Sophie Dennis

My talk at Port80 2013 riffed on the theme of the parallels between music and the web, and why music offers often better analogies, especially when considering workflow and collaboration, than traditional print design. Here are the slides, playlist and suggestions for further reading.

http://www.slideshare.net/sophiedennis/working-in-harmony-port80-2013

Designing with musical harmony

Owen Gregory, Antiphonal Geometry, Responsive Day Out, Brighton, March 2013
Slides | Transcript | Audio | Video

Owen Gregory, Composing the New Canon, 24Ways, 9 Dec 2011
A more detailed look at designing to harmonic proportions

Viljami Salminen, Responsive Workflow, 28 May 2012

Karen McGrane, WYSIWTF, A List Apart, 2 May 2013

CSS Zen Garden

Dave Shea, 10 Years, mezzoblue, 7 May 2013 Dave relaunches the Zen Garden for the HTML5 era

Stuff I don’t necessarily entirely agree with, but that forms the context for some of the points I’m making.

Mark Boulton, A New Canon, 9 Dec 2012
Owen Gregory takes issue with Mark’s argument that on the web “there is no page” in his Antiphonal Geometry talk

Rachel Lovinger, The Nimble Report, Razorfish, 2010
“it’s more structure that makes content nimble and sets it free” - remains one of the key references when arguing for greater structure beyond simple HTML in content authoring

Cennydd Bowles, What Bugs Me About “Content Out”, 20 Nov 2011
Although Cennydd is also making the content+design=meaning argument, I’d take issue with the idea that “content out” disregards the influence of design on meaning

Cern, Twenty years of a free, open web

Jeffrey Veen, The Art & Science of Web Design, 2000
I quote from Veen’s earlier Hotwired Stylebook in the presentation, but this is a better overview of the history of the web and where we were c. 2000

John Allsopp, A Dao of Web Design,A List Apart, 7 April 2000
A lot of people are quoting this when discussing responsive design. It’s worth reading the whole thing to see how far we’ve come

Jeremy Keith, A Brief History of Markup, HTML5 for Web Designers, (2010)

• Steven Isserlis, Prelude Suite no 1 and Gigue Suite no 4, Bach: The Cello Suites (2007)
• Yo-Yo Ma, Gigue Suite no 4, Inspired by Bach (1998)
• Kathryn Tickell, Old Morpeth Rant / Morpeth Rant / Hesleyside Reel, Northumberland Collection (2009)
• Bellowhead, Dockside Rant, Broadside (2012)
• Kate Rusby, The Unquiet Grave, 20 (2012)
• Lau, The Unquiet Grave, Lau Live (2008), released 2012 on Lightweights & Gentlemen + Lau Live Remastered (2012)
• Seth Lakeman, Sound of a Drum, Poor Man’s Heaven (2008)

♫ Listen on Spotify

The Isserlis Bach Cello Suites is not on Spotify but you can listen to samples at hyperion-records.co.uk

Morpeth Rant on The Session
Basic notation and midi files

English rant step danced by Derek Shaw, YouTube

How to Dance the Rant Step, Colin Hume
Colin explains the vital “po-ta-to crisps” trick

120 web designers attempt to dance a Rant Step, a Vine by @cole007

By George, we did it! www.surrey.ac.uk

I’ve spent the last three months working with University of Surrey’s Digital team, wrangling* a team of freelancers, contractors and in-house designers, developers and writers to deliver what must be - if we do say so ourselves - the most radical and innovative HE website in the UK right now. Here’s the story of the Big Launch, as it unfolded on Twitter:

* aka project managing

[View the story “The relaunch of surrey.ac.uk” on Storify]

Dear Michael Wolff,

You are right. Advertising needs good writers. Like you, I get frustrated by bad writing. I get frustrated when my clients care more about how their stuff looks, than whether the words are right. I get frustrated with the ‘communication professionals’ my clients hire, whose job it is to sell stuff and sell it through words, seem so bad at them.

And yet, I can’t agree with your article in USA Today “Michael Wolff: What ad biz needs are writers”.

Here’s why.

(In no particular order because I’m busy, which means, as I’ll tangentially explain, that I do not have time to write something great for you.)

• A lack of good writing isn’t why advertising isn’t working anymore, though I expect it isn’t helping.

• Writing well is hard and takes more time than people think. If people can communicate their ideas faster and more effectively through a powerpoint slide than a memo, perhaps they should.

• That doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when conveying ideas through the written word wouldn’t be superior. If only people were able to express those ideas well in words. Which often they aren’t.

• Writing is not “print”.

• Facebook is writing. Twitter is writing. Good writers thrive there. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that. You don’t get much briefer than 140 characters. Just ask @stephenfry. Maybe all the good writers are too busy updating their Twitter accounts and getting rich self-publishing to take the advertising shilling? (No, probably not. But I digress…)

• Content isn’t just words. Photos are content. Visuals are content. Video is content. This often involves words even if they aren’t expressed as blocks of letters.

• Steve Jobs was a Great Man, but that doesn’t mean he was universally right about everything, in the world, ever. Maybe he was right to judge his advertising agency on the quality of their writers (I certainly would) but “Steve Jobs did it this way, so it must be the right way” is ridiculous. And getting tiresome.

