The Lemonade Stand

Lets say I am opening a lemonade stand. I use ice, lemons, sugar, water, and cups. I sell large cups for $2 and small cups for $1. At those prices I make a $0.30 profit on the small and $0.60 on the large (simple, I know). We’ll also assume I make a fixed amount of lemonade every morning and throw away whats left at the end of the day. I want to design a report or a dashboard that shows me actionable data.

Lets start with some reports I could make:

• Amount of sugar used today, this week, this month
• Amount of sugar left over today, this week, this month
• Amount of lemons, cups, etc. used today, etc.
• Amounts left over, etc.
• Large cups sold today, week, etc.
• Small cups sold, etc.
• Total cups sold, etc.
• Lemonade left over today, etc.
• Sell out time today, week, etc.
• Averages of any of these per day, week

That is a lot of possible report combinations. Do I need them all? No. I only need four. And here they are:

1. Average lemonade sold+left over per day of week over last 50 days
2. Small to large cup ratio over last 20 days
3. Profit totals per week, last 10 weeks
4. Holidays in the next 10 days.

That’s it. The average sold+left lets me know about how much lemonade to make each day. I keep a running total to adjust for seasons and booms/busts in my business. I can also detect if I need to buy more raw ingredients to increase my daily lemonade.

Small to large is to balance the prices and profit margins. If I’m selling much more of one size, then I raise the price. Supply and demand. I can also tell which size of cups to buy.

Profit totals let me track if I am making money or losing it. I can see how well my business is growing.

The holidays lets me know when I can expect a drastic change. I’ll do my best to make more lemonade on those days.

Looking at these four simple reports daily can help me to make decisions about pricing, purchasing raw materials, and projecting growth or bankruptcy. Are they the absolute only reports I need? Probably not. But they will give me a great picture of my business and give me feedback I can use to make decisions.

The Other Reports

While there are a hundred other possible reports, I don’t need to see those. They aren’t actionable. Each one of the four selected reports tells me something I either need to change or keep the same. I don’t answer every possible question, just the really important ones.

I know this is a simple example in a vacuum, but the point is illustrated clearly enough. Keep reports simple and actionable. Decide what will give you information that can be used to make a decision.

Here are some of the pitfalls of reporting. Making reports that are:

• Overly complicated
• Too simple
• Interesting but not actionable
• Too hard to distinguish change
• Too small a sample size to see results
• Too long or detailed
• Not providing feedback

The commonality is that they don’t give you good information to act on. Many reports above are very interesting to see. They look cool, and sometimes they make you think they have useful information. But they don’t. I have toyed with sites like Daytum that let you track things over time. The data is really interesting, but it hasn’t helped me make a decision or pushed me to make a change. Mint.com, however, provides reports that are simple and do promote change. And I don’t have to enter anything to use them.

Baseball Analogy

Imagine looking at stats from 3 innings of a baseball game. There is very little if any usefulness from these stats. The only thing I can think of that you might use to make a decision is pitches thrown, which could indicate fatigue. Other than that, nothing is useful to make a decision.

Now take an entire game. You may have some insight about a player who got a couple of hits or a closer with 2 Ks in an inning. But the sample size is too small. You may get overly ambitious or depressed because of a small bit of data.

Let’s go the other way and look at 4 years of stats for a player or team. Can you make a decision for the next season from these stats? Probably not a great decision. Most of the data might be too normalized or affected by other sources. Baseball is streaky, and teams tend to change some year over year. Over 4 years, you’d have a hard time what to expect in the next year. And some people use that type of data to predict the next four years. Ridiculous.

The ideal stage of data is probably around half a season, or a rolling 60 games or so. You get a big enough sample size while still taking into account current conditions. And you don’t need every stat under the sun to make a good decision.

