Currently charging my son’s shoes via USB for his first day of school because that’s a thing you do in 2018.
Ben Gibbard’s been doing the rounds to promote Death Cab for Cutie’s quite good new record, Thank You For Today.
Gibbard was asked to force-rank all eight Death Cab albums, and his answers were somewhat controversial (The Photo Album is way too low for my liking). However, it’s this interview with Entertainment Weekly that stuck with me.
EW asks Gibbard about the 15-year anniversaries of both Transatlanticism and Give Up. His answer is very illuminating, and incredibly self-aware:
When I look back at 2003, it was the best year I’ve ever had creatively: having Transatlanctism and Give Up come out in the course of six months. I’ll never have another year like that.
I can’t imagine how difficult it is to admit that your best creative work occurred fifteen years ago as a working recording artist, promoting a new release with major label backing.
Tomorrow, I’m gonna drive about 200 miles to drink some beers in grass parking lots and watch an amateur football blowout with over 100,000 of my closest friends and I CAN’T WAIT.
The seasons roll on by
Soundgarden was never my “favorite band.”
I was always a Pearl Jam guy, at least in high school. Others were Nirvana People, or Nine Inch Nails People. But Soundgarden was always a band that was just there. Always on the periphery, always high quality, but never The Band That Could Be Your Life.
I never stood in line for Soundgarden tickets. I never went to a midnight sale for a new Soundgarden CD release. I never bought a magazine just for the Chris Cornell interview like I did for Eddie Vedder, Billy Corgan, or Thom Yorke. There was no obvious outward showing of love, or fandom.
Which makes my reaction to the news of Chris Cornell’s passing feel… not quite fake, but perhaps not earned? Inauthentic? I’ll probably cry when Vedder dies. I’ll take a week off work when the first member of R.E.M. goes. But Cornell? I’ve been trying not to dive too deep into my feelings about it, to be honest, because I’m not quite sure what I’ll find.
And yet… I still remember the take-my-breath-away feeling of hearing “Hunger Strike” for the first time. It’s still just as arresting to this day. Cornell and Vedder sound like they’d been bandmates for a decade or more… yet they’d only met for the first time during the Temple of The Dog sessions.
I still remember the countless hours spent alone in my room, playing “Seasons” on repeat, trying to figure out what the hell open tuning it was written in, never mind how to play it. (I learned today that it’s FFCCcc, because of course it is.)
And it’s impossible not to think of the Summer of 1994 without thinking of “Black Hole Sun” and it’s subversively trippy video.
“Black Hole Sun” is by no means a great Soundgarden song. It’s not even the best song on Side A of the Superunknown tape. But that shit was ubiquitous, friends. You couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing that creepy, melty-face girl grinning sadistically at you. It was everywhere, always, woven into the fabric of that time.
And maybe that’s what’s so jarring about the fact that he’s gone. Cornell’s music was an institution, one I thought we could count on for another few solid decades of reunions with Soundgarden, occasional solo records and sporadic other projects. But nothing lasts forever, and the seasons roll on by.
What "Unrivaled" Means for Penn State in 2016
I’m so jealous of Ohio State fans this week.
Not because of their team’s success, recent or historical. It has nothing to do with their head coach, or their quarterback, or any of the monstrous playmakers and future NFLers that make up their secondary.
No, I’m jealous of Ohio State fans because they wake up in the morning and never wonder who their rival is.
They know it from birth. They know it before they even know how to verbalize it. They know it at a molecular level.
They know they love Ohio State, and hate Michigan, not necessarily in that order.
I feel similar pangs when I meet fans of Alabama or Auburn, USC or Notre Dame, Washington or Washington State, Florida or Florida State. They never have to wonder what their goals are, or who they need to measure themselves against. That’s a feeling that Penn State fans just can’t understand in 2016.
“Unrivaled” has become a buzzword during Coach James Franklin’s tenure at Penn State, but it’s been an overarching theme since the Nittany Lions joined the Big Ten: We don’t have a true rival.
It’s partly due to history. Penn State was an independent for 104 years, and didn’t consistently play the same teams every year as they would have with a conference schedule. Familiarity breeds contempt, and while Penn State did manage to build up some mutual disdain for a few programs, most of that momentum was lost when Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1993, and went from eleven games to schedule at its discretion to three.
Who is Penn State’s one true rival in 2016?
