven through the narrative, illustrating key points regarding design concepts, principles, and sustainability practices with illustrations and sketches. It also includes a good number of everyday people who came to the design profession late in life, after they had their first “glimmer” moment.

Continue reading at The Designer's Review of Books

]]> Books Design David Sherwin Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:11:55 -0800 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/review-of-glimmer-in-the-designers-review-of-books.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/cQqgaYOh364/can-you-say-that-in-english-a-list-apart.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/can-you-say-that-in-english-a-list-apart.html The new business meeting was going swimmingly—that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology. Why should we do that thing you called...what was it, task analysis? We’d like some of those personas. They’re important, right? What the heck is contextual inquiry?! As mental models flew about the room, I realized how hard it is for clients to understand the true value of UX research. As much as I’d like to tell my clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call me back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. The whole team needs a common language...

The new business meeting was going swimmingly—that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology.

Why should we do that thing you called...what was it, task analysis? We’d like some of those personas. They’re important, right? What the heck is contextual inquiry?!

As mental models flew about the room, I realized how hard it is for clients to understand the true value of UX research. As much as I’d like to tell my clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call me back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. The whole team needs a common language and a philosophy that’s easy to grok.

I created a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise. But, before we get to the cheat sheet, let’s talk about how we can communicate the value of UX research at a much higher level.

Continue reading at AListApart.com

]]> Interaction Design Usability User Experience David Sherwin Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0800 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/can-you-say-that-in-english-a-list-apart.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/UN6Abeycoxs/better-ideas-faster-seminar-at-how-conference-2010.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/better-ideas-faster-seminar-at-how-conference-2010.html I've been asked by the good folks at HOW to participate in the upcoming HOW Conference in Denver, June 6-9, 2010! The seminar I'll be presenting is on the topic of coming up with better design ideas faster. Here's the description: Have you ever felt stuck when trying to come up with design ideas? Do deadlines cause you to freeze in your tracks? "Better Ideas Faster" is a seminar that will help you learn how to brainstorm better design ideas for print and interactive projects within practically any time frame. Over the course of this 75-minute seminar, participants will learn how to: Approach a design problem with the right ideation questions in order to focus their creative energies Use the...

I've been asked by the good folks at HOW to participate in the upcoming HOW Conference in Denver, June 6-9, 2010! The seminar I'll be presenting is on the topic of coming up with better design ideas faster. Here's the description:

Have you ever felt stuck when trying to come up with design ideas? Do deadlines cause you to freeze in your tracks? "Better Ideas Faster" is a seminar that will help you learn how to brainstorm better design ideas for print and interactive projects within practically any time frame.

Over the course of this 75-minute seminar, participants will learn how to:

• Approach a design problem with the right ideation questions in order to focus their creative energies
• Use the most appropriate brainstorming methods to coax out tons of ideas
• Learn how to properly ruminate on your newfound ideas and then improve them
• Understand how to generate ideas collaboratively when working on a team

Participants will leave this workshop with handouts detailing a wide variety of brainstorming techniques and methods for reinvigorating their creative process—as well as newfound confidence in their creative abilities!

Along with this seminar, I'll be participating in a panel about creativity. (A topic that you've never heard me talking about on this blog...)

If you'd like more info about the conference, they have an interim site up at http://www.howconference.com, where registration and the full lineup will appear soon.

]]> 80 Works HOW 2010 David Sherwin Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:54:07 -0800 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/better-ideas-faster-seminar-at-how-conference-2010.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/anzOo0qj65Q/the-fourth-no.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/the-fourth-no.html One of the risks in creating comprehensive brand experience frameworks, replete with scripted behaviors that employees must follow dutifully down to the letter, is that it can make a mockery of conventional human activities. Take my shopping visit over lunch to Borders, which is a few blocks closer than Barnes & Noble—a critical decision factor when the rain is pelting down in its characteristic Seattle fashion. Walking through the front door, I paused to peruse the new Eoin Colfer entry into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy canon. Scanning through the preface, I was interrupted by a headset-wearing young woman. "Need any assistance?" "No, thank you," I demurred, glancing briefly through the tome before wandering deeper into the wilds of...

One of the risks in creating comprehensive brand experience frameworks, replete with scripted behaviors that employees must follow dutifully down to the letter, is that it can make a mockery of conventional human activities.

