Motorcycle City Milwaukee Unleashed

Scott Schwebel, VP of Creative at Hanson Dodge, teamed up with Scott Starr of Rev Pop to push Schwebels Motorcycle City Milwaukee brand online. Rev Pop created a simple to use flash site combined with paypals easy to use interface to sell Schwebels simple, classy and bold shirt designs.

Okobos Music Festival

While most of this summers largest music festivals have already passed, the Okobos Music Festival is coming to Green Bay in October. Death Cab For Cutie, Ben Folds and Jewel are among the artists on the top of the list. Rev Pop designed and produced the Okobos Music Festival website with the help of Hanson Dodge Creative VP Scott Schwebel.  http://www.okobosmusicfestival.com

A New Pair of Scissors

Never let friends get hair cuts… unless it’s with Erzie.

Rev Pop was recently commissioned to design Heroine Salons website and identity. If you’re looking for a hip place to get a cut in Milwaukee, this is the place to let it all down. Relaxed atmosphere, righteous people, and all around cool vibe with a whole lot of attitude.

Mux Tape

This weeks blend:

Death Cab For Cutie: Bixby Canyon Bridge
LK: Eurovision
Breathe Owl Breathe: Drop and Roll
Bon Iver: Re:Stacks
Delorean: As Time Breaks Off
French Kicks: The Trial of The Century
Hayden: Barely Friends
Pela: Your Deserts Not a Desert At All
Vic Ruggiero: Always Something in My Blindspot
Calla: Initiate
Neutral Milk Hotel: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Pedro The Lion: Arizona
The Rakes: Open Box
Sea Ray: Sisters Gone

Dirty

Not that I’m bitter, but when I was 20 I worked as an intern for no pay, while fixing bicycles to pay my way through school. Call me cruel (just call me!), but if the dotcom bust and the general recession mean that a 22-year-old can no longer collect eighty large for Instant Messaging his drinking buddies all day long, I don’t consider that a profound national tragedy.

What galls me about the new New Economy is the reluctance of clients to part with their money while continuing to expect that work be done. I can’t count the number of businesses that owe me money, and if you freelance or run a small web or design agency you probably can’t count your creditors either.

As businesses struggle to stay in business, many are short-changing vendors, and it’s making life rough for those who don’t consider meals optional.

DEATH OF A THOUSAND PAPER CLIPS
I once had a client go bankrupt – not because of anything I did – so I know the drill: First you pay your landlord, then you pay your employees, then you stall indefinitely on the rest.

Inspired by the ploys of health insurance companies (whose profitability seems to depend on never paying for anything), web clients have developed brilliant new methods of delaying payment almost indefinitely. Chief among them: death by paperwork.

It’s no longer enough merely to submit proposals, contracts, and invoices. Clients need forms, forms, and more forms.

One client has compiled more paperwork on me than the FBI has on Osama. I’ve filled out form after form, each more complex, more baffling, and more obviously useless than the one that preceded it. Not that I’m bitter.

“MAKING PROGRESS”
Even if you send completed forms by Registered Mail, you will likely be told they were not received. Send them again, and you’ll be informed that you filled them out incorrectly. By your third or fourth submission, the person responsible for filing the forms and approving your invoice will have been laid off.

Ten phone calls later, you hook up with someone new, who humbly invites you to begin the process all over again, on the grounds that the laid-off person failed to tell you the company can’t accept forms delivered by Registered Mail. Or they can’t accept faxed forms. Or they can’t accept email attachments. Or they can only accept forms in – which software did you say you don’t own? – yes, that’s the only format they accept.

Sometimes you get a friendly type who tells you the company is “making progress” on your overdue invoice. The more trivial the amount of money involved, and the later the payment, the more neighborly this person becomes. After a while, you forget they owe you money, and begin thinking of them as an old combat buddy.

