Yesterday Apple announced its third-generation iPad, simply named “iPad.” Buried in MG Siegler’s excellent take on the press event is this statement:

What’s more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it’s a joke to think it will take a full five years.

In the post-PC world, tablets are becoming the new normal more and more. In just the two years since the iPad was first introduced, we’ve seen it pervasive on airplanes to entertain children, many executives in Silicon Valley walking around with them instead of lugging laptops, and even the President of the United States receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad instead of a sheet of paper.

How We Really Use Tablets

Rosetta—the agency for which I work—released a study last month around how we consumers use tablets. Consumption and entertainment are still the primary uses of tablets today, but here are some interesting points to note:

• 33% of tablet users (who owned one 12+ months) prefer to read/check email on their tablets
• 38% of them prefer tablets to read e-books, magazines or newspapers
• 34% of them use their tablets at work
• 45% on the go

In other words we’re witnessing the trend of users either adding to their repertoire of connected devices or in some cases shifting away from traditional PCs to tablets. As MG Siegler said in the quote above, tablets are poised to become the primary computing device at home.

But I would argue that place is a misleading distinction. Yes, PCs will likely still be a primary computing device at the office, but maybe it’s the wrong way to put it.

Work/Life, Life/Work

PCs today are not stationary. Almost every workplace I’ve come across in recent years outfits its workforce with laptops. Those laptops are often taken home so that work can be done at home. And here’s the thing: as much as we’d like to draw a hard line between work and home, it’s too fuzzy. It’s too gray.

Workers check their personal emails and Facebook while at work, on their work machines. They IM their friends or watch funny cat videos on YouTube in the office. Conversely they check their work email on their personal smartphones and catch up with industry-related reading before bed.

The workforce of today achieves work/life balance by seamlessly blending the two to get things done. Wherever they are.

Responsive Web Design

Out of this notion of users being connected constantly and wanting access to information all the time, wherever they are, the responsive web design movement was born. Essentially it’s a set of techniques to enable a single codebase to deliver multiple layouts for different screen sizes. The redesign of BostonGlobe.com has become the poster child for this modern and forward-looking approach to designing for the web. It’s about letting users access content from whatever devices they have, wherever they are. And with this approach, content creators are also saving money on operating expenditures because they only have one site to maintain, not two or three. No longer should you need to write a different headline for mobile.

The Impending Future Is Here

With all this data staring at them in the face, it amazes me that when it comes to digital marketing, many corporations still have the traditional view of developing for mobile. They are still stuck on starting with the desktop experience and then dumbing it down for smartphones and tablets. The old way of thinking made sense at the time (three, four years ago?): users on the go have different needs, and the screen real estate is too small to do anything significant.

However, as we’ve become used to having the Internet in our pocket and as we’ve found a place for the tablet to live in our lives, that four year-old thinking is sadly out of touch with the impending future.

432 million users use Facebook on a mobile device every month. Facebook partially attributes the 76% increase from 2010 to the release of its iPad app. With Apple selling more iPads in Q4 2011 than PCs sold by any PC manufacturer, and with annual tablet sales projected to be at over 45 million by 2016, tablets are here to stay and will become more and more prevalent.

Additionally 472 million smartphones were sold in 2011, 46% of the U.S. adult population have smartphones, and 69% of smartphone owners use it for business. Last, but not least: 81% of smartphone users browse the Internet. The mobile web and the notion of content anywhere cannot be ignored.

The workforce of tomorrow will read their work emails on their smartphones and tablets. They will do research and consume work-related content on those devices. And they will go beyond consumption and produce work on those devices.

As designers and marketers, to ignore this is ignoring the inevitable.

I have been a Mac user since 1985, when I was in the seventh grade. For months I lusted after the Mac on display at Computerland on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. I’d go there after school just to play with MacPaint. It simply captured my imagination. Finally, after many weeks of begging, I got my dad to buy me a 512K Mac. Thus began my love affair with Apple.

Imagine how lucky I felt when I actually began working on the brand and on Pixar in 2001-2002. It was such a privilege to be so close to the magic and to Steve Jobs himself.

The Steve Jobs I knew was human. Not a god. Not someone who could distort reality. Just a man.

But he was sharp and always focused with his opinions and observations. He demanded perfection. Always.

I was a lowly pixel pusher when I worked directly with him. In addition to Pixar.com, I also designed some pitch slides for him. His feedback was always direct and always right. Yes it was surreal to have him call me on the phone and for me to load slides on his Mac.

