nickd

How I do.

Spurred by Walter Mossberg’s code of ethics and certain events of late, I figured I would talk a little about the principles that I hold online. None of this is new, but I’ve never bothered to make any of it explicit. This is what works for me; other stuff may work for you, so you shouldn’t take it as preaching.

Don’t write about any products that I don’t already use. Easy enough. With a few extremely rare exceptions, I can’t force myself to use things that aren’t already appealing, and I won’t write about theoretical interfaces. This industry changes so much that speculative demonstrations matter worth very little, so I will only discuss shipped, usable, and useful products. This also means I won’t take free products, because in any such situation, I would just pay for the product anyway. (I sign up for beta tests if and only if I’ve already purchased an earlier version of the product, or if I plan to purchase the product once it publicly launches.)

Don’t write about any products that lack a clear, non-advertising-focused monetization strategy. Open source products, one-off hacks posted as a community service, nonprofits, and side projects don’t apply here, because there is already no expectation that the creators will make money off them. But if you’re going to found a startup and you have no clear way to monetize, forget it. I refuse to support any products that lack the courage to make money, I refuse to post about anybody who is too squeamish around the idea of making money, and I refuse to support (or work for) services that believe they have to fall back on advertising as a crutch for charging people.

No more than five public, non-@ tweets per day. This includes retweets. I maintain a personal account with a (much) higher follow cost, but the public one should remain unintrusive and easy to read. I chose five as an arbitrary number a couple of years back, and I’ve rarely hurt for it.

Don’t post any articles that I haven’t read the whole way through. No exceptions. Skimming is not the same as reading. I won’t support anything that I haven’t put the effort in to understand. I owe the article’s author – and anybody who reads my own blatherings – the time and effort to provide my full attention. This is sort of like the first rule above, but it may explain why I tend to post articles a few hours after everybody else.

Only follow real people on social networks. No couples sharing a login, no groups of people, no food trucks, no conceptual 140-character art pieces, and especially no companies. Two sort-of-exceptions on Twitter at the moment: I follow a design agency because I’m friends with the account’s maintainer (and she doesn’t ever post to her personal account), and I follow an account organizing a car share for an upcoming conference. (I do read several companies on RSS, but RSS hardly qualifies as a two-way communication medium in the same way as Twitter or Tumblr does.)

Market by word of mouth whenever possible. If people aren’t compelled to spread the word about the stuff that I do, then I’m not working hard enough, and I’m not making awesome enough things.

Don’t waste money. Be clear about profits and expenses. I don’t believe in buying things that I can’t clearly justify. For example, I outlined every single expense in my book’s budget and posted it online for people to inspect (and call out accordingly, if they thought they smelled any bullshit). This means that when I charge you money for something, you generally know where the profits are going to go. Not enough people – including the makers in our field – talk about the money that they earn, and what they do with it.

Be clear about an un-launched product’s timeline after its announcement. 99% of the time, it’s not going to ship “whenever.” Or “soon.” Be honest about how it’s going, what’s working, what isn’t working, and what is holding up the process.

Don’t flame anybody without a damn good reason for it. Nobody likes a hater, and constructive comments are almost always more valuable.

Use the Oxford comma. It’s just common sense for removing ambiguity from a sentence. I can’t believe that this is even an issue.

I reserve the right to change, bend, or break any of these. Lighten up. They’re guidelines, not laws. If some major event happens, for example, I’m probably going to break the five tweet rule. But you do get to hold me to this post if I do something that’s obviously heinous, and I don’t follow it up with a solid justification. (And for the record, I could have just as easily not written this post, and you wouldn’t know whether or not I was breaking something.)

Charge money for your work. Don’t be a jerk to people. Repeat.

Two things happened this morning that are worth further comment.

First, The AV Club’s interview of Dan Sinker, AKA @MayorEmanuel, where, buried a little ways down the page:

Because [Chicago-founded Groupon and Threadless] are companies that aren’t founded on California principles … which I will define as, “Hey man, we’ll make something really cool, and we’ll eventually make money from it.” Instead, [they’re based on] very Chicago roots, which is, “Let’s sell something people can buy, and let’s do it really well.” There’s actually a business plan in effect. Whether it proves to be a correct business plan or not is one thing, but it’s much less touchy-feely-and-eventually-we’ll-find-our-way than what you see out in California.

