there’s one small but crucial point made in the piece: writers and publishers are usually so distanced from their tools that they simply expect to be able to write once and publish anywhere. of course, this never works.

we ran across this notion for the first time while developing for a publishing team who wanted every post to have a headline, subhed, deck, byline, timestamp, excerpt, and body. in that order.

what we didn’t know at the time was that the writers didn’t understand that when we said “to be present at all times,” it meant to them, “unless you guys forget to write it, or are simply too stoned, or just don’t feel like thinking about it,” in which case it was supposed to degrade gracefully. such are the differences in understanding technology and just using it.

photo by flickr member dullhunk.

I’ve been, like, sitting around for days now trying to figure out if I have anything to say about Paula Scher freaking the fuck out on Imprint a couple of weeks ago.

I love it when Paula flips out in public. She’s one of the fiercest proponents of design’s necessary balance between service and artistry, and does a really good job defending that position. But this freakout seemed more reactionary.

Paula didn’t read Justified’s submissions criteria very throughly. That’s clear. She decided early on in her interpretation that because AIGA is now asking designers to point to ways they think their work’s effective, that effectiveness will be the only criteria for judging. That’s never said anywhere in AIGA’s admissions request.

Conversely, in a departure of logic, leaving selection criteria up to entirely emotional means (beauty, creativity, surprise, innovation, and inspiration) is portrayed as somehow more truthful than quantified proof.

Paula goes on to connect the act of delivering a rationale as “design bullshit,” then points to an account of a Richard Meier spat in which there was literally a boundary drawn between “his stuff” and “the other designer’s stuff,” followed by a wildly disrespectful third-party account of Vignelli basically being an arrogant cock in a meeting to a weak-kneed client (which, huge surprise).

According to her piece, ascribing value to the designer’s thinking (for which a client is paying thousands of dollars) by delivering proof supporting effectiveness is invalid—apparently because it’s boring and it takes a long time to write. But to leave the designer (again: thousands! of dollars! in expenditures worth firing people over!) free of any numerically-based judgement is totally valid.

To extend that reasoning, there is no connection between the constant calling into question of design’s value and the designer’s refusal to be measured in any way. Paula says herself that “The AIGA membership never believes that their clients respect them,” and I kind of don’t believe that’s true.

So, according to this line of thinking—measurement is idiotic, emotional judgement is paramount—there is no connection in the current spate of ten-dollar-logo sites and the fact that designers steadfastly refuse to give up any quantifiable information about the value they bring to the table. Instead, It’s a better idea to lie to the client to make them feel better like Vignelli did, or simply have a tantrum, like Meier did.

Right.

I guess I’m just let down to see such a normally-well-spoken designer spitting out thoughts that are virtually identical to those of a junior designer: “Numbers don’t matter! Our clients hate us! What about beauty!?”

That is design bullshit. The steadfast refusal to analyze the real value a designer’s thought brings to the work is complete bullshit. The absolute refusal to try to quantify beauty, to quantify excitement, is garbage. Those things can be quantified. Conversely, ideas which sound logical and effective can just as easily easily be disproven. Here’s a great piece that shows a very clear case of Jakob Nielsen’s so-called “usability studies” being shot down.

Design is in a much larger state of flux right now than it ever was in the print-only era. Right now, we need to prove that we do actually understand that our work is more than logos and letterheads.

I’d like to see someone of Paula’s level of talent and intuition publicly accepting our need to give clients what they need to report to their superiors. Nathan Shedroff posits that AIGA’s gone off the tracks, but we’ve heard it from interactive designers many times before. I was hoping for this to close the schism between graphic designers and other visual designers. Maybe next time.

cheryl bowles in the chicago tribune's features department, from trib social media manager amy guth.

The web as a disruptor of commerce has been a really curious thing. On the one hand, it’s been a huge boon to industries which rely on a promise of high sensory input after a sale. Things the purchaser can envision, and really really want, are easy to sell.