Near the end of my tenure at Pixar, I wanted to do more. I was hoping to build a little design department there. But Steve didn’t think I was ready, and he told me so—directly. Even though I was crushed at the time, it was probably one of the best pushes I ever got to do better, to stay hungry, and to stay foolish.

Thank you, Steve. You changed me—and more importantly, the world—for the better.

With everyone sharing their sweet Steve moments, I have to share mine.

I was working at Apple in the motion graphics group within the Graphic Design department. I was assigned to work on the intro animation for the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther setup assistant. We went through the normal design process with our stakeholders (people in charge of “MacBuddy”) and got to an animation that was essentially swarms of dots that formed each of the different translations of “Welcome” on the screen. And then we showed this nearly-final animation to someone higher at the top—forgive me, I’ve forgotten who this was—and he killed it because the dots looked too much like sperm. OK, they kinda did. (Think about swirling points of light but with motion trails. We tried increasing the motion blur, but it was no use.)

It was back to the drawing board and I presented more ideas. Eventually, Steve got involved and started looking at the animations. Each week my boss would show Steve a new revision of it, and each time we got a little closer. Then on Round 14, the week my boss was on vacation, I had to go present it to Steve Jobs.

He was eager to see this new revision. No pleasantries. No introductions (actually he knew me from Pixar). Just got right down to business. But he did say this to me, “Wow. We spend more time on MacBuddy than Microsoft does on all of its UI.” And then he chuckled.

The presentation was quick and he only had a couple of pretty minor notes. I think I had one more revision and it was finally done.

What my time at Apple and working with Steve taught me was this: Keep going until it’s right. Don’t settle.

Thank you, Steve.

This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.

The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.

When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.

What that first generation of attempts miss though, is they are trying to replicate 20th century print experience on a 21st century device. The magazine apps feel very one way. But the iPad is an Internet-connected device and users on the Internet demand more interactive experiences. They want to copy and paste passages to put on their blogs. They want to share articles via Facebook and Twitter. Using Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution, Condé Nast is starting to address some of these issues.

Meanwhile apps such as Flipboard are aggregating content and repackaging it for their users. Flipboard presents news items according to a user’s social graph, creating a personalized and highly relevant news stream. Additionally, the app presents this content in a unique way: as a paper magazine. The visual is striking, yet it still holds familiarity with users since it loosely mimics the experience of reading a real-world magazine, with the benefits of interactivity. And so far it has been a hit with users, even earning an [App of the Year](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-calls-flipboard-ipad-app-of-the-year-2010-12 “Apple Calls Flipboard “iPad App Of The Year"") award from Apple.

Different kinds of content demand different kinds of packages. For example as a designer, I—along with most designers and art directors—flip through magazines such as Communication Arts and Print, and peruse blogs and websites like LovelyPackage.com and SmashingMagazine.com. Seeing something cool usually sparks an idea for whatever we’re currently working on.

To get through the hundreds of design-related sites out there, I use RSS feeds to aggregate this content for myself in Google Reader. Unfortunately, because I am so busy, I am not able to keep up with all my feeds. I may manage to check it only every few days. And I dread seeing that “1000+†number next to my unread items.

So last year, when the iPad was introduced, I decided to find a solution as an independent side project. I knew that an app on this large dedicated canvas could be created to serve this need of efficiently consuming visual inspiration. I teamed up with a developer friend and we started work on DesignScene.

We set out to create something that designers would enjoy using and become part of their daily ritual. We had two primary objectives:

• The UI must serve the content and the audience. It has to be beautiful and show off visuals well.
• The content must be relevant. There’s a glut of design-related websites and blogs on the Internet. Let’s help designers navigate through them.

The UI we designed is sparse—a simple grid that takes advantage of the screen real estate afforded by the tablet. Users flick through the various grid cells to see an assortment of images. They can enlarge the images to fill the screen or read the accompanying text from the original source via the built-in web browser. DesignScene surfaces up the latest inspirational images of not only design, but also architecture, photography, art and so on. The content is a curated list of sources and—as a whole—has an editorial point of view to enhance discovery.

It’s been two weeks since DesignScene launched. [This was originally posted three weeks ago on the PJA blog.] So far we’ve had great response from users and media. We built social sharing into the app and we can already see hundreds of discoveries being shared on Twitter. Our users are interacting with content in a way that was not possible just a year ago.

