The phone survived intact!

Likewise, Gruber points to this promo image for Microsoft’s new Zune HD:

Notice anything?

Guys, I have a secret for you: you control both the software and the hardware. It kills me that someone would take the time to take lovingly-staged product photos or actually lay out ads with this on the screen. If the designers who put together the billboard had written, “Now Available: BlackBerry Stor…” they’d be fired on the spot. Is there any excuse for this?

Hashing out some icons

Anyway, in the process of checking the weather at Middlebury I visited the Weather Underground site— I understand it’s one of the leading sites out there, for this sort of thing, right? — and was confronted with the following site design, whose ghastly, horrifying awfulness may haunt my dreams tonight:

This should serve as a reminder to you UI folks: Keep fighting the good fight, but remember: people are willing to swim through some pretty scary and shark-infested user interfaces to find a bit of information.

I was a late adopter compared to most people— it’s only in the last month or so that I’ve been taking an active interest in it.  (The day I started to get into using it, they mentioned it on the Daily Show.)  Now I use it to communicate with clients, friends, or students at the schools we’re working with; to shoot the breeze with my co-workers, some of whom work in distant cities; and sometimes simply to spout off about whatever, just like everyone else.  I used to Twitter a lot about Twitter.

Mostly I think of Twitter as a way to reinforce White Whale’s fundamental message: that five people can run and grow a moderately successful business, and in the process change nothing about the way we express ourselves: in a nutshell, that the people we are online are the same people we are in person. (I think the same goes for my four co-workers Tonya, Alex, Donald and Janie.)  We don’t practice much message control because we don’t really have much to hide. (Whatever I do have to say that’s worth hiding, I express on symmetrical networks only.)

Although the 140-character short form initially seemed too restrictive, I’m now finding it a great source of inspiration.  Here is what I think is perhaps the most perfect tweet ever written, by my old friend @johnpavelkehlen:

I don’t know about you, and maybe it’s just because I miss my old friend’s company, but I can imagine myself dining with John and his friend in his little garret pretty easily reading that, and he didn’t need a single extra character to express it.  As John himself reminded me, brevity is the soul of wit, and never has that felt more technologically true.

Having said all that, I worry a little about the effect Twitter is having on me.

For one thing, I’m on much more than usual these days.  I move through the world with an active and engaged brain. I see things as I’m walking to work (today it was an odd misspelling on a sign) and think, should I Twitter this? (I’m convinced that the verb is “to Twitter,” not “to tweet.”)  A thought occurs to me.  It feels sorta profound. Is it profound enough to become a tweet?  And if so, will it affect my follow cost?

I like to think that when I’m working at my best, I have a fairly sharp eye for detail and nuance; thanks to Twitter, I carry this eye around with me much more than I used to, and these details and nuances hang around.  I’m worried LOST is going over the top with this “judging Ben” thing.  I enjoy Bonterra’s organic Zinfandel. I really love my bank.  Which of these things should I broadcast?  (answer) In a nutshell, I never thought I’d spend so much time qualitatively evaluating my own thoughts.

So after a day spent out in the world this way, I sit down to dinner with my wife.  Am I going to Twitter about how great dinner was?  Or what a wonderful evening I’m having?

Of course not.  Because that’s my time, not yours. But the temptation is very strong!  And I don’t always resist it.

I am learning to control the impulse to chronicle my leisure time; this is largely because White Whale is my company, Twitter is partially a work thing, and if I let work bleed into every corner of my life it would destroy me.  But I can tell that it’s changing people, and I’m not sure it’s always for the better.

I see people, friends of mine, twittering about how they just woke up, or they’re happy, or it’s a beautiful day.  Is the chronicling of that experience (and the cognitive and physical processes required to make it happen) interfering with the plain appreciation of the fact?  I can’t see how it doesn’t.  Here’s a guy who Twitters a hundred times per day. (Don’t ask about his follow cost.)  People like that used to be considered wackos or oddballs (like 2004 presidential candidate Bob Graham, a compulsive diarist)— now they’re just high-tech, plugged-in people.

But does anyone worry about the long term effects of this way of relating to the world?  It seems like the opposite of ADD— Attention Surplus Disorder.  I wonder if the most active Twitterers among us ever will ever enjoy the pleasure of a blank mind, an hour spent staring into space, etc. What we now think of as “vegging out” is what they used to call “relaxation.”  Actions that now might be considered downright yogic— like simply not speaking for a couple of hours— used to be the norm, I’m sure, at a less frantic time in human history.

For now, it’s fun.  I like keeping tabs on what my friends are eating, reading, listening to, or coding.  It’s an enjoyably odd feeling to know what very casual business acquaintances think about certain TV shows.

But in the long term, will the people who engage most deeply with technology lose the ability to exist quietly in the world it’s brought us?

Note: 140 characters exactly in that last paragraph. Bam!

This is it!  This is the blog post where I’m supposed to introduce myself as the newest member of White Whale.  But who reads this blog the most? Or at least in the finest detail? – probably my coworkers.

So: Donald, Alex, Tonya, Jason–how truly serendipitous.  If the four of you ran a bookstore, or a bakery, or played in a metal band, I’d likely want to join you.  Luckily for us all, I’m a higher-ed Web designer, and you are a purveyor of higher-ed Web sites.  That part worked out perfectly, and I’m proud, so proud, to join you.

But wait!  To those readers who aren’t Donald, Alex, Tonya, and Jason: I’ve been listening longer than you know!  I’ll have some catching up to do with @grether.  I’d like to schedule a garden tour with @davidmsilver.  Southwestern, I grew up on your 9-hole course!  Let’s talk about it.

And finally, what to the bystander, the late-night link-follower, or the potential client?  Well, introduce yourself.  This certainly feels exciting, doesn’t it?

Great!  Let’s get to work.

Yelp’s Just Not That Into You

You know what they say… the best way to get over someone is to get under someone. But what if you just want to be by your lonesome? Yelpers get very creative when it comes to finding those spots in the city to avoid the ex.

First, you need to get off the beaten path. Flora Grubb is a nursery and café that masquerades as an urban garden, and Rob B is just thrilled to be able to enjoy his “Ritual coffee without dealing with the herds of Valencia Street hipsters.” The Dogpatch Saloon is good for crying into your beer with the rest of the regulars: “2 hipster dates, 1 lesbian date, 2 drunks and Miss Lonely Hearts, a middle-aged redhead with a mountain of curls and a lifetime of trouble.” Beth S assures us, “These are my people.” [...]

Or, a few weeks back:

Pho in Love with Yelp

So you think you’ve found the most pho-nomenal pho in town? Yelpers can tell you just where to plunk down that hard-earned $6 for the most slurp-worthy meal in the city,   pho realz.

New to the pho scene? Valeria R lost her pho-ginity at Golden Star, but was lucky to have a friend give her a lesson on, amongst other things, “how to dress the bowl with basil, sprouts and lemon juice.” And while said friend failed to inform her that “it’s not a good idea for a beginner to wear a white shirt while eating pho, the collateral damage was completely worth it.” You might say Ryan V is more of a pho hoochie; he prefers it hot, cheap and easy at Pho Tan Hoa, where the steaming dish comes with plenty of “large, tender, slightly bloody tendons.” Yum!? [...]

Yes, a bit cutesy, but I love it. The bloggy, gossipy style is a perfect way to reward engaged users while drawing unengaged subscribers deep into the site.

If you live in or near a big American city, I totally recommend subscribing — even if you aren’t into Yelp itself, it’s a great overview of what  people are talking about in your city. (And fellow White Whalers, you’re all covered: the East Bay, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, and New York.)

One of the parts of the job that’s been really fulfilling for us is following the work being done in David Silver’s Digital Media Production class— it’s great to see all the exciting stuff they’re doing with Flickr, Google Maps, Twitter, blogs, and the intersections among all those media.

Something I’ve been working on for a while— ever since hearing about the class’s Google Maps assignment— is a map that would incorporate all the individual students’ Google Maps of San Francisco.  If done right, this will result in a USF-driven map of the city, with students’ words and pictures populating a dynamic map that would give prospects a true students’ eye view of what’s happening.

So today I have a proof of concept!  I’m using a Web app called MapChannels to integrate Google Map feeds; it’s a little unsatisfying to rely on a third party for this, as I’m sure it’s something Donald could code in a few hours, but he’s doing more important stuff, so it’s MapChannels for now.

I’ve used Twitter to locate the students’ maps, and one by one I’m adding them to this master map.  This definitely feels like a beta, but it’s still pretty cool:

San Francisco, mapped by USF students

At the far end of this spectrum is the new Skittles.com. For a brief time last week, the Skittles homepage was nothing but a little Skittles navigation widget with a twitter search for “Skittles” in the background. Everything any twitter user had to say about Skittles was up there in real-time. Now, the homepage jumps between Wikipedia’s Skittles entry, the YouTube Skittles Channel, and the Skittles Facebook page. “Pics” links to a Flickr search for “skittles”, and the Twitter search is still under “chatter”.

Now, we know you’re not selling candy. And unlike Skittles you probably don’t have the benefit of total brand recognition. But there’s an important lesson there.

Your audience can spot “marketing” miles away. And they tune it out. Your message is still important and we’ll help you get that across in the right way (it’s classic “show, don’t tell”)–but you’re going to need to sprinkle some student voices around. First-person is in. Total control is out. Authenticity is the new black.

I generally have a sense of what my passwords are, but couldn’t remember it this time, so I went through the forgotten password process.  Given that LiveWhale has functionality for forgotten passwords, I’m always interested to see what people do.  I had to submit an SSN, date of birth, and answer one security question.  Pretty straightforward.  They let me set a new password, and I logged in with it.

Immediately after login I was asked to set FIVE new security questions.  Five!

Here they are:

OK, listen up, Sallie Mae.  

Really?

Are you really asking me to give you answers to five security questions so I can read a PDF?  And what if, when I come back in another two years to read another PDF, I have a different favorite vacation spot?

Do you really want me to tell you my greatest fear, Sallie Mae?  So I can read your PDF?

Frankly, I already know what the PDF says.  I changed my bank account, and they need the new number.  Fine— I’ll call them on the phone and give it to them.

I’m the designer of today’s MIT homepage image (http://www.mit.edu). This is super exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of the MIT homepage for quite some time, and to get to do a homepage design myself frankly makes me a little giddy.

The design promotes our new site for the Transportation @ MIT program, which is built on the same design foundation as the MIT Engineering site with some tweaks.

Once today (Wednesday 3/4) is over with, I’ll post a screenshot for posterity.  I’m also planning to interview Rebecca Macri, the MIT homepage team leader, about what I’m sure is a fascinating and crazy job.  More on that later.

Update:  Here’s the screenshot (click to view full size).

The birds on the right edge belong to this photo from Flickr user freshelectrons.  (MIT didn’t include the credit because the birds aren’t visible on smaller monitors, and they didn’t want to get a million “what birds??” emails.)

Of course the writing we do in this blog is important to us from a marketing perspective— it’s the only “marketing” of the company that we currently do.  If you’re reading this, and if you are neither a WW employee or my mom, then you’re part of that process.  If you work for a university, we like to think maybe someday you’ll consider hiring us for one of your Web projects.  If you’re already a client, then we hope reading our blog will help you get to know us better, and increase your engagement to our collaboration.

But that’s not why we write on the blog.  We write on the blog because we’re geeks, and because we have lots of ideas that we bat back and forth around the office, and once in a while one of them gets batted out to the public.

What this means for us is that writing on the blog is a kind of balancing act.  We really do not want our blog to come off as a “corporate blog”— if it were, nobody would read it.  Nobody expects the Chrysler blog to criticize the auto industry bailout; it’s a corporate blog, of course it’s going to reinforce the party line.  We don’t want to create a steady stream of posts about how wonderful we are.  At the same time, this isn’t the sort of blog where we’re going to spout off about every tech-related thought that crosses our minds.  I think that putting the tabs above the address bar in Safari 4 is a fantastic idea, a long-overdue UI improvement, and a Google Chrome ripoff, but I don’t need to clog the airwaves with that observation.  Instead, all of us at White Whale share the tendency to make our posts simply epic— filled with bons mots, interesting insights, nice turns of phrase, and a neat conclusion that illuminates something we’ve done worth sharing.  (Of course, this post is no exception.)

These two poles— “OMG safari 4 is a total Chrome ripoff” and “Here’s a story about the way White Whale does things…” characterize the well-known microblogging and what you might call macroblogging.  (People use that term already, of course, but without much focus.)  Of course the top tool for microblogging is Twitter (where you better believe they’ve got something to say about that tab bar), but Facebook status updates are obviously a kind of microblogging, as are IM status messages.

Our new client relationships are leading us deeper into this world.  For example, we’ve just met David Silver, a USF media studies professor with a well-trafficked blog and a busy Twitter account, and we’re hopeful his students will eventually collaborate with us to some degree on the design and content of USF’s new site.   Through David we have learned about “thick” and “thin” tweets: simply put, some tweets convey only one bit of information (”I enjoyed LOST last night”) where others convey multiple layers of information (”here’s a link to some photos from our trip to Uruguay, and let us know if you like them”).  Our clients at Lewis & Clark twitter too, as does Southwestern’s News Office, as of a week or two ago.

Now, because we don’t have dedicated marketing staff— and never will— we can only develop the content that we have time to create.  So if blogging is the main way we reach people, how should we do it— over Twitter?  In blog posts like this one?  Or shorter, chattier posts, Daring Fireball-style?

The fact is, we don’t know.  When the muse strikes, there’s no time to decide whether our thoughts are best expressed as thick tweets or thin tweets or chatty posts or lengthy, digressive posts like this one.  But what we do know, I guess, is that if anything unites the people who make up this company, it’s a commitment to the art and discipline of the written word. So in the end I suppose we’ll always wind up erring on the side of verbosity, even if it means we post on the blog less.

And in the meantime, my Facebook status is constantly out of date, but I guess that’s the way it goes.

And by the way, we do all have Twitter accounts, if you’d like to follow me, Donald, Alex or Tonya.

(Update: Corrected a typo in Donald’s Twitter page.  If you wondered why a White Whale employee was so bizarrely concerned with whether Guitar Hero is better than Rock Band: that was detto, not dtetto, which is Donald’s actual Twitter handle.)

It’s really the perfect commercial, and its biggest strengths are the very reason it’s on YouTube and not during the commercial break of Lost. The strongest statements are those that relate only tangentially to Trader Joe’s corporate goals and messaging–yoga moms, tons of unread signage, cases of water next to the exit–or even negative ones–paper bags that rip, the sold-out bakery sections, repeated gripes about discontinued items.

I don’t often shop at Trader Joe’s. But these are all things that give me a flash of recognition. And the line about the overcrowded parking lot doesn’t make me feel like I should go somewhere else and avoid the hassle–it makes me feel like I’m somehow part of a Trader Joe’s community that has shared this same experience. It creates an emotional connection. And it actually makes me want to shop there more.

The first bit of advice we usually give to our clients is “first-person narratives.” And there’s a slew of reasons that you should have your students and faculty blogging on your website, from the practical (they’ll create content for you!) to the slick (consider your demographics!). But perhaps the biggest reason is that people relate to genuine, warts-and-all messages far more than they do to a catchy slogan that some outside consultants dreamed up.

I can tell you first-hand what messages I respond to as an alum. And–not to be callous–it’s not the emails about providing financial aid or building new facilities that get me. It’s when I’m reminded of what a mixed blessing the meal plan actually was. Or about that required class I spent half the semester hating. Or New England winters. There’s plenty of effective messaging about all the great stuff, too–but without the complete picture, those messages fall flat.

This is not to say that you should write on your website that your dining hall sucks. But you might be surprised at what your community has to say about all those little annoyances. These quirks are an important part of the shared experience that differentiates you from your peer institutions. And presenting that full experience will help your audience–from prospective to alumni and staff–identify with and feel emotionally connected to your school.

I wrote this post in August; it concerns a couple of friends of mine, one who works for iTunes, one who works for Pandora.  Immediately after posting it, I got a frantic text message from my Apple friend, saying something along the lines of “OMG REMOVE THIS POST IMMEDIATELY.  IT CONTAINS CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION.”  I killed the post, having no real idea why I was doing so.  It definitely seemed a little weird.

Then just a few weeks later, Apple introduced Genius, an enhancement to iTunes that essentially copies Pandora’s approach, sequencing songs based on their inherent characteristics.  That’s when the reason for my friend’s freakout became clear:  Although I hadn’t posted anything about the Genius feature (and in fact didn’t hear anything about it until it came out), my friend obviously thought I had heard something and posted about it.  Apple’s security about new products and features is legendary; if my friend had been tied to the leak of information like that, he’d have lost his job.  (For the record, he never tells me ANYTHING about new iTunes or iPod features, no matter how many cocktails I ply him with.)

