Rihanna’s video for “Rude Boy” isn’t for the faint of heart.  Besides its racy lyrics, the video is completely retro stylee, and I’m not convinced which took the bigger set.  Love it.

The Black Eyed Peas‘ new supervideo for singles “Imma Be” and “Rock That Body” — called “Imma Be Rockin’ That Body” — is utterly ridiculous, and just fantastic.  They’re owning the future-is-now vibe, combining funkadelic transformers and mohawk-saving headgear for 10 minutes of “wait, what?”

Fitzwilliam Darcy, of Pemberley:

I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen [women], in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.

Jane Austen goes on to describe, in Pride and Prejudice, what makes an accomplished woman:

A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.

What makes an accomplished designer? What characteristics should the modern, truly accomplished designer possess?

To be considered accomplished, the modern designer must have a thorough knowledge of:

• Design fundamentals, such as Color, Proportion, Harmony, Balance, Hierarchy, and Rhythm, as well as design/art history
• Writing, both informal and formal, including spelling and grammar
• Speaking and presenting, both informal and formal
• Typography
• Web technologies, HTML, CSS, Javascript
• Print design, including pre-press, printing techniques, materials
• Film/motion design, plus hardware and software
• Photography, plus hardware and software
• Psychology, usability, interaction design, user-centered design
• Modern practices, including improving one’s mind on a wide variety of blogs, journals, conferences, groups and forums
• The Philosophical Method, in which she questions her own opinions and biases
• The Woo, an impeccable ability to relate to people, clients, and partners
• The Ego, or her own skills, abilities, and faults

Certainly we can also apply Austen’s “something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.”   There’s something about a great designer that demands respect by the way they carry themselves.

Then again, in Austen’s novel, Elizabeth responds to the definition of an accomplished woman with,

I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.

Do they exist?  Are you accomplished?

Do you know any accomplished designers?   Who?

Their Next and Back buttons are placed on a little floating div at the footer.  The content obviously scrolls, but no longer do you have to scroll down to Save.  Nice. Filed in the GANK THIS folder.

Adam Schefter is an ESPN reporter.  One of the good ones.  One of the ones you see in the ticker on TV saying “as reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter.”  In journalism speak, that means something.   Scooping, or being the first to report, a hot story can lead a reporter to being known as an inside man, where he starts getting texts at 2am and anonymous sources calling his phone to leak information.  This is a good place to be.

Adam works for ESPN.  He has clout because of his employer.  Many of us on the web have similar situations.  But Adam does something extra.  He’s building a following on Twitter filled with people who know he could post breaking sports news at any minute.  This may seem trivial, but it’s Adam’s entire value to ESPN, and he gives it away for free on Twitter.

He usually does it in this manner: “Filed to ESPN:”, followed by his scoop.  In my Twitter feed, Adam’s “leak” will come several minutes before ESPN posts his story.

And Adam’s feed is far from just leaks.  He posts throughout the day (and nights too) on breaking sports news.  When something big happens, Adam has it.

His following on Twitter: almost 100,000.

What would happen if Adam left ESPN for FSN or SI?  100,000 people would follow him over.  What if Adam founded his own online sports news network?  100,000 followers, immediately.

This is smart.  Why aren’t we seeing many others do this?   Do New York Times writers do this?  Do video game designers do this?  This is the new job security.  Leveraging your day job and social media to create a powerful personal brand that becomes your new resume.

Too often the experts stay comfortable and work quietly behind the cubicle walls in the big buildings and go about their business anonymously.  Sometimes employers prohibit establishing a personal brand.  But in this new landscape, this connected, twittering, status updating world, where anyone and everyone can build a following — your own 1,000 true fans — it’s foolish and wasteful to spend all your energy creating amazing work and taking none of the credit, having just a cover letter and a bullet point on your resume to show for it.

Global Ignite week is now in full swing, and we get our turn at the firehose here in Salt Lake City this Thursday. Doors at the Stateroom open at 6pm, with 18 speakers and tons more on tap.

Ignite is best described as “geek culture” — an awesome mix of technology, nerd references, inside jokes, and off color topics that you’ll never find at any other tech show.

Here’s who we’ll see light up the stage Thursday:

