March 2006 Archives
Tomorrow's April Fool's Day, but none of these links are a joke.
It's Friday and there's dead mouse smell lingering around my cubicle. That must mean it's time for a link roundup. At some point in the near future I plan to again add some real content to this site, but in the meantime links to others adding real content will need to do the trick. Also, I'll make another plea: If you have any thoughts on the design of this site or want to help me by taking a look at my thoughts for the redesign, please let me know.
April Fool's Day
Yup, it's that time of year again.
Design
Two Favorites
- Apparently there's a section in New York Magazine called High Priority and each week they ask a different designer to create a graphic for it. According to Design Observer the rules are simple: "The illustration is 4.4 inches high by 6.875 inches wide; it has to include the five events, the dates of the week, and the words "High Priority;" and it can only use two colors, red and black." Check out the full gallery of designs.
- I like Guy Kawasaki. Check out his recent post The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy. It includes eight ways to go about doing it, but more importantly, it's all based on being obsessed with the pursuit of excellence and better customer service rather than beating the competition.
Word up. That's it for now.
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Is he Mario Lopez? Or AC Slater? The world may never know . . .
Sorry about the quietness, I was in San Francisco for the last few days. Once I finish catching up with everything I should be back on a regular posting schedule.
Until then, here's something for your viewing pleasure. Team Tiger Awesome presents:
As a special treat (or whatever you want to call it), I did a quick interview with Nick Mundy, Chief Awesomeness Officer of Team Tiger Awesome. Their newest video, 28 Day Slater, just made prime-time on Channel102.net. For anyone around the NYC area, the screening of next month's episode is on April 24 at the Magnet Theatre.
Noah: Why Slater? Why now?
Nick Mundy: Slater is not just a person, he is an ideal. If you werent a blond haired guy with three names or you hit puperty before 18, you wanted to be Slater in high school and junior high. Plus, Derek looked just like him, and we were too lazy to think of anything else.
Noah: And if you were blond I assume you wanted to be Zach?
Nick Mundy: No i might be Jeff, the guy who stole Kelly from Zach... man, that is some good time.
Noah: Who would win in a fight between Slater and Ryan from the OC?
Nick Mundy: Dance fight or regular?
Noah: Give me the results of both bouts.
Nick Mundy: Slater 9.8 to Ryan's 7.6. Regular, Slater would pin him in a minute flat.
Nick Mundy: Would Ryan be willing to wear spandex?
Nick Mundy: I dont know, this season kinda sucks.
Noah: On an awesomeness scale of 1 to 10 what would you give Slater?
Nick Mundy: I would give him the ranking of Slater.
Noah: Are there any other television characters on the awesomeness scale? Have you ever considered renaming it the slater scale?
Nick Mundy: Scott Baio.
Noah: Is it possible that there's a correlation between awesomness and hair products?
Nick Mundy: No, but if you have the awesomeness, chances are your hair is awesome. It's in the bible.
Noah: Do you think Slater ever read Shakespeare in high school?
Nick Mundy: I think there was an episode about that and he got dressed up, then Zach got mad. I have a feeling hijinx ensued.
Noah: How is it that one high school was so full of hijinx?
Nick Mundy: I think every high school has it, just some have louder laugh tracks then others?
Noah: Describe the episode in 7 words.
Nick Mundy: Is he Mario Lopez? Or AC Slater? Can I have a 8th word?
Noah: Sure.
Nick Mundy: Boobs.
Noah: Where did Slater draw his power?
Nick Mundy: The children of america and Brandon Tartikoff.
Noah: One more question, is there a more ridiculous last name than Turtle?
Nick Mundy: Yes, S. E. Hinton. Get off your lazy ass and write me a fucking Outsiders sequel, christ.
Noah: Last words.
Nick Mundy: Visit TeamTigerAwesome.com to watch 28 Day Slater and our other shorts and episodes, i think youll like them... oh yeah, ASTROS In the '06.
Noah: Are your last words really going to be a shameless plug?
Nick Mundy: Are you going to do that for me anyway?
Noah: Yup.
Nick Mundy: Then i will go with, Astros in the '06... and Boobs.
Noah: Thanks Nick.
I think Nick said it all, check out the video at Team Tiger Awesome.
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More links to chew on.
It's Friday and last night I drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of wings and watched a lot of really exciting basketball. That means today you get lots of random links I've been meaning to point you to for the last two weeks.
I tried to organize these into groups, but I don't have the energy. Please forgive me.
