Ticking the boxes

The Apple App Store has launched. With midnight having passed in New Zealand and customers in the southern hemisphere now able to purchase their second generation iPhones, Apple have pushed the necessary iTunes upgrade. This gives us a preview of the applications that we are going to be able to buy here in Ireland from midnight onwards.
My initial thoughts are how important the usage-generated lists of Top Apps and Top Free Apps are going to be in helping users to decide which applications to install. At least in the iTunes Music Store the design of the album covers afford more visual cues about the nature of what you are buying. Browsing the Productivity section, it looks like this may not be the case with some categories of icons in the AppStore. Good luck with deciding between 'To Do' and 'Todo':
Disclaimer: Before anyone comes back to me on it, I do need to acknowledge my role in overseeing the rebranding of the Topline chain of hardware stores last year. Said rebranding giving them a new check-mark symbol on a purple octagon. Perhaps I ought to sell them on the idea of their own custom iPhone application...

Identity design systems and co-branding

I have been circling around some of the issues relating to co-branding over the last couple of weeks, in connection with a number of projects that I have to hand. There are a number of inter-related topics here that bear some analysis. I am going to post some on-going thoughts and gather together a some relevant visuals. Lets start with this facet of the problem.
Considered thinking about corporate identity today tends towards systems with some capacity for formal play built into them, rather than merely focusing on maximizing uniformity as tended to be preferred before. This can be delivered on a sliding scale. At its simplest iteration it means building in enough variety to allow for appropriate modulated treatments in different scenarios. All the way up to very sophisticated, free-flowing identity systems.
One sophisticated approach is where I have developed a suite of decision-making trees for my client for various applications. 'If the advert format is tall and narrow and the constituent branding elements required are X, Y and Z, then the correct approach to using them falls within this class of patterns.' This is a scenario where I am showing the user conditions and matching those with their desired outcomes and asking them to make some decisions as to how best to achieve those outcomes within the palette of opportunities available to them. I like to think of it as the designer's role as one of defining the idea-space of the identity system and then letting its users explore the landscape within that topography.
Contrast that concept with what so many organizations still want, which is branding equivalent of lego blocks. All of the visual elements locked together in one immobile set of ratios and relationships that can merely be dropped into place. The design equivalent of 'Place tab A into slot B.' This methodology results in co-branding relationships that are consistent across all applications, but it is a crude sort of consistency. Almost by definition this is going to be inappropriate (or at least sub-optimal) in many many applications.
What this often boils down to operationally is, where do you want the expertise to lie along the chain of responsibility? Or where the organisation chooses to deploy its resources. If an organisation wants its most junior personnel to knock together documents and adverts using modular graphics in MS Word, that is a valid choice for them. But it seems unrealistic, in that scenario, for them to then be concerned about measuring the 'brand efficiency' of their outputs. The greater fallacy is then believing that the solution to the problem is to build better templates. Or, as it is so often phrased 'templates that are easier to use'.
More on this as I build out my thinking...

Error message screens

Error messages are one of the minor inconveniences of our online navigation experience. They are never welcome on our screens. But, when something does go wrong, we do need to know probable causes and remedial actions. How well an organisation presents information when everything goes pear-shaped speaks volumes for its approach to its customers.

Steve Job's keynote for Macworld on 15 January 2008 began at nine in the morning, San Francisco time. That's five in the evening here in Dublin; still within my working hours. I was able to keep a weather eye on the proceedings with a Twitter browser window open in the corner of my screen. At least four of the people in my Twitter feed were live-blogging the keynote event.


Obviously they were not alone, as the level of Twitter activity (twittering? tweeting? twoottering?) coming from Macworld quickly began to put a serious load on the Twitter infrastructure. Very quickly the updating of posts began slowing down noticeably and after acting erratically just stopped completely about five minutes before the keynote started.


Reloading brought up this nicely crafted error screen. The little bird reminds me of that ironic smiling puppy with the electrical cord in his mouth that is used on The Simpsons whenever an in-show TV station experiences "technical difficulties" or presenter's on-air meltdown. The Twitter bird may be just as cute, but it does not make me feel any better.