Less Reporting = Less Data

It’s really tough coming up with a good, small set of reports. Most people have a fear of missing something, or they want to look at things to be able to know them. There is a desire to be able to extract every detail of possible data, but most of that data doesn’t really tell you anything. A great report must be able to do the following things:

• Give you actionable data
• Quickly provide feedback from changes
• Use the right size of data
• Be visually easy to understand

Those are not easy things to accomplish. Good reports take a bit of focus to understand and create. The other big benefit is that the data you need to collect is dictated by the reports. This means that data collection (and entry) can be better. This isn’t that interesting in our Lemonade stand example, but could be very important in big business. Less data entry and easier data entry multiplied over large groups of people can also increase data accuracy.

The last part of a good report is that it helps you achieve your goal. Our goal with the lemonade stand is to maximize profit. The four reports we use help us do that both in the short-term and in the long-term.

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

This is quite long. It’s great because we get the day of week, month, date, and the full year all in one spot. But this format just feels much too long to be something that you would want to appear for anything recent. If it was the day after, then Tuesday, Yesterday, the 11th, or even Jan 11th would suffice. But, as an archive format, this date can be useful.

Jan 12, 2010

We get the short spelling of the month and the day without a suffix, and finally the full year. This date is much shorter and compact, however it does not convey everything. The day of week is missing and is probably not something someone would know immediately. Also, the date abbreviation can be tricky if done by hand. I’ve seen Sept. and the full July written while the others were only three letters. Consistency is lost.

1/12/2010

This, or similar with dots or dashes solves the problem of the abbreviated month, but it still misses out on the day of the week. This date is shorter which is of great benefit. However, meaning is lost and this can be confusing, especially for foreigners. Many (all?) european countries show dates as DD/MM/YYYY while the date about is MM/DD/YYYY. The month and day are switched. For 3/31/2010, it’s not confusing. But it is for 1/11/2010. There are even variations with including or not including a leading zero. 01/12/2010 or say 01/09/2010 for Saturday.

1/12/10

This is the same as above but with a shortened year. This is not helpful at all, since 10 can represent a month, day, or year. This format still exists, often in handwritten form, as year in the final place is universally accepted. This is about as short as the numbered dates can get. The semantic dates are a bit different.

Last Tuesday

This is a time-sensitive date. It only works for about 7 days, and then there is a new Tuesday to take over the role of the last Tuesday. On a day like Wednesday, this can also be confusing. Does last Tuesday refer to the previous day or 8 days ago? It is hard to tell. This is also true of saying last weekend on a Monday. Is it the one that just ended or the one previous to that.

Tuesday

Now we have lost the ‘last’ as well as most of the value. This only works in a range of about 2 days surrounding the Tuesday in question. This can be very useful on Thursday and on Sunday, but not Monday and Wednesday because then you could use tomorrow or yesterday.

3 days ago

This is a relative date and is only good for one day, after which it changes. This can help when referring to things that are not likely related to the day of week or the date. I had pizza for dinner 3 days ago is more useful than a date in a numeral form. But, once it exceeds about 5 days, it becomes difficult to quickly count and find the day of week or date.

Unfortunately, there is no best date format. It almost always depends on the situation you are in. In conversation, words work best for shorter distances in time. For the longest dates, more detail works. However, if the day of week isn’t important, it can often be left off. The real trick is to pick the least confusing date at that time.

This may sound boring to most people, but choosing the right way to display a date is one of those savory pieces of polish in really good software. With time-aware programming, websites like Twitter are able to display dates differently depending on the length of time between the date and now. This small distinction can go a long way in good communication and usability.

Job security lowers as technology increases, and unfortunately for those workers, technology is increasing very quickly. Many of the changes that would put these people out of jobs are made by businessmen, not really by staff or supervisors.

Knocking down the Barrier

Technology has done a wonderful job at breaking down these high barriers to entry. You can be a graphics pro with a cheap computer and cheap (or free) software. Likewise you can self publish online with a variety of free or cheap platforms. And becoming a marketer can be easy using free online tools. The problem with reducing the barrier to entry, though, is that the community/market/audience becomes saturated with people with little talent.