That's it for this week. Hopefully that's enough to keep you relatively busy this wonderful Friday. I'm thinking about going for another slight redesign of the site, if you've got any thoughts let me know.
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Design is not about 'design,' it's about whatever it is you're designing for.
I know I've been talking about design a lot lately, but it's a subject I can't get off my mind. Beyond just dealing with it on a daily basis at work, by opening my eyes to it, I notice it in every aspect of my life. I like to think I don't approach design like most people, though. I think of it as a holistic process, not a prettying device. I know I must be starting to sound like a broken record on this, but it's a point I feel so certain about I feel like repeating it over and over again.
This time, though, the repetition is going to come in someone else's voice. On Design Observer, Michael Bierut wrote about not writing about design on a design blog. I know it sounds awfully meta and geeky, but his point is one that needs to be made and I think extends well past just design. He wrote:
The great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.
I think that lesson is relevant whatever it is you do. The real visionaries and brilliant minds in this world are able to connect seemingly disparate topics with ease. The biggest innovations often come from finding meaning in what may at first look like a meaningless connection.
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What makes a Moleskine great is that it makes you feel like it deserves great ideas. That's design at its finest.
Today I was having a conversation with a fellow Moleskine fan and we got on the topic of why we liked the notebooks so much. It's not so much the toughness, or the pocket in the back, but rather it's that it feels like a notebook that important ideas should go in. There's no one piece of its design that leads to that conclusion, yet he agreed with me wholeheartedly. When you open the pages of a Moleskine you write more neatly and think more clearly. You feel as though you must give it the thoughts and words that its pages deserve.
Tonight as I was clicking around, I landed on Joshua Porter's site where he had linked to an essay by Joel Splosky on design. Josh pulled out this quote specifically to discuss the essay: "If you have been thinking that there is anything whatsoever in design that requires artistic skill, well, banish the thought. Immediately, swiftly, and promptly. Art can enhance design but the design itself is strictly an engineering problem."
Josh and Joel are both trying to get to the point that there's more to design than just the visuals, and I could agree more, but that's not to say you can't leave them out. Now I have great respect for both Josh and Joel (and have even talked at some length about how much I respect Joel's design take, but it takes more than just 'engineering' to give someone the feeling I described about the Moleskine. That's engineering, art, science, psychology and just about any other discipline you can think of converging together to create something beautiful.
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It's time to stop thinking of education as a transfer of knowledge and start thinking of it as a gateway to learning.
[Editor's Note: This morning on my walk to work my mother and I discussed some of the ideas in yesterday's Education 2.0 post. As we were talking she was taking down some notes, which she sent to me after the conversation. I have then taken what she's written and added some of my own thoughts in italics.]
As you might have suspected, your post struck quite a chord with me. First, let me say how flattering it is to be considered in the same thought as George Siemens, who is my most recent educational hero. I do appreciate your bias on my behalf!
I love what Siemens had to say about visiting virtual museums as 'visiting content.' It always grates on me to hear educators talk about 'integrating technology in the curriculum,' which is on just about every school improvement plan I've ever seen. They definitely don't grasp that as far as the internet is concerned, it's the "curriculum" that must be integrated. They are indeed still " … fixated on the notion of learning content."
To quote you quoting McLuhan, in terms of the internet, only the early adopters have really even thought about what 'the medium is the message' really means. As we discussed this morning, in the traditional educational model, the teacher and textbook were the media – they were the locus of knowledge and authority. Keeping in mind that the word 'curriculum' stems from the Latin for 'current' (as in a river), the 'course' for students was teacher and content-driven. But when the internet is the medium, there is no central authority or locus of control; there is just the current -- the flow and movement of information. Which relates back to my idea of idiocentricity, which puts the user at the center of their information universe.
This analogy seems particularly appropriate to your objection to the phrase 'surfing the net.' As you've said, on a surfboard you're a passenger on a wave – re the net, on a wave of information. But on the internet, you can't be a passenger, you have to be a navigator or explorer. When we discussed it this morning, we concluded that before the internet, every medium had navigational control built into it. Television has a finite number of channels and books have pages. But the internet subsumes all of that, it is essentially infinite. We could visit an almost endless number of pages and, thanks to those behind intranets and the like, never reach the end. The only real navigational elements we have are built into the structure of the medium itself in the form of hyperlinks. For additional navigation we must turn to websites like search engines, furthering the idea that the medium is truly the message.
