This Is Locomotion - Design, Code, and News

A few choice words on the importance of reducing clutter from the master of marketing, Seth Godin:

Digital media expands. It’s not like paper, it can get bigger.

As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it’s free.

One more link, one more banner, one more side deal on the Groupon page.

Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn’t work any more.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it’s hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

Here’s a brief synopsis on the art form known as the Zen of Python. We’re increasingly finding this meaningful on our MediaCore project, and thought we’d share it with our readers.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

I just finished reading the latest edition of Jacob Nielsen’s alertbox covering email newsletter usability. As many of our clientele have email subscriber lists we thought we’d comb through his tips and pull together a few key points and tips.

Key Points / Tips:

1. The number of new or unread emails in an average inbox is 300% higher than it was 4 years ago
2. The title of your email needs to be attention grabbing, and straight to the point, not abstract
3. Put the most important information first, the first paragraph is crucial as it may be the only one that your readers look at
4. The most important information should be the information that is important to your client, not to you
5. Newsletter subscribers are more important than Facebook/twitter followers, treat emails with respect and don’t spam subscribers
6. People are more likely to want to receive updates via an email newsletter than a facebook or twitter post
7. Making your newsletter mobile friendly is important as many users browse newsletters on their mobile devices
8. Users are hesitant to click on videos within emails
9. 50% of users said email marketing influenced their B2B purchases when timing was right
10. View email newsletters as a long term investment

The full article is well worth a read, and provides a much more in depth look at the key points I’ve summarized above.

I just finished reading Stefan Sagmeister’s book titled “Things I have learned in my life thus far” and found this beautiful clip today on Vimeo that expresses what I really feel the essence of this book is about. Experiences.

Taking time out of your life for experiential moments (a little wanderlust) as a designer is one of the best things you can do to continue to nurture your creativity. Many of the best projects I have ever worked on have happened just after a period where I’ve had a complete break from the internet world. Steffan Sagmeister took an entire year to do it, but I believe it can be done anytime you set your mind to it, even if it’s just for a few hours a day.

Wanderlust from Thinklab on Vimeo.

I just finished reading an article by Paul Graham (founder of  Viaweb aka. Yahoo! Store) on the downfall of Yahoo, and how it went from being one of the brightest lights on the Internet to a company that has now been declining in power and influence for years.

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

Read the full article on What happened to Yahoo.

Perhaps his biggest pointer for technology startups is that they can’t afford not to have a hacker centric culture, which in his opinion is one of the many factors that had an important part to play in the downfall of Yahoo. For anyone interested in technology (or the tech business in general), his article is definitely a must-read.

I keep forgetting whenever I setup a new photoshop installation, which settings are in fact the best for web use. A while back I saw this terrific post on Viget Inspire about issues surrounding colour shifts in Photoshop when you use the “Save for web” menu option.

Basically it boils down to a view things:

• View > Proof Setup > Monitor RGB
• Make sure proof colours is enabled under the View menu
• Save for Web & Devices > Click the little button to the right of the Preset field > Uncheck Convert to sRGB

I have left my ICC profiles setup for sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as I don’t like the idea of allowing the monitor to set the colour profile. This does differ from what they recommend in both of the articles I read, but I just feel that I can’t trust the monitor to set the colour profiles.

Here are a couple great in depth reads on the issue:

• http://www.viget.com/inspire/the-mysterious-save-for-web-color-shift/
• http://www.gballard.net/psd/srgbforwww.html (Forgive the terrible site design)

I recently came across this series of articles from idsgn on Design Love. The series features couples who are designers and manage to run a design firm together. I think it’s rare to see such partnerships and it’s interesting to see how working together impacts the lives of various couples. I really enjoyed how the Vignelli’s summed up how they deal with disagreements in the workplace:

Disagreements are the salt of life and a partnership grows stronger by having some of them…

Here are a few of the articles in the series:

• Vignelli Associates
• Design Army
• Triboro Design
• Workshop
• SML Office

I’m finally getting around to updating Locomotion with a new blog article. Over the past 2 months we’ve been super busy working on our MediaCore Video CMS, and have been concentrating a large amount of our effort into building the platform out.

During this time I’ve also had the opportunity to attend a Masters Photography workshop in Florence Italy with the New York School of Visual Arts in New York. From a photography perspective the course was excellent and I really felt like it deepened my knowledge of both my camera and photographic techniques substantially. I’m definitely looking forward to taking a lot of the material I learned from this course and applying it to all kinds of various client projects; taking the time away from web design to experience a completely new medium has been both refreshing and invigorating creatively.

Once the course wrapped up I was off to the UK to continue working on MediaCore and drum up some more European clients while preparing to deliver a series of speeches at the EuroPython conference in Birmingham. I’ll have to make a separate post in the next couple of days on what I learned in prepping for those presentations, but suffice to say that I learned more about speaking in a week at EuroPython than I had during my entire time at university. Nathan and Anthony also presented and learned a lot from their presentation during the conference. They are now off on some much needed R&R for the next week. Anthony will be spending his time in the north of the UK, while Nathan is off to Paris.

At the moment I’m currently situated in Amsterdam as we pause for a week of work, and am finding that I absolutely love how the city blends 16th-17th century architecture with contemporary interiors. Transportation is good, a beautiful canal structure winds throughout the city, and watching everyone commute to work on bicycles has been pleasantly refreshing. The design scene is well established and I’ve met the teams from Sofa and SoGeo, both of which are running exceptional businesses. I’m looking forward to another few days of exploring Amsterdam, and I’m sure I’ll get a chance to post a few photos.

Everyone will be back in the office by August the 2nd, and we’ll be heartily at work cranking out the next version of MediaCore.

Today I came across an interesting translation app for Ruby on Rails called Tolk. Tolk is a Rails engine designed to facilitate the translators doing the dirty work of translating your application to other languages. It gives translators a slick little web interface for translating words and phrases into whatever language you are needing help translating.

I think we’ll be implementing a Tolk instance to translate MediaCore, which is our open source video cms project. We’ll provide a little review of Tolk once we get it setup and running.

Recently Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter discussing Apple’s stance on Flash. As you may know, Flash is not permitted to play on the iPhone, iPod, or the new iPad. Here are a few choice words on the matter from Mr. Jobs:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. Source: Apple

A representative of the browser software company Opera also chimed in with a few thoughts:

“But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology. Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content. But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.” Source: TechRadar

Even Microsoft’s General Manager for the Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, had nothing positive to say about the future of Flash:

“The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.” Source: Microsoft Developers Network

Apple has thwarted Adobe’s efforts at every step of the game in bringing Flash to the iPhone platform, and Adobe is now responding by requesting an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.

Adobe really ought to take Jobs’ advice, see the writing on the walls, and start building HTML5 tools instead of wasting it’s time complaining.

At Simple Station we couldn’t be happier to see Flash slowly going the way of the dodo. We stand behind open standards, fast loading interfaces, and interactions that make good common sense; we will continue to recommend open-source solutions over Flash to all of our clientele.