Scott Berkun's Blog, page 78

Can you redesign a chocolate bar?

Over on designmind, David Sherwin, author of the upcoming book Creative Workshop, is sharing some of the design challenges from his book on his blog. Some of these are really fun and provocative.

This week's challenge:

Choose a product you use as part of your day-to-day life—food, drink, paper products, etc.—and  redesign or repackage it so that consumers will want to use less of it.

How can you use your design skills to make more out of less and encourage people to use that reduced quantity in a more mindful manner?

There are some photos of what a redesigned chocolate bar might look like.

According to David, this challenge was inspired by designer Tithi Kutchamuch, who said "I buy Twix Extra because it's only ten pence more expensive… I finish it in one go, and feel guilty for the rest of the day… Bargain food persuades people by playing with the value of money, which has brought a lot of problems to society: over nutrition, eating disorders, obesity, illness, guilt, wasting food, wasting resources, over production, etc. Can design make people buy food that offers less?"

A free preview chapter from David's Book is available here.

Help wanted: designer for next book (updated)

This is an updated and sanity enhanced job description.

I'm looking to hire someone to play a unique role in my next book: The Designer.

The plan is to self-publish a collection of my best writings, from essays, to blog posts, to magazine articles. But to avoid the traps of "blog posts in a bundle" books. I've hired an awesome editor as the first key member of the team. Now it's time for the next key member: the designer.

The role:  A book is a kind of user experience, starting with the cover, but extending to every font, every layout, every chunk of whitespace. Typically designers come in late, are forced to work quickly and without much input – it's no wonder most books are so ugly, so sad, so unloved. Why can't we make a book where fantastic writing is matched with a simple, bold, and clean visual design?

This role will different. You'll be involved early. You'll have power and influence over what's in the book, not just how it looks. There will be no bureaucracy: it's just me, you, Krista (editor) and a few other hand-picked people we choose.

Here are the responsibilities:

Drive the visual design and user experience of the book
Have authority over the cover design, typography, layout and interior choices
Manage challenges of print & e-book (kindle/pdf) design
Contribute to the vision for the book itself
Suggest and provoke me to write new material
Collaborate with me, Krista and other team members
Use readers of scottberkun.com to contribute ideas and feedback

Here are the rewards:

More influence over a book's design than you will ever have
The potential to do great work with great people
Redefine the contribution of design to modern book publishing
If you're a fan, you'll get a unique opportunity to define one of my books
You'll be paid a negotiable fee. But as a self-published book it may be less than you're used to.
I'm considering a bonus structure for team members based on how well the book does (a bonus when the book breaks even, and another if it makes a significant profit).

Requirements (read them all – it's a test):

You understand the power of clean, simple, bold design
You enjoy collaboration with smart, fun people – good feedback inspires you
You are organized, self-directed, and can lead a project with many parts
You've wanted to contribute to a beautiful, well-crafted, book that defies convention in favor of smart, clever ideas for book design
You are psyched about this for reasons other than money
Bonus points for being a fan, or being familiar with my work

To Apply:

Email me: info at scottberkun dot com
With the subject:  I want this book
Must include: a link to your design portfolio and the name of your favorite cartoon character
Deadline: apply today (already reviewing applications – rolling hiring process)

More on free work / Designer job

Weeks ago I posted a job ad for a designer position on my next book.  This led to a post on sometimes working for free and why I support the idea. Then after what seemed a long debate, I apparently changed my mind with a new job posting. A few asked me to explain, so here we go.

In retrospect it was a poorly written ad.

I asked for a "design god" while simultaneously suggesting their wouldn't be much pay, if any.  The combination is offensive. I can understand that. Anyway, I don't need a design god – or even a demi-god. I think a talented and motivated design student could fit the bill perfectly. Or a veteran looking for a fun and interesting side project. I got carried away, on both ends.

My goal wasn't to cheapskate my way to a book, instead it was to raise a flag in my network for people who find this project, or working with me, interesting enough to want to do it primarily for those reasons, not the money. If a great candidate stopped by and said they need a minimum of X or Y, I'd likely say yes. Perhaps that's arrogant, stupid or both. Mea Culpa. As I said, it was a poorly written ad.

I've written a new ad and just posted it.

One reason for the change in the ad was, practically speaking, I've gotten more attention for the free debate than the job itself (FAIL again for me as a copywriter).

The most convincing argument I read was this one from Balfur and Jace:

You are a writer with a record and it's reasonable for an outsider to assume that a book you self-publish will earn you money. You're not doing this as a non-profit project, you're not donating the proceeds to charity. You expect to profit from the project financially.

(Jace) I basically agree with Baldur here. You're asking someone to put in a lot of work on an an experimental project, yet accept a disproportionately low (as in zero) share of any possible rewards, which are — let's face it — likely

It's surprising how certain some of you are of my future success. As the guy who actually does the work, I feel differently. I know nothing is guaranteed to me. I know no one will buy my next book purely because of my 'record'. Exceedingly few books earn back their costs, much less make money, and self publishing ads more risk, risk that goes primarily on my shoulders. Given the experimental nature of this book, it's even more of a gamble. But you readers don't know that – and these two comments made clear how my ad looked to you ("uber-author rips off small innocent creatives") and I got it.

But as to the question of the philosophy of free, many of the arguments didn't hold water:

Fuzzy The Bunny wrote:

I've heard all these arguments a million times. The experience! The experience! did I mention the experience? Experience is only as good as the future job it will help you land.

I agree.

And if you don't think the experience of a free job is worth the investment, don't take the job. If you work in a profession where literally no one ever gets paid, not even the best and brightest, it's worth asking why you'd call that a profession and not a hobby. And if some do get paid, it's likely because they are more experienced than their peers. Seeking experience is what writers, artists, actors and dozens of other kinds of professionals have always done. You will not find a painter or songwriter who didn't work for free at some point or another in trade for experience and exposure.

