Specific blog posts can be credited with widespread influence of opinion. How can microblogging’s limited format accomplish the same thing?

In the early days, blogs were mostly misunderstood by establishment media as glorified diary entries, navel-gaving or just a fad. Eventually it was recognized that blogs were just the platform. Self-publishing itself was the real revolution, whether or not you called your website a “blog”, a magazine, a journal or whatever.

Making a Dent

90% of everything is still crud and blogs are no different. Yet the other 10% has been responsible for some game-changing ideas. In our own industry, there are writers and thinkers (ex: John Gruber, Mark Pilgrim, Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith) who make a dent in the way we think about websites nearly every time they post.

Blogs got another credibility boost when businesses began using them strategically. Back in 2008, 37signals’ Jason Fried wrote “Why We Skip Photoshop”.

When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup…None of this is to say we think Photoshop is bad or a waste of money or time, but for us we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience.

He simply posted about his process—causing thousands of others to reevaluate their own processes. A discussion about mockups vs. prototypes broke out. Some had epiphanies about how to develop more efficiently. This post by Meagan Fisher a year later sealed it.

So the blog format—able to support traditional long-form essays, rich formatting and hyperlinks and references—has proven its ability to drive persuasive ideas.

Then Came Microblogging

As the lead microblogging tool, Twitter is now past the early stages of being dismissed (ahem). Journalists write about it breathlessly in situations like the American student’s arrest in Egypt or the Hudson River rescue ferry. But those examples are more about Twitter’s role in the incidents themselves rather than the substance of the tweets. Maybe that’s its strength.

But I still wonder about the idea of individual tweets causing important shifts in our thinking. Is that even reasonable to expect from a 140-character format?

“Why We Skip Photoshop” is what I consider a “reinforcer” post. Fried isn’t proposing a new technique. He’s reinforcing his own methods aloud. Many readers already developed their prototypes in the browser, but the reinforcing nature of Fried’s post made it official.

Twitter is good for reinforcer posts. This tweet from Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the very few I’ve seen quoted often:

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

Surely most designers felt that already, maybe subconsciously. But it struck a chord and touched on a common problem. Instead of being a game-changer, it reinforced that above all, Design should be intertwined with Message, not sprinkled in the margins.

When I asked on Twitter about noteworthy tweets, @timothymeaney from arc90 responded with this by @codinghorror:

people > algorithms

And this by @timbray:

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: Slow conversations are better than fast ones.

Those are both memorable and obviously helped reinforce unspoken ideas that already lived somewhere in the public consciousness.

Conversation Starters

Last month, Elliot Jay Stocks tweeted this:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

It led to a discussion on Twitter that meandered all over the place. Elliot then posted a much longer follow-up. It became clear no two people fully agreed about what makes a well-rounded Web Designer. It was a conversation that needed to happen and it started with < 140 characters.

These days it's a short distance between a moment of brainstorm and a bit of published text that might lead to sea change within an industry. What other specific tweets have caused a change in your thinking? Which ones can you recall word-for-word? Are there ways microblogging could be useful that aren’t being explored yet?

Or, is microblogging a good platform for conveying substantial ideas in the first place? Are we too busy compressing ideas rather than exploring them?

Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters.

What’s interesting is that soon after Geoff made the observation, Novak’s web team removed all references to Obama from the CSS and templates, even changing the name of the /theme/ directory.

Keep in mind, Novak is a candidate who previously said:

Obama is the most dangerous official in our history, in my opinion. He is a globalist, an elitist and appears to be trying to drag this great nation down until it resembles a third world country.

But to look at the bigger picture, should the theme out of context really matter? Geoff wrote:

I knew Ms Novak (or any Republican candidate) wouldn’t want to be associated with anything having anything to do with Barack Obama no matter how tenuous the connection…What she was using was well designed and suited her (and I assume approved by her)–it just made a positive reference to Obama.

Why does that mere fact make it bad?

Fair enough. No reason design elements from a Pro-Obama theme can’t reasonably be remixed for an anti-Obama candidate’s purposes. The result is invisible to most visitors, save for those like Geoff who peek at the source code.

But if the point is to remove yourself from any Obama associations, why not choose a different WordPress theme altogether? Why knowingly choose a widely-distributed theme that plenty of bloggers already associate with Obama?

As Geoff mentions, it shouldn’t matter necessarily—but evidently it did to Novak’s web team, who made extra efforts to cover it up.