Part of the great thing about a very high barrier to entry is that only the capable and talented were able to climb that wall. Hiring a designer with a top firm meant you would get a premium product, though this also meant a premium price. Now you can get a bargain basement designer, but as the old adage says, you get what you pay for. So, how does a high barrier to entry correlate with a premium candidate on the other side? The answer is focus.

A person had to be very focused on what they wanted to do if they had any chance at breaking into that market. You had to be really serious about graphic design if you were going to justify spending thousands of dollars on the required equipment. You had to spend the time getting a degree and working at firms to practice and hone your trait if you were going to have access to some of the great work that was being done in the field. A nobody off the street couldn’t decide one day they wanted to be a graphics pro. But technology has “fixed” this problem for us.

From a buyer’s perspective, this is painful because there are far too many options, and the ones that are most marketed are often not the best options. But I’m much more interested in what’s good for the maker. By lowering the barrier to entry, the market entices people to take up new hobbies and activities. People can now choose to be whatever they want, and can do so quickly and easily. New technology is like a miracle drug for work. Little to no cost and effort and you can be a web designer! No need for expensive school or tools. Pay a little money now and be whatever you’ve always wanted to be.

This is poisonous. I know because I’ve been there. I wasted lots of time trying out new things and being a make-believe professional at something I had only done for 50+ hours. That’s not even equal to a single semester course. I was robbing myself of focus. By bouncing from new technology to new technology and coding to design to publishing I wasn’t able to focus or improve on a single thing. I kept switching ideas because I was running into the hidden barrier.

The Hidden Barrier

Technology took away the clear barrier to entry, but it doesn’t remove the hidden one. The hidden barrier is the one that requires work to get over. It requires sweat and experience and hours upon hours of doing something over and over. In the past we never saw this wall. We were pushed away from things because of the high barrier to entry, but never realized that when you climb that wall, you also gain the strength to climb the hidden barrier of experience. The technology barrier was easy to break down, but until we get instant learning a-la The Matrix, we will still struggle when we hit the hidden barrier.

This hidden wall makes things worse in another way. When I hit the wall in programming, I then moved my hobby to design. And I worked for a few hours and gained a tiny ounce of experience, and then I hit the hidden wall of graphics and again moved on to something else. The low barrier to entry plus a high barrier of experience causes us to move from thing to thing and never really learn how to do anything. It removes any reason to focus.

I still struggle with focus because I’m not exactly sure what I want to be doing. There is no shame in wanting to dabble and try new things, but you must be aware that you are doing so. Do not kid yourself into thinking that every six months you become an expert in something new. In reality, you are dabbling and quitting and trying something new. I am now aware of this. Along with that awareness is a desire to not dabble. There is a desire to focus.

Focus for Success

The formula to success has always and will always be simple. Do something for a long time until you are very good at it. Become an expert first, and then figure out the sales and marketing and other stuff. In the long run, a great designer just getting started in marketing will do better than a crappy designer who has good marketing. It’s a tortoise and hare story. The current problem I see in many places is that people keep skipping the part where you spend thousands of hours becoming an expert. They just jump to the marketing tricks and sales techniques and stay mediocre forever. I want something better than this.

Of the many things I have dabbled in, “explaining” seems like the best fit for focus. I am very good at learning things quickly and then explaining them to someone else. Someday this could be teaching, but now I think writing is the best place for it. My formula for success is to focus on getting very good at explaining things to other people. I consider myself a great analogist (person who makes analogies) and am improving on my ways with words. Right now it takes me over a thousand words to accurately explain something, and my goal is to lower that to a few hundred.

Focusing on something will get you much farther in the long-term than dabbling will. The tough decision is deciding what to focus on. Try to pick something that you know will be around in 20 years. That often means abstracting the technology that is in front of something. My focus on explaining things can be in person (public speaking), in writing (here or in documents), in video online, or possibly in a classroom setting. My current job in SEO is all about explaining things (to Google and to content writers). I am confident there will still be a need to explain things in 2030.

