I ignorantly assumed that white has its origins in preserving and advancing the interests of light-skinned people. Perhaps the entrenched networks established by and for the Anglo-Saxon colonists sent over from England. But this origin story is not a full accounting. It would be bad enough if white were rooted in a racial purity or a supremacist movement, but the truth is even more repulsive.

It was Austin in mid-March. That can only mean one thing: South by Southwest.

After an unusually rainy week, the clouds finally parted. John and I put the developers to bed and slipped out into the balmy Texas night to track down some music. Hours later, we found ourselves perched in the smoky wings of one of the countless blues bars that dot Sixth Street. The sort of place with one bathroom, folding chairs and a drain in the center of the floor. After every song, we’d fist bump and remark at the unbelievable talent in our midst. Suddenly, a man appeared at my side.

Severe in a Miles Davis kind of way, he sat much too close and stared directly at us with huge, unblinking black eyes. Not sure about John, but I assumed this man was a musician and perhaps we’d been made a part of the act. As quickly as he had materialized, the stranger produced a pad of cheap paper and a ballpoint pen. He began scrawling furiously, pausing from time to time to do cartoonishly artistic things like holding up one thumb, closing an eye, and sticking out his tongue. We were being drawn by the Pablo Picasso of the honky-tonks. He finished, and gazed approvingly at his accomplishment. Only then did his intention become clear. With dramatic flourish, he spun around the spiral-bound canvas and offered to sell me this fresh masterwork. I’m sure John and I gave him a few seconds of our tough guy routine, but I caved quickly and went along with the sales pitch. Needless to say, I’d sampled a few of Austin’s buttery bourbons and gleefully handed him a wad of bills from my pocket. I’m a patron of the arts, after all. We ordered our enterprising friend a drink and had a few laughs and he was off to find his next target as the eastern sky grew red.

Now—not even nine months later—John’s body is in the ground, stolen away by cancer. He was my friend and colleague, and in many ways, my mentor. He was, without a doubt, one of the most gracious people I’ve ever known. It’s only been a couple of weeks and I’m still adjusting to a world without him. It’s a little colder and lonelier than I’m used to. Cleaning out a drawer earlier tonight, I discovered a rolled up sketch and fresh tears sprang to my eyes. I have no idea what I paid that bar-hopping bon vivant for this portrait, but it’s suddenly worth much more.

The crazy thing about street cred is that as soon as you go to cash it in, you’re stripped of it by the very people who gave it to you. It’s like some sort of scummy casino.

It seems that Banksy is the latest to add his name to the list of well-known street artists that have been harshly criticized for “selling out” by the skateboarding masses. Apparently, while Banksy was busy writing the preface for his coffee table book and story-boarding the recent opener for The Simpsons, the real artists were hanging a gallery show ankle deep in New York City’s collective fecal matter. Tough crowd.

Just goes to show that credibility is hard to earn and all too easy to lose. At the same time, it does provide a sort of cultural system of checks and balances. Brands that manage to earn the wary trust of a counter-cultural crowd — especially one who’s ideology is inherently anti-consumerism — must tread particularly lightly. The oft-cited Patagonia comes to mind as a company that seems to walk the talk. They stand by their guns, even when they’re shooting holes in their own business model. The eco-clothiers have made a habit of cultivating deep loyalties with their core consumer base through efforts like 1% For The Planet and The Footprint Chronicles, through which they candidly admit that they’re part of the problem. That’s some serious street trail cred: Humility before glory.

Organizations that sign up for this voyage into truly authentic branding have got to take the long view. It would be so much quicker to work a gimmick or endorsement and go huge overnight, but as soon as their cover is blown, so is their credibility. Forever. The Milli Vanilli of marketing, so to speak. Menswear mogul Giorgio Armani said,

“I’ve tried to find a new elegance. It’s not easy, because people want to be shocked. They want explosive fashion. But explosions don’t last, they disappear immediately and leave nothing but ashes.”

The same is true in advertising. Companies should strive to be surprising in their openness and exceptional in their consistency. The road to sustained credibility is to respect your customer, accept slower growth and constantly check your product (and your promotion) against what you claim to stand for.

On the other hand, you’ve got to be willing to ignore the inevitable haters. Viva Banksy.

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.

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.

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.

Publishers stand at the edge of a bright future.

