Archive for July, 2006.
Jul 29 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
Lately, if you’ve inhaled the composition of one lonely carbon and a pair of oxygens in the web design field of dreams, you’ve probably noticed the putrid stench of “suck” in the air. It’s easily missed unless you’re paying attention to the signs, some which are obvious and some that are quite obviously, not.
One simple thing that might tip you off is that the majority of web sites littering the web are not architecturally or visually “foxy.” Thanks to this growing junk heap of lousy HTML code clogging the pipes, we’ve careened full-throttle into the midst of something called the Web 2.0 Revolution. Designers are going old school with a little modern javascript and beveled graphics thrown in, utilizing the original rules of html construction from the inventors of the web and turning tail on a generation of bad coding practice. This approach is brilliant, but thanks in part to the open source mentality of the Web 2.0 innovators, slowly but surely, web sites are all starting to look the same — A world wide web of sexy, easily updated and navigated fembots, all wearing the same lingerie and lipstick — how, *cough*… neat. A little further down the road to suck, lies the majority of the Creative Departments in our fine colleges. As far as the “I” can see, many still split up print designers and web designers quicker than they can suckle a funnel of warm hops. The rationale of separating creative people into the sketch artists vs. the code jockeys boggles even my miniature, ape-like mind, considering the increasingly diversifying tapestry of the employed creative world, unravelling in the past 10 years.
Some things are not so obvious to the untrained sniffer, like the fact that the Anti-Christ of the web, Jacob Nielsen has gradually cultivated a really smart congregation in the Creative World — a planet where it seems most designers have been beaten so hard with a fear stick that they’ve started thinking that the rantings of a madman could really be the gospel truth from the savior of your choice. Now before you take me out to the wood shed to beat some sense into me faster than you can say “useit.com”, keep in mind that Mr. Nielsen was the guy that said Flash is a waste of time in 2000. He changed his tune a few years ago when he formed an alliance with Macromedia, but I’ll still hold it against him to show my grandfatherly “web age.” While there are times when I do agree with the old fella, blackballing software without an intimate understanding of the full capabilities of the application, is a bit like blaming computers for the fact that the design profession is going to the dogs…
…Wait a sec. Did I hear a woof in the distance?
In the Beginning, there was The Brain. The Brain came up with all kinds of neat stuff to ensure that we didn’t need to use it as much — Putting fire into a convenient lighter so we didn’t have to look for sticks to rub together; Guiding us to make weapons so we didn’t need to come up with clever arguments to get away from confrontation; Creating GPS systems so we never really have to remember how to get anywhere. In fact, when The Brain rolled out It’s shining achievement, designed in It’s own graven image — the personal computer — The Brain basically let us monkeys know It was heading to the retirement home. The Brain was tired, and this number-crunching doohickey sure could do a lot of the legwork that It always did in the past.
So, it’s with this chicklet-covered computer keyboard that my Neanderthal knuckles are tippity tapping, fighting tooth-and-nail the evolutionary pattern of our skull-nugget taking a back seat to the revolution it designed — all in the interest of entertaining your trusting skull-googlers (or eyes just in case your brain has already shut down it’s power to grasp dreadful metaphors).
Thanks to our sometimes trustworthy friend, the computer, work gets done faster. When work gets done faster, money can be made quicker. And if a designer can use a computer, they must be able to do that “design thing” really fast, right? Well, sort of.
If you can type, you can code fast, but it doesn’t help to generate the “bravo!-inducing” idea for a client. That’s what the brain is for. Sadly, as I mentioned above, our brains are getting all mushy on us. And after that primordial ooze clears out from between our ears, what are we left with?
We are left with…
…mySpace is a naughty little scamp in the war of standards-based html, *poofing* an instant website for bands, Stans and Pams alike with underlying code so fantastically awful, that it should be covered in molasses, dipped gently in wet husky fur and dragged through a slip n’ slide of harvester ants at war with poisonous beetles. What makes the code so mind-numbingly bad is the fact that there’s enough of it stuffed behind the scenes on a single page to code an entire web site. This is because the “Dumbing of Design Bible” says that as long as you can make it look good on the front, it doesn’t matter what the code looks like. This Holy Writ also says if the user can create something quickly and without any knowledge of how things work behind the scenes, it leaves them plenty of time to do things like watch advertisements, eat chips, and watch their friend list grow.