What will you decide to focus on? You may still need some time to dabble, and that’s OK. Just understand that dabbling is not the same as gaining experience just as tasting a wine is not the same a drinking a bottle of it. Once you found what you want to do, start doing it. It will still be tough, but the long term effect is success, and that’s what it is all about.

• Too much Spam
• Not really providing a “conversation”
• Not enough to make a difference
• Can be very self serving
• Don’t relate at all to the article topic
• Can’t follow up with comments
• Showing Retweets aren’t the same as comments.

Not a spammer? Aren’t trying to flame someone? Read the whole article? Have a question or something to share with other readers of the same article? Then you are a good candidate to comment. But I’m guessing that eliminates too many people.

I think comments might work under a couple of conditions:
The writer has vetted you as a real person with good ideas or questions. You can now have access to comment on anything. Sort of a white list. Not on the list? Then you can ask to be. But the request list could turn into a bunch of spam crap as well. Hard to avoid.

I’ve never really been about scalability, because I’m not sure that really high quality stuff should scale. Comments certainly don’t scale, and even for a site as small as mine, there is way too much spam and such.

The biggest problem I have with internet comments is there is no accountability. If you have an idea I disagree with but it is well explained and well written, then I will certainly post it. But, if you want to put “nice post”, “LOL”, or just about anything that you see on most popular blogs, it makes me want to tear off my face and renounce the internet all together. (Has anything practical at all ever come out of Yahoo answers? Seriously.)

And this doesn’t even tackle the big internet problem that still hasn’t been fixed: the annoying idiots that try to ruin it for the rest of us. I’d rather not play with them at all.

I’m just as happy not having comments, because any Really Important comments will make it to me by some other means.

Collaborative Technologies June 2006 – 23 mins

Web2.0 Expo September 2008 – 15 mins

O’reilly Interview October 2008 – 36 mins

Business of Software October 2008 – 60 mins

Chicago Convergence March 2009 – 19 mins

IIT Entrepenuer talk March 2009 – 60 mins

Big Omaha May 2009 – 32 mins

FOWA Miami July 2009 – 16 mins

Business Innovation Factory September 2009 – 14 mins

Startup School October 2009 – 33 mins

LessCon 2009 Videochat – 15 mins

Bigthink February 2010 – 30 mins

Those areas are “multi-tasking” and “data portability”.

Multi-tasking done better

The new Apple iPad doesn’t do multitasking (yet). But, it hints at a better way to think of multi-tasking. Look at the horizontal view of the Mail app. We have panes. We are multi-tasking, but it occurs in the same app. We have an inbox app open in the left Pane, and we have an email app open in the right. It looks like when you reply or forward an email, it opens a new Pane that rests atop the others. To me, this is the future of multi-tasking.

Imagine, if you can, a 30″ iPad (the iDesk) that sits in front of you on a table at a 30 degree angle. You have a keyboard in front of you, because no one has invented a better way to get words or thoughts into a machine that is faster (i.e. voice recognition isn’t here yet). This is your new workstation. It will let you do anything you can do now, just better.

There is no mouse, because you use your hands instead. The screen is on the table so your arms don’t get tired. If you want to do some graphics work, you fire up a graphics app. Now, let’s say you need to compare what you are doing to a website. Many graphics pros either have two screens or a single giant screen with a high resolution. We put things in windows now, but let us let go of that concept. Instead, apps will exist in Panes. The way you multi-task is you open up more than one pane at once. When there is only one pane, it fills the screen. Click a button (hardware or software) and you can add a Pane, which autofills with the app launch screen. You can resize the Panes relative to one another, but they will fill the screen. So they could be 50/50 horizontally, 70/30, or arranged vertically instead. To multi-task some more, you can open another Pane. The software might cap you at 4 panes for performance and usability reasons. Or maybe you can have Spaces in the current OS X context so you can swipe the iDesk screen (or hit a button) and be carried away to a new area with different apps.

