After the first one or two steps where the video was uploaded to YouTube and published on Erics site credit in most cases were lost.

So my tip is to always include your name/site/twittername or something on the first frames in the video, but don’t pester the poster image with it.

If you don’t do that you might miss a ton of goodwill if your work goes viral.

Jeremy Messersmith – Tatooine from Eric Power on Vimeo.

I’ve embedded the Vimeo version cos it has the correct credits :-).

Remy Sharp and Chris Mills gave an excellent, from a designers point of view, introduction to unobtrusive development and accessibility. As a designer getting more involved in technology and development the level was excellent, some stuff I knew and some stuff were new that I didn’t know of.

The technology Remy and Chris spent two hours describing was completely focused on enhancing the user experience of a website. The point of the talk was to show how and what you could do to make a site work no matter what plaform or level of css-, html- and javascript support the visitor has. It was obvious that what they talked about has to be used by us designer and developers to make the most out of our clients businesses and the sites that we produce for our clients.

The shocking thing to me was some of the questions from the audience and some of the tweets after Chris and Remys presentation:

“Have you talked to a designer about graceful degradation? How do you think we designers feel creating a lot of different versions of a website?”

“Isn’t graceful degredation just a lazy/bad (couldn’t hear the exact wording) solution … why don’t you just force the user to upgrade to a better browser?”

“… sane thoughts but not appliable in reality …”

I might have quoted some of you wrong but it’s the general attitude in the questions I’m trying to capture.

What the …? How on earth can you ask such questions after seeing and hearing Chris and Remy for two hours? And the sad thing was that some of the questions came from people working at some of the most promintent agencys in Sweden.

If you as a designer or developer doesn’t understand the value or choose not to use the available technology, you will lower the possibility for your clients to run their business online and in the end you are going down a quite risky path wasting your clients money and, worst of all, risking their business.

As a designer it’s your responsibility to dig into technology and get a brief understanding of what it does and how it works, you don’t have to know it inside out, you just have to get a brief understanding so that you can design and plan for it in your projects.

Design is not about beauty or pixel perfection, it’s about delivering content and functionality to the end user so that the get a hassle free experience when they encounter your clients business.

If you fail to do that you will, hopefully, be out of business pretty soon cos:

1. Your clients will go somewhere else because what you deliver will be bad for their business. If a site fails to make a sale due to lack of decent degredation you have failed. No matter how great the design and error free validation the site has.
2. Your co-workers won’t continue working with you because you’ll become an obstacle, a no-doer that hinders the development of great sites and services.

That’s my response to the questions.

Watch the talk here:
http://bambuser.com/node/218451
Slides will be available at:
http://my.opera.com/chrismills

In his traditional way of thinking there is a clear and strict agency-hierarchy. The production slave is at the bottom of the food chain. He or she is eaten by the designer who then gets wolfed down by the copy/art director. On top of it all the Creative Director is orchestrating the gluttony. And that’s the way it always has been … not in every agency of cource, but unfortunately in way to many agencies run predominately by middle aged white men there is a love for the hierarchy.

In my world tech and design/creativity goes hand in hand. But hierarchys like that that is outdated and will strain creativity. Your ideas and creative is not better just because you have the title “Art director”, probably you have a lot more experience in a lot of fields but using the hierarchy today as a validation of quality is wrong.

To me the hieararchy was valid when tech was slow and there were well defined surfaces between the communicator and the reciever, when there was TV, radio, print and old school web. Then the distribution chains and channels of communication was fixed and monopolitized by creatives. It did cost a hell of a lot of money to reach the broad masses, and as a creative you could charge a hell of a lot to let people use your fixed channels. The time from idea to public apperance and impact was long.

But that is pure business and, again, has nothing to do with creativity or quality of ideas.

The essence of personal creativity to me is to capture and realise your ideas, nurture your curiosity and most important get your ideas out in public. To me an idea is worht nothing if it’s not outed and valued and viewed by others.

Back then it was impossible for John Doe to get his stuff out and make an impact on the broader mass and therefore the correct and only way to do things was to move up the hierachical ladder. To support and be apart of the hierarchy.