• I love words, but I’m not sure “text-heavy copy” is ever necessary. Did I mention brevity is the soul of wit? The mark of great writing is usually fewer words. (Just as great code is often less code.)

• The most powerful ideas are those that are simply expressed. Nike “Just Do It”. BMW “The Ultimate Driving Machine”. The genius here is not really the writing, but the process of boiling down the mess of brand and message and desire to its simplest possible expression. That’s what great writers do. And that takes a lot of time, and you don’t have much to show for it. What? three words, maybe four. How long can it take to write four words? I can type 60 words in a minute…

• Dangerous, in a world where the value of your job may be measured by volume (like the programmer, judged on how many lines of code she commits a day) and you can’t measure a slogan’s impact in Facebook likes.

• Which doesn’t leave much room for those who stare out the window all day, in search of just the right four words.

• Which leads me to think…

Perhaps the problem is really, as you say, that “the bureaucrats have taken over from the creatives”. In that world of big data, creative work is being judged on quantitative metrics. “If you can’t measure it, how do you know it’s working?” is becoming “it can’t be working if we can’t measure it”. Dangerous.

Is that why advertising isn’t working anymore?

Perhaps it never did and now we just know it, thanks to the bureaucrats metrics?

I suspect we just don’t like adverts that much. I suspect we never did. We just didn’t have much else to look at during a three minute break in Coronation Street. There was an opportunity for a great piece of creative advertising to grab us. But there is so much amazing creativity out there now. And it is so easily accessible. Even during a three minute break in Coronation Street. We are no longer so thirsty for it that we will drink the sand at the end of the advertiser’s mirage. Will more, better creativity and great writing in advertising fix that, or are all the great creatives just working elsewhere, because that’s where the audience have gone?

Just a thought.

Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.

Simon Collinson, ‘Taming Complexity’, 24ways 2011

Morrisons, the UK supermarket chain, have a mobile site. So far, so good. Unfortunately their device detection is somewhat, ahem, flaky.

Here’s what it looks like on my HTC Desire S, a recent Android phone:

Let’s leave aside for a minute that that mock phone surround is pretty cheesy. The offending image, “iphone-surround.gif”, is being applied to the <body> by the stylesheet “notmobildevice.css”. Which suggests it’s intended to be loaded only if you’re not viewing on a mobile phone. Presumably to show, should you stumble across it on a desktop, that this is a mobile-specific site.

Unfortunately my small Twitterverse sample suggests whatever device detection Morrisons are using is only treating iPhones (and iPods) as mobile. On iOS the cheesy phone is mercifully absent. But iOS is only around 18% of the mobile market. So - assuming my guess is right - 82% of mobile users are getting a desktop experience in error. This is, in essence, the flaw in relying exclusively on device detection.

What Morrisons could - should - have done is use CSS media queries to load notmobiledevice.css only at larger screen sizes. Either in conjunction with their device detection or instead of it. Media queries future-proof sites against the introduction of new devices their device detection script is unaware of. Provided the new device supports CSS media queries, which new devices almost certainly will, the site owner does not need to fret about supporting every mobile device individually.

Media queries offer a flexible, reliable, future-proof method to give different styles for different screen sizes. Used well they let your site elegantly fit to any screen size in a way that is device agnostic. As mobile devices proliferate and overtake desktop internet use, as assumptions about screen size become ever more dangerous, every site will need to use them to ensure a good browsing experience for its users. I’m not against either device detection or mobile-specific sites. Both have their place. But you want to use them alongside media queries to enhance the mobile-browsing experience, not instead of them.

(As a weird ps, I’ve realised the mobile detection is even more messed up. It was capable of redirecting me to the mobile site in the first place, but then decided I wasn’t mobile after all.)

The Law of the Instrument can be seen in every web discussion forum, on sites such as Forrst and on Twitter. Ask for a CMS, blog or framework recommendation and you’ll see people immediately leap in to declare their hammer the best, without any knowledge of the requirements at hand – sometimes even when the requirements really rule out that tool from the outset

Rachel Andrew | ‘If all you have is a hammer…’

You cannot recommend a solution until you’ve identified the problem. Yet the web is awash with people pushing their favourite one-size-fits-all answers to whatever question is posed, whether a particular CMS, a certain programming language, or the latest social media cure-all. They are focused on a solution: one which works for them, one in which they are competent. Their own personal comfort zone, recommended as much for their own benefit as anyone else’s. But Twitter is not a marketing strategy, nor WordPress the only answer to web publishing.

I’m much more interested in problems, burrowing down into what’s really holding a business or organisation back and seeking out those golden nuggets, the smart ideas which are the real solutions to people’s complex, real-world problems. When someone asks for a recommendation, your first answer should be a question: what are you trying to do, what is the problem you are having, tell me more…

I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.

David Heinemeier Hansson, ‘The problem with the tech world’s “swing for the fences” approach’ | 37signals

There’s a fundamental difference between a bootstrapped business and a funded business. It’s all about which side of the money you’re on. From Day One, a bootstrapped business has no choice but to make money. There’s no cushion in the bank and not much in the pockets. It’s make money or go home. To a bootstrapped business, money is air.

On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There’s a pile in the bank, and it’s not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There’s less—and in some cases, no—pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts…

Anyone can spend money. Making it is the hard part.

Jason Fried, ‘How to Get Good at Making Money’ | Inc.com