Category Archives: Net Culture

The Message Comes in Medium

Rumplo.comNo one should listen to anything I say about anything.

For instance. My friend Sahadeva Hammari told me a long while ago that he was working on a new startup that would collect and display links to graphic tee-shirts from all over the Web. My reaction was, “That’s a neat idea, but to what end?” It didn’t strike me that it was a concept that would go very far. As it turns out, the resulting site, Rumplo is pretty damn engaging.

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Subscribing to RSS Theory

You know that drawer you have in your kitchen that’s full of rubber bands, pens, take-out menus, birthday candles, miscellaneous kitchen utensils, string, magnets and all sorts of other junk? That, to me, is what my RSS reader feels like. No matter how much I try to organize it, it’s always in disarray, overflowing with unread posts and encumbered with mothballed feeds.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending chunks of time here and there trying to clean out the drawer, so to speak, organizing the many, many feeds that I’ve haphazardly stashed inside various folders and subfolders within NetNewsWire. My goal has been to group them into some sort of hierarchy that will allow me to make better use of them, to cluster them together logically. Not necessarily by content type, but rather in use-oriented ways, like how often they’re published or how often I tend to read them.

The whole process frustrates me though, mostly because I feel like I shouldn’t have to do it at all. The software should just do it for me. I acknowledge that some customization is often — if not always — necessary to get the most efficient use out of any given software. But moreso than with most classes of software, it’s my feeling that RSS readers shortchange users with only half of the features we need to get the job done.

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Charityware

The much hyped One Laptop per Child project makes me sad. I ordered one of these promising, kid-friendly portable computers last November, during the very first week it became available for domestic customers under its foundation’s “Give One, Get One” program. For US$400, not only would I get an XO Laptop, but I’d also be be effectively buying one for a needy child in a developing nation.

But my XO never arrived. I waited and waited, and it never arrived. And then it became apparent to me that good intentions and great publicity don’t necessarily equal great customer service. When I went looking for my laptop, I discovered that the OLPC foundation’s ability to track, update and ship my laptop to me is barely better than that of a home mail order business. Last I heard from them, they assured me I would get mine “delivered in 45 to 60 days.”

Now I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the laptop altogether, especially given the generally poor reviews that the device’s operating system and interface have garnered. So I called them this week to cancel the part of my order that would buy a laptop for me — I didn’t have the heart to ask for a refund on the half that was ostensibly destined for some poor Third World child. Even that, they couldn’t get right; the operator on the phone could only refund an unspecified “fair market value” price, for some obscure reason. It felt like bureaucracy, to me. Sadly.

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Command Shift Me

Command-Shift-3If I had a lot more time on my hands, I’d learn video. It seems like a blast. But I’m struggling enough already to keep up with the relatively static brand of design I get paid to do; a self-initiated foray into the world of motion seems expensive and time-consuming.

Still, I had fun messing about in a completely primitive way with video last month. I was invited by Jennifer Daniel, Erin Sparling and Amit Gupta to create a short bumper message for their new site, Command-Shift-3 — which is billed as being “like Hot or Not, but instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot Web sites.” It’s a cute idea, and in the early days, at least, Subtraction.com was a leader in the head-to-head competitions.

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Talking at Length About Brevity

It’s no accident that editor Liz Danzico and I came up with the idea for and launched A Brief Message this year, of all years. Brevity is a meme with a lot of currency today. You can see it not just at our site, where the design opinions and the reader responses run no longer than two hundred words a piece, but at completely different sites like Twitter, Pownce and Tumblr too, where the economy of words is so sparing that it might take hours before you come across a sentence with a fully formed subject-verb-predicate construction. Similarly, Very Short List offers a kind of editorial curation that, in years past, might have run much longer than its two- or three-paragraph average length. Think Suck.com

People’s attention spans are shorter, for sure, but there’s an argument that, by accommodating shorter attention spans, sites like ours are only compounding the problem. Some people, in fact, find the whole trend alarming (a prominent design writer whom we invited to contribute to A Brief Message politely replied, and I’m paraphrasing, that he was ‘against everything we stood for’). And if you look at an outlet like Brijit, even champions of brevity like myself might give pause.

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New York to Boston to Denver, and Back Again

That was a busy weekend. Here’s how I spent it.

I woke up at about 4:00a on Friday morning and flew to Boston for the Society of News Designers conference, which was great fun. In our session just before lunchtime, Tom Bodkin and I had a very lively public debate about the merits and flaws of digital design, which I think some members of the audience recorded. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have stayed longer.

