All entries from January 2008

I was fortunate enough to speak at the Cranbrook Academy of Art design department at the end of January. Having graduated from Cranbrook in 1995, I was really excited to see what students were up to, and to catch up with Elliott Earls, the head of the department. Back in ’93, Elliott interviewed me as a perspective student and was instrumental in getting me into the program.

Elliott has been carrying on the Cranbrook tradition of an open studio environment that centers around self-initiated projects and weekly group critiques. I gave an hour long lecture to the students touching on my personal and professional work as well as talking about the collective nature of the Athletics studio. One of the main themes of my lecture was the notion that, as a designer, it’s not only the actual work you create, but also your own unique perspective on the design discipline that informs the creative process.

Cranbrook, like other design programs at Cal Arts, RISD and Yale, has amazing design resources: large-format digital output, laser cutters, wood shop, audio/video facilities and an impressive library. All of the available tools and raw materials offer Cranbrook students the opportunity to pursue and produce nearly any design idea. I think the big challenge, and the same challenge presented to me 13 years ago, is how to focus your own ideas and efforts to further one’s development as a designer.

During my visit, I spent about 30-45 minutes with each student learning their background and speaking with them about their work. The range of skill, ideas, energy and focus were pretty vast. I also found that students had decided to enter the Cranbrook graduate program for a variety of reasons. Some students had already worked in the professional sphere and were looking to either teach or shift their ability. Some students had very little design training but were selected for their creative ability in another discipline such as painting. Overall I felt the students had a firm grasp of what they wanted to do and were actively working together to move forward as designers.

I also found the group critiques to very informative. Group critiques begin with 2-3 students that hang their work in the crit room the day before critique. Another student is then selected to review the work and write up a 1-2 page evaluation. Reviews consist of an interpretation of the project as well as an assessment of the work of other artist or designers (contemporary and historical) that may help frame the project. The day of critique, the review is read aloud and all of the students have an opportunity to give their assessment. Comments range from issues regarding clarity of purpose, craft, meaning, technology, context, concept and aesthetics. After everyone comments, the person that created the work then reads a statement of purpose that articulates their ideas and goals for the project.

All of the students then have a chance to realign their comments to inform the statement of purpose and provide comments on how to move the project forward. It was my feeling that if every student were to take the critique format seriously and truly digest, evaluate and then act on the comments, the resulting work would be extremely strong. But as we all know, this is easier said than done. Just because the group provides the designer with the ammunition to push the work forward, it does not mean that a clear path emerges. The real opportunity for students is in learning to absorb feedback, and then work from it.

The Cranbrook experience is part academic, part self-help, part teamwork and part personal soul searching, and in the end provides a creative/critical format that is unique within the design discipline. It’s sort of the design equivalent to tv shows like Survivor or Project Runway, but it takes two years, there is no prize money and you have to read a lot more. Like any academic setting, I think Cranbrook provides the basic framework and facilities to push an individual designer to another level, but it is up to the individual to take advantage of the people, resources and environment.

Talking with students I stressed a need for a high level of sophistication in projects. Just because you have great resources does not mean that a big digital print of a Photoshop file represents “finished work.” Notions of craft, materiality and format help distinguish between a design “sketch” and a fully realized idea. For example, I would rather see tight story boards that clearly articulate a motion project than a 5-minute video “sketch” of an undercooked idea. It was the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt that said, “The idea behind the work supersedes the work itself” and that, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” I truly believe that if a designer has an idea they believe in then articulating that idea can become an amazing journey where the sky is the limit.

As a designer, I think it is important to live in the “now.” I feel more urgency and enthusiasm for the design discipline than I ever have. I also feel that Elliott, as the head of the program, continually expresses a level of energy and commitment to design discourse that is genuinely inspiring. For students, I feel it is their personal responsibility to realize that their time at Cranbrook is very special, and as a creative person, you must push yourself and your fellow students. If you have the opportunity to do whatever you want, why half-step it?

On the last day of our visit we had a chance to see the Eero Saarinen exhibition at the Cranbrook museum. The exhibition was incredibly inspiring. From his 1948 womb chair design for Knoll, to the 1962 TWA Terminal 5 at JFK, Eero’s creative output was staggering. I felt the exhibition was a great reflection of the true potential of the design discipline, and part of what makes the Cranbrook legacy so special. From Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Michael and Kathy McCoy, P. Scott Makela, Andrew Blauvelt, Elliott Earls, Martin Venezky and more recently the likes of Jason Jones, Camm Rowland, Chris Williams and many many more, I think there is something very unique about the Cranbrook experience that brings really talented people together and provides them with the right creative and critical tools to bring out their best. Ultimately Cranbrook grads have an oppurtunity to impact the larger world of graphic design in amazing ways.