All of these factors act to put the user/learner in the position of having to learn how to control the content – how to use it for the end that suits his/her own purpose. To get back to education, basically, teachers will increasingly have to be learner-driven – they will have to prepare young people for the reality of a world in which information is both limitless and increasingly accessible – if you know what you're looking for and how to look. The marketing world is feeling the same heat, just look at the number of companies encouraging brand co-creation.
You used the word gateway to describe this new role, contrasting it with broadcast, which is a fascinating way to look at the change in the very concept of how teaching must change. Teachers should be a gateway to the world for their students – helping them explore learning from an access point of their own choice.
I've been thinking about this since your last post on Intention, Attention and Metadata vis a vis what motivates kids to learn, and for most kids, I think it's entering the learning stream from a place of personal interest or curiosity. It's like the whole video game thing and the intrinsic reward of getting to the next level. The trick is to build metacognitive awareness -- not just how to play the game, but understanding what it has taken to get there (a very McLuhanesque concept, actually.) I think that piques curiosity -- makes the player want to, say, read and write about game-playing, creating games, etc. When you follow that course, it very naturally integrates reading, writing, science, math, history … all the things we want kids to understand, and in a very interdisciplinary way. That takes you right back to Siemans connectivism theory -- and to the internet as a metaphor for how the brain works.
You said that metadata is what leads to metacognition. You need to understand the pieces -- the unbundled pieces -- that make the whole before you can understand the thinking behind your thinking. And that's where this needs to go … I think students have to want to understand the pieces, and the only way to do that is to help them find an access point of high interest and then help them become aware of the connections. Then it becomes a facilitated conversation in which both teacher and student are learning. How to get there, however, is a very tough question!
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While we're all busy talking about reforming media, some of those same ideas could help the school system.
Education is a very big issue. While we're all busy talking about 2.0, America's children are being taught like the computer has yet to be invented. If we think making change in the media/tech world is hard, try your hand at education. Trust me, I have a mother whose job it is to find ways to help schools connect with students the system's disenfranchised.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of money in fixing schools, so smart people tend to use their brains for other causes. Luckily, there are a few brilliant people who do it anyway, like my mom and George Siemens.
In a recent entry about a roundtable discussion he had with museum professionals, Siemens discusses his response to the concerns of the group around their "desire to get people to use virtual museum resources." Siemens writes:
I think this is the wrong question. People don’t want to visit your content. They want to pull your content into their sites, programs, or applications. This is a profound change, largely not understood by educators. We are still fixated on the notion of learning content, and we think we are making great concessions when we give learners control over content (and start to see them as co-creators). That misses the essence of the change: learners want control of their space. They want to create the ecology in which they function and learn. Today, it’s about pulling content from numerous sites and allowing the individual to repurpose it in the format they prefer (allowing them to create/recognize patterns). Much like the music industry had to learn that people don’t want to pay for a whole album when all they want is one song, content providers (education, museums, and libraries) need to see the end user doesn’t want the entire experience – they want only the pieces they want. We need to stop thinking that learners will come to us for learning content – our learning content should come to them in their environment.
What does this actually look like? Well, it means that our education platforms should be designed to allow for learners to pull our content into their space. We need to make content open and available to be accessed so that exploration and dialogue can happen on the learner’s blogs, wikis, or personal eportfolios. It’s not about us, it’s about them. The dialogue and learning will happen on their time, in their space, on their device. We must create the ecology that allows for maximum innovation, so that the greatest number of recombinations are possible.
Sound familiar? Of course it does, this is unbundling at its finest. Those same ideas we've been talking about to reform media can be used to fix the educational system. After all, it's pretty much the same model. For years educators have broadcast their teachings to students who were expected to provide their full attention and unwavering belief. Then all of a sudden technology starts to fragment that attention when students start clicking around the internet and realize that following your own path is not a bad thing. Add in the fact that all of a sudden that institution at the center of every school, the library, is increasingly meaningless and you realize that schools are stuck in a world that's passed them by.
So what can we do to help? Well, I think we can start by including them in the conversation. After all, if you really want to change the world, there's no better way than starting when they're young.
My question to everyone is what other 2.0 models could be applied to the educational system? Think about it.
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With everyone talking about attention and more recently, intention, is metadata the real heart of the issue?
2.0 is all the rage. People seem to be attaching it to every word they can think of: web, media, marketing, identity, attention, brisket (that might just be my Grandma). As a term, it's only meaning comes in describing that we've moved past 1.0. It's all but lost its true identity, which comes from the version numbering of software. Semantics behind us, though, the shift is as real as they come.
