I am not alone in this qualm. In fact, I would venture to say that the majority of the design and UI community takes issue with the leather stitching, mandatory shine, and linen textures of iOS. But today I came across this thought from Oliver Reichenstein of iA that changed the way I think about the issue:

Half way through the Steve Jobs Biography, the biggest revelation for me so far is the clash between Raskin and Jobs. It’s a clash between serious design and selling design:

1. Serious design does not necessarily sell well. That’s why it needs to be expensive to even exist.
2. What sells is sentimentalism, nostalgia, solemnity—what sells is kitsch. That’s why kitsch can be so cheap. Because it sells so well.

That is true for any kind of design. And this is why iCal has this fucking leather surface that makes any user interface designer puke wet feverish dogs. And that’s why Apple has so much money in the bank. Not because of the mind blowing design of its hardware. (They always had the nicest hardware). But because people are sold through its nostalgic interface. The winning path started with OSX, the interface “you want to lick.” Kitsch interfaces makes the average user think:

“I know how to use this!” (which is always a false promise)

instead of

“Looks like I need to learn to use this.” (which is always the case)

In practice, Jef Raskin’s serious design approach would win hands down against the Jobs approach—but Jef would not even get the chance to compete, because no one cares about serious design before getting in touch with it.

I don’t agree with it all, but there is a big revelation in there for me. Some people believe that skeuomorphism makes an interface easier to use, or more intuitive for the user, and I simply don’t buy that. But what hadn’t occurred to me is that it doesn’t matter if it actually does make it easier to use, all that matters is that it makes the average person think it’s easier to use. In reality, a user must take time to learn any interface, whether clad in faux leather or not. The skeuomorphism in iOS plainly tricks people that might otherwise walk away, convinced that they can’t learn something new, into putting in the time required to get acclimated to a new interface.

For every one designer pointing out flawed and unnecessary ornamentation in iOS, one hundred non-designers, normal people, are tricked into thinking they understand something new.

Apple has become increasingly mainstream with the success of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad. They always appealed to the creative class, those with a trained eye and developed taste, but now they’re in the pockets of an incredibly diverse chunk of the population. They recognize this, and they’ve draped artificial linen over the eyes of the everyman so the future doesn’t scare or intimidate him too much. Skeuomorphism, in Apple’s case, is not a cute style or an attempt to make their interfaces easier to use, but instead a way to ease us on to the new frontier.

I am certainly not off to throw a linen texture on the apps we’re working on at Friends of The Web, but I am definitely thinking about skeuomorphism differently now.

Thanks to Cemre Güngör for turning me on to the post from Oliver.

On September 14th, they announced the “Subscribe” button which allows users to follow the updates of people they aren’t “friends” with. On the surface, this may seem a small update, a slight twist on the idea of “friending”, undoubtedly inspired by, if not directly taken from, Twitter. However, I think it is much more important than it may seem.

Every other aspect of Facebook is an emulation or facilitation of some common, normal interaction. Your Facebook friends are your real life friends; the service emulates the idea of sending them a letter (messages), having a conversation with them (chat), writing on their wall (posting), and now thanks to the newest updates, listening to music with them and sharing information about various media with them. Zuckerberg in his keynote states directly, multiple times, that the experience of going through someone’s Facebook page should mirror the experience of having a conversation with them. This is all well and good, but it is ground we’ve all trod thoroughly in the course of our lives. At the end of the day, none of these things are unique and meaningful interactions that take advantage of the immense potential Facebook and its 750 million active users have. To clarify, when I talk about the potential of digital media and communication, I mean the types of interactions that the internet can facilitate that would not be possible without it. No matter how cool it may be to listen to music with your friends on Facebook, it will never be as good as listening to music with your friends in real life.

This brings me to Twitter. I have been thinking a lot about Twitter, a service which I adore and use daily, and why it has been so successful. It’s a stupidly simple idea with its fair share of technical problems, way more in its formative years, and what must be the most childish and silly naming conventions of any mainstream website. (5000 tweets later, I still feel like an ass saying “I tweeted such-and-such” and “Follow me on Twitter“.) In spite of this, the service has grown speedily.