Even bothering to make your own web site is becoming something that old folks did back before all that “dot com” stuff went belly-up in an innocuous cloud of Cheech and Chong smoke. With mySpace, both individuality and design prowess are becoming less important than how many knuckleheads you have in your fictitious network of “pals.” I noticed that some of my mySpace friends have thousands of friends… so, obviously that’s why they haven’t returned my calls.
If mySpace is the hobgoblin, then the recent scourge of overseas “designers” is the bugbear. A recent visit to the website “guru.com” has revealed that the majority of web designers and programmers available for contract work are located in Pakistan and India. Not to say that they aren’t consummate professionals, but with rates ranging from $10-$50 hour for everything from coding, to branding, to web design, you ain’t getting the most bang for your buck. My pal told me that “when you pay peanuts you get monkeys,” and being a part-time monkey myself, I think he’s referring to the lowest tools on the “eep ladder.” With $10-$50 an hour design rates, if you don’t have a client that needs to put together a web budget to hide from the tax man, or you can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the creative poop you’re hurling through the creative cage doesn’t stink, there’s going to be trouble in the zoo.
A while back, a bunch of geezerly designers that couldn’t figure out how to use a computer any quicker than program a VCR, decided that the world would be better served and squeezed of creative budgets if graphic designers were “certified” like lawyers and doctors. All this chippity-chap about designers being validated by an exam and a piece of paper will become the incoherent blubbering of the lunatic fringe if the combination of low design expectations (mySpace) mixed with equally low rates for designing and programming, places the above average designer on the streets.
Mom and Pop, get ready, because if we designers don’t get our act together soon, your little college graduates are going to be taking back their old bedroom soon — and they’re gonna want the top shelf liquor they became accustomed to in the glory days of higher budgets and usable web sites.
Maybe, just maybe, dear old Jacob is on to something after all…
Jul 24 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | 1 Comment
It became painfully obvious to me on Saturday night that regardless of how “foolproof and airtight” the internet might be, it still requires one important thing to produce the flowing sewage pipe of increasingly useless information we gleefully slurp upon on a daily basis: Electric charge.
This mighty electrical current is a necessity, empowering the servers which house this information. Without it, they are rendered as impotent as a champion stud mule two minutes past his prime. I learned this lesson first hand on Saturday night by following the weather trends in the Other Coast; the place known as “Not New York City” — Los Angles, Californication… The Land of Buttermilk and Funny.
It would seem that the folkies on the West Coast have been suffering at the hands of “Old Man Winters’” sour, inbred half-cousin, “Ol’ Ghoul Summer.” His hand-delivered nasty summer brush fires will likely be followed by killer bees, a rainstorm of frogs and possibly living, hissing snakes running amok on planes, attacking and cooking everything that’s not nailed down to the bottom of a fancy, petrol-chilled pool in the West Hollywood Hills.
Zuleyka Rivera from Puerto Rico collapsed in a pool of sweetly scented sweat in “Los Hades” after winning the crown of Miss Universe on Sunday night. Being a thinking primate for at least 1.2 hours of my 27 hour work day, I realized that much like human beings, without air conditioning, servers overheat and shut down — just without all that “complaining and dramatic passing out” nonsense. So horrific was this meltdown of servers in the cooled server hives in LA, LA Land, that the 2nd most frequented web site in all of cyberland, “mySpace,” suffered a shutdown on Saturday and finally came back up to full strength on Monday along with a million or so other sites.