I’m really proud to announce that DesignScene for iPad has shipped today. From idea to release, it’s been about a year in the making. Here’s a little trailer I made in case you missed it:

I’ll be frank and say that this app was really made for me. Like many designers I spend a lot of my time going from website to website looking at stuff and reading up on trends. I eventually started using RSS feeds but even my feeds got unwieldy. I dreaded opening up Google Reader and seeing “1000+” unread items.

When Apple announced the iPad 12 months ago it struck me that this device was the perfect thing to visually browse through all of my design-related feeds. It didn’t take me too long to sketch and comp up something.

Of course I am just a designer and had zero Objective-C skills whatsoever. I can do simple HTML, CSS and even PHP, but real programming languages elude me. I knew I had to find a development partner. Problem is that there are tons of people like me with an idea, while developers are in high demand. I asked my network of friends and contacts, posted on Craigslist and BuildItWithMe but didn’t really find anyone. I had a couple of meetings with friends of friends who were iPhone developers but they had their own objectives. Finally I got in touch with an old friend who was working on his first iPhone app.

I presented my idea to David and he liked it. We decided to go to iPad Dev Camp which took place a week after the iPad shipped and just a couple of weeks after David and I initially talked. We built the prototype for DesignScene at the camp (and received an Honorable Mention). We were off to a great start.

The reality of day jobs and personal lives slowed progress down as we got into the spring and summer of 2010. But in the fall as chatter of curated content emerged we kicked ourselves into high gear. David worked on functionality (there’s a lot of backend processing that actually happens so that the app is as fast as it can be) and I worked on reaching out to sources to get official permission.

Fast-forward to today, and DesignScene is now available for purchase on the App Store. We’ve worked incredibly hard on this, sweated all the details (there’s actually a maintenance upgrade that we released hours after 1.0.0 went on sale), and are really proud of what we’ve accomplished. Of course we could not have done this without the immense and loving support from our families. A million thanks to our wives and kids for putting up with our late night hackathons.

We are going to keep working on to improve DesignScene (we have some neat features we’ve been thinking about) but we’re also going to think about other apps. Stay tuned and wish us luck!

iTunes Link to DesignScene app for iPad

David’s side of the story

“1000+” should be a familiar number for Google Reader users. My RSS feeds have been neglected in past months. Emails from AdAge.com, Creativity-Online, and links from friends go unread and unclicked. I’ve just been running 100 miles per hour at work. This is not to slam my current employer (because I truly like working here), but more of an observation.

If we creatives are always so busy with projects, and never take the time to look up, take off our headphones and find inspiration, our work will suffer. Our work will stagnate. Our work will suck.

So this is a reminder to myself (and to other creatives) to take a bit of time each day to remain inspired. Surf the web. Watch TV. See a movie in a theater. Listen to new music. Read a magazine or a book. Go to a bookstore. Go to a museum. Go hiking.

Eric Baker spends 30 minutes every day scouring the web for inspirational images. He shares them regularly on Design Observer.

And I’ve started to try to gather images and links that delight me in a couple of Tumblr blogs (ELT and ___ is awesome.)

This is also a reminder to managers of creatives: you must let them play. You have to structure your organization and processes to allow creative folks time to recharge and get inspired. Google’s 20% time is a great example of how structuring some R&D/inspiration time can yield results. The Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes were invented by engineers at 3M during their 15% time. Or taken to the extreme, Stefan Sagmeister closes his studio every seven years for a yearlong sabbatical to get inspired again.

Now how can I get someone to pay me for a sabbatical?

Recently Guillermo Esteves did a fantastic experiment with HTML5 and CSS3 by recreating the opening crawl to Star Wars. Although it only currently works in Safari 4, it’s a good preview of how to create something dynamic using web standards and web fonts once the other browsers come along.

But Guillermo’s experiment also reminded me of how awful the typography was of those opening crawls. The original Star Wars opening crawl uses two different typefaces (three if you count “A long time ago…”), is justified without hyphenation, and thus creates obvious rivers and awkward tracking.

Opening crawl from A New Hope as grabbed from the DVD.

As the subsequent movies came out, the typography was all over the place. The Empire Strikes Back dispenses with letter-spacing altogether. Return of the Jedi overcompensates for the failure of the previous two crawls by using too much letter-spacing.

Opening crawl from The Empire Strikes Back. What happened here? I can drive many trucks through those spaces.