Session 1

• James Young, “You sunk my Battleship!”
  Twitter: jamesyoung6979
• Jessica Watts, “Wasatch Roller Derby” This is the stuff great Ignite presentations are made of. Jessica, aka “Moxie Rotten” of the Wasatch Roller Derby, makes me ask one hell of an introspective question: why haven’t I been to a SLC roller derby game?
  Facebook: moxie.rotten
• Dean Cheesman, “Procedural Art Generation” is basically computer-driven artistic shenanigans.   That might sound like a nerd alert, but you should first check out these pictures of Dean in action.  Not sure which one is him, but based on that alone I’m betting this talk will kick some tail.
  Blogger: deanandyou
• Ana Collins, “I’m Not a Mexican: Enchiladas, 5 de Mayo, and other stuff I wouldn’t know about”
• Jason Vance, “15 things to remember when dating in a post Apocalyptic Zombie Environment” Of all the zombie instruction manuals, this is the only one to address the truly necessary.  Even if you’re married, chances are your significant other will bite the dust at the hands of a dirty zombie.  Or if you’re the zombified, your special someone will no longer tolerate your advances.  Hence, this guide.
  Twitter: studio1909
• Jessica Petersen & Marci Vasic, “Life is Tweet” My first reaction is to go off on how played out putting “tw” in front of everything, how sick I am of these tweetups and tweeps and twoohaas, but Jessie “KittyGutz” Petersen is a local legend and Twitter fiend, so whatever she wants to put a “tw” in front of is just fine by me.  My bet is this is gonna rock.
• Robert V. Bolton, “Utah Culture Shock or: Why I gave up everything I know and love to move to this frozen waste land.” If there’s one talk this week that I most identify with, it’s Rob’s. But first you should know something.  The dude works for the Center for High Performance Computing at the U.  He’s legit.  He also says his talk is “an in depth comparison between the South Carolina’s laid back Low Country and the busy lifestyle of Utah’s Wasatch Front.”
  Twitter: RobertVBolton
• Matthew Reinbold, “Super-Empowerment, Networked Tribes, and the End of the World as We Know It” Matt runs a SLC Cold Fusion shop, is a long-time Ignite sponsor, and comes to the show this year as a speaker. He says he wants to explain “a diverse business ecosystem made up of parallel economic tribes with semi-permeable membranes based on shared belief.”
  Twitter: libel_vox
• Jeremy Hanks, “Curve-Boulders” Jeremy’s given the best Ignite talk I’ve ever seen, Ignite #2’s Blowing Minds and Melting Faces.  The dude is extreme, having camped out for the SLC In-n-Out opener and being crushed by a boulder.  I’m convinced this talk is about one of those two.
  Twitter: jeremyhanks

Session 2

• Matthias Shapiro & Jason Alderman, “Mobile App Dev RAP BATTLE” Matthias is a data visualization guy, having given several Ignite talks already, and as of November was working with CNN doing some crazy ass videos.  Regardless, anything labeled “rap battle” has my vote.
  Twitter: matthiasshapiro and justsomeguy
• DJ Waldow, “DUDE” As a frequent user of the word, this could go one of several ways.   Either he lambasts people like me, he makes me look like a champ for using it way past its prime, or he completely ignores me and goes for Jeff Bridges.
  Twitter: djwaldow
• Joey Wilson, “How to see through walls” This dude researches Radio Tomographic Imaging, a way to track moving objects with simple radios.   I’m hoping for some Bioshock-style plasmid abilities, but 5 minutes may be too short for that.
• Deb Henry, “Does Widening Roads Cause Congestion?”
  Twitter: heydebhenry
• Chris Adzima, “Ensuring species continuation during an extended undead cataclysm” This guy appears to not exist online, and is the 2nd talk on zombies.  You put those pieces together.
  
• Misty Fowler, “I’m a Coder and You Can Too (Or Why Programming Is Just Plain English)”
• John Dilworth, “The Power of Inaction” That’s John’s slide up there, and he says his talk is “based on the principle of inaction found in Chinese Philosophy.”  Whatever this is, I’m really hoping to improve my inactivity, especially at work and around the house.
  Twitter: johndilworth
• Kellen McAffee, “How to tell your friends that you’ve seen a Sasquatch.” Another soon-to-be gem.  Where else do you get these kind of tips?

This unique 20 slides / 15 seconds-per-slide format proves hilarious, a sort of open mic night meets NASA meets Weezer show.  Or maybe a zombie meets derby girl meets sasquatch thing.  Either way, count me in.

I’ve revived my little Stimulate project and we’re starting small:  Thursday March 11th we’re hosting a free hack night in Salt Lake City at the Betaloft downtown.  8pm to midnight.  Only space for 30 of us, but it’ll be rad.

All the details are at Hulabalub.

A few readers misunderstood my last post to mean I was anti-design, or anti-aesthetic.  My point couldn’t be further from the truth (I am, after all, a designer).

My point is:

1. a website is far inferior to the actual product/message/service it advertises,
2. no one cares about websites, and
3. no one else cares about quality.

Tonight Scrivs sent over this clip from Saul Bass, the legendary graphic designer, discussing the one person responsible for caring and paying for design:

Companies in American commerce, that you deal with, are companies that don’t deal with aesthetics…   What I’m saying is that, aesthetics are your problem and mine, and no body else’s. The fact of the matter is, I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does, to be beautiful.  I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything or whether it is worth anything.  It’s worth it to me.  It’s the way I want to live my life.  I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

Now sometimes, you can’t make everything beautiful, but that’s my intent.  And I’m willing to pay for that. Now that’s where money comes in, because you can get much more quickly to an answer if you don’t worry about those things.  It costs every designer money to make it beautiful, because it means you have to spend more time, you have to futz with it, you have to noodle, you have to push, you have to pull, you have to try, you have to do, and that’s all money.  You’re eating up your budget.  But that’s a commitment that you either make or you don’t make.

