When I first saw this word show up on Wordnik.com, I thought it was more like, “Man, I really have a huge aitch on my…”, but alas, it turns out that some of our letters have a word dedicated to themselves. This made me intrigued. And so, here you have it. The letter (and word) AITCH. Enjoy
I’m starting something new. Wordguile is meant as a one month project that explores the power of words and how we learn them. Every day this month, I will be posting a new word and somehow bringing that word to life. It is an experiment for me to fall in love with words all over again, but also to remember the incredible power which they wield. They carry connotations and are packed full of meaning. We often forget how many things one word can mean.
Beyond the power of words, this is an exploration in communication. It is a challenge for me to find new ways to communicate the meaning of a word. Many will be visual representations of a word, but I will also be exploring other media for communicating – be it video or music, poetry or prose, look forward to something new from me. And who knows, that something new just may be incredible.
Without further ado, here is the very first Wordguile.
Stay tuned for more.
I left my last job a few months ago for one primary reason. I was a designer working in a vacuum. I was the only designer in the company, a position a lot of people would love (you get paid well, they can’t afford to lose you, etc. ). However, I have a core belief that design is best when it involves other people. Because I was on my own there, I left.
I’ve been at this design thing for a few years now and there’s still one major aspect that I am missing. The social design community – not just in a specific job, but on a broader scale. Here’s the thing. I’m on twitter, facebook, flickr, tumblr, simler, blah blah blah. Somehow, there is a disconnect between this thing we call social media and any actual interaction with other designers. Like any other social situation in the world, there are certain groups or cliques, and it can be hard to break into them. In the design community, you make friends if you produce incredible work or if you have something valuable to say. At least that’s the theory. The reality is more like this. You make one good connection and that person sees something nice in what you do, and they share it. Begin ripple effect.
But that’s where it gets’ sketchy for me. things begin to catch on, which is kind of exciting. Suddenly thousands of people are hitting your site every day, and everybody wants to retweet everything you say on twitter. But what’s so social about that? It might as well be a faceless system. We are still single designers, working in a vacuum. What I’m looking for is for a way to work WITH people on projects. Not some place to show people the projects I’ve completed. That’s a single moment in time (when you share your work), but what about the process. The process is what I’m interested in. I think if we spent more time working on the process rather than trying to promote the product, we would have better products to promote.
I’ve got this list of possible projects scribbled on a piece of paper in a moleskine in a bag I keep with me. It’s always growing. There has to be close to 50 ideas on there - most of them full-on business models. The problem is that for me, ideas get stuck when I have to carry them from idea to product all on my own. It’s not that I can’t do it (although I am increasingly aware of my inadequacy in many areas), but who wants to go through all of that by themselves. I want to work with a team to make things happen. I want to sit down with friends and hammer out the details. I am keenly aware that working with other talented people is going to produce something far greater than I could produce on my own. And so, those ideas will stay on that page, and probably a few new pages, until I can actually find a community. Not a community to share my finished designs with, but one to share my raw ideas with.
The picture of an idea designer is often one of a freelancer, sitting in his PJs, designing the world’s next big thing – alone. Unfortunately, this simply isn’t the reality. While this exists, most of the great products we see were not designed alone at all. There was collaboration, critique and a desire to do something bigger than just one person. That’s where I want to be, and I think that’s where most of us need to be headed. PJs are optional.
While I’m very impressed with the technology, 3D seems to be one of those things that surely won’t catch on. For me, there are just too many barriers. Of course, that means I’m probably wrong, but isn’t this an uphill battle? What’s the benefit?
First, there’s the high price of entry. Don’t think I need to go to far into this one, but who has the money for this stuff? Second, there’s the goofy glasses. Please don’t dismiss this. It is just plain stupid to have to wear huge ill-fitting glasses in a movie theatre, but we are supposed to do it in our homes too? And have they not realized that MANY people complain that it makes their eyes hurt, or that it is blurry, etc. etc. etc? The technology needs some work.