Porn was one of the web’s early adopters for just that reason, and its commerce engines pre-dated banks. In 1997, I wrote a comparison between Chisel’s purchasing methods with Visa’s (which were, at that point, nonexistent). Chisel (it’s out of business, stop Googling, you pervs) looked a lot like some of the purchase forms we see today, but with a bonus: a recurring purchase you’d be too embarrassed to cancel by phone. All in good fun!

The entire Chicago restaurant market seems to practically live on Twitter, Facebook, and their blogs, endlessly congratulating each other on every successful plating, and basically advertising in small text-based bursts on a 24-hour basis from our star-studded community of chefs. Sales? Plenty enough that they’re willing to throw money into monthly publishing and social media budgets.

But publishing? Ugh. Terrible. The early publishing market relied heavily on the ad-based model we all know and hate now, but they designed in such a nasty way that attention was forever fragmented, reading became difficult, and even now, very few publications do purely-visual content very well. Publishing has to work to be sexy, and it’s not doing a good job of it.

Where is publishing now? Spinning its wheels in the dirt. As usual.

On one side of the equation, we have web-based publications trying desperately to transition readers to paywalls, and doing a sad job of it. The Wall Street Journal reported only last month that most paywalls are failing. The ones I see succeeding are the ones in which the content directly relates to a perception of value. The Wall Street Journal has long been a standby subscription for anyone interested in business news, and that’s reflected in their subscriber numbers: 537,000 subscribers. Others are similar. Most are tanking. Newsday, a year after launching their paywall, has less than a thousand subscribers.

On the other side, we have tablet-based publications, usually adapted from printed magazines. They seem to be doing okay.

In an interesting Adobe PR call a couple of weeks ago, Linly Schambers-Lenox (Digital Publishing Suite’s marketing lead) talked about Adobe’s publishing efforts for paying clients, and how the platform’s been working in the year that it’s been up. So far they sport about 1500 live apps for Android and iOS, and some substantial reader engagement. Ad engagement is substantially higher than on the web, because it doesn’t interfere with content, and therefore acts as a reader expects it to. Revenue is also higher, as there was never a case where the reader expected a free version.

This would probably only work with publications coming from an established brand, or one with a serious upfront marketing campaign, but the numbers were still impressive: 68% of readers were paying for digital-only products.

I noticed Linly wasn’t saying anything about people moving from the web to DPS, and I wondered why. Seems like a natural evolution to me; you get sick of the medium that’s beating you up and you move, right? Not so much. Towards the end of our call, I asked Linly how many DPS products had been adapted from publishers moving from the web to a paid format, and the answer was “none that I know of.”

None? That’s upsetting in its implications. It says to me that there’s a strong possibility that web publishers might not consider moving to a tablet to gather revenue, and are still hoping to make untenable, ugly ad placements work—even though actual clickthrough rates are awful, viewer engagement is just as bad, and the ad content is forced into such ridiculous sizes and proportions that it will never look anything short of ungainly.

That lack of movement to tablets from the web says to me that the schism between paid content in app form and free content in web form is going to continue, and could even widen.

The thing that frightens me about that is that it would leave the web, in my eyes, with an unfulfilled promise. There’s no reason that the web should continue to be publishing’s ugly stepchild, just because its builders can’t find a middle ground for communication with less technically-abled management. There’s no reason at all the web can’t be a place for paid content that both audiences and advertisers trust and can count on.

I know for a fact that the culture between web publishing and print publishers is already branching into two different directions. We did a proposal for a site (which, to be truthful, was a site built from a print magazine the parent company wanted to resuscitate) that we thought would be a great candidate for a tablet treatment—but the publishers simply didn’t get it.

We showed comps of actual existing content, refreshed for a tablet, we showed engagement numbers from other apps. No light of recognition, no spark of possibility. Nada.

As it turns out, it is incredibly difficult to adjust a web publisher’s expectations to the numbers of eyeballs they might see in a tablet-based format, and the ad sales figures make no sense to them at all. The engagement numbers sound like absolute fiction (I once had a web-based publisher actually call me crazy when I said that in-app time spent hovered around 25 minutes), and the revenue figures are incomprehensible.

