Matthew T Grant

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Tall Guy. Glasses.

May 20, 2009 Comments Off on Interactive Design is a Team Sport

Interactive Design is a Team Sport

In the early days of the Web, it was not uncommon for companies to say they wanted to hire someone who knew HTML, Photoshop, JavaScript, Java, SQL, Cold Fusion, PHP, etc.

As the Web grew and people became more sophisticated, it was understood that there was a division of labor on the Web and that someone might know a lot about JavaScript without knowing anything about Java, and vice versa.

This post, which first appeared in February of 2009, addressed the fact that, sadly, there are still some people out there who think that if someone knows one Web technology, then they probably know them all.

2212455873_f6e4853b1b_m.jpgI wrote a post here advocating greater transparency in the staffing business and someone left the following comment:

“Graphic design is a tough business. That being said, seeing positions posted for a web designer that knows Flash, web design, and print design for the jaw-dropping salary of 35K isn’t going to cut it. That is senior-level design knowledge.”

I couldn’t help but agree with this individual, and not just because recent salary data published by Robert Half puts starting salaries for graphic designers at $36K, with motion graphics specialists commanding salaries starting in the mid-$50Ks.

I thought that we had put the days of kitchen-sink web positions well behind us. Overlooking the significant and long-acknowledged differences between print and web design, a position description like the one above indicates a failure to recognize that certain sub-specialties of web design, as one might consider Flash, for example, have actually become viable career options in their own right.

Interactive design has always been a team sport precisely because it is interactive. The web is undeniably a visual medium, hence the importance of visual design in the creation of websites. But a web site must function in addition to looking pretty and the technical complexity of its functioning demands skills and expertise that are more math than Matisse, if you know what I mean.

The classic division of labor on web projects has always been design AND development. Although most designers will have some technical chops, and developers, on the front-end anyway, will understand design basics, this just means they can communicate and collaborate with each other, not that they are interchangeable. Indeed, they are less interchangeable than ever as the “classic” division of yesteryear has been replaced by today’s “baroque” arrangement of sundry strategists and marketing mavens corralling a shifting constellation of user experience specialists, designers, copywriters, Actionscripters, programmers, and analysts, and more.

I know that money is tight and that the web is critical to everyone’s efforts. Nevertheless, you don’t do yourself or your business any favors by trying to cut costs by hiring one person to do the work of four (or more). Instead, you will be better served by starting with a comprehensive plan for your web efforts, which may in the end be “owned” by one person, and then hiring talented specialists on a project or contract basis to bring the plan to life. Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it ALWAYS takes a team to create good web stuff.

Image Courtesy of elvissa.

May 20, 2009 Comments Off on “Don’t Just Take Any Job You Get” and Other Tips on Running Your Own Design Studio

“Don’t Just Take Any Job You Get” and Other Tips on Running Your Own Design Studio

In 2007, I interviewed Minh Nguyen who was working through Aquent’s San Diego office. He had built his own web design studio from scratch and was kind enough to share with me lessons he had learned along the way.

rsz_minhrooster.jpgMinh Nguyen, a Southern California-based web designer currently working for Sony Electronics, has been represented by our San Diego office for a little over a year.

Interestingly enough, his entrance into the Aquent world was fairly coincidental. “A friend of mine was looking for work and I told them about Aquent,” he tells me. “I was walking them through the application process by setting up a profile of my own. I didn’t think much about it but pretty soon someone from Aquent contacted me.”

Minh got into graphic design at an early age. As he puts it, “I owe it to my family. My grandfather taught me how to draw when I was 3. My mom taught me how to color inside the lines when I was 5. My dad taught me HTML and introduced me to Photoshop when I was 14.” He was doing web-design casually as a teenager, but by the time he got into college realized he had a passion for it.

Having a hard time getting a full-time design job after graduation, he started his own studio with some friends. Although the studio did fairly well – garnering clients from Jack in the Box to the Surf Rider Foundation – he decided that he was more interested in doing design work than running a business. He turned to Aquent to get back into design and eventually found a permanent position through us.