Last month I was lucky to be drafted into Dribbble by a fellow designer. It’s a private beta site with a lot of buzz. It will eventually grow and go public which got me thinking about the ramifications.

If you haven’t heard about it, Dribbble is a community created last year by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett. Designers can upload and share 400×300 samples of whatever they’re working on, kind of a visual corollary to Twitter’s “What’s happening?” Just like Twitter, you can follow others’ updates, comment on their work, mark favorites, and view the whole thing in a stream:

Notes about Dribbble

• Uploads. There’s a basketball theme so it counts as a “shot” on goal every time you upload something. 20 shots per month are allowed. Most are “leaks” or sneak peeks of upcoming design projects. You can also make “rebounds” which are visual responses to others’ designs.
• Streams. You can filter shots according to People You Follow, Most Popular, or Everything at once. This means that no matter how big it gets, you still have control over what you see. But there are downsides too, discussed below.
• Quantity. There are currently about 1000 members.
• Quality. The quality of designs on Dribbble is very very high. Nearly everything in my stream makes me click to view the details. Most any shot gets favorited a handful of times. I’m currently following 70 designers, almost 10% of Dribbble’s whole user base.

  True, you can’t deduce much from 400px crops. You don’t have insight into the projects they’re for. Many things can look great out of context but still not serve their project well. But there’s something addictive about seeing the sheer variety of styles in all these designers. So in terms of quantity and quality, Dribbble has them both in spades.

• Discovery. Dribbble has also introduced me to designers who are seemingly unknown in the blogging and Twitter world. Yet looking deeper into their work, it’s better than nearly anything you’ll find from the A-list designers we all follow.
• Discussion. Because the crops are small and somewhat inconclusive, Dribbble isn’t always ideal for workshopping an idea. Discussion is about 95% compliments, which is great for designer self-esteem, but doesn’t do much for critical thinking or the mutual back-patting that folks like Tim Van Damme noticed has gone on way too long in our industry.

  At the same time, certain feedback from a few great designers can open your eyes. It recently gave me the confidence to try out a radically new masthead idea for a project, which got approved by the client, against the odds.

• Openness. There are currently no third-party services or APIs until beta testing is complete.
• Privacy. I spoke with Dan this week who mentioned the public Dribbble will be visible to the public, but membership is required for participation. Facebook-style privacy filtering is not yet in the cards.

Intimacy

Finding intimacy among groups of friends and colleagues online isn’t always about limited numbers. Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right people. But once you’ve found an intimate place, how long can it last?

At some point in 2008-2009 everyone I’ve met in my entire 35 years got a Facebook account. Instead of trusted recent friends, my circle expanded to acquaintances from high school. People who I never intended on re-establishing contact were now privy to my every silly status update. I got self-conscious and had to create filters so that certain people didn’t get certain updates. This idea of relationship-filtering will continue being an uncomfortable part of our lives as social media grows.

Currently, Dribbble feels pretty intimate. Among the nearly 1000 members, there are still clusters of friends that form little subgroups. Within your trusted circle, you can be yourself and post private/client work without worrying much about it.

This intimacy is important as many of us designers spend our time maintaining an airtight wall of professionalism on our personal/portfolio sites. We publish only the most pixel-perfect portfolio samples. We still use the royal “we” when describing the work done at our one-man design studios. The web allows us to contrive whatever identity we want for ourselves.

Dribbble is a nice escape. You can be loose and be yourself. It’s more personal. There is no veil of professionalism. Because it is private, people post wacky stuff they might not share otherwise. There is less noise, more focus. You don’t feel lost in the shuffle.

Currently only a select group can offer invites and “draft” others into Dribbble. But eventually there will be more. And then….

The Public Dribbble

Some questions that come to mind:

• Will the feeling of intimacy disappear when Dribbble expands?
• Will the signal-to-noise ratio suffer?
• Will users feel less private and start thinking twice about what they post, re: client work and privacy?
• Will users feel obligated or subconsciously guilted into following people who follow them, as with Twitter? Will their stream become diluted, and eventually, less useful? Will Dan need to build in relationship filtering, like with Facebook?

It’s natural to get protective over an online community when you sense it’s changing. Same with bands and companies and media sources—there’s an impression that once they get big, they start to suck. Sometimes it feels genuinely true. Sometimes it’s a myth that the magic has gone. Sometimes, it’s you yourself that has mentally moved on.