So now that Genius has been released, I present the original post, both as a historical artifact, and because I continue to be very pleased with its title.

1.

I have a good friend who works for iTunes. Apparently you don’t say “the iTunes division of Apple,” simply iTunes. It’s a different wing of the company, I guess; he works in a separate building from One Infinite Loop, although apparently it’s closer to the gym, which he says is nice.

Hanging out with my friend, I’ve come to know a little bit about how iTunes’ marketing machine works.  Basically, the primary unit of measure for marketing success is iTunes Music Store user account creation. They believe (and presumably research has shown) that creating an account makes a person much more likely to purchase music eventually, whether or not they purchase anything when first creating the account.

For this reason, the primary iTunes marketing efforts center around giving away free iTunes songs.  If you’ve been to a large music festival of note this year, someone may have handed you a card offering you free iTunes songs from the artists participating in the festival— that’s what I’m talking about.  So you take the card home, open iTunes, go to the Apple Store, enter the 12-or-so-digit code, and your download begins.  But if you haven’t opened an iTMS account yet, well, you have to create one, right?  So you do, and the mission is complete:  the iTunes folks have their conversion.

There’s something about this marketing plan that feels off-kilter to me.  For one thing, it fails to note one important fact of human life in 2008— that if you have an iPod, you use iTunes, and for practical purposes everyone in America has an iPod. At this point in tech history, it’s nowhere near as easy to download free music as it used to be, meaning that 9 times out of 10, if you want to hear “Don’t Stop Believin’”, you’re going to buy it.  Probably from the iTMS.

So conversion is important, but I think you could just as easily proceed from the assumption that iTMS sales growth is tied to iPod sales growth, and that’s not a bad horse to be tied to.

iTunes’ real problem, it seems to me, is that it’s not connected to a Web site.  (The iTunes Music Store isn’t a Web browser, even though it behaves like one in some respects.)  You’d think that the #1 music buying site in the world would somehow protrude into the Internet— that there’d be an itunes.com where you could visit, preview new music, read and post reviews, etc.  Something like Pitchfork meets last.fm, but with everything tied to iTunes.  Reading and previewing music in a social Internet environment, it seems to me, would make it pretty damned easy to spend $.99 for a song— and that, I would argue, is the real conversion point.  Once you get someone in the mindset where they’ll quickly buy a song they like, well, you’ve got ‘em.  Right?

2.

I have another good friend who works for Pandora.   If you don’t know about Pandora, you should— it’s the commercial outgrowth of something called the Music Genome Project: an attempt to categorize all the world’s music in terms of a finite number of variables.  From Wikipedia:

A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, and fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers.

What this means to a Pandora user is that Pandora can take information about what you like— an artist, group, or even a single song— and turn it into a streaming, personalized radio station, with songs by bands you’ve never heard of that share qualities with stuff you like.  It is amazing technology in practice— pick your favorite song, hit play, and the fun begins.  As you go, you can rate things up or down, which lets Pandora understand your interests better.  And did I mention that it’s free?

(The friend in question, Kevin Seal, also hosts a tremendously entertaining and educational podcast, The Musicology Show, as part of his Pandora duties.)

Experiencing Pandora for the first time is pretty mindblowing— it’s one of those things that seems too good to be true.  And there’s the rub— it is.  Information might want to be free on the Internet, but there are a million contrary forces to that basic longing— some of them totally baseless and pernicious, some of them perfectly valid.  But in the ongoing battle between the recording industry and the Internet, it’s tough to bet against the old white guys with the deep pockets, and Pandora is, it seems to be, fighting a difficult and losing battle.  Kevin has been pointing me to a Web site, SaveNetRadio.org, devoted to fighting the good fight; it is by no means a lost cause, but it looks like a tough road ahead for Web broadcasters, even for reasonably well-funded and popular services like Pandora.  In an article about Pandora from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Pandora’s founder suggests they may be close to pulling the plug, as fees for Internet broadcasting rise and rise.

3.

When you mouse over a track that’s playing in your Pandora stream, you get some options:

The left and right buttons let you rate the track you’re hearing.  The middle one opens a menu:

As you see, it is technically possible to buy the iTunes track from the Pandora interface.  But it’s easy to see, even for a non-UI expert, that actually *buying* the track seems to be a pretty low priority.  The Pandora-specific functions, like creating a new station, bookmarking, etc. are much more highly prioritized.  And once you do mouse over the Buy… button, you get two options, iTunes and buying the CD on Amazon.  But isn’t Pandora the product of a more highly evolved approach to music where the physical CD is almost completely irrelevant?

4.

Apple should buy, license, or exclusively partner with Pandora. That middle button ought to take you right into iTunes to buy the song.  I couldn’t tell you how many songs I would have purchased on iTunes if that were the case.  If you get into the habit of rating up, rating down, etc, then having that button there just becomes an extra-high rating; man, I like this song so much that I’ll pay the $.99 to play it anytime I want.  Not much of a sacrifice— just about the easiest conversion ever, I’d say.  And given that Pandora is now a free and immensely popular download for the iPhone, well, there you go.

I’m sure Pandora has lawyers writing briefs on this whole thing already, but it seems to me that making the conversion to a sale easier might take some heat off the “giving away free music” charge— the fact is, there’s not a HUGE difference between the one-time-only, unpredictable play of a song you get with Pandora and the 30-second preview of a song you can already get with iTunes.  In fact, a good attorney could probably make a case for considering Pandora not as a “radio broadcaster” but rather as a straight-up social networking/viral marketing tool for the songs themselves.  It has always seemed a weird characterization to think of Pandora as “radio,” even though that’s how they market it.

Now think about how the benefits could flow the other way.  If iTunes were driven by the Music Genome Project, the ways in which iTunes could recommend music for me to listen to would become ten times as interesting.  iTunes itself could incorporate Pandora-like functionality.  Ratings within iTunes could feed, and be fed by, Pandora ratings.  The world would become a better place, and two companies— one with an amazing tool and some great technology, the other with market share and a direct line to 75% of the world’s headphones— could share the love.

PS.

Although this is not a conventional love story, it’s interesting to note that the two friends I’ve mentioned became engaged— to different people— on almost exactly the same day.  Congratulations to both of you!

All of this is to say that when we do take on a project outside the realm of the .edu world, we generally don’t stray too far.  We have recently finished a project for Creative Commons that, even though outside our traditional range, was a great fit for us, and let us try out some of our ideas in a new context.

Creative Commons’ ccLearn project is attempting to do for the world of education what Creative Commons itself does for creative capital in general: to democratize a closed industry by promoting open standards and the sharing of resources, while protecting the rights of creators and authors.  It is a really interesting project, that promises a substantial benefit to society; on top of that, it’s excitingly geeky.

What we were hired by CC to do is help convey ccLearn’s message to a wider public audience.   Currently CC is about as geek-friendly an organization as there is; certainly most anyone who uses technology on a regular basis knows who Creative Commons is and what they do.  But they don’t do too much outreach to the general, non-tech-savvy public; most of the public awareness of CC comes through its integration with sites like Flickr. And even Flickr’s CC info page is fairly technical in tone.

What that means is that in the general public awareness sense, CC works behind the scenes.  And for Creative Commons itself, that’s fine— much of CC’s work has to do with promoting legislation, defining open standards, and so forth, and it doesn’t require a large public profile.

But ccLearn’s mission is different— they plan to be much more directly involved with individuals seeking to produce or consume open educational content.  The fifth-grade teacher who can use open resources to supplement her class materials, or the program director looking for guidance in developing a poetry workshop: these are very concrete public audiences, and their awareness of open education resources will be of great importance to ccLearn’s overall success.

This means that ccLearn needs (to use a crude marketing term) a different brand positioning than Creative Commons in general.  Our job was to help them find that place, and interpret it visually on the Web.

ccLearn currently lives at http://learn.creativecommons.org.  This site serves as the base camp for ccLearn’s internal operations, such as its board members, top contributors, and other stakeholders, and it shares a general look and feel with Creative Commons.  Our first recommendation to CC was to create a separate URL for promoting open educational resources to the public:

opened.creativecommons.org

And with that new URL came a brand:

(The follow-up text is still in flux, as ccLearn decides how best to position Open Ed with regard to CC.)

As part of our messaging strategy, Donald wrote a couple of opening sentences that neatly encapsulate ccLearn’s offering in a way anyone can understand, geek or not:

“Open education brings the ideas behind open source to the world of education. Open ed resources are learning aids, reference materials, and even textbooks that are free to use and free to distribute— whether you’re a teacher, a learner, or a little of both.”

(This kind of friendly, just-the-facts introduction is a particular talent of Donald’s— he wrote opening paragraphs for Southwestern and White Whale’s 2007 site.)

And finally, we created a site design:

… that will allow ccLearn to put a wide variety of engaging content in front of a relatively non-tech-savvy public, while allowing them quick access to basic information about open education and without turning off insiders with “marketing”-ish language.

We handed off the final files, including XHTML/CSS/JS buildouts of the homepage and inside page templates, to CC this week; they’ll be doing the implementation with their wiki-based CMS.  Overall we think it’s a great success, and we’re happy to know they think so too.

To view the buildout version of the site, visit http://opened.babywhale.net.   To view Donald’s buildout handiwork, I suggest you try it without Javascript and/or CSS.  Oh, and click into the search box!

The Overhead Rack 

Worst of all, and most hated by me
as I sit docilely crammed into my seat,
crammed and strapped like a psychotic in restraints,
are these bland-faced complacent graduates
of business school, trained to give each other
and the rest of the poor world the business,
who attempt to stuff their not one but two folding bags
big enough to hold an army of business suits
into the overhead rack, already crammed
with traveling crap like a constipated ox’s
intestine. The blond doors cannot lower,
the hats and hags of earlier arrivals
are crushed. Why don’t the smug smooth bastards check
their preening polyester wardrobes and
proliferating printouts, sheaf on sheaf,
at the ticket counter, or, better yet,
stay home and attend to their neglected wives
and morose, TV-mesmerized offspring
instead of crowding their slick and swollen bags
and egos onto my airplane, my tube in space, my
clean shot home? Like slats of a chicken coop
overrunning with dung are the overhead racks.
If we crash, thus overloaded, the world
will yield up a grateful sigh at the headlines:
one less batch of entrepreneurs to dread.
Oh, kill, kill, kill, I think, watching the filth
strap itself in, exhaling export beer
and nasal exchanges of professional dirt,
these fat corpuscles in the nation’s bloodstream:
oh, would I were a flying macrophage
to eat them all, their bags and all, and excrete
the vaporizing lava into space!

I love to imagine Updike writing this poem on the plane.  

I encounter these guys all the time, and will be sure not to become one.

She gave up. And almost didn’t apply—until she figured she might as well Google it.

Natalia: “[...] and it is a school that has classes in interface design!”

After touring both exhibitor’s halls, we sat down at the big fancy Apple presentation stage and watched the show for a bit.  I managed to catch the last half of the iWork (basically Apple’s version of MS Office) presentation, which has some really fancy UI updates, but took in the iLife (Garage Band, iPhoto, iMovie, etc) presentation in its entirety directly after.  Dude, the new iPhoto is pretty awesome.  At first, I thought that the constant prompting to sync my phone, my camera, or any memory device that happened to have a picture extension attached to the file name (.jpg, .crm, etc) was fairly annoying.  However, I was in a hurry to dump the photos from my phone one day, and was actually pretty into the speed and automation iPhoto provided once I gave it a chance.  I now use it from time to time, and have begun to organize my photos into categories and all of that, but I think that if I were to update to the newer version of iPhoto, I’d be more inclined to lose myself in its fancy new features.  For instance, if you have a camera with GPS (including the iPhone 3g), iPhoto will automagically convert the GPS coordinates encoded in the photo to the actual city/state/country, and allow you to browse photos based on location.  Sure, doesn’t really sound all that breath-taking, but it gets better: in the demo, the GPS translation was so specific that it knew the photo was taken at the Eiffel Tower!  Dude, that is crazy specific.  So, it is kind of awesome for vacations—particularly when traveling internationally, or if you are out in the middle of nowhere—because you can view the entire album of a trip on a multi-pinned map.  This would have been pretty useful for my trip to Barcelona last year, but such is the technological life.

iPhoto also recognizes faces now, and does a crazy good job at it—not to mention that you can flip through all of the photos containing any given person that you’ve decided to identify in your photo library in a fancy cork-board interface.  Sure, little things make the world go ooh and ahh, but it gets better: you can now upload any photo selections to your Flickr and Facebook at the click of a button.  Why is this a big deal?  Well, aside from the obvious time saved by not having to login and go through the steps of uploading the photos manually, the Facebook thing is kind of awesome and beneficial because if there is an unidentified person in one of your photos, another user can tag them for you, and it will automatically be updated in your local photo library as well!

Lots of other neat stuff happened with Garage Band, particularly the fully customizable music lessons by fancy pants musicians as filmed in high definition.  I saw this in action, and it is actually pretty rad—and while additional lessons beyond the (I think they said) ten lessons for several different instruments that ship with Garage Band 09 are like $5, they are still a hell of a lot cheaper than private music lessons.  I’m oversimplifying how neat this feature actually is, as you can

- view the on-screen fretboard/keyboard/etc in a multitude of ways (show the fretboard/etc itself, show the sheet music, show the tabs, show the sheet music with the letters of the notes written overtop of them, etc)
- loop any section that is giving you difficulty (e.g. – solos)
- during playback, you can play any piece of the arrangement desired (e.g. – just drums and bass, just guitar, all but the instrument you are playing, etc), and you can even change the mix (make any instrument louder/softer, etc).

Pretty damn cool—Guitar Hero should watch its back.  iMovie had a bunch of updates as well, but honestly I’ve never even used iMovie, so I can’t prattle on about how neat the updates are since I have no prior experience with it.  It did have a really great stabilization feature though, and based on my experience, it seems much easier (though obviously more limited) that the likes of Final Cut and After Effects.

My favorite part about the MacWorld Expo—this year and last—is getting to talk to the independent software developers.  Last year, I met some of the Coda dudes, and got a personal demo of what shortly thereafter became my code editor of choice.  Getting to interact with them was pretty sweet, as they could totally answer all of my questions right then and there—satisfying my nearly infinite curiosity sans several hours of internet research.

This year, I’ve taken up a much more strict budget as part of my several goals for the year (these go beyond mere “resolutions”, as they will be accomplished and there is no backing out of them).  I’ve been keeping track of spending via Google Spreadsheets for the last few months, utilizing some formulas to do the math etc, but it wasn’t quite robust enough for what I was trying to do (attempting to keep track of my various accounts, etc).  I walked by the Quicken booth of all places, a product which I’d always strayed away from due to its perceived clunkiness during my brief interactions with it—sorry, I just can’t bring myself to use ugly, awkward software anymore.  At any rate, the demo at the booth caught my eye, as they totally rebuilt the entire program from scratch specifically for the Mac.  It actually looks like a Mac program now, and is reasonably intuitive if you are familiar with the likes of iTunes, iPhoto, etc.  I stuck around for the last few minutes of the demo, and listened to the QA to learn a bit about it.

After the crowd had kind of died down, the rep noticed that I’d been there oggling for a few minutes and asked if I had any questions for him.  I responded by asking for another demo since I’d missed most of his previous one, after which I set in on asking him about the other features that I’d wanted in a resolution to my needs: iPhone integration, a sort of overview of all of the accounts, budgeting options, loan/debt tracking, and then a few other more frivolous features like a 401k tracker/manager.  Apparently this new Mac-specific version is just now in beta, but he was really siked about several of my suggestions and was furiously scribbling down the ideas.  This kind of interaction is totally awesome to me—to be able to get an intense demo by one of the three developers that actually made the program, and to give them real world feedback that will benefit us both in the end; makes for a pretty awesome and personal relationship to the software that I use on a daily basis, as well as supplying a face to the money that I’d likely spend on said software.  This is one thing that I really like about designing/developing for a small company: the clients and developers come to know each other throughout the course of a given project, thus making the collaboration more personal and directly beneficial to the final product since all parties have an emotional stake in the project.  All of that having been said, Financial Life for Mac Beta Group represent!