But technology aside, I have consistently had one other major complaint – gimmicks – or, more accurately, just one gimmick. I would love to say this is because of the newness of the technology, but years ago when I went to Disney and saw Donald Duck in 3D, the only thing that was impressive was the wave of people reaching out and trying to touch him as if he were in their face. It seems like every movie being made now has the same silly gimmick. There is always a scene that is only there to make you think something it about to splatter, or jump, or explode, or erupt in your face. It’s just plain cheap.
I went to see Toy Story 3 today. This changed my perspective just one tiny little bit.
I don’t think the use of 3D was gimmicky at all, and in fact, it was very thoughtful. It got me a little excited actually. Their use of 3D in the credits was genius to me. The titles were slightly smaller and pushed slightly into the background, and the names were just a bit bigger and in the foreground. By adding this third dimension to the text, they effectively created a new level of hierarchy that I had never seen before. The names jumped to my attention, and yet the titles were not so far back that they were unreadable. This was a very welcome break to the typical title on the left and name on the right scenario.
I know it’s just one small detail, but that’s what takes things from good to great, isn’t it?
Well, prove me wrong, but I don’t think 3D will be the future of television, or even movies. However, I do think there is an interesting future of a new visual language to be explored here. Exploring how foreground objects relate to background objects could be a very important part of how we design.
Even if there are no new big design revelations, I hope that this can be inspiration to how we think about typographic hierarchy in the future. How can we push certain details back, while highlighting others? While I’m not overly hopeful about the future of 3D, I do hope it can push the visual arts in a positive direction. Only time will tell.
After a conversation at lunch today with Sven Elligen and Alex Coles, I have come one step closer to realizing how I fit into this online design community thing, and the answer is… not as much as I thought. For the past few years I have been trying to make the connection between the design community and the blogging community. It seems like every big designer has an equally successful design blog, and I’m not sure how I haven’t realized this before, but that really isn’t true. The reality is that most of the blogs that I read aren’t by successful designers. They are by successful bloggers (which has dramatically reduced the number of items in my Google Reader as of late).
Without a doubt, there are some really great designers with really great blogs. However, the fact that these two things require different sets of skills is inescapable. I’ve been rounding this corner for a while, but I am really starting to realize that the people I admire as designers are not necessarily the most vocal online and they don’t necessarily have the best or most popular blogs. While this is a fun realization, it also leaves me back at square one in some respects. Where do I find the really great designers, and how do I build design community with them.
There are some really great ways to meet other designers in the online community and I am really appreciative for those tools (Dribble comes to mind). However, it seems that most of these tools are are based on sharing the final product. Even most links on twitter are based around sharing a piece that is just finished. While I think this part of the community is very important, I also feel like it is over emphasized. What interests me more is the process of design.
Without understanding the process of how a design was created, we’re really just looking at one big internet gallery. We need someone to create the tools for designers to collaborate on projects together. I want to find the places where I can share roadblocks in the thought process and ask for help, not by crowd sourcing it, but by creating real relationships with real people that I can talk to about real things. From what I understand, the development community does this much better than the design community. Code is open-sourced rather quickly and then people work on it together. People share ideas and help each other a lot. This interconnectivity is increasingly important as we sit behind our screens day after day after day.
For me, the community of people I work with is very important. It’s one of the most fun and fruitful parts about any project. Some designers are great at working alone. I’m just not one of them. I am most inspired when I’m in conversation about a project we are working on or a particular design philosophy. I am most productive when I work closely with a team. And for me this is one of the main roles of blogging (and a lot of the other community tools we use).
Blogging is another means of communication. I have, for some time, valued the opinion of some of the thought leaders in the design community, and have aspired to offer that same type of advice. However, they are thought leaders because of the valuable things they have to say, which is where we differ. This is why I have decided to rethink how my website is structured.