A rival is someone you play every year. A rival is someone you’re evenly matched with, in the fullness of time. A rival is someone you hate. And, most importantly, your rival has to hate you back. Who ticks all those boxes for Penn State?
Much was made of the Penn State resurrecting its historic rivalry with Pitt earlier this year. But, the Keystone Classic is a four-year engagement, with no extension in sight. Michigan and Ohio State are clearly off the table, since they’re obsessed with each other. Maryland and Rutgers can’t honestly say they’ve been consistently competitive with Penn State.
So that leaves us with… Michigan State? They’re in a similar situation: A late-comer to the Big Ten, struggling to find their partner for the Rivalry Week dance. So, the Big Ten, with all the tact and consideration of a married couple setting up two long-single friends, waved its hands and said “Ta-Da! You’re rivals!” We’ve had some laughs at the expense of the Land-Grand Trophy, but you can’t just declare a rivalry by fiat. You have to earn it.
So, back to “Unrivaled.”
Whether he meant it or not, Coach Franklin tapped into over a century of history in Happy Valley. He’s declared that every game on the schedule matters equally, and that the only goal is to go “1–0 this week.” You don’t need One True Rival, you just need to handle your business each and every week.
“Unrivaled” doesn’t satisfy my wish for laser-focused hate, but does it get results? Has “Unrivaled” given a young team with limited preseason expectations a fighting chance at a Big Ten division championship, and maybe more? If so, can we as a fan base sustain it? Will we be content with “Indiana Indiana Indiana,” or do we want to hate? Do we need to hate? Is it possible to forget about Pitt or Michigan or Ohio State or anyone else until it’s their turn on the schedule?
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it’s your turn this week, Sparty.
(Originally published at Roar Lions Roar)
Three Weird Tricks That Might Help Your Sketching (or not)
They might not work for you, though, and that’s okay!
Sketching remains a vital part of the design process here at Arcweb Technologies, and has been incredibly transformative for me, personally:
I can honestly say that buying into a process that includes both sketching and prototyping has exponentially leveled up my game this year. — Len Damico (@lendamico) on December 11, 2014
Any old writing instrument and paper can work for sketching. It’s an incredibly open-ended discipline, and that’s part of the beauty of it! But as I’ve sketched more and more, these three simple things have made my the time I spend on it much more productive.
Dots, Not Grids
Graph paper can help make your layouts feel more like precision documents than rough doodles, but not all graph paper is created equal. Some variants have lines so dark that you struggle to see your sketches on it.
The secret: find dotted graph paper rather than lined. The dots allow for some precision and alignment, but don’t compete with your sketches. (I personally love these hard-backed notebooks from Baron Fig, which are available with dotted pages.)
Commit to the Pen
Typically, sketching happens with a pencil. In fact, every designer gets a beautiful Alvin mechanical pencil when they start at Arcweb Technologies. But while pencil has its place, consider giving pen a shot for your next sketch session. In my experience, the fact that pencil sketches are erasable becomes more bug than feature. A pen forces me to always keep moving, not stopping to erase mistakes. Plus, a pen’s indelibility makes for a good reminder to move forward and save all ideas, instead of erasing as you go.
Invest in a Date Stamp
As I look back through my sketching journal, the days often run together. I’ve tried dating pages by hand, but those hand-written dates tended to blend with the actual sketches on the page. The solution, borrowed from Philadelphia artist Mike Jackson, was to invest in a tiny date stamper. The stamps feel official and important but its true value is that it stand out from everything else on the page. Plus, there’s a certain Zen-like quality to the process of stamping today’s date at the top of a blank page.
To Each Their Own
These hacks came from spending lots of time sketching, finding out where my own friction points were, and removing them as simply as I could. They may or may not work for you, and that’s okay! If you’ve got your own sketching tricks, tweet them at me and I’ll share them around. Good luck, and happy sketching!
Hail To The (New and Improved?) Lion
Let’s start our discussion of Penn State’s new academic logo with critiquing the work itself, before we dive into critiquing the process.
The mark itself? It’s… boring. Corporate. Safe. Could be a bank, could be a hospital. The rendition of the lion itself is fine. I don’t love the 2-Color approach, and that’s going to be a real pain to embroider, but it’s fine. The type itself is also fine. Very contemporary, and again, very safe.
