April 2006
Get Creatives
Danny Ocean and Charlie Croker knew that pulling off “the big jobs” meant assembling the right team of experts. And that’s true in the creative world as well as the criminal.
In this month’s column for The Creative Forum, Montrealers Marie-Jo Leroux and Warren Wilansky tell me how they build and manage great teams for their videogame and web development companies, respectively. If you feel like it, post some followup questions at the Forum and we’ll see what answers we can get for you.
April 28, 2006 in Published Articles
Rebel sell, rebel style at Sun Microsystems
With Scott McNealy handing the reins of Sun over to Jonathan Schwartz, gossip abounds in regards to Schwartz’ hippie-nerd-engineer ponytail. Would he “give in to the Man” and cut it off, or remain a True Rebel™ and keep it?
I’m sure Schwartz has his own reasons for his tonsorial choices, but the commenters on that article who think a ponytail is “rebellious” or “anti-corporate” need to have their heads examined.
I mean, it’s rebellious the same way a leather jacket and a motorcycle is, which is not at all. It’s just another individual choice available to citizens of our lovely liberal free-market world. But of course the marketing of such things as “rebellion” still sells Harleys to over-the-hill dentists in Tucson.
On a similar note, Earth Shoes (they’re still around?) are rebel-selling their latest campaign: “Different, Like You!”: of course, written in a sort of extreme-skateboardery jagged font with a Photoshop glow effect added.
Yep, I buy negative-heel, spine and posture-supporting shoes to express my dissent with mainstream culture and show how extreme I am to others…don’t you?
April 28, 2006 in Branding | ✍ 1
Cultural literacy: seen these movies? (via Kottke)
Jumping on a meme here, via Jason Kottke:
Film critic Jim Emerson recently compiled a list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate. How well do you score?
Continue reading “Cultural literacy: seen these movies? (via Kottke)”
April 26, 2006 in In Real Life | ✍ 3
37signals does Patterns, too
How could I forget Ryan Singer’s article on design patterns over at Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog - although to be fair, he doesn’t get much into the concept of patterns themselves and why they’re useful. From the comments thread, a reader suggests the book The Design Of Sites: Patterns, Principles and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience. And browsing quickly through Amazon, I note the upcoming O’Reilly book Ajax Design Patterns by Michael Mahemoff, which should be a great companion to Jennifer Tidwell’s book mentioned earlier.
April 25, 2006 in Web Standards & Usability
Pattern Languages for the Web, part III
As usual, I’m not the first to think of these things; a quick sweep of the Interweb reveals a slew of IA, HCI, design and development sites with repositories of design patterns. Here’s a few.
- The University of Italian Switzerland hosts 28 design patterns under the categories of Interface and Layout, Structure and Navigation, and Content. They also have a showcase of practical applications of patterns for diverse kinds of sites and desktop apps.
- As previously noted here, Yahoo! open-sourced a lot of their UI library, but I missed the fact that they published a series of design patterns for developers, too.
- MIT’s Jennifer Tidwell, author of the O’Reilly book Designing Interfaces, published Common Ground, a pattern language for human-computer interaction. back in 1999.
- Martijn van Welie’s patterns list.. Note there are also pattern pages here for GUI design and mobile interfaces.
And there are many, many other sites with such patterns available, far too many to link to in one post; there are, however, some great repositories of these links:
- Tom Erickson’s Interaction Design Patterns list.
- The IAWiki’s list of sites about design patterns (some of which are reproduced here).
- The CHI 2006 conference is going on right this minute here in Montreal. They have ongoing workshops and forums on design patterns. (Conference blog here.) In the past, they’ve discussed work on creating a single, unified repository to manage collections of design patterns.
April 23, 2006 in Web Standards & Usability
More About Pattern Languages
Adapted from an ongoing email exchange with Andy Rutledge, which helped clarify my thinking a bit.
What threw some people off about the initial post in this series is my use of the word “design” — which I use in the sense of industrial design: how it all works together, to solve a problem.
For example, in the history of the automobile, it’s taken 10,000 years to go from the discovery of fire to the launch of the Toyota Prius. We have an accumulated body of knowledge about all aspects of the process of building and using cars, from basics like woodworking and metallurgy to the invention of the assembly line, time-and-motion studies, robotics, ergonomics and visual perception studies, modern road-building techniques, safety studies, traffic studies, etc….Without design patterns, we’d have to reinvent everything from scratch every time we wanted to go from A to B.
To further the analogy, consider the fact that the “user interface” of most cars are surprisingly identical, including the placement of pedals and controls, even down to the little icons on those buttons and controls — while the size, power, type of engine, fuel and exterior styling may vary dramatically. Are these design patterns at work?
Continue reading “More About Pattern Languages”
April 20, 2006 in Web Standards & Usability
Before we continue, let me say just this
Joe Clark and Andy Rutledge express some concern that I’m confusing “web development” with “web design.”
I respect and admire these two gentlemen’s work tremendously, but I think both of them are misunderstanding where I’m coming from, and I’m probably to blame for that for not being clearer from the outset.
So here goes…
Continue reading “Before we continue, let me say just this”
April 20, 2006 in Web Standards & Usability | ✍ 2
Pattern Languages For Web Design & Development
Formerly titled: What is Good Web Design?
