Make Seriously | Design and Life

It’s been too long between posts, so I thought I’d pop in a few words. (Posting has been on the backburner with the million things I have to get done as well as the broken A/C in the house this week, going on day 4 of 90+ heat with no relief!)

Yesterday was the staff retreat for the agency I work at. This year we had a bit of fun with social media at the Indianapolis zoo. Instead of a traditional scavenger hunt, we had our resident pregnant lady sending us tweets for clues from back at the Riverhouse (she couldn’t do the walking, so she got the joy of being home base). The team leaders each were subscribed to her (protected) feed, and as they got clues remotely the teams were to take photos to match the clue and then upload them to flickr. All in all it was a very fun experience.

At the end of the day, my colleague working home base commented that it was fun to be back at control because she got to see what was happening in next-to-real-time as we uploaded and tagged our photos. She knew where we were and what we were doing, and got to watch the search unfold as we completed it. While I’m sure the scavenger hunt idea using social media isn’t new by any means, I think it serves as a great example of how social media can be used.

For instance, suppose you have multiple reporters in who agree to set up a single flickr account and then individually post to sets. Now you get to watch the story unfold from three different angles as it happens, and something that would otherwise be missed by a lack of personell or cooperation can be caught. Or maybe you’re lost and need help. You can send out images of where you are and can get immediate feedback if anyone can identify the landmarks. It’s very, very powerful when used creatively.

Ad Templates and a Painful Reality

It’s a funny thing to see what can happen when you’ve done an ad as a template. I did some pro-bono work for a local non-profit, designing an ad for a series. After the first one, they said they’d like to just go forward with it as a template and requested my files. Since it’s a pro-bono job, and I’m not one to lose my daylight hours lightly, I went along with this. I know better than that, of course. I know and have seen what happens when designers pass off their work to clients who want to move forward with it on their own, I just didn’t think it would happen this time. Sadly, it did.

The image on the far left is the original ad (I don’t have the published version, I never caught an issue with it inside) The middle one is the first iteration that I didn’t touch. You can see where they dropped the screening on the background to make the type legible, and added a drop-shadow to the logo, making it impossible to read what’s on the right side (also note, I did not design the logo, just used it) The titling was the serif instead of the slab-serif, and far too tightly leaded, completely breaking the rules I had. They changed the location of the contact information as well and placed it before any information of events. Really though, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.

Unfortunately, this was not true of the second ad. There is no background image, period. I used easily found faces, yet they chose whatever seemed to be convenient (at least it would appear) for the header. The logo got blown up to ginormous (it’s almost a full 2″ wide”) the justified text that I spent so much time making even is completely neglected, word spacing gone crazy. All formatting, for that matter, is gone. It’s just text on a page and a logo.

It’s okay though. It’s a learning experience for me, and hopefully one for the client. There’s a clear degree of ability and sensitivity that got lost along the way and which will leave the ads getting neglected as well.

And it’s an important lesson, I think, for all people when it comes to design. It’s not something anyone can do. It takes time, training and visual sensitivity. It takes intention. Color, type and layout all matter. Hierarchy helps guide the viewer through the information. The value of this skillset is critical for an ad to be effective, and with each removal from that skillset the ad becomes clearly less effective (not to pat myself on the back too much). So many people are happy to dismiss designers, or agencies, because they don’t see value in their services. They assume that a nephew with photoshop is the same as a professional designer. Hopefully the lesson here, is to think that such is as silly as thinking a child with toothpaste is a dentist. The child could clean teeth, but I wouldn’t want to go to them for an exam.

You Website Will Be Assimilated

As is fairly typical during my day, I checked UnderConsideration’s Quips. It’s basically a wall where Armin Vit posts cool design-related things on the left, and visitors do likewise on the right. Sometimes it’s just normal stuff, sometimes it’s cool stuff. And sometimes, just sometimes, there is something so amazing it blows my mind. It’s no secret that YouTube has been getting revamped by people wanting to use it in new ways. Many will already be familiar with Nintendo’s very cool advertisement for WarioLand: Shake It. If you’ve been a loyal reader here, you may also be familiar with YouTube Street Fighter.

