Having somehow managed to miss each and every pass Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica took through NYC, I was thrilled to catch the New York premiere of Objectified last week. Like it or not—and I’m definitely in the “like” camp—Hustwit and cinematographer Luke Geissbuhler have put together two solid treats for design fans, with word that a third is in the works. Post-screening, Hustwit, Geissbuhler, and designer Karim Rashid (who also appears in the documentary) took a few moments to mix it up with the audience in an open Q&A session.

Echoing points made by Rob Walker towards the end of the documentary, it wasn’t long before someone put the doomsday scenario to the trio: If the hurricane was barreling down upon you, and you only had seconds to save a few treasured items before you dashed out the door, what would you take?

It occurred to me that my own answer really shelves the kind of personal nostalgia this question is typically hunting after, probably saying less about me than it does about the times in which we’re just beginning to live.

I’d grab the same three objects I check are on my person before I walk out the door every morning:

Smartphone. Wallet. Keys. In that order.

That’s it.

Why? It’s about access—and to a slightly lesser degree, authentication—in a world of distributed systems.

These are the means, in compact form, by which I can obtain the vast majority of the other material goods, services, or vital information I might need, both in crisis and everyday life. (Provided the systems that support them are still functional. Which, granted, as of now can still sometimes be a very big “if.”)

Life among truly distributed support systems is predicated on information about the system itself. I’m not as concerned with the items the system delivers as how they can be delivered because, if things are working, the objects can ultimately be replaced at one cost or another. (Touching on sustainability, this also implies the system should be able to reabsorb and redistribute objects and their constituent components accordingly—something we obviously have a lot of work to do on.)

For objects that are truly so imbued with personal stories that the real value in them can not be duplicated at any cost (think, “I’d take Uncle Fred’s old golf clubs. It’s a funny story…”) well, at the risk of sounding cold, better to have saved yourself and ensured you have the means to conduct your affairs and aid others.

Credit to Rashim, the designer of the trio, for pointing out as much. Ultimately the objects are replaceable, he noted, “You are not.”

Surprising, one might think, given that his life revolves around creating so many of the items I’m cavalierly talking about abandoning at a moment’s notice. But perhaps being such a prolific creator as he is, he’s well aware that the object itself is not where irreplaceable value lies.

“This request is coming in really late.”

“Yeah, I know. Can you gin something up?”

“Probably. Maybe something like the one we did last week. It would work well for this.”

“Which one is that?”

“The two column layout. With the image running across the top of both columns. Something like that.”

“Hmm…”

“It would look like—got a pen? Thanks. Here… like that. You could drop the copy in right there.”

“Well…”

Pause.

“I know it’s really late, but can you mock it up for me? I’m really more of a visual person.”

“You know that implies exactly the opposite of what you intended, right?”

“What?”

“That means you can envision it without actually having to do it.”

Another pause.

“Like if I said I was a ‘plumbing person,’ I could conceive of how to set up a water heater without actually cutting pipes and sticking them together. But what you’re saying is you lack a visual imagination. Think about it.”

Someone is grinning now.

“Stop being a jerk.”

This entry started out life as a sorry little mea culpa for the recent spate of sporadic posts. The not being in the swing of the writing thing. The fits and starts. The yadda yadda yadda. But apology by way of navel gazing just wasn’t cutting it.

“Well? Where the heck have you been?”

Patience, Grasshopper. All things in the fullness of time.

At any rate, I’ve been doing my exercises, rebuilding the muscle memory in the vital blogging organs and instilling myself with the discipline to routinely put fingers to keyboard. Blog early, blog often.

Say It Well

The needed jolt to get me off my writing duff came from, of all places, The Writer’s Almanac. September 10 was Stephen Jay Gould’s birthday, and the morning broadcast quoted the celebrity scientist’s take on writing:

So many scientists think that once they figure it out, that’s all they have to do, and writing it up is just a chore. I never saw it that way; part of the art of any kind of total scholarship is to say it well.

Literally stopped me dead in my tracks. It isn’t done until you’re able to put words to it. It isn’t done until you can pass the knowledge on.

“What the heck is this?”

It’s late 2000, and I’m staring at a mystery package. An anonymous cardboard box that showed up in my mailbox one afternoon. Inside is a cat-shaped wand, with a light source where its esophagus ought to be and a PS/2 cable crammed up its rear. I am looking at the print world’s latest attempt to grapple with its new online reality. They’re calling it a CueCat.

It might as well be a battery-powered kick to the crotch for all the good it’s going to do them.

Switch gears. Jump forward. It’s 2007 and a glance through the current Columbia Journalism Review shows that the ghost of this folly lingers on even today. That’s frequently the case with ideas this bad.

Trail of Tears

“Damage Report”, a telling article by Craig Flournoy and Tracy Everbach, is worth a look whether or not you work in the news business. Flournoy and Everbach detail the continued fall from grace of the Dallas Morning News, a paper that within the space of a decade went from lining its litter box with Pultizers to hemorrhaging some 200 editorial staffers.

Topping a litany of fuzzy-headed moves by the paper’s parent company, Belo Corp., was a $37 million investment in the CueCat. $37 million. While I knew the CueCat story (mainly as the butt of tech jokes) this is the first time I’ve seen a dollar amount pegged to the calamity.

For those not familiar with the publishing industry let me just tell you that’s a lot of scratch. There are perfectly fine news organizations that lack operating budgets that large. And the Belo folks blew every last cent on a barcode reader. Someone had a serious jones for this thing, and it helped give the entire organization a solid nudge down the road to ruin.