UPDATE 2. Oooh boy. I think the title is throwing people off…still. Let me change this and make some edits for clarity…to reflect the real emerging focus of what I want to talk about here. Also, if you haven’t already, please check out the post linked in Update 1, below, and there’ll be another one specifically about Pattern Languages up momentarily. Isn’t evolution fun, kids?
UPDATE 1. If you’re coming to this article from Andy Rutledge’s DesignView, welcome! And please have a look at this bit of clarification before coming back. Like life, blogs are a work in progress…please comment as much as you like, let’s keep it constructive, that’s all I ask.
Three blog posts got me thinking about the idea of “best practices” in Web design lately, from three different perspectives: process, standards and user experience design.
- D.Keith Robinson talks about differing web design processes, although the post digresses into a discussion of different working styles - how formal and informal, off-the-cuff or rigidly documented things get depending on the client.
- Joe Clark’s rant (possibly NSFW) about the general cluelessness of the Toronto web design community when it comes to even basic standards, much less accessibility. (via Boris)
- Lea Alcantara’s questioning of how we often justify our web design decisions on rather shaky empirical grounds.
In reading these essays, I feel like the Web world, as young as it is, is still grasping, making things up as it goes along, constantly reinventing the wheel. As commenter Joshua notes below, we’re still in the trial-and-error phase and the underlying technology is in constant flux. A few brave souls beat the drum for standards (Zeldman, Bowman, et al), people looking to solve their own problems invent tools and give them away, where they become widely adopted (SiFR, Textile, etc.).
But it’s still a kind of free-for-all. Unlike, say, graphic design or typography or even mechanical engineering, where hundreds of years’ worth of accumulated knowledge informs the practice, Web design has a scant decade or so behind it, and its democratic practice means that thousands of amateurs are out there, making their first 1000 mistakes at any given moment, in public.
I left a comment on Lea’s blog to the effect that it seems like we’ve moved awfully fast; the “printing press” was just invented yesterday but we’ve already leapt to David Carson-style deconstructed design without passing through the intermediate stage of defining a classical school of practice, as embodied in a pattern language.
Continue reading “Pattern Languages For Web Design & Development”
April 18, 2006 in Web Standards & Usability | ✍ 4
Indie Idol?
Furthering the thoughts from the last post: Isn't it strange that there's practically no regularly scheduled show devoted exclusively to live pop music performances on North American television, aside from bands appearing in the music slot on talk shows, awards shows, Live 8-type events, and presented-after-the-fact concert films? (and, maybe at a stretch, the Pop Idol shows?)
The UK (and presumably, other European countries) have had a long history of these kinds of shows - Ready, Steady, Go!, The Old Grey Whistle Test, So It Goes, The Tube, Later with Jools Holland, and even if it's lipsynced, Top of the Pops.
Why doesn't any TV network in Canada have some sort of show like this? Did we ever have a real live-music show that was...you know, for kids?
Continue reading “Indie Idol?”
April 16, 2006 in Music | ✍ 5
The Social Economics of Indie Rock III: The Search For Schlock
Ok, no long treatise this time, but now that I've had some time to digest it a bit, what is up with Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew's disdainful comments about the Canadian Idol kids at the 2006 Junos?
I think everyone with two bits of sense realizes that the global franchise that is Pop Idol is not going to generate the next Radiohead - or even turn up the next J.D. Fortune.*
The Pop Idol kids are vocal athletes, champion melismatists, who are made to sing goopy prepackaged Diane Warren-esque pop songs and ballads for their shot at the top. They're not allowed to play their own songs, sing in their own style, or play an instrument (much less rap, while we're at it).
And they know it. This is what they sign up for - a disposable, one-hit-wonder, moment in the sun.** It's not a million miles away, conceptually, from the Eurovision song contest.
And whoever watches the show, spends money to vote via 1-900 number, or buys the CDs knows it, too.
Broken Social Scene's audience probably doesn't overlap the Canadian Idol demographic. No one is forced to watch the show, listen to the songs or buy the Pop Idol CDs, either. So it's not like someone is stealing sales from indie labels; I don't think there's any conspiracy by major labels to keep indies down, not that I'm aware of, anyway, and after all, the music business is not a zero-sum game. Music lovers will buy whatever they want.
At its root Drew's comment isn't really aimed at the major labels, but at the Canadian audience that gives Idol its cultural currency. In truth, he's accusing them of having bad taste. It's the old rebel sell all over again.
And given the current ascendance, both critical and commercial, of the Canadian indie scene, it seems a bit disingenuous for Drew to cry "corporate oppression" when his band's records*** are mandatory listening for cultural cognoscenti.
If they're not making enough money, maybe cutting the band back to a 4-piece and writing some songs that girls can dance to is in order?
Continue reading “The Social Economics of Indie Rock III: The Search For Schlock”
April 15, 2006 in Branding | ✍ 2
We Have Moved...
...from the home office, to the Belgo Building, and now to new offices at the edge of Mile-End and the Eastern Plateau, steps away from Avenue Mont-Royal and Lafontaine Park. And it rocks.
I'm renting a desk, so to speak, from premier print designers Black Eye Design. They recently moved out from a downtown space shared with web supremos Plank into their own, shiny new digs up here in urban bohemia.
More about that partnership later - in the meantime, please update your address books:
King Marketing, Advertising + Communications (Montreal)
1701 Rue Marie-Anne E.
Suite 1
Montreal, Quebec
H2J 2E2
My cell is also now my main business phone: 514-795-4795
And the main Black Eye number should you wish to say hi to those lovely folks: 514-940-2121.