Take my shopping visit over lunch to Borders, which is a few blocks closer than Barnes & Noble—a critical decision factor when the rain is pelting down in its characteristic Seattle fashion. Walking through the front door, I paused to peruse the new Eoin Colfer entry into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy canon. Scanning through the preface, I was interrupted by a headset-wearing young woman.

"Need any assistance?"

"No, thank you," I demurred, glancing briefly through the tome before wandering deeper into the wilds of Fiction & Literature. As I strolled along the stacks, the book spines flicking past in reverse alphabetical order, I was stopped by another Borders employee.

"Looking for something?"

"No, just browsing, thanks," I said. I didn't want to let her know the title of the book I was seeking—Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness—so I wouldn't be sucked into dialogue regarding cross-listing of books within various departments, opportunities for special orders that may be delivered to the shop, and an infinitude of other actions that could emerge from that simple request for help. She can tell that I am hedging my true intent, as most customers do, and swiftly moves along to Westerns.

I arrived at the B's. They only had copies of de Botton's On Love and How Proust Can Change Your Life. I took the former book from the top shelf and began to read the first chapter.

"Finding what you're looking for?" I turned to see another Borders employee, kindly smiling up at me as my mind froze mid-sentence.

"You bet, no problem," I said. She continued about her business. I continued to read about transatlantic flights, the probabilities inherent in meeting your true love, and a host of other topics. After glancing at a few other volumes on the shelf, I started to walk out—only to be confronted by yet another staffer.

"Need any help?" he said.

What I wanted to say: "I do need help. I need you to seriously rethink what customer service looks like in a bookstore."

Instead what came out was a final, cavernous "No." This was the last word I emitted before leaving.

*

The level of tact and nuance expected from an employee being paid $8 an hour (plus potential benefits) in an industry that expects a high level of literacy and devotion to the printed word is staggering, considering the volume of information contained within the 10,000 square feet of a retail store. This defies the notion of the designed, logical user flow within the computer interface, an ever-open search box beckoning for controlled input. In bookstores, we have seen people dance and mime book titles, noting that they'd been on NPR or in the New York Times or highlighted on their favorite blog, and expecting staffers to pluck out of the ether the most likely result. The air is our interface, and the computer is our adjunct.

As a result, it's easier to reduce the set of possible actions to canned behaviors and rote interactions when not near a computer. Never engage with your customer, allowing them to dive deeply into books on the shelf, and you risk alienating them—or letting them treat the store like a library in both atmosphere and expectation of free book consumption. Aim for over-service, and your staff's behavior can smack of desperation. (In retail, the latter can also happen because the staff has identified you as a potential shoplifting risk, and feels that they can goad you to leave by piling on an excess of proffered help.) A hard-lined set of rules and regulations that must be followed to the letter. The computer is the fall-back position, the single hub that all the worker bees must return to in order to access the primary catalog.

Over time, a further decentralization will wash over the book-selling world, where staffers can fall back on WiFi-connected devices that provide the same data on the spot—speeding up the likelihood of placing the right book in the customer's hands. Add in book-reading devices like the Nook and augmented reality apps that are swiftly moving from proof of concept to mobile devices, and the scenario I experienced today will probably cease to happen. The onus for seeking what I need will have shifted from the customer service professional to the customer.

But in the process, we'll lose something important—the fruit of someone's physical and mental labor, placed gently into our hands, with the attention of another soul who had confirmed the value and importance of the contents contained wherein. A tweet is a far cry from the heft of a handshake. Commerce will always require at some point a physical component, applied with the right volume of attention, at the right moment in time.

Call this the weight of lived knowledge. Perhaps as we load more books onto our Kindles and Nooks, the device should grow heavier or glow more brightly, to imply that our shelves are becoming more and more laden with the meaningful intelligence borne out of a hyper-connected society.

*

If any of those staffers in the store had seen the Alain de Botton book in my hand and said, "Oh, you like that? Let's chat about a few other books that you'd probably like," then I think the situation would have played out much differently.

Adding improved context to our potential dialogue—maintaining the human element and the quality of information provided—should be the result of any in-person interaction, in a store or out in the world. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, parroting the words of our masters, and otherwise denying the passions that we should always be seeking to share with the world.