The interactions don’t always go as swimmingly as they did with Coda and Quicken though.  I sat down at a table in the snack bar area at some point during the afternoon to munch on some organic toasted seaweed—which raised several questions from our fellow Mac geeks around us (one dude thought I was eating “green plastic”, and another thought that it was “a candy sheet” haha).  The table was littered with all of these handbills for various products, and while glancing through them, I stumbled upon a flyer for some “new scripting language that was similar to PHP, but also had the functionality of MySQL”.  Yep, my interest was piqued, and I made a beeline for their booth after snack time.  The language is called “WebDNA” (sorry dudes, kind of a horrible name for a scripting language).  The syntax looked pretty simple for the most part, and seemed intuitive enough, but the fact that it isn’t open source—it is actually a totally proprietary language that requires users to purchase licenses for its use—just kind of rubs me the wrong way.  For several reasons, I feel that languages have only to gain from being open source, and this has been proven time and time again.  While the syntax is kind of interesting—and the idea that it is a self-contained server-side scripting language that also has database functionality all rolled into one is an interesting idea in and of itself—it isn’t terribly much easier and more intuitive than a PHP framework (e.g. – CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc), or even an alternate language like Ruby as framed in Rails.  Despite being kind of on the fence about the language, my interaction with the developer felt more like a fencing match than a conversation—such as the one with the Quicken dude did, or the Coda folks for that matter.  Here is a link to their site though—as well as some screencasts—if you want to check out WebDNA for yourself.  At least it is a different approach to the current offerings, and for that I commend them.

All in all, MacWorld was fun and interesting—mostly due to getting to talk to all of the other passionate developers out there.  I’m kind of nervous about its fate now that Apple has pulled out, but I suppose time will tell; for the conclusion, tune in next year, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel…

The early part of 2009 brings the kickoff of two projects we’re very excited about:  our redesign of the University of San Francisco site, and the buildout, content writing and LiveWhale implementation process for  Lewis & Clark, whose design was approved in late 2008.

We are deep in the design process for an exciting project for Creative Commons— designing a new site for CC’s Open Education project (currently part of ccLearn).   You’ll hear more about that in the next week or two.   And we’re completing a refresh of the White Whale site, which ought to launch in the next few days, in addition to the usual assortment of small-scale projects, phase 2’s, and creative detours that keep us on the ball.

There are some big things in the works at WW.  Users of our CMS will find a couple of major new features with our next major sub-version (1.2).  We’re talking with some really exciting new clients.  And we may be adding to the family, with a sixth Whale— we take pride in being small, so we don’t hire people lightly, but we’ve met someone we like a lot.

Hopefully all of this won’t keep us from blogging, either.  Whether you’re a regular reader or a new visitor, thanks for paying attention.  Stay tuned for fireworks.

Sticking to the “use your own tools” mantra, we use LiveWhale to edit that site.  I can tell you that it is a heck of a lot faster to add items from an externally generated RSS feed to a LiveWhale-powered page— two minutes, give or take a few seconds— than it is to add an external feed to this WordPress-powered blog.

But that’s not what I’m here to write about today.

Well, in a way, it is what I’m writing about.  Because what we’re talking about here is usability— user interfaces that are easy and enjoyable to interact with are inherently more usable than ones that aren’t.  I might think LiveWhale’s interface is more usable than that of another CMS, but that’s not because that CMS isn’t capable of being used by human beings; on the contrary, top commercial and open source CMSs are used every day by plenty of people without complaint.  I think our interface invites you to use it, which to me is the ideal of usability.  Anyway, as it happens, one of the primary books on Web usability happens to have the worst, most foolish title of any book on Web development anywhere.*

Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think espouses a particular philosophy of Web usability that makes perfect sense. You shouldn’t have to look at a page and sit there thinking about what to click on; the information hierarchy of a page ought to be self-evident. Every day I encounter Web sites that make me think in ways I shouldn’t have to.  Where is the search box?  How do I find directions to your campus?  What’s going on this week?  Often the competing interests at work in a Web design tend to crowd out the simple big picture observations, and the things that ought to be easy get lost.  It’s true, as Krug writes, that people don’t read Web pages, they scan them, and that’s why information hierarchy is so important.  Frankly, I agree with most of what Krug has to say in his book.

But that title!

My company designs Web sites for colleges and universities.  Usually the schools we work for hire us largely in an attempt to improve their sites’ outreach to prospective students; when we’re working on an Admissions site this is an obvious and explicit goal, but it’s almost always a general mission.

We have found, from years of experience, that prospects will become more attached to an institution if they find ways to make contact— let’s call it intellectual contact— with a school.  They fall in love with a book by an alumni author, they meet with a faculty member, they have an interesting conversation on Facebook.  At some point in the process of getting to know a school, something clicks.  A connection is made.

(Obviously some students pick a school on less interesting criteria— its position on the US News list or the likelihood of a Fortune 500 job after graduation.  But we’re not talking about them.)

This process, above all, involves thinking. Constant, engaged, curious, obsessive thinking about a number of schools, the choice of which will have an enormous influence on the kind of person you’ll turn out to be.

In our site designs we try to encourage this, and to create Web environments that repay close attention.  Sometimes this means putting an actual math problem on a math homepage— why not?  And sometimes it means detours, hidden doors, or easter egg-like features that you have to explore a bit to find, such as what happens when you click the motto (”Since 1840,” etc.) on the Southwestern University site, or the mouseovers on the Brown Admission Student Life page.  Building things like this makes our job interesting, it makes our clients (and their stakeholders in the know) feel special.  It’s fun for everyone involved.

But it does make you think. And invariably, at some design meeting or another, someone will ask, “Well, Steve Krug wrote this book, and doesn’t this design violate his main principle of usability?  I mean, that design definitely is making me think.”

I don’t think Steve Krug is opposed to Web designs that invite some intellectual engagement. Especially not for prospective college students, for Pete’s sake.  But the simplistic title of his book waters his argument, which I believe is a good one, down to its lowest common denominator.

I want the Internet of the future to be smarter, more engaging, better organized.  And I want it to make me think.  Otherwise the inevitable availability of Web content on every available surface in our lives will turn us into dull, unfeeling automatons.  (Some people would argue it’s happening already.)  Without an Internet that makes us think from time to time, we’ll end up glued to our chairs, waiting patiently for spoon-fed information from our Internet masters.

And nobody wants that.  Not even Steve Krug.

I also like the idea of “communicate with me”, or “tell me what is going on here”.  This seems like a more personal connection between designer and audience—or product and user—and maybe it’s just me, but I actually really appreciate it when someone teaches me something new.

Enter the idea of communicating in plain English. Wow, I know, what a concept!  If I’ve learned anything in my time at White Whale, it is that clear and effective communication is the key to successful sites and applications—be it through the interface, the content, etcetera (though hopefully all of the above).  Take the first time I used LiveWhale (our fancy new approach to content management) for example.  We had all been fairly busy with client work through a bulk of its development, so outside of a few glances-over-the-shoulder and catching snippets of development conversation here and there, I was basically ignorant of how the thing even worked until it was in beta form.  Rather than walking me through the basics of the app, the LW developers just gave me a login and told me to poke around.  This of course is a form of user testing—albeit on a subject with a more critical eye and ellevated skill level.  Fascinatingly enough, the system was really intuitive, and required no real explanation at all.  This is a product of good interface design and clear communication—every button tells you what it is going to do, every input field is clearly marked, and things are laid out in a logical fashion.  Obviously, I was thinking throughout the entirety of my perusal of the app—as I was learning a new method of doing something—and it was easy to figure out the LW way of content management due to its level of explicit communication.  This follows the principles of “don’t get in my way”, “communicating in plain English”, and “tell me what is going on here”, but never “don’t make me think”.

On the topic of communicating in plain English, I ran across some amazingly easy to understand explanatory videos this past weekend during my usual relaxing passtime of internet perusal.  Stumbling upon these videos is what really sparked this tangent, as I found them so clear and effective that virtually anyone above the age of ten with at least a tiny bit of internet familiarity should be able to understand them without fail—and what is more, rather than being intimidating explanations that answer questions with questions, they are actually really entertaining and straight forward.  No one likes to feel ignorant, or left out because they can’t understand how to operate something that thousands of other people have no problem with.  It would be difficult at this point for someone to step forward and say like, “Hey man, what is this crazy WordPress thing I keep hearing about?”  Or, “What the hell is MySpace, and why is everyone of all shapes and sizes freaking out about it?”  Sure, you can get all of that from Google—or Wikipedia or something—but there is still a certain entry level base of knowledge required for even those explanations, and before you know it, you are left with tons of other questions that need answering—such as “what is a blog?”, or “rss?”  Right, it gets overwhelming when you get your questions answered with more questions, and pretty soon you’ve dropped an hour just trying to figure out what WordPress even does, let alone learning how to set it up and all of that.  Obviously, we are all well ahead of the curve here—and are pretty technically-minded—but I could just imagine my poor mom (an ex-computer programmer mind you, but not so internet savvy) trying to figure all of this out, getting intimidated and frustrated with the whole thing, and eventually resigning to be left in the dark.  Enter Common Craft and their awesome The Common Craft Show video series that even my dear mother could understand (they don’t just focus on web technologies either, there are also videos on how the Presidential Election process works, how to fight off zombies, etc—you know, important stuff).

LiveWhale, our CMS, is essentially a module-based system. Individual modules can be provided to our customers on a per-client basis. Each module is a self-contained element, that “registers” itself in the CMS framework, thereby establishing its functionality throughout. A module is responsible for creating and managing its own data, but if it is flagged as group owned, access to that data is handled by LiveWhale’s users and groups system.

It is, of course, possible for an administrator to manage those users and groups, and should a circumstance arise in which a group should be targeted for deletion, LiveWhale automatically cleans up data associated with that group (whether it is stored in a database or the file system) so that it is not orphaned. (This is in fact the case with any piece of data which “contains” additional hierarchical data.)

The mechanism we have in place for this is simple, but it is also flexible. Each piece of associated data that has to be cleaned up by a parent marked for deletion can optionally be given to a handler deletion function. For example, if a piece of news stores an image in the file system, the handler function is activated to clean that up as well.

Eventually we added a global activity log to our CMS, LiveWhale. Activity is associated with a user and a group, making this data group owned. As it turned out, the group deletion mechanism possessed a flaw. LiveWhale’s internal delete routine initially expected the logic about what a handler function had to do, if anything, to come from the handler function itself. In fact what it needed to do was to first deduce if a handler was optimal for a particular type of data at all. The activity data made this clear, when there was suddenly a need to delete hundreds or thousands of individual pieces of data which were designed to be stored in huge quantity over a long period of time (unlike with news management, for example). Pushing the handler logic up into LiveWhale’s delete routine made it no longer necessary to perform logic a hundred or thousand times when the result was always going to be the same, and a one-off deletion procedure could alternatively be used for the bulk data.

This drives home the point that building something requires either the proper foresight to know how that system has to conform to conditions that haven’t yet come about, or ensuring that the foundation you’ve already built adjusts to appropriately handle new features as you add them. Fortunately, our LiveWhale development process utilizes a variety of monitoring tools and diagnostic tests which inspect the system closely to continually perform a sanity check on the results of code execution over the product’s development lifetime. This was a case where the system noticed the deletion flaw even before I did.

Although Google’s entry into Second Life’s market gave many of us .edu-dev-type people the sense that maybe there WAS something to this virtual worlds thing, it looks like that was a short-lived experiment.  From a Reuters article cited in the above:

It’s hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life’s hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let’s not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my “beat,” I’d get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I’d right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

Although I’ve expressed my skepticism about virtual worlds in higher ed before, I do feel sorry for those colleges out there that can’t afford to redesign their viewbooks this year because their budget is tied up in the maintenance of a Second Life island.

More and more of our clients are moving to the Common Application— in most cases that’s because homegrown applications tend to be unwieldy and hard to manage, and it’s easy to see how tempting it’d be to outsource that whole process— information gathering, account creation, payment collection, reporting, security, etc.— to a third party.  I don’t know if the Common App is a publicly held company, but I wouldn’t say no to a gift of stock options if they were.

However.  Although the Common App is certainly a convenient way to manage the process of college admission, doesn’t it feel like a missed opportunity?

The process of applying to college is an anxious, scary time, as anyone who’s ever done it can attest.  With a very few exceptions, nobody’s going to be accepted everywhere they apply.  So in applying, you know you’ll be rejected somewhere, and the kind of self-revelation required in a good college application adds a fear of exposure to the process.   (At least that’s what it was like for me.)

If that’s the case, it seems that a college or university could do a great deal to alleviate this anxiety— and build a relationship with the prospective student— by presenting her with a thoughtful, friendly, easy to use, customized, streamlined and responsive, online application.

The first step in applying using the Common App looks like this:

Wouldn’t it be better if the first page started like this?

Hi.

It’s great that you’re applying to Middlebury.  Our applicant pool always includes an incredibly diverse group of interesting and thoughtful young people from around the country and around the world.  The students that join Middlebury next fall will become part of a close-knit academic community; we expect a lot from our students, and we give a lot in return.  In other words, we aren’t just looking for the best students, we’re looking for the best neighbors.

We’re looking forward to reading your application. If you have any questions at all about the process, e-mail John Doe, our online application support counselor, at JohnDoe@middlebury.edu.

To get started, enter your first and last name below.

We know from experience that students choose colleges based on direct connections.  Sometimes it’s a friend they made touring campus; sometimes it’s a favorite book by an alumni author; sometimes it’s a discussion on Facebook.  Sometimes university Web sites include tools that encourage connections as well— for example, Haverford will occasionally let a select group of admits or top prospects create student profiles, and we’re working on a project for Lewis & Clark that will let prospective students create customized portal pages just like faculty, staff and current students.

The question is, why can’t that sense of personal contact extend to the application itself? I’ve suggested some of the most typical reasons why colleges go to the Common App— convenience, security, stability, etc.  These are all fine reasons to outsource the application; there are other reasons too.  It is undeniably more convenient for the *applicant* to only enter their information one time and apply to multiple colleges at once.  Web database development projects done in-house are notoriously hard to maintain over time; this is one reason why schools’ own online applications are often a little clunky.  And there aren’t many companies that offer customized application development.

(The reason for this last case are clear.  The perfect online application would be the better mousetrap, and it’s hard to even think about how you’d build a college application without seeing visions of how the world of higher ed would beat a path to your door.)

But it’s my belief that when the right school— unsatisfied with the Common App, wanting to create personal contact with applicants, and without the staff or the time to develop an application in house— meets the right Web development vendor, a few steps might be taken toward an online application that will itself do some of the work of recruiting great applicants.

Consider this blog post a want ad; I think we’re the right company for that job, and if anybody’s interested in talking about it, let me know.  Over the next several days I’ll be posting a few more thoughts on this topic— how an application might reach out and speak directly to students, building connections in the process.  If anyone else has any ideas about what the ideal application might do, please drop me a line.

Our first effort, a screencast of LiveWhale’s news system, leaves much to be desired; it’s clear that we’re new at this.  It’s hard to figure out the right tone of voice (how much humor?  how fast?  etc.), and it took several takes to get through it without messing anything up.  (And we still had to edit the final product a bit.)  I’m sure it’s something we’ll continue to refine and improve as we continue developing LiveWhale’s documentation.

All of this is to say that I  just watched the most effective screencast demo I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever.

Google has just added video chat to its Gmail service.  This is a big deal— not only is it a potential Skype-killer, it opens up the possibility that video chat will become a part of life for all computer users the way it is for Mac people.  (Video chat has been deeply integrated into the Mac for years now; I know several people who have bought their parents Macs solely because it’s so easy to do long-distance videochats.)

Anyway, the video demo is sublime, wonderful, perfect:

On the one hand, it’s probably best to let users make mistakes, or format as they wish, and depend on human communication to clear things up— instead of trying to build in a bunch of extra structure designed to cover for mistakes.  It’s our view that the latter approach leads to bloated, overbuilt CMS systems that discourage accountability.  But at the same time, consistency and coherence of communication across a Web site is a really, really important thing— it is what distinguishes sites that serve as good vehicles for an institution’s messaging from sites that are just decorated Web pages.

We’re thinking about this right now because we are considering automatically converting the titles of news items in LiveWhale to Title Case.  The following three news headlines, though identical in content, send very different messages:

1.  White Whale Web Services to Release New Content Management System, Revolutionize CMS Industry
 

2.  White Whale Web Services to release new content management system, revolutionize CMS industry
 

3.  WHITE WHALE WEB SERVICES TO RELEASE NEW CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, REVOLUTIONIZE CMS INDUSTRY
 

Although there might be a justification for #3 in a particular Web design, it’s clear that you wouldn’t want a user to enter news headlines that way.  For one thing, caps are just hard to read in many contexts; but on top of that, it’s always easy to {text-transform:uppercase} if you need caps.  My general preference as a design snob would be for #2, but that’s clearly not common practice— as much as I enjoy headlines like this (or this), that style is much more common in European news than American.

