In Defense of Client Services

While I really do believe that the design industry has changed enormously over the past decade, and that the opportunities available to designers are much greater today than they were even a decade ago, I have to admit that when I recently blogged about this topic I was being a little bit sensationalistic by titling the post “The End of Client Services.”

Several other design bloggers wrote thoughtful posts in response to mine — the best one was probably from Erika Hall at Mule Design — arguing that client services will never go away, and I think they’re right. It’s hard to imagine that all businesses everywhere will ever stop having a real need for outside design expertise; there’s just too much for most companies to know, so being able to access external help will always need to be an option. Now, it’s my belief that the best businesses will meet those needs by internalizing design expertise and methods themselves, and going forward many — if not most — of the choicest design challenges will be tackled by in-house teams.

But there will always be work out there for design studios and agencies, I’m sure of it. What’s more, the services industry is full of smart, talented, visionary people, a disproportionately large number of whom are extraordinarily effective agents of change. What I meant by “the end of client services” is that, within a few years, the landscape for this industry will look very different from how it’s looked up until the recent past. The best of the best from this industry will help evolve the client-designer relationship to meet new expectations and to create new kinds of value.

For me, at this time in my career and my life, client services just isn’t what I want to do, but I wouldn’t ever say that I’ll never return to it either. I’m not sure any designer, no matter how prolific they become as auteurs of their own career and products, ever really rules out the possibility of taking on a fantastic project with an enlightened client. What makes a designer a designer is an inability to resist solving problems, and services is still a great way to get exposure to many different kinds of irresistible problems — and to learn a lot about subject matter areas that most in-house designers will never get to touch. Even better, if you have a good services business — one that satisfies you creatively while rewarding you financially — then you have a great way of getting paid to do design. If you’re passionate about design, like I am, then that’s gold. Not a lot of people can pull this off, but if you can, then more power to you.

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Photos of Pets Shaking Their Heads

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A great gallery of photographer Carli Davidson’s shots of pets caught as they shake their heads.

Carli Davidson Photography

It’s no secret that I’m a dog person, so of course I find these adorable, even the shots that completely distort the animal’s face. But what I really like about these images is the way they capture something hidden but that’s been right out there in the open forever, until technology came along and allowed us to see it. See the full gallery here.

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Pop Sensation

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

An entertaining blog of vintage paperbacks — of the seedy variety that once allowed commuters and housewives to safely dive into the racier parts of mid-20th century Americana. Adhering to the dictum that one should not judge a book by its cover, blogger Rex Parker provides details on the plot, tone and unintentionally hilarious details of the book — he even posts back covers.

Part of the blog’s purpose seems to be to create a sales catalog for Parker’s collection of these paperbacks, as he lists prices with each post. The net effect, though, is that Pop Sensation is a rich trove of specimens from the tradition of truly commercial art. This is not high-minded design or illustration; this is down and dirty commercial work intended to titillate and rack up sales. Nevertheless, lots of these samples are fantastic works.

Pop Sensation

On a sideways note, the paperback featured here in the upper right is an early edition of what eventually became one of the strangest — and best — film noirs of all time, “Kiss Me Deadly,” which was recently re-released by Criterion. It’s a cynical and surprisingly satirical take on the detective genre, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring a captivatingly vain Ralph Meeker. Its ending, which had been mysteriously hacked by unknown hands, also inadvertently served as a critical bit of inspiration for a very different school of filmmaking. Read more about that here, or peruse the rich Pop Sensation archives here.

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What Comes After Reading on iPad

I’m bullish on the iPad. Some people have assumed the opposite, based in part on my frequent criticism of the way publishers have risen to the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

But I really do believe that the iPad is a truly transformative device, an innovation that’s going to re-make the way we work with and play with technology. Looking back at its introduction in January of last year, it’s fitting that it debuted at the start of what I believe we’ll look back on as ‘the tablet decade’ — if we don’t end up thinking of it as just ‘the iPad decade.’

On the other hand, I think it’s still too early to know exactly how these devices are going to shape the next ten years. We’re all still discovering and exploring how different a multitouch tablet is from laptops and desktops. As that collective understanding progresses, we’re sure to see some unexpected if not startling new uses for them. There’s one safe likelihood though, and that is that the things that are attracting so much attention on the iPad today will probably become less exciting to us tomorrow.