Since running one’s own studio is a choice that many designers make and even more consider, I asked Minh what he learned from his experience doing so. Here’s what he told me:

1. Don’t just take any job you get, do things for free, or do things on the cheap.

Not only does this lower the bar for other people working in the field, the sites usually aren’t that great, and the client will ultimately be dissatisfied.

2. Try to maintain control with clients.

In my first meeting, I am very clear about what I’m going to do, what it’s going to cost, and the timeline I’ll be following. If there are any changes to the timeline or the scope of the project, I have to approve them. If during the course of the work I think that the timeline isn’t going to work, I address it immediately. You need to speak up and restructure things when it’s not working out. Finally, if the client is giving you a timeline that’s too tight, don’t be afraid to ask for more time. Chances are, other things will come up in your life making that deadline even more impossible to meet.

3. No matter how badly you want a client, if they give you a bad gut feeling, its best not to work with them.

Good money is important. but if they keep you up at night and you find yourself utterly aggravated working with them it’s just not worth it. If the client is too focused on the money, that’s a red flag – they’ll jump ship the moment they can find a better deal. Likewise, if a prospective client tells you he/she has had 4 designers quit while on the job, watch out. Don’t let yourself become the 5th to bail.

4. Plan out your pricing.

You need to consider what you need to make. It’s not just about your time and the materials. When you’re running your own business, you have overhead, taxes, benefits, etc. you have to pay for. That needs to be factored in. If you don’t think about the real cost of doing business, and keep and eye on your margins, you won’t have any.

Coda: The Talent Bridge

As it turns out, Aquent placed Minh at his current position through our “Talent Bridge” program, whereby people can try out a job before ultimately committing to it. When I asked Minh if he would recommend that arrangement for others, here’s what he said:

“I would definitely recommend Aquent, or something similar, for other designers seeking permanent or temporary work. For me, they’ve always been fast, reliable and compliant to my needs. When I needed a job, Aquent would find multiple openings tailored to fit what I wanted. They matched or exceeded my pay scale every time and only sent me on jobs that I felt comfortable doing. I tried finding my own work on Monster and other job sites and it was nearly impossible for me to find the kind of tailored fit they were finding for me. It would take me a whole week to find 2 decent job openings while Aquent was calling back every day with 2 or 3 options.

“Another reason I would recommend Aquent is because they’re great for designers who’ve had a few years of experience at one design firm and want to move on and explore their options. Through Aquent I got the chance to go from one company to the next, small, medium and large. It allowed me to find and gauge what I was looking for in a long-term job. Without you guys, I think it would have taken a couple of years to do all that. Instead I did it all in less then one.

“As a designer, working for myself I didn’t really have much experience negotiating with HR or even knowing how to get a fair chance at an interview. I loved how Aquent took care of that for me. All I had to do was show my work at the interview and it was a done deal. Its nice having a team of agents negotiating my every need.”

And, frankly, it’s a privilege to work with folks like Minh.

Image courtesy of Minh Nguyen.

Apr 28, 2009 4

The Irony of Authenticity and the Authenticity of Irony

authenticity and social mediaSeems like nowadays, authentic is the thing to be.

Mitch Joel calls authenticity, “the cost of admission” in the Web 2.0 world, though he warns: “Being authentic isn’t always good. Let me correct that, being authentic is always good, but the output of being authentic [ie, revealing your flaws, shortcomings, and “warts” – Matt] is sometimes pretty ugly.”

HubSpot TV called the “marketing takeaway” of a notorious scandal involving a company paying for positive online reviews: “Be authentic. If not, you will get caught.”

When CC Chapman was among the Twitterati recently profiled by the Boston Globe, one of his Facebook friends asked, “Ever wondered why you have such a following?” He responded, “I wonder it all the time actually. I asked once and the general theme in the answers was my honest approach between life, family and work when it came to sharing things.” To which another friend replied, “Exactly right CC. You don’t try to be someone you’re not. It’s that authenticity that attracts people.”

Among the first to identify this flight to authenticity were James H. Gilmore & B. Joseph Pine II, who wrote Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (2007). What notably separates them from contemporary partisans of authenticity is that their take is tinged with irony, an irony most evident in their promise to define “how companies can render their offerings as “really real.”’