Well, BooneOakley just blew my mind. Think about the video below that you’re about to watch. That is their website. Yes, that’s correct. Their website is embedded in my website as a fully-functioning, fractal-style, mind-blowingly creative concept:

That this can happen, period, is incredible. You can even try going to their home domain: www.booneoakley.com. Guess what you’ll be redirected to? Yep. Not only do they not need to design or host ANY content, they can have any other company (or design blog, a lá MakeSeriously) HOST their website by embedding the YouTube video. It helps that they’re creative and have cool work anyway, but the concept itself is just amazing.

The only costs for their entire web promotional efforts are to purchase a domain name. No hosting required. No site-building. No broken links to worry about. No one to maintain content. No bandwidth restrictions (thank you third-party hosting!) All of those costs slashed, with SO much value added by taking advantage of a free, universally known video hosting website. They can have their whole website hosted anywhere that a video can be embedded. They can upload and easily change content and “linking” at any time. It’s just so cool to see companies to look at new forms of “media” and take such great leaps to make them awesome.

Twitter is not Statistically Sensible

If you’re in the business of marketing, or if you work with marketers, or if you read blogs done by marketers you may have noticed a new game that’s gotten wildly popular: Statistic Says. It’s an exciting new game that takes Twitter to a whole new level by finding statistics relating to the demographics and use of Twitter, then making up stories about it’s future boom or bust. While it’s a lot of fun, it’s about as useful as looking to Hollywood for accurate depictions of history.

The unfortunate reality of the situation is that most of the competitors in Statistic Says don’t actually know how to read, or use, statistics. Tossing fuel on the fire, Harvard Business released a set of statistics that examine who is using Twitter and who they follow. The real trick to going through this report is interpreting the data.

Watching this hit, I noticed a general reaction to a particular statistic: Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.

It seems that there are two camps on this.
1) Nobody actually uses Twitter! If most people only post once, it shows that it’s pretty useless!
2) Twitter isn’t about posting, or Tweeting. It’s about other people Tweeting and gleaning information.

What Harvard Business did, instead of trying to interpret the data alone, was look at trending from other “social media” sites. They compared contribution rates from users of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook and noticed that Twitter was far more like Wikipedia than Facebook. As a user of all three, I can’t say I find the trend surprising.

During a day of using Twitter, I find that there are several kinds of people, including those that never tweet. The catch, however, is that they still use Twitter. Compare me to Guy Kawasaki for instance. You’ll notice a small (read: enormous) disparity in our posting rates. Me: 826 updates, 66 followed, 107 following. Guy: 25,411 updates, 122,767 follwed, 127,137 following. We may not use Twitter equally. I have 3.2% of his total posts and only follow .05% of the total number of users he does.

However, this follows the exact trend that Harvard Business points out: the top 10% of active users account for 90% of the content. It’s just like Wikipedia. Most of the people who use Wikipedia (and Twitter) don’t actually go there to push content. They don’t have a whole lot to say. Maybe nothing. Instead, they find value in watching it and listening. A few examples of my own use include following the Indianapolis Star’s shopping feed on Black Friday to find out where the lines and sales were. Or following RedBox to get a free rental every Monday. Maybe it’s following Mike Massimino to find out how the Hubble repair mission is going. It could be following the Yankees to get scores on my phone without having to pay for a subscription.

Whatever the case may be, Twitter users aren’t always “users” in the sense that they contribute content. To see the tweeting rate and take it to mean the usage rate is to ignore some very common sense facts about statistics. With that, I leave you with one more thing to think about: lurkers. If you participate on message boards, you likely have noticed the large number of people who never post as well as the very few people who post a lot. The same is true of a very public, very real time message board.

I Drawr Pictchers

In my down time, I like to hone my illustrating ability since I don’t really get a lot of time to do it otherwise. I’ve gotten to illustrate a lot more lately, but as you can see from this sketch (done on a post-it) it’s been a while. Hopefully I’ll get to keep doing some illustrating, and there may even be a job getting lined up for a novelist! Not sure about taking that on in my free time, but at least I’ll talk to him and see what’s the scenario.