As your expenses pile up, you slip the bounds of reality altogether. I fantasize about showing up at the office of one particular client wearing my pajamas and dragging a sleeping bag behind me.

WE LOVE TO FLY AND IT SHOWS
While I’m kvetching, Lord help you if you do any public speaking in connection with your work. In addition to filling out everything from W9s to Loyalty Oaths and submitting your outline nine months in advance, you will be asked to send your personal credit card numbers via unencrypted email to “cover” your double bed at the Mount Pilot Ramada Royale. Six months after the event, you may even get paid.

Some conferences no longer pay cancellation fees, even if they cancel the week of the show, when you’ve already flown to the gig and ensconced yourself in the Hooterville Grande Hilton at your own expense. Not that I’m bitter.

THE ROAD OF HAPPY DESTINY
During occasional bouts of lucidity, I ask myself why I put up with this crap, and the answer is always twofold:

I love the web. (Indeed, having done many other things for a living, I can’t deny how much I prefer this line of work, late–paying clients, browser bugs, and all.) Reality is reality, and currently all businesses are struggling. It’s business, not personal, and when business improves, behavior will follow. Those who hang in there will reap the rewards. Or so I keep telling myself. My only wish is that more businesses would act as if things are already improving, would show a little class and a little faith, since the rest of us have to. Ultimately things will get better. Behaving as if they have already done so will speed the recovery. Acting fearfully will only delay it, if you ask me.

Not that I’m bitter.

Wash – Rinse – Repeat

Design by metaphor—or, as is often the case, design by simile—happens when a client provides design and development in the form of a reference to another product. This can occur both in high-level concepts, such as, “MySpace, but for B2Brelationships,” and in individual details, like “the login should be just like Gmail’s.”

Spoken language provides an interesting analogue to design by metaphor: If you’re not a fluent speaker of a particular language, you’re often forced to stretch your limited vocabulary into bizarre, descriptive phrases instead of the exact words that say what you mean. Maybe you remember the last time you were overseas and asked directions to the “shop of changing banknotes.” In the same way, you’ll mostly see similes in specifications provided by clients who may not know how to say that they want “database of user registrations with reports X, Y, and Z” or “JavaScript menus that degrade into CSS-formatted lists.”

Metaphors and similes are also excellent ways to summarize multiple, loosely-related concepts in shorthand. After all, the basic behaviors of any web-based discussion forum, contact form, or shopping cart are largely the same as those of any other once you factor out the specific content of the site.

Why put up with comparison-driven design?

When used to pin down abstract concepts or unusual design details, design by metaphor or simile bridges a major gap of understanding. The customer may not be able to pin down what he wants from another site, but in some cases, pointing to that site can be enough to make the features he desires apparent to experienced developers.

Conversely, comparative references can be extremely powerful for explaining design decisions back to a client. Few client-provided specifications are all-inclusive, and you can expect questions when your judgment calls don’t match what he imagined. If you explain that you designed your booking process “like Expedia,”you can easily summarize a wide range of choices through the system, as well as gain added authority by showing that your choices mirror those of a successful system.

When comparisons attack

Unfortunately, the power of this method of communication comes at a significant cost. If a client says he wants his new auction site to be “like eBay,” what does that mean? An artist hears “It has a tacky color scheme.” A developer hears “It’s scalable to 20 million users.” A user hears “It has feedback ratings on all sellers.” Which, if any of these, did the client mean? You may spend dozens of hours writing specs for eBay-esque features that didn’t capture the client’s heart.

Conversely, defining your own work in terms of other products may set up unacceptable comparisons or fixations in your customer’s mind. If you boast that a new shopping cart works 95% like Amazon, the client may grow obsessed with “fixing” the 5% that’s different, or incorrectly believe that his site has acquired the capacity and features of Amazon across the board.