Further reloads and the cutesy illustrated error message was replaced by this one. Obviously the problem was escalating. Devoid of all decoration, at least this screen presented me with some potential options. Although given the scale of the meltdown going on none of those three links resolved

There is a definite argument that a disappointing customer experience can be mitigated (somewhat) by considered, thoughtful error screens that inform the user. But all of that is absolutely no substitute for getting the product delivery right in the first place. In this case engineering the server-side to take the expected load.

Update, June 2008


Twitter has learned some lessons and put measures in place to take the strain for Steve's next keynote at WWDC. The Twitter infrastructure made it through that without falling over.

Shouty-shouty signs

Consider this post as a coda to my A-IV Marketing post last March on the many uses and abuses of the A4 page in contemporary communication.

Last week I came across this amazing example of over-instruction when I was paying for parking at an automated vending machine. (I only had my old mobile with me, so these shots are pretty low resolution. But should be more than adequate for you get the idea.) OK, so these type of machines are generally not well regarded for the quality of their user interfaces, but realistically could its manner of operation be so obtuse as to require this amount of explanatory appendices? This looks like the visual equivalent of those Irish people who-speak-very s-l-o-w-l-y whenever explaining something to anyone who doesn't speak English as their native tongue. What this really says to me is that the people whose job it is to answer the phone whenever somebody can't get their crumpled tenner into the slot are doing their best to try to ensure that they never have to answer that phone. Surely someone could take them aside and point out that making your customers feel like they are being treated like morons is never a good policy.

Not only where there about twelve notices affixed to every one of these machines, but every door I passed through in the car park had two or three similarly redundant, over-emphasised, A4 notices added to it. In the pièce de résistance, the entrance/exit barrier had three hanging A4 pages sellotaped across it, blowing in the wind, reminding you to have paid for your ticket before approaching the barrier and so forth.

(One thing that the sheer abundance of this visual noise made me think again about are those currently popular futurist scenarios where we shall all soon be wearing smart glasses/implants that overlay context-specific tags onto our physical environment. Which is not too unfeasable or too far off. When there is no physical/spatial limitation on overlaying visual cruft, the results could be far worse than the eyesore shown above.)

Who are ‘We’? And where are they at exactly?

All this blogging starts to pay off somehow.
After three or so years of blogging here at ThoughtPort, I have picked up some blog construction skills. I recently applied all of those self-taught skills building a blog for Loretta and her team over in Dublin Docklands Development Authority. Developed in partnership with Project Arts, We Are Here is described as a ‘season of alternative projects probing the physical and cultural landscape through interactive film, mixed-reality gaming, mobile theatre and gently subversive audio tours’. Given that these events deal with the interaction of culture and technology, I believe that having a dedicated blog gives DDDA the ability to build some community of interested parties prior to the events and to then generate some audience interaction once everything starts to happen.
When I created the blog, I also built-in some social networking features that hopefully will be adopted by users of the blog. I set up a public Flickr pool so that all sorts of imagery around the events can be posted online. I was inspired by looking at the quality (if not the sheer volume) of images that appear on Flickr clustered around events like SXSW. There's not too much content up there now except for some test shots of Eddie’s way-cool logo stencilled around Docklands*. Ideally, that pool will be populated with photos taken in and around the WAH2.0 events themselves.
The teams in Docklands and Project are now set up as authors on the blog and will be populating it with up-to-date content from here on in. Go and have a look

www.wearehere.ie

*Eddie and his posse were out last night stencilling away, doing the on-street viral marketing campaign, tagging the Docklands with lots of lime green logos. They didn’t have too many run-ins with security guards and An Gardai!

Delicious Tags: We Are Here 2.0 | Dublin | Docklands | BFK | | Blogging
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My Cloud Library