So, we’ll have to be patient, strip down to our skivvies and wait to see how this heat wave ends. Usually, we can count on Fall and Winter in the Northeast, but with the certainty of Global Warming stinkin’ up the planet, we can probably count on an early ski season in Los Angeles as well. Until that happens, there’s one request from us New Yorkers for all you folks in the Los Angeles area: Turn off those air conditioning units that are cooling your pools, fancy pets, and Jetson-inspired drinking containers, and we’ll keep designing web standards compliant web sites to make your browsers happy and your designers filled with awe, then fear, and finally, rays of happy mayhem-inducing sunshine.
Jul 20 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | 9 comments
When I was playing the part of a student at Buffalo State College, I coasted through most of my classes including the design department. Now that’s not to say that I was some hot-shot designer (or maybe I was, I’ll never tell). It just means that during my tenure in the graphic design department at Buffalo State College, computer-aided graphic design was in it’s infancy. In other words, you either got it, or you didn’t. Software applications like Adobe Illustrator (88), and Photoshop were mere shells of what they’ve become today, and most beginner design classes involved rapturous lessons like “how to use a mouse” and “how to find the print button on a GUI.” (Yea, I’ve used GUI to speak to the designers out there — they never used the word GUI in school in 1989. Nerds used that word, and weird little nerds weren’t invited outside of their dorms. Ever.)
Out of this apocalyptic landscape of computer-less design (yea, I know I’m waxing a bit dramatic here, but who cares - it makes for better reading), came a man with a beard and a familiar name…
Rand Schuster was a burly hippie, covered in long, stringy black hair peppered with several strands of gray (stress), and a beard that made you shout “Boo-Ya!” (in a horrified way) every time he passed by. He was definitely from the age of Aquarius, yet taught me (and maybe a couple others in the class who weren’t sleeping off last nights hangovers or taking a class in design to coast through college to a glorious life of husbandry, accounting, waiting tables or giving lap-dances at local Buffalo strip club) quite a bit about design and value of deadlines. His temper was legendary, and he would be the first to tell you “Get the hell out of this business!” at the drop of a client.
I managed to take a couple semesters with the guy and beneath the beard and his weird, yet oddly approachable demeanor, stood a designer at the crossroads of his career. He loved the industry one day and despised everything about it the next. He kept his classes on the edge, wondering day by day if they should just head over to the local junkyard and apply for any job that would take them far, far away from an industry that would make you into this much of a paranoid maniac. Keep in mind this was a man with the almost Royal name of “Rand” — duh. Paul Rand; Rand Schuster, I mean it was as powerful a “designer name” as Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt in the acting profession. He wore the “suit of odd,” which meant students could look forward to a joyous career of sandals and over-washed rock shirts as work attire with daily bathing as an option. Yee ha! A future life as an eternal college student!
What I’m saying is that the guy kind of looked like a bear. Not a cuddly one, mind you. More like a terrifying, Steven Colbert-nightmare inducing grizzly bear of design. A benevolent monster that would eat your work and leave it smoking in the woods once it passed through his digestive track. The truth is, once you got to know the guy, you realized that what he wanted you to do was to become a designer almost by yourself.
An interesting approach when you think about it.
He wasn’t the best critiquer in the world, but I noticed how he silently reveled during a class where we all slammed each others work like a proud papa bear, grinning a toothy, albeit sinister grin. It seemed like he wasn’t trying to save the world, or even ensure that everyone in the class was accounted for. He appeared to try to develop just a few designers in each class that would go out into the world and hopefully do something with their miserable lives. He did this by remaining quiet until someone asked him his opinion. The kids who really wanted to have a career in the design world would speak up and ask him a question. It’s a wild approach that I’ve tried to apply in my own career when I’ve had the pleasure of managing great creatives. Give them space, give them direction and let them know that you’re looking out for them — all from a distance.
Or maybe Rand just didn’t give a shit and hated teaching and designing. I prefer the other explanation myself.
Jul 19 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | 1 Comment
So I’m sitting on a very large couch in the living room at 1am, absorbing Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits, and it “hits” me. It’s been so long since I’ve aurally devoured this collection that I forgot how fantastic it was to hear over and over again when I was in college. As I’m listening to the tracks I’m catipulted back into a dingy late night hangout called the “Inn-Between” with about 150 of my best friends for the evening, shooting pool, hurling darts wildly into an unsuspecting and clueless crowd, and absorbing life as a 20-something in one of the foulest and yet, most formidable towns in all of New York State: Buffalo New York.