Exactly. Make something cool, charge people for it, take their money, keep making cool stuff. Sadly, an awful lot of people don’t practice it.

Second, the Ethan Marcotte-led Boston Globe redesign launched, which – shock! horror! – charges money for its content, and gives you a great experience in return. This is more or less the same thing that iA wrote about a few months back. Now, maybe this won’t work – I don’t think people have found a magic bullet for journalism quite yet – but kudos to the Globe for trying. I’ve wanted to pay for quality journalism for a while – and I don’t think I’m alone in demanding that it be coupled with a good reading experience.

I made a book. I charged people money for it. People bought it, and I made a profit from it. It took a lot of work, but I was rewarded accordingly. This, in turn, encouraged me to keep making more awesome stuff. It’s a tried and tested way of feeding myself – hustle, build, profit, repeat – and I’m happy to see others doing the same, in whatever other small ways. It sure beats the alternative.

Writing on writing, and what’s next.

I’ve spent some time here talking about the promise that I find in well-made books, but I haven’t talked very much about writing. Books are only as valuable as the writing that they contain, after all. Excellent design won’t save crappy text, but excellent design can help good text. And most books are going to contain a lot of text. A lot of text means a lot of writing. Good writing only comes after writing a lot of (usually) crappy stuff, like exercising weak muscles. So, enough good writing to fill an entire book is kind of a tall order – something that may not be apparent until you actually go and try to do the thing.

The internet – and blogs in particular – are good at encouraging and proliferating short-form writing. But I’m increasingly curious about how to create and perpetuate long-form writing, because while it appears that readers continue to hunger for it, writers seem less willing to write it.

It may be a question of effort; it is, after all, slightly easier to write and edit a thoughtful 140 characters than it is to write a blog post, and blog posts are easier than longer feature articles, and articles are easier than books. The effort increases (I’d argue exponentially) with the size of the output, the number of moving parts involved.

But it may also be part of the nature of the internet. Tons of people have criticized the internet for having a dumbing effect, where discourse drops in quality. I don’t agree with that; it takes a dim view on our cognitive faculties.

Still, I wonder about the logistics. The internet allows us to generate and work through ideas much faster. Have a question about something? Post it to Twitter – it’ll be answered. Want to start a really interesting conversation? Write a blog post about something that you’re passionate about. If you have the right audience, people listen to you and converse with you, and your writing works to refine your opinions and clarify alternate perspectives much faster. Which is all fantastic for short-form content, but where does that leave longer analysis?

There are sites, like Longform.org and Give Me Something to Read, that collect long writing. And a ton of it is great, but most of it is of a journalistic or political nature. I like reading it, but I’m a designer, and I want to read stuff about design, too. The best long-form articles about design are usually skills-based. They tell us about a specific technique, or they encourage us about process or logistics. Where’s the writing about why we do what we do? And, sort of related, circling the point: how can we encourage people to focus more deeply on such topics?

I’m reminded of a comment that I frequently see on Twitter, something to the effect of programmers channel their beliefs by making programs. Angry at something? Build a program to protest it. A tool doesn’t exist that does what you want? Scratch the itch. It’s constructive, useful, and it perfectly fits the web’s ethics.

What stops us from doing that as designers? Lately, there hasn’t been much long-form writing about the ethics and ideas that surround our profession. Why do we so frequently resort to link bait invective that tries to tear other designers and disciplines down? I think it’s because we lack a place for studied, considered writing that tackles the biggest issues informing our work. And I’m trying to create it – but I can’t do it without you.

I’m working on a big project that concerns thoughtful writing and considered research about design topics. I’m pretty far along in the process of making this, and I think it’s going to be great, but it concerns a scene that’s way larger than just me. The end result will focus on other people who demand better out of what we say, what we do, and how we think through problems.