This irony is refreshing because invocations of authenticity regularly fail to acknowledge or appreciate what is inherently contradictory about the concept. Said failure begins with the mistaken equation of authenticity and honesty (see above). Honesty may be a characteristic of an individual, but it is not a characteristic of authenticity. For example, an authentically honest person is being “authentic” when she is being honest, but an authentically devious person is being just as authentic when he is lying.

Similarly, we don’t call a painting an “authentic Rembrandt” because it is honest; we call it authentic because it was really painted by Rembrandt, unlike the forgery which only looks like it was painted by him. In other words, we call it authentic because it is what it seems to be. Herein lies the essential contradiction of authenticity: Authenticity isn’t about being real; authenticity is about really being what you seem to be.

The centrality of “seeming” to authenticity becomes even more clear when we call a person “authentic.” Such a designation usually means, “the way this person acts transparently or guilelessly reflects who they really are.” Because our sense of their authenticity depends on an assessment a person’s behavior, we should pay special attention to the fact that authenticity is performed; as paradoxical as it may sound, authenticity is an “act,” in the theatrical sense. (Which is why I always say, “Be yourself. It’s the perfect disguise.”)

The bigger problem though, is that our notion of authenticity assumes we really know who someone is and likewise the imperative to “be authentic” assumes we know who we really are.

Our identity, “who we really are,” is always contingent, provisional, and changing. It is an amalgam of who we want to be, who we mean to be, who we’re supposed to be, who we have to be, and who we are in spite of ourselves. Moreover, no matter how much we’d like to think so, we are not the authority on who we really are since it includes much that cannot be known by us. Indeed, and again paradoxically, we can’t know anything about ourselves without assuming the perspective of another, that is by identifying with someone else and precisely NOT being ourselves.

Just as one must consult an expert to determine the authenticity of a treasured heirloom – it can’t speak for itself – we can’t call ourselves “authentic;” that is for others to decide. At best, and this is the irony, we can always only strive to “seem” authentic. True authenticity calls for acknowledging that “who you are” is an open question and, moreover, a collaborative work in progress.

In the end, we must distance ourselves from our claims or pretensions to authenticity. We must call it into question and even suggest, especially to ourselves, that it may just be a ego-driven pose. (Hey, it just may be!) This distancing, implicitly critical and potentially mocking (or at least deprecating), is the classic stance of irony. And though the dodginess of irony (“did he mean that or didn’t he?”) seems to put it at a distinct remove from authenticity (“this is exactly what I think”), it actually mirrors the open-ended, unresolved, and ever-changing “dodginess” of reality itself.

Which is to say that irony, as a posture, an attitude, and as an approach, is more authentic (in the sense of “really being the way reality seems to be”) than honesty, sincerity, openness, or any of the other qualities that pass for such. The tragedy (or irony) is, however, that it will always seems less than authentic due to the all-too-human suspicion of ambiguity, indeterminacy, uncertainty, and, lest we forget, the wily intelligence native to irony and the ironist.

Image Courtesy of Mary Hockenbery.

Apr 25, 2009 1

Information Design and Visual Complexity

Investigations into the use of ActionScript 3.0 and dynamically generated representations of data sets led me to write this post on visual complexity, first published on December 1, 2006.

3090102907_c3b7c67a13_mMy research on Amaznode (see this post) reminded me that there are a lot of folks out there working on innovative and practical ways to display complex sets of data and networks of information.

While I thought I was so special for stumbling across Amaznode at Adobe Labs, I soon discovered that someone had actually referenced it back in September in a comment on this post from David Armano’s blog. In the aforementioned post, Armano praises the Visual Thesaurus, which depicts relationships between words in the same way Amaznode depicts relationships between products on Amazon (except the Visual Thesaurus actually allows for much deeper exploration of the related words it displays).