Twitter is one of the only truly new things I can think of. It facilitates interactions that would not be possible without digital communication. It allows its users to connect with celebrities, thought leaders, and other individuals that would never friend them on Facebook, and in an intimate way no less. In this massive web of leaders and followers, truly unique conversations occur, interactions that lead to amazing things. I have made friends on Twitter, true friends, whom I feel like I know on a personal level. When Anthony and I traveled to New York for the Photo Hack Day, one of them kindly and without hesitation allowed us to stay at his place, having never properly met either of us before. Connecting with people that aren’t our friends is what gives Twitter its edge. It’s actually taking advantage of digital communication’s potential, and it’s exactly what Facebook is trying to tap into with the “Subscribe” button.

Twitter is a hard thing to describe to someone who hasn’t used it. This is because it is not an emulation of some other interaction like Facebook and every other major service out there. You can’t simply say “oh, it’s like X, but online!” The closest comparison I can draw is everyone in the world (on Twitter more accurately) standing together in one huge gymnasium, huddled tightly around the most charismatic and entertaining individuals, casually and heterogeneously spread out around the average user. Everyone is talking, some almost non-stop and some rarely. In real life, this would of course be madness without benefit; no one would be able to hear anything meaningful. But with Twitter, everyone can hear. That’s the magic of it. Everyone can hear every other person they care to listen to. Even the quietest individual can be heard by the most influential expert. Some are serendipitously amplified into communities they would otherwise be unaware of, wherein they discover meaningful interactions and relationships. The result is an incredibly nimble and reactive community; one that can turn a passing thought into front page news and respond more quickly and effectively than any institution or major media outlet ever could.

These are the kinds of things our social networks should be doing for us. Listening to the same song in real time with my friend is a cool novelty, but it still leaves so much potential on the table. The subscribe button is a step in the right direction, but perhaps only in the spirit if competing with Twitter. I suspect privacy concerns are one reason that Facebook will have trouble competing in this space. Twitter’s brilliant and simple solution is that there is no privacy (save direct messages, which feel tacked on anyway). Everything said is said publicly, and eavesdropping is encouraged. Any “privacy” on the internet is an illusion anyway, might as well play to it.

This was perhaps a bit messier than my usual posts, but I wanted to get these thoughts out.

I was fortunate enough to present at Baltimore’s most recent Ignite. For those of you unfamiliar with the format, each presenter gets exactly five minutes and twenty slides, automatically advancing every fifteen seconds, to get his or her point across. I chose to present an adaptation and evolution of a paper I wrote for a film theory class in college, one of my favorite classes, about Marshall McLuhan’s evolutions in media and how they pertain to our most recent technological innovations in communication. Specifically, I propose that the Internet and the World Wide Web have retribalized us in many of the ways that McLuhan predicted back in the 1970s.

I had a good time making the visuals for the presentation. I have always liked designing slideshows; they have narrative, a time aspect, sequence, and almost always benefit from being simple and bold visually. This particular presentation involved stealing a lot of images from online and editing them to make them more aesthetically homogenous and appropriate for display on a large screen.

I hope you enjoy it, and I’d appreciate any thoughtful feedback on the presentation.

Somehow, I neglected to post any photos or write anything about the bike I have been riding for the past two years. As nerdy as it may be, I like to document these things; bicycles come and go and I would like to have something to remember them by.

I was in a smidgen of an accident a few weeks back that unfortunately left my front fork a bit out of shape. Still rideable, but far from ideal. Perfect excuse to get another bike. I found this old Italvega — Italian made, but imported and sold stateside in the 70′s — on Craigslist and bought it from a nice gentleman who was moving and couldn’t take it with him.

It needed some love, so I stripped it completely, painted the head tube and two stripes on the seat tube white, finished the whole thing in a few coats of polyurethane, replaced the stem, handlebars, seat post, saddle, pedals, and wheels. Luckily, I had almost all of these parts around my basement. The only things I had to buy were the seat post, half clips, new housing and cables, grips, and brake levers, all of which I found on eBay at very reasonable prices. All said and done, the bike cost me just over $100, (if you don’t count the saddle, which I have had and moved from bike to bike for years) and I am pretty pleased with the results. My new neighborhood isn’t as fast paced as downtown, so I appreciate the more relaxed riding position and geometry.