It’s also the case that styles #1 and #2 look terrible next to each other:

• White Whale Web Services to Release New Content Management System, Revolutionize CMS Industry
• Other CMS providers cower in fear

So.  Should we let users do what they will, and enter headlines according to any system they prefer?  Or should we legislate something?  It seems pretty clear from the above examples that— at least in the particular case of news headlines— legislating is the way to go.  And if you’re going to require a particular format for headlines, it seems pretty clear that Title Case Is Your Only Option.

So what’s the best way to do it?

You could, for example, simply ask the user to format the headline a particular way:

___________________________________________________
Please use Title Case for headlines.

Or, a bit more diplomatically, you could provide an example:

___________________________________________________
Example: Stock Market Soars on Rumors of Bailout

Alternatively, we could let users enter any headlines they want, and control the front end display with CSS’s text-transform property.  But that’s not going to work either, because these are the only options we have:

Title Case Is Great, But Not If You Capitalize Every Word In The Sentence.  Otherwise It Looks Hacky.  The text-transform property doesn’t have the kind of sensitivity you’d want in a good Title Case headline.  I am personally big on punctuation and capitalization styles that reflect spoken rhythms— that’s why, no matter what Douglas says, I always put a space after an em dash— and capitalizing “the,” “and,” etc. ruins the spoken rhythm of a headline.

So the only approach left— assuming you want to engage this issue at all!— is to automatically convert headlines into Title Case on the back end.  And that’s the whole reason I started this post in the first place.

It turns out that converting to Title Case is nowhere near as simple as you’d imagine.  Sure, we know that you don’t capitalize “the” or “a” or prepositions, etc.  But how about sentences like these?

Read markdown_rules.txt to Find Out How _Underscores Around Words_ Will Be Interpreted

Notes and Observations Regarding Apple’s Announcements From ‘The Beat Goes On’ Special Event

These sentences are from a suite of test cases for a Title Case script originally created by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.  We are planning to use the PHP version of the script to convert some of Southwestern’s old news headlines (originally entered with uppercase headlines) to a thoughtful Title Case, and are considering using it when headlines are created in LiveWhale in the first place.  In the process we discovered yet another odd, fascinating corner of the world of CMS development to geek out in.

In other words, a response to an email I’ve sent with only the reply “Thanks!”

Now, I know why these emails exist— to acknowledge receipt of my message.  But I trust the Web, and so I’m assuming it was received anyway— and whenever the email bell rings, and I see there’s a message from a client or business contact, I stop what I’m doing to open Mail and check it out, and whenever it’s a Thanks! I can’t help but feel a bit prickly, for having interrupted a creative stream for several seconds to find out something I already assumed.  I know it’s a little petty, but when you’re  juggling lots of tasks, a relatively content-free email like that seems superfluous and unnecessary.

Contrast this with an email I got a couple of days ago:

The effect an email like this has is completely different.  By adding just a few extra words to this quick thank-you message, the author let me know that the sentiment was truly sincere: that the letter I’d sent had a positive impact.  The difference is so minor— between spending three seconds on a response and spending ten seconds— but the resulting email really made my day.

So now I’m resolved to do a better job of writing thank-you messages myself; I’ll commit to spending 10-15 seconds elaborating why an email was particularly helpful, timely or informative. If I can’t make the time for an even marginally thoughtful or heartfelt response, I won’t clutter the mail servers of the world with a content-free return receipt.

Of course, internally, you would think that people would shout any questions across the room and notify each other of any mistakes. Tonya has gone from entirely non-geek to believably geeky in her time at White Whale, but when it comes to technical details in a proposal she always runs it by us developers to make sure her take on it is clear.

All this is to say I spotted this on the website of one of those razzmatazz web 2.0 startups:

(And no, Tonya won’t get this joke.)

The fact is, we aren’t claiming that LiveWhale does everything— that’s part of the point.  It does what its users need it to do.  

But maybe its successor, EpicWhale™, will make all other communication obsolete.

UPDATE: I don’t use Twitter enough to get the Fail Whale when it’s overloaded.  Now the comic makes much more sense!

One sad note during the weekend was the passing of Paul Newman; he died on September 26th, the day before our ceremony.  Although Oz Farm is off the grid and there’s no cell phone reception, the news spread slowly across the farm on Saturday.

Paul Newman was a great, admirable man in all sorts of ways, from his commitment to social justice to his lifelong and devoted marriage.  But he’s on White Whale’s radar because he was an alumni, frequent donor, and great friend to Kenyon College, whose site we redesigned earlier this year.  I was fortunate enough to be asked to design a homepage graphic to serve as a tribute, and it’s now live on the Kenyon homepage, along with a moving tribute page and a photo-by-photo description of the homepage graphic.   To create it, I paged through countless photos, which really gave me a sense of how long and how deeply Paul Newman has been a part of the American consciousness.  (The folks at Kenyon did the important work of securing all photo permissions, which I know was no picnic, given that since Paul’s passing copyrighted images have spread across the web without proper attribution.)

I’m getting married in a week.  (Thanks, I’m excited too!)  We have to get wedding insurance— something I’d never heard of— for our weekend-long wedding in the wilds of northern California.

Here is the list of exclusions in our policy:

Exclusions: Claims by Athletic Participants, War, Terrorism, Expected or Intended Injury, Sexual Abuse/Molestation, Asbestos, Nuclear Energy, Total Pollution, Fungi or Bacteria, Aircraft or Watercraft, Pyrotechnics, Employment Related Practices, Communicable Disease (Hepatitis, TSE, HIV, HTLV, or AIDS) Collapse of Temporary Structure, Lead Liability, Professional Liability, Use of Trampolines, Cheerleading Pyramids, Sale/Manufacture/Distribution of Athletic Equipment, Use of Saunas or Tanning Devices, Polo, Skin & Scuba Diving, Squash, Downhill Snow Skiing, Water Skiing, Whitewater Rafting, Bungee Jumping, Mountain Climbing, Rock Climbing, Motorsports, Rodeo or any Equestrian Related Sports, Waterslides, Ballooning, Parachute Jumping, Luge, Tobogganing, Gymnastics, All Motor Sports, Violation of Telephone Consumer Protection Act or CAN-SPAM Act.

How can we be expected to have any fun at all if we can’t play squash or violate the CAN-SPAM act?

The rest of WW weighs in:

Who are these people who maintain accounts with Tumblr, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Mixxd, and CrowdVine— what do they do all day?  How do they get any work done?  

(OK, I made up Mixxd. But I think the others are real.)

Update: Tony from CrowdVine comments that CV’s network is transient— used primarily during conferences for attendees to let each other know which sessions are “hot.”  That’s a good point— it’s easy to understand how transient, explicitly function-oriented tools can be useful, and if CrowdVine’s efforts really are directed at serving temporary social networks like conferences, I wish them well.  It’s a good idea.

I have heard from several past clients that Hobson’s doesn’t offer much in the way of customer service—  they seem to be a company that earns its money by buying up any higher-ed-related tool with market share and repackaging it as part of a “platform.”  Judging from this email—which, as you can see, showed up in my inbox with no content whatsoever, and a reply-to link to the mysterious “myvippage.net”— they put about as much thought and work into email marketing as they do into innovation and technology.

Every other airline had a screen like this. But at the Airtran counter they had something that had more in common with one of these. And over the course of our three hours in line it became clear that the board wasn’t being actively updated. So we stood there for a frustrating afternoon in an information vacuum, not knowing if we could make our connection or would have to be booked on a later flight. Only at the counter did we learn that our flight had been cancelled and we’d have to return the next day for a rerun of the same.

Aside from all the practical help that just a small bit of information would have been–giving us time to make other travel arrangments, sparing my parents extra round-trips to the airport, allowing us to skip dosing our dog up with the sedative he takes before flying–simply taking the step of updating the status board would have measurably decreased the stress level of the planeful of passengers in line.

Here’s a point of contrast: After our second go of it was unsuccessful, we ended up getting a refund and booking the next day on US Airways instead. And, as it turns out, that flight was pushed back quite a bit too. But we weren’t left guessing about it because I woke up to an automated call that told me the duration of–and even the reason for!–the delay and offered a path to follow in case I needed to make alternate arrangements. And at the airport, the first thing the representative told us was, “It looks right now like you’ll be able to make your connection. But keep your eye on the status and come back here if it changes.” So, though the flight was delayed an additional two hours, we made it home because when we saw that the status had changed they were able to help us fly standby.

Clients sometimes tell us that we’re the most responsive vendor they’ve worked with. And–though Tonya schedules our deadlines with something approaching clairvoyance and Alex is known for lightning-fast coding–it’s not that we have a superhuman ability to get work turned around. It’s just that we know how frustrating it is for our clients to be in the dark if their website is broken or the Dean needs something on the homepage as of yesterday. It only takes a few seconds to say, “Hey, that looks like some bad records in the faculty database. We’ll take a look at it first thing in the morning.” Or to slide the little plastic FLIGHT CANCELLED into its appropriate slot.

So I surprised myself this morning when I came across the Oregon State Fair’s Web site and was so impressed with its design, functionality, IA, and writing that I actually wrote a glowing, completely unsolicited email to their marketing director. (By the way, I found her email quite easily.)

I know the team that developed this site left no rock unturned. I can tell immediately. There are no weak links: They spent just as much time making sure the writing was spot-on as they did refining the design.

It’s a complete package:

• The design – great, catchy, beautiful, perfect for a state fair
• The IA – clear, easy to navigate, with a touch of unique flair (Big Tomato) that does the double duty of reinforcing brand
• The writing – smart, clever, knowing, funny, succinct
• The functionality – I love My Can’t-Miss List (such a great use of shopping cart technology) and that the big Purchase Tickets graphic on the top of every page

Even when our involvement on a client project is limited to design or strategy, we always emphasize the equal importance of these four elements. But of the four, writing is often overlooked until well into the project. As a result energy and resources are in short supply when the time comes to focus on content. I look forward to the day when all the RFPs we receive include a section on writing; when Web committees allocate a line item in the budget to content development before the project even starts.

I don’t mean to overemphasize writing, but as the lead IA strategist and content developer at White Whale, it’s something I fret about all the time. I let the other guys worry about functionality and design. In the end, sites succeed when it all comes together.

I haven’t been to a state fair since I was in high school but I’m going to this one. Amazing what a great Web site can do.

At the code level, LiveWhale is a framework, which means the same codebase is hit for many different types of requests. The question is then: how to achieve high performance with a codebase that has to perform so many tasks and is therefore code heavy. It makes sense to divide code across a handful of files. The objective here is to only load libraries when you need them. A typical request will only use a tiny percentage of the entire codebase, so there’s no need to read a great deal of code from the filesystem and eat up RAM per PHP request. Also, with a modular system like LiveWhale, it is not explicitly known what modules exist that will need to be loaded. An important optimization is one where only the first request to the server has to perform logic to determine what to load. The results of this expensive operation are cached, and all subsequent LiveWhale requests enjoy dramatic savings in the module loader.

A common problem with application frameworks is that they perform two very expensive tasks with every single page load: 1) initializing a session and 2) connecting to a database. Neither of these two should be assumed. In LiveWhale, a session is started only when a component requires it. A database connection only occurs when/if the first query to it is performed. Making your application sufficiently “smart” about if and when these initializations take place will also lead to dramatic speed improvements.

Less is more. That means you should optimize out any hit to the file system that you can, or remove extraneous database queries. Also, be wary of OO (object oriented) slowdowns. If something doesn’t need to be a class, don’t use one. Remember that calls to an object’s method are more expensive than global function calls. The same holds true for accessing an object’s properties. An obvious optimization is done when dealing with data from a foreign server. Such content should be cached as much as possible, so that rapid hits to your site don’t rely on the performance (or availability) or an external data source. Another tip would be to use error suppression (@) sparingly. This is a known performance hit. There are a number of similar, simple tips available via a quick Google search for “php optimizations”, and there are slideshows available from PHP developers on the subject.

Analyze how your code operates. If you have a function that uses a lot of logic (if/then, switch), make sure you understand what the “common case” is. In other words, what’s the most likely condition that function will come across? Then determine if the function’s logic is conducive to the fastest possible result under the most common case. For example, I had a function that has to intercept a variety of XML structures and handle them in different ways. One particular XML structure (the simplest possible one) was far and away the most common case. Rather than parsing the XML with simplexml_load_string() as I do with all the chunks of XML I receive, I first do a preg_match() to determine if I have the common case. In this situation, I can immediately return a simple result and skip both the parsing of the XML and the lengthy logic that goes with performing operations with it.

Identify “hot” functions. Functions that are called many times, often within a loop, should get the most attention in terms of optimization. First, make sure the function should be called at all, as opposed to using inline code, otherwise you needlessly acquire function overhead. Second, move any redundant logic outside of the hot function. Perhaps the check can be performed just once before the hot code is executed. There are also situations where a function can potentially be called repeatedly and end up with the same result. It might make sense to declare a static variable inside the function, to locally cache content generated by the function. On a subsequent call, it can first check the static array to see if a result already exists, and simply return that if so. This sort of fine-grained optimization will only help when there is a significant bottleneck with a particular function, but it can make a huge difference if done wisely.

Lastly, use XDebug! XDebug is your friend. Among the many things it can do, it will let you profile your PHP code and generate a report about how much time your script is taking overall and within particular functions. Here’s a mockup of the type of information it provides:

In this example, the function LiveWhale->foo() clearly takes the majority of the time for this request. At 38.3% of request time for a single call, it is a good candidate for serious analysis. LiveWhale->bar() is also expensive compared to other operations, and there may be ways to make this function perform better too. The function do_something() takes 6.3% for a single call, on line 41. Another function, do_something_else(), takes nearly the same amount of time but due to the fact that it was called 15 times (at 17 CPU cycles each, so 252 cycles total). Knowing why each function takes the time that it does, and why it might be called so many times, will help you maximize the performance of your application.

Familiarity with what makes PHP code perform well will only lead to the best decisions being made early on, so that XDebug reveals fewer inefficiencies. In the long run, many of these tips become automatic and part of your coding style, but for the best quality, production ready code, a little bit of analysis and thought goes a long way.

Being that I adopted back in February—just after the fancy 16gb gen1’s release—I’ve been witness to a great deal of technological evolution, albeit in a fairly short time. After the first week, i had that “this could be better” impatience that we-the-ingenuitive get shortly after a brainstorm, and I jailbroke (a tiny hack that allows one access to the inner recesses of the iPhone) my phone, installing a ton of 3rd party apps just prior to a trip to Barcelona. These apps put a lot of the functionality I’d expected of my new pocket mac into motion, such as:
- being able to actually put documents of any nature onto the device without the typical iTunes rigmarole (seriously, that thing is going to BE osx at some point if it continues it’s trend of forcing users to become increasingly more reliant on integrating with it to use their files/gadgets).
- FTP access.
- reading, storing, and bookmarking PDFs.
- writing real text files.
- playing games (not crappy cell phone games, but emulation of the nes/snes/genesis/gameboy/etc childhood favorites that are still somehow desirable after all of this time. )
- and the usual osx ammenities like a dictionary, a translator, a conversion tool etc.

During our trip abroad, these new found features were invaluable, particularly in terms of communication and commerce when my American Standard/half-fluent/US Dollar programmed mind reared it’s ethnocentric head. Even after our return, I found these new abilities so infinitely useful that I couldn’t imagine the void that should be in their place.

Well, as it is often said “all good things must come to an end” (though I scarcely believe this statement to be applicable beyond instances such as these). With the release of the fancy new 3g iPhone came the release of the ultra buggy, lethargic instability known as the 2.0 firmware.

My initial reaction was “Ooooooh I can forsake my freedom for the ability to install applications… sike.” however, after a few weeks, I saw all of these sick apps surfacing and realized that a majority of the hackers I’d been patronizing had been captured by the machine, thus slowing the release of new apps outside of the official Apple app store (more iTunes-driven fun) to a near halt, and effectively killing off support for many of my current apps. With the first update of the 2.0 firmware came the fix of a TON of bugs, many of which were fixed by a subsequent update, after which I figured “what the hell, I can always rehack it,” and took the plunge (quick note: updating your firmware undoes the jailbreak that allows one access to everything under the iPhone’s hood, this disabling the installation of 3rd party apps, creating an adhoc network to use your phone’s Internet connection on your laptop, etc).

