[gb] Studio

In many ways it’s hard to remember, the but internet didn’t used to be as social as it is now. There was a time, not too long ago, where Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. didn’t exist, or at least had very little traction in our daily lives.

Last week, as I found myself needing to make a final push on some work—in particular, a large update to the very blogging platform this post is published on (more on that later)—I noticed, and became increasingly annoyed with my proclivity toward CRS. What is “CRS”, you ask? It’s what I’ve dubbed Constant-Refresh-Syndrome—and I had it bad.

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Last Saturday I had the privilege to give a short talk at TEDx Boulder. It was an amazing opportunity and I wanted to leave the audience with something they would remember and a question they could walk away with and process later.

I’m a designer, and so I view life through that lens. I settled on using some of the tenants of Minimalism as an analogy for the way we might want to more actively curate and make choices in our incredibly-hectic daily lives.

(photo by Thad McDowell)

Each speaker had been given different time-slots for their talks. I had one of the short, 3-minute slots. It was a fun challenge. I decided my slides would have no words so that I could speak fast. I sketched out a bunch of little illustrations and used them as visual accents to the story of my day, as I told it.

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I’ll start out by saying this: excuse my ignorance. This is not a topic I’ve studied to any extent or have any sort of professional expertise in. I’m simply making some observations and drawing some conclusions in hopes that someone (maybe you) will respond and enlighten or correct me if necessary.

Every so often I hear the argument that journalism is dying. It usually goes something like this:

• The newspaper industry is struggling. People are reading less newsprint and the internet is forcing publishers to give news away for free.
• Network TV (and therefore Network News) is struggling because of the internet and because consumers have too much choice in cable/satellite, and, of course, the internet.
• Because of these factors and declines in ad revenue tied to readership/viewership, real professional journalism is dying.

Coupled with what I’ll call the “journalism is dying” argument is usually a very grim picture of the future of democracy in our country. That argument usually goes something like this:

• An informed electorate makes for a healthy democracy
• A healthy journalism industry leads to an informed democracy.
• The journalism industry is in decline and therefore democracy is in trouble.

I call bullshit.

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We’ll get there. I have confidence in this. But seriously, even in the interim, how is the above acceptable?

I’m making my way through the first full-length book that I’ll read entirely in digital form, in this case on my iPhone. On the whole, the experience has been decent. I don’t mind the digital screen—it doesn’t strain my eyes. I don’t mind “turning” the page more often. I love being able to highlight, add notes, add bookmarks and have everything be easily tracked. But I lament the loss of good book design.

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Like many of you, I’m excited for the iPhone 4, but I’m patiently waiting for the glorious-looking white version.

I spent the morning making a little site you can check (and even subscribe to) to make sure you don’t miss it (as if…).

Check it: isthewhitenewshinyavailableyet.com

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Today, Happy Magic Fun Time, the blog of internet pundit and celebrity developer Kenny Meyers turned 1 year old (I think that’s something like 100 in internet years). Kenny approached me awhile ago and asked me to help him with a new book he was writing, announced today in celebration of his blog’s birthday.

I’m really happy with how things turned out. The new book is called, Businessing and you can download and read a sample chapter of it right now. It’s the last business book you’ll ever need to buy. If you have never bought one, it’s the first and last.

“If you’re not familiar with programming… [all] you need to know is that you need to use Rails, and then you are very Agile.”

I did the book design and marketing site design for the project, while Kenny handled all the code magic. That said, as a Rails douche guy, I’m particularly fond of essay #6, Be agile. Pure brilliance.

So, help us a spread the word, check out the sample chapter, but most of all, be sure to:
Get Businessing.

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In theory, the Internet is the great democratizer. I can publish or create art as a relative nobody and share it with the world. But in practice, this is an ideal. The internet is not the great democratizer in a final sense, it just provides more opportunities for exposure in the art and creative and intellectual spaces than we’ve ever had before.

The idea that all good work, all good art, all good thoughts always rise to the top is idealistic.

The idea that all good work, all good art, all good thoughts always rise to the top is idealistic. It’s a good ideal, but when this idea is presented as fact, it’s naive. We are limited by time, culture, attention spans, and yes, even still influenced by celebrity/popularity.

So what? Other than my displeasure when ideals get presented as absolutes, I posted this as a reminder to you (and to myself) to do something very simple: support the things you love. Those artists, content producers, projects, non-profits, that you enjoy would love to have their stuff introduced to one new person that’s never been exposed to it before today.