The bike is a tad small for me, but this is the compromise of buying dirt cheap things on Craigslist.

Bonus shot of me stripping the frame, courtesy of the ever-foxy Dan Martens.

Before

This is a photo of the bike in the condition that I got it. Thanks to Erik for the picture and the bike!

Ready? Here it is:

“Should I learn how to code?”
“If you want to.”

Really, it’s that simple. This question is no different from “Should I learn how to screen print?” or “Should I learn how to bind books?” Basic coding is a skill that will allow a designer to produce something they have designed, which is an immensely rewarding experience, but is in no way essential to the design process. Will knowing HTML and CSS make you a better designer for the web? Maybe a tiny bit, but no more than knowing how to coat, expose, rinse, and pull a screen will make you a better poster designer. We learn about how to design something by using it, not by building it. An avid reader is better suited to lay out a textbook than a bookbinder. If you’re reading this, you’ll probably visit and use dozens of websites today — most of us interact more with screens than printed material on a daily basis. Assuming you’re constantly analyzing the world around you for the basic principles of design (hierarchy, composition, etc.), and you should be if you call yourself a designer, I say you’re all qualified to design for the web.

I know how to develop websites. Once, I even coded a website that accidentally worked perfectly in IE6. However, at Friends of The Web HQ, I am surrounded by far more capable and speedy developers, as any designer working for a decent sized company or studio will be, so I haven’t touched a single line of code since I graduated.

Which reminds me, a real developer doesn’t want your garbage “designer/developer” slashie code anyway. It doesn’t matter how many articles you’ve read on A List Apart or how long you’ve followed Jason Santa Maria on Twitter; your code sucks. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Being a good developer and engineer is a full-time job, not a side-dish to your design career.

Yes, there are exceptions. Jonnie Hallman, one of my earliest design role models and now a close friend, is a designer/developer that consistently puts out clean looking, smartly engineered apps and websites. However, I am sure even Jonnie would admit that in order to keep his execution on par with is discerning standards he spends the vast majority of his time and energy wearing his developer hat; design is the cherry on top. Phenoms like Jonnie are the exception, not the rule.

Why this is so important

I am definitely not trying to discourage designers from learning how to code if they want to. Just as Jonnie designs and builds his own apps and Chris Muccioli designs and prints his own beautiful posters, you too can design something and bring it to fruition. I recommend doing it at least once.

However, I think it is dangerous and misleading to say that coding is an essential skill for a designer today. As I have discussed previously, one of the most apparent issues in design education to me right now is the deficient excitement around web and screen based design. The “designers need to know how to code” attitude is largely to blame for this. To some of us, code is meditative, logical, and beautiful. However, to most designers and design students, code is confusing, boring, and frustrating. This will probably never change.

I worry that posts like Frank’s, which perpetuate the myth that you have to know code to design for the web, are pushing students away from screen-based design. The Internet is an exciting and powerful medium and people should be jumping at the chance to design for it, whether they understand code or not.

Besides, breaking the rules is how we get progress. Think wrong.

Spoiler Alert.

The movie features contemporary protagonist Gil Pender, a writer that has been successful selling shallow, vapid scripts to big budget Hollywood productions. Though he has been prosperous in all quantitative measures in his career, he longs for the romantic life of an artist and yearns to write a novel set in Paris in the 1920′s, what he considers to be the “golden age.” He discovers if he waits at a certain street corner, when the clock strikes midnight, a vintage Peugeot will pick him up and drive him back through time that he might experience his “golden age,” rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ernest Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, and T.S. Elliot. He falls for a brooding and curious woman in the 20′s (GASP! An affair in a Woody Allen film?) and ends up travelling with her even further through time to the 1890′s, what she considers to be the “golden age.” The resolution of this four-dimensional scandal is that everyone thinks that some time before theirs was the “golden age” because life is generally unsatisfying, and this is something that we simply cannot accept. Bleak, existential the–grass–is–always–greener.

This is something I have thought about before, and I find it to be generally true. People who work for others always tell me how lucky I am to be self–employed, and entrepreneurs I know wish someone would do their bookkeeping for them and give them a health plan and a 401k. I suspect this dissatisfaction is one of the major forces driving humanity ever forward, a whole species — or at least a whole hemisphere — chasing the carrot–on–a–fishing–line that is contentedness.