Opening crawl from Return of the Jedi. Standbackafewfeetandtrytoreadthatlastparagraph.

The absolute worst though was when ILM matched the style for the Star Wars prequels. At least there was more tracking in the original 1977 version. The 1999 version of the crawl that appeared in The Phantom Menace lacked any letter spacing whatsoever and created huge holes between the words that made the crawl barely readable. (No offense to special effects god and Photoshop co-creator John Knoll. He’s great with FX but he’s not necessarily a designer nor typographer.)

Opening crawl from The Phantom Menace. Shit in = shit out. It’s a tragedy that they used Empire as the model.

I set out to do a quick experiment to see if I could redo the crawl any better. The first thing I did was to standardize on one typeface. The “A long time ago…,” title and body copy are all Franklin Gothic. Then I tried a version where I kept the justified alignment but decreased the type size. The copy becomes much more readable, but feels too small and loses that epic quality George Lucas was probably after.

Then I simply tried centering it and I think it works. I am able to keep the type size large without creating large gaps between words or letters. Although the very straight sides are lost, I think the intended dramatic effect is still there.

And of course, I had to whip it up in After Effects to really test the design.

Yeah, file this under geekery.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about how so-called “digital” agencies are or are not ready to be the lead for a campaign. But I think the question is a little off.

Instead the question should be “Why are clients splitting up campaign work based on tactic?”

Despite the maturing of digital agencies such as Razorfish (for whom I work), R/GA and AKQA, today’s clients are still sending digital work to digital agencies and traditional work to traditional agencies. And equally bad is having a third company plan and buy their media (sometimes there’s a traditional media agency and a digital one). Why is this bad?

OK, the end-zone is down that way 50 yards! Make sure you talk to each other along the way. Now go! [Download PDF]

I’ve seen it time and time again: if you want an integrated marketing campaign, how could you possibly brief all the companies and hope they work together and come back with something good and cohesive? The agencies will pay lip-service and say they’re collaborating, but there’s only so much collaboration that can happen in reality. Each agency is moving fast and really has no time to talk to the others. Plus there is always unspoken political jockeying for protecting the work each agency does have and trying to steal more business from the others. I strongly believe that this model is inefficient (money and time), makes agency people insane, and creates less-than-stellar campaigns.

What should instead happen is the client needs to brief one agency who will create a singular idea and execute on that idea across different tactics and mediums. Therefore the messaging, art direction and strategy for the campaign are cohesive.

Let the one Agency bring in specialists as needed to serve the idea. [Download PDF]

Agencies should not be labeled “digital,” for digital is only a tactic. I’d say the same with “traditional.” What clients should ask for is strong strategic work that drives results. Let the agency—regardless of its label—decide on who to sub-contract to if necessary.

When we see clients trust their agency and its vision, we witness great work all around:

• TBWA\Chiat\Day + Apple
• Crispin Porter + Bogusky + Burger King
• Goodby, Silverstein Partners + Sprint

Oh wait. There isn’t a “digital” agency on that list. But there soon will be.

Further reading:

• Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead
• Why Digital Agencies Are Indeed Ready to Lead
• What if we held a controversy and nobody cared?
• Digital must be anchored at the heart of agencies

Please feel free to use the above diagrams which I’m making available through a Creative Commons license.

FEED 2009 has now been released and I feel privileged to have been a part of this one. If you haven’t already checked it out, please do so. The report and findings are very compelling and eye-opening. [Download PDF]

I wanted to share a little bit about the process we went through in designing the new report.

When my friend and colleague Garrick Schmitt first approached me, he already had an editorial direction in mind. He realized the data was so profound that the usual packaging of articles around the report would actually take away from it. So he wanted a smaller format with less content. He referenced books by Marty Neumeier: simple layout, large type, lots of infographics. The theme for the book came down to “customer engagement.” The data shows that when brands engage with customers in an experience of some kind (like an event, contest, etc.), ninety-six percent (96%) of their customers are more likely to consider, buy from or recommend that brand. Ninety-six percent. You never see a number like that in a survey. (To get that number, add up the sometimes/usually/always percentages for the consider, purchase and recommend results.)