View pics of my visit on Flickr

Many small, idiosyncratic organizations make an effort to remain shrouded in mystery in some myth-building effort. Large, publicly-held companies rarely do. But there is one major exception: Apple.

At Apple, nothing is revealed until the last moment possible. Then, once every six months, Steve Jobs strolls out on stage in front of a packed house and delivers a keynote speech revealing various new gadgets. Every time around the tech world is obsessed with what might happen, and then post-event, obsessed with discussions regarding whatever was actually revealed. It makes for fantastic punditry. (I do love that John Gruber.) All consumer electronics companies release new products, but Apple is the only one turning product launches into media events by refusing to discuss, or even hint at what lies ahead.

What I find staggering is how much effort Apple puts into secret-keeping. Apple products require massive numbers of humans — designers, software and hardware engineers, advertising partners, overseas manufacturing partners, documentation-writers, web designers, etc. So many humans and no one is leaking. iPhone, the most highly anticipated product of recent memory, didn’t leak. Clearly the entire company has been organized around this secret-keeping principle, and it’s an integral part of the Apple brand strategy.

I mention Apple because we are fascinated by specialness in brands, particularly the myth-building qualities. Apple’s secret-keeping is a perfect example.

Months ago we considered penning an article for the blog detailing the inner-workings of a functioning design collective, specifically the business model. After all, we are operating outside the bounds of a traditional corporate entity; it might be an interesting read. Ultimately, we decided, No, we don’t need to share such information, at least not on the blog. Once distilled down to words on a screen, it didn’t seem so interesting. If anyone really wanted to know, we figured they could get in touch and we could have a conversation.

Turns out this is exactly what happened. This past Thursday we were treated to lunch by our new friends Renda Morton, Andy Pressman and Holly Gressley. All three are talented designers and currently sharing studio space in Dumbo. They wanted to chat with us as they are considering forming a collective. They stopped by and we shared our thoughts on the subject.

The take-away here is less is more, and sometimes lunch.

Matt Owens launches redesigned volumeone.com.

AisleOne has a great interview with designer Duane King.

Duane is one of our good buddies and creative director of BBDK, our partners out in Sante Fe.

I’m not sure you can be a Flash designer/developer here in 2008 and not have mixed feelings about Flash websites. Understand: I have been working with Flash for ten years. I like Flash a lot. It does one million things. But I think everyone has realized that all-Flash, all-the-time, makes no sense. Specifically, I’m talking about “Flash-world” websites, or websites that load all site content into a single Flash shell.

Before web browsers were any good, before CSS worked well, before AJAX Javascript noodlery, before blogs and RSS hit, before Google ruled the earth, a lot of people thought Flash might be the answer to everything. During this time (1999-2005ish) the Flash-world approach dominated among designers and ad agencies. Unlike HTML, Flash offered designers exacting control over the visual experience. In particular, designers were lured by Flash’s ability to render fonts. Ad agencies were seduced simply by Flash’s ability to render the Photoshop “boner-boards” they sell to clients. (This is why ad agencies are still obsessed with Flash.)

However, even as early as 2000, Flash-world sites were receiving a lot of criticism, particularly regarding usability (See: Flash: 99% Bad). By giving designers total control, Flash-world sites broke nearly every rule of the web; each Flash-world site introduced new, idiosyncratic conventions for navigation, scrolling, etc. The mess of the whole slowed the emergence of many of today’s established web design conventions. Now, many realize that Flash is best used to solve specific problems, not provide complete site architecture.

Consider YouTube. The entire site is predicated on the delivery of video using Flash, yet the site itself is HTML/CSS. At this point, the silliness of rolling all of YouTube into one giant Flash-world should be obvious to all.

MTV.com is another example. In 2006 mtv.com went Flash-world. As a designer and developer, I found the site interesting and certainly an impressive technical achievement. However, the user experience was frustrating. MTV realized their error and within nine months ditched the Flash-world and returned to an HTML/CSS architecture. Flash is still used to deliver video content, but the site browsing experience is no longer hijacked by a Flash-world.