Exploring the plethora of new apps was super exciting for the first few weeks until I found myself getting really frustrated with the idea of having to pay for apps to give me back the same functionality I’d had for free (see? my scrupulousness in motion again) with no real guarantee of them actually working. This sentiment was only echoed by Apple pulling apps that permitted too much freedom (one called “Netshare” that eased creating the aforementioned adhoc network).

I was spurred to action at the realization that I’d only have dial-up internet access during a week long stay in Florida, and thus decided to rehack my phone in hopes of tethering my phone’s Internet connection to my laptop. Interestingly enough, Apple ensures to close up all known ways of jailbreaking your phone with each firmware release. Being that I’d just upgraded to the most recent firmware, our friendly neighborhood hackers hadn’t found a new way in yet. Some new jailbreaking method had surfaced which required one to basically restore the iPhone to a hacked firmware file. This doesn’t really sound like that big of a deal, but you’d be amazed at how rooted into this thing you become, and thus starting over again is quite the pain when it comes to setting up all of your preferences and email accounts and files etc. So whatever, it’ll be worth the trouble, right?

After the craziness involved in creating a hacked version of the firmware, booting into this special recovery mode, and then tricking iTunes(OSXI) into loading up the hacked firmware when restoring my phone, the whole thing came crashing down into a pile of embers with a massive error message.  Awesome!  I get to restore my phone for real now and have nothing to show for the slow tedious pain of setting everything up again.  Rad rad rad, man that was fun.

Ironically enough, the day that I started this blog post on the fancy WordPress iPhone app (which works quite well, by the way) as I sat in the darkness of my hurricane-encased hotel room in Florida (yes, I typed this entire damn thing with my thumbs on a 3″ screen during a hurricane; how’s that for devotion?) there was another hack released for Windows.  Now, you’d think that I’d have learned my lesson with this the first time, but hey, what the hell, I already restored my phone once this week…

So, I queued up the necessary components for download via our hotel’s snail-esque wireless connection (1kb/s, how “high-speed” is that?) and headed to bed.  When I got back from Epcot the next evening, these files had finally finished downloading, and I got to work.  The allure of this new method was that you didn’t have to restore the phone, which in theory should save a great deal of the headache of the previous endeavor.  I booted into Windows via VMWare Fusion, set everything up, and did the deed… No dice, another awesome error message.  Tried to download yet another version of the damn firmware to be hacked, which was another evening’s worth of downloading, only to be met with yet another error in the morning.  Yep, there’s nothing like the smell of failure in the morning, particularly one that has been brewing for several days.

My frustration aside, it’s still easily the most convenient tool ever, other than a real computer of course; I just wish that Apple would open the door a little more, well okay a lot more, but you know…

All of that being said, here you go Apple, here is my official resignation… well, at least until a better tool surfaces..

But at the risk of stealing some thunder from that announcement, I’d like to show off something that we’ve been spending a lot of time on:

This is the add-a-news-story page of LiveWhale, the CMS we’ve developed as an answer to problems posed in our infamous (among our clients, anyway) content management manifesto. In later posts I’ll go into some detail about specific interface choices we’ve made (a personal favorite is the flowchart behind attaching images to news stories), but for now I’ll talk about what we didn’t do.

One of the main problems with most enterprise content management solutions is their unapproachability. A simple task like a creation of a news item can be buried by layers of menus, technical jargon, and–let’s be honest–really ugly interfaces. It’s the type of interface that savvy users master through days or weeks of training and non-savvy users end up navigating by way of post-its on the side of their monitors. But you need those weeks to worry about everything else involved in your website launch; you need that space on the side of your monitor for pictures of your kids.

We set out to create an interface that minimizes the distance between what the user wants to accomplish and what she has to do. This gap is huge huge in most enterprise CMSes. Adding or editing a news story is a task that every staff member at your institution understands intuitively; why does it so often feel like piecemeal data entry?

Making the user click “Attach resource” when she wants to add an image creates a cognitive separation where one needn’t exist. So all of our instructions and labels are in plain English. Steps like having to enter the story body on one page and the contact info on another–or burying things in menus, or presenting disparate information as visually equal–create a similarly artificial distance. That’s why our news edit page looks almost like a published news page: we want the headline to jump out at you and the image to appear at reasonable size, and we want everything that appears on the frontend to appear here.

By minimizing this distance between the user’s goals and the user’s processes, we think we’ve made LiveWhale a snap to use regardless of where you fall on the scale of technical knowhow. One of these days we’ll give more of a detailed tour; but, in the meantime, let us know what you think.

I was in Portland on Monday to unveil final Lewis & Clark site designs to an open audience.  It went really well, and I think we have an approved final candidate! 

The next step is for it to go to a larger public, on the redesign blog (which in this case is being run by Lewis & Clark instead of us, though we’ll be posting there from time to time).

If you’re interested, visit the Lewis & Clark New Media blog, where the designs will be appearing soon, and watch the action unfold!

I recently looked at five versions of a free class that provided some relatively trivial functionality that I wanted to include in our CMS, but didn’t want to spend too much time with. Some of them felt like they were the size of our entire core CMS library! I found plenty of frills that we don’t need (bloat which arises when a developer wants to pack their project with features to make it more than it needs to be), inefficient repetition of constants, and long procedures meant to do something that can be done in a few lines of smarter code (often meaning the developer missed some of the basics of the language). The fact that there’s a lot of garbage out there doesn’t imply that there’s nothing to gain by sharing open source code. In this case I had to study the scripts that I saw and develop my own (small) derivative, but if you are selective and critical when choosing to go with packaged code, there’s a lot of milage you can get out of other developers’ work. Fortunately, projects like PEAR (http://pear.php.net/) help to screen and collect useful code libraries and facilitate their distribution. Many other code archives just don’t fare so well.

I find that good PHP code is relatively fast and easy to write for any situation, because PHP comes with a wide range of libraries that automate most desired tasks, and the APIs are usually not very verbose. The places where I think open source software really becomes a feather in PHP’s cap are the multitude of extensions developed for the language as distinct open source projects (whether originally created for use within PHP or not). They are endless, and many of them are perfectly critical to writing a good web application. Nevertheless, there are areas where open sourced PHP code is also useful in the industry. I have felt that templating and caching are good examples of this, and created two open source projects for that. I aim to release another one that is designed to produce a powerful XML toolkit by adding a thin API on top of PHP’s XML foundation that vastly reduces the complexity of XML-generating code, making it more accessible to programmers at all goals and skill levels.

Some of the tools we have developed in-house and make freely available to whomever wants to experiment with them are available at http://technologies.whitewhale.net.

With some thought, we were able to come up with a taxonomy of content photo sizing:

1. Constrained horizontally (e.g. in a sidebar):
   
   
2. Constrained vertically (e.g. to align alongside text):
   
3. Constrained both horizontally and vertically within a box:
   
4. Constrained both horizontally and vertically to fill the box, with the edges lobbed off automatically (e.g. when needed as specific design element):
   

I thought the fourth case would be the only troublesome one, but we knocked out uses 1, 2, and 4 rather quickly. Use 3, however, proved to be a problem; we just couldn’t get it to size appropriately for every test case. Unlike the others, it was unclear what dimension to constrain to: it varies not only for the same image placed in different spaces, but also for different images in the same-sized space:

It was one of those problems that is as easy to describe–”fit the image in the box”–but hard to wrap your mind around programatically. We knew there must be simple logic to it, but despite examples in Photoshop and repeatedly walking through the problem we were having trouble making sense of it. Finally, we realized that the key comparison is the ratios of the images: if height_original:width_original > height_target:width_target constrain by height; otherwise, constrain by width. We actually managed to make an educated guess at the solution before we fully understood the problem, but we did some old-fashioned pen-and-paper work to prove ourselves right.

The ins-and-outs of this backend code and logic no doubt are pretty dry to much of our audience. But this sort of problem is one of my favorite parts of my job: working through the logic of it is completely fun stuff to my inner geek, but more importantly there’s a great satisfaction in knowing you’ve found that killer solution. When you get home, it’s hard to explain to your significant other why spending the afternoon on this one simple function wasn’t a waste of time–heck, sometimes it’s tough to get that across to your boss. But here’s a case where, by taking that time, we were able to both clearly define all the ways we employ content photos on the design-side and create a single function that quickly fits any given photo to those uses. And that not only solves an immediate goal, but we can take that solution with us. We nailed it. And we may never need to think about image sizing again.

Next thing you know we’ll be taking three-martini lunches and sleeping with our secretaries.

(I mean, don’t get me wrong: we like design blogs too.  And farmers’ markets.  And we don’t have secretaries.)

I wrote a blog post the day the Kenyon College site launched, and had intended to do something more splashy. I still might. We at White Whale are all very, very happy with how the Kenyon site came out, and are very proud of Kenyon’s able Public Affairs staff, who did a great job of implementing our CSS/XHTML designs into a sometimes unforgiving CMS; we’ve been there to help, but most of the finishing work was done on their end. So— Shawn, Patty, Rebecca: congratulations again.

But I’m really writing to talk about something specific that is happening to the design, which in my view is the most exciting thing about it.

At the beginning of this job, we brought the whole company to Kenyon’s campus for three days of meetings to talk about every imaginable aspect of the job. In those early meetings, whenever the conversation turned to including student-generated content on the home page, everyone expressed hesitation about whether Kenyon’s close-knit culture was ready for that kind of open channel. We pretty much assumed that Kenyon’s home page content (text and images both) would be under pretty tight editorial control for the foreseeable future.

When we finalized the site design, we suggested that the photo wall that dominates the home page might allow for the opportunity for student submissions. Although nobody was really sure if people would use it, the decision was made to include a “Submit Photos” link on the captions for the larger photos that result from clicking on the thumbnails. And they decided to give away a gift certificate to the cafe for any submissions they accepted.

And lo and behold, it’s starting to happen! If you click on the very middle photo in the wall (of two graduates); or the sixth photo in the top row, or the last photo in the second row, you’ll see photos submitted by students. This is just the beginning of what will eventually be something really interactive and exciting (and we’re building Kenyon a special page, as a farewell gift, to contain it all).

But IE stylesheets can only get you so far. When working with a public-facing website design you just need to get it right once: we make sure the structure is flexible and adaptable and forward-looking, but mainly we build to the best standards of the current day. But because development of our backend solution will be continuous (that’s a hint about a major feature, by the way), continuing to tie ourselves to IE6’s sundry limitations would be crippling down the road.

All this is to say that we’ve made a careful and tentative decision to drop IE6 support for the backend web app. The software is seven years old and was buggy when it was released; its replacement is already two years old. Still, requiring a more modern browser felt somewhat risky: about 20% of visitors to the public pages of a small liberal arts college are still on IE6; at a major research university, the portion is slightly higher. But we decided that a fully-fledged rich “web application” can have different requirements than a public site, and now we see that we’re in good company: both Apple in MobileMe) and 37signals (in all their apps) have decided to drop support for IE6. Hopefully this will be the start of a sorely-needed chain-reaction–it’s clear that the catalyst is not going to come from Microsoft, which is not at all interested in pushing the upgrade, even with version 8 on the horizon.

So if you’re using IE6, might we suggest an upgrade to Firefox, Safari, or IE7? Your web experience will be leagues better. And you’ll be able to play with our new toy as soon as we release it, just around the corner.

The following IM conversation with David McKelvey of Lewis & Clark began as a discussion of their recently approved Web design final release candidate.  L&C uses the phrase “Uncommon Journeys” as a motto of sorts, and although many higher ed slogans are kind of lame, we all really like this one.  A discussion of its use in the home page design led to a discussion of one of my most beloved bands, Journey (beware: loud rockin’ flash intro!), and their new lead singer (who was found on YouTube).  Reviewing this information, David also noticed that Journey’s now got an island in Second Life.

David is an early adopter and a technology enthusiast (and is eminently Googleable, though not to be confused with his many imitators).  I, on the other hand, am more old school, and my love of technology is ambiguous and complicated.  I am, therefore, deeply skeptical about Second Life.  Once David mentioned it, I couldn’t resist engaging him in a conversation that wound up expressing my professional opinion about SL (or is it 2L?) pretty well.

The full chatlog follows.
 

What is XPHP?

XPHP is a free class for PHP which allows for the embedding of dynamic content (web application variables, function output, etc.) in a web page, using a pure XML-based syntax. It is designed to quickly bring application functionality to your web pages, while avoiding the complexity and overhead of a full CMS suite or application scripting framework. It has been deployed on many projects from small-scale sites as a basic templating engine, to powering mid-sized e-commerce applications, to running full-fledged intensive data applications on high profile web sites.

Who’s it for?

XPHP is designed for developers who want to improve the efficiency and structure of their applications without committing to a complicated, bulky framework, or involving disorganized, unsafe, and philosophically questionable pseudo-code in the delivery of dynamic content to a web page.

Basic goals of XPHP development:

• Embracing XML as a powerful programming tool and partner in PHP application development.
• The avoidance of dispersing significant application logic, whether as PHP code or otherwise, throughout individual site files which take focus off the central web application itself.
• Adhering to an extremely simple syntax, while allowing for maximum flexibility.
• Ease of development and fast code execution.

Features of XPHP:

• fast, seamless templating functionality
• ability to execute application components with advanced parameter parsing
• support for nesting/recursion, and output evaluation
• advanced output control, including flexible caching support, basic if/else statements, and variable casting
• fully aware of object-oriented programming techniques
• support for PHP extensions such as XSL, and the popular APC opcode cache
• support for pushing content
• built-in routines for performing common actions
• allows for the registration of user-defined tags and tag types
• simple implementation via output buffering, or manual parsing
• 100% pure XML syntax

System requirements:

• PHP 5.0+
• SimpleXML extension for PHP (enabled by default)

A full tutorial and download link are available at: White Whale Technologies: XPHP.

Now, make no mistake about it, I’ve been a type-nerd for some time now (just ask Jason, as I regularly harass him about his use of emdashes). Up until last semester though, I’d only been reveling in the work of others and the rules they discovered along the way. Our typography course began with our instructor drilling us—seriously drilling us, pop-quiz style—on instances of good and bad typography/typographic rules. Whether it had to do with inappropriate leading or kerning, or using a forward-slash (a virgule: /) in the place of a true fraction bar (a solidus: ⁄ [you can type this on Mac by simultaneously pressing Option-Shift-1, but not on Windows {of course} without the glyph palette]), we had these rules pounded into our heads throughout every class.

While this was all interesting—and certainly entertaining considering the instructor’s vehemence for inappropriate/bad typography—about half way through the semester, we finally got to the really good stuff: learning FontLab Studio in order to build our own fonts. As with nearly any design, this process began with sketching a few ideas for typefaces (typefaces are essentially the way that the letters look, whereas fonts are comprised of code that tells a computer/printer/etc. how to render these letters).

From there, our instructor chose which typeface we were to pursue, thereafter asking us to create three and a half inch tall refined drawings of all letters A–L—then M–Z, and finally a–z & 0–9 during the consecutive weeks. These were all drawn on drafting graph paper, and had to be perfect, no smudges, no erasings, etc.

With only three weeks left in the semester, we had to learn FontLab well enough to translate these drawings into beautiful fonts, complete with metrics and kerning pairs. This turned out to be an amazing amount of work, but I found myself falling into this sort of font-zen as I built my font, transcended time and space to the point that the sun was rising before I realized I missed bedtime.

After making my way through the hellish 30 pages of filling out font information prior to rendering my font, there was something beautiful and almost… numinous about seeing something that I designed and created reveal itself on the screen every time I touched a key. In the end, everything turned out beautifully and Inflectia was born of immaculate conception; a beautiful nouveau-inspired sans-serif featuring the elegant thick-to-thin stroke and old-style figures of many serif fonts (dude, how many sans-serif fonts have old-style figures?), one of many Graves Foundry™ fonts to come.

download Inflectia.

/* Column layouts */
.column { float:left; overflow:hidden;}
.columns { margin-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px; }
.three.columns .first { width:200px; padding-right:20px; }
.three.columns .second { width:200px; padding:0 20px; }
.three.columns .third { width:200px; padding-left:20px; }
.two.columns .first { width:300px; padding-right:20px; }
.two.columns .second { width:300px; padding-left:20px; }

This lets us code the XHTML like this:

<div class="three columns">
     <div class="first column">
         Column 1
     </div>
     <div class="second column">
         Column 2
     </div>
     <div class="third column">
         Column 3
     </div>
<div style="clear:both;"></div>
</div>  

… which is pretty nice semantically.

As of June 2008, this notion is so deeply buried in the conventional wisdom about Web page design that just about nobody ever thinks about it anymore; the idea of using a table for anything other than Tabular Data is met with scorn and derision from developers.  And so the lowly <table> tag sits alone in the lunchroom, friendless, with nobody to talk to except its perpetual hangers-on <td> and <tr>.

