David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
I have noticed in looking around at desks of various people in my office, that some people, like myself, take a “Google” approach to organizing: everything is just in one big pile, and when you need something, you just sort through it and find what you need. Other people take the “Yahoo!” approach to organizing: everything is in nice, neat piles, or even filed away by project or what have you.
Don’t you hate getting a two-minute long voicemail from someone, at the end of which, they tell you their phone number so fast you don’t have time to write it down? People will like you much better if you leave your phone number both at the beginning and the end of your message. They get two chances to write it down, and if they miss it the first time around, they don’t have listen to the entire message again to get another chance.
I dedicated today’s would-be blogging time to researching and writing a comment about Typographygate, the scandal surrounding forged documents about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.
As an “expert” I can say these documents were definitely not created with technology that would be available in an office in 1972. As you will see if you read my comment, these documents are forged very badly, so badly I wonder if they meant to make a few mistakes.
I came across The Visual Thesaurus, which is a fascinating tool for examining the relationship between words. This is a great example of Human-Computer Interaction knowledge at work. Sophisticated visualization applications such as this will continue to bring art and technology together, and demand graphic designers that have a much better understanding of technology, psychology, and the relationship between form and space in establishing hierarchy than today’s graphic design curricula tend to offer.
A common trend in writing is to come up with “clever” names for articles. This annoying attempt to create reader curiousity is only appropriate for print design. The web is another story.
Not only is writing on the web for humans, but it is also for machines, or in many cases, humans using machines that help them find what they want. If a typical contemporary print magazine contained an article about naming articles, there is a good chance that it may be called “What’s in a Name?” While this is annoying to a reader who is trying to decipher what the article is about, this title will not be significantly detrimental to a reader’s ability to find it (though I have many times flipped through my magazines, trying to find that great article I read, only to find out after scanning over the right issue many times that it had been named irrelevantly). However, if that same article is put on the web, not only do you essentially exclude your useful article from search queries about “naming articles appropriately,” but you also run the risk of mucking up the search results for someone who is looking for the origin of the popular Shakespeare quote.
So, next time you write a blog, imagine, if you were someone searching for the information in that article, what words would be in your query. Then, try to include those words in the title of your blog. It’s true that the contents of the blog may be relevant to what someone is searching for, but that information only has a <p> tag around it. The title of a blog on my page has an <h3> tag on it, which holds much more weight as important information to a search engine than a <p> tag. Then, in the archive of my blog, each page <title> includes the title of the blog in it, which I have found to have more semantic weight than anything for determining search rankings.
Keep in mind that you should title your blog postings relevantly. Just because “brittney spears” is a popular search query, including it in the title of your blog post won’t help your search rankings any unless there is truly valuable information in your blog about brittney spears. Search engines such as Google will get you sorted out one way or another if your information isn’t truly pertinent to said search query. I know that seems to run contrary to my previous point about the Shakespeare quote, but nevermind that, just be a good web citizen and name your blogs appropriately.
I spoke with Michael Braley the other day to ask him if he wanted to judge AIGA Nebraska’s awards show, which I am co-chairing this year with Donovan Beery from eleven19, but he couldn’t make it on the weekend in question. Darn. He gave an awesome presentation about his design process when I was going to Iowa State. That presentation had a strong influence on my design process, and I’d love for the design community in Nebraska to see it. Maybe I can get him to come for his very own event.
Here is an image of the type exercise I wrote about in my previous blog:
I used only proximity to establish hierarchy in the content (all of the type is the same size). One could also argue that I used different capitalization states. The relationship between space and form in this piece is also based on the Golden Section, but I can’t remember precisely how, nor would I like to reveal the “secret.” It’s still very arbitrary though, I assure you.
Here is a PDF if you’d like a closer look.
I have, for the time being, abolished ornament on my blog. Yes, there is nothing but type on it. For usability’s sake, hyperlinks are still underlined, and the fact that I use color to differentiate information is perhaps questionable in this minimalist approach, but I feel much more free now that I have broken the chains of ornament.
It’s not so much that I think that ornament is evil. I do this to make a statement. Graphic Design’s academic programs, from what I have seen, have chosen to concentrate on visuals, and the copying of “styles,” at the expense of their students’ sensitivity to form and space.
