nickd

6. Writing for future issues.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:41:20 -0600

This is the sixth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

Because so few people knew what we were working on, we could take as much time as needed to publish Distance’s first issue. Because Distance is a quarterly publication, though, we don’t have that luxury for future issues.

Accounting for the time to write, edit, print, and any padding in case things go wrong in authors’ lives, we’ll be planning issues x+1 and x+2 when we are printing issue x. So many things can go wrong during all three simultaneous processes, and many of them are out of my control, so I’m left balancing the desire to make something truly great with the rigors of a quarterly schedule. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that deadlines are a fake idea that I am willing to shirk with great aplomb, but this remains the scariest proposition of the whole thing.

Issues 2 and 3 are being planned right now, and issue 4 is starting in small ways. Issue 2’s authors have already been announced. Each issue has a theme, which will be divulged once the essays’ first drafts are in. Essays can fit these themes as loosely as the writers want, and I expect them to be all over the map, because (as an editor and reader) that is part of the fun of it.

I am contacting a lot of people myself, but if you want to write, or know somebody who might be interested, you should get in touch right now. Imagine me putting my beer down and looking you straight in the eye and saying that sentence very slowly.

There.

In the past few process articles, I’ve talked as much as I can about my editorial strategy and current expectations. I hope that I have done this in a way that sounds appealing to prospective writers. I am very much selling the idea as much to writers as I am to readers. I know that readers are really excited about it, but a publication is only as good as its writing, and that writing could very well be penned by you. So let’s make something great together, something we’ll both feel really proud of.

The blurst question.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:25:00 -0600

First, second, and third, you should read the thoughtful conversation between my friends Buzz and David about the cultural and ideological differences between New York City and San Francisco, both as towns and as professional communities. They do a good job breaking down the broad differences between each, and the relationship that companies often have with their environment.

Buried within the latter aforelinked is a reblog that mentions somebody moving from Chicago to New York. Which comes on the heels of my apparent coercion that somebody move away. And that all follows a year where dozens¹ of talented designers and developers left town. And two days ago, I had lunch with somebody who expressed dissatisfaction with Chicago and was super pumped about applying for jobs in another city. Based on everything I’ve seen over the past year, Chicago is facing a massive talent retention problem, and I believe it isn’t alone. (Nor is it alone in a rural/urban split, but that’s for another day.) Which is kind of a total bummer, and it makes me wonder why mid-sized communities are unable to stably sustain themselves.

Despite our being the third largest city in the country, our design and technology scene is similar to others in mid-sized American cities; New York and San Francisco are currently the biggest two. Chicago tends to sustain its identity among a handful of outgoing people that have stayed here for many years – around which orbit hundreds of others, usually younger, who come and go.

But it is there. Collaborations exist all the time, with people creating their own spaces and opening forward-thinking agencies. There’s a nascent VC-funded startup scene and an incubator doing good things. There are three great companies within three blocks of each other, and others all over town. The ethic in this city tends to involve bootstrapping your own thing, supporting your own, and – yes – calling people out when you think they might be going down the wrong path. It’s more akin to NYC’s scene than anybody else’s, from what I know, but it’s also very much its own thing in many ways.

Which brings me to the worst question that you can ask me: when are you moving to [SF/NYC]? While I’m sure that it’s asked with the best of intentions, this question de facto assumes that Chicago is inferior, and I would be upgrading to a better city by leaving. It comes off as condescending to people who have made a conscious, deliberate choice to live somewhere – not just in Chicago, but I imagine anywhere. What about the tech scene in Oklahoma City? When are they all moving to San Francisco?

Conversely, this is the best question that you can ask me: why do you live in Chicago? This gives me an opportunity to talk about the great life that I have here. I’m aware, as much as anybody else, that I could pack up and leave at any point. I would be able to make friends wherever I moved. I would have no shortage of interesting work. And while it would be stressful in the short run, maybe things would be fine for me and Erin in the long run. But I haven’t moved, and I’m probably not going to. Why?

I have been asked the worst question several dozen times over the past year, usually by folks from other cities who don’t know me well, and think they are just making small talk. I try to be gracious, and think I handle it okay: again, they’re likely well-intentioned. But in the past three months, people have asked me the worst question who already live here. As if it’s taken as law. As if I’m going to leave because I’ve encountered some fleeting modicum of success in my field. In the same time period, I’ve been asked the best question twice.