Today it’s different. The time from idea to apperance and impact is close to zero.

As a creative you need to get into tech cos it’s is the way to commuicate today. It is the way to realise your ideas. It is the way to impact the masses. Tech has made it possible for anyone to have an idea, produce it and make it available for the masses, thus making an impact. And the beauty of it is that tech doesn’t care if you are an art director or production retard. As long as you know how to tech you will have the power to change the world.

You don’t have to become a rockstar developer, you just have to get your ass out of your creative dungeon and move over to where the tools and techs reside. Read, learn, test, try and explore.

I condemn the hierarchy, if you support it you will be sitting with your brilliant ideas in an ancient structure that doesn’t let you realise your ideas. You will be left behind because every idea you have will be made public by someone else long before you.

You can be a brilliant copywriter but noone will hear you.
You can be a fantastic art director but noone will see you.

If you want to make a change, if you want to impact a broad mass. For gods sake, embrace tech.

[Update]: I’ve shortened the post … it took forever to get to the point earlier.

[Update 2]: I’ve renamed the Codeplay project to Codecamp since there is a company in the UK named Codeplay. My mistake, didn’t mean to cause any copyright infringements.

Following up my earlier post If I build it what will come here is my future plans.

During the last 10+ years I have been very fortunate to work with design and business development both on- and offline. Both with really small businesses and some of the worlds largest corporations. This has given me insight in a lot of different business environments and I have met a lot of people in different positions and situations.

In the smaller businesses and startups I often find people that shares my passion for work, we share the same ideals; a huge LOVE for the things we work with. I love my situation even more since I know that I’m totally in control of mine and my business’ direction and progress.

But too often you find yourself locked up in large projects, that takes weeks and months to knock off, and you tend to think “I’ll get on with my personal ideas and projects once I’ve finished this project”. No more of that I say. It’s time to get more serious about the non-client stuff. It’s playtime!

Based on my past I have the design and business knowledge. What I lack today is serious tech and development skills. That, right now, is the biggest obstacle for me when it comes to realising my ideas.

To me it would be a priceless suite to have the three; business, design and development. Hence my plan for the future:

I will start “Playday” and “Codecamp” – self education during work time … or more correctly; playtime during worktime:

Playday
So, once a month it’s “Playday” – a full day of just with playing around with my personal ideas (I think I will schedule it on a friday. Rules for Playday:

- No sitting in front of the computer.
- Use pen and paper to sketch things out.
- Look through all the old projects and ideas. Find the really good ones and build further on those.
- Share your ideas with the community by Twitter, Nofont.com or maybe UStream/JustinTV-like services.

Codecamp
5 hours a week of learning new programming languages, guess I’ll start with two … more on that in a later post. Rules for Codecamp:

- Has to follow a strict timeline that I will set up for each programing language.
- Has to follow a “learning plan”; a book. Be serious Andreas!
- The net is only for refrerence and problem solving, no time-wasting by surfing tutorials here and there.
- The overall goal for Codecamp is to realise the Playday ideas and projects.
- Share progress and techniques with the community and other designer that wants to get more into tech/dev.

Things has already started good with mine and Jaan Orvets “Noded” book/site and the recent LoveTweet.com … and a few more projects is in the pipe.

So that is my plan for 2009 … see you soon!

I’ve come to a crossroad for Nofont.com … and I haven’t even started to build it for real yet. A year ago I was sure that this was the place where all my material should end up, and that would form the “killer content” that would draw the masses. In a “If you build it he will come” kind of way.

I remember when I was 17 or 18, I used to watch Field of Dreams every weekend. It was not for Mr Costner, not the love of baseball, not the history or the culture of the game. No it was that feeling when the single man put every thing he had into what he believed in, every breath he took aimed at reaching his goal. He knew he would do it, the rest of the world just didn’t give a damn. It was the poetic justice when Karen said “Dad, there is a man in the field” and Doc Grahams “When a place touches you like this, Ray, the wind never blows cold again”. It made me cry sometimes.

