Moo

A grainy picture of some exceedingly nice business cards that have just arrived from Moo. This is just a freebie sample pack, but I’m really impressed with the quality of the card and the print. I may have to actually buy some now.

Sign of the times

Can’t get your DeLorean up to speed? Police box needs a new lick of paint? Want a new way to traverse the fourth dimension? Well look no further! Introducing the University of York’s bizarre signage system: giving you directions through space and time.

On tumbling and shallow identity

So as you may or may not know, I publish the blog part of this site using a little thing called tumblr (the portfolio bit is cobbled together with Cargo and spit and bits of string). Most of the time tumblr is brilliant because it’s simple. Really simple. You can literally set up and account and start blogging within a minute.

Khoi recently discussed the ‘shallow identity’ that this simplicity encourages. There’s no default ‘about’ page, so many bloggers are completely anonymous (or hidden away in the small print – something I’m guilty of with my other site, Concrete Proof) and the intent of the blog is unclear. And there’s no in-built commenting system, so actual human discussion beyond clicking a ‘like’ or ‘reblog’ icon is discouraged, unless you figure out how to install an unsightly third-party commenting system like Disqus.

Despite these shallow shortcomings, I’ve stuck with it a lot longer than other blogging platforms, because it just works. Over the years, I’ve tried my hand at Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, but none of them allow me to post something as quickly and reliably like as tumblr does.

Well, I say reliable …

This week it went a bit screwy. The way I manage Concrete Proof is I gather together lots of lovely images in one go and then queue them up for auto-posting, so it publishes one beautiful drab grey image every afternoon. It’s like a daily concrete scooby snack for you all. The other day, HAL tumblr decided to publish my entire queue in one go. Not the end of the world, but still a right royal pain in the bum for me and all those other people whose queued posts were vomited onto the web.

My gripe here isn’t with the queuing feature itself, it’s with way tumblr have dealt with problem: silence. Lots of people have mentioned it in their posts and on twitter, but still nothing has been said. No apology, no explanation, no reassurance that it’s being looked into. If you’re running what is essentially a communication product, the very least you can do is actually communicate with people, and do it really well.

[Actually, the least you could do is demonstrate complete bewilderment at the concept of communication whilst attempting to push it onto people it in the most obnoxious way possible. An art perfected by BT, aka the world’s most inept company.]

All blogging tools are going to have glitches. Talk to us about them. Be open. Encouraging shallow identity is one thing, but adopting it as a business practice is just plain infuriating.

Even Now

This is one of my earliest bits of professional design: the sleeve for Dave Keegan’s excellent Even Now EP. Originally released in a limited run back in 2002, it’s now available to purchase online for whatever you’re willing to pay, Radiohead-style. If you like music – and I can tell that you do – you should really get you mitts on this.

Skeuomorphia

Adam Greenfield has written a great post about Apple’s insistence on using rustic, skeumorphic symbolism for their apps. The little spiral-bound address book, the yellow legal pad, the radio microphone: are these really symbols of 21st century, cutting-edge tech? This use of nostalgic metaphor has bugged me for a while. Sometimes I don’t mind, because they seemed to put some effort and taste into the symbols they used (e.g. the entirely Rams-ian calculator icon … which has unfortunately now been replaced).

But the quality has recently dropped, most notably with the introduction of iBooks. Those shelves! If you are going to go with a book-on-shelf metaphor (even though iTunes manages perfectly well without trying to look like a box of old vinyl), then at least go for some nice looking shelves (Vitsoe, anyone?). Those wooden ones look like they’ve been fished out of a skip. And then today I noticed something just as bad: I added a PDF to iBooks and it very kindly added a little black plastic comb-bind to it! Why put that extra effort into making something look cheap and nasty?

And surely somebody at Apple HQ has had a look at their iPhone and thought ‘hmm, maybe representing two very different functions with compasses is a bit dumb’ … ?

Buried data

I love new inventions. I love using technology in new ways to solve old problems. The future excites me. On top of this, yes, I admit it, I’m a shameless Apple acolyte.

