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.