Howells.

Brainpickings highlighted this motion graphics piece which illustrated part of This American Life host Ira Glass’ interview on the art of storytelling. I took time to transcribe the piece because his message really resonated with me. Doing work and a lot of it separates those with mere good taste to those who produce great work:

All of us who do creative work, like, y’know we get into it and we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste—the thing that got you into the game—your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point they quit.

…

I would just like to say to you—with all my heart—is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted to have… Everybody goes through that… You’ve got to know that it’s totally normal.

…

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

…

It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

(On a side note, if I were American, I’d want to speak like Ira Glass.)

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First, read this post by Cameron Koczon:

The final group of heroes is a marriage of the first two. I like to think of them as the big “H” heroes. Mostly because I don’t have a better name. These Heroes are people have done astounding, almost unbelievable, things and yet they aren’t imaginary. They’re real. You can see them. You share the air with them. They’re existence makes the world seem full of possibilities because they stand as an example of just how far one person can go. My first love is products, so for a while now my only version of this Hero has been Steve Jobs. This article, which I wrote when I first heard about the SJ biography being released today, was meant to be a thank you to him for setting that kind of example. I’ve had to edit things because he is dead. Overnight, he was transformed into a historical figure. There is no next chapter. As of today, I have no living Heroes. I’m pretty bummed about that.

While like Cameron I struggle to identify my own heroes, I know plenty of people in the industry who look up to many people that inform or inspire their work.

So secondly, I want to make a point about actually being a hero. This isn’t related to me, but last week I observed two instances with made me think about this. If you’re famous within this industry (i.e. have a large twitter following, and regularly talk at events, etc.), there’s a lot you can do to actually be a hero to someone who clearly looks up to you.

Be humble, be interested, and be flattered. If someone takes an interest in your work and is excited to meet you in person, the least you can do is engage even on a basic level to find out more about them and their work. It’ll make their day. And the likelihood is that they will share taste, ideas, and projects on par with your own, and you will never know where your next collaborator may appear from.

Today I met Carter Cleveland, the CEO of New York-based start-up Art.sy. At it’s core, Art.sy helps you browse and discover your taste in art, and if you are so inclined to buy it will connect you with the galleries that showcase the pieces.

To me, Art.sy is important for three things.

Firstly, it is one of the most beautiful web interfaces I have seen in recent times: dramatic in its black and white simplicity and careful typography, complemented with slick functionality that makes the site incredibly sticky. It’s a triumph of design and front-end development, such that unlike any other art site you can easily find yourself falling into a rabbit hole of beautiful content. You can jump effortlessly from a Dutch master to a hyper-contemporary sculpture, all tied together with a powerful taxonomy they term The Art Genome Project:

…an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art. Art.sy evaluates artworks across 800+ characteristics (we call them genes)—such as art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities—to create a powerful search experience that reflects the multifaceted aspects of works of art.

Secondly, with stunning high definition artwork (supplied by their gallery partners) the site becomes an extension of the gallery experience. On a large screen, the images are huge, with a zoomable interface that allows you to explore a piece’s texture and detail. (And incidentally, the copyright protection that obviously is required for such a site is ingenious.) A particularly nice feature is being able to see a piece in context, hanging on a wall in a gallery. It sounds like a skeuomorphic novelty, but feels great and relevant. This also means Art.sy becomes an important educational tool; a perfect encyclopaedia for the arts.

Thirdly, you are able to curate your own taste. The social layer of Art.sy is in development, but from the initial wireframes that Carter showed me this is an exciting execution of the idea I posted recently. Your own profile can sit alongside well known individuals profiles: imagine jumping from Sofia Copolla’s curated collection to that of your friends. It’s a powerful discovery tool.

Finally, Art.sy will rip open the art industry. To outsiders the art scene is a closed circle composed of the privileged few. And to insiders, it’s all about playing political games with gallery owners. Art.sy will cut through this leaving traditional auction houses and galleries resisting engagement with the web to suffer. I like to imagine the site will inspire a whole new generation potential art buyers, previously shut out from the system.

Importantly Art.sy has a robust and obvious business plan. As well as taking a haircut from each referred transaction, they provide services to gallery owners who can manage their own inventory, and once payment processing systems are in place on the site, the model becomes even more clear. The benefits are not constrained to gallery owners: I’d like to see how an art advisor might leverage the site to help their clients.

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I’m not going to link to the dreadful article, or even mention the writer’s name. I think everyone in the industry knows what I’m talking about.

.net magazine wrote a robust article pinpointing precisely what was wrong with the article. Daniel Gray’s and my own few pennies’ worth were quoted in it.

What I would say though is almost more than the article itself, I’m disgusted that The Guardian/The Observer gave the writer a platform for writing such dreadful nonsense. I do love The Guardian with their technologically savvy approach to journalism and is a refreshing destination for non-gutter tech coverage, which makes me particularly disappointed with this sorry episode.

