Information Squid

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start with discovery: research, interviews, what company does and
	message they want to convey
do discovery in a place where you feel creative - colors, books,
	stuffed animals
he keeps morgue files - printed matter that inspires him
he keeps sketchbook - capture ideas and go back and find them and
	be reinspired
sheet music title pages often have cool typography
also digital morgue files - stamps, ads, photos, matchbooks, colors - tag
invited to Comhaltas, preservation of Irish music/dance/etc, in Dublin
invited to music sessions - feeling of community, playing together 10
	minutes after meeting
looked at traditional knotwork for inspiration
told them to avoid dancing leprechauns
had music available to bring online
used knotwork, colors from those knotwork patterns, emotional
	connection, modern feel
ended up with Comhaltas site
A List Apart site - crossover between content and design
took inspiration from old books' typography
why is designing for yourself or your agency so difficult? hard to
	translate feel
use iterative design
makes what he calls grey-box comps
look very like wireframes but are about layout hierarchy not just
	elements on page
"AIGA stands for the professional association for design"
	(mm, de-acronyming)
figured out flow of editorial then were wrapping different things around it
third comp has design competition images in header
don't want to cross designs but focus on one and develop that
in second round, he focuses on details
does it need an underline there?
what's the relationship between headers and content?
between 2 and 3, the logo got bigger. :)
on article page, cleaned up navigation
widened article column and inlined images instead of thumbnails
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
WordPress head is in audience
use brand equity when you redesign
gridwork - i.e. early maps of Philadelphia by William Penn
very different from London....
starts in Illustrator for grey-box comps, then moves to Photoshop
pay attention to focal point
reduce over-contrast
over 400 members of Flickr group called Atrocious Apostrophe's
“ ” ‘ ’
Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst
Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton
Grid systems in graphic design, Josef Muller Brockmann
Making and Breaking the Grid, Timothy Samara

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interfaces are mostly text
try going to a website in a foreign language and see if you can
	tell how to interact
content drives traffic - i.e. boingboing
words + how big they are + where they are
THIS IS WHY...  1. All sites have big writing / editorial budgets.
2. All sites (especially big ones) have a content czar.
yeah right. so what do we do?
"Thinking with Type"
one of the most humane features of design is to help people read less.
guide copy explains what the site's about and how to interact with it
should be brief, clear, and enable you to do things
Veer is a nice site for buying fonts, pictures, etc.
Khoi Vinh saw Zeldman give this talk, and now the NYTimes subscription
	wall page has a link
if copy doesn't set tone, the design can (i.e. e-cards for tween girls)
but needs to be audience-appropriate
"Understanding Your Medicare Benefits.  You must have Flash installed
	and JavaScript enabled."
project management is a tough job - moment of appreciation
Basecamp's login "we'll send you right along" is friendly
Joyent "Take a tour and we'll prove it." instead of "Read more about
	our services."
give us a chance to make a value proposition
Flickr - must appear to be easy to use
"copy" copy - doesn't have to be as brief, can be silly
XHTML fist shirt has six fingers....
brand copy - taglines, blog subheads, etc.
forgetting to write a sentence of introduction totally lose a visitor
Marley's daughter's clothing site's shopping cart is way too formal,
	not reggae
Lulu's about page guy in a suit in heaven with huge amounts of text
	really doesn't work
labels can reinforce your brand - Cap Gemini's "how we work together"
URLs can be labels - name them for humans
reading online might be more fatiguing than reading print, but studies
	are unclear
compare a versus b
Attack of the Zombie Copy
Your About Page is a Robot
how do you reconcile people-read-less with SEO?
cutting the fat and natural language help both
so does using markup so important words are in headlines
can sometimes get funding for editing content by saying will help SEO
what are some questions to determine what's brand-appropriate?
discovery process. what materials have you already produced
	about yourselves?
what do you know about your stakeholders? compare with real users.
there are no good books about copy
there are good ones about writing for the web, but they don't address
	these issues - i.e. Crawford Kilian, Writing for the Web
Zeldman is thinking of writing this
pronouns in copy?  used to be more we, now with blogging more I

ETA: Fixed spelling of Kilian, after seeing his discussion of I versus we prompted by these notes.