Flash Development

Beyond the issue of appropriateness, Flash applications (especially Flash-worlds) are challenging development projects. It’s not that Actionscript is complicated. (It’s pretty easy to pick up for those familiar with Java, Javascript or any OO language.) Flash development is challenging because it is ridiculously tedious. By providing designers and developers with a blank canvas and complete control, Flash development becomes an exercise in reinventing wheels. Want to go to another “page” in your Flash-world? You’re going to need to write Model, View and Controller classes. Want a form in Flash? You’ll need to instantiate a bunch of objects, add event listening, and tie the whole form to a bunch of logic for error checking, data handling, etc. Even the basic task of loading an image (a no-brainer with HTML in a browser) is a challenge in Flash — you’ll need instantiate an image loading class, set up some logic, and bother with event handling. It’s all a lot of work.

Flash-world development is essentially the reinvention of the browser, inside a plugin, running in a browser. It’s silly. Browsers already do such a good job of managing state, rendering content and working with forms. Why start over?

To be profitable in the Flash-world business, you have to develop and maintain a library of frameworks and classes to deal with all the wheels you need to reinvent. Historically, Flash development had a closed, proprietary, arms-race quality to it, with studios maintaining proprietary arsenals of frameworks and classes. The closed nature of Flash development was due to a number of factors:

• Unlike plain-text HTML and CSS, SWF files are compiled runtimes and there is no way to “View Source” or otherwise look under the hood of Flash apps. This keeps the code mysterious, prevents the development community (from beginner to pro) from examining and learning from the work of others, and generally excludes Flash from the web’s traditional culture of knowledge-sharing. Two notes: Flash decompilers do exist, but such tools have only been used by the extremely motivated, and again, one doesn’t need a decompiler to view HTML or CSS source. Second, View Source functionality is now possible in Flash, but this still remains a developer-elected option rather than a default.
• Flash started as a designer’s tool. Designers, being a bit more guarded with their intellectual property, do not have the same culture of sharing that you find in the software world.
• Actionscript did not become (in the eyes of developers) a real programming language until the introduction of Actionscript 2 with Flash 7 (2004). AS2, being styled directly from Java, was designed to appeal to Java developers. Having AS embraced by the software world injected a lot of software culture in Flash, and helped pull Flash out of its designer-centric origins.

There is now a growing open source Flash community, but you still don’t find near the scope of community as you do around big-timers like PHP or (relatively) new technologies like Ruby on Rails.

Flex

Adobe has tried to remedy Flash’s customization-over-convention problem with the introduction of Flex, a development framework for creating Flash apps, or what Adobe refers to as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Summary: it’s like HTML for Flash. There are certainly some very interesting things about Flex, but again, it all seems like a very complicated way of doing things that are already possible with HTML/CSS/Javascript in browsers.

Flex doesn’t seem to have much of a future, and it’s difficult to find anyone excited about it. These days the web is full of rich internet apps (i.e., Gmail, Basecamp, Flickr), but I couldn’t name a single app built using Flex. I went to Adobe’s Flex Showcase but didn’t find any particularly rich internet experiences — mostly the same confusing, idiosyncratic Flash interfaces quick to hijack the browser’s scrollbar and disable the scroll wheel (in OS X anyway).

More coming

Over the years we have certainly built our share of Flash-world sites, though we have been moving away from this type of work. Rather, we try and only use Flash when appropriate – video/audio players, widgets, games, slideshows, etc. But now, for the first time in nearly a year, we are tackling a proper Flash-world project — an experience-oriented site with a few particular demands that only a Flash-world can accommodate.

Flash-worlds have come a long way since our last contact. Developers have been working to bring Flash apps in line with standard web conventions, most notably deep-linking and browser back/forward-button support.

We are using Asual’s open-source library, SWFAddress, to provide our Flash-world with state management and deep-linking. SWFAddress plugs in nicely in front of our otherwise proprietary MVC architecture. It has been great to find a solid open-source, cross-browser solution that solves one of the most glaring Flash-world usability issues. We first discovered SWFAddress after visiting Burst Labs, a wholly appropriate Flash-world site designed by Gridplane and developed by David Knape. (Note: Knape has also released Bumpslide, an open-source library of useful AS2 classes.)

Given our thoughts on the Flash-world practice, this return to form has been an interesting challenge. In some ways frustrating, others rewarding. We are pleased to be using Flash for its intended purpose: constructing interactive applications combining both visual and technical challenges. Despite our criticism and reservations, the Flash-world architecture can still make for smart solutions given the appropriate context.

Look for more Flash-related thoughts over the next months as this current project progresses.