Something such as a blog is, in it’s sublime sense, purely information. Most blogs take advantage of the wonderful semantic markup of the web, which, when used wisely, enables search engines such as Google to find the most relevant information to what you are searching for. There’s increasingly more information out there (duh!) so relevancy is more important than ever. It seems that many college Graphic Design curriculums have forgotten that Graphic Design all starts with the transfer of information (this all feeds into my disdain for all-Flash websites and text in images, but that is for another post, and maybe not even then, because (futile) attempts to pound these concepts into the heads of members of the general Graphic Design community have been made) and I don’t mean “information” as in some esoteric, masturbatory, “concept” you are trying to support, I mean information…the useful kind.
So, rather than learning about typographic nuance, students must resort to rummaging through CA to decide what “look” to copy (many of these “looks” are simply rip-offs of the pop-culture graphics of yesteryear). So, I present to you an exercise in space and form. The form being the letters and word-images, and the space being the space between these forms. It’s like that exercise in school that was a great exercise when taught at the Basel School of Design, and was supposed to teach you that the only necessary factors for establishing hierarchy are: proximity, size, weight, color (I’ll omit “visual punctuation” for the sake of supporting this theory that I simply do not have time to assimilate irrefutable information on), but that somehow got bastardized by your reconstituted design school’s curriculum. In my case, we were assigned to typeset a recipe, which has a hierarchy depth of TWO (ingredients and steps). A couple years later, when I finally realized what the actual objective of that exercise was supposed to be, I had to resort to independently re-typesetting the information on a deodorant bar to truly understand the nuances that establish hierarchy (I’m dead serious…I still have the files if you want to see them).
P.S. I have had the honor of being invited to be an author at Be A Design Group and this post, as well as some other future posts, will appear there as well as here.
Since starting blogging, I have increasingly found myself referring people to my blog, rather than explaining things that already reside there. Though my blog isn’t particularly personal, it reminds me of those rather impolite mass-emails you may get from a friend on occasion saying “This is what is going on in my life: yadda yadda.” I say rather impolite because my natural reaction has always been “Who are you to think I care?” and “Am I not important enough for you to write an e-mail just for me?”
That’s what’s great about blogs:
Anyway, now I sometimes find myself explaining something that happens to already be on my blog, then I get fed up, stop explaining, and simply say “just read my blog.” How selfish of me to consider my time so precious that another moment of human interaction isn’t worth explaining something an extra time.
Some people get offended if you don’t read their blog. I had someone ask me, “Hey, David, how is the blog going?” I, of course, responded “Don’t you read it? If you read it you wouldn’t have to ask me that question.”
I think some day in the future a man will come home from work and say to his wife “Hi, honey, how was your day?” and her response will be a hurt “Don’t you read my blog!?” Or, he might even hear “Are you reading another woman’s blog!?”
I have for some time noticed it, but didn’t know what to call it until today. Affluenza: the disease of epidemic proportions that causes Americans to sacrifice their health, communities, and families, all for the senseless pursuit of owning stuff, or simply “wealth” to buy stuff. Apparently, there’s a TV show on it, a book, and seminars to help combat it (the friend who introduced me to Affluenza noted that perhaps to buy the book was to demonstrate that you have Affluenza). I love this quote from the Amazon.com book review:
“To live, we buy..all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity.”
Apparently this book won’t teach you anything you don’t already know, but it’s exciting to witness our society finally waking up.
Do I have affluenza? I score 15 points on the Affluenza Diagnosis Test, which puts me just below having mild Affluenza. Well, nobody is perfect, and it’s not like all posessions are bad. Some of the things that may or may not make me guilty of Affluenza:
My personal belief is that if you truly have an intrinsic passion for something, owning a few things that help you exercise that passion is okay. That’s why I won’t count my two guitars, my CD’s, and my book collection. Perhaps I shouldn’t count my computer being on all of the time, because it enables me to exercise my passion for design and for the internet (I believe there is virtue, if used for certain things, in the information classification and transfer that the internet makes possible). Also, working alot of hours has been cited as a symptom of Affluenza, but I do that because I like what I do (not that I never work a few more hours than I’d actually like to).
Of course, the “passion” argument sucks, because someone could say “I have a passion for driving an obnoxious tank that gets 6 miles a gallon half an hour to and from work down the main arterial road of my city,” and that’s not cool. I guess if you’re concerned about it, ask me, and I will tell you whether you should make your purchase or not. I’ll get this all sorted out some day into a solid argument, but until then, just be careful.
A truly fascinating art project related to this from right here in Nebraska: Obsessive Consumption.
Sidethought: I wonder if our economy would just collapse if everyone were magically cured of Affluenza.