Now of course, we don’t use tables for layout at White Whale.  Ever.  How could we?  It’d be like driving an SUV, listening to a Zune, or voting Republican— it’s something cool people just don’t do.  We (as a company) couldn’t design a site with layout tables and look at ourselves in the morning.

But I don’t like conventional wisdom, and as a result I often find myself thinking about tables— in particular, how there are some things you can do with <table> that you can’t do with <div>, no matter how hard you try.  (At least across all browsers, and without using Javascript.)  

What makes it worse is that these are some REALLY, REALLY SIMPLE THINGS.  Like attaching a footer to the bottom of the viewport, or the bottom of the content area, whichever is appropriate.  Like displaying two columns of content, and having the width of the two columns be determined by whatever makes sense for the amount of content they contain.  Like setting a content area at, say, 10% width, unless your content contains a word like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” in which case the content area won’t get any narrower. 

Now, I know not many people read this blog, but if this were a serious CSS design blog (which we modestly hope it someday may be), I’m sure we’d get commenters tossing out <div>-based solutions for all these cases.  I am pretty good at CSS, but I’m certainly not a black belt, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are some decent solutions out there.  But here’s the thing—all this stuff is built into <table>.  And all browsers get it.  Automatically.

<table> is a relic from a simpler time, when there was a general idea that common sense ought to govern how browsers render Web pages.  <div> is a creature of the present— all it knows is rules.  It knows nothing of “common sense.”  As a result, much of CSS design— even the high end stuff— becomes an attempt to duplicate in CSS behavior that comes naturally to a <table>.

Here’s a quick site I did last summer for a kickball league we started in Oakland.  If you resize it a bit, making the page really small, really big, etc., you’ll see how there’s a 250px wide side column, a title at the top that changes color as it crosses the color line, and background images pegged to page bottom.  I must have spent four hours getting that to work in CSS, without success; once I decided to use a table, I coded it in five minutes.  

But of course, that’s a personal site; we could never have done that for a client site. Now, those of you who know us know that Donald is the most standards-obsessed Whale; he handles all our initial CSS buildouts once designs are approved.  We often have conversations like this:

Jason:  Why isn’t the buildout done yet?

Donald:  Grrr!  I’m having a hard time getting (insert awesome design feature here) to work in IE6.

Jason:  Well, you know, you could use a table for that.

Donald:  No I can’t.

Jason (knowing D hates when I ask this):  Why?

Donald:  Because tables aren’t accessible.

Jason:  Are you suggesting that an audio browser isn’t able to interpret a one-row table?  Do you suppose, then, that this page, which uses a table for layout, is inaccessible?

Donald:  It’s just not best practices.

Jason:  Well, if it can be rendered by a screen reader, and it works across all modern browsers, and actually involves less code than a CSS solution, how is that not best practices?

Donald:  People will laugh at us.

Jason:  OK, fine.  But if we don’t get it solved by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll use tables and code it myself.

And then Donald stays up all night and figures it out.

The fact is, I’m fine with <div>; I just wish sometimes it had some common sense.   And just like a former cigarette smoker might occasionally step out behind the house and indulge in the guilty pleasure of an old bad habit, I reserve the right to use tables occasionally in my own work.

We’ve changed and tweaked the formula a bit since we posted this, and are thinking of releasing a 1.1.  If there’s anything any of you would like to see QA do that it doesn’t already, please let us know in the comments!

Every higher ed website is going to have landing pages with a ton of links. Your various audiences each demand one-click access to what they need, but the resulting page is rarely very scannable and its hard to categorize these sundry links in ways that meet the expectations of all your visitors.

Enter Quick Access. Quick Access is a lightweight Javascript solution we first created for Haverford College to address this problem (we later ported this to jQuery for versions for Kenyon College and Southwestern University). It’s best summed up with: “Just start typing what you’re looking for.”

Quickaccess dynamically searches links in a particular div for text and keyword matches. To add quickaccess to your page, all you need is your existing series of links; to additional keywords, just use standard HTML comments (<!– –>) within the links.

I’ve ported the latest version to a jQuery plugin. You can see a robust example here and grab the source here. Getting started is as simple as:

$('input#inputselector').quickaccess({selector:'.searchselector'});

And of course you’ll need a recent version of jQuery.

It’s largely undocumented at the moment but it’s super-straightforward; configuration settings and examples appear as comments at the start of the JS source.

We hope you find it useful, and let us know if you have any questions!

Of course, all those sites exported RSS, and so I tried adding them to my mail application. I found that I *really* intensely did not like the mailbox approach to RSS. This is why Google’s and other company’s offerings don’t appeal to me in this regard, since this is the interface they choose. What I wanted was a blog-style aggregator for all the blogs, news, etc. sites that I read daily.  Maybe it’s because I am a long-time LiveJournal user. Maybe it’s just a basic matter of taste that the blog format appeals to me much more, especially when there’s a lot of information to scan through, quickly.

At any rate, one intense evening later I had a “bloggregate.” It basically pulls together all the feeds from my favorite sites into a single page, paginated, allowing you to view today, yesterday, past week, or past month. It uses a curl backend to process several feeds at once. It even logs into password protected feeds for me to retrieve the posts I want (yes, this includes LiveJournal protected feeds which nobody seems to be able to figure out!) Individual “blog posts” have the usual link to view comments, where appropriate. And best of all? It looks lovely on the iPhone so I can be a junkie from anywhere.

This kind of play on the side often leads to a piece of code or an entire idea making it into a job one way or another. What better way to fuel what you do for a living than to do it with noodlings that you love to produce anyway?

Carlos Segura (founder of online type-foundry T-26)

segura-inc.com
t26.com
5inch.com
cartype.com

T-26 born in 1994, wanted to change the industry in regard to royalties, and permitted their fonts to be sent to service bureaus. They made a music video/commercial for each typeface, and sent the videos out on floppy disks (they had over 2000 (almost 3k) videos); remember that it took a week for the videos to even render. People liked it so much that they started to submit their own movies. Born during grunge era, in the same era of Raygun Magazine; after being invited to speak/present in London, they decided to make very large (almost 2′ x 3′), they put together really beautiful and clean pieces to advertise their fonts and foundry in unique and in limited runs (they were great designs that were silkscreened, letterpressed, etc).

5inch.com designed limited edition cd designs in trigger cases that they were the first to import from Germany.

Cartype.com just launched yesterday (6.5.2008), and it is a collection of car-related designs, advertisements, and photographs. They also have the “I Park Like An Idiot” section.

“Go beyond and think outside of what is requested; take it a step further”. Segura Inc was selected by Express Jeans to design a tag along with like 9 other designers. They did “Dangerously Bold”, and designer 9 labels (only required to design 1), 7 of which were bought by Express. They weren’t normal tags, they were pouches that doubled as pda/phone characters, kung fu fighting stencil templates, iron on patches (black and whites featuring sharks, etc).

Segura Inc was hired by Grant Morrisson and DC to design the covers of his comic called The Filth. Grant’s only condition of signing with DC was that Segura did the covers and that they didn’t look like comics; they were ironic and yet very clean looking design. They were then hired by DC behind Grant’s back to do a design of what they would look like if they were actually designed as comics; they silkscreened all of them.

Segura was hired by SRAM, bike shock manufacturer of Rock Shox. They went in and talked about what you think of when you look at car logos/brands (mini=fun, bmw=reliable, ford=everyone, etc). They went in and designed a 3d topographical catalogue for their “the earth is not flat” slogan.

They also re-invinted Corbis (owned by Bill Gates, who wants to own the stock image business). They re-designed the Corbis personality, and rather than creating a 9″ x 12″ 3″ thick book of thumbnails, they cropped all of the images in interesting ways and made them all large photos (one per page) in a large format made to be shipped in a fedex tube, designing the pages very minimally and beautifully. They called the catalogue CROP, and wanted it to be visually identified with in the same way that macs are recognized without their logo even being visible. They wanted to print them large to show that they would look great when printed as large images (some online stock photos beg the question of whether its going to look good when printed large). [i like the crop image labels]. They won a Red Dot: best of the best award two years in a row for Crop, as well as Crop-5.

They are successful mostly because they pay very careful attention to the details: the smell of the paper, the way it is folded, using transparent ink rather than a photoshop filter, the specific sequences and pairings of images, etc; they really show respect for the audience’s experience, as well as the client’s budget.

When a client said “Money is no object, we want to do something to change the world”, Carlos said, “You know Jim, I’ve heard this all before, and frankly I don’t believe you”. This level of honesty and frankness won them the client and several multi-million dollar jobs.

Great Quotes

“Go beyond and think outside of what is requested; take it a step further”

“I’ve always had this big-mouth reputation where I can help but say what is on my mind”

“I’ve learned that clients don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear what they want to hear”

“I just didn’t want to feel ‘icky’ anymore, and that is why Jason and I started to do our own things with Coudal”

“I want to work with decent people and I don’t want to complicate my life…”

“We have always had the point of view and goal of staying small and being selective about who we work with”

“I don’t focus on the past experience of someone as much as I focus on their future potential”

“We don’t follow the totem pole model; when we get a new project, everyone works on it from the intern to me”

“The group that created the picked comp is the lead and we all follow their lead in production; we give everyone the opportunity”

“We don’t make you happy just by money, we want to make you happy in your heart”

“Start early and decide who you want to be; be firm with this idea and you will get what you want, slowly but surely. You have to be prepared to deal with the repercussions of your stances with clients, even if it means less money, being less busy than you’d prefer, etc; be honest, and be firm.”

“I’m not interested in your boss’s favorite color, your past in-house designs, re-creating a past design, etc. It is good to explain early on in the process when you are still friends with your clients that they (their internal projects, etc) are irrelevant in this project, and that it is about their target audience, not them.”

“There is value in some research, but what we bring to the table is more grass roots oriented rather than refined and we go off of our instincts more than anything else.”

SkinnyCorp (featuring Jeffery & Jake, founders of Threadless)

threadless.com

Their presentation is called “The SkinnyCorp guide to doing what you love for a living”, and the title page features a cutout of Freddy Krueger saying “Don’t fall asleep”.

Simply enough: do what you love, do what excites you, do work that you would be doing for fun in your spare time even if you weren’t getting paid for it.

Awesome Quotes

“Whenever we start to do something, it usually starts with ‘It would be awesome if…’”

“How can you sell somebody something that you don’t even like?”

“Ride the Exciting” (obviously a reference to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning)

“Create something for yourself, and when you are truly excited about something it will have a unique energy that will make it grow”

Jason Fried (37signals)

37signals.com

37signals doesn’t do wireframes, documents, diagrams, mockups, etc. because there is no difference between building and designing; you get too focused on things that don’t matter and may not even be built, and they don’t want to spend time on things that will ultimately end up unused in a file cabinet. They want to get in and build the applications because building is designing

The 37signals Approach:

• They start out with sketches. They use sharpies because thin pen lines are too open and tend to focus too much on the details, which should come later.
• They then go into html/css and build from there; they don’t mock up in photoshop etc, which has been a massive controversy on their blog.
• * It is all about the details, just like fine furniture or a beautiful building.

Think about the flow (eg – the use of a to do list app where you have to click to make a new list, go to a new screen, add a new item, new screen, type a note, click etc. 37signals’ version you click once, type the name of the list, hit enter, type a list item, hit enter, repeat; sooooo much quicker)

Copyrighting is interface design; writing IS design, there is no separation between the two, you need to be paying attention to the words on the screen as much as the pixels on the screen; design the type, design the words.

Instead of calling it “permissions”, they use logical self-explicative terms (eg – Who can see this person? Everyone, Only Me, etc)

“If you wouldn’t say something in a conversation, don’t use it in a UI” (eg – when selecting items, you say “delete this person”, when more than one is selected, the phrase changes to “delete these 2 people”). User Interfaces are communicating, it should communicate exactly what you are doing in clear language so that users know exactly what they are going to get when they click things.

Timing is everything: set a .25 second delay on hover events so that you don’t rub the user’s mistake in their face; you are showing them respect and forgiveness. You also don’t want to flicker things every time you roll over it, so on some features they will use a .25 second delay.

Photographic Memory: 37signals doesn’t like preferences or settings, the ui should remember where you were and keep the last viewed page in mind. Think about what people want to do as they are moving across a series of products, and anticipate where they will want to go (drop them on similar pages etc). Remember the last state of a checkbox, etc (”Yesterday’s weather is the best example of today’s weather; what was done before will likely want to be done again”)

What Just Happened? In the old days, you reload a web page and you know that something is happening; with ajax nowadays, you need to show what just happened (eg – when adding a new note to Backpack, there is a yellow fade on the background of a list item; deleting an item, the whole page slides up slowly to show that something is happening). Subtly let the user know something, and then get out of their way.

“Extreme Detail is like UI Porn.” Don’t throw in errors unless it is absolutely necessary; errors are abrasive, and no one like to be told that they’ve done something wrong (eg – if a user doesn’t name a list, don’t give them an error, just automatically name it ‘list’). When you click something that would normally expand off of the page, the page automatically scrolls up for you.

Enterprise software is based on the length of its feature list, rather than its usability; Jason says that there seems to be a connection between the expense of the product and the quality of its user interface (meaning: the more expensive it is, the worse the UI is). The buyer is seldom the user of enterprise software.

Decisions are temporary: the timing of your js events could work at .3 seconds for an event, but if it doesn’t feel right a year later, it can always be changed.

Sam from 37signals wrote the javascript library Prototype, which is implemented in all of the 37s apps.

“We try to make sure that our products deliver more value than the price we are charging. We go on our gut feeling: would we pay $xx /month to use _____ product?”

“Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity.”

Numbers represent what people do, but I’d rather talk to the people and hear back from them than analyze numbers that represent their complaints.

If someone is excited about some new thing that they learned, then they should get to implement that and deal with the bugs next week; I let people work on what they want to work on, and eventually we get around to working out all of the flaws and getting everything done. If shit is really broken, of course we get in there and fix it right away, but we don’t think that bugs are special, and they will all be fixed eventually.

Diffuse points of head-butting and get to the heart of the issue and figure out what the real problem is, then get everyone to agree and get them on the same page.

Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners)

coudal.com

Coudal is a small chicago design firm that share an office space with 37signals; started out as a small advertising firm making work for other people, and then went on to be more entrepreneurial designers. They have gone on to create many things: layer tennis, the deck advertising, fieldnotes, jewelboxing, etc.

Through pseudo-science (relativity), Jim is going to try to unify the creative and scientific world during his lecture. Understanding creativity, it is difficult to analyze the original creative spark that is responsible for the great masterpieces because there are a lot of moving parts that create the sum total of the final product. Susan painted the entire bathroom with chalkboard paint; the entire firm played hangman, etc, which went on to inspire something called “Booking Bands” in which the names of bands and the names of books are combined to produce an entertaining result (eg – Megadeth of a Salesman). This game associates the known (the constant [eg - the band name you think of]) with the unknown (the variable [eg - the book titles that you are reeling through]). The essential creative moment is the combination of something that you know and something that you don’t know.

Its that first moment of interest, where it clicks and you get that moment of first love and enthusiasm… that is the moment, that is the juice, the fuel to turn that interest into a powerful thing that will ride that creative fuel. The most important thing is that you have that rush of enthusiasm, whether it gets finished or is monetarily successful of not, it is a success and it was fun. Inspiration is not from outside, it comes from inside of us, and it is our enthusiasm that must be obeyed and cannot be denied. Be prepared to fail as often as possible; failure is lovely. “Let’s crash this ship and see where we go from there”.

Like to the 3rd power

• Like to the 1st power explain with a metaphor (eg – this thing/idea is like this other thing/idea)
• Like to the 2nd power create an executive summary; powerful shorthand (”i was like ‘and i can’t believe it’, and he was like ‘duh’)
• Like to the 3rd power as an aesthetic judgement (”I like brown better than blue”, etc)

Creative relativity: the expected or unexpected fueled by enthusiasm and explained by like to the 3rd.

The 3 Questions We Ask Before Really Pursuing an Idea

• Can we make money from it?
• When we get done are we going to be proud of it?
• Will we learn something new along the way?

There’s the terror of the blank page vs. Constant revision bc projects are never done

Excellent Quotes

“If we hadn’t re-evaluated our company and its approach, we would be a much bigger company doing work we don’t like for people we don’t like.”