(or “No, it won't be meta-ironic if I call it Spellr”)
The inline spell-checker in FireFox 2 is one of its most useful features. Particularly now that we all are writing much more text within our browsers. The days when we really only typed little more than passwords and occasional email addresses into browsers are well past. Today we are typing long blog posts, short comments, and all sorts of data into web applications.
I habitually work on more than one computer. A practice which has revealed an (perhaps unforeseen) opportunity within this dictionary/spelling space.
The pre-loaded core dictionary that the spell-checker begins with is of limited utility without all of the custom words: names; surnames; brand names; industry-specific terms and so on, that I am constantly adding. Extrapolating from the individual to the collective, each of us has our own unique, arguably valuable, collection of words
FireFox caches my unique wordset onto my hard drive. When I write a first draft blog post on my work Mac, I correct all of my mis-spellings and add all of the unrecognised, yet correctly-spelt, words into my custom dictionary. Later, when I complete that post on our home laptop, the screen is once again littered with red underlines as that second instance of FireFox is checking my text against its own custom dictionary. I then have to go though those words adding each of them to this custom dictionary. (Once you've published a few blog posts with screaming typos in them, you get pretty careful about copy-checking before hitting the 'Publish' button.)
Therefore, why not have my custom wordset out in the cloud, and not stored locally at all? Think of doing for spell-checking what Del.icio.us does for bookmarking. Actually best not to think in terms of spell-checking at all. That is really only the task supported by, and enhanced by, your personal wordset. It is more helpful to think a lot broader than the specific example I gave above. Think of your custom wordset as data that you continually add more value to every day. There have to be great benefits to having that dataset be accessible across multiple platforms and also to-be portable. For example, say a FireFox-killer arrives in a few years time, do I want to have to start the whole process of generating a complete new custom dictionary again if I migrate to a new browser? Or if I change job and am issued with a new laptop? Do I want to have to teach my friend's names to every new mobile phone that I buy?
I did a quick search and the existing model for online services in this space are basic spell-checking sites: paste in a block of text and have it checked. A closer model to what I envisage is Google's inline spell-checker (which seems to override FireFox's, although I am unsure how that pecking order works). What I cannot divine is whether theirs is fully integrated or not. I want to teach GoogleSpell a word by adding it while writing a Gmail today and have it recognise the same word in Google Docs tomorrow*. If I include someone's nickname in their contact details in Gmail, then I want Gspell to not flag that word as misspelled in my Gmail. Making this happen within a suite of products yoked together with a common user profile and log-in has to be more manageable than aiming for the Internet at large. Building this within a related suite of applications could provide short term lock-in.
Back to creating this as a stand-alone web service then, technically speaking there would be some a lot of non-trivial issues to overcome to achieve this. Would you have to log-in to your browser to activate your wordset? Or, if the service is disassociated from the browser, would it need an open tab at all times? Interoperability with all my devices and platforms would be ideal: I imagine writing something in my jPhone on the morning commute; giving it a polish in GoogleDocs over lunch, and then publishing via Blogger that evening. Would it be better for my jPhone to simply cache the most current wordset when I sync it, or to pull it live directly out of the cloud?
Another issue is that a service like this adds another component to your online data shadow. If someone (say a potential employer) could gain access to your personal wordset and run statistical analysis or personality profiling over it, what are the implications there? As usual the Faustian trade-off appears to be increased functionality versus having your private data residing out of your absolute control.
Batting this one around with David, he pointed out that, apart from giving the Google Conspiracy Faction even more to fret about, this class of solution will probably evolve into a component of a master personal dataset stored online. This ultimate dataset facilitating everything from spell-check, drag-and-drop files/data/ in and out, to whatever your having yourself. Therefore not being computer/browser/Google-specific. All of which gives me a few more ideas...

*It does not at the moment. I used the made-up word “Cloodliberairiewooord” to check.

Delicious Tags: Online Dictionary | Browser | | Productivity
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Big typeface? (Cló-éadan mór?)*

How is the broader adoption of Irish Language and Accessibility obligations impacting literature design and typesetting?

Bilingual requirements
2006 was the year when I saw the real impact of the roll-out of the recent Irish language legislation requiring the majority of state and semi-state communications to be produced as bilingual publications. While many of the relevant organisations were able to previously get by with paying lip-service to the bilingual requirements there has been a noticeable tipping point in their adoption over the last twelve months.
The preference today is for one combined bilingual publication. A few years ago it was more common to publish Irish language editions as separate documents. I believe the inventory costs of storing a high quantity of unasked-for documents is the real driver for combining the two.