I enjoy writing and so I think I am going to keep my blog. However, as I was thinking about a new site design, I realized that blogging is not who I am as a designer, and therefore it should not dominate my design website. This means that a redesign will take a little longer as I think about a better way to adequately represent myself on this site. I’m really sick of “Hey, I’m Josh, and I’m a really awesome designer with a great fun personality”, portfolio types of websites – so shoot me if that’s what I come up with.
This is more of a ramble than anything, but I have been wanting a better way to connect with the (quality) design community for quite some time now. I am still searching for it, but now I will be taking steps to create it as well, and to become a valuable part of it.
Let’s work on something together!
If you have any suggestions, or feel I have missed something, I’d love to hear from you
I’ve been in Berlin for almost two months now and, as in any city, I am constantly coming across a unique visual language that identifies this city, giving it a character of its own. As I walk the streets, I am often stopped by the smaller details like iron work on bridges and signage on restaurants. These things are the things we take for granted. Maybe it’s a bit easier to notice them when you are in a new place, and they are not so common as they are to someone that is used to seeing them every day.
The simplest of visual cues often have a large part of forming our surroundings. They can make us feel comfortable or, conversely, they can make us incredibly aware that we are nowhere near home. Coming from a land of blue and green street signs with white text, these typical Berlin street signs are just one more visual sign that I am no longer in America.
Whether welcomed or not, hand-drawn signs (or graffiti covered buldings) are another unique identifier helping us identify where we are. These are two common examples. When I pass them, I know right where I am.
Storefront in Stockholm
Over the Easter weekend, my wife and I took another trip. Turns out there is more to Stockholm than H&M and IKEA (kidding). We really just did the tourist thing, but we were still pleasantly surprised by the city. It made me want to stay longer and explore deeper.
As always, the lady was laughing as I had to stop and take pictures of all the signage through the city as we walked. I’m becoming increasingly interested in the context of the typographic messages that we see. Individually, the type is not always that interesting, but in combination with the storefront, or in contrast to of the rough wall behind the highly designed signedthese pieces of signage start to become an integral part of our surroundings. And we may never consciously think about it, but these signs form a big part of our surroundings.
So without further ado… a snapshot of Stockholm.
Number 45
Another 45?
This next one really made me laugh. Maybe the letter “j” was just really ugly in that font and they really liked this one? Or maybe it fell off, and they only had this one to replace it with. In any case…
I wonder what kind of design they do...
Store Signage
Sometimes it's just a regular apartment entrance. So simple, and yet I love it.
Store signage
As always, you can see more of my found type on my Flickr Page
When I got the email my heart skipped a beat. I was on vacation, checking up on things from an airport in Tahiti. This brought a sense of gravity to our vacation that I wasn’t really expecting. I mean, I had applied to work with them, and I knew (or at least I thought) I wanted to go, but now that it was seriously on the table, I had to make a decision.
In the end of December I saw a tweet from Erik Spiekermann stating that they were looking for a new web design intern. About this time, I was passively looking for a new job, clicking on links like this, so I kept with the trend and clicked through to investigate more about the position.
I hadn’t really been considering any internships, and Germany decidedly wasn’t something on the radar, but I figured it was worth a shot. I went home and told my wife (who just so happened to be pregnant) about sending over my resume. We both laughed, knowing that I had also applied to be the brand presentation manager for Starbucks (something I am by no means qualified to do) and skeptical that anything would ever happen from this. But sometimes life surprises you.
In late January I heard back from EdenSpiekermann in Berlin requesting a skype interview with some members of their web team.
I obliged.
I waited.
Another month later, they told me I was hired… as an intern.
So here I am in Berlin. Interning my little life away.
In case you’ve never heard of Erik Spiekermann, he is someone I had been following on twitter for a while simply because he is one of the world’s typographic and design leaders. From what I had learned about him previously, he knows more than most anybody in the industry about a lot of the things I am interested in doing.