“If you aren’t chasing after the next shiny thing in the grass, then you aren’t going to stumble into the accidents along the way (eg – Coudal made some tv show and went to package it and send it off, didn’t like the packaging options, so came up with some alternate packaging system and then decided to market it, so they had to get into advertising because the advertising options sucked, etc)”

“We don’t have a five year plan… hell, we don’t even have a 5 minute plan; we’ve been told that from the outside it looks like we are following our whims to their logical conclusions, and we are pretty much okay with that.”

Gary Vaynurchuk (wine video blogger)

winelibrarytv.com

Commitment: He wanted to have the biggest wine store in the world, and wanted to “kill Sams in Chicago”. He was really passionate and built an multimillion dollar online store.

2008 is the year for the gold rush on building personal equity: build your brand equity.

Do what you love best, and don’t think about it; put yourself in a position to be obnoxiously happy; you will come home and dominate shit. Do what you love and break it down to what you love to do and talk about it (don’t compare it to other things that are out there). When you are obnoxiously happy, you aren’t going to be snippy, you are going to be pumped.

Create your own blog; just talk, get people to know you. Don’t hide anything, be real, be you, and allow everyone to get to know you. Don’t run away from your flaws, embrace them, lay them out, be who you are.

Answer every email; your customers will love you, and it is an unparalleled marketing and research resource

Effing Hysterical Quotes

“I keep things extremely basic, but dream very big… I want to buy the New York Jets.”

“Content is king… but Marketing is queen, and we know who runs the house.”

“If you are really passionate about what you are into, you can take it and own it and be the king of it with patience and persistence… Don’t give up.”

“When you bring straight thunder, people are going to love you because of your confidence.”

“You have to embrace your dna: you have to embrace what you love and who you are, and go toward where you want to be. Make your dna your business.”

“Your intuition is never wrong; people just don’t want to listen to themselves.”

“Keep bringing it every day, what you bring you will get back.”

“A lot of people give up because there is already someone out there doing that in the game; if you love what you do and you get into it, you will own it.”

“We’re in a branded society, and the quicker you can make your brand visible the better.”

Panel Discussion (all of the day’s speakers conversing on general topics)

How do you balance your passionate love affair with work and your home life?
Its all about understanding who you are with, which means understanding your partner and their limitations, as well as them understanding your life and passions along with the limitations that come with them. You shouldn’t be with anyone that can’t understand what you are doing. “Working is breathing, we have to do it.”

*Carlos and his wife have never been on vacation. “Take a vacation from what,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘I am my life; I love my life and have nothing to escape from.”

Quotes to Live By

“Don’t be scared to make money”

“Hire the clients; don’t let them hire you if you don’t like them/the project”

“Relationships are like a shark: they have to keep moving to stay alive.” - Woody Allen

(Note: If any prospective clients are reading this in, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma— don’t let our reluctance to travel keep you from contacting us! We’ll still fly a long way for the right job.)

Anyway, back to Graceland. This is actually a pretty exciting project for us, in that it’s a departure from our typical way of working, and as a result we don’t mind a day’s worth of travel for this one.

Usually we work in one of two ways: either we manage and execute a soup-to-nuts Web site redesign, where we handle everything from message development to design to CMS programming to copywriting (in collaboration with our clients, of course); or we work with clients with a CMS already in place, and our engagement is limited to strategy, design, information architecture and template buildout.

The job with Graceland is different. Their director of creative services, Steve Edwards, really believes that he has a team that can do the work of redesigning and rebuilding the Graceland site themselves; he says they’ve got a lot of talent, some great ideas, and plenty of enthusiasm. What they do need is a roadmap— a burst of energy, a plan for information architecture, and some processes and strategies for getting it all done. And that’s where we come in.

Over the next two days, Tonya and I are going to meet with virtually everyone at Graceland with a stake in the redesign process: admissions, athletics, deans, students, faculty, alumni, development, and of course Web staff. We’ll share some of our experiences and ideas, but in this visit, we’re mostly there to be sponges— to give the community a chance to put all its concerns on the table and see what’s out there, and on our end, to learn as much about Graceland as possible.

Then we go back to the West Coast and crunch all that data, turning it into reports, strategic recommendations, meeting notes and executive summaries. We produce an information architecture, some content mapping and story ideas, and some proposed design fundamentals. Then we return (either both of us or just me, not sure yet) and present all that to the community. We sit down with the Web staff and plan it all out. And then we’re done! And it’s up to Graceland to take it from there.

This arrangement should work out great on both sides. For Graceland, it lets them use the resources they currently have, and get some strategic direction for a fraction of the cost of a redesign; for us, it lets us offer our services more quickly, and it helps us sketch out a model of collaborative consulting that I think is going to be increasingly common as we go forward.

Tonya has arrived! So away I go. By the way, here’s what it looks like to land in Des Moines:

The video’s a little jumpy because I was trying to hide my use of an electrical device from the flight attendants.

We work with a very small number of clients at any given time, and as a result we don’t get to enjoy the experience of a site launch very often; it sounds ridiculous, but our last site launch of major consequence was the Haverford site, which launched almost nine months ago.  We’ve certainly been hella busy since then, but this is our first flower to bloom in 2008.

I’ll have more to write about this later, most likely in an article for the main WW site.  I don’t think anyone reads this blog yet besides the other White Whalers, but just in case, to mark the occasion: here’s the first collection of Kenyon design ideas that we posted for internal discussion, on October 23, 2007.

My sincere thanks to everyone at Kenyon, everyone at WW, and everyone else reading this blog (which basically means you, Mom).

Anyway, I’m riding to work the other day, past one of the lots (I think it was the GMC/Subaru/Toyota place, I’m not sure), and I see this:

If you can’t read it: the sign in the background says “EASY FINANCING AVAILABLE,” and the sign in the foreground says “BANK SEIZED SALES EVENT.”  Basically, “we’ll make it super easy for you to buy a car that was repossessed from the last guy we made it easy for.”

Getting these PNGs to actually be transparent is no longer a major issue—we’ve used a few different approaches over the years, but settled on Angus Turnbull’s iepngfix.htc as the most straightforward drop-in solution out there. The way it works is just really smart.

But while building out some recent client projects, we just couldn’t get it to catch. We checked and double-checked the file paths, and re-exported the PNG images, and finally copied a working example from a live client site, but nothing seemed to do it. Because IE has no decent debugger, I removed the conditional comment to see what I could learn in Firebug.

It turns out that our staging server sends the .htc file as text/plain, while the working client version was serving text/x-component. Changing out server config to mimic this fixed the problem. Later, some Googling revealed that the release notes for the newest beta version address this (and even include a PHP solution that serves the file while sending the correct headers).

There are still a whole host of limitations: no repeating images, weird layering glitches that happen even in IE7, and really bizarre link clickability issues. But iepngfix gets far enough to solve 90% of the problem.

• Even when it is a perfectly acceptable size and is not screaming “THIS IS THE NAME OF MY COMPANY!!!”, they ask “Can you make my logo BIGGER?”
• After painstakingly designing the whitespace of their design in the interest of facilitating a bit of visual respiration, the client notes that there “should be more content because the page feels empty in spots”.
• And then we have the infamous “The headlines need to be brighter and much larger”

In my Saturday morning internet perusing (it is at times sadly amusing that this is what has taken the place of cartoons in my adult life), I stumbled upon this; apparently our brethren have taken to satire as a vehicle for alleviating their work-related frustrations. While its easy to laugh about now, I am truly thankful that White Whale has largely pulled me from disputes over these issues; out of the several WW clients that I’ve been involved with, I don’t remember any of these issues being major points of dissent; here’s to having higher ed. clients!

Editor’s note: Yes, Douglas, but that’s because we usually make the logo really big anyway.

As you can see from all the cellphone pictures I took in 2005, the limitations were originally technological; my cell’s camera just took crappy photos.  But if you look at all the cellphone pictures I took in 2006, you can see that the quality’s actually pretty decent.  I’m not doing much creative with the camera, though; just taking snapshots.  (Of course, some of the snapshots came out OK.  And in case anybody’s wondering:  (1) that is NOT real blood; I used to be the captain of a kickball team called Trauma Center.  (2)  Yes, that’s White Whale’s VP running a marathon.  (3) Like the rest of the world, pretty much all I took pictures of were dogs, babies, and my friends.)

Lately, though, I’m finding that I use my new phone in a more active way: to snap quick shots of things that seem like they might be relevant to Web designs I’m working on.  At last January’s SEED conference, I listened to Carlos Segura talk in an incredibly inspiring way about finding design inspiration from the everyday world; he apparently carries his camera everywhere, and he showed some really hilarious and amazing photographs.

I’m not the sort of person who carries a camera everywhere I go (unlike Donald); but I do have this cell phone, and lately I’ve been learning to whip it out when nature inspiration calls. We’re currently working on a design for the Lewis & Clark Web site.  LC’s natural environment is so unbelievably stunning that we’ve got to convey it on their site, ideally in a beautiful, non-cliched way.  (We’re not there yet as of today, June 1— but by the time you read this, we’ll probably have it figured out.)  Walking the dog the other day, I just began to notice how much natural beauty I was surrounded by even on my residential Oakland streets. The cell phone came in handy:

I doubt any of that will make it into the site design, but at a time when I felt like I needed to gather some inspiration from natural forms, my little VX8350 came in handy.

Maintaining code libraries does not have to contribute to bloat, either. The idea of a framework is to implement core APIs that are used from project to project to build functionality specific to that job. The independent framework itself will not absorb any of this site-specific functionality, contributing to bloat. A good framework plateaus, only growing incrementally upon necessity and relevance to the entire breadth of your work. Furthermore, more robust frameworks are modular, loading on the components they need. Sometimes explicit control is desirable, in which certain users are authenticated and given access to particular modules or plugins. Other times code logic dictates which portions of the framework need to be loaded and deployed. It may be desirable to go for a model in which services are dynamically registered within mechanisms central to the framework.

It’s particularly exciting to be in a position where you can rely on a powerful foundation of tried-and-true code, and be free to unleash your creativity in terms of how those static APIs are deployed from project to project. Broader communities might also benefit from your work if you can isolate and open-source particular APIs that contribute to smart application development, and certainly there are great options out there which you can adopt and benefit from yourself. Just as with any other career, the knowledge you gain, tools that you build, relationships that you make, over time, help to define who you are and what you can bring to the table in terms of problem solving, creativity, and commitment to the industry in which you work.

Of course, this is just one example amongst many, but it is illustrative of our collective mindset here: we can change the world (or at least our small corner of it).  The notion that we can do anything with a bit of effort in mobilization has become inherent even in our passtime activities.  For example, every Easter there is a massive big wheel race where hundreds of people simply show up, sans-permits, and block off a street to race each other on vehicles built for five year olds, there are zombie walks several times a year in which all participants dress as zombies and descend upon the financial and shopping district of downtown SF, and there are mass pillow fights in the middle of the downtown SF a few times a year as well.

In combining the two—governing corporations and organizing spectacles to behold—I give you our latest approach: CarrotMob.

Mark and I played in a band together in Providence (that’s how we met).  He plays bass, and he really is one of the best bass players I’ve ever known.  A lot of dudes who play the bass are really just guitar players who dabble on the bass, usually as a way to get into other people’s bands; Mark really lives and breathes the bass.  He’s just awesome.

Not long after moving to Oakland, I joined a band myself, as a bass player.  (I’m a guitarist, but I dabble on the bass, usually as a way to get into other people’s bands.)  In order to pass as a real bass player, I figured I needed some respectable equipment, so I called Mark for advice.  And I have thought a lot since then about what he told me.

Playing the electric bass in a band, Mark said, is all about headroom.   In other words, what matters in bass amplification isn’t volume so much as potential volume.  In order to be properly amplified, the bassist has to be loud, but with the constant potential—which may never be taken advantage of at all—to be louder.  So when looking for an amplifier setup, you have to find something that will let you be as loud as you need to be at, say, 6.  If you have to turn up to 10 to be heard among the other instruments—even if that seems loud enough— it’s not.

I got a loud enough setup (an Ampeg SVT-350 head with a cheap Behringer cabinet) and lo and behold, you could really hear the headroom in action. It’s all about those little trebly peaks, like in the brushy transitions between notes and such; when you can hear those well, the bass jumps right out of the mix.

(If you’re still reading, thanks for indulging my lengthy setup.  I’m ready to talk about Web design now.)

So White Whale is busy lately—working almost to capacity—and I have found myself thinking about headroom in different terms.  It’s sort of a cliche that Web developers work much more than 40 hours per week— along with bloggers, programmers, and just about everyone who works with computers for a living.  We can generally take our work home with us, which means that if we feel compelled to work hard at our jobs, the only thing standing between us and a 90-hour workweek is our hobbies and our social lives.  If we don’t have anything personally enriching to do, we work.

That’s true of us at White Whale as much as anywhere else. (I’m typing this on my front porch at 8pm.)  But what I’m realizing is that in order for WW to stay engaged, creative and productive, it is absolutely essential for us to maintain a level of headroom in our workload.  We have to have the *potential* to work more, in order to do our work well.

With this in mind, we have a brand new rule:

Nobody at WW is allowed to work nights on a project unless (a) it’s really, really important; (b) it’s super fun; or (c) we literally have nothing else to do.

If we have a big deadline tomorrow, OK, maybe somebody will put in some late hours.  And if my fiancee’s out of town, or I’m in a motel room on a business trip, fine.  And sometimes nothing can stop Donald from geeking out over the single most cross-browser and standards-compliant way to render PNG transparency  But if anyone at WW is working more than, say, 45 hours a week or so on a regular basis, then we need to make changes, either shifting some work to someone else or looking to hire new people.

Maintaining headroom in our work process will enable all of us to achieve the trebly peaks of creativity and discovery that we need to keep our minds engaged, our work fresh, and our lives interesting.

There is an SSH2 module that requires a little more effort to set up on your web server, but enables support for SFTP servers. The question is then, how can I integrate this extension and its features into an existing FTP codebase in an efficient manner? Furthermore, the SSH2 module’s syntax is not as straightforward for basic FTP tasks as the actual FTP extension is.

The answer is really pretty simple. I created an FTP wrapper class which runs in one of three modes: FTP, SSL, or SFTP. Depending on the mode, the wrapper class reroutes its method calls to the appropriate extension. All the methods for this class exactly match the ones for the FTP extension. In the case of FTP and SSL, it is easy to map the methods from one to the other, because they’re exactly the same. In the case of SFTP, there’s a translation layer which converts FTP commands in the FTP extension’s syntax to the SSH2 extension’s equivalents.

The reason this approach is efficient is because all the existing code can be painlessly converted to the wrapper class, such that SFTP is instantly supported. No alternate SFTP code paths, no significant code rewrites, no new syntax to follow. What it boils down to is one extra step to specify the FTP mode, and then just prefixing each FTP function call with the wrapper object (i.e. ftp_put to $ftp->ftp_put). Done!

At White Whale, we’re of course always thinking about code efficiency: less queries, less code, fewer requests, et cetera. And much of this on the design side is rote best practices (semantics, accessibility, compatibility). But I still find myself sweating more nitty-gritty details, so I was fascinated to see jpsykes’ analysis of this one. The question boils down to, “How specific should I get with CSS selectors?”

We have:
#header #navigation .portal  { font-weight:bold; }
vs.
.portal { font-weight:bold; }
I’ve leaned toward the first on a gut feeling; .portal will only ever appear in #navigation in #header, so why not tell the browser where to look? But intuition is wrong in this case. Check out the graph (again, via jpsykes):

Giving more selector specificity causes performance hits across all the major browsers. What’s happening is that the browser actually starts at the right-hand side of the selector and searches backwards. So it finds all instances of .portal, then climbs up the DOM to make sure it’s in #navigation, then filters again for #header. (You’ll see that FF3 seems to perform best overall, but that’s a little misleading for reasons a commenter notes here. Check out the results with a better control.)

Interestingly, the opposite effect is true for JS frameworks. Their selector implementations — we use jQuery at White Whale — tend to process the selectors from left-to-right: first finding #header, then looking inside it for #navigation, and then inside that for any instances of .portal. So those work best when coded with some specificity.

It’s important to note here that we’re talking fractions of a second on a page with 20,000 test elements. So until we start serving 20,000 database records on a single page, our best practice will be whatever makes it easiest to keep the code straight in our own minds and for our clients — but I can’t help but think I’ll be subconsciously affected by the knowledge that every .newslist li .summary might shaving precious milliseconds off our load time.

See, Tonya?  Blogging is really not that hard.

And I always answer the same way:

“Like the love child of Pau Gasol and Sasha Vujacic.”