I tend to answer the worst question by example. When people visit, I try to introduce them to my awesome friends. I show them what’s going on here. I take them to my favorite bars and restaurants and prove that we have a great food scene. I’ll invite others over and somebody will give a talk in my living room over a couple growlers of beer. If they need to get some work done, I’ll drag them over to one of many coworking spaces. Because I can’t realistically answer the worst question in a way that satisfies anyone, other than by proving that I don’t live in a windswept hellscape.

While it’s sometimes a useful way of framing things, I’m heartbroken to see people distill tech rivalries to a binary that ignores smaller towns. It isn’t surprising – they are the two largest scenes out there right now, after all – but it implies the worst question all the same. Somebody from Chicago (or Oklahoma City, or wherever) is going to read those posts and think that they’re somehow missing out – and then, someday, they’re going to leave. But we can do our jobs from anywhere that has an internet connection, and it’s easier to connect with kindred spirits across time zones every day. As the scene increases in size across the world, perhaps we’ll reach the point where there will be some stability in mid-sized localities – ideally, people will look down the street and build a great community around their own home, rather than move someplace out of disillusionment with their existing surroundings.

Which is all to say: every single one of the people who left Chicago in the past year gave it a chance, and we screwed it up. We get the scene that we deserve. Let’s try to deserve something better. This is on all of us, but I’m resolving to build a great local community in whatever way I can.

¹ I counted 54 after a cursory glance at Twitter, and that’s just from my own perspective; I imagine there were quite a few that I missed. That said, it could just be that Chicago has a high turnover rate, and I simply haven’t met a bunch of people who have already moved here from other places. But even if that’s true, I worry about people using Chicago as a stepping stone to get someplace else; that it doesn’t represent stability or finality.

5. Revisions in the Afterlife.

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:57:21 -0600

This is the fifth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

While there’s no undo button in print media, publishing a text doesn’t have to freeze it in time. Distance’s essays deserve to have a life beyond their publication date. Inaccuracies and typographical errors are bound to appear, but more broadly, new research can change the findings, previous research may exist that we didn’t find while writing, and new technological developments can undermine premises. Essays gain value for authors and readers when they adapt to their unforeseen futures.

And so, as developments warrant, we plan to update Distance’s essays after each issue’s release. Edits will be included in the digital edition, and major revisions will be pushed to existing customers. The original version will always be included, changed content will be subtly highlighted in the PDF edition, and all changes – no matter how small – will be posted to Distance’s errata page.

There may come a point when we deem that this revision process isn’t necessary anymore, at which point we’ll declare an essay closed to further modification. When that happens, errata will continue to be published to clarify minor points or correct issues of proofreading, but the broader argument will remain frozen in time.

Whatever's next; whatever's good.

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:54:00 -0600

It’s now-or-never-o’clock. I quit my job on Friday, primarily to focus more on getting Distance off the ground and moderately profitable. And while that’s indeed occupying a large chunk of my time, I now have way more time than I need to launch the thing. And I’m curious, and I like dabbling in small projects with good people, and I like making tiny amounts of money so I can eat burritos in a city with a comically low cost of living.

Here’s the overview so far:

I’m an interaction designer by trade, and I focus a lot on what most folks call “product.” I blathered on about this once, and I continue to dig up examples that I find interesting. If you cofounded a startup in the past year or six, I can throw darts at it with great aplomb.
I’m also a writer, editor, and printer. Probably as a result of all that, I’m a rather extreme type nerd, and I have a fondness for physical typesetting. I know how to work letterpress machines that weigh twenty times more than I do. So, if you want me to poke at your writing, I can do that. And if you want to collaborate on any hands-on projects with metal type, I can also do that. Or, anything with typography that doesn’t look like this stuff? I’m probably game.
I always keep an open mind about any sort of projects that involve some degree of research, play, and curiosity. So if you want to plan anything off-the-wall funny or pranksterish, then get at me. I love outlandish, ridiculous projects. Let’s scheme together.