And so I’m looking for folks who work in our industry, make cool things, love to write, and care a lot about the circumstances that affect them. It won’t be a huge commitment – probably no more than ten hours a week, for the next couple of months – so you can do it in addition to your day job, and it will have a definite endpoint. So if you’re intrigued, and you’d like to hear further, I’d love it if you would send me an email (nickd at nickd dot org) or contact me on Twitter.

Comprehensive.

Twenty books in the stack, which is unprecedented and more than a little daunting - four almost done, one re-reading, two fiction, one a reference text, two completed by friends, one telling me nothing I don’t already know, and Explorations in Typography, which resets the same passage over and over and over, changing typefaces, indents, exdents, weights, sizes, overall layout, little bits of flair. The text hovers between 7 and 8 pt, and the paper is 9.25”x12”, which makes the page:text proportion completely suited to print and heinously suited to interactive, but that’s okay because the layout tweaks are afforded tremendous freedom, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of mental effort to say “okay, this is kind of the same mental process that I work through every time I prototype, wireframe, nudge, etc.” Which all sort of takes me back to when I was 18 years old and redesigning my personal site and thinking really hard about whether I should bold the word “about” in an otherwise undifferentiated list of links.

And this reminds me a little of the 892 ways, which made me super enamored (for, like, twenty minutes) with the whole idea of programmatically explaining all sorts of permutations of a specific layout, which I’m imagining only works very well for very simple layouts, with very simple constraints, so that the permutations don’t scientific notation up the joint. But that’s really interesting, right? I think there’s a (somewhat romantic?) notion of applying math to something as squishy and emotional and coming-from-the-art-world-but-only-sort-of field as design, and to do it so neatly and completely is doubly so. Bosshard on steroids. He might approve.

I spent the evening thinking about all that, and drinking Lion’s Pride, and winnowing down the stack so it hits the teens by the weekend.

Garbage text.

I went to a party at a friend’s apartment last night. He showed me a book he had recently purchased, a best-selling novel. There is no way I can be charitable about this: it looked like crap. The paper stock was flimsy, rough newsprint. The leading and letterspacing were far too tight, presumably to fit more content on fewer pages. And the margins - what margins?

The novel might have been entertaining, but I shuddered at the idea of enduring over seven hundred pages of that particular design. The whole thing appears to have been produced without much regard for the way that people comfortably read. So even though the book’s designer may know typographic best practices, the cost of paper kept them from being implemented.

This book, with text that can be translated to other contexts without losing its intrinsic value, is a perfect candidate for ebook reading. And it’s not alone: thousands of other books, fiction and non-, work in the same way. This is the precise reason why ebooks are selling so well. Even the Kindle’s typographic issues are forgivable here, as any electronic platform would be a massive improvement on the book I saw last night. It felt like a waste of paper, a renunciation of possibility.

I had 20/12 vision for most of my life, but it degraded steadily when reading went from obligation to habit to obsession. I’d like to think that I have quite a lot more life left in me - and so there’s a lot more text to read. It’s hyperbolic to cast this as a matter of health, some warped kind of lifestyle illness for the hyper-literate, but it hits close to home all the same. In a world where the information we consume - both what and how much of it - increasingly defines our personality and our relationship to others, it becomes even more vital.

The world is demanding better design in piecemeal ways. Complete design novices now gush over how pretty a site or book or cell phone or grocery packaging looks - something that would be unheard of a decade ago. This is partly a matter of identifying with specific brands (and their attendant design aesthetics) in order to signify personality traits, but it’s also a matter of sheer practicality: legible text, typeset better, is easier to communicate. We should demand this of everything that we read.

Distance.

I am working on something new. I’d figure that’d be obvious by now but it probably is worth saying here. Everybody asks me what, of course, I’m working on, but I don’t feel okay telling very many people right now, because it is unfinished work, and I don’t like showing unfinished work, or even discussing unfinished terms of relatively finished work, which is sort of what this is; and so when I do tell people, if they don’t live in Chicago, and so I can’t take them out for coffee and tell them everything, I handwrite them a letter. I sit down and stick a pen on a piece of paper and I move my hand such that letters come out. Then I put the letter in an envelope, and I put the envelope in a box, and due to technology and some sort of complicated infrastructure the letter ends up in an entirely different box that is owned by the person whom I wish to tell. And then, of course, they are told.