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Web 2.0 reflection of Yoda!
isindex tag? from HTML 1.0, no one's used it in five years or so.
display: table doesn't have to only apply to tables
padding on images not just text; images have backgrounds
punchouts with transparent images so changed background on rollover
	shows through
turn a table into a bar graph
	old version on Meyer's site
	table { display: block; position: relative; }
	tr, th, td { position: absolute; bottom: 0; }
	tr { width: 25% } (create columns)
	th, td {width: 100%; }
	thead tr { left: 100%; top: 50%; margin: -2.5em 0 0 5em; }
	(headers outside table)
	thead th positioned correctly - legend with border on each th
	table #q2 {left: 25%; border-right: 1px dotted #999; } etc
	table tbody th { top: .75em; vertical-align: top; }
		(Q1 label at top of column)
	start using <th scope="row"> and <th scope="col">
	tbody td.sent vs td.paid colors
	position td.sent on left of column, 40% wide
	and td.paid on right, 40% wide
	borders set so look like buttons
	outset CSS property doesn't say what colors should be
	so browsers decide (poorly)
	#q1 .sent { height: 36.9%; }
	#q1 .paid { height: 33%; } etc
	precalculated numbers here; since probably coming out of database,
		just program to produce
	or could use JavaScript
	CSS will probably never let you do math: see section 8(?) of CSS1
		but also see CSS3 proposals
	Microsoft had behavior CSS-like property, but many people hate it
	extra div/list/whatever for tick marks at each $10,000
	could use content::after if willing to lose them in IE
	could use tfooter row maybe?
	#ticks { position: relative; top: -30em; margin-bottom: -30em; }
	#ticks .tick { border-bottom: 1px dotted #999; }
	#ticks .tick p { position: absolute; left: 100%; }
		(put them to the right of the graph)
use same markup for horizontal bar graph instead of vertical
accessible and indexable
reset styles
	:focus { outline: 0; }
	table { border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0; }
		(need cellspacing in markup)
	blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after { content: ""; }
	blockquote, q { quotes: "" ""; }
Firefox package / Contents/Mac OS/res/ has Firefox's default .css files
line layout is incredibly complicated, so not getting into
can set all elements to display:block and will show head etc. in (most?)
	modern browsers
html element's background inherits upward to canvas
if html element doesn't have a background and body does, it inherits
	upward to canvas
if display html element, there can be space outside it - that's where the
	Force comes from

Better late than never. Following will be my notes from An Event Apart Chicago 2007, held August 27th and 28th. It was the AEA lineup I was most interested in seeing, and conveniently they came to my city. I’ve since moved to Washington, DC, but I’m glad I was able to bring their ideas with me. Definitely worth the price - and I was saying that after the first two talks, so the value of the full conference had to be much higher.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s event wrapup, with various links

Links to individual posts:
“Secrets of the CSS Jedi” by Eric Meyer
“Writing the User Interface” by Jeffrey Zeldman
“Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag” by Jason Santa Maria
“Search Analytics For Fun and Profit” by Lou Rosenfeld
“The Seven Lies of Information Architecture” by Liz Danzico
“Interface Design Juggling” by Dan Cederholm
“Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave.” by Jeremy Keith
“Best Practices For Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski
“Accessibility: Lost In Translation” by Derek Featherstone
“The State of CSS In an IE7 World” by Eric Meyer
“Selling Design” by Jeffrey Zeldman
“Dealing With the Both of You” by Jim Coudal

Ebooks seem to be hot again, at least for slightly warm values of hot. I’ve seen more articles mentioning them in the past month than I had for quite a while before that. Most prominently, both the Washington Post and New York Times had survey-of-the-industry articles, the Post’s pegged to a review of the Sony Reader.

The more interesting development was that the Times article and a BloggingStocks post bring up the idea of iPhone as ebook reader. One of the difficulties for the industry has been that current devices and before them the Rocket eBook cost real money, $300 and $500 respectively. Most people don’t want a separate, expensive device just for reading on pixels. iPhones (or future iPods with a similar screen) could make ebook readers widely available - at which point more people would start using them.