I would like to make cool things with good people. Maybe you’re one of these good people. And maybe you know other good people, too. I’m in a rare inflection point in my life where I don’t have to juggle competing priorities to take on new stuff. I would love if you got in touch (nickd//nickd/org or @nickd), and spread this far and wide. I am a little scared these days, but things are really only worth doing if they’re scary, so I figure I must be at least a little right.

4. Rebuttals and responses.

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:40:57 -0600

This is the fourth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

When an essay is released into the wild, its life begins. People read it; then they say something about it. It used to be that you would handwrite a letter to the editor and send it in the mail. These days, though, commentary takes the form of content on the internet, ranging from emails to comments to blog posts to tweets. But that is just the first step. People can respond to the responses; authors can think about these responses, and revise their own work accordingly. That’s how discourse works, and I think it’s a very good thing. And while this all sounds pretty elementary, it’s hard to get right, to encourage new ideas and insights. With Distance, I want to support and nurture it however I can.

When a new issue is released, I’ll be paying attention to what people say about it. If a response is thoughtful or insightful, I’ll reach out to its author and ask them to reprint or excerpt it. Each of Distance’s issues will have a digital edition, and bundled with this (and posted to the issue’s page on Distance’s site) will be an ever-increasing, forever updated corpus of interesting commentary from other people. Anybody will be able to respond, including the authors themselves, so hopefully this will create an interesting conversation with many different threads. Distance’s essays are meant to last, so the longer they’re in the wild, more discussion will accumulate around them.

I think this is a great way to moderate a conversation around big questions, and I graciously hope you’ll participate.

3. Citation technique.

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:26:00 -0600

This is the third post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

Distance exists in many forms. There’s going to be a book, of course, but we’re also releasing a digital bundle for PDF, ePub, and Kindle formats. The PDF is a different page size than the book, so every single format is going to paginate differently. And because journal citations usually go by pagination, this poses a problem: how do we know we’re referring to the right place in the text?

The Bible actually does this fairly well. You know that John 3:16 is going to be at the same place between differing copies of the same translation (i.e., King James version) of the Bible, no matter what page number it may be on.

So in this spirit, but holiness notwithstanding, Distance doesn’t have page numbers; instead, it has paragraph numbers at the beginning of each paragraph, which direct readers to the right place in the essay. In the PDF and physical book, these are to the left of each paragraph. Kindle’s and ePub’s paragraphs begin with them. And in ePub, Kindle, and PDF, each of these is represented by a permalink that can be used in a specific citation.

We know this isn’t entirely novel, but maybe it is for interactive texts. And we’re well aware that it proscribes a specific citation style that “breaks” traditional citation schemata, which may frustrate some people – but we didn’t take this decision lightly, and think it’s for the betterment of our writing to generalize citation across analog and digital platforms. It’s increasingly unreasonable to assume that readers will keep their content in just one form, and we’re well aware of that, and trying to account for that in the best way that is as reverent to the text and the reader’s habits as possible, meeting everyone halfway.

We take a page at the beginning of each issue of Distance to discuss how citation works for that particular medium, and to advise people on the best way to cite Distance’s essays so that readers and researchers can find what they need as conveniently as possible. We hope this may be helpful for your own research efforts, but we’re always thinking what we can do to improve, so we seek feedback on what works and what doesn’t work for you.

2. Editorial strategy.

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:07:00 -0600

This is the second post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

Mandy Brown has discussed the nature of editorial strategy in many publications, and when I first contacted her about Distance, that was the first thing she asked me. So I’d like to talk a little bit about what I’m doing with authors’ essays for Distance. Everybody is a unique snowflake, so this process has never been precisely followed for any particular essay – but going into it, this is what I tend to ask for and expect from people.

First, a proposal. Write a paragraph-long pitch: what you care about and how you hope to write about it. This can be something as short as:

I want to use the history of video games to justify that gamification and virtual currencies are damaging the form.

Or it can be longer. The more the better, really, because it helps convey that you’re passionate about what you do, and that you’ve already started to think through some of the details.

Second, we talk about it. We’ll get on a Skype call or IM or whatever and I’ll throw some ideas out there, and we’ll bat things around.