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The following are a couple thoughts on happiness and satisfaction in your job as a designer from Frank Chimero (@fchimero) and a brief exchange regarding those thoughts with Neven Mrgan (@nevenmrgan) that I grabbed off Twitter one day.

I don’t know either of these guys, but respect them (and their work) greatly. I also thought this exchange was excellent and worth repeating here.

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As is my morning habit, I’m writing this while sitting in my favorite local coffee shop in downtown Boulder, sipping Sencha green tea. It’s a typical morning, lots of regulars and a few newbies, but the biggest change is a new policy in the shop: a $5 minimum on credit card purchases.

They’ve run their numbers and found that it would be less costly to take cash, up-sell customers, or even potentially turn a customer away than to run a credit card for under $5.

They’ve run their numbers and found that it would be less costly to take cash, up-sell customers, or even potentially turn a customer away than to run a credit card for under $5. Why? Because of the merchant fees associated with processing credit cards.

In 2008, the most recent number I could find, a subset of these fees (the interchange fee) added up to $48 billion dollars in the United States alone. That doesn’t include all of the other merchant account fees that can vary widely depending on your merchant agreement.

To me, that’s an astounding number that business owners (and, ultimately, consumers) are paying. And, with regard to internet sales, here’s the catch: you can’t take cash over a website. There is no option B.

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I’ve been super-busy the last couple months on a lot of things in the studio: pushed a bunch of smaller projects out the door, one really big one, and continued work on some other big things that I can’t wait to share with you all.

As 2009 winds down, I’m excited for where [gb] Studio is headed. In particular, I’m looking forward to kicking off January with the fine folks at Carbonmade. For those that don’t know, Carbonmade makes it wicked-easy for designers, artists, photographers, and anyone else to put together a slick online portfolio.

The official announcement went out this morning from their end. I’ll be working on a lot of different things related to the next version of Carbonmade.

I’m looking forward to working with their team and excited to see where things go.

( ps – be sure and check out my own tricked-out Carbonmade portfolio: gb.carbonmade.com or get your own )

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I randomly made a couple iPhone Wallpapers for myself this morning and thought I’d share them.

The first, Risk is a bit inspired by this Andy Rutdledge post (and corresponding desktop wallpapers), though my desire to remind myself to take risks is somewhat more personal in nature.

The second, Metal is based off a photo I took this morning with my phone for my hello mopho photo blog.

Adding the Wallpaper
to your iPhone

To put either on your phone, follow these simple instructions:

1. Visit this page in your iPhone.
2. Decide which one you want to use.
3. Using your finger to press and hold your chosen image.
4. Select Save Image from the menu.
5. Go back to your Home Screen
   and select Settings.
6. Select Wallpaper and choose,
   Camera Roll.
7. Scroll down and tap on the image.
8. Tap Set.

More Wallpaper Images

You might also enjoy this set I released at about the same time last year, along with a corresponding design tutorial.

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I’m currently working on a book cover design for none other than my dad, Chuck Blakeman. We’ve got a few different designs we’ve narrowed it down to, and I thought I’d have some fun by throwing a couple of them out on Twitter to get some responses.

The above aren’t all of the ideas I came up with, but representative of the 4 different directions of the design choices.

I put out a couple tweets asking for opinions and started getting responses almost immediately.

So far, what has surprised me the most is the polarization between the grey covers and the more colorful covers. It’s almost a mutually-exclusive response. If you like the grey cover in the first set, you’ll like the grey cover in the second. If you like the white cover, you’ll like the blue/yellow cover.

I’m not sure what to do with that information yet, but it’s fun to see the strong pattern in responses. What would you pick?

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Today I had the privilege of speaking at Andrew Hyde’s new conference, boco. My Backstage business parter, Reid Phillips and I gave a super-short, but hopefully super-awesome talk on the state of the music industry, and specifically, how change is a constant force in any industry.

I unfortunately had a crazy day and couldn’t attend the conference in its entirety, but what I did participate in was fantastic. Andrew has such a knack for bringing together interesting groups of people. I left with the reminder of how important it is to constantly push ourselves into new areas. It’s easy for all of us to stay in our own little interest-area groups. I loved Andrew’s format of mixing tech with music and food. I hope this is the first year of a long-standing Boulder event.