As we all know, digital technology has opened a giant hole in the side of many a business. The media world was the first and hardest hit because, amongst other reasons, it's they who have relied most on controlling distribution to make money. That's not to say they're doomed, just that if they hope to survive they've got to change their strategies. My point is that this is bigger than buzzwords.
As it exists now, and for the last hundred years, the media industry makes a living by shoving their content out into the wild but keeping it on a leash, so as not to wander too far. Media was essentially a conversation starter, not an active participant. Until digital technology came along, there really wasn't any good way for them to get unbundled and involved.
Unbundling is about separating the meat from the bone so that everyone can easily take a bite. Media organizations need to open themselves and allow their content to join the conversation. To do this requires injecting as much valuable metadata into the pieces as possible. (Non-geeks: metadata is the additional information that can be attached to a piece of information that gives it context. A simple example is that every time you take a digital picture, embedded within that file is the date, time and model of camera that took the photo.)
This is bigger than just media, though. In an excellent article titled Why Things Matter [PDF] Julian Bleecker writes of blogjects: objects that blog. Essentially the idea is that once objects are connected to the internet they can start to enter conversations. By aggregating their metadata, these objects can bring valuable insights that we may not have been privy to before. In English this time: throw some tags on some whales that track water temperature and pollution, then publish that information on the web and you get a firsthand look at the real effects of pollution on the environment. More than anything, though, I walked away from reading this paper with a hankering for more metadata (although it's just a small part of what Bleecker is discussing).
Metadata can help us understand our world in entirely new ways. Wouldn't you like to know how temperature effects you? How about heart rate? What about a shirt that 'knows' everywhere it's been and the manufacturing processes at each point? The more information that's embedded, the bigger the possibilities to play. Being able to take this information and create new tools (mashups) is where this starts to get really exciting.
The thing is, much of the most interesting information is not the stuff that exists on the surface. Attention is at the center of much of the media 2.0 debate at the moment. What is it and why does it matter? Some argue it's intention that's important, but I disagree. Scott Karp sums up my problem nicely: "Media 2.0 will fail without Marketing 2.0, and the evolution of Marketing 2.0 is being impeded by a fundamental principle of human nature  given infinite choice, most of us DON’T KNOW exactly what we want," he explains. Intention's the wrong direction, but I wonder if attention's still not enough either? After all, just the word leaves us feeling as though it's stuff we're already aware of, at least in one way or another. Wouldn't the most interesting learning come from collecting all the metadata we can get our hands, both that which we consciously interact with and that which we don't?
Like Scott, this is where I start to trail off a bit. I don't know that I have the answers . . . yet. I do know that for media businesses to survive they're going to think about how they're going to best prepare their unbundled pieces to enter the world's conversations. Anyhow, I'll keep thinking about it . . .
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Links from a week's worth of internetting.
Guess what folks? It's the time of the week where I throw out the stuff I read and found interesting this week. Just out of curiosity, would you prefer if I wrote up these as short entries as I read them, or are you cool with me putting it into one big entry at the end of the week? Anyway . . . on with the show.
Design
- I got pointed to an old Digital Web Magazine interview with Joshua Davis. When asked, "What would you say is beauty in design?" Davis replied, "Being able to justify every pixel." That's a damn good definition.
- On the other side of beautiful design is Scoble, who talked about the success of sites with ugly design. He wrote, "It’s amazing how few corporate types get that the quality and engineering thought behind your HTML matters more than whether your site is pretty or not." Arghhh.
- Luckily, Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form was there to defend design explaining, "Many sites with a poor visual presentation remain popular on the merits of their content alone. But does their audience enjoy bumping through the site’s awkward graphics and hard to read labels? No, but the personality of the content (it could be high quality, funny, worthwhile, and more) makes the rest bearable. Would their audience be happier if the personality of the presentation matched the personality of the content? Of course." I agree with Luke, design is a reflection of your personality. But underdesign or overdesign should be a design choice. A deli, for example, probably doesn't want to go with a sign that makes it look too elegant because that doesn't properly reflect who they are and what they sell. Beauty is just one aspect of design. Unfortunately, it's the thing people most often focus on.
- Mike Hosier at Speak Up describes the classic advertising agency battle between account and creative. In it he tells the story of a fired creative director who fought back against hearing what the client wanted, saying, "They don’t know what they want. That is our job. It is what we do. We figure that out." This seems to be one of the great conundrums of the advertising industry: Companies hire agencies to create work for them and then dictate the work that the agency creates to a point that they might as well have done it themselves.
