In the next few years I predict a glut of University Advancement jobs going to new-media types who are masters of their tools and not much else.  With the prevalence of content management, web-templates, and social media tools, the recurring weakness of most any web project is content creation.

Writers.  Communicators. Storytellers.

Without these people, the designers, the developers, the usability experts, and the webmaster server types are useless. In the absence of substance, our tools mean nothing.  It’s packaging without product; A concert without music.

So don’t hire a web designer.  Don’t hire a “Social Media Expert”.  First and foremost, hire a communicator who also happens to specialize in one of those areas.  Your decision will pay dividends.

(saw that great little cartoon in IABC’s latest CW magazine) It struck a nerve.

It sings to the same tune as “The Discipline of Content Strategy” from A List Apart:

until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about. Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.

For the few E-Newsletters and fancy html email invites that I’m called on to design/code/send, there is a mountain of pain and suffering that nobody else in my office could even begin to understand.  So I suffer in silence.

The first day of my vacation. And what am I doing? Reading posts about web standards for html email.

Microsoft’s Lame attempt at explaining their decision to AGAIN use the Word rendering engine for Outlook 2010, ..has solicited some great/entertaining comments:

Tim Dawson says:

“[click here to] Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007.”

- Quoted from the official Microsoft Xbox newsletter.

Even your company’s own marketing teams cant send out appealing newsletters using the tools you are providing.

Jamie Newman says:

Outlook is the only client that seems to purposely cripple industry-recognized HTML standards in order to allow Word (a Word Processor NOT an email message composer!) to build emails of a poor standard and limited by yesterdays technolgoies.

And before some misguided argument about ensuring a safe experience for the user - the rendering engine should be no different to a web browser which also gives the user the same security preferences and lets them make an informed choice.

What I and thousands of developers want to know is - why should Outlook go against what all other email clients are doing and make our lives a living hell?!

Robert Burke says:

You say your users can make professional grade emails without having to be HTML experts. I have yet to see one person in any place I work use Outlook to generate tables and graphs, they use Word Docs (if they know how, which most people don’t), and attach them to the email.

Outlook’s, and thusly, Word’s capabilities are so far outside what the majority of everyday business people can comprehend. You rarely see anyone capable of using Word/Excel/Powerpoint to their fullest extent because most people aren’t Office literate enough to make use of it all.

You are obviously only thinking from an internal business point of view and not the whole world.

David Kaneda says:

Apologies if this is a bit of a flame comment, but come on — it’s Outlook 2010. One would think it could render HTML emails better than Netscape Navigator 4. Like I said, this is just absurd.

And I surmise that in the PRINT world, this was semi-sustainable. Enter web. With the advent of analytics and TASK measurement, the same way of “looking at things” doesn’t cut the mustard.

The web designers you WANT TO WORK WITH will hand-off a design and withhold judgment until they get feedback on how well it PERFORMS.

And this involves both a commitment to design AND content.

It’s an old and well-worn conversation.  But a rehashed conversation that took place in my head while reading this great post:

Writing Microcopy
“The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.”

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

The layouts, the grids, the fancy background images, and the elegant typography are meaningless without effective messaging and meaning.

So two goals for myself as a designer.

• Push back the demand for style when there is a lack of substance.
• Do a better job of crafting and promoting effective content when opportunities arise.

See also:

eduGuru: Content is more important than design
Zeldman: Content precedes design..

Also see also:

Where’s the Beef?

Often times the creation of a site, in a client’s eyes, is about making the juiciest-looking hamburger around, one that customers cannot resist. The conversations in process are about what toppings are going onto this thing, a la sweet javascript functions, glossy buttons and calls-to-action in every nook and cranny. But; and I hesitate to push this metaphor and former Wendy’s slogan too far; where’s the beef? How do you know that what you’re offering your audience even has any value?

Noteworthy bits from each speaker at the Suny Cuad Advancement Conference, as cataloged by TimsHead.

“Social media is not a tool to blow your horn, jump up and down and say ‘look at me!’ It’s a place to have conversations.”

“We are all content designers. Whatever you do in communications or design is content management. Content is king.”

“Looking at college Web sites, you can feel the pull of a committee. Too many sites designed to please committees when they should instead focus on what users want.”

many many more here:
http://insidetimshead.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/suny-cuad-web-roundup/

It’s an innovative online publication produced by students at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication and E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

Quick stats:

• 41 projects
• more than 50 photographers, designers, Web developers and writers.

My thoughts
If I could go back in time and have a do-over, I’d like to attend a university where I could participate in projects like this. The pitfall of the traditional university visual arts program is a lack of connection to storytelling. To often you’ll find art for art’s sake and design for design’s sake. ..and ultimately a poverty of meaning. I love these stories and their strong community connection.

See Also:

• Nice post about the project at Innovative Interactivity
• Soul of Athens on Twitter
• ..and on Vimeo

Two inspirational quotes to get us started on our journey of pain:

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.– Denis Waitley

Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

So we want to produce better audio slideshows, and better videos. We could fail in every possible way and incrementally and painfully improve over time, or we could follow the simple advice from these two outstanding links:

Ten Ways To Improve Your Multimedia Production Right Now - A post from the experts at MediaStorm.

“Often, as multimedia producers, we are given work to edit that others have created. Some things simply cannot be changed, like an out-of-focus photograph. But there are some things we can do right now to improve the work no matter how challenging the original assets may be.”