If You See Something, Say Something

All of which leads me to my point. The CueCat was a seriously, fundamentally, obviously flawed idea. One that folks should have been doing flying tackles to keep from getting out the door. Yes Virginia, there really are such things as bad ideas—your teachers lied. And some of the real stinkers can do an awful lot of lasting damage before they’re done.

No, I’m not saying avoid radically odd, wonderfully divergent new ideas. Far from it. (To do anything truly new is to guarantee some degree of failure.) What I’m condemning is the sort of organizational complacency that lets obvious clunkers like the CueCat slip by. The sort of coplacency that’s complicit in bad ideas through silence.

We’ve all seen it. There are plenty of companies filled with workers that look the other way, avoiding confrontation when the braying office jackass is stumping for the suicidal. There’s an underlying assumption often deployed that everything will “just be okay”‘ anyway, so why bother? Without discussion the loudest voice wins, regardless of merit. The veil goes down, hands are washed and people take a pass on reasoned protest all for the sake of having a more pleasant day.

Well, life isn’t for the faint of heart. When you see a CueCat, push back (tactfully).

Being the gadfly isn’t easy or fun, and it may even occasionally keep you from being the belle of the ball. But without it truly awful, destructive ideas are free to jump over the transom and morph into monsters. It’s a play on the old, “If not me, who? If not now, when?” saw. Don’t be complacent. Don’t be complicit.

Take that bad idea out behind the shed and put it out of its misery. The job you save may be your own.

If I’ve timed this right my article, “Stand & Deliver”, is now live on A List Apart. Take a moment and give it a once over, why don’t you?

This particular missive sprang out of a conversation I had a while ago with Jeffrey Zeldman about preparing new designers for challenging presentations. Pragmatic exercises for ducking baseball bats and other realities of meetings sans kid gloves. Okay, so no fisticuffs—just the upshot of life among the hurried and harried. Naturally, I was flattered when he asked if I could jot down a few thoughts on the topic for ALA. The result is, I hope, a short collection of tips to steel you for the gauntlet.

Yes the Universal’s Here

While the article focuses on difficult meetings it’s important to note that the topics discussed (preparation, timing and research) are universally applicable. Regardless of experience or DEFCON level, the best practices you use to prepare for tough meetings are the same best practices you should be using to prepare for any meeting. Not just when you feel like your audience is getting ready to break out the pointy sticks and go all Lord of the Flies on you.

I was delighted when my goodies showed up in the mail today, but even more delighted to find them wrapped in one damn fine package. Seriously, take a look at that thumbnail. No cheapy paper-and-scotch-tape business here. This a heat-sealed mylar envelope with full bleed printing and satin finish. The featured designs are two of Oddica’s signature pieces: Simon Noynay’s Bluebird Migraine on one side and Kenneth Lavallee’s Sheltered on the other. There were a host of gratis ancillaries inside with the shirt, including a button of the design I ordered and several postcards of other Oddica offerings, suitable for mailing or decorating.

Someone really took a moment to consider how this should look and feel.

Building What Now?

We hear a lot these days about “building user experiences”, whether it be retail products or websites, yet it’s still the exception that someone actually does it. That frustrates the bejesus out of me. I always took it as part and parcel of what folks call “doing a good job”. To me it’s implicit. The job isn’t done until all the details are taken care of. All of them. And building a user experience means having an eye for details.

Designers have long nodded their heads at the mantra, “God is in the details.” Yet here I am taking the time to write about about a piece of stationery. All because someone got it right. Guess we’ve got a ways to go.

Oh, and the shirt is pretty sweet too.

Geez, man. I’m not even going to dignify this with a link to your site, lest I contribute to inflating your PageRank.

Let me just be real clear that as far as I can tell this guy has no direct affiliation with either Wired News or ESPN, both of which I consider to be fine upstanding companies with great reputations on the Web. I’m sure they’d both be a little irked to know someone was doing this with their brands slapped all over it (scratch that, will be).

Widgets aren’t compiled apps. They’re just little web pages, open to the world to be poked, prodded, and experimented with. I encourage this. I’m a Creative Commons kinda guy. But you can’t just copy somebody else’s work and pawn it off as your own. Last I checked all the hip young kids call that… um, let’s see here, what’s that word–oh yeah, plagiarism. 90% of the code is the same, right down to the id values (though he did take the time to scrub off the copyright notices–clever lad). On his site he even goes so far as as to advertise his services as a “widget designer”. What’s that other word I’m looking for here… hmmm, that’s right–fraud. Man, if you had just asked we would have been glad to talk shop.

Of course, I’m not too worried about defending our rights on this. This cool guy named Steve was nice enough to demo our widget the day we launched it. You may have heard of him.

Holy cow! Steve Jobs featured the BusinessWeek News Widget in his WWDC keynote today. It’s an honor and a thrill to have some of my work included in a marquee event for the Apple community.

The widget was originally the brainchild of coworker Niels Meersschaert, who did a masterful job of putting together the JavaScript backend and making it all hum. I was responsible for the presentation layer (UI design, graphics, CSS, etc).

The magic moment happens about 15 minutes into Jobs’ keynote, just after Amazon’s widget and right before CNN’s. (Sorry about that CNN. “It’s not as nice as looking as BusinessWeek’s, but it does the job…” Nothing like a little friendly rivalry, eh?)

Tiger users can download the BusinessWeek News Widget here.

Update: The widget got featured on Apple’s homepage too!