The Visual Thesaurus is just one example of information design that shows up on the site Visual Complexity, the stated intention of which is “to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.” This site is endlessly fascinating both due to the ingenious (and sometimes oddly beautiful) ways that people have devised to portray complex, densely interrelated systems, as well as due to the range of data, be it business-related (for example, what patterns might we discern by examining 10 million receipts from a large DIY store?) or just strange, that they have chosen to model.

As the serendipity of blogging and intellectual interest would have it, a colleague of mine brought The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager to my attention yesterday. The NameVoyager shows the waxing and waning fortunes of baby names from the 1880s to the present. (It allows you to see, for example, that the name “Chester” peaked in popularity around 1910.) The creator of the NameVoyager is one Martin Wattenberg who has come up with a number of methods for graphing complex processes such as the editing history of Wikipedia pages, among other things. In fact, he has been so inventive that several samples of his work show up on the Visual Complexity website, which I didn’t even know existed two days ago!

Image Courtesy of michael.heiss.

Apr 24, 2009 Comments Off on Product Placement in the Real World

Product Placement in the Real World

Another blast from the past, originally published on Aquent’s Talent Blog, December 11, 2006. Summary: Advertisers must consider “all the world’s a stage” and manufacture ubiquitous product placement.

2534254541_06b30f2c59_m“As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them,” according to this New York Times article which focuses on the emergence of Times Square as “a publishing platform.”

In brief, thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras and the rise of user-generated and social networking sites, marketers are finding that “experiential marketing” (aka, “publicity stunts“), such as Charmin’s fancy public restrooms, are growing long legs on the Web. These restrooms alone, “[u]sed by thousands in Times Square [were] viewed by 7,400 Web users on one site alone.”

While this raises a lot of interesting questions about the meaning of “product placement” and whether or not advertisers should start courting, and compensating, particularly popular or prolific private citizens for featuring their products on Flickr and YouTube, I was particularly struck by the formulation “getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them.” Now it is certainly the case that YouTubers and Flickr-ers are, wittingly or un-, doing things that benefit advertisers and the brands they promote. But so is anyone wearing a t-shirt with a visible logo.

It is not the job of advertisers to wander around the city in sandwich boards; it is their job, however, to come up with novel ways of getting brand-specific messages out to the world. If they create a spectacle noteworthy enough to generate spontaneous buzz promoted by random individuals, then they have done exactly what they are supposed to do. In fact, by now, I’d be astonished if the folks who conceived of and executed these events weren’t planning on a significant “web” effect. In a sense, if no one had posted this stuff to the Web, then you could rightly accuse advertisers of shirking.

Or do I, and not the paper of record, misunderstand what advertisers are supposed to do?

Image Courtesy of funadium.

Apr 15, 2009 Comments Off on Is 4-D the New 3-D? Thinking about Photosynth

Is 4-D the New 3-D? Thinking about Photosynth

One thing that irks me about the 3-D world is that it’s hard to find things in it. I’ve often been looking for my keys or a book or a CD and wished that I could just open up a search box, type in the object of my fruitless and frustrating search, and instantly locate the darn thing. The fact that 3-D spaces can be difficult to search visually is one thing that stands in the way of the the 3-D desktop metaphor, IMHO.

Then I remembered Photosynth, a software that allows you to make 3-D models of places from 2-D images which, thanks to the magic of tagging, come replete with a conveniently searchable 4th dimension (raising the question: Is information, and not time, the 4th dimension?).

I first wrote about Photosynth on Aquent’s Talent Blog in 2007. Here’s the original post:

Visual Information, Design, and the Future

photosynthjp.jpgA friend of mine passed this link along to me. It is a video of a software demo at the TED Conference back in March. The speaker is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who was demoing two software packages – Seadragon, which is used to browse large amounts of visual data, and Photosynth, which organizes pictures into navigable, 3-D spaces.

This stuff really has to be seen to be believed. It represents the future of how we will interact with visual data and also highlights that we are already creating virtual models of the world we live in by uploading content to websites like Flickr. There is also a cool example of an explorable, high resolution advertisement for Honda. Imagine if a picture in a magazine contained the richness of data you could find on an entire website. Mind-boggling.