]]> Business In-Store Sales David Sherwin Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:30:53 -0700 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/the-fourth-no.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/SnrgcVfa7Bc/phone-knows-best.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/phone-knows-best.html Can a phone be your trusted best friend? Your personal trainer? Your confidante? Can it cheer you up when you're stressed? Can it know what you're feeling, and why you're feeling it? Can it go away when you just want to sit in the corner and cry? If we're serious about pushing the utility of mobile devices to their absolute limit, then we will have to create software so sophisticated that it can discern the difference between the perceived intent of user actions and the actual intent contained in our brains and bodies. Computers will need to make us feel like they're reading our minds—not just our words, where our eyeballs are pointing, and where our body is positioned in...

Can a phone be your trusted best friend? Your personal trainer? Your confidante? Can it cheer you up when you're stressed? Can it know what you're feeling, and why you're feeling it? Can it go away when you just want to sit in the corner and cry?

If we're serious about pushing the utility of mobile devices to their absolute limit, then we will have to create software so sophisticated that it can discern the difference between the perceived intent of user actions and the actual intent contained in our brains and bodies. Computers will need to make us feel like they're reading our minds—not just our words, where our eyeballs are pointing, and where our body is positioned in physical space. And when we behave in a irrational manner (meaning like human beings) these same computers will need to withhold judgment on what does not compute.

We will call these design challenges "HAL 9000 problems," because this leap in technological evolution brings up some very gnarly dilemmas for designers and developers—though not because an AI in a spaceship is preparing to kill us. (Yet.)

Let me paint a culinary scenario of the near future...

A week ago, I installed an Augmented Reality Diet App. Since the installation, I've been eating healthy. Until yesterday. I was a bit peckish and went to Burger King and had a Double Whopper with extra pickles. Now my phone's going crazy.

Tonight, as I amble down the block, looking at my augmented reality Dinner Locator for what might meet my stomach's fancy, the application dims out places where I really shouldn't eat—that is, if I want to stay within my caloric intake for the week. I recently upgraded to the iPhone 7G SX, which is able to track how many calories I've eaten on a daily basis, by meal, and how many calories have been burned by my activity. It knows that I'm skinny and unlikely to binge out on a regular basis. But the app is making some assumptions based on the likelihood that I'll consume something that conflicts with my stated diet goals. (I filled those in when I set up the app, and it measured my fat levels by sending a little electrical current through my body when I was holding the phone in my hand.) A few stray variables have been screwing with my Diet App, which perceives my intent as follows: "Dinnertime + hungry + low blood sugar + surrounded by bad dietary options = likelihood of making bad choice."

If I started to walk towards one of those places the app deemed a dangerous choice, my iPhone won't let me pay. (The app is connected to my credit card.) Thankfully, I'm carrying cash, so I just turn off my phone and buy some fried chicken. But my iPhone can detect how my stress level is rising due to limiting the choices that I want to make, and throws a final wrinkle into my evil master plan. It lets me go where I want to eat, but whines and barks as I reach the upper limit of my possible caloric intake. And if I go over that limit, I'll risk being mildly shocked. After all, I did click "Agree" on those terms of use in the App Store...

*

I crafted this scenario to sound farfetched and silly, and I think I've succeed. But most of the technology I referenced exists, in one fashion or another. Give us time, and we'll be talking with our phones in hushed tones, asking for advice, rather than shouting at them in frustration when they crash.

Which brings us back to HAL 9000. Poor Dave had to shut HAL down because HAL thought that his mission was being jeopardized. HAL could detect human stress levels in a number of ways, intuiting stress and emotional upset with his auditory and visual sensors. "I can tell from your voice harmonics, Dave, that you're badly upset," speaketh the machine. Of course, HAL was overreacting just a tad, in his highly logical fashion. But isn't that what humans are supposed to do? Overreact?

I lifted that HAL quote from an article about how researchers have fitted a Roomba to detect the stress level of people around it. Grow too tense, and the area around you will stay dirty. (So even though I was worried about getting this blog post done, I did want the carpet under the coffee table to get clean. Damn you Roomba!)

Discerning the intent of users is a tricky business, even with metrics tracking your every gesture online, people being paid to observe your actions as part of research assays, and the never-ending quests of e-commerce websites to ease you through purchasing flows to acquire that fancy blender you've always coveted. UX designers aren't going to be put out of business because of system intelligence—at least not for another fifteen to twenty years.