The move to a more neutral, middle-of-the-road shade of blue is disheartening. Again, could be a hospital, could be a bank.
I get why the existing mark needed some time in the shop, but compared to this new mark, it feels even more timeless.
Maybe my comments on the new mark being corporate and safe are off the mark. Maybe that was a stated goal in the brief. I don’t know! Penn State is among the largest research institutions in the nation. Maybe a boring, corporate brand will serve them better in the long run.
But as an alumni, this new mark leaves me full of… meh. Just, meh. No visceral reaction whatsoever.
And maybe I feel so positively about the old mark because I’ve been seeing that thing since I was born. But, if you take away the Lion statue, you take away 1855, you take away that beautiful type that looks carved in stone… you better give me something really, really good in return.
To be clear, I’m laying the blame for this squarely at the University’s feet. I’m sure the firm did some great work that died in committee. For example, this is a recipe for disaster: “More than 300 members of various faculty, staff and administrative groups were engaged during the process.“ And seriously, please miss me with “they spent $128k on THIS?!??!” That’s a drop in the bucket for a rebrand effort of this scale. (If we really want to get Nit-picky (see what I did there?), I think it’s fair to ask why the University couldn’t find a PA firm qualified to do this.)
Overall, the whole thing is boring, corporate and safe. Underwhelming. I expected better from something like this, but maybe that’s my fault. Thanks for listening. We are Penn State.
(One last thing: You can change the chipmunk logo after you pry it from my cold, dead hands.)
The purely aesthetic form
I’m about halfway through Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. So far, it’s a good read. It portrays Ive as someone with exquisite taste who was in the right place at the right time, willing to work harder and care more than his competitors. It never descends into hagiography (in spite of the sub-title), as many tech bios tend to do.
Author Leander Kahney goes to great lengths throughout to express Jony’s distaste for “skinning” a product (applying surface-level design to something engineering had already created). In Ive’s design-centric mind, the “inside-out” method lead to compromised products.
But let’s square that with this tale from the design of the original Mac Mini:
The decision about the size of the case might seem trivial, but it would influence what kind of hard drive the Mini could contain. If the case were large enough, the computer could be given a 3.5-inch drive, commonly used in desktop machines and relatively inexpensive. If Jony chose a small case, it would have to use a much more expensive 2.5-inch laptop drive.
Jony and the VPs selected an enclosure that was just 2 mm too small to use a less expensive 3.5-inch drive. “They picked it based on what it looks like, not on the hard drive, which will save money,” [former Apple product design engineer Gautam] Baksi said. He said Jony didn’t even bring up the issue of the hard drive; it wouldn’t have made a difference. “Even if we provided that feedback, it’s rare they would change the original intent,” he said. “They went with a purely aesthetic form of what it should look like and how big it should be.”
This is… well, it’s not design.
Design is solving problems within constraints. The characteristics of components, including price, are constraints. Without having a damn good reason to make the case 2 mm too small to fit a much less expensive 3.5-inch hard drive, you’re just decorating and playing artist, not designer. This is even more surprising, given that Ive is notorious for knowing and waxing rhapsodic about every last detail of his materials.
Outside-in product development is just as problematic as the inside-out approach that Ive despised. In this case, it may have led to a product that was more expensive (or less profitable) than it needed to be. Given that one of the Mac Mini’s core benefits as an entry-level Mac was its low cost, this is baffling.
Great product development is a true partnership between engineering and design.
(Yes, I know. Jony Ive is perhaps the most celebrated industrial designer in the history of the field, and rightly so. And Apple has a track record of ignoring practical decisions in the pursuit of a product’s true essence. That doesn’t mean we can’t examine a particular design challenge they faced and learn from it.)
Why We Prototype
Here at Arcweb, we’ve been spending more time using analog methods of exploring and communicating our ideas and we’ve augmented our UI design process with Sketch.app. The next piece of the Arcweb design process that we’ll explore is prototyping.
What is Prototyping?
In our context, prototyping is the process of efficiently creating a representation of a digital product that reflects our current vision of it. Prototypes are meant for learning and communicating, not perfection. They can vary in fidelity from simple, ad-hoc paper prototypes to complex, clickable versions that are almost indistinguishable from real, working software. Efficiency is key here; we create the prototype to learn more about our assumptions and how a piece of software might work before actually building the software.
Why Prototype?
