nickd

The mexican restaurant rule.

I live in Logan Square, which is sort of like the Mission in San Francisco: a bold, awkward mix of hipsters and Mexican immigrants. There are many taquerias in Logan Square. They are run by Mexican immigrants who came here and opened taquerias. One of them is on the block where I live. This is not special because there’s a taqueria on nearly every block in the neighborhood, but it is special because it’s open 24 hours, and because there is an awning. Here is the awning:

It’s easy to find excellent Mexican food in Logan Square because the selection is so vast; if you don’t like one restaurant, you walk over to another block and eat there instead. Fine. This is doable. But it’s thrown out the window when you just had fifteen cans of Blatz, like a giant liquefacted misfortune, at the dive bar next door and it’s 3am and you just closed out the whole infamous grifted drinking town and oh my god, you now just fucking require tacos. Eight tacos. And, woe be your tilting drunk self, this restaurant is your only option. The food at this restaurant is terrible.

And so the awning. It reads “good mexican food.” The awning is a lie. Here is the mexican restaurant rule: if you have to declare something about yourself or your work, it’s not true.

This has implications outside the internecine, entrenched taqueria battles of Logan Square. Your software is simple, you say? Easy to use? That’s nice. Don’t say it. Your graphic design is beautifully expressive? Don’t say it. If you say it, you’re doomed. Your indie band’s press one-sheet says you’re sincere and emotive? That’s very interesting.

The mexican restaurant rule may be a thing because if you aren’t living the principles that you believe in, you start to talk about it, as if you’re trying to will it into being. But everybody can smell a fake, and this is a great way to come off as one. So I’ve found that the best way to promote quality is by showing it, and letting folks decide for themselves. People are smart; they don’t need hand-holding.

There are exceptions, of course, like any breakable guideline, but I think this holds true in enough circumstances to write about it on the fancy Internet, and that must be worth something.

Cadence & Slang’s service.

I spent my previous post discussing Cadence & Slang’s sales. Now I’d like to discuss service. I spend much of my book’s first chapter discussing good customer service, although some folks have done it better. I try to practice the best service possible for a one-man operation for many reasons:

• I practice what I preach. It would be extremely weird to write about good service, and then not follow through on good service.
• As a self-publisher, I can. The more middlemen are involved, the less I can service my customers. Cutting out middlemen also allows me to make more money.
• Running a Kickstarter campaign taught me the value of nurturing and building a good, if slapdash and only semi-connected, community. I care far more about the people I met through Kickstarter than the funding it gave me.
• But, most importantly, it is simply the right thing to do. The publishing industry has lost sight of the connections it makes with its customers. Authors don’t know who reads them, and readers rarely have a way of directly contacting authors.

So what all does that entail?

Handling problems. Books can arrive damaged or late. One fun example: I sold around 400 books in the first week of December, and sent them all out via Media Mail on the morning of the 6th. While I did know that Media Mail doesn’t provide a guaranteed delivery date, I didn’t know that the delivery times - formerly a few days in most cases - became over six weeks during the holidays, because Chicago post offices, infamous for not delivering anything on time, ever, if at all, simply weren’t delivering any Media Mail. And not telling anybody about it until after the fact.

So between December 15 and 20, I received around two dozen emails from frustrated customers, and overnighted copies to every single one of them, at the cost of around $25 each. I kept the customers’ names on a chalkboard, tracked each package, and crossed each name off when it was listed as delivered. Then customers would receive the second copy, sometime in the middle of January, and I would tell them to give it to a friend. Why inconvenience them to send it back?

That is but one example. If a large bookstore had the same problem, it’s highly unlikely that they would have been able to respond so quickly, and personally, to each customer. It’s also unlikely that the customer would have been able to keep both copies. Or that the bookstore would have cut a profit. If I were the CEO of a publicly traded company, I’d probably be ousted over this. But again, it’s the right thing to do.

Correcting errors. I maintain an errata page, which is largely created by my customers, who email me with corrections or clarifications. I reply back to every single email towards this end, and often it provokes a lot of research and good conversations.