I hope that I’m wrong in seeing all these clues. I don’t want to see the net turn into a duality between walled-garden apps and websites. I want to see a middle ground where the web can send readers into apps for heavier content purchases, and apps can continue to shoot readers back out to the web for more community-based content. But I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. Nobody’s got the chemistry right just yet to make the to media work well together.

u.s. soldiers touring an army research laboratory, from flickr member RDECOM.

Since the last post a couple weeks ago, I’ve been stewing over what exactly I think is missing from a design curriculum which would adequately prepare young’uns for a new career. More importantly, I’ve been looking at other trades to figure out why the discrepancy between our training and trade exists.

Lawyers, it turns out, have the same problems we do; law schools, like design schools, are terrified of being perceived as trades which can be learned through experience rather than professions requiring university-level training. That’s a reasonable fear, as both situations are actually true. It’s technically possible to pass the Bar exam without a degree in law. It’s really hard, but it’s possible. Likewise, in visual design, we have practitioners who piss everyone else off by effortlessly sweeping aside everything we’ve collectively learned to redefine what it means to communicate professionally—without a college education.

What does that mean for colleges? In a nutshell, it means that they work extra special hard to look smart. They concentrate on theory, they concentrate on ideas, and they totally ignore what it means to work.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any help from any professional design organizations coming any time soon to re-set this skewed balance between the idea of design and the practice of design.

So. In a nutshell, here is a first, off-the-cuff draft of everything I think a young designer should be trained in doing. This is based almost entirely on my experience as a designer who makes his own way—not someone who’s employed by a company. Take it in that light.

First off: the whole shebang should be renamed to visual communications.

1. Visual training with at least two concentrations
   1. Motion design
   2. Design for online media
   3. Interface design
   4. Design for printed surfaces
   5. Publication design
   6. Environmental design
   7. Design for languages
2. Business principles
   1. Marketing
   2. Negotiation
   3. Operations
   4. New Market Discovery
3. Technology principles
   1. Programming
   2. Machining
   3. Supply chains
   4. Transportation

Clearly off the cuff.

But by building this outline, I want to point to a major theme in design these days: we’re not expected to make just logos and boxes any more, but a lot of our educational programs still emphasize that.

At the moment, graphic designers, as we are taught, design the ephemera and the tossables of culture. We make trash. New grads generally make it badly (which has some nasty financial implications for the visual industries).

Imagine how powerful visual design could become if we were taught to integrate ourselves further up the value chain, rather than at the bottom (at the stage of implementation) as we are right now.

Here’s some examples:

A designer might partner with a drilling team and begin to find ways to move water to arid regions using that experience combined with package design.

Designers from print disciplines could learn through supply chain foundational training how to find and utilize fibers with tensile strength, but shorter lifespans. Packaging would sit for less time in landfills.

Language designers—someone with a background in pictograms and typography—could partner with a team experienced in stealth transportation and distribution to allow governments to fight information wars by distributing reading instruction to illiterate populations of autocratic societies.

These are all huge, broadly-sketched examples, and they’re meant to be way way over the top. The point i want thee examples to make is that: young designers could be powerfully utilized in the marketplace if they’re taught as broadly as their thinking actually is. But we don’t do that—we teach them in a narrow band of experience. Logos, books, animation, other one-way narrative forms.

Maybe if we teach designers to be combinant and entrepreneurial at a younger age, we show them their truly endless versatility.

designers makin' bank at a renegade craft fair booth.

Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times the other day; you toddle along and pretend to read it and I’ll wait here for you.

So basically, it turned on a light bulb over my head about a lot of what really burns my ass about design education: many design programs are completely out of step with what it actually means to be a designer. I can’t tell you how many designers I know who are either self-employed or own their own companies, and yet never have I once heard anything about a design program offering any business education at all. For the most part, they’re run like extensions of art programs, teaching mostly visual skills, maybe a little advertising too if you look hard enough. if this article’s any indication, these programs don’t think they should be teaching real-world skills. Like, you know, budgeting. Billing. Getting employees with non-normative sleep schedules into a normal schedule. Things every designer over the age of 25 has to deal with.