The big trick to multi-tasking is that it works differently on a big or small screen. Think about the differences between the Calendar apps on the iPhone and the iPad. The screen real estate lets you do so much more. True multi-tasking that is really required is done differently on a 4″, 10″, and 30″ screen. An easy way to think about this is like internet tabs. On a laptop, your browser has space at the top to show the other tabs. On an iPhone, you have to leave on tab and swipe over to see the other options. You can essentially multi-task in web apps, but you do it much easier with a bigger interface. I love the idea of Panes and Spaces (or something similar) and think that this could be a great solution for multi-tasking in New World computing.

Data Portability

The next issue is data portability. Steven tackles this as two separate things. Sharing data (i.e. “documents”) with others and sharing it with different apps within the device. OS X has done this very will with iPhoto. If you really allow iPhoto to manage your pictures, then you really shouldn’t ever have to deal with photo “files”. You can email, upload, and import pics all using iPhoto. I think this model can be abstracted to other types of “files”, namely text documents. If I can create a new doc in iWork on the iPad, then upload it to Google Docs or email it, then I am beginning to have some document freedom. I don’t want to have to drag files into folders. I want the machine to know that this bit of data is a document with text and other things (images, tables, etc.) and I want to be able to send it to and open it in other places. We can do this today in part because of a unified document format that is pioneered by Microsoft. I understand people want to use open formats and other types of files, but can’t we just forget about all of that? I don’t need to care what the file type is. I just need to know that it’s a document that I can open, search for, send, and edit. Whether it’s a .pdf or a .doc or whatever, I just need everything I use to use it. That may mean I can’t use every app, but that is the sacrifice. Yes, we lose freedom and are constrained into a single type of file. But that shouldn’t matter. No one whines about the types of files used in Evernote or in Gmail or many other places that you can make things. As long as we can get data in and out, we shouldn’t even see the file type.

This is a huge break from how people think about computers, specifically how businesses think about them. But I am positive that I could still do all of the work I do now without thinking about file types. I will sacrifice freedom for the ability to move things around.

A computer doesn’t work this way now, but it will in the future. iPhoto can work this way if you let it, and written documents and other types of data will too. And really, are there many more types of documents than text and images, audio, and video? I realize those come in many flavors each, but those 4 are our core.

The iPhone was just the beginning

With multi-tasking done in Panes or something similar, and data management handled by the computer to maximize portability, all the applications on current desktops can be recreated and improved for a touch interface. Forget about your flash drives. You won’t store data that way. You will send it. The machine will communicate your data for you.

And screen size will make a big difference on how well this works. A 4″ screen will not work like a 10″, which will not work like a 30″. A keyboard will still be around in some form or fashion (software or hardware). But, the way apps are used and the way work is done will become much easier. Forget about USB drives: the computer will send things for you. Forget about a mouse: use your hands instead.

The iPhone was just the beginning. It goes with you everywhere and is best for communication. The iPad can travel as well and does some things better than the iPhone. Adding a keyboard to the iPad can make it work like a laptop.  And the iDesk stays put and gives you more power and space to work with. The only screen you won’t want to touch is your TV screen, which will be connected to it’s own computer (like a Mac mini), and will be controlled by the iPhone or iPad. PC equivalents or similar products will follow, and the general masses will move over as well. I put the iDesk release in 2013 and businesses transitioned over by 2020. The future will be here sooner than you think.

Predictions are so Yesterday

There is currently a ton of buzz about a rumored Apple product. There have been thousands of blog posts, tweets, and articles by professional publications on the subject. They began years ago. And after the rumored product is announce, all the speculation will immediately become useless. There will be no more speculation. Instead we will be inundated by more semi-reviews and predictions and praises/condemnations.

A few weeks ago the National Championship game finally settled a debate that started before the football season began in August. Not only was their speculation similar to Apple’s device, but there is hours (days) of video of sportscasters and others making predictions and speculations. Now no one is talking about it. But all of that old content is still taking up space in a database and out in the web.

The Speed of Web

The speed of the internet brings breaking news to laptops, browsers, and cell phones at a record-breaking pace. Many old media agencies are just now learning to break news quickly. Meanwhile the new media equivalents are publishing blog posts as fast as they get press releases to their inbox.