Making friends. I’ve made at least a dozen solid professional contacts through service calls. I didn’t expect this to happen, but I do think it was far less likely to happen through traditional models. And at the very least, it humanizes my customers. Contacting them on Twitter gives them a face, a name; even the reductive biographical information helps put it in context, and instructs me on who may be reading.

So that’s it on service, I think. I don’t care that this differentiates me more from traditional publishers, or further exacerbates the rift between new media and old, or represents some kind of punk ethos. I am doing it because books are communication, the beginning of a vital conversation, and it is just completely bankrupt to me to consider writing something and not follow through on it in this way. It’s messy for sure, and requires a lot more work than with traditional models, but my god, it’s just so much more gratifying.

Cadence & Slang’s sales, for the curious.

Cadence & Slang broke even with its Kickstarter funding, but while 1,062 copies were printed, only 320 copies went to those who helped get it printed. I’m keeping eleven copies for myself (one of which is beaten to hell with corrections), two were damaged out of the box, and as of this writing, 98 remain for sale. So that leaves 631 that I’ve sold for 100% profit, minus Google Checkout’s fees. For a $43 book after shipping, I earn $41.45 after those fees. Minus $2.72 in media mail postage, that’s $38.73. There are a couple of other overhead costs - my postage provider charges me $17 a month for their services, for instance - but they’re roundoff errors in the grand scheme.

I think many people are squeamish about making precisely enough of their work for backers, but I was clear with my readers that this was going to fund a full offset run, and I put all of their money back to supporting them with bonus notebooks, stickers, etc. Yesterday, I gave them free PDFs of the book, because I don’t think it’s right to charge people (and especially backers) twice for the same content.

While the whole process has not gone perfectly smoothly, nothing on this scale does, and I have no regret about how I’ve conducted my business with my backers and customers. I would do it all again in a heartbeat. So in light of Amy Hoy’s lack of squeamishness about sales figures, I’m going to follow suit and share my sales figures, too.

As of this writing, I have earned $22,898 from people buying through the site, $741 from multiple copy orders, $1,240 from in-person sales through Square, and $160 in cash. Since launching the PDF yesterday, I’ve earned $238 in sales from that, too.

My sales have dropped off considerably since the holidays; around $18,000 of that was before December 24. Part of this was because I had unusually strong sales from being listed on Ars Technica’s holiday gift guide; part of this is probably a post-holiday slump. My launching of the PDF was not in response to this, and it was not a cash grab; in fact, I’ve already given away 1,712 downloads of the PDF in the past day, mostly to my Kickstarter backers, which was about double the number of book owners. I care more about spreading my book’s message than making money, and many people simply wouldn’t be reached if Cadence & Slang remained a physical artifact.

I have very little idea what sales are like for other independent authors, and I have no idea if these numbers are even good (or if it constitutes success by any sort of arbitrary metric - hell, I barely even know if folks like it), but I believe that these are the most favorable terms for me, and I’m pretty certain that they would be far worse if I had gone through a traditional publisher. Lest you think I’m smugly rolling in money like the Scrooge McDuck in my Kickstarter video, that could not be farther from the truth; with Cadence & Slang’s profits I’ve bought a pair of nice boots, I took my infinitely patient girlfriend out to a nice dinner, and then I put the entire rest of it into my student loans.

If you have any more questions about Cadence & Slang’s finances, I’d be happy to share anything with you. I’ve probably omitted something, which I assure you is more forgetfulness than hesitance.

Hesitate.

In 2006 someone made a Facebook group about me called “nickd sure is into a lot of stuff,” so titled because that was the first sentence they uttered after walking into my then-apartment for the first time. The description was a list that started off like “tea, beer, design, websites, animated gifs” and deevolved into a nickd roast like “himself, giving orders, being didactic.” Har, har. But overall I think it showed that I’m really overly curious and into a big series of topics and try to learn as much as possible about them, etc – more compliment than not, right? That group was posted in the middle of a spate when my now-desiccated friends-only Livejournal was at full tilt (to which said group’s founder was very much privy), and I felt comfortable ranting about just about anything. Why? Because it was in private.