So far, I have told three people.

I am gratified and humbled that so many people are interested in what I am working on, but I am not planning to tell very many more people before I am done with the thing. There will be fingers left on two hands, when counting the number of people that I will tell between now and when I am done with the thing, which deadline I am predicting as “some time in the future.” Not now. I love you, really, but I will not tell you now. In the interim, blog posts here will have to suffice.

Which doesn’t, of course, prevent people from asking me. Constantly. What I am working on. Which, due to said unfinished work thing, makes me really super uncomfortable. And so I have adopted a routine where I usually respond to this with “Doomsday device…” and trail off and stare into the middle distance until they stop asking me any questions. Now that you know that I do this, I cannot stress this enough: do not become one of these people. But you’re nice, and you’re my friend, right? So I can only assume that this wasn’t even something I needed to say.

Okay. Here. I compiled a list of the things I am not working on.

• The great american novel
• A doomsday device
• Cadence & Slang 2: Electric Boogaloo
• Cadence & Slang: Kindle Edition
• Cadence & Slang: Second Edition
• Freelance UX work
• A stealth group texting startup
• Any kind of startup (I mean, this is Chicago, after all)

Here is probably a useful thing. Imagine a big marble slab that consists of all the things I could be working on. Chisel away all of the stuff I am not doing, like some majestic David of productivity, his dong hanging out like he does not even give a crap. And what’s left is what I am working on. I am happy that you figured it out.

i am filling out a form and it asked this question

7. How do you look at the world? Is the glass half empty or is it half full?

I live in Chicago. It snowed two feet on my birthday this year. The blizzard brought ~70mph winds sustained. I had been laid off three days before – the company went out of business last week – and I was walking across a bridge over the Chicago River to get to the train home. A gust of wind knocked me into a drift. My entire front was covered in snow by the time I walked two blocks to the station.

When I got home, my girlfriend was waiting for me at a fancy restaurant/bar. We had dinner and got snowed in. The bartenders responded with bourbon. When we finally left, it was around 10pm. People waged a snowball fight in the park. They planned it on Twitter. One person was dressed up as a viking.

I am awed and terrified by the world and already drank the glass because there was bourbon in it.

Afterword, for now.

Now that Cadence & Slang has sold out, it’s worth doing a postmortem. Copies went on sale on October 15, and it sold out on April 18. So that’s about six months to ship about 700 copies. On average that works out to 26 copies per week, but the reality is much less even: Cadence sold in large bursts that were contingent on third-party publicity and word of mouth.

Because Cadence & Slang had no advertising or marketing strategy, the impact of specific events was really easy to measure, as long as I paid careful attention to what was going on, and who was talking about it. Reviews of the book (both positive and negative) found me quickly, blog posts were easy to parse with google alerts, and Twitter’s easy to search in the short term.

Word of mouth is interesting when applied to Twitter. A rough math can be worked out that correlates one’s subject of interest, their follower count, and my book’s sales. Basically: the more involved you are in UX or product design, and the more followers you have, the more copies I would sell as a result of your single tweet about my book. I don’t plan to use this to target people through social media in the future, because that sort of thing makes me feel kind of skeezy, but it’s probably interesting all the same.

I also took measures to research who was buying my book. Because I had a relatively small customer base, I could find most peoples’ Twitter handles, thank them, and tell them when their copy would ship. I’m interested in seeing where my customers work, and what they do there, if only to sate my curiosity.

It’s extremely easy to take this research and use it for questionably ethical purposes, to pester people with marketing and pursue them in areas that make them uncomfortable. It would be really problematic if, for example, I mass-followed all of my customers, or friend requested them on Facebook, or even added them to a Twitter list. Single @-reply tweets, which won’t show up in my followers’ timelines, are (in my opinion, at least) ephemeral enough that they won’t make a difference in the grand scheme.