Then the problem becomes the cost of the books. Charles Stross, science fiction writer, pointed out in March that “the economics of the commercial ebook market are sick”. Ebooks are sometimes being sold for almost the cost of hardcovers, which is crazy. Audio editions I can understand being worth that much, since they have added costs in the form of voice actors and sound editing, and they still have media and packaging costs. Ebooks? The simplest way to produce an ebook is to distribute the Word document you’re working from. You’ll still have costs for editing, promotion, distribution channel, etc., but none for paper and printing. How can that require charging as much as for a hardback?

I like physical books because I can see them and be reminded to reread, which (even with something like Apple’s CoverFlow for book covers) is unlikely to happen with ebooks. I like physical books because I can decorate my apartment with them. I like physical books because I can easily loan them to friends - and given the fog of DRM around most ebooks (there are exceptions like Baen), that’s not going to be possible any time soon. Ebooks aren’t worth as much to me as dead-tree editions, and I’m not sure what price would be right.

Some publishers are starting to think about the price problem. Baen’s ebooks cost a little less than paperbacks. Toby Buckell notes that Stross’s publisher was persuaded by his arguments to price his books’ electronic editions at three pounds. And of course the romance e-publishers have consistently kept their prices comparable to series romances, less than single title paperbacks. But most traditionally published books aren’t available as ebooks for anything like an appropriate price. Hopefully that will change soon.

Note: this is about ebooks-as-purchased-content rather than ebooks-as-freely-distributed-marketing. The latter strategy is going strong, with HarperCollins expanding its sample pages program to an iPhone-compatible website, authors posting first chapters on websites, and ebook authors expanding their work for traditional publishing deals.

LibraryThing is currently hosting a fascinating thread on tagging, “What does tagging do to knowledge (and they’re giving away copies of Everything is Miscellaneous to ten commenters).

The site is a place to catalog personal book collections, and they’re also working with libraries and booksellers to share their useful information. Because the community is interested in books and in libraries and in classification, some of the thread comments are fascinating. Some are from laypeople, others from librarians, archivists, etc.

“I like fun tags that are so personal or unique that nobody else uses them. A friend of mine, for example, has tags like “Detectives with gimmicks”, “Elaborate crimes”, “Witty people being clever”, and my favorite “Fangirlin’”. I myself want to use a tag for “Farm boys with magical destinies” but it’s apparently too long.” - saturnine13

“Conversely, the most intriguing tags (autistic-like character, Kleenex, the end of Pottermania) are almost inevitably used by only a single member.” - SilentInAWay

This reminds me of Elizabeth Bear’s LiveJournal tags, such as a policeman’s work is never done, all three sides of the story, and ask a stupid question.

“First, tags really only seem to work for organizing stuff you have some sort of conceptual “ownership” of - things that in some way you have an incentive to keep order within. People don’t seem to want to tag in enough quantity / detail to be useful when they don’t have a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess.” - cubeshelves

I wonder how this relates to people’s del.icio.us collections getting out of control? Perhaps that mostly happens when they’re saving “interesting links” rather than “links related to this interest or project”. In the former case, it’s not at all clear what tags will be useful over time (level of detail, omitting broader categories, forgetting what’s been used before, etc.). In the latter case, the focus of a particular area lends itself both to continuity in tags and to having “a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess” - or a stake in not letting it become a mess.

“In a small community, though, tags are very interesting. Not only do they provide the advantages mentioned above, but they also allow the community to negotiate meaning and context — the types of tags that are used, and the content of those tags says something about what is meaningful to a community.” - Placebogirl

But getting critical mass of tags in a small community is hard. One of the great things about Flickr, for instance, is that there are enough people tagging enough photos that I can easily find a Creative Commons licensed photo of just about anything to put into a presentation. Maybe this is just an instance of many intersecting small communities in one place, so that the wider world gets the advantage of each of those smaller groups’ tagging efforts.

