This morning I received an invitation to join virb, a new online community. It appears as though they're gunning after the 8 million pound gorilla that is MySpace, which they must know is a gargantuan feat. That said, virb is a hell of a lot of fun to play around with.
It appears to be built on Rails (which I've been having a lot of fun with lately) and allows for adding music, photos, videos, blog posts and the like. It seems as though they've gone to a lot of trouble developing an interface that is easy to use, and the final product is very pretty.
The music player is fantastic - you can store your playlist, get recommendations from others, etc. The player is brilliantly simple to use. You can even plug virb into itunes and access your music from there. The artists putting music up there are really good too.
They've made it easy to customize your page as well - instead of resorting to hacks like div overlays and the like, they've baked massive customization right in. I'm sure myspace hacks will run in and ugly the place up in time, but there are some really pretty pages are already up there. Hopefully when it launches folks will look to them for inspiration vs. the monstrosities they're used to.
I have no idea whether this thing can take off (maybe they don't care about toppling MySpace - what's wrong with carving out your own niche on the net and being happy with it?) but I wish them well. It's very well thought-out, and the dozens of other social networking sites out there could learn a thing or two from these guys.
In the past, I've found nothing gets you quite out of a rut like starting over. With that in mind, I decided late last night to tear things down and rebuild again. I've got a ton of work still to do (for example, any page but the front) but I'm happy with the overall direction.
For the redesign, I decided to group everything into "living" or "working." I've also decided to try and lighten up a bit - there is certainly a place for the thoughts that have dominated my writing over the past year or more, but lately I've felt like I can't write unless I have something big and important to say. And since my life these past few months has largely been an exercise in getting immense enjoyment out of the mundane, why not embrace that instead of fretting over having nothing to say? Life is really good, and I should enjoy it.
I'm hoping this latest iteration will give me the inspiration to explore the other interests that haven't been getting enough love from me the past few years. I'm hoping you enjoy the realignment. At the very least, I'm hoping you don't go to the effort of printing this out, just to light it on fire, standing over it and cackling into the cold evening air.
I have a problem - I have a hard time pursuiing something unless I think I can become very good at it. I'm pretty confident that I couldn't pull this off in a million years:
A lot of programmers I've talked to lately are worried about Ruby on Rails. They are worried that this framework is going to put a tremendous amount of power in the hands of anyone with a computer and a free weekend. They're concerned that, just like Frontpage and Dreamweaver did to web design, Rails and frameworks like it are going to let anyone become a programmer.
I think that's all true. And I think they have absolutely nothing to be worried about.
Today about half of my day was spent sifting through over 400 resumes from people all over the country. They have various backgrounds, various work histories, various talents and skills. They all have one thing in common - they call themselves 'web designers.'
Out of 400 resumes my colleagues and I managed to whittle the list down to about a dozen. This isn't a dozen strong candidates, mind you - this is a dozen people who passed the initial screening. I'm sure these people are very bright, energetic, creative, and hard working. I'm sure they have a ton to offer some company out there. Just not for the service they are advertising.
This is the fourth time we've done a search like this since I took over the creative department. And the search has yielded 3 people.
Perhaps this is because I'm extremely picky, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that there are web designers, and there are Web Designers.
Web Designers understand that theirs is not a service or a hobby or a skill. It is a craft, as much of a craft as painting or writing poetry or making shoes. They understand that a great Web Designer is not twice as good as everyone else - they're 10-20 times as good.
Web Designers are obsessed with their code - they abhor tools like Dreamweaver. Their chisel is the text editor, and their code is painstakingly written by hand.
Web Designers are students of design - golden ratios, kerning, letting, color theory and the like. They know that unless they understand design the way a painter or sculptor understands design, their work will suffer.
Web Designers are focused first and last on what the user's needs are. They don't use tricks or effects for their own sake, but ground their work in methods that make their user's lives easier.
Web Designers are constantly looking for ways to improve what they do. They were the first to move from tables to divs, the first to validate, the first to design for multiple browsers and media. They were the first to take advantage of AJAX and unobtrusive Javascript to make their sites more intuitive. They were the first to begin stripping everything out of their pages that wasn't necessary or beneficial. They're the ones who are constantly learning, stretching, growing.
There will always be plenty of web designers out there, but Web Designers are few and far between.
I have a buddy back in Colorado. This guy spends his days humbly behind the desk of a publication you've probably never heard of. His official job is to manage content for their online presence. But he is probably their best designer, he's become one of their regular photographers (shooting the likes of Roger Ebert and the wackjob professor from my alma mater above,) and he is increasingly being called upon to write articles as well - the results of which are predictably stellar.
He's way too humble to admit it, but he's one of the most talented guys you're likely to meet. If you need someone to write something, take a photo of something, or put something online, you should give him a call.
The ever-forward-thinking Amit has a new project, and I'm betting it will be just as successful as the ones that proceeded it. It's a newsletter called Photojojo, and it shoots ideas and tips for making the most of your photos to your inbox twice a week. It's a beautiful site about a fun idea from a brilliant guy. You should check it out.
