cgerrish – Page 154

Industrial Design: Creating The Look of the DOM

Published October 22, 2007 by cgerrish

For a long time now the visual design of websites has had no relationship to the underlying structure of the document. It’s as though the visual manifestation of the website had no relation to its material. There are lots of web production processes designed this way. It’s usually done in photoshop by publication designers who know nothing of HTML or the Document Object Model.

Traditional industrial design is all about understanding your materials and the purpose of the thing you’re designing. Putting the underlying structure of the document in sync with the visual design creates a flexible, powerful whole. It allows websites to serve multiple output devices, including meeting ADA requirements.

Like the effort to get web browser makers to adhere to standards, and the new effort to get HTML email readers to abide by the same standards— this effort needs to be directed at the Content Management System makers and the visual designers of websites. CMS’s should produce POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML), and designers should create visuals that respect the structure of the document.

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Art Notebooks

Published October 19, 2007 by cgerrish

There’s some beautiful work on display over at the Moleskin project. I’m a big fan of the Moleskin notebook, although sometimes I find them too beautiful to write in. I don’t take snapshots when I’m on vacation, usually I’ll bring a sketchbook to record my impressions. People are devoted to the Moleskin, at times it seems like a bit of a cult.

Anything that gets people using a pencil or a pen to draw pictures—I’ve got to like. I’m immersed in the digital, but the things I find most valuable are original and unique artifacts from the hand of an artist.

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Why Marketing is Broken

Published October 16, 2007 by cgerrish

Allen Stern claims that RSS is broken because it doesn’t deliver customers to him on a plate. Of course, he then explains that RSS was never designed to rat out it’s subscribers to marketers. Gee, people can anonymously subscribe to my feed. If you think about it, I do know that the subscriber is the kind of person who would subscribe to my particular feed. So that tells me something. Although it doesn’t tell me when they’ve lost interest, or if they intended to unsubscribe, but were too lazy to do so.

But the idea that marketers have any claim on the kind of data that Stern is asking for shows a real lack of understanding. Perhaps Mr. Stern needs to have a long conversation with Doc Searls about Vendor Relationship Management. Yes, traditionally marketers put potential customers into their sights using the kind of stats Stern wants RSS to collect. But the equation isn’t the same on the internet, it isn’t a “one to many” broadcast medium. It’s “many to many” where there’s a democratization of the participants in the network. People are starting to understand that their interest in, and even their raw attention toward a product has a value. And deciding to expose any data to a potential vendor is a customer choice, not a marketers right.

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St. Ann’s Warehouse: Save Me