I have had that feeling for this site ever since I first started it (or actually got the domain from my friends on my 25th birthday ten years ago). I have had the feeling that this will be my safeplace of pure passion, that this is the place that I would retreat to when other things failed.

I didn’t realise until a few days ago that Nofont.com is my field of dreams. But as soon as I realised that I wasn’t sure any more. I’m not sure that if I build it they will come, and I’m not talking about the subscribers, followers and the unique visitors. I’m talking about passion, and the love I have for what I do. What if I build it and I loose that feeling, then what will come?

What if all this effort that I’m about to put into it and everything I have done up til today makes me lose my passion for the whole thing. Maybe the whole point of it is that it cannot and should not be built or completed.

I don’t know.

Right now I’m feeling forced to bring to much business and strategy into this site that is drains the love and passion. It has become a long list of must-dos instead of a long list of love-to-dos.

So the obvius thing is to remove the must-dos and bring in the love-tos.

… to be continued.

So things are going to be a little bit different here at Nofont.com in the future. The “Running a business”-section will move over to Noded.biz.

The Nofont.com site will be more focused on typography, both online and offline.

So if your main reason for following my rss was the business talk please head over the Noded.biz and pick up that stream and you won’t miss a thing.

Only the first room with the workplaces are finished, but to be honest something else would have been impossible since I have about 40 boxes of reference work, inspirational material, books and stuff that I need to sort before we can start decorating the back area.

My workplace

My desk, it looks like … I don’t know a German DJ booth from hell? Well I really like it anyway, I will have external harddrives underneeth my desk for easy access and current stuff on the lower right section. The desk is made minimal so that I’m forced to keep it clean and not clutter it with magazines, paper, cups or any other crap.

Mine and Malins workplace, the typographic tree will be a divider to the others sitting next to me.

The beloved wheels of steel. Vinyls goes in the shelves beneeth.

The collaborative space with the Thai pillows. Yes, that ugly shelf in the back will be painted white.

I finally managed to get my hands on and old hospital scale, will use it as a magazine stacker.

Some of our beloved boxes that needs to be sorted and taken care of.

… but instead today became all about those waiting. Waiting in the back to come out of their boxes, to come out of their jars and their cans. Those impatient ones that want to come out of the dark and engage into battle, get down to work, play that music again. Those who want to be dusted off and serve a purpose, to be lined up in the windows and shelves again after all these years. Today was for all those crazy ones … and God have I missed them too.

The plan is to have the office up and running on monday 1st of September.

Read part I, part II and part III of this series of posts.

The plan is to create different sections:

Workplaces (1 – bottom) for me, my wife Malin and our friend Viktoria. The wall behind will be decorated with some really old and torn letters from signs that I have found.

The temple (1 – upper left) – Raised area inspired by asian houses, thai pillows, Hellboy and more. Used for meetings, lunches and relaxing. Next to that is the holy decks and some of the vinyls will be stored in the green shelves.

The fireplace (1 – upper right) – Dark, red and brown corner where you can hide away for some reading or thinking. There will be a cinema chair and a retro TV showing the quite tacky Fireplace-DVD :-)

The factory (2) – the place for hands on work, cutting, pasting, drawing and more. You don’t have to keep the area clean all the time, if you start something there it can be left for a week or two. The space can also be used as a product/packshot mini-photostudio and meetings if needed.

Kitchen (3).

Progress after day 1:

To be continued …

Read part I and part II of this series of posts.

These days my standard phrase is “Hi, are you busy?”. I started using it simply cos I know that myself and others are often busy and, maybe just here in Sweden, too polite to cut you off.

The result has been that people in general sounds happy and surprised with the unexpected easy way out.

An easy way out of a conversation will make people more engaged in what you have to say.

Cutting someone off after an opening as the one starting this post is like stabbing them in the heart. So giving the “opponent” an easy way out is an advice I can highly recommend if you want to show that you respect thir time, and I bet you others will respect your time after that. They will also be more engaged in what you have to say when you call back later.