Mastering Multimedia: How to make your audio slideshows better

“I have probably produced 75 or so audio slideshows. I understand the challenge of making a compelling narrative resonate with viewers. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned over time…”

Those two links contain a treasure trove of tips and pointers. Four of my favs:

• It’s best to open your show with a bit of natural sound rather than with a subject talking. The ramp up into your story is important. If you don’t pull the viewer in fast they will bolt. Natural sound eases the viewer into your story without jolting them with dialogue.
• Like video, try to match up photos to what the narrator is talking about. The same goes for the natural sound. When you do this, your story will really start to crackle.
• Use room tone between gaps in dialogue, even when using a musical bed. Without room tone, your audio will sound like someone dipping in and out of a cave.
• Watch your production on speakers with someone who has not yet seen the piece. There’s something about reviewing your work with an audience that makes one more self-conscious and thus open to seeing new things.

“It’s not unusual for creative types to do their best work at the same time every day. By this I mean that it’s important to follow our own circadian rhythms. Hemingway began writing every morning at dawn and explained his choice this way: “There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there.”

Do your most important work (or the work requiring the greatest focus) during that time when you’re most energized and have the fewest distractions. Use the rest of your working hours to solve secondary problems or gather information that will fuel the next productive sprint.”

My primetime seems to be between the hours of 8pm and 1am. The kids are down. The wife is occupied by crappy tv that I refuse to watch, and last but not leastly, I’m not in the office.

When do you do your best work?

I’ve wanted to address this issue for some time now.  And I just so happen to have read a few interesting opinions on the subject of long-form writing for the web.   1: Whether it’s a good investment of time or not - and 2: What’s required to pull it off in an effective, well-presented format.

Starting off, a post from David Sleight, Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com expounded on the topic:

“You can’t do long-form writing online.”

“Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?”

And this morning a link from Harvard’s Nieman Reports website pointed to a Christian Science Monitor article titled: Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.

A juicy nugget about presentation in that article:

“Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.”

Back to WHY this kind of writing is important, I’ll pull a quote from Gerald Marzorati’s keynote address at the 2009 CASE Editors’ Forum:

We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts. Lots of facts. And facts are more compelling, easier to digest, when arranged narratively.

…this sort of magazine writing is stuff that the people who do it take very seriously, and they take it seriously for one reason, in the end – to engage you, the reader. The bet is that the narratives they so carefully construct draw you in, get you hooked, get you to identify with people and places,  keep you there to the end.  Pieces  like the ones I’ve briefly described may take up to an hour, or more,  for you to finish.  They  require a lot of you.  The payoff is that the facts you learn in the reading of such pieces stay with you, nudge your understanding of the world a little.  I worry that this experience will not survive in the Information Technology Age. I am not at all sure you want to or can stick with pieces like this reading on a smart phone.

In the end, what we all want to do is DIFFERENTIATE. Tossing up press releases on your homepage is a lame, impotent strategy to support that goal. Quoting again from the CSmonitor article:

“Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.”

It’s silly to hang on to that system of doing things. It’s a sinking ship. The challenge I’ve yet to accept as a designer/developer is to craft better, more appealing ways to present and package online stories. To give long-form writing an online house it deserves.

All this research and quoting of articles is meaningless of course, unless I um, start doing something about it.

Back to David Sleight’s post for a pre-design pep talk:

Bottom line? It’s a bald fallacy of presumption to hold that presenting text on a webpage ipso facto induces peripatetic behavior in your audience. The content itself, and the design used to present it, are the leading factors in shaping success. Not pixels or points. The hands that matter are those of the writer and the designer. If you’re a Web designer, you have incredible power (and a responsibility) to help further the case for this medium.

The first one from Smashing Magazine’s post: 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People. It’s a short and simple reminder:

We should aim to expose users to our content, not our website.

The second:

The Altitude Branding blog says: I want to follow stories.

Your press release on your blog doesn’t inspire me to think of you in a different, fascinating, personality-infused light.

Your carefully crafted brand message doesn’t motivate me to see my world differently and change my perspective on how and where I fit, either with or without you.

…in amidst the noise, I want to hear your voice. I want you to stand out, to rise above your function and instead find your purpose. I want to know why you’re here, what makes up the fabric of you.

Won’t you put down your style manual, your brand guidelines, your notions of what you think will make me open my wallet or write something nice about you?

Won’t you stop trying to get my attention by waving frantically, and instead invite me to hear a quiet story that’s instead been written just for me?

Innovative Interactivity:

“UNC masters student Eileen Mignoni recently launched her thesis project and it is a definite must-see. “Facing Deportation” is a multimedia documentary site about families impacted by North Carolina’s immigration policies.”

“Mignoni elegantly blended beautiful stills and video to tell the stories of three families affected by immigration laws, …my favorite video was, “Phone Calls from Papi,” an intimate story about three little girls waiting for a phone call from their incarcerated dad.”

Not to be missed is the extended interview with creator Eileen Mignoni.

“I chose to do a documentary project on immigration because I kept reading all of these awful stories in the newspaper about traffic stops that turned into deportations. I began focusing on this topic in my documentary photo class where I wanted to do a story on the life of an undocumented immigrant because I couldn’t imagine what it was like to live with the fear that at any moment one could be taken from this life and sent home.”

Topics covered include her process gaining trust with her subjects, her choice on using music, and her achievement in teaching herself graphic design to incorporate graphics in the package.

Innovative Interactivity is a great blog from Tracy Boyer, an award-winning multimedia producer, specializing in Flash development and multimedia production. She is obtaining her masters degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying Human-Computer Interaction in the School’s Information Science program.