There are certain times in life when you realize that what you are doing is not the most rational thing, but you just do it. Plus, a lot of the designers I respect seem to have done something like this at some point. They saw someone doing great work and they sought them out. I didn’t figure I would be spending too much time in direct communication with Erik (which turned out not to be so true), but I figured he must keep pretty good company (that part turns out to be pretty true).
I’m here for three months and my wife won’t be here with me for most of the time. That is to say, I spend most evenings in front of the computer reading, designing, and watching old episodes of Lost, trying to catch up. Life is crazy sometimes, but in my experience, every time that life has thrown curve balls, I look back on them as extremely positive experiences.
So here we go. Stay tuned.
Last weekend was a new experiment.
For the most part, when I make websites, I do all the planning, graphics, and markup myself. I’m normally a one man shop (although I’m actively looking for new people to collaborate with), writing most of the (X)HTML and CSS by hand. That control is very important to me.
However, while writing everything by hand plays well to my OCD desire to have control over everything, it takes time, and I’m limited to only the things I know to do. So, naturally, a quality CMS would be a great next step. It would allow me a little more power, and hopefully remove some of the time to write markup.
I have looked around and haven’t really found much that I was pleased with. However, about a year ago I was introduced to Squarepace.com. I looked around and it claimed that you have control over the whole process and that it would be easy for you to move modules around, edit them, and delete them. After a year of curiosity, I finally found an appropriate project to start last week.
So I met with my client, got everything planned out, and explained that it would be an experimental process, but we were hoping to get the site done and live pretty quickly. And we did it. AmyLashelle.com launched within a week of me starting the design process – by far a new record for me.
I’ll start by saying that, by using squarespace, I was able to make a somewhat powerful front-end experience with very minimal effort. The site has a nice (although not fully customized) contact page, a jquery shadowbox slideshow, an integrated blogging engine, and another slideshow on the home page. Nothing too fancy, but keep in mind, I built the whole site in a little under three days worth of work. I felt pretty good about what the site can do.
Here’s where it gets a little rocky. The user experience of building this site was frustrating at best. To the best of my knowledge, Squarespace is aimed at “designers”. It appears to me though, that those would be graphic designers, and not web designers. It seemed that almost every step was just a little harder than it should have been.
Control over styles is supposed to be easy in their interface, but some key features (like width) are not editable there.
Once or twice, I wanted to wrap something in a div tag and couldn’t do it because their editor only lets you add HTML inside specific places. I upgraded so I could have “code injection points”, but it turns out that those points are very specific, I still cannot access all the HTML. The points also weren’t where I really wanted them. For instance, some things like Cufon and Google Analytics are supposed to be right before the end of the body tag, but their interface made me put it inside a nested div somewhere near the bottom of the content.
While I can appreciate that a template gives me all the markup I will need, it really needs to be flexible so that I can cut out unnecessary markup. This was a big issue on this site. I was incredible unhappy with the final markup. It is incredibly cluttered, messy, and non-semantic.
It also only allowed me to edit some commonly editable styles. The main page styles were not accessible. For example, I could not change the font stack for the whole site. I could change one main font in their interface, but not the whole stack.
Here’s the one that got me the most. You can export the styles… in an XML file. And the main page styles are minified! It’s as if they were trying to make the process as hard as possible for me.
Little things like this meant that I had to relinquish control over the markup – something I didn’t want to do.
As far as the Squarespace interface, it did a couple things that made me use a lot of hacks to present the page well. I could not add a class or change the ID of page links, which meant I had to inspect the code with Firebug, find the randomly generated ID, copy it, paste it in the custom styles section, and create a new style – which was overriding current styles, instead of just editing them.
I suppose I could go on, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
So essentially, I’m still looking for a quality CMS designed for front end web designers like me. I can’t imagine I’m really that much of a minority. I’m looking for something that gives me complete control over the markup without making me wade through piles of PHP.
If there is a CMS out there like this, I would really appreciate hearing from you. Otherwise, maybe this means I need to work with someone to make this type of product. I know I would love to use it.