Never before have so many opportunities existed to tell stories to so many people in truly meaningful ways. Whether on television or radio, in the print or digital arena, viewpoints are being offered up constantly—all vying for audience attention and trust. They all want to be the channel through which people encounter the world, and there are plenty of channels out there. Perhaps most exciting to me is the emergence of the latest evolution of the magazine.

The word magazine comes from the Arabic for “storehouse” or “to store up” and the modern connotation first appeared in the 17th century in the titles of books of information intended for certain groups of people. Early examples of niche publishing. Since then, magazines and other periodicals have pushed the boundaries of user-centric communication again and again. Titles like National Geographic, Popular Science, and Sports Illustrated have made an art of catering to a very specific segment of the population about a very specific subject. Some are personality based, some politically aligned, and some just express a point-of-view that forges a loyal readership through strong editorial voice and vision.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES
Those same points-of-view are now being delivered across an ever-broader range of media platforms to increasingly savvy and demanding audiences. These days, the name of the game is saying what you want to say in a way your listeners want to hear. Luckily, the potency of the tools to do this are scaling in proportion with the newest platforms. With most digital interactions, publishers can track if, when, and how users engage their content and get instantaneous feedback to what they did and did not like. An editor’s dream come true!

Last week, Time magazine announced their plans to begin charging readers a fee to access magazine content on their website. Mind you, this is the same content that is printed for sale at newsstands or delivery to your mailbox and also the same content that appears in their five-dollar iPad edition. This model assumes that the kinds of people who read Time only want to engage it on one fixed platform. People that read the print magazine wouldn’t be caught dead looking on the web for news and information. And the last place you’d find an internet user is holding an iPad. Huh? Not sure if this is laziness, lack of foresight, or desperation, but it seems to me that Time, Inc. is squandering a huge opportunity to publish their (still popular) channel on every platform their readers might want to engage it in a way that is distinct and compelling, as opposed to redundant, and uh—disappointing.

Imagine if publishers leveraged individual platforms to do what they do well. Dedicated apps on smart phones and tablets have very specific strengths, as do browsers in a PC environment. If the majority of a magazine’s readership want to receive a print edition, why not give them interactive features and video on your website and augmented photo edits and exclusive long-form articles on their tablets? If they love the browser edition, why not surprise them with a beautifully produced print publication every now and then? Publishers could include lush photography and supplemental author profiles or behind-the-scenes content to show their audience that the magazine’s stories transcend medium. And here’s the kicker: They could stop charging for every stinking platform. Magazines are known for their advertising prowess, so why not sell space to relevant advertisers or charge a one-time subscription fee to gain access to the channel? Deliver more than they expect, and they’ll keep them coming back to your magazine—regardless of platform.

PRINT AS OBJECT
There will always be people that want to own content in a tangible format. Whether we’re talking about your uncle who still collects LP’s, your brother’s impressive DVD collection, or your mom’s library of cookbooks, the human connection with our objects will persist. My encouragement to publishers would be to let your print-edition books become beautiful objects. Keepsakes. Perhaps even heirlooms. Enough with the crappy paperbacks and low-rent Twilight knockoffs. Release that rubbish for Kindle. Embrace the emerging seriousness of print. Part of the appeal of pixels is their transience, but ink should be permanent.

THE IRON IS HOT
So what’s the big deal? Computers have been around for ages right, so why now? One key reason: truly beautiful design has come to the screen. Resolutions are higher. Images are brighter. Text is crisper. Typography is—well—attainable. Whether designers are creating immersive experiences in the browser or sharing up-to-the-second news through a dedicated app, for the first time in history publishers can (and should) demand the same visual excellence on the screen that they’ve come to expect in print.

CONTENT IS (STILL) KING
Our magazines and periodicals are being delivered across a broad spectrum of platforms to wherever the audience may want to engage them with surprisingly consistent messaging. Publishers are intentionally putting ink on paper when they want it to last and they’re doing it beautifully. But what are they saying?

This is where that idea of “storehouse” comes into play. Maybe in the 1600’s it was enough to just compile a bunch of random stuff that was interesting only to a unique subculture, but these day’s that doesn’t quite pass muster. We, the readers, want curation. Believe me, if I could come up with a non-buzzword that was as strong, I would use it. I’ll say it again: Curation. Our storehouses must be showrooms. Editors and strategists should be perpetually reviewing what’s been said, what the readers thought about it, and how they can best be engaged tomorrow. Aside from the slick advertising and elegant design, there’s an intrinsically human reason Apple has already sold three-million of their shiny consumption devices. Publishers rejoice:

We want perspective. We want connections. We want magazines.