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Anyone who follows the Quotes section of my blog knows I read the Lefsetz Letter pretty regularly. A quote in one of his most recent posts called Update grabbed my attention:

“Don’t know if you’ve been following the movie business, but the studios have taken back compensation. Rather than give eight digit salaries and profit participation from dollar one, they’re making almost everybody, actors and directors, wait for their money (if it comes in at all!)…”

There’s nothing too earth-shattering about this shift in the movie industry, it’s also happening in other areas like music, as he argues. But I think it’s representative of a more fundamental shift to something I’m calling—for lack of a better term—the Responsibility Economy.

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Last week I launched a splash page announcing the Lilly’s Table project. I’ve been working on it for some time, and part of the plan is to give you all (my 2 or 3 faithful readers) some insight into the process of designing and building a web application from the ground up.

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything…

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything from the business development side, to the product design, and of course, the actual site design & development. One of the initial design pieces I worked on was the visual brand for the project. In this first post discussing the branding process, I’ll show a bit of the work we went through to arrive at the final logo for Lilly’s Table.

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I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a while with the very talented Chef Lilly from Bella Cuisine. The project is called: Lilly’s Table and it will feature fresh and creative, seasonal, meal plans on a weekly basis, directly from Lilly herself.

I think Lilly and I first started to talk about her project toward the end of last year, so it has been in the works for a while. This fun little splash page is just the beginning. Be sure to sign up for the email list, or follow @LillysTable on Twitter so that you don’t miss anything.

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The writing is definitely on the wall for IE6. Some major sites and services are starting to drop support for it. Even so, I keep hearing the argument that IE6 must be supported because a good chunk of corporate America is stuck with it. From my understanding, they’re stuck with it because they have propriety web apps that only work in IE6.

From my understanding, they’re stuck with it because they have propriety web apps that only work in IE6.

Ok, fine. But maybe we’ve been approaching this the wrong way the whole time. Why can’t these companies install Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari alongside IE6? Tell employees to use IE6 for their stuck-in-time web apps, and a normal browser for everything else. What’s the problem with this approach? And why aren’t more people advocating it? What am I missing?

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This is a short one related to this tweet:

“worked ass off all week to try to get a little break, that really is a half-assed break, which isn’t much of a break at all. #doingitwrong”

I like what I do, so I don’t want this to come off too negatively, but the reality is that I tend to work too much and not schedule much time off. In the case of last week, I had some good friends getting married, and I simply wanted to clear most of my schedule for a couple days so that I could enjoy the festivities.

I’m not sure what’s worse sometimes, not taking breaks, or scheduling a break and then feeling let down when you can’t follow through
on it.

Well, stuff doesn’t always work out the way it should, and I had an interesting (to me) observation Friday morning, while working when I was hoping I wouldn’t be: I’m not sure what’s worse sometimes, not taking breaks, or scheduling a break and then feeling let down when you can’t follow through on it. The emotional/psychological consequences of option two are often more frustrating to me. I was expecting some time off, began to look forward to it, and then couldn’t actually make it happen.

Oh well; that’s life sometimes. I’ll try not to use this as an excuse to not schedule time off in the future…

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I’ll say this up front: I sincerely (and selfishly) wish I had written and posted this months ago. I posed the following argument to a friend not long after I had become hooked on Twitter, and frankly, had I written about it then, I would’ve looked like a genius at the outset of the fix replies debacle. Instead, you’ll have to take my argument for what it may (or may not) be worth now:

Twitter will feature-add itself out of existence.

Huh? Let me explain: Twitter is brilliant because of its simplicity and the way it lends itself to being an open and public messaging/broadcasting platform. These basic tenents are what differentiated it and helped it become what it is today among a host of other more “traditional” social network sites.

I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features.

I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features. There are no groups, there are no sub-sets or tiers of users. No special treatment. Up until Twitter “fixed confusing replies” (as they originally put it), everyone saw what everyone else wrote (unless they chose not to). You are valuable to people on Twitter if they listen to you and find value in what you say. On some level, Twitter stumbled into what it is today. It would be hard to come up with a more simple structure for a social network if you tried. Simplicity is the genius of Twitter. But there is a problem…

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Earlier this year, my friend Andrew Hyde and I worked on a video for the band, The Autumn Film. Before going further, check out the video. In this post, I’ll go over some of the behind the scenes: a making of, of sorts.

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