The amount of self-censorship that I practice in any public, potentially archivable communication is pretty astounding. I only write when I have something important that I want to say, that hasn’t been said by too many people before, on a topic that may be pertinent, and when the stars align such that I have a couple of hours of free time to write on something so dedicated and internally consistent. And so when Livejournal cratered in use among my friends, and as they flocked to Tumblr, which lacks any such access rights, I simply stopped posting long-form writing online. Where does my energy go now? A locked Twitter account, which has a very high follow cost, and manifests in ranting about cultural inside jokes, Chicago stuff, setting up where to drink that evening, and then drinking.

Because there is nowhere for me to write that can be read by a limited group of people that I curate, the amount of long-form writing that I put online has all but vanished.

“Sure, nickd, but you wrote a book,” you say. I wrote Cadence & Slang in one week, and spent the next two years obsessively editing it. During that period, I actually wrote almost nothing. “Fair, but you’re still eloquent.” I pour that energy into my job (which I lost on Thursday! “LoL”), instant messages, and emails. None of this serves to quell the almost completely orthogonal-to-all-that heinous discomfort that I feel with the vast majority of my public content on the Internet.

Access rights and public content have absolutely nothing to do with jumpstarting my enthusiasm for writing. I write just fine, without anybody having to coach me. I feel like Internet writing has to be refined, though, more than people give it credit for; it’s becoming more important than print, and way more copyable. “But all these bloggers say that blogging is where you put the rough drafts,” you say. “Books are for the more permanent stuff.” Believe me, I know. I’m with you on that last sentence; that’s why I revised C&S 141 times before printing it. But I disagree that blogging is where you put the rough drafts. Few people have the ability to command enough attention that their readers see a blog post twice. And maybe my worries about public online content can be chalked up to some kind of stage fright neurosis, but that’s the way it’s been for the better part of a decade.

How does Twitter differ? Sure, I post a lot of stuff on my public account, but it’s always stuff where there’s no ambiguity about where it belongs. If there’s any slight doubt, it goes private. Period. And from an attentional standpoint, reading a tweet is relatively harmless compared to making you read this far in some screed about access rights. It’s also worth noting that I’ve spent the past year hashing out the situational and attentional import of my 140-character snide ramblings to a truly ridiculous extent. If you told my 20-year-old self that I would get neurotic about crafting tweets properly, he would probably slap you.

The point here, way down at the bottom, is this: strong access rights on the Internet allow me to revise my thoughts with less risk of shame when I fuck up. My friends serve as a check on my half-formed, and sometimes entirely incorrect, beliefs about things. They excoriate me when I’m wrong, and they know how to push me to figure out the right things. This allows me to come up with solid justification for any topic before I ever publicly discuss it. It allows for trusted confidants; it allows me to become a better authority on something; and it allows me to be more comfortable with my own voice. I never feel more comfortable in my skin than I am when I’m around people I trust, and that goes just as much on the Internet as it does in person.

I’ll confess that this all is driven by half fear and half pragmatism; the problem is that it makes me appear a hell of a lot more one-dimensional and boring than I probably am. It’s a matter of perception, and of prevalent tastes: it’s somehow “better” to share a ton about yourself. People check into venues on Foursquare. I rarely want people to know where I am; they can text me if they want to know that. People write about their travels. I don’t do that much either, and I don’t even travel very often. People put all their small-talk minutiae on Facebook and Twitter, out for everybody to read. Beyond my private ramblings, I don’t get the justification for it, and I don’t buy the belief that sharing this with people is actually somehow better than not.

Which sucks because I fear that it is screwing me over in my professional dealings by failing to humanize me more than others. I come across as someone who just wants to put his head down and bang out a 200 page wireframe deck, and I think that’s a real shame, because that’s not my best skill at all, and there’s no way to articulate that beyond going out for drinks sometime and having me violate fifteen different NDAs at once. This whole dynamic of sharing online means that your friends and colleagues actually need to overshout in order to be heard among others, which is just completely fucked up to me, and I’ve grown up with computers for my entire life. By all logic, I should be the first one to embrace this, but I don’t, which just serves to make me feel even more uncomfortable and alienated. It’s something of a problem when you’re 29 years old and still don’t know how to handle online etiquette, decent protocols for sharing, or – worse – think you’ve dug a hole of privacy so deep that no light can possibly get in. Which is why I’m hitting “publish” on this, done in one take, before I think better of it.

