space to imajin

Apple and Jamaican tourism have something in common. The ability to grow when your competitors are contracting, even hemorrhaging. With Apple now officially a $50 billion company, their profits up 50% and the iPhone sales near 9 million they have shown that recession or no recession people want their digital wares from Cupertino, California…..bad! It is within this carefully crafted context that Apple is about to unleash the tablet today, January 27th. A date that seemed so far off a few months ago is now here. The hype has reached it’s crescendo and I am reminded of that buzz you hear of musicians tuning their instruments and anxiety laced chatting in the crowd. This all ends when the conductor raises his baton. Mr. Jobs is about to waive his wand again and the press and the Apple fans are transfixed in another suspension of reality. We are plunged again into another techno-orgasmic escape of global proportions. Designed to drive their stock price even higher. Sigh…why didn’t I buy that Apple stock in 2003.

There have been countless predictions regarding the tablet/iSlate/iPad whatever!?!?! But the ones that intrigue me the most are the following. Apple’s partnerships with print publishers and the possibilities of the tablet as an input device. It was amazing to follow last year how the media covered numerous print houses that were crashing left right and centre as the Red Baron of the new digital reality shot them mercilessly out of the air. Remember the Napster days? Digital distribution was spear-headed by pimply-faced iconoclasts out to rule the world with gnarly code and a pirate server. Just like the music industry of yore before the iTunes store and Napster, the print industry was caught with their pants on the ground.

Last year, a very obvious tipping point for print was reached. Newspapers were folding (pardon the pun) all across the US. This accelerated Kindle lust and helped Amazon and others to sell e-readers like gangbusters. But Apple waited, biding it’s time as they negotiated and secured contract after contract to enable their new product to be head and shoulders above the rest.

The tablet will create a whole new world for us content creators and designers. I can just imagine the next generation of children’s books, sports magazines and the soon to be popular music LP that Apple introduced last year that I believe will transform our musical experience…again. As a designer, I am really looking forward to the input capabilities of the tablet. I think Wacom is going to suffer some serious losses over the next 2-3 years. It will not be pretty. They may have to shift to input wands and software for the tablet to stay in business.

One thing so many other pundits are not mentioning much of is that the tablet will not only be a platform for print media but also for Apple’s twin juggernauts.

Apps and Music.

This is what the Kindle and the other players do not have. This One-Two-Three punch will really create the most sought after, life altering device since….fire. Either way, Apple is doing it again. Ol’ Stevie is proving why he was chosen as CEO of the new millennium’s first decade. It just goes to show that even if you get kicked out of the company that you founded there is always a chance for a second coming.

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Designed by Yorkali on wordle.net -  Images of Wordles are licensed Creative Commons License.

This guys work is wonderful and highly creative. First saw a piece of his in the NYC subway. MTA commissioned him. Well the big news of late is that Dreamworks just bought the rights to a project of his. DinoTrux :)

Chris Gall – Illustrator and Author.

The Commoditization of Coding, the Democratization of Design and the Importance of Meaning.

There is a shift that has taken place in the building of the worldwide web that many organizations, institutions and small businesses are not realizing and the later they come around the harder it will be for them to make the change. The current economic crisis will make this situation even more acute.

This shift is:  The Commoditization of Coding and the Democratization of Design

Whenever  a product or business service approaches the tipping point of commoditization or democratization the professionals that have crafted their careers on this service start pushing back and squealing. This is definitely happening in the wild, wild west of the world wide web. Web design and web development is going through a significant change that many in the industry will not survive if their skill sets do not evolve.

Note, I have separated the two.

Web development for this author involves the actual building/construction of the site. Web design is the branding and information architecture that gives form, meaning to the site. When I studied Architecture in the ’90s there was a book called Structure and Fabric that was incredibly useful in our coursework. The title confused me at first but after a little while I came around to understand what it really meant. But today I am going to re-purpose that title.

Web development gives the structure/framework upon which is draped the fabric of the design.

Two distinct, yet in-extricably linked entities working together for the common good. To make your site’s visitor either spend money or listen to you.period. All the major brands and web properties understand this from Coca-Cola to Kimberly Clark. From Nike to Ecko. The sad reality is that, not enough of our small and medium businesses and organizations realize this.

But where is this commoditization and democratization coming from? On the design side so many people have a crack version of Photoshop that it is relatively easy to procure a layout for your site at a moment’s notice. Then on the coding side there are an increasing large number of online outfits that all they do is code the photoshop layouts being generated by the crack editions of Adobe’s bread and butter. This, in addition to the fact that so many people know how to code a site in Dreamweaver or write CSS in a text editor. These two activities  are approaching critical mass and are rapidly squeezing out what I would call the “masterbuilder” function of the webmaster and splintering the activities of this post into two distinct tent poles under which websites are being built. It will become increasingly difficult to find persons that are equally versed in both design AND development as coding is such a commodity and people who say they can design are everywhere.