Now there are a lot of firms, a lot of designers, who just do the work.  And get paid and make a buck and are happy.  And there are many many designers, I would suspect more, that really do care about those things, but, I think it’s very important for us to not be under the illusion that anybody else cares.

I whole-heartedly agree.  Here’s the clip, from the Saul Bass DVD Documentary:

What a fantastic card.  Sold out by PaperWheel, on Etsy.

Via Pixstory’s Tumblr, a catchy little collection of graphic goodness, where on the first page they have 1-2-3 guns and a link to this site.  Subscribe.  Why doesn’t every site have a “click to appreciate” like Behance?

My wife just told me my two year old has learned how to use his two fingers to scroll on her Macbook trackpad. This is also the same child who can now swipe my iPhone unlock and place an emergency call.

Chris, upon hearing the news:

Oh no! He doesn’t know there’s a fold! He’ll never find anything below the fold!

Paddy Donnelly, in Life, Below 600px:

We all know, people have learned to scroll. They did a long time ago, but still the ‘everything needs to be above the fold’ concept lingers on.

Many web designers, after presenting a site design, hear the client worriedly ask ‘But, where is the fold?!’ Your first response is usually to switch on the guides in Photoshop to show and they then nervously say ‘Hmm, yeah, we’re going to need those articles, and those links, and those 6 images all above the fold.’

And there goes any sense of white space, readability and story telling you had planned for their site.

Word. His article’s layout:

No one cares.

No, no one cares about our work.  We just make websites.  That thing you’re working on is just a website.  It’s no big deal.

What people are excited about is never about our work.  Sure, we love to aggrandize each other within our field.  But our users don’t give a crap.  When I hit up espn.com several times a day, I don’t marvel at the design innovation being put forth, or the amazing logo work, or the stupid grid.  I check how Kobe did last night.   And freak, baseball is about to start.   Never have I pulled up ESPN and critiqued the thing.  I don’t care about espn.com.  I care about Kobe.

This is why website design seems to have no impact or correlation to traffic or popularity.  It’s because it doesn’t.  It’s about the content. It’s about the utility.  It’s about what the users want to see and do, and how kickass you make them at some small part of their life.

Design’s one role

Design does play one large part in the success of a product or service.  It can get in the way.  Does it matter if your button is blue or green?  Does it matter how heavy a bevel you’ve put on there?  Does it matter how many lines of code your jQuery is?  No!  It does matter if people can’t find your content, or if they can’t find your Twitter link, or if your order button is nowhere to be found.

A few examples

Gary Vaynerchuck is a master of personal branding, self promotion, and using social media to further your message.  And he loves design.  In his book Crush It!, the only service he recommends purchasing is web design.  But check out his site.  It’s no modern marvel of design excellence.  Is it poor?  Not at all.  It’s perfectly adequate.  It’s actually leagues ahead of most websites, and it works.  It gets out of your way so you can absorb his message and make a connection with him.  Perfect.

My old friend Cameron Moll hasn’t changed his website in ages.  It’s way too old for him to call himself a real designer, right?  He didn’t even do all the work on Authentic Jobs himself!  Fact is, the man’s a genius.  It’s just a website.  The real money’s in his content, and people eat up anything upon which Cameron deigns to letterpress Bickham Script Pro.   He’s pure gold, and has nothing to do with his site.

Jeffrey Zeldman is the father of web standards and the reason many of us got into web design.  His website is a huge orange creamsicle.    It’s even a little gaudy. But hell if it doesn’t stay out of your way while you eat up every word that comes out of his mouth.   And he’s built a business pumping out excellent websites that do the same.

Google is a better web designer than you are

Another example is how stupid we can get with our website architecture.  A few months ago Jason Fried mentioned that he preferred Google’s version of your site  to your real site.  If you search for any major website or company on Google, you’ll find a handful of helpful links right under their website link.  I can assume this is pulled from Google’s vast data on which pages of your site their users are most likely to search for and find.

A search for Comcast reveals the following:

In contrast, a quick look at their real website shows us a different view of what they think is important to you:

What a mess!  Google is doing a better job of knowing what Comcast users want than they are themselves.  Literally, 8 links with no pictures is way more useful than this branded page with all sorts of links and advertisements.  Check your own site.  Chances are, Google is doing it better.

Which means, your stupid website doesn’t matter.  We, our customers, clients, and partners, are taking our websites way too seriously.   It’s just a website!  Figure out what information your users need, and figure out how to get it online without screwing it up.

What to do about it

My point is, stop taking yourselves so seriously.  Yes, make your work beautiful.  Do whatever you have to do to keep your designer title and still sleep well at night. But stop thinking you’re God’s gift to the internet, and stop mulling over design decisions for days and days when the most basic solution will do just fine.   It’s just a website, and it’s going to be alright.