But in the next few years, we'll be seeing technology that evaluates your emotions as part of how they relate to you. And at the same time, we'll be finding ways to make our interactions with our phones even more private. Can you imagine trying to decide where to eat with your A.R. diet app, pointing it at McDonalds—and then red, flashing warning lights appear on the screen, visible to those around me…

Technology is no longer the great enabler, but a potential source of public shame. We no longer have the luxury of the computer screen to shield us from our users, or each other. In the most advanced mobile technology, our intent can be observed and recorded in more ways than we can imagine.

It will be our task to provide the right shape to these kinds of experiences, so we do not reduce the humanity of those who use them. And it will be the role of users to smack down those artifacts of novel technology that reach far beyond the bounds of what a computer should provide a human being—emotionally, and maybe even spiritually.

Until the upcoming robot invasion. At that point, all bets are off.

]]> Augmented Reality Design Ideas Interaction Design Mobile User Experience David Sherwin Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:21:46 -0700 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/phone-knows-best.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/9RwojdrAuLE/youser-experience.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/youser-experience.html What DNA does conceptual art share with interaction design? More than any technical profession would care to admit. "The idea in conceptual art is that the artist causes experiences to happen to himself, and then ruminates on the interaction between the self and the experience; an audience may be permitted to observe, but is not essential," says Roger Ebert, in his recent (and fantastic) blog post "The agony of the body artist." So if I was to apply Ebert's thinking about conceptual art to the discipline of interaction design, then it would read as follows: The idea in interaction design is that the designer causes experiences that happen to others, then ruminates on the interaction between the other and his...

What DNA does conceptual art share with interaction design? More than any technical profession would care to admit.

"The idea in conceptual art is that the artist causes experiences to happen to himself, and then ruminates on the interaction between the self and the experience; an audience may be permitted to observe, but is not essential," says Roger Ebert, in his recent (and fantastic) blog post "The agony of the body artist."

So if I was to apply Ebert's thinking about conceptual art to the discipline of interaction design, then it would read as follows:

The idea in interaction design is that the designer causes experiences that happen to others, then ruminates on the interaction between the other and his or her experience; a designer may be permitted to observe, but s/he is not essential.

Is the core activity of my profession really this simple—and this complex? We want to control the user's experience as much as possible, though it's often like grasping at soap bubbles. And unlike the conceptual artist—who needs no audience to perceive the effect of his or her actions—designers depend solely on the audience's reaction in aggregate. We spend so much time and energy trying to boil ourselves out of the work to ensure that it functions properly, it's inevitable that we have no place in the actual day-to-day use of what we create. And the cost to us is that we only have our personal experience to represent the whole.

*

Asides...

Ebert's definition of conceptual art comes from his coverage of the work of Chris Burden, whose fame in the art world revolved around performing art pieces in which he was shot at, nailed to a Volkswagen Beetle, shut in a locker, at risk of execution, and otherwise caught in scenarios that tore down boundaries between the spectator and his own experience. When experiencing his works in a college class in the mid-90s, I remember thinking, "What will we put ourselves through to shatter the illusion that our lives are wholly within our control?" Chris Burden's "body art" work is so unsettling because it forces us to think deeply about what he is doing in the moment, empathize with his experience, simultaneously focus on him and ourselves reflexively as we watch.

It's infrequent that I find a user experience professional bleeding for a great wireframe. Look at Stefan Sagmeister's poster for his AIGA Detroit lecture, where he carved a poster for a lecture onto his own body. This seems right out of the realm of Chris Burden, where a rumination on one's body of work—the interaction between the self and experience—becomes the actual commodity we comment upon. His "Sagmeister on a Binge" poster is just as scary and points the way towards the Super Size-Me mentality, where life and limb is risked to force a deeper emotional bond between the artist/designer and viewer. We have yet to find the same kind of artistic expression in the field of hardcore interaction design... but the form it would take is definitely in the realm of conceptual art.

Perhaps the pursuit of meaning in our century will require making an audience out of designers, and designers out of the audience. Everyone will identify themselves as a "YOUser"—a term I've been using recently for the user as designer, and the designer as user. The concept of a "user" has always lacked a sense of embodiment, and anything we can do to bring how we talk about whom we design for (besides ourselves) helps to remind us of our humanity.