There’s one sentence in that piece at the NYT which echoed almost completely what I was really wondering about design education:

Part of universities’ function is to keep alive man’s greatest creations, passing them from generation to generation.

The article essentially boils down to an assertion that universities’ importance lies in offering a student instruction on critical thinking, not practical knowledge.

Okay, I’ll buy that, I suppose. But, if university’s a way to learn how to think, who guides a student through the practical application of that learned critical awareness?

I mean, the things I need to do every day as an independent designer—learning how to read a client who’s on the fence about a new piece, structuring my assets so that all my eggs aren’t in one basket—who’s teaching students these common sense things of how to live as an artisan? Who’s teaching them that as the posessor of a basic and somewhat rare human skill that it could be in their interest to incorporate and protect everything they sell rather than working for someone else? I certainly don’t remember being handed any practically applied information like that at all, which resulted in an amazing loss of money and in some cases, being utterly taken for a ride by employers. I remember lots of color theory and endless hours of critique, but not one single seminar on how to get paid.

image: flickr member anonymous9000

Watts Martin explains what gets him twitching about #protest #hashtags on Twitter, and I would actually expand that to surround my own reasoning for not wanting anything to do with the Occupy protests: they are often used and performed from a point of total naiveté.

Watts points out a few things that have set my teeth grinding about slacktivism (using your online social profiles to feel that you’re creating a protest movement):

• changing your avatar, which does literally nothing for anyone
• signing online petitions without first understanding where those petitions go, or what legislators actually pay attention to in terms of communication
• protesting Twitter’s censorship, without understanding that Twitter is actually complying with the censorship rules thrown at it. Google’s not censoring, governments are.

My own problems with half-understood activism of this sort, as it relates to Occupy, were that I found it incredibly galling that so-called one-percenters were globally portrayed as top-skimming opportunists. (None of them legitimately staretd businesses and created jobs..?) Ninety-nine percenters were almost always portrayed as hapless victims. (None of them are lazy opportunists who prefer to simply coast?)

It just isn’t true, and comes from a position of generalization. And misunderstanding your protest points is what sinks a movement every time. The thing I find most dangerous about social media in a protest scenario is that it creates the emotional fiction for the user that they are actually participating in something larger than themselves in a real, viable way.

Sometimes, yes, that happens: SOPA and PIPA got great reactions because of Twitter. But most times, you’re just making yourself feel better by howling into a search result.

We see ideas spring up as a result to broad circumstance, which are then visually interpreted ad hoc. That initial communication is done both with and without design—as some designers, naturally curious about new ideas, are involved in the movements.

But then, it turns into a chicken-or-the-egg conversation.

Does design only give a concrete way to see at a pre-formed idea, or is it also the inverse: that design helps to form the structure of the idea, because now it can be seen?

imagery from flickr members mediafury, isafmedia, and blaisone.

First: I’m up to my nose in cause-related work from some organizations traditionally thought of as the ones advocating for The Common Good. Unfortunately, neither is doing much of interest when compared against the larger backdrop of the social web, neither really gets why they should be, and the work they’re asking us to do is, in the long run, disappointingly workaday—a fact made even more disappointing by my conscious decision to chase a clientele I thought could advocate social good. Every time we make a recommendation countering something we find ill-advised, the result is meetings, conference calls, requests for approvals from higher-ups, and then nothing interesting. Few people are willing to try anything new, even with a complete roadmap laid out. Fewer understand what they stand to lose if they don’t try something new, and even less than that understand that it’s harmless to try something new. In short, I’m a little burned out with billing for meetings that amount to not much.

Secondly: We’re working for a restaurant called Yusho lately, a turn that’s making me reconsider my market composition. Chef Matthias Merges, who’s been working for years owns Yusho, but it’s his first property under his own steam—previously, he was chef de cuisine for Charlie Trotter’s, and as such essentially trained a huge number of younger chefs now making a splash at other restaurants around town. The people flocking to him are other cooks from other restaurants. So this means: the people building the hype are other practitioners. (Here’s a link to Yusho’s Facebook page, which is largely populated by local chefs.) Those same people are the ones spending money on his food.