I have found this to be especially true of my peers, who all happen to be recent college graduates, most of which are still looking for gainful employment. I have seen first and second hand how important knowledge of basic interactive and web design is to getting a job in design today, and to put it bluntly, schools can’t seem to keep up with the lightning fast evolution of the web. The vast majority of my classmates at MICA, and I suspect students across the country, feel nostalgic for the “golden age” of graphic design. There is boundless passion for letterpress, screen printing, patinated signs, and 60′s logos and branding. People lament the death, or at least realignment, of print and designing for the screen is tiresome and limiting.

Everything is faux distressed or egregiously skeuomorphic. The web is in the throes of puberty; we have all sorts of new and exciting potential, but we’re uncomfortable in our own skin.

Students should and need to be excited about the amazing possibilities afforded by the Internet. As much as I love the tactility of paper, the sound and feel of a Vandercook, the smell of ink, we are not living in the age of print. Your counterfeit vintage poster is easy; your retro typography is irrelevant. Print is not changing the world, Facebook is changing the world, and not necessarily for the better.

May we all learn to not just accept, but love the times we’re living in, against all odds. Eyes on the future, everyone, not the past.

I have changed a lot since then, unsurprisingly I suppose. Now I find more inspiration in Louis CK’s brilliant, observational comedy than on any of the “design” blogs out there.

Nowadays, a short list of my role models looks very different. Dave Eggers, the force behind the avant garde publishing house McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia, and by association Wholphin, is one of my biggest influences. I admire Jesse Thorn for building a modest podcast empire around content that he wanted to produce, and looking good while doing it. I am inspired by John Bielenberg, who walked away from high–design — everything I was running towards four years ago — to start Project M. Ben Pieratt, the last of my heroes who could still be considered a true designer, says bluntly on his website “I used to be a graphic designer but now I run Svpply.com.”

I am especially enamored with Ben, whose posts in the past have expressed, more eloquently and thoughtfully than I ever could, ideas that had been bouncing around my own head. These four in particular, in chronological order and going back almost a whole year, resonated strongly with me:

• In Praise of Quitting Your Job
• My Design Career is Dead, Long Live my Design Career
• My Job pt. 1 — I Have No Idea What I’m Doing
• Dear Graphic and Web Designers, please understand that there are greater opportunities available to you.

Ben has been through some big changes this year, and it has been fun to follow along. His shift from wonderment to confidence in his newfound career path has been inspiring.

This all leaves me in an interesting situation. I no longer identify with or look up to any “real” graphic designers who are alive and working today (with the exception of Paul Sahre and Milton Glaser, perhaps. Both of whom reside on the fine art side of design, which I have eschewed for years.) I chose not to take a job at a design firm when I graduated. I haven’t taken a significant freelance job in almost a year. Instead, I am working with three of my best friends to build websites and mobile applications. Right now, some for others and some for ourselves, but our goal is to be supported by our own web-based products and services as soon as possible. We are entrepreneurs, and we are working on a number of self-initiated projects that we hope will connect people in meaningful ways and make a difference in the world.

It seems, without trying or really noticing, I am working on “startups” almost full time.

Ever since I first heard the term “startup” I disliked it and didn’t want to identify with it. Every new venture is a “startup”, so the name itself holds very little meaning. Additionally, I always heard the term in relation to venture capitalists, angels, and other investors; I didn’t know anyone that self-identified their project as a startup, until it became fashionable to do so, at least. The whole thing reeks of capitalism. To say you’re building a startup — as opposed to a service, community, website, etc. — implies, at least to me, that your focus is on money. Startups are meant to be sold, traded, and bought by Facebook and stunted in their infancy, as countless Silicon Valley institutions have shown us. I too hope to make a comfortable living from web-based products, but I make an important distinction: I am deeply passionate about all of the businesses I pursue, and the thought of building something merely to fill a niche only to sell it to the highest bidder doesn’t interest me in the least. An unbelievable and burgeoning business, for sure — just not for me.