Marketing
The last link seems like a nice segue . . .
- Gary Stein on the need for agencies to embrace new media: "'Placing media' is a symantic holdover from the offline-only world. As are insertion orders and even the concept of premium inventory. They all speak to the discipline of putting a message in front of someone and hoping for the best."
- I don't read Seth Godin a whole lot, but he has some interesting things to say about the need of businesses to develop edges. An edge is a product or service outside your core realm (he calls it a cluster). It's a way to make yourself unique. He gives the example of a bar that begins selling hot chocolate. Or, on the flip side, of Pan Am airlines, for whom "First-class long-haul travel was a great sweetspot . . . but when the world changed, they got hammered."
Sports
- Bill Simmons, the sports guy, had a two part email exchange series with Malcolm Gladwell that's worth reading. My favorite bit was when Gladwell explained why he'd be a better GM than the despicable Isiah Thomas: "Would I have traded for Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball -- and about Eddy Curry -- than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player's potential. But I'd look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that's he's been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I'd tell his agent to take a hike."
- In other sports news, has there ever been a more boring or worse presented Olympics than this years? NBC just did a horrendous job with it and The Nation took them to task for it.
Final Thought
- On his Connectivism Blog, George Siemens writes about "how significantly [teaching and learning] have changed due to the internet's affordance of connectivity." In explaining why he doesn't use textbooks in his courses, he writes: "I don't view content as something that learners need to consume in order to learn. As I've stated before...learning is like opening a door, not filling a container. Content is something that is created in the process of learning, not only in advance of learning." All I could think is that's why I have this site. This is a place where I learn by writing. I work through ideas and present them to the world with the hope that I will get some feedback. Hardly any of the writing here represents my conclusions, but rather it's the thinking behind them. I'm working through issues in front of an audience and having a damn good time doing it. I've learned more and thought about a wider variety of topics since starting this site than I can remember at any point in my life (including school).
Thanks for coming along for the ride . . .
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With media changing rapidly it's about damn time marketing followed suit.
I feel like I say it every day, but if you're not reading Terry Heaton, what, may I ask, are you doing with your day? His latest essay, New Metrics and Principles, is up to his usual stellar quality. In it he discusses the need for new marketing principles. Although he's speaking generally about media, I think most of what he has to say relates to just about any brand out there. Anyway, here's his list of new principles with a few of my own thoughts for each.
- Respect. The faceless masses are not so faceless anymore. They've got a voice on the internet and they're not afraid to use it. If companies were stupid enough not to respect their audience/customers before, they better not make that mistake now. Treat them as equals, encourage co-creation, let them know their voice is being heard. Otherwise, they'll find someone else who will listen.
- Genericize. I have to admit I'm a little shaky on this one, not sure I completely get what Terry's trying to say here: "We need the courage to see that even our best "brands" can have baggage, and it usually comes from the hype associated with the brand. Dragging the brand into everything we do, therefore, places unnecessary obstacles in the paths of creatively meeting information and entertainment needs that are out there. We need the willingness to genericize ourselves in some of our work in order to overcome those barriers. We also need a way to measure the effectiveness of the effort." Thoughts?
- Fluidity. Let your brand out of the death-grip for a second and see what happens. Allow people to leave the site, encourage honest communication and find ways to unbundle yourself in a way that allows people to play with the pieces in any way they wish (think APIs).
- Influence. Appreciate it: influence is a direct measure of attention.
- Trust. I have a bit of a hard time getting a handle on trust as a distinct principle because I feel as though it plays it to just about all of them. It's right up there with respect for me. You've got to trust your customers, because if you make them feel empowered then they won't soon forget you.
- Transparency. Big, big, big. No more hiding behind the closed doors of boardrooms. Make your decisions out in the open. Ask people what they think. Encourage feedback. Converse with your customers. Make them feel as though they both understand and are a part of the process and you've earned yourself an evangelist.
- Credibility and reliability. Again, this one is rather over-arching. Your customers are people, treat them that way. Don't rely on caricatures and cliches to communicate with them. Earn your credibility by being yourself, by being transparent, fluid and honest. As for reliability, we're living in a world where endless choice is a reality. If your product's not up to snuff there are 10 other companies who will sell me theirs. Don't screw around and if something should go wrong, admit it and find a way to fix the problem.
