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.

Slides

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

Further Reading

Antiphonal Geometry

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

Workflow

Viljami Salminen, Responsive Workflow, 28 May 2012

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

Zen Garden

CSS Zen Garden

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

Context

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

History

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)

Playlist

• 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

The Rant Step

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

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.

Companies have always created media in the form, usually, of advertising as well as corporate literature, brochures and websites. The difference now is that companies, more and more of them, are creating their own media themselves, without specialized help or resources… Instead of hiring smart, experienced specialists to tell their stories, they are relying on pretty much anyone within the organization who knows how to Tweet… Every company is a media company. Unfortunately, when it comes to creating their own media, most are doing a bad job.

Twitter reaches people who are already significantly more engaged in online community activities (to give it the old-fashioned name) than the general Internet population:

US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%). In other words, the 14 million odd people who regularly go on Twitter (as opposed to the 95 million that have signed up), are already active in social media

Conclusions?

1. Active Twitter users are not “Joe Average” internet-user, but a specific subset of engaged, social internet users.
2. Twitter is not a magic bullet for reaching an otherwise unengaged audience.

Michael McWatters’ delightfully simple diagram shows how to get started with your web content strategy. Here’s my take on where web content strategies usually go wrong.

Andy Rutledge, articulate as ever, puts some figures on the idea of pricing-by-client (about which I know I’ve read more recently, but can’t for the life of me find again) in “Calculating Hours - the Client Factors”.

Client A is a really good client… You will seldom get a call from Client A. Most often it is Client B who calls on you for a project.

I love articles like this for the same reason I love conferences and meet-ups - the reassurance that there is no magic project-management pill, no super-agency super-power, that saves everyone else from the nightmares that attend many a web or design project. Andy’s list of “client characteristics” will be frighteningly familiar to anyone doing client contact agency-side.

If you are a client, do you recognised in yourself any of Andy’s Client B Characteristics? If so, it’s costing you money. Worse, at a time when good web firms are booked up months in advance, if you hit any of his (1)s, (2)s or (3)s - those behaviours which, for Andy, trigger a level of concern which has him considering not taking on a project - you may struggle to find an agency at all.

Apart from the obvious - being pleasant to deal with - Andy identifies a number of characteristics around the fatal flaw of “not properly understanding your own business”. These are real red flags. No matter how pleasant and co-operative and willing to take advice this client may be, the project is probably doomed.

• Client is not sure what they need and/or knows little about the target audience(s)
• Client cannot clearly and concisely describe their brand to you (*1)
• Client is not sure how the application should work or what all the components should be (*2)

This client does not just need a web designer, or not in a simplistic pixel-pusher sense. They need a consultant. A web consultant in the latter case, probably an experienced designer or developer who can help them work out how their application should work. In the former two cases, what is being revealed is a wider business, marketing or branding problem which will cripple any website project before it starts. If they are lucky they may find a web designer or agency who can be these things. Most of the time they will not.

Design Strategy

And this brought me back to another article I was also reminded of just today:“Designers: You’re So Intelligent” by Michael Bierut. Designers, Michael observes, long to sit at the strategy table with the big business boys. We want, as he says, “to be seen as more than mere stylists, we want to set the agenda, to be involved earlier in the strategic process”. We want to wade in and get our hands dirty with clients’ business and marketing and branding problems.

In fostering this desire, he says, we are deluding ourselves. Via way of an amusing write up of the Problem Definition Escalation Technique which any designer will get a snigger out of (“The problem isn’t your logo! It’s world hunger!”) he tells how:

I found myself at a design conference listening to still another demand that clients give us designers that coveted place at that legendary table where all the big decisions are made. Sitting next to me was one of my favorite clients, someone I treasure for her levelheadedness and good humor. “I’ve spent hours at that table,” she whispered to me. “It’s not that great, you know.”

The desire for a place at the strategy table is not necessarily merely a plaintive longing for love and respect as Michael thinks (though it may be that too). It is also an inevitable reaction to Andy’s “B” clients. The client’s inability to articulate - or worse, to even grasp themselves - their own business strategy, to define the business context within which a design needs to work in order to be effective, leaves the dilligent designer little choice but to wade in and attempt to do it for them.