Prototyping helps us build customer value from the day we begin the Discovery process on a project. More specifically, it facilitates three types of communication that contribute to building the right product for the problem at hand:
The Designer’s Inner Monologue
The closer something is to “real,” the easier it is to evaluate. Consequently, that’s not the case for what’s in a designer’s head. What’s in a designer’s head is, in fact, the furthest thing from “real” there is. But a prototype changes all that. By prototyping, we are able to iterate quickly through ideas that won’t work without sending other departments (like development) on missions built to fail. Said differently, rapid, iterative prototyping allows the design team to fail fast which in turn will bolster confidence because everything’s been considered.
Designer-Developer Collaboration
Prototyping also facilitates more effective designer-developer collaboration. With prototypes, the design team is able to show the development team what’s to be built rather than simply telling them. (This is valuable for both practical and interpersonal reasons.) Some prototyping tools even allow developers to pull snippets of code that they can use to get started or in production.
By prototyping, we reduce the frustration and ambiguity that can occur when designer and dev terms don’t make sense to the other. For example, when the design team prototypes, devs don’t have to guess at what a phrase like “the sidebar dances in” means. Instead they see it. (By now it should be abundantly obvious that prototyping minimizes engineer grumpiness.) And when they see it, developers can provide rich, insightful feedback, assess technical feasibility and system design and cut excess scope earlier in the process.
Customer Dialogue
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. Prototyping allows us to build consensus with our customers earlier in the life of a project. As much as a customer can say they “get it” from reviewing flat comps, prototypes that look and feel like real software allow for deeper, richer understanding. Throughout the life of a project, that means fewer surprises and the less-than-comfortable conversations you have to have when they spring up.
Finally, customers tend to be more vocal when it comes to raising issues when they’re looking at a prototype versus live software. And this makes sense: no matter if it’s a small modification or a complete pivot, change requests after multiple dev sprints are expensive. They are far less so in the prototyping stage. (Think hours instead of weeks or months.)
So that’s why we prototype. It improves how designers communicate their visions. It aligns designer-developer relationships and workflows. And it helps customers better understand what will be built before it’s built.
Now what?
The first Penn State memory I have was the stein. It proudly sat on the bookshelf in the family room. “Class of 1972,” it read. I had no idea what the words meant… but somehow I knew what the stein itself meant.
My next memory? January 2, 1987. The Fiesta Bowl. Second time I ever saw my dad get teary. (The first was when he picked me up at kindergarten to tell me my grandfather had died.)
After that? A graduation gift. My acceptance letter from Penn State, framed. On the back, in my father’s inscrutable handwriting:
“I am so proud of you.”
There were a lot of other things. Meeting and falling in love with my wife. Proposing on the lawn at Old Main. Celebrating at The Diner. Drunkenly predicting that Penn State would return to glory in 2005 on the heels of a dismal 4-7 season. (I still have the index card I wrote it on to prove it.) Dressing my son as the Nittany Lion for Halloween. Hoping I could share what I loved so much about my alma mater… and that he’d want to continue my family’s legacy.
And now I don’t know how much of that stuff is gone forever.
One other thing, seemingly so innocuous at the time, sticks out now. I worked as a host in a chain seafood restaurant just outside of town. A coworker taps me on the shoulder. “Holy shit, that’s Jerry Sandusky.” He asks for a table for two. The wait was an hour, maybe more.
He got the next table that opened up. He was very appreciative. I felt so cool.
And now, not to go all Rick Reilly on you, but I feel like an idiot. Part of the problem, right? The football-first culture?
So now I’ve got all these memories, and a football autographed by none other than Joe Paterno himself. And no idea what to do with any of it.
About 8 years ago, we received a coffee grinder as a Christmas gift. It was a very thoughtful gift, because my wife and I both love coffee. Except that after a pretty short while, it became a hassle. Grinding beans is just another step in the morning, I don’t notice much if any taste difference, and it’s almost impossible to make a cup in the morning with my son asleep.
Yet still, we bought bag after bag of whole bean coffee. Because we had a grinder, and we couldn’t let that go to waste, y’know?
Finally, I had a Moment of Clarity on the subject. I realized that this was silly, and that we should just buy ground coffee, and that we should ignore the “sunk cost” of already having a grinder. I felt enlightened as I went to grind beans for presumably the last time this morning.
The coffee grinder was dead.