Then it was off to Denver for the AIGA National Design Conference. I got just a few hours of sleep that night before reporting to the impressive and immense Denver convention center (they have an awesome sculpture of a bear giving drivers-by the ass in front of the building) the next morning, to be introduced for my solo talk by the extremely classy Kurt Andersen, who asked me some sharp follow-up questions after I was done. It was a little frightening, too, to speak for twenty-five minutes in front of some 2,500 attendees, but I’m proud to say that I did not mess up, at least.

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Preserving Preferences

One of the more popular posts that I wrote in July was “Designed Deterioration,” in which I observed that digital hardware is rarely intended to get more beautiful as it gets older.

Governed mostly by the modern business principle of planned obsolescence, today’s hardware products are meant to get scrapped and replaced when they age beyond the near future. By contrast, older hardware goods — like the cast iron skillet I mentioned in my original post — often seem to have been designed with their eventual deterioration in mind. As they get older and become more heavily used, they get better.

That post might have led many to believe that what I’m advocating is that digital products should all be developed with designed deterioration in mind. While I wouldn’t object to that, I wouldn’t expect it to happen any time soon. By now, planned obsolescence is too strongly rooted a concept to allow for that.

I also happen to think there’s a lot to be said for designing for the current moment, designing something that addresses today’s values without feeling the pressure to create something that will last for all time. Which is to say that I have a bias towards what I consider to be ‘timeless’ design, for sure, but I also believe that our craft and our culture don’t progress when everything tries to appear timeless.

There’s one more part of this discussion I want to bring to light. So far, I’ve been harping on hardware and industrial design. But my original thought, when I sat down to write that post, was that designed deterioration seems like an idea that software could benefit from, too.

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The August Work Ethic

Are you on vacation these last few days of August? If so then what are you doing staring at a computer screen, reading my blog?

Me, I’m at the office throughout this slow, concluding week of the summer. But if I weren’t, if I had time off, I think I’d do what I haven’t done yet all year, even on the ostensible holidays I’ve taken: fall off the grid entirely and relax properly — without telephones, without text messages, without the Internet.

We don’t do that enough in the States and I sometimes regret it painfully. European readers know what I’m talking about. Just before the calendar turns to September, the cities empty out and the shops close in a kind of workers’ solidarity like no labor strike ever seen on American shores.

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The YouTube Aesthetic

YouTubeIt’s still too hard to locate online versions of recent television commercials. When McDonald’s, say, runs an ad that I want to talk about here, I don’t know of a particular place where I can go find a link for it. Sure, the more notable ones make it to YouTube, but sometimes it’s the mundane ones that don’t that are more interesting to discuss.

There are two that I have in mind: one, from McDonald’s, features two young, college-age guys, beatboxing some ridiculous rhyme about Big Macs or something. And there’s another for Oreo cookies that plays like a home movie in which two pre-adolescent girls sing the praises of Oreos. If I could find them to show you, I would, but maybe you’ve seen them already.

They’re both cute enough, but what struck me was how thoroughly they ape the ‘YouTube style.’ Which is to say, they are shot on digital video (though at a higher grade of quality than most of the source material at YouTube) in a cinematographically naïve manner; they feature pronouncedly offhand, amateur and somewhat embarrassing performances from purportedly ‘real’ actors; and they are ostensibly improvised — or at least they go through considerable effort to obscure the influence of any sort of director behind the camera.

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The Limits of My Stupidity

Somewhere along the way during all of the build up and anticipation for this Friday’s release of Apple’s iPhone, I became personally invested in owning one on — or very soon after — the first day of release.

I had an ‘in’ for a while there, when a friend of mine who works at Apple assured me that he would help me procure one through internal means. But, as no sign of an employee purchase plan has yet presented itself, I’m realizing that I need to make alternative arrangements if I want to avoid the mortifying shame of getting caught still using my old mobile phone next Monday. I’d just about die of embarrassment. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.

Except… I’m cringing at the idea of queuing up outside the Apple Store to get my hands on one. That’s about where I draw the line, I think. Standing in line too easily dredges up memories of long spells in line at my local shopping mall trying to get decent tickets to see R.E.M. or some such act when I was sixteen — I guess I’m glad I experienced that kind of extravagant stupidity once, but I’m not about to do it again. Ever.

The fact that I’m more or less mentally committed to buying an iPhone at the first reasonable opportunity — regardless of what potentially scathing reviews its touch-based keyboard will undoubtedly receive — is enough, I think. I’m not going to physically plant myself on a sidewalk through heat, rain or multiple mealtimes just for bragging rights. It’s just too much; this personal investment in having an iPhone of my own by Saturday isn’t that important to me.

On the other hand, if you have a surefire plan to share queuing duties, let me know.

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