Towards confronting the ethics of user experience.

Then Peter Merholz flipped the card table on the way that user experience disciplines fit into ad agencies, and the card table landed on a powder keg, and the keg exploded, only the keg-table assembly was also in a cute hamster factory, where the hamsters are made, killing all the hamsters inside and now we can’t have nice things anymore. Partly, I suppose, because now we have this giant us v. them mentality going on: UX people at ad agencies feel miffed, UX people not at ad agencies are fist pumping, and I (someone who has worked at ad agencies and not ad agencies in the past) feel weirdly shrifted by the entire thing, stuck trying to defend one mentality to another mentality, and yet preferring only one of those mentalities if you put a gun to my head and made me choose.

I think it’s a problem to open rifts in any discipline where ultimately the same design decisions are coming from the same places of empathy and consideration. The only difference is that I’ve found you have to fight a lot harder to get those considered as valid when you’re in an ad agency. Not that that’s bad, of course: it just means you need to put on brass knuckles from day zero, because you have to work to effect really significant institutional change. But I don’t want to start seeing any situations where someone directed the UX practice and just killed it at an ad agency, and they get black-balled from practicing the same at an interactive firm, or a UX firm, or wherever. Then the rift widens, and it’s more difficult to reconcile. And people my age then have to worry whether they’re being pigeonholed as an ad-centric UX designer, and oh god will they be screwed because all they really wanted to do in their lives was work at (e.g.) IDEO. Or are they really practicing user experience at all, etc.

Fighting in this particular way can only be resolved if we all try to heal the rift, and we can only heal the rift if we start to put our heads down and soberly ask really big questions about what we do.

Headbutting this problem directly in the sternum

I spent two years writing my book in part because I believe that non-IxD types make IxD decisions, usually unwittingly, all the time in their jobs. I want to go a step further and assert that most IxD decisions are in fact ethical decisions – in fact, technology in general is an ethical decision, one that we all too rarely confront, on every side of the table, in every agency, on every team, in every company, ever. Jacques Ellul knew this, in his book Propaganda:

But I think that propaganda fills a need of modern man, a need that creates in him an unconscious desire for propaganda. He is in the position of needing outside help to be able to face his condition. And that aid is propaganda. Naturally, he does not say: “I want propaganda.” On the contrary, in line with preconceived notions, he abhors propaganda, and considers himself a “free and mature” person. But in reality he calls for and desires propaganda that will permit him to ward off certain attacks and reduce certain tensions.

Replace every instance of “propaganda” with “technology,” and you can figure out what I’m getting at here. So I think this is tremendously important, yet few people are asking these questions, possibly because they’re big and scary and may result in significant reductions in the size of our paychecks.

To our defense, we have made some admirable attempts to codify the ethics of UX. Design Activism is currently devoting some space to ethics in every end of design. Dark Patterns is a nice collection of misleading and unethical practices. And last year, Whitney Hess attacked the problem by revising the Hippocratic Oath for UX designers. Even with all this, gaps remain.

I believe that solidifying and continually revising ethical guidelines is a good step towards finding consensus and healing these rifts. Moreover, it’ll be good ammo when we try to pitch precisely what it is we do in the broader design process, and a good defense to hold up when unethical decisions are proposed.

So let’s stop bitching at each other and try to figure this out. I’ve been researching this for the past week, and in a few days I’m going to write up some initial findings. I’m tired of seeing everybody taking potshots at one another, because it doesn’t actually do anything. I am very much listening, and would love if you sent me email or talked at me on Twitter. These are big, big questions, and there’s no way that I’m answering them alone.

On electronic copies of Cadence & Slang.