Damn, is that how “Fly Like and Eagle” sounded? Steve Miller was so cool that he actually could turn “shoe” into a verb. “Shoe” those children Steve, “Shoe them” real good.
Back to Buffalo. I call it “foul” with the utmost respect. Despite the harsh winters that made you deliriously wonder if you would have to eat your best friend on the way home late at night just to survive, and the roving gangs of hoodlums with baseball bats, I grew up as a designer in that town. I spent my days, beginning at 4pm, reading the Artvoice and crapping out mock-ups on a Mac IICi in the Buffalo State College computer room. Lesson #1. If you have a computer room in your college, and your teachers don’t understand how to teach computer-aided design, get the keys to the kingdom by offering to be a computer room monitor. You’ll find that the computer room will become a willing late night vestage for you if the beer and tomfoolery at the bar doesn’t work out. The design department might even pay you a tiny check for your precious time.
Jet Airliner. I’m recalling laughing hysterically at Phil Zirkuli eating his own hand; watching it disappear in his massive, woolly beard. College humor was classic, yet so mind-numbingly dangerous at the same time.
Flight back to Buffalo. I escaped the Buffalo State Design Department at the top of the class and proceeded to land a job with a bank (HSBC for those taking notes), laying out ads for the Buffalo News. I worked my tuckus off at my first job and I was the only person in the Art Department that knew how to use a computer. You see, even a room full of creative monkeys can’t tap out Ogilvy on Advertising if they don’t know what that thing is they’re tapping on (See Lesson #1 above to see how I worked that one out).
Lesson #2. Tenacity. Take the bull by the horns and clutch him like Star Jones on a ribeye steak. I took a job from my design professor Rand Schuster because I answered the phone in his office while he was getting coffee. The “deal” went down something like this:
(Rand’s) Client: “Hello, can I speak with Rand, please?”
Me: “Um, he’s not here right now… Can I help you?”
(Rand’s) Client: “Well, we have this project for him, not a lot of money. Can you give him the message that…”
Me: “I’ll do it for free. When can we meet?”
(My) Client: “Free? Well, I’m sure Rand won’t mind. Can you meet me at…”
There you go. See how that worked? My first professional job. Free…but I stole it from my professor like a Gangster of Love. Don’t think I’m advocating doing free work either. That part of this story sucked. It sucked so massively on the “suck scale”, that in order to recall this story fondly, I’ve wiped that portion of this story out of my memory forever. I did manage to break the news to Rand at the end of the class. It went something like this:
Me: “Hey Rand, can I talk to you?”
Rand: “Sure. Hey, did someone call here for me today?”
Me: “Yep.”
Rand: “Cool, they want me to do some project for them. What did they say.”
Me: “They gave me the job…” (insert long uncomfortable pause)
Rand: “…”
Me: “(…yikes!)”
Rand: “…You’re gonna be good.”
He sauntered out of the room and was over it by next class. But he never looked at me the same way again. He looked at me like another designer and not a student.
Take the Money and Run
Well not entirely. Tenacity, and honesty to one’s self and the profession is important. If I never told Rand that I stole the job from him, I would have likely become a knucklehead like the rest of the Creative Directors in that town.
Well, all the Creative Directors except one other fella. But that’s for next time.
Time to add some Wild Mountain Honey to my tea and go to bed like a responsible and respectable 36-year-old creative synergist.
Jul 10 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | 1 Comment
Decadesrocklive.com has won a prestigious CSS World Award in the category of Entertainment.
Why prestigious? Well, it’s because we strive to build our sites to be standards-compliant, and so should you.
Why CSS World Awards?. Well, they recognize the work done by developers that build websites using CSS. We like these types of awards, because it heightens the awareness of the companies using Web Standards.
Great stuff to check out at the winners page for everyone who is interested in this kind of stuff. Congrats to everyone who won.