Now, part of the reason companies and organizations hire a hybrid of the two is because they take for granted one of the two functions, coding or design. It’s as simple as that. Usually it’s the design that gets knocked down a couple notches the priority pole. It’s seen as the skin, the lipstick on the pig, the “make-it-pretty” layer in the workflow. This approach, I believe is dead wrong.

“Photoshopping” is not Design.

Design is much more than making it pretty.

Real Design is infused with strategy.

By relegating the Design aspect of a site to the fringe of it’s creation, you are crushing up to 50% or more of your site’s potential. If I said to you, I could get 30% more persons to stick around on your site for longer would you listen? If I showed you that beauty has a function would you take this article seriously? It is crucial for stakeholders to realize that Design needs to be seen less as decoration and more as communication.

If your site’s Design does not; communicate the brands core message, influence a specific action or at the very least grab the user’s attention by the horns, just trade in your marbles and go home.

The web is built on an attention-driven economy. You keep someone’s attention, they stick around. If they stick around at some point they WILL do what you want. Simple. If 60-80% of your sites visitors are clicking away to your competitor in under 30 seconds you have a problem. Either your content is weak or your Design is poor…or both. Within those 0-30 seconds there may not be enough time to show off the wiz-bang functionality of your site. So all the resources you invested in the site’s back-end Coding is gone in 60 seconds…usually far less. The decision to stay or leave your site is based on the Design, content or lack thereof. It is the first interaction before they make a single click. If the design sufficiently attracts, then solid Coding and content will cause the bee to go in and get the pollen.

As time spent on your site goes by the functionality aspect takes precedence and the quality of your Coding starts to show. But it’s still the Design and content that keeps them coming back. It’s a fact of life, we like to hang around people that either look good, have something great to say or posses something that we want or all of the above. The same for websites. It’s the cool place to be after school. It’s the spot to be seen at. While at the Caribbean School of Architecture, award winning architect Denny Repole once said to us during studio class, “People go to special places not only to see, but to be seen”. Creating a site that people want to be seen at (like Facebook) takes many man-hours from the Design and Coding teams to pull off. But what is the result?

continued . addictive . attention.

Spending large sums of money on a website is becoming increasingly rare especially among small to medium size businesses. As this kind of spending goes down, especially in this caustic economic environment, making the case for spending either to your board of directors or to your wife is gonna be pretty darn HARD!

So the design is out-sourced to your nephew and the coding to a friend that’s a network admin in his day job. The splintering of web development is in full swing. It is rapidly becoming cheaper to do and the long-time Designers and Coders are being marginalized rapidly.

How can everyone benefit from a situation like this? Probably not, is the truth or at least not in every case. I believe the only way to add value to what you are good at is to specialize in either coding or designing. Evolve what you are good at to it’s highest possible level. With the public’s highly evolved awareness of good design and the increasing functionality of what sites can offer now a days, there is plenty of opportunity to specialize in either field.

I think more of us website producers seriously need to adopt the model of car production. Where the functions of the engineers and the designers are distinct but the product reflects the synergy and symbiosis of the two.

By specializing on their skill set the end product will be much better for all parties. The two sides of the coin will have a better chance at evolving their deliverables to the highest possible point by going through multiple versions without causing critical aspects of the site to suffer in the production process.

Coders should focus on squeezing every drop of functionality, robustness and elegance from every line of code while paring away the unnecessary barnacles. Make the site sing. Optimizing their  processes.

Designers need to establish themselves not just as Photoshop jockeys but also as thinkers and communicators that know how to embed meaning into every pixel they lay down through intelligent branding, wise use of color theory and typography along with  smart information architecture.

That leaves us with the third leg for the previously unmentioned stool. Meaning.

But what is meaning…really. Meaning is beyond the template driven, monoculture that is producing multiple sites that look way too much alike. Meaning is taking the brand D.N.A.  of your client and expressing that in every single pixel. LACK of Meaning is what happens when you remove the text from a site and you have no idea what it’s selling or communicating. Where this company is and who is behind it. Most times you have to go to the about us or the gallery to get a sense of place and purpose from a website. It should not be so. These two aspects of meaning can and should be expressed in the design.

We remember things because they MEAN something to us. We remember a first kiss, our first car, our favorite color, our first job, our favorite teacher and many other things because they mean something to us. I bet your mind just drifted. One of those things must have meant something. It’s what makes them special. Sometimes it’s a weird little quirk that we like about a place, a person or a thing that adds the meaning. It is the same with a website, a car, a home, our iPhone. Even a smell has a meaning. Simply put, Meaning aids memory, when your website is saved in someone’s memory you are there for life. Top of mind forever.

At the end of the day it is the subconscious Meaning that will help in a large way to help people to pay attention to your site. Because the inconvenient truth is, if a site’s visitor does not want to pay attention, there is very little else they will pay for.

When the coding structure and the design fabric reflect a high level of evolution and are blended perfectly in the matrix of meaning you will not only have a site that can take you from point A to point B. But will ride like it’s on rails  and oh yes, is drop dead sexy and unforgettable. Those are the functions of a successful site.

Yorkali is a Jamaican designer. Follow his tweets on Twitter here.

TheDieline.com: Victoria’s Secret Pink Organics.