“Something I’ve found frustrating about the tags I find on books here is _sometimes_ nearly all the tags are personal. If I am looking for sci fi recommendations about Intergalactic Travel, well, very few people use that tag. In fact, a fair number of the sci fi books will tell me the main character, series, where people have stored it, etc. without telling me what its world-view/situation is (such as psi, alien encounters, culture clashes, intergalactic civilization, parallel worlds, etc.) Those were things I was hoping to learn from other people’s tags, and, at the moment, can’t always figure out.” - EowynA

When cataloging physical books, the first instinct seems to be to tag with physical locations (coffee table), ownership (mine vs my boyfriend’s), personal state (unread), etc. Books’ contents come after personal reactions.

“Is there a genre that has a low/no rate of tagging? Why would that be? How would one find it if it isn’t tagged? ” - hexmap

A symbol for zero was invented much later than those for positive numbers. Stumbling on Happiness talks about people ignoring the intervening time when thinking about how they’ll feel in the future. Clearing your mind while meditating is difficult. Absence of information questions are a lot harder than presence of information questions.

“I have to admit, I never got really excited about tagging until we could search multiple tags. That ability has made me rethink how I tag things. ” Katissima

Tagmashes are fascinating. I’m looking forward to playing with them.

BBDO Netherlands, working for Chrysler, recently created a viral video ad for the new Dodge Nitro SUV. The ad showed the car electrocuting a dog. Chrysler was not pleased. (And they’ve had problems with BBDO Detroit’s ads before.)

Chrysler apologized and tried to have the video pulled from YouTube - apparently without initial success (it’s now down, “due to a copyright claim by DaimlerChrysler”). And the video has spread, to the Detroit Free Press, Jalopnik, SpikedHumor.com, and probably elsewhere.

It’s hard to pull an ad these days. Anything controversial will spread. Even if your ad airs once in an obscure market, or is placed only on a few low-traffic websites, if it’s interesting then someone’s probably made a copy to put online - and they’ll be rewarded with plenty of hits for doing so. (The most prominent example of a small ad buy provoking amazingly more free media coverage is the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential election.)

There have been media stories about ads being squashed for a long time, but the new element is that people can read the story and see the ad for themselves. It’s not one-day news. An ad you pull can still go viral, being forwarded from one person to another and being copied to too many sites too fast to stop.

But isn’t this what the advertiser wanted in the first place? Chrysler noted in its apology that “European commercials — especially ‘viral’ ads like this one — are often edgier,” so it seems likely that BBDO Netherlands knew its market. The comments at SpikedHumor are mostly amused. The previous BBDO Detroit ad, where a car gets a jump from a Nitro and is blown into the sky, seems different in degree of attack by the Nitro rather than in kind of attitude of the car. Even if this isn’t the brand message Chrysler wants (and if it’s not, they apparently haven’t conveyed that to BBDO anytime in the last six months), hasn’t this controversy helped reach the Nitro’s target audience?

Well, Apple’s iTunes has finally given in to variable pricing pressure - a little bit. iTunes’s new “Next Big Thing” section lists albums for $5.99 and $6.99, instead of the normal $9.99. While it’s not the per-song variability the record labels have been pushing for, the door has cracked open.

The labels would love to sell new, hot songs for more than iTunes’s standard 99 cents, since their price elasticity is probably pretty low - people will buy them regardless of how much they cost. And the labels want to sell older, less popular songs for under 99 cents, since they hope more people will buy if they’re cheaper. So far Apple has resisted. Their only concession has been to price the EMI tracks without digital rights management (DRM) at $1.29, since they’re both transferrable without DRM restrictions and encoded at higher quality.

But now Apple has set up the “Next Big Thing”, and it’s producing results for the featured albums. Sara Bareilles’s Little Voice hit the number one spot for albums with about 14,000 downloads. The Wall Street Journal compares that to “albums from Paul McCartney and the White Stripes [which] sold around 16,000 digital copies during their first week of release earlier this year,” and mentions, “Atlanta rapper Unk’s 9-month-old album, which had been down 1% the week before the promotion, enjoyed a 152% spike in digital sales.”