As I have touched on before, I am drawn to design because of my affection for people. The simple fact of the matter is that the web allows me to reach a wider and more diverse audience than I could ever practically reach in print. I still identify as a designer, and I suspect I always will. Design is how I solve problems, visual and otherwise.

The web is a tremendous well of opportunity and we’ve only skinned the surface; it’s an exciting time to be working. I cannot imagine finding satisfaction in designing anything else.

I have timed this post to be published precisely at the moment I walk across the stage at the Baltimore Symphony Hall to receive my Bachelors in Fine Arts in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute College of Art. I have come a long, long way since high school, and I can honestly say that I dedicated myself wholly to my work and studies at MICA. So much so, that looking back I wonder if I was too narrow focused. At any given moment over the past four years, my work was at the forefront of my mind, almost exclusively; I was truly and happily immersed. Things like eating, sleeping, romance, and relaxation were distractors — speed-bumps in my productivity. While this might have been alright for my student years, it is not how I hope to live my life.

So on this, my graduation day, I am hoping to turn my life into my biggest project, instead of the other way around.

I have no aspirations to move to New York or Chicago and work for some big shiny design studio, no dreams of becoming a “Young Gun” in the next seven years, and no desire to swim in big piles of money. I want to surround myself with people I love who inspire and challenge me, do fulfilling, wholesome work in my local community and beyond, and live a balanced life wherein I stare at a computer screen for less than eight hours a day.

To everyone out there graduating this spring, from Art School or otherwise, congratulations. Do what you love and don’t let it consume you.

All of this success raises some big questions for me; as great as Kickstarter seems, I am hesitant to believe that it has caused such a landslide shift as it appears. I think it’s a fairly widely accepted fact that it is damn hard to make money as a creative person, especially as an individual and especially on the Internet. Let’s pretend you’ve designed and screen printed a poster that you want to sell. It’s already going to be difficult to fetch a fair price with respect to all of the time that you put into it; these days Kinkos can produce something similar in a few minutes for a few dollars. It’s going to be even harder if you’re not represented by a gallery, co-op, rep, or some other larger organization that pulls more weight than you do as an individual. It only gets more difficult when you attempt to sell your posters online; now your customers can’t physically see or touch the poster before buying. Also, you’re now in a much larger market, competing with every other poster-screen-printer out there. Plus, you probably need to increase your prices a bit to cover shipping and handling. Sure, the Internet does allow you to market to a much larger group of people, but at the end of the day (unless you’re Olly Moss) it’s probably going to be real tough to make decent money in this way.

Yet, nearly every single Kickstarter project I hear about is getting generously funded, usually well beyond its goal. How can this be? Has Kickstarter somehow tapped into some well of old-wealth benefactors with an affinity for iPod Nano watches and chubby styluses? I have some theories:

It’s sometimes easier to sell an idea than a product.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive at first, it is often much easier to sell an idea than it is to sell a product, and I believe this contributes to the success of Kickstarter. When you’re just pitching an idea, people’s minds will fill in the blanks, usually favorably, especially if they respect and admire you and your work. I could decide to back Frank Chimero’s book imagining that it will be an intensely personal diary of Frank’s thinking about design while someone else could be picturing a how-to book for his simple and smart illustration style as they’re entering their credit card info. In actuality, he could write a book that is nothing like either of these; two idea customers that may not have been book customers.

Backing > Buying.

The simple shift from the idea of buying a product to the idea of backing a project is a very powerful one. Even though the vast majority of Kickstarter projects seem to result in a product of some kind, and all projects must reward their backers, there is a very intentional sense of benevolence developed by Kickstarter. You’re not buying, you’re backing. Most video pitches will mention that supporting their projects is supporting independent designers/inventors and DIYers everywhere, which accomplishes a couple things: it validates retail therapy by making people feel better about spending money on stuff, justifies generosity by allowing certain backers to look at their reward as a consolation to their philanthropy, and gives both these groups of people a story to tell instead of just a thing. Kickstarter is not the first to utilize this model, which I have seen Project M use when trying to raise money for water meters in Hale, Alabama. They sold t-shirts with “425″ printed on them for $425, the exact cost of bringing clean water to a disenfranchised home. By asking for a specific donation and giving their donors a t-shirt, they were able to raise a lot more money than they would have likely been able to if they had just asked for donations of any amount. In this way, donors know that their money helped a whole household and they get a t-shirt to remind them of their good deed.