]]> Interaction Design User Experience David Sherwin Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:17:48 -0700 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/youser-experience.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/E1JaHNxcdjs/how-to-estimate-design-projects-tips-from-a-pro.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/how-to-estimate-design-projects-tips-from-a-pro.html Two words that make a designer's ears bleed: "Over budget." Estimating is the scariest activity that designers manage for themselves or their studios. We are experts at making intuitive design decisions based on qualitative information—but in the rational world of dollars and cents, that same intuition doesn't always make for a better profit margin. We learn (and forget) this, over and over again. I've heard countless designers say to me, "I haven't done this kind of work before. I don't know what to charge. So I just made a guesstimate, and if I go over budget, I'll just eat the difference." Sadly, "the difference" is not edible. While designers may hate estimating, it's a business skill that you'll need to...

Two words that make a designer's ears bleed: "Over budget."

Estimating is the scariest activity that designers manage for themselves or their studios. We are experts at making intuitive design decisions based on qualitative information—but in the rational world of dollars and cents, that same intuition doesn't always make for a better profit margin. We learn (and forget) this, over and over again. I've heard countless designers say to me, "I haven't done this kind of work before. I don't know what to charge. So I just made a guesstimate, and if I go over budget, I'll just eat the difference."

Sadly, "the difference" is not edible. While designers may hate estimating, it's a business skill that you'll need to develop—that is, if you'd like to make some money.

For professional estimating advice, I emailed Fiona Robertson-Remley, a fantastic project management guru I'd worked with at Worktank Brand Storytellers on a wide range of interactive and traditional marketing programs. This is what she had to share on the subject.

First and foremost, create a high-level plan. "You need to map out the steps and milestones of the job," Fiona says. "Lay out the roadmap of how you are going through the project." For a solo designer or even a larger team, this can emerge from a quick whiteboard session that helps map out the overall arc of the project, key deliverables through a set number of client reviews, and what resources will be necessary to complete those deliverables. At that point, be sure to also begin a list of assumptions—you may need to include those in the estimate to put a lid on scope creep.

Take a stab at how many hours you think the project will take. "Then take a step back and review. Then pad by about 20%, especially in the areas where clients are involved. Designers notoriously under-estimate their hours." This is hard for some designers to swallow, but it's the truth. We're often quite optimistic about how quickly we can reach a design solution, when actually we need the space to meander (while being paid). Consider setting up a spreadsheet in Excel where you can estimate hours—and having your 20% buffer hardcoded into the formula that creates the total.

Never, never, never give discounts. "Avoid the tempatation to reduce your rate. I see freelancers do this ALL the time. if you need to cut the cost, cut a deliverable—not your rate, and not your time." This requires tough negotiating tactics, but this is the only way to maintain your profit margin.

Bill for thinking time, not just computer time. "Make sure you… allow a little time for off-the-wall-thinking." Creating the time and space for dreaming in the midst of cranking out a big design deliverable can have a beneficial effect. And you should be paid for it.

Never under-estimate yourself. If you're in an all-out bidding war, you should stick to your guns and be willing to walk away from what seems like a great opportunity, but you won't make much money actually fulfilling. "In general, agencies/freelancers always under-estimate. Add an [low] bid to that, and you are deep trouble, my friend!"

Don't be afraid to pick up the phone and get insight from a colleague. "Talk to a Project Manager or someone who has done this [frequently] to get their perspective." They may save you with a crucial piece of information you wouldn't have obtained by any other method.

Do your timesheet! And refer back to it after the project is over. "Track, track, track your hours religiously. You will need to keep data on what things cost—so next time you have to estimate, you have something to refer to." A useful metric when evaluating your timesheet is burndown—how much of the project was completed, based on time used by each person (or each role you fulfilled) over the life of the project. If you're burning the majority of your hours on production as opposed to concept generation, it gives you a good indication of what skills you may need to improve, or what hours you may need to pad on a future estimate.

 

Resources:

For a much deeper dive into this subject, especially with regard to how much you should pad your estimates with regard to a client's initial ask, see Andy Rutledge's "Calculating Hours—The Client Factors" on Design View.

Cameron Foote's The Business Side of Creativity has a nice section about estimating and how to work with clients through the negotiation process.

*

This post was suggested by designer David Cole. Did you know you can email me or tweet me topics you'd like to see on ChangeOrder?