I'm wrapping up work this weekend on a site for The International Ecotourism Society in Washington. They hold an auction every year that is responsible for the bulk of their operating revenue, and they wanted a site that would get people excited about the vacation possibilities they had to offer. They also wanted to give the organizations donating trips an opportunity to market themselves - the majority of these groups have lofty goals and small budgets, so they appreciate any marketing opportunities they can get.
I was excited to take on the project, but knew my time contraints were limited. I needed a way to quickly get these auctions up.
Enter Wordpress.
After attending Scott Kidder's presentation at Barcamp about using Wordpress as a full-featured CMS, I thought I'd give it a try. Turns out it's surprisingly easy - Wordpress comes with a nearly infinite amount of customization possibilities, which made it easy to turn the homepage into something entirely un-blog like. The template conventions are easy to customize, allowing me to build the custom continent pages as well. Pages helped me keep track of constant information, giving me the flexibility of having dynamic and static content on the site.
There was a lot I still wanted to do to some of the internal pages, but everyone's happy with how it's turned out. It relies heavily on the beauty of the various locations to do the selling, which makes my job easier.
You can check out the site at www.ecotourismgala.org - see if you can visit the site without getting a travel bug.
If you're interested in helping promote Ecotourism, I encourage you to become a TIES member - it's only $60, you get ridiculous discounts on travel to any of their member organizations, and a free subscription to Outdoor magazine. Oh, and you help a fantastic cause.
If you're looking for design inspiration, do yourself a favor and visit The Generation Church website. This very well could be the most stunning site I've seen in the past 12 months.
I knew Sean growing up, and was always humbled by his intelligence. These days I'm similarly humbled by his design aesthetic. Just watch - in five years he'll be touring the country on the CSS speaking circuit with Doug Bowman and Jeffrey Zeldman. And I'll be asking for his autograph.
Every Christmas, my mother goes to great pains to create the perfect holiday home. Everything has its place, from the pictures to the placemats to the candlesticks. The centerpiece is the eleborately decorated tree. The details are meticulous - the colored balls go on the inside of the branches so the soft white light shines just so off their shiny surfaces. The same patterned cloth bows are used each year, lovingly packed with paper towel rolled up between the loops. The red beads and the gold beads criss-cross in a precise and consistent manner. And the ornaments are painstakingly placed in the perfect location - nothing is where it shouldn't be. It's a labor of love, and she's extremely proud of the end result.
A few years back, the men of the house decided to rebel. We picked up a cheap fake tree, grabbed pop cans and toy cars, and threw the whole thing together in five minutes. The tree topper was a roll of toilet paper. It was truly a work of art.
The tree has only improved with the seasons, as our carelessness has consistently reached new highs. These days, the brances are placed in improper spots, with the longest branches at the top. Some spots we just leave bare. The lights are thrown on the tree in a big clump, and the tree topper hangs off to one side.
Honestly, I'm not sure how we're going to beat this year's effort - I'm open to ideas:
Got promoted last week - I'm no longer the ambiguous 'Director of User Experience' but a full-fledged Creative Director. It's a pretty cool feeling - since college, I knew that if I were going to bite the bullet and work for someone else, this would be the kind of position I'd want.
Whatever creative faculties I possess will have to wait to be flexed temporarily, however - the downside of being a growing company with an ever increasing client base is that someone has to produce all that work - and I'm now the lucky gent managing the guys who make that happen. The fact that they're able to create over 200 sites a year is pretty amazing stuff - my job is to make that process even more efficient, and to push the proverbial envelope of what we do even further. A pretty daunting task - but I've never been one to back down from a challenge. We'll see what happens.
As an aside - if you're an amazing designer looking to add some unversity clients to your portfolio, feel free to email me at sean DOT johnson AT gmail DOT com. As the great Tom Peters says, it's always the right time to look for great talent.
November 26, 2005
The extremely talented Andy Rutledge weighed in on the home page design for auction mega-giant eBay earlier today. His analysis was pretty thorough, and he managed to take a page that was extremely cluttered and hone in on what he felt were the most important pieces.
Andy does a great job of focusing on creating a "usable" site - reducing the number of competing elements, being consistent with links, etc. But while he does quite a bit to create a page that adheres to the guidelines put forth by the many usability experts in the marketplace, the focus on structural usability leads to a site that ignores some other factors that can lead to a good experience.
We're working on the next iteration of a pretty slick tool for students on campus, and It's a doozy from an interface standpoint. The company prides itself on customizing everything we do for clients, and it's a big reason why we've been so successful. But for interfaces it can be tough - every aspect of this app can be turned on or off depending on the client, which makes placement of elements difficult.
The main difficulty is that the elements don't all merit the same space. Some pieces don't really justify a large amount of screen real estate, while others would look downright silly if they're too small. So we decided on two sizes - should make things fairly straightforward.
But if elements are turned off, the placement of the remaining pieces looks strange, especially when a larger element is removed. What does one do with the missing space?
The app has no advertising (nothing we do does,) so slapping in some random ads isn't an option. The funniest scenario is for the school that only has one module (which happens.) What happens to the page then?
We're close to rolling it out, but it's been an interesting challenge. I'm curious how other people would address it...
And they said you couldn't learn anything from Tetris...
