Rating vs. Curating
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on December 2nd, 2010
Today the popular iPad app Flipboard which bills itself as “the world’s first social magazine” released a major update which introduces “the beauty of print, the power of the web.” Heady stuff, to be sure, but as usual— I’m hung up on the m-word. More and more, magazine is being reduced to nothing more than a form factor. It’s pretty fonts and consistent layouts. It’s an empty vessel for — whatever. Don’t get me wrong: I use Flipboard. I love Flipboard. It’s a beautiful aggregator of personally relevant content. It’s brilliant at generating a cohesive package from a variety of channels in ways that are intuitive and enjoyable to consume.
Flipboard is many wonderful things. It is not a magazine.
And the reason, of course, is curation. I know, I know. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger buzzword and it’s easy to disparage the term itself because of its overuse, but the fact remains that it’s the best way to describe what many of the best publishers are doing on the web and on the tablet.
My problem with Flipboard calling itself a magazine stems from the utter lack of curation. Or worse, the notion that curation can be crowd sourced.
Magazine is your friend the gourmet chef. She invites you to a dinner party and your mouth immediately begins to water because you already know the meal will be an immersive, multi-sensory experience. Course after course of surprising, yet ingenious combinations of textures and flavors. Intentionally paired with the perfect wine to complement and draw out the subtleties you would have otherwise missed. A coherent expression flowing from a perceivable point-of-view. It’s edited. Your friend wants feedback to what she’s serving up so her next meal can be even more impressive. She wants you to come back for more.
By comparison, Flipboard is potluck.
The iPad has breathed new life into this whole discussion and opened up a new frontier to publishers — as I’ve mentioned. Some of the brightest folks in the business are thinking and writing about it. Even guys like Khoi Vinh have chimed in. Writing about the web more broadly, Rand Fishkin penned an excellent post on the need for what he calls “benevolent editors” beyond just the algorithm and the crowd. It’s tempting to think of ourselves as little editors making little magazines — wielding our “Like” buttons and retweets. But the truth is that when done well with pacing and insight, a magazine is much more than just a collection of things that have been deemed worthwhile. It takes us on a journey we didn’t even know we wanted to go on. Whether or not our friends care to tag along. There’s Texas and then there’s Texas. The difference?
Curation.
Leave It To Beaver
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on November 8th, 2010
Summers in college, I worked for a carpenter framing additions, building staircases, and installing trim. I was a cutter. My colleagues would shout down measurements and my job was to grab the correct piece of lumber, measure the desired length, set the appropriate angles and chop. Two-studs-eleven-six-and-thirteen-short-on-a-forty-five coming right up. Unfortunately, seven sounds a lot like eleven and sometimes I’d make a wrong cut. Anyone who’s worked in construction will recall what I heard then. The carpenter’s cry would rattle the ladders, momentarily drowning out generators and nail guns: Measure Twice, Cut Once!
Lots of people apply this same wisdom to the building of websites and I can see why. It’s tempting to think of the web as a known quantity and a website as a fixed vessel. And the construction metaphor is helpful so far as it goes — primarily when talking to neophytes. But a website is the sort of house that needs renovation the day after it’s built and the web is far from known. With the obvious exception of preparing images in Photoshop or Fireworks, the philosophy of Measure Twice, Cut Once has little place in a serious conversation about building for the web. When you’re making a website, whether your business card says IA, UX, Designer or Developer, you are not creating a final iteration. Not even close. You are building — in the best of times — the latest evolution of a space which is engineered to scale and flex in response to the changing needs of it’s owners and users. At worst — it’s the overpriced custom cabinetry that looked great on paper, but turns out to be utterly useless in the kitchen.
Consider the lowly beaver: nature’s busiest builder. Once he finds a tree that’s roughly the right size and shape, quick as he can, it’s felled and into the river. Pretty tough to tell how a particular piece of wood will perform from the safety of dry land, so the beaver gets it into approximate position before he starts trimming and fitting. But the job’s hardly done. Whether he’s working on a dam or a lodge, the thing about rivers is that they never sit still. One week, there’s a flood and the next, a drought. And that beaver just keeps on reading the river and building to suit — shoring up the dam or adding a layer to his lodge for winter. How do you think they earned the reputation for being so busy?
The beaver could spend months at the drawing table perfecting his blueprints, but he knows the river won’t wait. With both mountain streams and site traffic, flow is hard to forecast — the best we can do is be ready to adapt and have the right tools close at hand. We must be not just willing, but eager, to build and build again to meet the changing currents.
Mind the Gap
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on October 11th, 2010
It’s been an interesting few days in the world of mark making. First, GAP Inc. unveiled a new logo on their website which swiftly became The Biggest News in The Entire World. Then, for a week or so, people bitched and moaned about it. They designed their own better logos. For free. They made fun of each other for designing better logos for free. They flocked to other mediocre mainstream retail outlets for comfort and familiarity — then, in a move historically reserved for French military units and very reminiscent of the Tropicana re-brand debacle, GAP surrendered to the horde.
That’s right. Tonight, waving white flags with blue squares on them and shouting something ludicrous about crowd-sourcing, they went back to their old logo.
This is in no way a commentary on the aesthetic value of the new logo, you can get plenty of that elsewhere from people a lot smarter than me — what concerns me is the prospect of a future where branding and design decisions are made by the mob. Crowd-sourcing is awesome. This isn’t it. This isn’t even design by committee. If the internet had been around, could someone like Paul Rand or Milton Glaser have ever existed? Someone with singular vision, willing to be booed at first — believing that history would eventually prove him right. Or would IBM still look like a meatball wearing a corset?
There will always be people who prefer the old and sometimes those people will be very noisy. Evolution is uncomfortable, but throwing eggs at everything we perceive to be a downgrade isn’t just juvenile — it’s dangerous. It undermines what’s great about the web. It’s wonderful that we have forums for discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of different brand identities and it’s fun to see what out-of-work designers woulda-coulda-shoulda done, but at the end of the day: it’s a logo.
And it would have been okay.