Microsoft acquired Seadragon back in February. Aguera y Arcas makes a funny comment about that when people start clapping at the amazing things he’s showing them. Have you ever attended a software demo where people burst into spontaneous applause?

Image Courtesy of Live Labs.

Apr 10, 2009 Comments Off on Trust Agents in the Time/Space-Shifting Continuum

Trust Agents in the Time/Space-Shifting Continuum

A slightly different version of this post originally appeared on Aquent’s Talent Blog, February 16, 2009

2971146962_c99af07858_mThe concepts of time-shifting and place-shifting (originally called “space-shifting”) come from the realm of consumer electronics. The classic time-shifting device is TiVo, which allows you to “shift” the time of your favorite TV programs to a time of your choosing. On the place-shifting front, Sony, HAVA, and Sling Media, among others, have devices which allow you to change the “place” where you consume media by sending TV shows to your PC, for example. You could also think of the iPod/iPhone as doing the same thing with your music and videos.

At least one denizen of the interwebs, Nari Kannan, postulates that the ability to shift time and/or place is an essential element of technical innovation. He writes, “Placeshifting in the larger context with the widespread adoption of the Internet enabled Outsourcing and Offshoring! Work is not tethered to one location anymore.” We find the same idea, mutatis mutandi, expressed in this article on the future of electronic design, “The Internet dissolves international boundaries, creating a time- and place-shifting global village of design and engineering.”

Any work whose end-product is an electronic file (which could be a text document or a feature film) requires solely that collaborators be connected electronically, not spatial proximity. In fact, the only complication introduced by the fact that the end-product takes a more material form, a chair, for example, is that the collaborators must each on their end be connected to some physical transport system such as that run by FedEx or UPS.

Given the boundary-less world of cyber-enabled work, to what extent are we still bound by geography when it comes to landing gigs or hiring people, especially since anyone can post a resume or portfolio online or advertise a job opening and it can be found by anyone with access to the web from anywhere on Earth?

When it comes to actually getting hired or hiring I believe that the only thing making physical presence in a particular geographic location necessary is trust (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). As atavastic or primitive as it may be, the most basic form of trust still rests in seeing someone with our own eyes, shaking their hand, and sizing them up by talking to them, asking them questions, and gauging their responses.

Nevertheless, people nowadays will readily work with others they have never physically met. The trust encouraging them to do so is not primarily generated by marketing and faith in governmental regulation. It depends instead on the accumulated recommendations of total strangers (as can be found in seller ratings from Amazon to eBay), and the growing reach of influencers who essentially make a career out of being trusted (Brogan calls these folk “trust agents“).

The same technology that enables time- or place-shifted collaboration in myriad domains has also fostered the growth of globe-spanning trust networks. And that, in the end, may turn out to be its most revolutionary effect.

Image Courtesy of Kevin Krejci.

Apr 8, 2009 Comments Off on “Interweb the Rainbow” or the Rise of Aleatoric Design

“Interweb the Rainbow” or the Rise of Aleatoric Design

This was my last official post for Aquent’s Talent Blog, March 4, 2009. I explored some of the implications of aleatoric design on Marketing Profs’ Daily Fix Blog.

Ms. Pistachio was the first to alert me, via Twitter, natch, that Skittles had gone all Social Media on us. Sure as shootin’, the current (March 2, 2009) Skittles.com is a mash-up of social media sites where the name of the colorful and intoxicatingly concentrated jelly-bean-oidal confection appears.

Of course, Skittles, with the aid of Agency.com, are following in the footsteps of Modernista!, who took their own website in this direction last year. Still, the fact that a consumer brand has emulated a trendy design shop has got everybody talking, including the ever articulate (and strikingly handsome) David Armano, who rightly predicts, I believe, that we’ll see more of this, not less and goes on to link the Skittle move to the emergence of “sponsored conversations.”

But what is this “this” that we’re going to be seeing more of? I think it’s something we could call “aleatoric” design which takes advantage of the fact that web pages, in the end, exist as a set of instructions to be executed by a browser, not a fixed arrangement of text and image (as in the print world). Since these instructions can be linked to dynamic sites themselves (Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), design now becomes the quasi-symphonic arrangement of fluid elements that resist control or even predictability.