Sometimes I’m amazed how short the lag is between receiving a PR pitch in my inbox and seeing it regurgitated on Mashable. – Anil Dash, Jan 4, 2009

It’s quite amazing how quickly news spreads, gets linked to, and tweeted and re-tweeted. This helps us grow a message, yes, but at what cost?

Duplicate news is not something new. The Associated Press has syndicated stories for decades. The intent behind this was that newspapers were locally based, so someone in Des Moines may not read the Chronicle or the Times while someone in Houston doesn’t subscribe to the Register. And publishers have relationships with the AP to be able to reproduce that content. But just like almost everything, the internet is changing this too.

Link blogs and re-blogging spreads a message to broader audiences, but they are rarely as segmented as local newspaper readers in different cities. I read Waxy’s Links, Gruber, and Kottke daily. When something interesting in the tech industry comes out, I may see it from all three of these guys. The long tail of re-bloggers is continually growing. The Spam scrapers that just steal content are growing larger than the legitimate content producers. It’s only a matter of time before the internet is just one guy making stuff and the rest of the internet re-blogging 1,000,000 times over. It’s not just the noise that I’m talking about. It’s the redundancy of legitimate content.

Digital Waste over Time

All of this creates a mound of mostly useless data. Much of this web content could be labeled “Flow”, according to a recent article by Robin Sloan. While I agree that a healthy amount of flow is good, I am beginning to feel the immense weight of this digital waste. Not only does this clutter data systems stored with great amounts of redundant info, but it starts to cloud the search engines and other tools for finding great things. Much of that data is expired in a way similar to old milk or forgotten fruit. And the data may not stink up the fridge now, but it will be there every time you need to find something specific from Google.

Searching Google for “photos of the apple tablet” (with quotes) brings almost 200,000 results. Now what are the chances that 200,000 people have posted original content and chose to use that phrase? Nine of the top ten results were the photos from Dustin Curtis. Eight of the ten on the next page were too. And this is just a single example of a single piece of content for a predicted product. Extrapolate that out in your head to the entire span of apple tabletry. Do we need all of this? No.

Fixing the Digital Mess

Tumblr does a decent job with its reblogging feature which allows for commentary while still attributing the original source, but it isn’t perfect. Google groups search results from the parent URL, so we don’t see 100 links from the same site because something is in their sidebar. But this isn’t nearly enough. We need to do one of two things with all of this “flow”, either 1) make smarter filters that find the original, or 2) start deleting things. I’m for the latter.

Yesterday’s flow is often useless today. It has gone past us and is no longer needed. Let’s get rid of it. Or, at least be smarter about archiving it. I recently moved my Google Reader Shared Items into tumblr. I did this mostly so have a cohesive group of things I’ve collected, but it wasn’t until I read Stock and Flow that it hit me like a brick: I was trying to revive my flow. This was a wasteful activity, as I see the costs far outweighing the benefits. Will anyone really go back to what I shared in June 2008? No. No one cares because it’s old news.

Separate Stock and Flow becomes even more vital now. I want a tool where I can keep and search the Stock I discover (del.icio.us perhaps?) while having the option to send something else to my flow (Tumblr) to be shared. Google needs to know what is Stock and Flow as well so it can relay information in those terms. As Google continues to come out with more features for the real-time web, I hope they will be smart enough to remove those same items from the old-time web.

We could also use a better archiving system. Unfortunately, current search algorithms aren’t able to keep up with the pace with things and separate out the old from the new. My Gmail strategy is to archive everything once read, tag things with context, and then use search to find things later. It works pretty well on my 10,000 emails, but even it isn’t perfect. Using this strategy for Flow doesn’t work at all. Google options for search by date help, but they aren’t the complete solution either.

Promote a change, smartly

It’s going to take years for all of this to be sorted out. The cheapness of Digital turns many of us into pack rats. I still have files from my sophomore year in college. And they are backed up. In the same way that taking care of the planet is everyone’s responsibility, I propose that taking care of the web is our responsibility, too.