A couple of weeks later, you’ll have finished the outline. Build an argument, tell me what you plan to write about, and try to fit it in a couple of pages. Some people feel more comfortable simply writing the introduction; other folks are rigorous, providing a proper Harvard-style outline. Do whatever works for you; I’m not here to impose structure on the planning. Then I revise the outline, we might talk about it a little more, and you start writing. Around this time, I’ll also dump a ton of research on you in the form of books, articles, blog posts, and academic papers, so that you can start to research things better and frame your argument more cogently.

Fourth, the half-completed draft. This gives me enough ground to stand on and recommend some ways to build your argument. Often I will say “this part needs a few sentences of examples that prove what you are trying to say.” Or: “now that you have finished half of the essay, consider this direction to bring it home.” Or: “move this part up here.” Or: “cut this paragraph, it doesn’t help.” High-level stuff. I don’t proofread much at this point, but sometimes I’ll give in to my grammar snob impulses.

Fifth, the three-fourths completed draft. Sometimes missing an intro and conclusion. Sometimes missing one major part. Doesn’t matter. Things are taking shape. We could start proofreading and doing more significant edits, and it would be passable, but not great yet, and we are here to make something that is great. No matter how we get there, I tend to work better with more collaboration and iteration, and I try to be nice about it, too.

Sixth, the complete first draft. Fewer high-level edits, and proofreading is starting to kick into gear.

Then we bat drafts around until the deadline or we collapse from exhaustion. Push it until it’s great. Shine it until you can see your reflection in it. Make it the best thing you’ve written in your life. That’s what I aspire to.

Maybe this is the wrong or unconventional way to do things. I don’t know. It will probably change in the future. Sometimes it happens organically, but it’s okay if it doesn’t. Today, though, writing this, it feels right, knowing what I know.

1. Essays and rants.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:17:00 -0600

In my work, the difference between a rant and an essay is: an essay offers a solution. This does not make rants any better or worse than essays; it just makes them different in their scope, their goals, and their strategy around research. An excellent rant is Bret Victor’s A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, which meant to discuss the state of the art and why he thinks it’s bad – but the lack of solutions came from the subject matter, because it was discussing theoretical interfaces and notional directions for future research. All fair ground.

Essays take a confident stand that a certain idea is (or isn’t) preferable within a set of prescribed bounds. Rewriting Bret’s essay, it would say something like “touch interfaces are preferable right now for this reason, and going ahead we need to start researching in this specific direction for this other reason.” Whether or not this diminishes the quality of his writing isn’t at hand; the real question is how much it changes the form of his argument.

If Bret were to take that particular tack, he would have to find different sources for research; he would have to build his argument in different ways, likely citing more real-world examples than conceptual videos; and, most importantly, the conclusions would be far more closed-ended. I believe there is a place for rants – in fact, I think Bret’s rant was one of the best pieces of writing to be released in 2011 – but that is not the goal of Distance’s essays.

Distance’s essays – and yes, that is why I call them essays – are meant to take a confident, unambiguous stand on an issue, and they are meant to back those up with enough research to state their case without coming off as flame bait or invective. In a very high-level way, that is how I edit essays: they should say “I believe this, and here is the context, and thus here is some research, and knowing that, there is why.” So that’s four points – three and a half, if you’re picky – that all contribute to the central conceit of each essay. This form isn’t new, but it is something we seem to have largely forgotten in our field, and so the broader goal of Distance is to shed light on that form, signify why it’s important, and prove by doing that it can help us out. It’s an attempt to write better, and to encourage readers to read better, too.

Distance.

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:09:24 -0600

We don’t write well enough. Linkbait invective spreads quickly because it angers people, in turn prompting a degradation in the quality of writing. People write opinions unchecked and unedited, leading to thoughtless arguments and shoddy research.

We don’t read well enough. We deal with problems of curation and moderation, which both stem from finding trusted sources to sift through the morass for us. We don’t focus on writing of substantial length, and we place rants on a pedestal, even though they don’t offer any solutions.

We don’t talk about writing well enough. To be sure, we’ve made inroads here, but I don’t think it goes sufficiently far. Comments aren’t moderated well enough on most sites, and thriving communities are difficult to build.

I want to create a space where we can do all three of these things better, so I’ve spent the past few months working with several others on the beginning. Presenting Distance: a quarterly journal for long-form essays about design and technology.

The first issue has essays from Ben Jackson, Vitorio Miliano, and Jon Whipple; you can read more about the content and authors at the journal’s aforelinked site. Subscriptions and single issues will be available, in both print and “digital bundle” (PDF, Kindle, and ePub) form.