So the answer was obvious in my mind. The design had to be simple (and elegant) but it really had to have an organic touch; it’s about the customer after all. I started thinking about Darwin’s journal and his observations and drawings of animals. I toyed with having the whole book typeset in a font I could make from Garrick’s handwriting, accompanied by scientific drawings of consumers. As soon as I thought about looking at illustrators who had a realistic style, someone immediately came to mind. Earlier in the summer I worked with a freelance copywriter named David Fullarton who was also a talented illustrator/artist. His work combines collage with portraiture and witty copy. His style would be the foil to the business-speak and myriad bar graphs and pie charts. He was perfect.

When I briefed David, I gave him a draft of the report and some loose direction. What he came back with was sheer genius. Because of his copy in conjunction with his art, the illustrations became another layer of commentary about the state of our industry and even our hyperconnected society. Yelpers are not only reviewing restaurants, but also doctors and schools. It doesn’t seem far off that they might be reviewing police officers in the future.

Meanwhile, I took another look at the nameplate for FEED. Last year’s design element of the small rectangular bars was inspired by the holes in computer punchcards. This year, I took the idea a little further by incorporating the actual shape of the punchcard and making the name a part of that.

Garrick and I also talked a lot about the format of the physical book. He liked the idea of putting it up on Blurb for anyone to order their own copy. The small 7x7 size felt right for the amount of content we had. In addition to Blurb, we have also offset-printed 2,000 copies of the book. For this I chose a natural white cover stock for the interior pages which alludes to Moleskine sketchbooks and fits well with David’s illustration style. And we even made temporary tattoos of the back cover illustration.

At Razorfish most of my days are filled with high-level, large-scale strategizing or pushing tiny colored squares around on a screen. It’s always nice to work on a small project and make something that can be felt, picked up and even smelled. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

In the age of digital and social media, and in the age of realtime marketing, what matters more? The big idea or the smaller idea and execution?

Many digital agencies have been experimenting with new ways of working to try to get at those ideas and executions that a traditional agency couldn’t dream of. I was working at Organic when we rolled out the “Three Minds” initiative, meaning that for every brainstorm, we needed to have at least three people from three disciplines in the room. This is similar to what Big Spaceship has been trying to do by throwing together teams of creatives, strategists, technologists and production.

Digital agencies think that this is a point of differentiation. They think that online, social and viral are so complex that they need all this brainpower to figure it out. What ends up happening when you put a technologist and/or producer into a room with creatives? Executions. It’s a natural and inevitable thing. And I believe it’s a distraction from getting to a better and bigger idea.

I believe that when you add in people whose jobs are to make things (technologists build, producers produce, etc.) too early in the creative process, before the idea is baked, you shortchange the idea. The idea becomes smaller and less compelling.

Creative teams go there all the time too. Too often do I hear an art director or copywriter say “OK, so the idea is a game within a banner.” No. That’s not the idea. That’s an execution. What’s the idea?

People may argue that the mass audience doesn’t care about the idea; all people will remember is the commercial, billboard or Facebook app (no one remembers banners). I disagree. People remember the campaign which was essentially that story dreamt up one late night in a conference room by a creative partnership.

In the traditional advertising agency model, the two-person copywriter and art director partnership is designed to tell stories. The idea isn’t a TV spot, a print ad or a billboard. The idea isn’t a banner, a microsite or a Facebook app. The idea is a story. It’s a story with a hook, that draws people in, makes them feel something and act on that. And as humans, we love stories.

I believe that for digital agencies to compete with the traditional ones, they need to be better at developing compelling ideas. A big traditional shop can always farm out a digital execution, but digital agencies can’t farm out the idea generation.

Fellow Razorfisher and social media guru Shiv Singh asks, in the age of social media, do big ideas matter less? Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about how to craft my reaction to this since I first read a similar tweet from Michael Lebowitz, CEO of Big Spaceship about how the old ad agency creative partnerships are being replaced with other roles.

@bigspaceship: where(sic) putting the art director & copywriter together was the structure of the tv age, we put strategy, tech, design and production together

The quick gist is that there’s a shift towards execution versus concept. The art school I went to had a very strong and simple philosophy that it taught its students: concept is king. In crits we were always asked, “Why did you pick that typeface?” or “What is that color supposed to signify?” or “Why did you choose that style of photography?” etc. There had to be a reason for all the elements in our designs and that reason had to be rooted in the concept.

Concept was not about layout. A concept (or idea) was your point of view on the message you’re trying to convey. And the acid test for whether the concept was a true concept was whether or not you could verbally sum it up in just a couple of sentences and have a completely different design to support that concept.

Oftentimes the word “concept” gets thrown around in our industry. It has become a stand-in for almost any creative deliverable. Three designs are not three concepts. A concept, however, can be executed in three different ways.