Given this tendency, wouldn’t it be better for web designers to have a background in performance, choreography, or musical composition than graphic arts? Isn’t it time we acknowledged that interactive design is NOT graphic design (or that the latter is an increasingly small and incidental component of the former)?

Apr 1, 2009 2

On Letting Machines Do the Work

3232485_a749eb3bdf_mBlade Kotelly is an interesting guy. A product of the Human Factors program at Tufts University, he made a name for himself in the field of speech recognition and literally wrote the book on it. He is currently Chief Designer at Endeca Technologies, a provider of “Enterprise Search, Information Access, and Guided Navigation Solutions.”

I met Blade about a month ago. Because he had made his name designing machines that humans could talk to and currently works at a company which builds machines that help people sort through the avalanche of data that a simple web search can produce, I was curious to discover that he at times turns to recruiters to find design talent. I asked him, “Why don’t you just let the machines do it?”

His answer was not surprising, On the one hand, he explained, good designers are difficult to find so you need to enlist assistance when searching for them. On the other hand, a big part of recruitment involves recognizing fit, and, if I understood him correctly, teaching machines to match personality types with the idiosyncratic needs of hiring managers and the peculiar nuances of corporate cultures is difficult. (Blade, if you happen to be reading this and I’m misstating the case, please set me straight!)

Oddly enough, while reading an SAP/Accenture white paper, “BPM Technology Taxonomy: A Guided Tour to the Application of BPM,” I found this point reiterated, after a fashion. In order for a business process to be automated, it is ideal that it take place in a predictable, step-by-step manner. The authors of this study point out, however, that some business processes do not play out like that. The example they use, fittingly enough, is recruiting. Recruiting, they write, “starts with a job description and ends with a hire, but exactly how all the interviews, evaluations and meetings will go is not clear at the outset.”

It’s curious that they say that it’s not clear how the interviews, etc., “will go,” since each of these events has but two possible outcomes: either the candidate advances to the next stage, or the candidate is rejected. In that sense, modeling the process is fairly straightforward: A candidate applies by submitting an application and resume. Those documents are reviewed and the candidate is either invited in for an interview or the process ends. The candidate is interviewed and the interviewer either decides to recommend that the candidate be hired, or the process ends. Etc. That is, the process indeed lends itself to a binary, forking path description wherein each step results in a (1) or a (0). (Indeed, applicant tracking systems handle the process at this level.)

The problem however is not that there are only two possible outcomes at each stage. The problem is that, aside from certain kinds of testing that might be employed, the way the outcome is produced, how the interview “goes,” cannot be easily modeled and therefore automated. In fact, the psychological factors at play, as Malcolm Gladwell has described are so unconscious, so rapid, and so irrational, that they defy automation. For this reason, many organizations turn to so-called “structured interviewing,” which can take many forms but at its most refined reduces the impact of personality quirks and coincidental affinities between interviewer and interviewed by designing questions so that the anticipated responses will demonstrate clear compatibility or incompatibility with the requirements of a given position.

Humans are really good at certain things – pattern recognition, decoding facial expressions, fuzzy logic – that are difficult for machines to do. Machines are good at processing data (performing calculations, rendering images, etc.) by running algorithms really fast. Of course, machines can also learn, and putting a human “in the loop” can help machines learn even faster. The automation of processes such as the recruitment and hiring of new employees might not be realizable yet but such systems are not theoretically inconceivable. Indeed, everyday, they become more and more possible. [Update: For a more detailed and informed discussion of the difference between computers and brains, and the superiority of the latter to the former, check this New York Times op-ed piece.]

Which brings us to the real question, which is not, “Are there processes that we cannot automate?” Rather, the real question is, “Are there processes we don’t WANT to automate?”

Image Courtesy of The Alieness GiselaGiardino²³.

Mar 27, 2009 Comments Off on SEO-Friendly Title

SEO-Friendly Title

Keyword-laden content.

Self-credentialing commentary and links.

Call to action.

Thus ends this morning’s lesson.