Category Archives: Business

Home Alone…with All My Stuff

Every serious adult should have an inventory of the possessions in his or her home in case of fire, flood or alien attack, but I don’t. This is one of the things that I’ve been meaning to do forever, and I’ve always thought that software should be able to help me do it. But home inventory software has always struck me as being unrealistically data entry-oriented. That is, most of the packages I’ve seen are predicated on the idea that the user is going to be very thorough and record every data point around each possession: not just the make, model and serial number, but also date of purchase, price, a scan of the receipt, notes on any servicing that might have happened, even a photograph of it… I mean come on. Who’s going to do that?

Part of the problem is that almost all of the home inventory software I’ve seen is intended to live on my hard drive. It’s packaged software (or, now, downloadable from the Mac App Store) that resides locally, tied to a specific computer, with little or no awareness or acknowledgment of the network. In reality, it should live on the cloud where it would make much more sense as a service, and not just because keeping this data physically off-premises is in keeping with the whole point of tracking it in the first place.

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This Could Be Google’s Design Moment

Last week’s news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence led many people to wonder whether the company truly has a vision that will sustain it in his absence. I happen to think that in the short term, at least, Apple will be just fine, but it’s interesting to note that implicit in this worry is whether Apple’s singular attention to good design will continue to prosper. Which is to say, perhaps the paramount anxiety surrounding Jobs’ leave — and his inevitable departure, whenever that is — is whether it represents the point at which Apple’s ability to design wonderful products went on the decline.

It’s true that when visionaries leave a company, a lot can go wrong, though of course right now it’s impossible to know for sure what will happen. But by the same token, major shifts in leadership are also an opportunity for a company’s design acumen to improve.

This is what I’m hoping happens over at Google where, as also reported last week, Eric Schmidt is handing over the reins to co-founder Larry Page. Page is an engineer, of course, and quite private, so I have no particular insight as to whether he has any meaningful appreciation of design. But as a founder he has a unique power to influence the priorities at his company, and as the new CEO he has a unique opportunity to imbue his organization with a new design sensibility. If he wants to.

And hopefully he does. Few companies seem to understand the concept of design so cannily and yet so incompletely as Google does. It’s abundantly evident that they pay exceedingly close attention to usability and they slave over getting that right. And yet the total, intangible effect of their hard work is little more than the sum of its highly efficient parts. Google products are rich with design intelligence, but they also suffer from a paucity of design inspiration. They could be so much more than they are — they could be surprising, witty, fun and, yes, they could be truly beautiful. (Read former Google designer Doug Bowman’s notes on this for added perspective.)

We tend to think that design is a function of good process, well-structured organizations, and copious time and budgetary resources. But design is just as much a function of leadership. Who’s in the top seat matters very much to whether a company can design well. If the leader cares passionately about producing amazingly well-designed products, then you can get a string of indelible successes that capture the popular imagination like we’ve seen at Apple for the past decade-plus. We haven’t seen that kind of result from Google during that same span of time, though. Beyond the iconic minimalism of the original Google home page, not one of their subsequent products has truly inspired us. I hope that Larry Page realizes that, with the resources and design talent he probably already employs, there’s no reason that has to continue to be the case.

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Students, Don’t Do As I Have Done

The Canadian graphic design organization RGD Ontario was kind enough to invite me to speak at their annual Design Thinkers conference in Toronto last week. It was a quick trip for me — I flew in and out of the city on the same day — but they made it really fun. In addition to a lecture I gave about the difficulties that the practice of art direction has in finding a place in digital media (I’ll post some notes from that talk in a few days), I also appeared on a question-and-answer panel for design students, the theme of which was providing advice on ‘making it’ in the design world.

In that session, I heard from another of the panelists that, due to inexperience, newly minted designers should understand that their productivity will barely cover the cost of employing them. It was his belief that businesses who hire fresh graduates essentially sign up to provide a kind of on-the-job training — at a loss to the business. He didn’t put it in so many words, but the inference I made was that employment is a kind of favor bestowed by the company on new entrants to the job market.

What’s more, this person insisted that these freshly graduated professionals should be prepared to work for very little and for very long hours, that they should dedicate themselves to their work in tireless fashion, potentially at the expense of many other priorities in their lives.

I have a hard time with this advice, but for complicated reasons. It’s not that I think that the advice is not valid. On the contrary, I think this is an accurate reflection of the way the design industry ingests new talent. Rather, my quarrel is that I think this advice makes some unfortunate assumptions about what the quality of life within a design organization should be.

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Someone Could Make a Lot of Money with Personal Finance Software

Mark Hedlund, the founder of shuttered personal finance Web app Wesabe, has written a fantastic post-mortem on his experience entitled “Why Wesabe Lost to Mint.” It offers tremendously candid insight into what they did wrong at Wesabe, what Mint did right, and the surprisingly persistent myths around failures and successes in both camps.

This is a story that is of course full of valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and anyone trying to create a product in a competitive marketplace. What’s even more interesting for me is that the last chapter has hardly been written in this category of software. This is not a case where Wesabe lost and Mint took the market, lock, stock and barrel. There’s still tremendous opportunity in personal finance software, mostly because, in its current state ca. 2010, most of these applications don’t fulfill their true purpose.