Next time, a more direct reaction to if big ideas still matter. Hint: They do.

Customer and user experience is not always about the website, the phone call, or person-to-person interaction in a store. It can also come through the form of packaging.

I just bought a Mac mini recently (for a living room media server) and was blown away by the unboxing. Apple has always been really great about their packaging. Having worked at Apple, I’ve seen the extreme extent of explorations that go into creating the outside of the box (over 500 comps were created for the Power Mac G5 box). (Incidentally, I worked on the second generation iPod package that featured musical artists like Jimi Hendrix.)

What really impressed me about unboxing the Mac mini was not the outside (although nicely designed), but the inside. The package anticipated my every move. How? Let me illustrate.

After removing the slip case, the typical “Designed by Apple in California” copy is printed on the thin box of manuals and DVDs. This box sits flush with the larger box. Nicely protruding from the right side is a tab to pull the manual box out. The tab also acts as a closure for the box. Multipurpose.

Removing the manuals reveals the Mac mini. What most companies would do in this situation is force you to turn the box upside down and shake the product out. I’ve done this many times and have found it to be quite maddening.

Instead, Apple thoughtfully supplies two plastic tabs that allow you to lift the mini out of the box. Also very cool.

For the bottom of the box, another cardboard layer hides the power supply and cord. Again, there are pull-tabs here built in to help you lift it out of the box. Did you notice the graphic design pattern here? The tabs are all in the same place and of the same size and shape.

After being so impressed, I thought that surely Apple would fail on the one thing that companies always fail at: tape around the power cable would be impossible to remove. Nope. They read my mind and included a little tab to unwind the tape.

Nice work Apple. You had me at first tab.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a site called crowdSPRING. I forget exactly how I got to the site, but what I found there made me feel a little icky and left a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote a tweet about it (which in turn updated my Facebook status) and many of my designer friends had strong negative reactions too.

Stepping back a bit, what is crowdSPRING? It’s a website that allows companies to post briefs for design projects (mostly logos and websites), with the expectation that dozens if not hundreds of designers from around the world will post their solutions to those projects. Finished solutions. Not portfolios, resumes or even sketches. But the finished logo, website comps, CD packaging design, etc.

Why the ick factor? It took me a few days to process it internally, but I eventually came to this conclusion: the site sucks time away from thousands of budding designers. They are all working for free. Only the lucky ones whose solutions get chosen are paid. Imagine if you ate dinner at five different restaurants and only paid for the one dinner you liked? That is what’s happening on crowdSPRING: free work.

This Forbes article talks about pushback from the design community. I’ve long been against spec work. It’s just plain wrong from the free work angle as I’ve already illustrated. The AIGA has also had a long-standing policy against spec work because in their mind it compromises the quality of the work. How? Company asks for free submissions; young, inexperienced and unqualified designers submit solutions; established professionals stay away. That is a recipe for sub-standard creative work. Or how about designer Mark Boulton’s argument that spec work is bad for business? “Architects are invited to submit bids, proposals and designs for prestigious competitions. The winner gets the contract and the glory. The losers get nothing; the work is conducted speculatively.”

My friend and colleague at Razorfish, Garrick Schmitt wrote an article at AdAge.com titled “Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced?” He posits that crowdsourcing creativity is here to stay. Whether it’s finished product ala crowdSPRING or inspiration ala FFFFOUND!, there is a place for it. I honestly don’t know if crowdsourcing creative output in an ethical way is possible. Maybe. But crowdsourcing creativity is entirely possible.

Rivers Cuomo from the band Weezer did a collaborative songwriting project called “Let’s Write a Sawng” on YouTube last year. He started with a single video, saying that he needed help writing a song. He led his large base of fans through the process, breaking it down step-by-step, starting with suggestions for a title, through lyrics and melodies. What worked was that he crowdsourced for ideas, picked the best ones and came up with a compelling pop record. On NPR’s Fresh Air he mentioned that if the song were ever officially released, it would probably break a record for songwriting credits.

Intel also experimented with crowdsourcing via an advertising program call Mass Animation last year. Via Facebook they invited animators to animate shots that would be part of a larger animated short film. I think it works here too because an animated film is very much like an open source dev project: the work can be divvied up into small discreet parts and worked on by volunteers. Intel goes one step further and has promised to credit and compensate contributors whose work appears in the final film.