]]> Estimating David Sherwin Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:33:30 -0700 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/how-to-estimate-design-projects-tips-from-a-pro.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/nX9UCb-VpMg/a-hundred-to-one.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/a-hundred-to-one.html When I first moved to Seattle, I freelanced at what was considered to be the meat grinder of the Seattle agency world. My first assignment was to serve as a production artist for a series of pet food ads. I was provided with layouts in QuarkXPress 4.0, consisting of a few dozen black and white portraits of happy Scotties, terriers, and other sedan-sized pups. The traffic person then handed me sheet of paper completely filled with three- to six-word phrases. "These are the headlines for the ads due today," she said, and scooted away. I spent the next few minutes puzzling over the page. Some of the lines made no sense to me, outlining in scientific terms the benefits of...

When I first moved to Seattle, I freelanced at what was considered to be the meat grinder of the Seattle agency world. My first assignment was to serve as a production artist for a series of pet food ads. I was provided with layouts in QuarkXPress 4.0, consisting of a few dozen black and white portraits of happy Scotties, terriers, and other sedan-sized pups. The traffic person then handed me sheet of paper completely filled with three- to six-word phrases. "These are the headlines for the ads due today," she said, and scooted away.

I spent the next few minutes puzzling over the page. Some of the lines made no sense to me, outlining in scientific terms the benefits of Pet Food Special Formulation A to Crappy Pet Food Type B. Others were clever puns and riffs on animal lingo. The rest of the lines seemed like doggrel, and at the time I didn't really understand why the writer had even included them.

Until that point, I'd never been exposed to the full brain dump of a creative person, and while I could see which lines were pretty good, I was a bit stumped as to which would make the best ads.

The art director came by and hunched over the headline sheet, circling various headlines that met his fancy. He then stood over my shoulder and instructed me which headlines to place in which layouts. Then, after pushing up his chunky black glasses and asking me to "add a little air" to a few headlines, he vanished, leaving me to print about six comps and send them out into traffic for proofing.

Thus began my first day of work at a "real" advertising agency... though it would take me a few years to realize that what I'd imagined as the world of advertising would always be a better place than the reality it embodied. (I didn't stick around that agency for more than a few weeks, just to get a taste of where I wouldn't ever work again.) And I'd share the ads, if I could find them. I only remember my emotional reaction to his art direction effort: a frothy admixture of surprise and dismay. Surprise at seeing how much energy was being expended (100 headlines!) for promoting pet food, and dismay at realizing that some of the weaker headlines (grammatically) were much stronger in ads than on the plain white page.

Since that day, I've tried to invert my work ethic regarding quality versus quantity. It's been an ongoing, uphill battle. Quality is the most important result of the work—but without a quantity of output within an design organization, it's quite difficult to determine that your design decisions will succeed in context.

Earlier in my career, I would rest as soon as I'd hit upon what I felt was the perfect idea, coast through photo and typeface selection, only to discover that the client didn't agree with my thinking. Or if I didn't spend enough time locating just the right illustration or font, those choices would be called out and beaten up in the client review. Or be asked to make changes, and realize that my well of options had ran dry and I'd fail to make the desired changes in the time frame I had left. I had to get rid of the idea of waste through every part of the creative process.

This led me to a principle regarding working in companies that depend upon great design work: To be wildly successful in a group of designers, your first ideas need to be wildly divergent.

Not just divergent—wildly so. From different planets, with little to no resemblance to each other.

This is only possible by being as generative as possible, in as many instances as possible. Instead of sitting around and thinking of solutions, you need to be documenting your thinking through the entire process, through each phase where you're expanding the client's view of potential solutions.

In the case of the pet food ads, this was a retained account, so people were paid to sit around and think of headlines—that's more billable time that can be applied against the retainer. Focus allowed those creative types to be generative.

But even with the specter of budgets and billable hours and account managers breathing down your neck, preparing to snatch the work out of your hands, I think that's an excuse. Instead of thinking of how much time I have on a project and limiting myself accordingly, I like to think about how much time I have to generate work, then trying to produce options without becoming too attached to one or two ideas and polishing them accordingly in the time frame.

One you throw out the fear of your work and time being wasted, there's nothing that stands in the way of exploring a wider range of design directions. More options always means better choices—not always better ideas, but a better frame for making decisions around them. Just because you have 100 headlines doesn't mean you'll share them all with the client—that's just cruel. But limiting that set down to the best range of options for your client, based on your far-reaching explorations, will serve both you and the client best.