Everybody keeps asking me why Cadence & Slang doesn’t yet exist as an iPad app, or PDF, or Kindle, or whatever else the hot e-format of the day is. There’s no way that I can answer that quickly. I can tell them “no” and then they ask “why not” and then I have to go all on a fugue-rant about the future of the form and typography and layout and then they just think I’m a wanker and my other friends buy another round, for which I completely do not blame them, because they’ve probably heard the iPad rant around 50 times already, and oh dear god is he really going on about the side notes again. So here’s that rant, placed here so I can link folks to it instead of constantly derailing otherwise nice conversations about nice things. For the time being, it’s the final word on the matter.

As someone who clearly cares a lot about technology, this puts me in an uncomfortable position. Because I’m definitely an early adopter and power user and I love having my content in many forms. But I’m torn between that and the desire to make Cadence & Slang fit the form of an ebook well.

In one section of my book, I talk about various devices prescribing the norms of the interface that you’re making. Think “mac-like” applications written for OS X v. cross-platform ones that try to work well enough all over the place. So it is with the text itself. The pages are a little wide to accommodate the reader’s thumbs, as well as a running log of side notes. Where do the side notes go in an ebook? Additionally, it’s printed offset, which is a very high-resolution and costly means of printing, one that’s around 4 to 8 times better than most commercial laser printers. Moreover, it’s a resolution at which the main typeface prospers. I would not use Feijoa for a computer screen, even a high-resolution one like the Retina Display. It would look like garbage; in certain contexts it may even be illegible. The parts about color wouldn’t make any sense on any black-and-white ebook readers, and they would likely have to be substantially rewritten or removed. Different devices render margins differently. The Kindle doesn’t support too many typefaces for its basic format, and in its current form, Cadence & Slang looks like shit on an iPad. (Don’t believe me? Load this excerpt on your iPad and judge for yourself!)

And all of this ignores the fact that, last year, I raised $12,000 solely to support a print run of the book. None of that money went to pay my food or rent; it went to dead trees and shipping those dead trees. My work went to support the text in that particular form, and I stand by it.

That gets to the heart of the argument, the big bold statement that you’ve scrolled down to: translating Cadence & Slang to another format is not simply a question of cutting and pasting. It means I have to translate its attention to detail, its innate quality, the things that make it a good artifact. This will require selecting new typefaces, laying out the entire text, changing its typography to fit the most common screen sizes and resolutions, making any revisions and errata that have popped up in the past few months, and in short, making it fit the form.

My readers don’t deserve any less than this.

I spent two years busting my ass on this thing, but ultimately, I was in no hurry. I’m not going to rush its release on digital devices, putting out anything half-baked, simply because some of my customers ask me to. I hear you, all of you, and I want to do it - but I also want to do it right.

I am honored and humbled by your collective interest in my book. The amount of publicity that I’ve received is totally beyond my expectations. So I ask for your patience in my delivering a good electronic experience.

Your computer is going to be thrown away sometime in the next four years. Your Kindle probably won’t last another two. But, with luck, copies of my book - as it’s printed - will outlast all the technology that you’re asking me to support. It might even outlast me. And I think that’s a pretty great sentiment.

(And one more thing: if you bought the book or backed my Kickstarter project, you’re receiving the electronic edition of it - whatever form it comes in - for free. There’s no reason you should have to pay twice for it.)

Thanks to Todd vanGoethem and Erin Watson for reading early drafts of this.

from the nyt

Our experience of technology has been largely wondrous and positive: The green revolution ameliorated the problem of world hunger (for a time at least) with better seeds and fertilizers to increase harvests. When childhood diseases were ravaging the world, vaccines came along and (nearly) eliminated them. There are medicines for the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS. There is the iPad.

i’m not about to equate the ipad to curing polio, but i was struck by the existence of this paragraph all the same. putting the ipad at the end of it is almost like a punchline - and with no explanation, as if everyone is supposed to nod and be like “oh, yes, the ipad,” as if we all already know the obvious benefits.

yulquen redux

my bike was stripped last year; they took the stem, rear wheel (which i built, tensioned, and trued all by myself), seatpost, and seat. when i saw the bike next, the handlebars were dangling from the brake housing.