I learned that graphic designers, developers, project managers, and CEOs bought copies of my book. Very few IAs, UXers. Ultimately I’m very happy about whom I sold my book to; my customers represented a much broader diversity in roles than I had expected, and I think the best thing for UX right now is to evangelize the practice in other tribes.

But researching this wouldn’t be possible if I were more popular, selling more copies faster. In general I’m happy with the pace that copies sold, although the holidays were hectic enough that I was unable to keep up with demand for about a week.

Second edition.

I’ve decided that no more print copies will be made of this edition of Cadence & Slang. I plan to revise it continuously over the years, and when enough revisions have accumulated that it makes sense to re-release the book, a second edition will be made. It will happen, but not, like, tomorrow or anything. Patience.

What’s next?

I’ve learned a lot about the process of designing an object that has a lot of moving parts (e.g., proofing, revising, complexity of the manuscript, interplay between sections of a very compartmentalized outline), making a bunch of that object, getting that bunch sent to me, and then sending that bunch to a lot of people. All of the shipping was my doing, and every copy went through my living room before their final destinations. Relatively little went wrong, so although I have only one data point, I think I can say I’m good at it - or at least good enough that I have enough confidence to, one day, do it again.

And so a few new loves have come as a result of this. I love doing things myself. I love coordinating a lot of moving parts. I love the substance of quality long-form writing, and think the web writ large is sorely lacking for it. (There are exceptions.) I love print, despite everybody heralding its death, and I believe that “print” in general is a red herring, as people still harbor an abiding love for well-designed, beautiful print. (Make your own resurgence-of-vinyl analogy here.) And I love obsessively editing something until I think it’s ready.

With the exception of the aforelinked A List Apart and the now-sadly-defunct Emigre, this space is largely empty. (I am following The Manual’s progress with great interest, although they have not published an issue yet.) I enjoy many of the design books that are coming out, but they’re often too one-dimensional, too professional… not enough opinion. No teeth.

So I want to keep doing this, again and again. And I want to do it with longer-form writing, both mine and others’. It’s going to be a challenging task, but I reckon I’m up for it. What shape it’ll take - well, figuring that out is half the fun, right?

Airplane mode.

My favorite feature on my cell phone is called “airplane mode.” You flip a little switch and it takes the whole thing off the grid. The switch is orange, meaning that it is probably extra dire if you flip it, meaning that I take extra pleasure out of flipping it. Airplane mode is like picking up the red phone to call on a superhero, only nobody is calling you, because you are in airplane mode, which is great, because I’m a total misanthrope and don’t ever want anybody to call me.

If I go to a bar with somebody and I really want to pay attention to what they are saying – if I want to immerse myself in the conversation, their ideas, etc. – I will flip the phone on airplane mode. If the meeting is fleeting, like I just flew there and we only get one hour a year to catch up: always airplane mode.

I can’t remember the last time I ever used airplane mode on an actual airplane. For all I care, the manufacturers of my phone should change the name of airplane mode to “interesting person mode.”

Then we’ll say goodbye and the interesting person will leave and I’ll probably be drunk and inspired a little more. I’ll turn airplane mode back off and get a series of increasingly pitched text messages from my friends who are wondering what all is going on and where to drink next. But nothing that went down couldn’t have waited those two hours, of course; and the attention I paid to them, to you, is what matters.

Almost sold out.

First, a picture:

This is every single copy of Cadence & Slang that is still available for sale. Currently, nineteen copies remain. (That picture has 21 copies; I’m saving two in case the post office screws up delivery.)

After this, the only way you’ll be able to get ahold of Cadence & Slang for the foreseeable will be by buying a PDF. And, as usual, all physical copies come with a free PDF for immediate download.

This is the last time that Cadence & Slang will exist in this precise form. If the book is reprinted, future physical copies will look substantially different from the current one, and that means the current copies - the ones on sale up at that link - will be the last sold of their kind.