When taking on the measurement of velocity, for example, calculus can make use of a “convergent series” which produces a way, mathematically, to account for the infinite series, obstacle-free, and produce useful values. In calculus equations, the tasks are admittedly practical ones, but in order to complete them, the question of the nature of infinity has been avoided. In other words, thanks to calculus, the problem of infinity in a metaphysical sense simply gets deferred, allowing mathematics to get on with its various applications.

Zeno was a champion of “reductio ad absurdum” which, like “via negativa”, “apagogical arguments”, “neti neti”, and the various other things this technique was called in other cultures, aims to adopt a position in order to determine that was proceeds from it is a falsity. In this regard, Zeno never made any positive claims about anything. The context of his paradoxes was the problem of void, which was posited at the time as a requirement for plurality. If there is an object A and an object B, with space in between, it is this “void” which is the nature of their separation. This void was considered to be infinite. One version of Zeno’s paradoxes (simplified) involves an archer shooting an arrow from point A to point B. If the arrow is to reach point B, it must first traverse 1/2 of the distance between point A and point B. To get 1/2 of the distance to point B, it must first traverse 1/2 of that, or 1/4. This is repeated, becoming an infinite regress. How then can void be infinite, when experience shows that the arrow indeed reaches its destination?

The atomists counter with the theory that if void is not infinite, then it is necessarily finite. Following this logic, in which there is a smallest unit of measure, an “atom” (having nothing to do with the particle), also results in self-contradiction. If there is a smallest unit of measure, then why can we not take 1/2 of that measurement? Well, the atomists would simply say that such a thing isn’t possible, as it is already the smallest it can be. It goes without saying that no one has discovered such a measurement, but the atomists would say that our instruments cannot detect such a small measurement. However, imagine you had a one inch circle. If you reduce that a little bit, its diameter becomes a fraction of an inch, and so on. At what point do you reach a point where you can no longer reduce the diameter? Theoretically, a point. However, you must necessarily make the claim that by definition a point has no diameter to be reduced. If such is the case, then a point (0-diameter) next to another point (0-diameter) equals the same measurement (0-diameter), and this then makes the point useless as an additive unit of measure which is responsible for the distance between point A and point B.

All such roads lead to nowhere for Zeno. However, behind this man was Parmenides whose poem, which has since been called “On Nature”, paints a completely different picture. It is a work in three sections, the proem, The Way of Truth (Aletheia), and The Way of Opinion (doxa). While this is no place for details on his work, the significance to Zeno’s paradoxes is the concept of being as one (i.e. a denial of plurality). While Zeno’s “reductio ad absurdum” intentionally did not make positive claims about this (for reasons which On Nature illustrates), he cleverly refuted each and every claim which supported plurality (along with time, motion, etc.), demonstrating that such claims are self-contradictory and therefore must be dismissed. There is a chronic misunderstanding for mathematicians, which have gone so far as to believe Zeno a lunatic for questioning things that are apparently irrefutable and obvious, making misinformed comments like “… one must ask whether Zeno actually believed it [...] One wonders whether he got around much.” Furthermore, this illustrates a distinction between science, which qualifies and quantifies our observations, and metaphysics which does not hold that the appearance and experience of phenomena is indicative of reality. There is quite a bit more to this story, but that will suffice for the sake of the point at hand…

Now back to calculus. It should be clear that the task to which calculus is applied is a far different matter, mathematical in nature, as opposed to metaphysical. Before calculus, there was a fire between metaphysicians and epistemologists, but a buffer appeared safely in between thereafter. Ironically, the bridge re-formed in 1958 when a soviet physicist termed a phenomenon in quantum physics the “quantum Zeno effect” after one of Zeno’s paradoxes. As science in recent years has boldly crossed a threshold which was previously seen as the edge of epistemology, a new appreciation is developing for metaphysics within science. Mysterious phenomena suddenly seem to have more in common with philosophical traditions stretching back for thousands of years. It’s a peculiar alliance, though perhaps a long time in coming.

He is also a fantastic doctor, and broke the news of my deviated septum in a very caring manner.

One of the things that’s been part of White Whale canon for some time is writing CSS declarations in a single-line format, with indents for parent-child relationships. From a current project:

#events { float:left; width:200px; padding:20px; background:#444 url(/images/background_events.png) repeat-x center top; color:#fff; }
    #events h3 { margin-bottom:0.5em; }
    #events .date { font-weight:bold; }

It took a bit of time to get used to at first (the practice comes to White Whale from frequent White Whale collaborator Jesse) but, since then, scanning long bits of code written the old way feels clunky.

I recently skimmed an article that briefly mentioned this coding style with the caveat that it “might produce messy results if you define more than 3 attributes for a given selector.” And we’ve had clients who objected on similar grounds. But I actually find that the opposite is true: longer lists of attributes actually hurt scannability more in the conventional style. The list of selectors is where hierarchy matters and where the cascade happens, and has orders-of-magnitude more elements than your average attributes-per-selector. Single-line declarations is may feel cluttered for those four or five attributes, but the organizational structure and lookup-speed benefits pay off where it really counts.

It had been a successful launch—the community was happy, the committee was happy, even the board of trustees was happy.  And throughout the inevitable cycles of revisions and adjustments, the design had kept its integrity.  So the designer was happy too.

As they walked, they talked leisurely about the process, and how they’d come to know each other well, and how in some ways the designer felt like he’d attended the client’s school himself.  In fact, although the director of communications would never know this, under his dress shirt the designer wore a T-shirt bearing the name of the school whose campus he now walked across.

“Working with you has surprised me,” said the director of communications.  ”I never thought a Web redesign could be an enjoyable process—every other director of communications I know has said it’s torture—but lo and behold, we made it, and it wasn’t that bad!  Sure it had its rough spots, like anything else, but on the whole, I have to say, I really had a good time.”

“I did too,” said the designer.  ”This isn’t always an easy job, and of course there were times that we got frustrated, but you really did a great job of managing everyone’s expectations, including mine.  Thanks for sticking to your guns on some of those hard decisions—the site will do a better job for your school because of it.”

They walked a little longer in silence.  Then the director of communications spoke again.

“There’s only one thing that continues to bother me.

“You and your team have been so responsive and attentive to us through this entire process, and I’m thankful for that.  But in reviewing the history of our project, examining the path that we’ve walked together, I have noticed that during some phases of the project, there was only a single set of footprints.  And what’s worse, these were the most difficult parts of the project— when the first round of comments on the redesign blog were really negative, or when the president wasn’t sure she liked the green, or when IT said they weren’t going to support PHP.

“As much as I like you and your company, I can’t believe that you would leave us to walk alone during such hard times.  Why did you choose the worst parts of the project to desert us?”

The designer thought hard about this, and then smiled.

“My friend, I can understand why you would think that you’d been deserted.  It is a terrible feeling to think that someone you depend on has forsaken you.  But we would never do that.  In fact, during those difficult times, White Whale was carrying you.”

The director of communications stopped walking—directly between the chapel and the dining hall, and in the shadow of a large statue of the school’s founder—and considered this.

“That is extraordinary,” said the director of communications.  ”It’s above and beyond anything I would have asked for or expected.  Did we pay extra for this level of service?”

The designer looked the director of communications deeply in the eyes, and smiled.

“Yes.”

Enter OUSD (Oakland Unified School District)!

I admit it; I recently got my fix. They came to us with the ceremonial Excel file on which the livelihood of an entire organization is founded. “With great data comes great responsibility,” wrote the great Stan Lee. (Or was it “with great power…”?) At any rate, our responsibility is clear: make-data-look-useful. Specifically: Learn what the data means. Store it in a straightforward and flexible manner. Handle manipulation of the data according to its prescribed relationships. Explore the various possible means of generating a visual display of said data and its structure so that human beings can interpret it.

This task presented some interesting aspects. The original data source itself is a subset of an hierarchy of implied relationships that must be extrapolated from its attributes. It’s a bit like building a genealogy tree that goes back a hundred years by gathering the knowledge of one household’s family members. One datum needs to be “expanded” into a chain of nodes, merged with those to which it is related, where each node becomes a virtual owner of other pieces of data. The other interesting aspect is in the display routines, which must be aware of patterns in the data, such that one node must know of its particular incarnation in another context and the new set of attributes it has there.

In the end, what’s it all for? Well, if we did our job right, someone has overlooked the incredible complexity of the data with its mind-numbing rules and exceptions in order to spend the absolute least amount of time necessary to examine the output generated and leave the computer to get back their simplified duties. Of course, that’s the beauty of it! Less hassle and increased efficiency through the clarification of an otherwise overwhelming wealth of information.

Really? There isn’t even enough imagination left to make up a story to entertain a half-asleep five year old? At what point did we stop pretending that sticks were really swords made in the explicit interest of vanquishing evil? That the grass was lava and if your balance slipped from the edge of the sidewalk you’d be burned alive? That fist-sized rocks were merely feasts in disguise?  Sure, they are childish activities, but when we stopped inventing explanations for why the stars shine, or what the tooth fairy does with all of those teeth and why she/he is willing to leave something valuable in return for them (they of course grind each tooth up with a mortar and pestle, thus rendering it fairy dust, duh), the world through our eyes lost some of its magic.  Instead, our fantastical wonderings were replaced with worries; the plaguing questions that we never utter aloud but rain on our thoughts throughout the day, questions about whether our hair looks good today, or if we are wearing the right clothes, what’s going to happen in the television show ____, or if we are cool enough, or interesting enough, or rich enough, etc. Not only was the magic ripped from our gums, but the subsequent worries only compounded with each passing year; what college am i going to go to? who is going to hire me? how am i going to pay this car payment? does my spouse still love me, etc?

There is an inherent irony in this: when I was little, I wanted nothing more than to be a grown-up; I couldn’t grow up fast enough.  I couldn’t wait to be able to see over the counters, to put my feet on the ground when sitting on the couch, to have a girlfriend, to drive, etc.  These sorts of excitements enthralled me at their very thought on nearly a daily basis for years and years, but now I find myself craving the wonder and excitement—and most importantly the imagination—from childhood. Now, don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoy the freedoms that adulthood has granted me, but what if we could integrate the best of both worlds? Would it be weird to see an adult swashbuckling the air with a stick? Tightrope walking the curb? Hell yes, people would think that you’ve lost your marbles (which was never much of a deterrent for me, but I’m not your average bear either).

So these poor, imaginationless parents, frantic with worry about inventing a few characters to verbally dramatize; I just felt so sorry for them, that in chasing prescribed dreams they’ve simply forgotten—or become too tired—to just think differently for like twenty minutes a day, that their source of inspiration comes solely from reality, or even worse: their nightly programming sessions. Let’s just pick up a brush and some cheap watercolors; let’s create some totally crazy arbitrary story; who cares if no one ever told you how to paint or invent stories, you’ll figure it out along the way, and best of all you’ll figure it out in your own way(s), and guess what? You can’t be wrong! When can you ever say that in adulthood? It’s just a matter of starting to think imaginatively again, and no ‘your sister didn’t get all of the artistic genes in the family’, everyone is totally creative, or at least has the aptitude—you just have to tap back into the creative pathways and let them branch back out; to stop stifling creative thought before it even has a chance to bloom for the sake of facts that you’ve been forced to memorize.  Its like saying you can’t run thirteen miles: of course you can, but probably not easily unless you’ve worked up to that point by running a little here and there.  I mean, in all likelihood none of these aforementioned parents are going to bust out some J.K. Rowling in their first try, but think about how their general approach to life could change if they simply instituted a twenty minute creative sparking session every day…

This message brought to you by my May Day inner-spirit.

Anyway, as part of the exciting getting-acquainted process with my new computer, I’m determined to put in the time to make this thing as lean and mean as I can make it, with only the apps that I actually use, and only the features that I care about.  In that regard, Mac’s automatic multilanguage support has been immensely annoying to me.

For example.  I have known some great Portuguese people, and I’d love to visit Lisbon, but I certainly don’t need support on my computer for two dialects of Portuguese. What’s that you say— maybe I’ll make a couple of Portuguese friends from different regions of Portugal?  OK, fine.  But I doubt they’ll need to use my version of Stickies (which has support for 18 languages!).

There’s a program called Trimmit that I have used in the past, that handles this pretty well.  But as far as language support goes, I just learned that you can change it yourself on an app by app basis, using Get Info:

Unclicking all those languages except English reduces the size of these apps alarmingly. For example, iCal goes from a bloated 89.1 MB to 13.4.  Address Book goes from like 48MB to 5.

I can’t figure out why Apple doesn’t let you choose which languages you want to support during the OSX setup process; after all, they begin the whole process by asking what country you’re in.  The least they could do is offer me some checkboxes at the start of the process.  But anyway, I’m looking forward to some speedier computer interactions!

The newest fork in that path has wound to my latest creation: The Veganomicon.  Sounds pretty damn cool already, doesn’t it?  So this new site will be a valuable restaurant resource for vegans and vegetarians alike, and will be similar to what yelp does, but take it a few steps further; those steps being all vegan listings, user profiles that will feature recipes, and a few other magician’s tricks that will remain unuttered prior to launch.  The domain (www.theveganomicon.com) has been secured, and the site should launch by June 1st.  Nothing like bending the rules for the powers of evil (yep, vegans are the devil, myself included, and the whole world is going to hell with The Veganomicon as its chauffeur; want a ride?).

Here’s the document.  We’d welcome any comments.

Kenyon College Usability Testing Protocol

Tonya, the VP, saved us from the blustery Portland weather just outside the airport, and off we went in search of breakfast-related items in a local health food store.  A cinnamon raisin bagel (hold the vegan cream cheese because instead of it being in a logical place, like with the rest of the other similarly refrigerated miscellany, it was hidden in the fine cheeses section right next to the exit; silly me, of course it would have been there rather than in the store-length section at the back with the vegan sour cream, soy margarine, tofu pate, etc), a pear, an apple, and some odwalla juice later, we arrived at Lewis & Clark’s beautiful campus.

We met up with the L&C designers-extraordinare David and Noah at their on campus cafe prior to heading off to our first meeting of the day.  These guys are totally rad, like our little design mole double-agents in L&C.  They briefed us on the day and whisked us away to the aforementioned meeting that was to be held with an assortment of L&C staff, with which we discussed their needs/desires/ideas for the site.  We became aware of the prevailing lack of a sense of community within the three schools that encompass L&C (the college, the grad school and the law school), as well as the seemingly disinterested-in-donating alumni.  After having discussed our ideas and potential strategies with them to resolve these two issues, we strolled off to a campus tour with our comrade David, then off to lunch, and inevitably our for real hardcore design meeting with the creative team of L&C.

This meeting was excellent; I feel like everyone walked away with a lot of new ideas and a great deal of newfound wind in their creative sails.  Jason, Tonya and I presented our ideas and inspiration for the coming site redesign, and everyone seemed to come to the consensus that we are looking for an “organic”, “hand-made”, and “experimental” design; looking to the skies as it were.  Teeming with inspiration, we returned home and began think-tanking our ideas to fruition; the result, I expect, will be a new chapter in White Whale’s portfolio, and an even further refinement to our new team dynamic.

Apparently over the weekend, we moved into our awesome new office, so I went down and tried the door, opening it this time to the greeting of a confused but nonetheless happy Jason.  The confusion ended up being attributed to his assumption that I would start my official employment cleanly on April 1st, and thus his presumed mental Monday schedule was now undergoing a slight change.  We opened up the calendar to see what was on our plate for the week, only to realize in horror that we had first-round designs for our new client, Berkeley Law, due in a mere three days.

My partner and I had been vacationing in Barcelona during the initial meeting with this new client the week before, so I hadn’t yet been made privy to the design-related notes for this client.  After a brief design discussion between Jason and I, we hurriedly hassled Tonya for her annotated novella of said meeting, and had Donald brief me on his notes, which spurred a series of preliminary sketches that I turned into mock-ups over the proceeding 24 hours.

Selecting my initial color palette from Berkeley Law’s view book, and banking on my Asiatic minimalist color and design tendencies, I digitized my sketches.  Upon Jason’s viewing of the first few digital versions, he expressed interest in the designs and concepts, but “hated the colors” and thought that they “needed to be brighter and friendlier”; the design killing statement was, “The color selections are too J Crew”.  So on into my foray with brighter, friendlier color combinations.

Forcing myself to work with color combinations that I tend to avoid like the plague (ie – red and yellow [McDonalds], red and blue [generally a color theory no no], etc), I actually managed to come up with something that we both like via subtly asserting the color combinations, and pulling some of the colors from pictures (blue skies).  Its shaping up quite nicely and I’m very excited about its potential, as it is pushing my design tendencies into a realm yet to be fully explored, and thus giving Berkeley Law a very unique solution to their site redesign.