two days later i bought a republic bike which is not bad but is still not the same and also weighs four pounds more and is harder to pedal. i’ve used it since. what was left of my bike, my real actual bike, the one that i love really ridiculously dearly for it being a material possession, sat on the floor of my apartment.

over the past two weeks i bought replacement parts, which are not the same parts (except for the seat) and do not feel like the same parts but still suffice in making the bike feel like the bike, which is very good.

yesterday i put all the parts onto the bike except for the brake cables and housing.

today i installed brake cables and housing; removed the bottom bracket lockring that refused to stay on and was a small, subtle pain in my ass for a year; tightened my rear cog onto the hub; tensioned the rear hub; and rode eight blocks to sultan’s market.

i had no preparation for how good that mile ride would feel, for aforementioned reasons of this being my bike and it feeling perfectly sized to me and handling precisely how i expect a bike to handle now. it was so god damned fantastic that i should just give up on further description on this here tumblr. when i arrived at sultan’s, though, a dude was unclipping his bike from the rack, and told me:

“man, it’s so good to get riding again.”

indeed, dude. indeed.

a place to call home

When I buy a computer, I move in. I change the background to solid black. I run software update (or whatever equivalent) to install the current versions of basic utilities. I tweak its OS-level preferences so it fits my workflow. I open the email program and add in my server. I install a few important applications and utilities. I plug in an external hard drive and load the iTunes library that references my music. Then I get to work.

Some of these apps fulfill basic needs that have become fundamental to modern computing experience: email, iTunes, system preferences. Others move a little more afield: for example, Dropbox is a good example of an app that feels very natural to use on a desktop, but could be done entirely through the web instead.

As a freelance employee who’s hopped around computers a lot lately, I now have the process of moving in down pat, and can get all this out of the way in a couple of hours. None of it is essential, but it is important because it makes the computer a little more mine - even if it isn’t.

Moving in is more than just setting up the picture of loved ones on your desk. It’s having something that fits your flow and allows you to do what you want while being happy.

Moving in is orders of magnitude more crucial on a personal computer. For me, dozens of apps are installed on a fresh OS: Tweetie, iStat Menus, Perian, Growl, Coda, Transmit, LittleSnapper, AdBlock, Things, CS4. Dashboard widgets are installed. Plugins out the wazoo. It’s nearly certain that you’ve moved in more to your personal computer than your work computer, if the two are separate.

So this may vary for you. It may belie my being a “power user.” But I think that this is important, and I’m going to say it, just get it out there, and you can do what you want with it. If the iPad is going to replace one’s laptop - or one’s entire computing system, whatever that is, and however complex that is - and become a dedicated device, it should allow us to move in (and out!) easily. Something that would allow easy download of any sort of media, including transferring between apps; backups (cloud or an external device like Time Machine, it doesn’t matter); and easily transferring information to another iPad.

It may be (and probably is) great right now as an augmentative device: one that you use along with your primary computer. But this is a matter of our stuff now: our music, our email, our work. And the jury’s still out - we are, after all, discussing an unreleased device that only a handful of pundits have seen. But whatever the iPad offers, this remains: over the years, we have all amassed a corpus of information, an array of types of information, that we keep to ourselves, and file away on our computers. We move it from computer to computer every few years, when we buy another one. We back it up periodically. We move some of it (but only some of it!) to the web.

And whether consciously or not, we treat this as our possessions. Our moving into another computer has become similar to schlepping our physical crap into a new place, and decorating it well, so that we can feel more comfortable during our time there.

Considering all that, it would be tremendous (and indeed revolutionary) if the iPad was a place that we could comfortably and casually throw our data on - our electronic possessions, our lives - and call home for a little while.

From: [REDACTED]

Subject: PSD slicing
Date: December 29, 2009 11:48:58 AM CST
To: Nick Disabato

That’s exactly what I do. I’m about to start another quarter of school, but come June I’ll have desperate need of a steady-like gig, so please please pretty please keep me near the top of your referral list.

Unless it’s Drupal. Then they can fuck themselves.

Thanks.