Back in 2002, the MetaFilter community experienced a popularity surge. Up to that point, MeFi conversations had a reputation for being meaty and substantial. Users were overwhelmingly a smart bunch. There were lots of in-jokes and meetups. The mods closed memberships for awhile. When they opened them again, charging $5 for a membership, there were surges of new members. In the next few years, the site went from 10,000 to 60,000. Loyal community members complained that the level of conversation had changed and too many newbs spoiled the experience.

On the surface, that sounds like a snobby and short-sighted reaction. Should communities perpetually expand to include everyone? What happens if they don’t?

I’m curious what would happen if Dribbble went the Metafilter route and “pre-qualified” many of their existing members while slowly allowing in additional members for a small price, reminding people with that $5 fee that what they’re getting is not Just Another Social Network. Metafilter’s successful model has done wonders for that site’s manageability. It would be a monetary reminder that Dribbble is not for spamming, causing trouble, and so on.

Merit Systems and The Open Web

Any follower of Dan Cederholm knows his reputation as a very nice guy and brilliant designer. I doubt anyone believes he envisions Dribbble as an ivory tower where elite designers interact without sharing with the greater public.

Granted, the only invites in Dribbble’s early days were given to the top designers in the industry. Judging from comments of non-members, there was a perception of exclusivity, though really this crowd was simply beta-testing. I sympathize with Dan trying to make this distinction clear to the general public.

In the real world, there are exclusive restaurants, prestigious universities, private clubs and other institutions that require money, merits or influence to even gain acceptance. No one is trying to hide it—exclusivity is the entire point. Those institutions seek small numbers of like-minded people to qualify based on stringent standards. Some charge them with elitism.

The web is a different animal. Many services and communities are free and don’t require application, unlike universities. Can you imagine YouTube telling you you couldn’t use their software because your father was not a YouTube user and, considering the poor quality of your videos, you just weren’t YouTube material? The internet in 2010 has such a strong philosophical undercurrent of populism and open access, the idea of “applying” to a website is unthinkable.

Many think forward progress depends on the philosophies of the Open Web. Namely, sites should aspire to be transparent, decentralized, hackable and accessible to all. These notions are so overwhelmingly supported by pundits, I sympathize with the pressure anyone feels to abide by them, especially when trying to keep a community small and retain its intimacy.

In order to be all-inclusive while maintaining quality, there need to be more faders, filters and switches to tune your web experience more finely, or people will abandon ship and go elsewhere.

Maintaining Control

Just to be clear, I don’t want to imply the sky is falling when sites like Dribbble go public. And I’m not saying it’s net loss for the design community if the quality control at Dribbble gets a little muddy and the site becomes hard to sift through and feels a little less special.

Also I don’t think anyone consciously wants to discourage new, young designers from participating. But it is tough to reckon masses of people joining just to join. Following others, not because they’re fans of their design, but in hopes of being followed—joining for all the wrong reasons.

Think of when you get a new Twitter follower. You view their profile and see they’re also following 35,000 other people. They are clearly not there to exchange information or make intimate relationships. They’re serial networkers. They want a microphone and a gigantic audience. When they follow others, it’s merely an overture for you to follow them back. Which I never do. I would hate to see this kind of mentality invade Dribbble.

I think I’m just having a reaction to the general loss of control. This is why tools like Readability get created. A more calm web experience. More raw content. Less compulsive networking and and “me-too!” commenting. Smaller tribes rather than one tidal wave of unfiltered humanity.

At the beginning of each new year, I do some navel-gazing about where I should be career-wise. I look over my portfolio and take note of things I could have done differently.

This year I designed for some new platforms (iPhone, Symfony) that interested me. I considered whether I should learn to design on platforms which don’t interest me to diversify my skills or surprise myself.

I also considered whether it was smarter to market myself as a designer of WordPress-based sites, specifically, or a jack-of-all trades open to anything. I thought about what clients like to see in a portfolio vs. what I wanted to show.

One question I wonder each year is this:

Is it more attractive when designers can…

a) design like a chameleon in any style or genre appropriate to the project, or
b) design over a period of years in a consistent, signature style

What designers out there qualify for each of these categories? Which marry the two effectively? I’d love to know what others think, from the perspective of both fellow designers and people who have been in a client’s position.