Accessibility requirements
The second factor influencing literature design projects is the increasing awareness of, and adoption of, accessibility and legibility requirements. These are being adopted in a more à la carte manner - presumably because they intrude more directly into the remit of graphic designers. One common approach is to produce two separate editions of each publication. A printed edition typeset at today's standard size (or, more accurately, falling within the gamut of current design conventions for preferred font size parameters) and an accessible version typeset in twelve point text with the page count running about 20-30% longer. I think that the economic realities of running such double editions will result in more of the accessibility conventions migrating into the primary edition, and eventually the two merging. This would not be the worst-case scenario that some designers claim, as most established accessibility conventions align with what I understand to be good typographic practice anyway. I've had a predilection for setting ranged-left sans-serif typefaces with large x-heights for years. (While I was able to spec the only hardback book that I have yet designed in Scala, I still couldn’t have that text set justified.) Although I still find it difficult to get over how large twelve point type looks in practice: it is 33% larger than nine point and 20% larger than ten point. Which shows how ingrained your preferences can become based on what you have been exposed to.

Implications
Combining the bilingual and accessibility requirements, and assuming that the amount of verbiage remains consistent, there has to be an upwards pressure on page counts. The increasing use of PDF as the primary distribution mechanism helps defray large amounts of printing costs (essentially by passing some of them on to the end-user, who invariably chooses to laser-print before reading.) But, in the near term, there is still going to be some form of printed edition for the majority of publications, no matter how short those print runs are. At present these regulations primarily apply to literature projects for governmental and semi-state clients, but inevitably these implications will effect a broader base of business clients eventually.

(*My Irish headline is undoubtedly ungrammatical, being an automatic online translation of two separate words out of context. Gaeilgeoirs comment with corrections please.)

A-IV Marketing

“Today we'll be showing you all how to make your very own marketing communications. All that you will need to get started is one sheet of A4-sized paper (white, or coloured if you prefer), your very own laser-printer and one roll of sticky tape...”

After conducting a number of visual audits over the last two years, within a broad mix of retail, banking, and office environments, I have identified one of the most unsung, yet all-prevalent, marketing and communication channels in use today. Sure your creative agencies will try to talk you into investing in ambient media, viral marketing, corporate blogging, SMS advertising or building a virtual showroom within Second Life. Whatever. The real ambient medium du jour is the humble A4 laser-printed page.
I have encountered the same scenarios in every location that I have audited. Both in supposedly managed environments, such as bank branches and high street retailers, and in more visually cluttered environments, such as offices. Look around you, there are always lots of A4 pages taped up everywhere. The desktop publishing revolution is alive and well and is now part of our environment
Some of the most blatant examples are notice boards choked with a collage of current and outdated pages accreted since the last big clean-up. Any editing and prioritising of notices is usually non-existent. When everything is equally important then nothing is really communicated.
Why does this happen? Often it is a case of people being proactive and attempting to be helpful to their customers: trying to pre-empt and answer common questions. Not so helpful are the 'go-away' signs that only serve to make the customer feel like a nuisance.
Other scenarios involve staff on the ground having to address some larger design issues which fall outside of their immediate remit and are imposed from higher up the corporate hierarchy. I have seen self-service kiosks where the affordances of the chosen user interface and product design were so counter-intuitive that handmade instruction signs had been taped onto the terminals to somehow manage the barrage of queries about how to use them. Ad-hoc directional signs also fall into this category (particularly memorable are the delightful sort with multiple-angled or U-shaped arrows).
Microsoft Word is the default design tool for these A-IV marketers. The exquisite feature that produces such beautiful pseudo three-dimensional headlines is particularly beloved of the more creatively-inclined ad-hoc marketers.
Unfortunately, on the client side, too many corporate identity teams see this sort of tactical messaging as unworthy of their attention. This is a mistake. If you do not give staff appropriate and useful tools to address their needs they are going to find their own way. Then on the designer side the unpalatable truth is that, in my experience, most designers have little or no facility with Microsoft Word. (Mea culpa.) In their view, if a template file is not being constructed in Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress then it is not worth their time.
If you are happy with your client's customers experiencing a lot of their contact with your client's visual identity in the form of centred all-capitals instructions set in Times New Roman Bold (or even better, Comic Book Sans) then you are not doing your job. I believe there is an unmet requirement for identity management systems that include mechanisms addressing the ad-hoc communicative needs of staff. Facilitated via a suite of appropriate digital templates, useful examples and straightforward guidelines or frameworks. The availability and distribution of these ought to be centrally managed, but their use should be decentralised throughout the organisation.
Delicious Tags: Branding | Corporate Identity | Graphic Design
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“Too-Wit Too-Woo” To Whom?