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I randomly discovered this excellent Slideshare deck by interface designer Johan Ronsse. It contains some wonderful nuggets we should always bear in mind when creating interfaces:

• The power of good defaults — make sure your users have access to the most obvious options first (a good example is optgroup’ing the most likely/popular countries in a massive country select)
• The only benefit of customising a select is making it fit with your design: you lose all the very useful, native functionality a select provides
• If you don’t have the time or skill to customise UI controls (which is hard), it’s best to stick to the boring defaults that work
• (But at the same time if nobody took any risks, there’d be no UI innovation)
• Always leave that little annoying “View larger Map” link in when you embed a Google Map. Otherwise it’s a nightmare – especially on a mobile device – to see the map in full view.
• Alternatively, just embed a static map and link to Google Maps. Nobody uses the embedded map functionality anyway.
• Use outlines, subtly, referring to Google Maps place names, which have white outlines, and the left and right arrows of Facebook’s photo viewer. Your controls should always be visible regardless of their background
• If you use lightboxes to view images, make sure the image occupies the whole screen, and don’t use animated transitions (I’m very guilty of this myself…)

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I enjoyed Al Monk’s reaction to Apple’s announcement of OS X Mountain Lion:

For those of a discerning nature, these things might not please your minimal tastes, but they help the vast majority of users understand, and as we’ve already established, this is who Apple want to please, not us on the fringes.

…

If Apple could have slapped on linen textures, shadows and 3D buttons on Mac OS 1, they definitely would have done. We need not be afraid.

I follow a lot of designers on Twitter, and I hate having to endure the whinging and complaining that goes on with every revision of OS X or iOS. I always bite my lip and choose never to engage in the conversation because it’s boring, and very unimportant.

Al touches on some great points in his article. Mac OS was not made exclusively for a creative production audience. It’s made for anybody.

And the easiest way to engage a mass audience is through proxy or cliché, which is why – even though we might not like it – skeuomorphism is the correct design approach for Apple to take if it is to engage a massive new audience, many of whom may have never touched a computer (my mother, case in point, who uses her iPad daily without any sort of lesson since day one). As I’d hope creative audiences would appreciate, good design cares for the end user, whereas design for designers is usually unsuccessful.

But we needn’t worry for much longer. The hyper realistic calculator – for instance – is a reference to an object that I’d bet won’t be with us for much long (in fact, I can’t remember the last one I have seen one, other than as a relic in a Dieter Rams exhibition). Once a new generation of users comes on board (which is just a few years hence), the proxies that Apple’s designers are using will no longer be valid. Instead, interfaces and patterns that were born in the touch era (such as Clear’s) will soon become the norm. Leather textures and torn edges will disappear with it as a natural, organic progression.

So bear with Apple for a little longer. They’ll reach a skeumorphic peak soon, and tend towards a new interface design paradigm that most of us probably can’t imagine.

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I just found this article on Fast Company about Foursquare’s new Explore functionality, which lets you discover places in a given area that you may be in the near future:

…Foursquare has created an elegant solution to the problem of searching not just for things around where you are now, but also the area where you will be. If you’re making plans on the move, the latter is arguably far more important.

This neatly captures my problem with location-based services and apps. I very rarely (if ever) use an app or service to decide on a place to go right now: the reason I’m in a particular place is because I have planned to be there in advance, usually having researched places on my desktop machine, or after referring back to a note of a place I have been recommended.

So Foursquare now allows you to explore places to visit in advance by pinpointing an area that you will be in the near future.

This is great news… kind of.

My problem is now a bit more fundamental. Hardly anyone I know uses Foursquare rigorously enough for the checkin information to be valuable. The gaming nature of the app means that the most active users check into every conceivable place they can find in their database (“oh, so you’re in Starbucks…?”), diminishing the value of the data with every check-in.

Also, the nuance of what a check-in really means is missing. I’ve seen a great many check-ins associated by a negative review: a place to be avoided. Yet if enough people check-in to criticise a venue it will just be viewed as a popular place. Thus the data becomes meaningless.

What I’d like to see now is the perfect recommendation app: simply a small series of carefully recommended places (by people I know and/or trust) that you can choose, and plan to visit later rather than right now. I’m hoping to do this to some extent with The Gourmand, and The City Agenda.

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Now at its seventh issue, So & So is a lovely project by Al Monk, a web designer and developer (and good pal, so I’m biased). Each issue takes a piece of quality writing of a wildly leftfield topic, and is carefully crafted into a single-serving piece of illustrated editorial for the internet to enjoy.

I’d love to see more of these projects: taking “wandering interneteering” from the quick blog post (best typified by the wonderful Jason Kotte), to longer-form pieces of content.

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I enjoyed this article by Chris Tacket in The Atlantic, which asks whether Pinterest and Svpply might in fact reduce consumption:

…counterintuitively, my experience with these services is that they actually help me cut my consumption and to direct my money at goods that more closely align with my values.

The crux of his argument is that adding a product to your profile is sufficient to kick in the endorphins:

…I have found that adding items to my Svpply page gives me a similarly pleasant rush of some pleasure-inducing chemicals

I agree with the sentiment, but for a much more simple reason that he doesn’t seem to touch on.

Fashion relies on consumers buying products as a proxy to convey an individual sense of style or taste to the outside world. But with services like Svpply and Pinterest, why would a consumer bother buying a physical product when they can simply project their taste to a vast audience at zero cost?

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This is an interesting essay by Paul Graham, particularly since it was published in 2008.

In the best part of 4 years, almost all of the 30 ideas he proposes have barely been exploited fully, nor any of the problems it raises have been solved.

It just goes to show there is still an enormous world of opportunities to be explored by technology and design.

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