Moreover, the ability to identify a loose aggregation of features via a single comparison may cause clients to accidentally include irrelevant or needlessly expensive features in their specifications. For example, many off-the-shelf shopping systems include extensive support for multiple currencies and tax jurisdictions. This adds many layers of complexity, and if you’re running a single outlet in Chandler, Arizona, you probably don’t actually want to spend $5,000 more on development to ensure your “just like Zen Cart” shop is ready to handle British Value Added Tax.

Finally, a client who can only speak in similes may be unable to bring the best possible choices to the table. If the client is selling merchandise, he’ll probably say he wants a self-contained shopping system styled after his favorite e-commerce site—but his comparison is limited by his experience. Odds are, he hasn’t seen an example of a hosted shopping cart service, or a single-action “Buy Now” button that he can allude to, even if those would suit his needs better. Your experience and expertise comes in there, as you’ll be able to offer your clients choices they didn’t realize they had and rescue them from the tyranny of comparison.

Bounce back to the real world

The ambiguity inherent in comparison-based design communication must be managed, or you’ll end up trying to build mutant websites which work as YouTube plus Newegg multiplied by DeviantArt…on a $750 budget. Fortunately, there’s a practical strategy for controlling runaway scope: limit the use of metaphors and similes to the phases in which they work best.

It makes sense to start with comparisons, especially if you’re about to develop a significant new functional unit. However, if you do so, the second round of specification development becomes critical. Once you understand what the client is asking for on a high level, you should restate that understanding in more concrete terms that will form the basis for binding design documents. You can even walk through the comparison product part by part and ask the client what he really means with his comparisons. There is absolutely no harm in asking “what part of this process do you want to copy?”

Developers often over-complicate vague requests, and it may turn out to be a pleasant surprise when it turns out that all the client really wants to lift from the $300,000 commercial backend is its color scheme and menu placement.

You may also be able to control ambiguous comparisons by treating them not just as a design reference, but also as a source of benchmarks. Compare compatibility and performance of the model site: when you bring a focus group in, let them attempt to complete tasks on your site and then on the sites the client presented as models. Direct comparison of user experiences and task success rates are solid evidence that your site matches, or even exceeds, the models. Such a strategy is particularly effective when the client has questionable assumptions about user behavior.

When it’s clear that the client is relying on a poor or inadequate analogy because he lacks a better choice, you can combine his understanding of comparisons with your wide design vocabulary. Speak his language, and propose that “instead of doing it like your example, what if we try doing it like this other example?”

Finally, don’t miss the possibility of the sum of a client’s models being significant as well. If all the sites he idolizes average 700k per page of images and Flash, the unspoken message could well be “a seamless, graphics-intensive look is more important to me than 28.8 modem users.” Reading between the lines is no less important here than it is with a more conventional specification.

One more communication tool: no more, no less 

Design by comparison can help to engage your clients in the development process while keeping the discussion at a level they’re comfortable with. However, its practitioners must realize that poorly analyzed metaphors can say too much or too little. The need for this delicate balance keeps the technique from being a panacea, but doesn’t prevent it from being useful.

She Walks In Beauty

Great web designs are like great typefaces: some, like Rosewood, impose a personality on whatever content is applied to them. Others, like Helvetica, fade into the background (or try to), magically supporting whatever tone the content provides. (We can argue tomorrow whether Helvetica is really as neutral as water.)

Which web design is like that? For one, Douglas Bowman’s white “Minima” layout for Blogger, used by literally millions of writers—and it feels like it was designed for each of them individually. That is great design.

Great web designs are like great buildings. All office buildings, however distinctive, have lobbies and bathrooms and staircases. Websites, too, share commonalities.

Although a great site design is completely individual, it is also a great deal like other site designs that perform similar functions. The same is true of great magazine and newspaper layouts, which differ from banal magazine and newspaper layouts in a hundred subtle details. Few celebrate great magazine layouts, yet millions consciously or unconsciously appreciate them, and nobody laments that they are not posters.

The inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful designer complains that too many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are “boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs.

The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.