But, the most important thing: Distance is on Kickstarter, and because Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, this can’t happen without your support. If you’d like to follow along, Distance is on Twitter, too.

This represents the first step in a very long process that, by design, cannot involve only me. I don’t make Distance; I help other people make Distance. So now that we’ve begun the beginning, I’m tremendously excited to see where this takes us, and I can’t wait to share all of this with every single one of you.

The timeline and the periphery.

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:42:45 -0600

When Twitter was first created, you could only write 140 characters of your own choosing. Now there are all sorts of other services that tweet on your own behalf, often without your noticing: Foursquare posts your checkins, Instagram posts your images, and all sorts of in-beta services tweet that you signed up for an invite. On the other hand, there are other apps that primarily exist to post your own content. The former I’ll call peripheral clients; the latter I’ll call timeline clients.

In order to make my timeline easier to read and understand, and in order to make my Twitter experience more about the things that I value in it, I run a timeline client that allows me to remove all tweets that are posted by specific client names. So I browse Twitter such that I can only read timeline clients.

As a result, my client-based filter list is formidable:

Amazon
Camera+
Chill
Colossal
Fab iPhone
Facebook
Flickr
foursquare
Geeklist Inc
Goodreads
Google
goscoville.com
Gowalla
HootSuite
Instagram
Instagram on iOS
iTunes Ping
Kinetik iOS
last.fm
LastfmLoveTweet
LinkedIn
Mashable Follow
Mixel on iOS
Momentile
MyZeus
Nike Application
Nike+ GPS
NYTimes on iOS
Ohours.org
Oink App
Paper.li
Pinterest
Posterous
Rdio
Readmill
Retro Camera for Android
RunKeeper
Songkick
SoundTracking
SoundTracking on iOS
Stamped for iPhone
StumbleUpon
The Visitor Widget
Tumblr
Turntable.fm
Tweekly.fm
Tweet Button
twitterfeed
Untappd
With
WordPress.com
Words with Friends on iOS
Year in Status
Yelp

Thankfully, client-based blocking is effective at removing peripheral clients while preserving timeline clients.

Some scattered explanations:

The worst offenders by far are foursquare and Instagram. They comprise around 20% of my unfiltered timeline. Draw your own conclusions.
HootSuite: I know you can turn off the little ow.ly bar that appears on shortened links, but I disagree with its premise, and the whole client just skeezes me out writ large. Blocking HootSuite, a timeline client, poses the biggest risk that I’ll miss out on insightful, volitionally posted tweets from other people.
Tweet Button: I don’t think link sharing should be reduced to the cognitive level of starring a tweet, and I prefer to read people’s thoughts on why they share the things they share, and what they have to say about it.
Google and Facebook: Filtering these clients preserves only tweets from people who are posting specifically to Twitter. I don’t have a Facebook account and I never sign into Google+ (and would delete my account there if I didn’t think G+ accounts will become compulsory in the coming months).
I turn off retweets from the vast majority of folks that I follow. I prefer to read what they have to say.
My timeline client has hashtag blocking, but not string blocking, so I can only block e.g. conference hashtags that begin with a #. I desperately wish I could block any free text, e.g. 4sq, @Fab, deck.ly, rd.io, Herman Cain.
When I see a new peripheral client hit my timeline, I block it. This doesn’t take much effort to maintain.

I feel like following somebody on Twitter has way too much importance attached to it, partly because we end up following every other internet-related product that they use as a result. We see all their posts on Instagram and Flickr and all their checkins and all the things that they Oinked or ifttted or whatever else.

But I want to keep my focus on what they have to say, and what we have to communicate to each other. Bringing excellent, like-minded people together is what makes Twitter great, and cutting out peripheral clients is a good way for me to do that better.

The Eatery's first-run experience.

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:06:00 -0500

Massive Health released their first product today: an iPhone app that appears to rate your meals, hot-or-not style, called The Eatery. Its signup flow touches on a few things I enjoy thinking about:

1. The “several page tutorial” pattern. Users can’t continue without paging through a set of instructions:

Long content scrolls, forcing horizontal and vertical swipes, but the team did a good job accounting for this by cutting the text at the fold:

This sort of pattern is especially common in iOS apps: they adopt the · · · · · · that you see on the home screen, and ask the user to page through a brief slideshow to learn the program. This is in contrast to the first-run experience where the “blank slate” state is annotated with arrows and suggestions for where to go. To-do list app Orchestra does this quite well.