In answer to my semi-rhetorical question in my last post (about the seemingly ever-diminishing quanta of web content over time) my attention has been drawn to Twitter.com. This site facilitates ‘real time blogging’ where you have a maximum of 140 characters to say whatever you are doing precisely right now.
One of the live examples that happened to be on the home page when I went and looked in was “Folding laundry, eating breakfast, a little morning surfing.” Evidently not somewhere to go in search of profundity then.
I gather that the high-concept idea is to constantly inform your circle of friends about what you are doing, in the manner of a constantly updated voice-mail message. Seemingly this can become quite addictive, so I am not signing up. Also, these services really are often just echo chambers unless a lot of your friends use them.
Twitter is the new venture from Evan Williams, one of the original creators of Blogger, who subsequently set up Odeo. On the basis of his track record it is probably a phenomenon worth watching.
UPDATE: I just have to append this link to a humorous visualisation of that blogging devolution meme.
Delicious Tags: Twitter | Blogging | Web 2.0
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Introducing ImpressionStream

Or “How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Just Get With The Blip-Post Programme”.
As ThoughtPort has matured, I have deliberately attempted to steer it towards more considered article-type posts and analysis pieces. I have mostly avoided clip-blogging and link-blogging, because I reckoned that the shifts in tone would be just too jarring. I also want ThoughtPort to become the central resource for my thinking and my content, not for anyone else's.
Recently however, I have been on the lookout for somewhere to capture, store and publish material that falls outside of my self-imposed remit for ThoughtPort. Given the ways in which I use the internet today, of necessity, a lot of the input coming down the information power-hose goes in one eye and out the other. There has to be some utility in collating at least some of the random fragments, nuggets of wisdom, one-liners and oddball WTF double-takes that cross my screen or my mind over the course of a day. The sort of mildly humorous asides or interesting factoids that might have warranted a ‘Seen This?’ email.
I have found a home for these blipposts* on the recently-launched Tumblr. (Yeah, I had to work hard to get past that name too.) The, unfortunately equally ill-named, tumblelog format is a sub-species of blog: basically its a much looser, free-form assemblage of fragments and of what used to be called sound-bites (Wikipedia: tumblelog definition). In it I can capture all sorts of content without feeling the need to overlay even the slightest gloss of analysis and opinion. There is none of that over-looming sense of short-changing your readers if you don't bring the added value to your posts.
Interestingly, the format also works well at a finer level of granularity than a book-marking site, which could arguably fulfil the functional aspect of a tumblelog. I regularly tag a blog post into my Del.icio.us account when all I want to retain is just one pertinent sentence. This format is more or less optimised to address precisely that kind of quoting.
Finally, there's a certain ineffable ‘Personal Journal’ quality to the form which appeals to me. Yet, given all that, its still a blog, it pumps out the RSS, it walks like a blog and it quacks like a blog. What I remain undecided about is whether the format can be of as much interest to readers as it will be to authors. We'll have to wait and see.
After all of that pre-justification and contextual back story, here's the link to ImpressionStream. In many ways it is ThoughtPort’s funky little brother, who has a shorter attention span, but who wears way cooler tee-shirts. Or something like that.
*My one recollection from watching the Max Headroom movie as a teenager was the concept of 'blipverts'. These were super-concentrated bursts of advertising distilled down and interspersed between normal content (TV content that id, they did forgot to predict the internet). Blipposts is a derivation of that based on the ever finer graduation of web content. Originally the website was the prime quantum, then it became the webpage within the site, subsequently the perma-linked post was the basic unit of the web, these micro posts supported by tumblelogs are just the next step down. I guess the ultimate logical step will be for someone to create a social networking site that just posts individual tag words on their own...