And yet, with all the recent discussion about the iPad and the future of publishing, I seem to have inadvertently positioned myself as a sceptic. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around the block a few times and seen so many things hailed as The Future that I’m just a bit harder to convince than I once was. You see, I don’t have a problem with the iPad per se, but with our approach to software/hardware in general. We’re so eager to jump ahead to the next exciting bit of tech that we completely ignore how to make what we produced with the old tech accessible.

For example, just over ten years ago, I produced a lot of (admittedly, not very good) artwork with DeluxePaint IV on my Amiga 1200. This wasn’t a rare piece of kit – it was the leading graphics software on the leading home computer. How on earth am I meant to access those files now? Even if my Mac could read Amiga files, where the hell do I stick the floppy disk? I can pick up a piece of printed material from ten (or twenty … or a hundred …) years ago and I’ll still be able to read it just fine thank you very much. If the history of computing has taught us anything, it’s that the shiny new format you’re currently using will be useless several times over within your own lifetime. An entire generation’s work is being lost thanks to ‘progress’.

Proof that our current approach to media is flawed is the Planets project (led by the British Library and a bunch of other European organisations). Acknowledging that most digital file formats have a life expectancy of five years, they’ve put the details of today’s most common file formats – and how they can be read – into a time capsule, and then put that into a nukeproof labyrinthine bunker in the Swiss alps. Adam Farquhar, one of the brains behind the project puts it simply:

Einstein’s notebooks you can take down off the shelf and read them today. Roll forward 50 years and most of Stephen Hawking’s notes will likely only be stored digitally and we might not be able to access them all … The time capsule being deposited inside Swiss Fort Knox contains the digital equivalent of the genetic code of different data formats, a ‘digital genome’.

Consider that for a moment: to make our current media formats usable in the future, we have to lock them in an impregnable fortress under a mountain in Switzerland.

Wake-up call, anyone?

By relying on hardware-dependent formats that will only last a few years, we’re turning into a civilisation with no long-term memory, only short. Publishing sorts, please acknowledge that the iPad is not the future, it is just a very shiny, very promising, fundamentally flawed present.

On magazines, music, apps and lessons already learnt

Think about your music collection. Chances are you’ve got it gathered together in a single library: iTunes. Everything is indexed by multiple bits of metadata, allowing you to re-order, search and smartly collate tracks with ease. The tracks are easily transferable from one device to another, so will most likely outlive the hardware that you currently store them on. And you can choose to buy single tracks or collected bundles of tracks curated by the band – it’s entirely up to you.

It’s a model that works. Now consider this alternative:

Every single band only provides their music within an app – one that only runs on one particular device, a device that’ll probably be defunct within a few of years. There’s no way to search or organise tracks across these apps because they’ve all been designed to completely different standards. And it’s pretty expensive too. You only wanted that one track everyone’s raving about, but the band will only let you buy it with twelve other tracks that really don’t interest you.

To start with, it’s not so bad. You’ve got your three or four favourite bands. But then you think about all those other bands you like to dip into every now and then. The home screen of your device soon fills up with dozens of band apps that all basically do the same thing, but with different content (and completely different ‘unique navigation interfaces’). It’s a mess. Trying to locate one track, let alone several related tracks, becomes such a time-consuming pain in the backside that you just don’t bother. In fact, it’s probably easier to just go over to the shelf and revert to the trusty old media formats.

And now replace ‘band’ with ‘magazine’, and ‘track’ with ‘article’. Which model would you say works best?

How to sell magazines

Threat Quality Press have a great post by an ex-Borderite on why the way we sell magazines is pretty stupid. It raises some interesting issues about the ghettoisation of magazines in shops (for example, why aren’t sci-fi mags kept with the sci-fi books, instead of next to the knitting mags?), and I completely agree with the conclusion that the logical future for book/magazine shops is in curation. You can’t compete with Amazon’s quantity, so don’t.

Less, but better. It applies to pretty much anything.