I’ve seen the introductory slideshow used quite well (my favorite is probably Thicket, although its slideshow is put out of the way of the user). That said, I tend to favor the latter approach because it puts the working interface in front of users faster, which may decrease the bounce rate after the app has been downloaded.

2. Putting a form in a tutorial that appears like a gallery. I don’t know if these multi-page instructional demos enforce the expectation that users will treat them as if they were image galleries. On the fourth page (of six), the above form appears, encouraging users to select any sort of dietary restriction. Will users expect this? I was thrown off by it. Is it required? I couldn’t tell at first glance.

3. Checkboxes on a single select dialog. This might work better as a radio button, but I’ll concede that it would look less nice from a visual standpoint, and it may be less likely to invite interaction. Nonetheless, I want the ability to select multiple options, with “No restrictions” clearing all other responses (and a response elsewhere clearing “No restrictions” accordingly), as I can imagine a world wherein a handful of folks are (for example) both vegan and gluten-free.

4. Interesting copy. “Don’t watch this video. It’s boring.” Reverse psychology carries a small risk with first run experiences. My doctor is boring; this app is supposed to not be boring. I’m left wondering what the “Feed” is supposed to be. This could be solved with some copy like Instapaper’s first-run experience, which replaces an ostensibly blank list with some instructions on adding articles to read later.

The tappity noise.

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:47:00 -0500

One benefit of touch interfaces: the subtle variations of keyboard layouts. Used to be that if you wanted a bespoke interface for your product, you would have to make it in hardware. One of the more half-assed examples: putting stickers on the keys of your keyboard, to indicate some sort of crazy remapping. Folks who went long with the concept ended up with all sorts of crazy stuff, though, like fake gas pedals that controlled driving simulators. Either way, such hardware tweaks affect the entire platform, not just one program that you use on it.

Now, of course, the screen is the interface for so many apps, so you can get away with some more interesting one-offs, such as Wolfram Alpha’s complex keyboard that takes up the entire screen:

In fact, Wolfram Alpha has such a large character set that they provide a unique control, at the bottom left of the custom half of the keyboard, that shows pagination for Greek and astronomical variables:

On the iPad, there’s the row of keys above the standard keyboard in iA Writer:

More subtly, Echofon swaps the Return key for @ and #:

Taking away keys always provides a small risk that users will hurt for what was lost. Echofon’s team appears to know this, because selecting “123” at bottom left switches the keys back to Return:

I haven’t seen a whole lot of people dwelling on the flexibility and freedom that software keyboards can afford us now, but I think it’s really important, both from designers’ standpoints (any such change is dramatic, upsetting the norms of the platform, and shouldn’t be taken lightly) and users’ (affording more contextually appropriate input, with fewer cumbersome kludges to get there).

What other customizations have you seen towards this end?

Carrier.

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:52:00 -0500

Now, this conversation just blew up on Twitter, and it contains a lot of somewhat-related issues that probably need to be handled separately, to the point where they could each spawn an individual blog post. But let’s be reductive and brief here, and try to organize what we’re all thinking about, as it concerns the publication of excellent writing on the internet, possibly in some sort of “periodical”:

Thematic issues

Wherein the content is deliberately arranged, however abstractly, around a specific topic. This usually benefits the content, but it takes more editorial effort to pull off.

The sporadic trickle vs. the fixed schedule

E.g., blog posts vs. issues of a magazine. Or kind of like how K10K worked with blending the two models. This affects readers’ expectations: people anticipate future issues, or they anticipate the possibility of future trickles of content. The anticipation imposes expectations on publishers, who are obligated to publish a certain amount of content on a rigid schedule, or who may be obligated to explain potential lapses in blogging. As publishers, this boils down to a customer service issue, in the event that a deadline happens to slip. As readers, this frequently enforces the belief (whether true or untrue) that we have to read a given issue’s content before the next issue is released.