Basically, this is going to create a ripple effect for the restaurant. Since these chefs are all talking in public about eating at Yusho, their own fans are seeing it. Those fans are going to take advice from the chefs, and then those people will start talking. And so on and so forth.

Wonder how this would work in design, without the path to public mass-popularity? I doubt the ripple effect from designer to design fan would be nearly as broad as it is in the restaurant community—but even the base notion of designers buying designers’ work is interesting. Would it simply end up with with a smaller economic community of designers financing other designers’ posters, clothing, typeface files, and so on? I’d love to know the dollar amount designers already spend on designer-created objects. If the design community is anything like the food community, the biggest fans are the ones already making their own blend, and hungry to try others’. Heaven knows Society6 is full of lovely things for designers’ fans.

This addresses something bubbling in the broader scheme of American culture too—the importance and meaning of work. Everyone likes the notion of being able to attach some greater meaning to their work, some way to get some self-worth from their occupation. But increasingly, that’s not viable.

So what would happen if workers and craftspeople began to leave the larger economy and focused on closely-held customer pools? Would we see a community of microeconomies flourishing for shorter periods of time, and under different rules? Would it be more conducive to a learning process, if we were freer to jump from vocation to vocation, knowing we had a pool of purchasers already in place? I’d love to know how to leave client work behind.

Maybe that should be my 2012 project to cure my overall disenchantment.

Behance’s founder and CEO, Scott Belsky, chimed in on the piece, saying:

If everyone restricts themselves to their own island (siloed website), then the only people that will find you are people who already know you. Many online platforms (including Behance) are trying to optimize discovery (by field, past client, location, etc…). NEW opportunity comes from generating leads by distributing your work in a controlled but efficient way.

Scott then pointed out a new product, called ProSite:

…but I agree with you, you need your own space and branded site on the web as well. Our team realized this a few years ago and ultimately created ProSite to help people create and fully customize their own websites while keeping them in-sync with Behance (and LinkedIn, etc…) to get the best of both worlds.

ProSite is essentially a service upon which Behance handles your content management (thereby saving you from dealing with WordPress or other CMS—and all the annoyances that come with), then presents it on your own domain rather than in a Behance-branded page.

This seems like a decent co-existence of personal ownership and corporate display. (We do it ourselves for our own portfolio at Cargo, another version of the same idea).

However, rather than what Scott is presenting—a branded space that’s in sync with the service—the emphasis should be on the designer’s own branded space, with less material at the service. That gives you the best of both worlds—independence, but with access to the service’s search reach.

Here’s why. Look at the service agreements for both Cargo and ProSite.

In the Cargo contract, there’s this clause which allows Cargo the right to use your work to promote their service:

By submitting Content to Cargo for inclusion on your Cargo web site, you grant Cargo a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the Service. This license exists only for as long as you continue to be a Cargo customer and shall be terminated at the time your Web site is terminated.

Here’s the ProSite version, which is actually Behance’s language (since there’s a clause in the ProSite T&C stating that by agreeing to that document, you’re also agreeing to the Bēhance T&C document):

…during this limited license, you allow Behance LLC to reproduce, modify, publish, translate, distribute, perform and display Your Content (in whole or part), and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. Such limited license also includes incorporating a Contribution, in whole or in part, into a Behance feature or in promotional or marketing materials (attributed properly to the artist).

The thing that bothers me about these contracts is the very subtle shift in power, and the result of that shift.

In accepting your license, you accept that your work is commoditized and used as an aspect of the technology provider’s marketing. Since they’re larger than you, they can create more of a broadcast. This broadcast message creates an unintended effect: the impression of a sea of handcrafted images. And that vastness portrays the idea that creation is easy.

So does that mean I’m saying these companies act malevolently by necessarily commoditizing content? No. Absolutely not. But I am saying that concentration of talent creates a wholesale shopping mindset for someone looking for a designer, which could have a serious effect on your billing rate.