This is a point that’s very fresh in my mind. Having recently left a job with a healthy salary to hobble together income from multiple smaller sources while raising a young family, personal finance software has, unsurprisingly, become much, much more critical to me, and its failures much, much more evident.

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Time Tracking Tweets

Last week I asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend a good application to help me track the billable time I’m spending on various client projects. Reaffirming the power of tens of thousands of similarly geeky compatriots, I was quickly deluged with answers, for which I’m very grateful.

I had originally asked for suggestions for software both on the desktop and on the Web, but most of the replies focused on the latter. Which is kind of amazing to me. I remember entering work hours in a hoary old package called Timeslips when I started working as a designer; it ran on one Macintosh in the design studio where I was employed, and the staff had to take turns with it to enter our project hours. It was poorly designed and really painful. Of course that was a long time ago but even five or six years ago, when I was researching time tracking solutions for my old design studio, the pickings were slim.

Now time tracking software is available pretty much anywhere and at any time; a number of the packages suggested to me have iPhone components as well. That’s a lot of progress.

In my cursory review of the links sent to me, I definitely feel that I’m more attracted to a Web-based app, mostly because I think the short-term economics are better for me. I haven’t really settled on which is the best fit, but several folks on Twitter asked me to reflect back on the suggestions I came across, so here we go in no particular order.

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Contractual Basis

Since I left my job at The New York Times in July, I’ve been working with a few companies in various capacities, and each of these relationships has in their own way required me to sign paperwork of some kind. Non-disclosure forms, independent contractor agreements, tax forms and the like.

The thorniest ones have been the contracts, which require not just my signature but a counter-signature too. This stuff typically comes to me via email attachments. I’ll print them out, initial each page and sign on the dotted line. Then I’ll run the whole document through my indispensable Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner, which creates a PDF version in practically a blink of the eye, and send it back to the other party as an email attachment. If that party has scanning capabilities, then they’ll send me back a new PDF with their signature; just as often as not, they’ll have to put final copies in the mail or defer the handoff until we next meet face-to-face.

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Take the Money and Stand Still

Last week I tweeted this eye-opening guide to spotting an ATM skimmer published by the invaluable Snopes.com. Like a lot of people, I’d heard of ATM skimmers before — duplicate card readers and wireless cameras surreptitiously attached to cash machines with the intent of stealing your card number and PIN — but I had no idea what form they actually took. The visual evidence was striking; skimmers are uncanny mimics of the visual language of ATMs. The colors, shapes and peculiar plasticity that we’re all familiar with are faithfully reproduced in their ersatz forms. I had no idea they could blend into a cash machine’s hardware so expertly.

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Show Me the Money (for Art Direction)

Speaking of magazines, I’ve just started writing a regular column about interaction design over at Print. If it seems a bit retrograde for me to publish my thoughts on digital media in that forum, believe me the irony is not lost. In spite of its somewhat anachronistic moniker, though, I still find Print to be incredibly vibrant as a showcase for great graphic design — and in spite of all my pooh-poohing of the fitful and awkward migration of traditional graphic design values into the digital space, I still think that digital designers have a lot to learn from print — just as print designers have a lot to learn from digital.

My first column will appear in the June 2010 issue, which will be on newsstands in May, but the editors have graciously decided to publish it in advance on the Web in full here.

Almost inevitably, the topic is Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” iPad and so the column has some overlap with my harsh criticisms of the Popular Science magazine app from earlier in the week (catch up on that blog post here). Specifically, I try to wrestle with the iPad’s prospects for ushering in a return to the visually and expressively rich values of traditional art direction.

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Adding Up Basic Maths

Since last November’s release of Basic Maths — the commercially-available, Subtraction.com-based theme for WordPress that I designed and developed with Allan Cole — I’ve been asked from time to time by friends and acquaintances how well it’s fared. My answer is usually that sales have been healthy but not spectacular, that I’m satisfied with the revenue that the theme has brought in, but also that it’s hardly enough for me to quit my day job.

As soon as I started having these conversations I began to realize that very few people really have a sense of what makes for a successful commercial theme, at least not numbers-wise. This included me, too, especially at the outset of my foray into the market, when my most specific ambition was basically ‘to sell a lot.’ Now with a little bit of experience under my belt, I certainly have a better idea of how to define success, but it’s based exclusively on my own personal experiences selling Basic Maths, with the benefit of very little if any intelligence from other commercial theme developers.

With that in mind, I decided early on that, when I had a sufficient amount of sales data logged, I’d try and share it so that others might benefit from it. Basic Maths was released on 14 Nov of last year, so there’s just over four months of records available to me; not a tremendous amount, but certainly enough to draw some early lessons regarding how theme sales work.

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New Shell for AOL

imageIn advance of being spun off from Time Warner next month, AOL debuted new corporate branding yesterday, rolling out not just a revised logo but a visual system with a bit of a twist to it. Using a modicum of cleverness, the company’s new look is in fact a kind of visual randomizer in which a new, mixed-case typographic mark “Aol” (instead of the previous initialism “AOL”) is superimposed on top of various whimsical, silhouetted images.

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