The corpus vs. the conversation

I care very deeply about the idea that a periodical can build up a massive stash of useful, insightful content over time. Emigre did this. McSweeney’s is doing this. The New Yorker’s longer pieces accomplish this, if you cherry-pick. Lots of long-form journalism does this. Regardless, I believe that 1) we can make a conscious decision to design periodicals such that they fulfill this; 2) this isn’t a black-or-white thing, as some content can be jettisoned when it’s not appropriate to some sort of central mission, or there can be multiple different categorizations of a publication’s content; 3) there’s a positive correlation between broader critical respect of a publication and its ability to function like this.

To me, this is the most interesting topic, and I could probably write a lot more about it, but I’ll leave it be for right now.

Decontextualization and bundling

Content can be reorganized in two ways: separate pieces from one corpus can be put together in new ways, or articles can be collected from many different sources. So e.g. you’d have a playlist only of one artist’s songs, making a mix CD like that; or you’d have a playlist of that artist’s genre that happened to contain a few of the artist’s songs in addition to others’.

The staying power of content

Not like this, although that is still really important, but rather how timely and trendy the content is, and how useful and interesting it will be to read at some point down the line. There is content that I don’t care about tomorrow; there is content that I want to re-read in twenty years. One semi-related point: it’s easier to build a corpus out of content that has more staying power.

The necessity for an iPad app

A native iPad app is never necessary, but if there is one, the content had better be braindead easy to share outside its sandbox. See aforelinked.

I have no idea what I am doing and wrote this in twenty minutes in one take

I’m sure other people have better insights about this, as well as major points that I am surely missing, but I figure this post is easier to read than the tweets page that I posted at the top, there, so that has to be worth something.

How we meet and what we say.

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:29:00 -0500

Rands covered this, more or less, so this post is probably going to come off all “me-too” about the whole thing, but it’s important enough to bear repeating, at the very least. In the past four weeks, I went on some exhausting, masochistic marathon where I attended four conferences in three time zones:

A barcamp-style one-day thing where I spoke about book design;
A ridiculously intimate, single-track conference with forty attendees and a dozen speakers, which involved some of the kindest people I’ve ever met;
Another ridiculously intimate, single-track conference with two hundred and fifty attendees - including, more or less, everybody that I respect and love on the internet - that focused on building relationships and making cool stuff;
And a large conference in a hotel, with some inspirational and insightful talks among several tracks, where I spoke about dark patterns in user experience.

Each conference is a reflection of its organizers, of course, and the configuration of each conference speaks well to the kinds of relationships that were formed, and the kinds of conversations that were had. You can roughly guess how surface (or how deep) the conversation went at each of these, and having the opportunity to run that gamut has helped focus my opinions about the conferences that I want to attend in the future.

After one of them, on the flight home, I wrote in my notebook, buried in a list of priorities and resolutions: more hangouts with fewer people. I vastly prefer sitting down with somebody, one on one, than I do holding giant parties or social functions (despite all possible evidence to the contrary). Which is all to say, mapped onto this whole gradient of design circlejerkery that we’re putting forth here, that I would much rather hit up the smaller conferences, held in the middle of nowhere, with internet use frowned upon, than the larger ones.

Which isn’t to say that I refuse to speak at (or even attend) the larger ones, but rather that if you gave me a choice, I’d probably select shivering in a teepee with six other dudes over the comfy corporate-expensed hotel room; or (less drastically) the single track, self-selecting, relatively chill conference over the massive, downtown-hosing clusterfuck that has become so thoroughly overrun by the advertising and social media industries that the makers, those actually responsible for cool shit, avoided it near wholesale, with many of them not buying passes, and all of them huddling in bars on the fringe, in quiet places, waiting out the storm, and doing the best they can. For example. (Sometimes things don’t play out perfectly, of course, so let’s assume we’re trying to describe a more ideal state here.)

I imagine I’m not very special on this front: that i’m one data point in a broader trend, and people are seeking this kind of intimacy after what all has gone down in the past year. I reckon we’re much the better for it, though, and we’ll see this bear out in coming years. Here’s to more good things.

How I do.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:31:00 -0500

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.

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:27:00 -0500

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.

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:45:00 -0500

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.

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:12:00 -0500

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.

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:24:00 -0500

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.

Mon, 30 May 2011 11:28:00 -0500

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.