I think the aforementioned two examples ultimately work as crowdsourced creative because they were volunteer collaborative efforts. Rivers Cuomo’s fans or Intel’s animators really wanted to be part of a project larger than themselves. Whereas design contests or sites like crowdSPRING feel unethical are because they’re requesting intellectual capital without investing a dime.

Whenever I look at anything with words on it, I look at the typography. Bring me to a local corner lunch cafe with a menu typed out and printed from Microsoft Word and I will have a field day. I would judge even more harshly at a more expensive restaurant. I can’t help it as I—like most designers, I’m sure—just look at everything with a critical eye.

My biggest typographical pet peeve is the rendering of apostrophes, single and double quotes.

It astounds me when I notice this on any piece, and all I can mutter to myself is “Where is the craftsmanship?!” This was not the case decades ago when copy was sent out to professional typesetters. The very thing that democratized graphic design was the the same thing that lowered the bar on what passes for “professional” graphic design. I’m talking about how the computer and software allowed more people access to the tools necessary to create great looking stuff. No longer did designers need to send out manuscripts to a typesetter who would in turn set the type into galleys for the designer to paste up in the mechanical. This spawned a whole new industry called desktop publishing, but killed the entire profession of typesetter, and along with it some higher standards.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no luddite. I put myself through college by working at a desktop publishing service bureau. But because I had some great teachers, and because of my sometimes unhealthy attention to detail, I had a lot of respect for typography, thus taking the time to learn all the rules and standards. But I digress.

What passes sometimes today for single and double quotation marks are actually foot and inch marks (or hour and minute marks). Why is that? My theory is that to be efficient in the manufacturing of some of the first practical typewriters, they straightened out the quotation marks so they could be dual purpose—open and close. In fact in Christopher Sholes’ patent for the QWERTY keyboard, only a single straight apostrophe key is shown, presumably the user would strike the key twice for a double quotation mark. And of course, most of this layout made its way into our modern computer keyboards and software.

Software companies like Microsoft and Adobe have been trying to mitigate this error by employing “smart quotes” technology. The software will analyze whether the quotation mark is at the beginning of the word (and then use the open state) or the end of the word (and use the close state). Most the time this actually works well. But what happens when you need to use an apostrophe in its close state as a contraction replacement in words like ’Til, Rock ’n’ Roll, and mac ’n’ cheese? The software isn’t smart enough to replace it with the proper close state and the designer or brand ends up looking amateurish.

How to not look like an amateur designer? (OK, maybe amateur could be considered a harsh term to you pros. Maybe bad craft is what I’m really talking about.) Go ahead and turn on the smart quotes feature of your favorite design app, but pay attention and override when necessary.

Yesterday the design and advertising community was abuzz over the leaked presentation deck (PDF) for the new Pepsi logo by the Arnell Group. Yes it is absolutely a work of pure horseshit. But, I was reminded of the decks that my colleagues and I create every day and how somebody’s horseshit may be someone else’s chocolate cake.

We all have to sell our work. Ideally the concepts and ideas come from a well-formed strategy, but that doesn’t always happen. Many times the strategy must back into the creative. In other words sometimes you might have a great idea that you’ll need to justify after the fact.

This is even more true if you’re dealing with a purely formal exercise such as redesigning an iconic logo like Pepsi’s. A good design strategy would be to do the due diligence and look at the different historical variations of the logo and then just have at it, coming up with dozens if not hundreds of iterations. But afterwards when you find the new design you subjectively like, you’re going to need to explain in an intelligent, tangible, evidence-based manner detailing how you arrived at that solution—especially if you’re getting paid $1 million for the effort. So that’s when you break out the horses and shovels.

(via Brand New)

Update: Validation that the Arnell strategy deck is all BS from a freelancer:

(the logo design) nothing to do with any of that bullshit on the PDF, that was (I believe) just a way to keep the client entertained (like we, viewers of this PDF were) and make them feel like their money (1.2B) was worth something.

The New York Times published a story today about the Genius Bars in the Apple Stores, and how they are the “souls of the stores.” Mentioned within the article is the video loop that plays behind the Bar, which I had the pleasure and privilege of designing!

Invariably in their 20’s and 30’s, and predominantly male, Apple’s experts do keep lofty company. Behind each bar is a screen with a rotating display of quotations from half a dozen better-known intellectual luminaries, like Leonardo da Vinci (“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding”) and Michelangelo (“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all”).