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Cinemetrics

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

This thesis project from designer and technologist Frederic Brodbeck “is about measuring and visualizing movie data in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual ‘fingerprint’ for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.”

Cinemetrics

This is gorgeous work and much more thoughtful than most similar projects, too. But frankly I’m a little weary of infographics being applied to ‘unexpected’ subject matter. Yes, it’s visually amusing to see beautiful abstractions of the mundane, but not everything needs to be reductively interpreted into its most simplistically brainy-looking form. The world is not a dashboard nor does it really benefit from being portrayed as one; it’s more interesting than that.

See the whole project here.

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Ghostery

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Ghostery is a plug-in available for all major browsers that “gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, Web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.” It allows you to block or allow the many legitimate and not-so-legitimate tracking scripts, img tags and iframes embedded into Web pages of all sorts that are quietly collecting information about your browsing habits, interests and demographic information. I’ve used Ghostery in the past but was pleasantly surprised to see recently that it’s been polished up significantly and made much more user-friendly. It also has a great name. Download it here.

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The New Spider-Man Is Half-Black, Half-Hispanic

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I try not to overdo it here with the super-hero stuff, but this I had to write about. Forbes reports on the reaction to Marvel’s recent — and typically gimmicky — decision to “kill” Spider-Man’s longtime alter ego Peter Parker and replace him with Miles Morales, a young kid whose ethnic heritage is half-black, half-Hispanic.

The article points to this post at I’m Not Racist But… which captures some of the public reaction to this decision. It’s not pretty.

Spider-Man

Notwithstanding the fact that when comic book publishers sentence major characters like these to death, they never stay dead and they always return in some form, I think any furor over this is ridiculous. First, the original Spider-Man was a kid from Queens, New York, and it makes all the sense in the world that a kid from Queens, New York, circa 2011 would be half-black and half-Hispanic. Second, the beauty of these characters is that we get to constantly reinvent their origins in new and interesting ways. This may not be a great example of pop reinvention, but it’s a perfectly legitimate one.

Read the full article here.

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A.V. Club: The Convenience Trap

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Writer Sam Adams has an interesting perspective on Netflix’s recent rate hikes and the unintended consequences of pushing users away from discs-by-mail and towards streaming.

“As critic and historian Dave Kehr is often moved to point out, the prevailing myth that ‘everything is on DVD’ is hilariously wrong. Every time a new technology takes over, a chunk of film history gets left behind. Movies that were mainstays of undergraduate film classes have been marginalized as colleges and universities zero out rental budgets and build new classrooms that only allow for projection from digital sources.”

I actually don’t quite agree that some film history is lost “every time” there’s a technological shift, or at least I don’t agree that it’s quite that simple. The advent of home video resulted in an explosion of movie availability, and I have greater access to films today than ever before. But it’s also true that not every film on a reel made it to VHS, and not every one of those made it to DVD, etc. In this argument, it’s important to weigh the benefits of availability as well as the lost inventory.

Still, I think Adams is essentially correct in his assertion that with this specific shift, from discs to on demand services, there is a very real danger of losing a nontrivial subset of the films once available on disc. As he argues:

“The services offering access to a bottomless library of content continue to multiply, but for myriad reasons ranging from licensing restrictions to tangled chains of custody, these services are critically flawed.”

It seems inevitable that most of our entertainment media will soon be accessed primarily via subscription or via on demand purchases — via Netflix, Spotify and Kindle — and that it’s not a safe bet to assume that everything that was available to us in physical form will be available to us as bits.

Read full article here.

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iCal’s Missing Months

I’m a proud and not-too-bitter veteran of Apple’s ill-advised infatuation with brushed metal-like user interfaces. So when I hear people complaining vociferously about the garish new appearance of some of the apps found in Mac OS X Lion, I shrug. Don’t get me wrong, I find the leather-like texture to be unsightly, but I figure I’ll survive it just as I survived brushed metal. What I regret much more is the regression in usability that this new focus on emulating real world objects brings.

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