- Listen and link. Every company should have someone paying attention to the way people are discussing their brand. Get involved in the conversations, get to know the most passionate customers and don't be scared to talk about people with dissenting opinions. Don't be afraid or insular, be proud and open. Although it may go against your better judgement at first, you'll soon learn that people want to do business with companies they believe in. Earn their trust.
Well, that's it for my comments, make sure you go over and read Terry's full essay and see what he had to say.
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Some of the best quotes of my very busy week.
Friday has finally arrived, and not a day too soon. Here's a wrap up of some of my week's best reading. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
On Branding
These days, the best way to get people's attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a context for people to engage with one another.
From Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market by J. Walker smith, president of Yankelovich Partners. He's right on. It's all about value: With all the choices out there you better do more for me than just tell me how great your product is. I want real value. (Link via Scott Karp's fantastic Publishing 2.0.)
From monochrom Brandmarker. People were asked to draw logos from memory. Check out the results. Think about how deeply logos become burnt into our conscienceless.
On Sports
But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers.
From Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell, an email exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons. That quote is from Gladwell and I never really thought of it that way. Interesting . . .
"I found the original photograph in the archives of Sport Magazine (where Schaap later worked as editor in chief)," Siegel said. "It was an action shot of Jerry West dribbling down the court from one of the Lakers' games. I sketched it, cleaned it up a bit and stylized it. I streamlined the tracing I made  (and) slimmed it down a little bit  so it would work in all applications."
From If West is the NBA's logo, should he be?, the above quote is Alan Siegel commenting on his creation of the red, white and blue NBA silhouette logo. The article is a great history of the professional sports, specifically the NBA's, branding efforts.
On Design
There’s no two ways about it; style matters. And style applied to a web page design is not always just style for its own sake. It’s often a vital supporting element in effective design. Competent designers understand this. The nattering nabobs and little design generals of the online forums do not. Which is why there’s a difference between getting paid and getting comments in a forum.
From The Layers of Design: the style layer by Andy Rutledge (whose writing I've been enjoying quite a bit lately). It's kind of scary how nicely the article compliments my little design rant, which just happened to quote a different Rutledge article.
I suspect what I’m really against is what that term “graphic design� has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I’m just not interested in. To me that idea of “graphic design� is as far removed from my interests as being a milkman or a lawyer. In fact, I’d rather be a milkman. This problem of definition is the same as what happened to the word “modernism�. I consider myself a modernist, but with a lower-case m. in the sense of believing in appropriate, reasoned change. Yet most people consider upper-case Modernism, at least in art and design, as being a fixed, formal style. So I’m really just reacting in some knee-jerk way to the fact that both “graphic design� and “modernism� are so defined in the minds of others, and it makes it difficult to communicate; it’s so easy to be misrepresented.
From Stuart Bailey Speaks Up an interview with the Dutch designer. Feeling pigeonholed sucks.
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The best television station you're not watching.
Last July I wrote about Current TV, the new cable station aimed at 18-34 that Al Gore is somehow involved with. In that article I took Current to task for trying a little too hard.
That was before I had spent time with Current. Now I get it.
Current is television for Generation Y. It's a station with segments of roughly five minutes on a wide variety of topics. It also includes some viewer created content that is first uploaded to the website and then voted on by viewers. Each pod, as they call it, includes a status bar that shows how far along in the segment the viewer is: a clear nod to the iPod. Design is clearly one of the strong suits of the station, everything looks good.
So what?
Current is trying to be the station millions of Myspacers have on in the background. They are a television station created for a multitasking world. Short segments allow viewers to tune in and out. Beautiful design makes the station feel like a good thing to leave on as background art. Viewer created content bridges the gap between the web and the television and encourages people to spend time on the site. In essence, Current has thrown out the old ideas of television and actually embraced some of the changes the internet forces.
On top of that, they're trying to rethink advertising. Instead of running regular commercials they already allow advertisers like Sony, who's video cameras would be appealing to content creators, to sponsor segments. They're now taking the idea a step further by allowing viewers to create the ads. According to Multichannel News, Current is asking viewers to create ads for companies including Sony, Toyota, and L'Oreal. If a viewers ad airs they will be paid $1,000, which is damn cheap for a commercial. If the spot goes beyond Current the producer will ear from $5,000-$50,000 depending on distribution.
Anyway, give it a watch and see what you think. I expect you'll be pleasantly surprised.
FYI, here are some of the more popular cable carriers and the corresponding channel Current can be found: DirectTV (366), Time Warner NY (103), Time Warner LA (116), Comcast SF (125).
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