If you want to create a campaign to promote this idea, that would be wonderful. But please don’t create 20 different ones and then cross link them of 100 different blogs. Let’s be smart about this. If you want to share this message then write something original and link to it, or tweet something original, or send an email to people who you know that use the internet.

We can all still share things in a way that duplicates less while still spreading a message. If you think of great ways to do this, please share them as well. I want to create a better web for everyone.

I designed this website almost from scratch. I based it on a few things I had seen (like Manifest), but most of the code was re-written. I don’t think I have a single image in the design. There are a couple on content pages and aside from the Creative Commons Logos at the bottom, I do not use images very often. Here are a few reasons why:

Most of my stuff is writing.

Writing doesn’t need images. I tell stories and think thoughts and make odd conclusions. All of this happens without images. Aside from embedded videos, the rest of the content is both short and long form writing. Most of the people who read this see it in a feed reader, which tells me they like to read the writing, not to just look at it. Meg includes images because they go along with her stories and content. My stuff is less a history of things and more about thoughts and visions.

I want a fast site.

My site generally loads in less than a second. If there is any delay, it is probably because I only pay for dirt-cheap hosting. The text renders very quickly and all the styles load in a single CSS file. The whole group of files loaded is very small. Images that would be loaded would only slow things down. Google recently started tracking site loading times in Webmaster tools, which says to me that they are placing more importance on speed. Speaking of Google, I use no graphics because…

It’s great for SEO.

Most of the text in the code is content, not markup. I don’t bury things in tables and leave text in images or any of the other major pitfalls of bad SEO design. Google gets a very good idea about what my pages are about. Google also gets it fast because there isn’t any junk code to get in the way of the content. This means crawls my content faster and indexes it faster. So, if I ever publish anything that is time-sensitive, I will have a jump on others. The search engine doesn’t see crap in the code the same way you don’t see crap in the sidebars or all over.

It is very usable.

Jakob Nielsen has said that he uses very few images on useit.com for many of the same reasons I have listed. While I haven’t gone image-less to copy him, I do agree with him. Images just aren’t needed. I can highlight the nav and footer and other important page areas with simple CSS. I can style headings and sidebars and other page elements just using code, and without any crazy javascript tricks. It takes a bit more work, but you can craft a website that functions beautifully with only style sheets. If you are having trouble using this site (i.e. reading things, finding things), please let me know. I’d be very curious to hear your issue. And finally…

I am not a designer.

I’m much more of a design critic than a creator. I can spot good design and often explain why it’s good, but that is much different from making it. I don’t have the skills or experience with the software, but the biggest thing I lack is the vision. Even simple wireframing is a struggle for me. I just don’t know what I want things to look like, so I simply don’t make them look like anything.

In engineering, the design is always secondary to the function. If the bridge collapses, then it doesn’t really matter how pretty it was. In high school I contemplated doing Architecture, but instead chose Mechanical Engineering. I did this mostly out of a fear of being able to make beautiful design. I think the differences between those two professions are very similar to the differences from someone who writes code and someone who designs in Photoshop. Both make websites, but in very different ways.

There are surely ways to improve upon my design, but I don’t think images are the way to do that. There is a clear focus on what I think is important. No distractions and no blogchrome. I think it is a work of art. Simple, clean, clear, and easy. I like it.

Not surprisingly, beautiful simple design can come with gorgeous images. David Stagg has a wonderful site that shines with a specific aesthetic in mind and similarly has few distractions. It uses images in many ways, though each seems to be chosen carefully with intent to enhance feel and not just filling space. The use of images and graphics can create amazing designs, but they are just not something I use.

In the future I may toy with repeated gradients and tiny icons for things, though only if they add something. For a site focused on writing, the only design characteristic I really need to worry about is readability. My ultimate goal if for this design to be as simple as possible while still distinguishing itself from a bare, un-styled wasteland. If that will continue, I will be very happy.