Apple is coy about who picks the abums to showcase, saying, “Just who decides what the Next Big Thing is? Is there a committee? A grand jury of elite tastemakers who have the power and influence to push something into the arms (and ears) of the pop marketplace? Honestly, there’s nothing of the sort (we hope). … Well, we’re halfway through the year and iTunes has a fine selection of artists who we think have the true grit (or pure luck) it takes to beome the next big thing.”

Absent any actual information, I have to assume this is like bookstore coop, as described in an AIGA Journal of Design article: “You may have thought the books on the front tables at B&N were hand-selected by a local book-loving manager, or that the titles on view are “bestsellers” or the books being talked about in the press. In actuality, the publisher has paid the store for this placement in a deal known as “co-operative advertising” or cost sharing between the retailer and supplier. Those books on the table often do end up being bestsellers, in part because of this positioning in the store.”

So have the labels paid for coop? If they have, so far they’re probably getting their money’s worth. And will this satisfy them, or will they keep pushing for per-song pricing? Universal is currently renegotiating its contract with Apple and trying not to sign anything long-term, and the labels have been more insistent about variable pricing each year iTunes has stuck with the flat 99 cents price. Will Apple be able to keep all songs in lock-step? Or what interesting concessions can they wring from labels for letting them break the ranks?

ETA: It has been pointed out to me that album prices have historically been somewhat flexible (the White Stripes album is $10.99, for instance, and T.I. versus T.I.P. is $12.99), and iTunes has run sales that look like this before, with a special page of “these things are cheap”. This seems to be the first ongoing discount program, though.

Following up on the concerns about how to use Yahoo SmartAds, the answer is probably to use a souped-up creative optimizer, ideally hooked into the ad serving system itself. That way you can analyze your results and then show your most effective ads most often (or modify the less effective versions). Creative optimization has been around for a while for search campaigns, trying to improve performance for certain keywords. Advertising.com in November 2006 released a study of keyword performance using three optimization techniques.

It’s harder to find information about optimization solutions for advertising, perhaps because everyone is trying to keep their methods proprietary. WPP’s (Ogilvy’s) mOne developed a tool called mEuclid and publicized it in 2005. That seems likely to be the same tool mentioned in The Quest for the Perfect Online Ad (Business 2.0, 4/3/2007). The Atlas Institute of aQuantive has done some writing about creative optimization (also in 2005), though the referenced white paper says to worry more about ad placement than about exactly what’s in your creative.

Still, given the option to have potentially thousands of combinations of ad components, agencies that take advantage of SmartAds will need a way to manage and analyze the data they collect. Erick Schonfeld’s The Next Net picks up the same concern about how many items marketers will need to juggle. Seems like Ogilvy has a good setup already - I wonder whether the other agencies are behind or just quiet?

Via Nick Wright’s Vir(tu)al Marketing and Media, online video and its inserted ads are getting more and more press.

Google launched an AdSense for video pilot at the end of May. Google Video has had ads since the beginning of the year, so presumably the insertion technology is coming from that program. Their setup allows the video creator to choose when in the clip the ad runs.

But picking the timing of an interstitial ad is only one possibility for advertising in online video content. Collected from several recent articles, here are some of the options:

Pre-roll or blipverts, before a clip starts
Midroll or interstitial, sometime in the middle of the clip
Post-roll or endcap, after the end of the clip
Bug or superimposed logo, not clickable
Bug or superimposed logo, when clicked pauses video and opens link in a new window
Bug or superimposed logo, when clicked opens additional ad content within the video frame
Ticker, generally across the bottom of the screen, like cable news channels
Link from items’ images in the video content to where you can purchase them
Sponsorship information inserted into the content
Show an advertiser’s video every certain number of other videos

What options did I miss?

The articles:
Make Way for Must Stream TV, Business 2.0, 3/1/2007
Will Video Ads Evolve?, Forbes.com, 2/23/2007
Video Ads: Every Startup Has a Different Solution, TechCrunch, 7/6/2007
The Revolution of Video Advertising, Entrepreneur.com, 5/30/2007