You need to be established to have success on Kickstarter (generally).

It is definitely true that most Kickstarter projects I come across get funded. However, this is probably because the projects I am hearing about are the ones getting a lot of traction, the ones started by the designers and innovators that have always inspired me, the ones started by people that have established themselves in their field or on the Internet in general. The fact of the matter is, I am sure more Kickstarter projects fall short than get funded. (Can anyone point me to the data to support this? I can only find data on number of successful projects.) In my research for this post, I came across this article about how Kickstarter is a “scam.” While I think the author jumps to some pretty steep conclusions and makes a lot of assumptions, he/she has some interesting points. It cannot be denied that someone like Frank Chimero has a much easier time funding his project than some other designer whose name is not so well known. Frank has earned the trust of his followers with years of thoughtful writing and speaking. It is important to recognize that Kickstarter is really about funding people more than projects. This is the way most of the world works, in fact. Likable, relatable people are often hired over more qualified applicants for a job and web startup funders point-blank publicize the fact that they fund people, not ideas. (So if you’re a jerk, stop it. It’s detrimental to your success.) It seems the only real way for an uninitiated person to have success on Kickstarter is to get the support of an individual or blog that is established.

What does it all mean?

For all of the reasons that the Kickstarter model is brilliant and works so well, I am wary of it. It almost seems too good to be true. So now we have to ask the hard questions: Kickstarter is a great way to sell ideas, but what happens when people start getting these actual products back, in their hands? How many people will have expected something different, or will be disappointed in the end product? Will they come back to Kickstarter and continue to fund other projects? How many people that receive funding will fail to deliver what they promise? Kickstarter doesn’t take any action to insure fundees follow through (nor should or could they) so when is the first large scale class-action lawsuit going to come from a Kickstarter project? Kickstarter has been fortunate enough to get almost exclusively good press up until this point, but I unfortunately feel like a heavily funded project going wrong in a big way is inevitable. I just hope when it happens it doesn’t do too much damage to the service’s image.

I am also concerned that Kickstarter may create, or exaggerate, the divide between the established creatives and the up-and-comers such as myself. I was a bit surprised to see Gary Hustwit’s forthcoming documentary Urbanized on Kickstarter. Hustwit’s 2007 documentary, Helvetica, was wonderfully successful, as was the follow up Objectified, and I enjoyed both very much. While I am happy that Hustwit had so much success on Kickstarter with Urbanized, I am sure the film would have gotten made with or without the help from his near 2,000 backers on the site; Hustwit and his team were 8+ months into shooting the movie when they launched their Kickstarter project. This is starkly different from the “make my dream come true,” “this will never happen without your help” Kickstarter projects that have defined the service. If individuals or groups that have had the kind of commercial success that Gary Hustwit has start to pop up more and more on Kickstarter, I fear they will pull attention and money away from the little guys, the projects that rely on the platform.

I am wholly in Kickstarter’s corner. I love the idea, I love the projects and people they have helped fund, and I really truly hope that they continue to grow and make it easier for anyone to put something beautiful and meaningful into the world. I ask these questions out of love.

Those who know me will be surprised to find that I have finally moved on from orange as “my color,” though I didn’t venture too far down the spectrum. I have decided to go with yellow this time around for a couple reasons. Orange was a cry for attention, robust and demanding. Sneakers, bicycles, soda cans and sports jerseys, all yelling at you. Yellow, while a chromatic neighbor to orange, has a completely different personality. Yellow is friendly. Yellow is primary and fundamental. Yellow is process — highlighters and sticky notes. My fascination with orange was largely born of a desire to be different. My crush on yellow is founded on what I believe to be more authentic grounds. Also, it is my mom’s favorite color.

The new website also includes some improved typography, served up by Typekit, a service I cannot recommend enough, as well as some photographs of me, past and present, all embarrassing.

I feel like I have said this before, but as I graduate in the next month, I hope to start writing on here more. Writing, not blogging. We’ll see how that goes.

Thank you to all of you out there who care about what I do and continue to follow along. Your encouragement, critique, and feedback means a whole lot.