Advice from business books

I read business books. I do understand that this is fairly uncommon amongst graphic designers. I’m not talking about the full-on, academic, formal MBA business tome, more the popularist (middle-brow) management, marketing, ideas genre. I have read my Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and Chris Andersen. I can hold my own in cocktail chatter about Tipping Points and Freakonomics. I have worked my way through potted histories of corporations as varied as IBM, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Go, Ikea, Starbucks, Ryanair, Boo.com and so on. Geek-wise I have even handed over good money for product histories of the Mac and Linux, even Windows-XP. I have also been seen thumbing the occasional CEO autobiography, Overview of Economic Thought, or Pop History of the Limited Liability Company. I have read the good, I have read the the bad and, far worse, I have read the mediocre.
On the most practical level my clients are business people and to truly address their needs I need to understand as much as I can about the business realities and issues that they face. On another level: I am somewhat of a business-geek. (I am still slightly more of a typography-geek, as I have more books on typography. For now.)
Larry Winget is not a business author whom I have encountered before. His recent essay You are Being Lied To and Other Truths is downloadable at ChangeThis. His essay is a short, fun read with lots of energy. I recommend it. I like that, as a business author, he is refreshingly candid about how useful business books can be, and the realities of having to write more to keep earning. I also really like his one-line meta-advice.
“Do what you said you were going to do,
when you said you were going to do it,
in exactly the way you said you were going to do.”
Which is very succinct. It resonates with a lot of the themes I am reading in John Simmons’ new book about Innocent. You can argue that this is a simplistic mantra if you will. But, after mulling this over and then running a rule over a lot of the work issues that are currently bugging me, there is a lot to be said for aiming for something as pure as that. And even more to be said for delivering on it.

Guideline Weekly Amount

Perhaps I could improve this by including some additional categories. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Ballinasloe Blogger’s Blatant Ballot Boost Bid

The Boy Johnny has gone and gotten himself nominated again for this year’s Irish Blog Awards.

So, in keeping with the tradition of all of the free publicity that I have been giving MaguiresMovies here on ThoughtPort, why don’t you all flock to the awards site in vast numbers and cast your votes before the fifteenth. He is in the Best Arts and Culture section.

John coped exceedingly well with not winning the award in oh-six, but he has high hopes for this year...

Speak To Me/The Emotional Type

Dalton Maag Exhibition 03
Originally uploaded by Aiden Kenny.

"How many flavours of vanilla do you want?" - Bruno Maag.

I brought the studio over to the Image Now Gallery for a look at the Dalton Maag typography exhibition Speak To Me on Tuesday. It was very interesting to see the type creation process from rough sketches on A3 marker pads all the way through to film tests.

We also attended Bruno Maag's lecture The Emotional Type at DIT on Thursday evening last. The talk was well titled as he is an emotional and animated speaker. It is always good to see someone so passionate about what they do. I also think that we always need to have such monomaniacal characters around who obsess about details like the inconsistencies of the diagonal strokes in the light-weight characters of the headline font for The Guardian newspaper, and where the pixels fall in the lowercase O when they are displayed in our interactive television guides. Admittedly I am probably more interested in type and typography than most but I don't ever think I would have the mindset to grind my way through the 700-odd characters he was talking about for the standard four-weight Latin A font package he produces for most of his clients.

His talk was wide-ranging in its scope and fairly humorous in spots: touching on some non-conventional topics as typo-porn, the joys of metal type and going to the UK National Type Library and fondling a flirty Fette Fraktur. Indeed. We also learned why never never to use Helvetica (never) and why if everyone used the nigh-perfect, yet arid, Univers Bruno would be out of a job. London Underground and Ty-Phoo tea did not fare well under his withering gaze either.

The headline quote above was his response when asked about the role of custom font creation in brand identity programmes and the observation that so much of that work today is variation around a theme of 'warm, soft and friendly' humanist sans-serif typefaces.

Never judge a...

Occasionally I come across a site that I am somewhat reluctant to recommend, where I have found myself using up an unconscionable block of time browsing its contents. But if you are lacking a little inspiration (and are not too bothered about being envious of some tasty design briefs) then you could check out the book cover archive site.

At the initial level of engagement you can just click through the pages enjoying the juxtaposition of cover designs from different genres and categories. Clicking on each cover brings you further: to a larger image for closer inspection and comments by designers and non-designers alike, often with additional comments by the book designer in question.

If you fall within that subset of bibliophiles who appreciate the design of a book as much as its contents, then you should find much to enjoy here. Even better, there is an RSS feed too. So if you don't want to blow a couple of hours a-browsing right now, you can just get one new cover at a time whenever one goes live.