]]> Advertising Concepting Copywriting Design David Sherwin Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:49:46 -0700 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/a-hundred-to-one.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Changeorder/~3/GYy_VahSSDA/the-proper-place-for-procrastination.html http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/the-proper-place-for-procrastination.html I've been putting off writing about procrastination for some time now. I thought I knew what I wanted to say, but now that the subject has rattled around my brain for so many days, I'm not quite so sure. This is the curse of being an iterative design thinker—the longer you mull over solutions for a big problem, the more options you end up considering for the result. Possibilities shift and morph in your mind like taffy. Arguments and counter-arguments scrape and spark, misaligned gears in a house-sized machine that keeps chugging along no matter how hard you try to feed it another subject... unless you're dealing with a well-defined problem. Solutions can appear fully formed, like magic. These "rabbit...

I've been putting off writing about procrastination for some time now. I thought I knew what I wanted to say, but now that the subject has rattled around my brain for so many days, I'm not quite so sure.

This is the curse of being an iterative design thinker—the longer you mull over solutions for a big problem, the more options you end up considering for the result. Possibilities shift and morph in your mind like taffy. Arguments and counter-arguments scrape and spark, misaligned gears in a house-sized machine that keeps chugging along no matter how hard you try to feed it another subject... unless you're dealing with a well-defined problem. Solutions can appear fully formed, like magic. These "rabbit out of the hat" moments seem like the norm in our community, but we are rarely clocked upside the head with a stellar idea, ten feet tall and luminous, just like the sign letting travelers know that you have arrived in Las Vegas.

Gigantic problems must be chipped away, slowly but surely, until the solution emerges from paring away excess. Opportunities come out of nowhere, but the ideas in our mind must be given form before they can be regarded as proper. Otherwise, we're just thinking some more.

So I think I've hit upon the right rhythm for how to incorporate procrastination into my daily routine. It required me to draw a very hard line between rumination—which is critical for doing creative work—and procrastination. If the chart above shows what my daily work process had been like in the past, the following one shows what it looks like now:

Rumination is taking a walk around the block after doing a round of sketches or designing some wireframes. It's eating, sleeping, exercising, and otherwise being fully in my body and focused on one continuous experience. Doing integrative practices such as yoga has almost become a struggle for me, because when I lie down to meditate puzzle pieces are falling into place.

Procrastination is none of those things above that I'd mentioned. Every time I try to distract myself with catching up on my Google Reader or checking Facebook, I am avoiding active engagement with the task at hand. A designer never wants to be driven by the fear that this is the one time they won't produce the right solution, or complete the task they have at hand. (As an aside—just while I was writing this paragraph, I ended up reading reviews for a book on Amazon I was thinking about buying. That sure didn't help me complete this paragraph... in a manner of speaking.)

Being curious is a curse for many designers. When I have a few days until a big deadline, I enjoy reading books, talking with friends about what interests they are pursuing, and otherwise letting the current problems du jour simmer in the back of my mind until I have a coherent point of view. When faced with the choice between checking email and putting more time against the (still insoluble) problem, I check my email. I've got time, right? I can just bang something out that will be good.

Not anymore. These past few years, I've been dealing with bigger and bigger problems in work and in my writing, and that has required focused, dedicated, scheduled, and mindful attention. So any time I don't schedule procrastination into my daily routine, meaning a smattering of time each morning and night to check the social medias and some blogs, I risk losing focus in the midst of an activity that demands every ounce of my energy to make serious headway.

At first, this change in my behavior has been a great struggle, as I meander endlessly through the margins when given enough leash. Being connected is also a challenge. My iPhone sure doesn't help this problem, which has led me to leaving it on Airplane Mode for whole chunks of the day. This means I'm out of touch with people for much larger periods of time—but when I do have a chance to connect with them for a substantial amount of time, I can provide them with my immediate attention.

That, to me, is the definition of procrastination in the domain of design: to distract yourself from providing attention to what must be done, rather than distract yourself with the purpose of improving what must be done (better). The latter is rumination, and should be fostered in its appropriate place and time.

I continue to dream of the day that I will be lying on a beach, not a care in the world, napping lazily and considering what big problem I will have to solve next. But to get there, I think I have a little more work to do. Starting now.

]]> Process Productivity David Sherwin Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:45:19 -0700 http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/the-proper-place-for-procrastination.html