Sam Greenfield wrote:

There is precedent for this kind of work. Union actors are not allowed to work for free without a waiver from their union.

True, but there are other precedents. For independent films many very successful actors waive their fees, because they want to help the project or the director. Many other professions have trial projects and true freelance work,  where given a sufficiently good opportunity people are willing to trade experience for pay. For anyone who doesn't think my job is a sufficiently good opportunity, no problem. I didn't expect them to apply. But it was those who do that I was trying to find.

Bruce Heilbern wrote:

Never ever ever work for free. Once companies learn they can get someone for free you will displace a paid employee. Never work for free; the conpany doesn't.

Really? Most companies I know like to pay employees so they're guaranteed to keep them employed there. Especially if they are talented and have other options (say, working for a competitor).

Larissa wrote:

As designers, we already have a hard time being respected for our work because some people think it's just "pushing pixels" – so I strongly disagree with the idea of working for free. If you do it for one person, then everyone will expect you to work for free.

Nearly everyone has trouble being respected for their work. Everyone makes fun of lawyers, politicians, accountants, you name it. As I mentioned, I have written for free many times, and also do paid projects. The exposure of a free project may be the only way to find people who have budgets to pay you for similiar work. But it's up to you to judge how much exposure a project might give you in return for your efforts. I never said say yes to all free work, only to work where the total benefits outweigh your total costs.

Jessie Mac wrote:

However, if you're already getting paid work in that profession, working for free doesn't make sense unless the project brings other benefits such as marketing exposure, networking possibilities or potential future paid work etc. In the end it's up to you to decide if those benefits make the unpaid work worth it.

Exactly. I totally understand people saying no to a project as it's not a good trade for them. But that's different from suggesting no one should ever work for free, or on a project like mine.

Need a new writing tool: help?

I'm a no frills guy. I can write with just about anything and don't think the tool matters much. The tool is not the hard part. I write in Word, WordPress and now and then Notepad.

But at the moment I have 3 different writing projects going on at the same time – and I find it blocks me to have to sort out which project I'm writing for in a given moment before I start writing. And I write less.  I want to be able to write first, and sort it out later without copying and pasting or doing other medieval type things.

I want to be able to write in one tool, and just tag each post afterwards. Then a month later I can just filter on the right tag and get all the "posts" that fit that project.

Any suggestions?

Design for now or for later?

"If you need people to enjoy it right away, that might mean you're not going to probe very deep"

- Edward Norton

Of course Mr. Norton was talking about art, not products, but his point raises questions for all makers. If you spend too much time trying to get immediate attention, you're likely to ensure little long term effect. Think of movies or novels that are most memorable: was it the first five minutes that caused that effect? I doubt it. But if you spend too much energy thinking about the final payoff, few people will make it that far into your design.

In software one of the most neglected parts is the first experience people have. Sometimes called OOBE (out of box experience), installing and setting up most products in the world is an afterthought. IKEA furniture is a cascading failure of OOBE, as it gets worse and worse as you examine each and every one of the stupid little pieces, described in microscopic hieroglyphics the author himself didn't understand.

Thinking like a writer, the burden is on each unit of experience to be worthy of interest. Each word should lead the reader's mind to the next. Each sentence to the next sentence. And on it goes. The last page might be awesome, but what's the point if no one gets that far?

In whatever you make, how do you balance designing for immediate rewards vs. long term rewards?

How I almost invented RSS

Dave Winer, who's known, in spite of his wishes, as the inventor of RSS, wrote recently about the myth of the sole inventor, a topic I spend an entire chapter exploring through research in The Myths of Innovation.

Primarily Winer offers he didn't invent RSS – pointing out, despite what people prefer to think, there were too many contributions to name anyone, including himself, as "the inventor".

This is refreshing, as Invention is often like that scene in the Kirk Douglas film Spartacus, when everyone stands up saying "I am Sparticus! No, I am Spartacus". When an idea succeeds there are often dozens of people claiming to be first, or to have righteous claims (See my review of The Social Network).

As evidence of Winer's excellent point: I worked on a project similar to RSS years before the name RSS was coined. I'd never say I actually invented RSS, instead I'm one of many supporting stories of Winer's point.

Working on IE4 in 1996 we realized browsers were dumb and websites were stingy – they didn't tell us much about how they were organized or updated. We wanted websites to have a smart way to tell browsers about their data and how pages were organized or updated.  We created an XML based standard, called Web Collections, and submitted it to the W3C in March 1997.  We even shipped one use of the concept in IE 4.0 beta 1, called sitemaps, which led to a U.S. patent.

Sounds impressive perhaps. But at the time few people cared. Even now, clearly, few people care :)

Moreso, Castedo Ellerman, a colleague working on another IE4 project called Channels, submitted a similar use of XML, called CDF, a few days later as part of our push technology offerings.

Netscape followed close behind with MCF in June of 1997 (It's possible they submitted something to the W3C earlier, but I couldn't find it. Hotsauce, the Apple based metadata system they more or less acquired existed earlier but not in a standard based form – links and more accurate history welcome).

Yet wikipedia's history on this matter starts in 1999 – Here's their history of RSS:

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.[4] In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91,[2] which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's scriptingNews syndication format.[7] Libby also renamed RSS "Rich Site Summary" and outlined further development of the format in a "futures document".[8]

Why are Web collections and CDF omitted? The reasons are simple:

The line for when an idea begins is arbitrary.When an idea, inherited from other ideas, becomes it's own concept is not a matter of science but opinion. This is not a crime, but simply convenience. It would take pages of names and ideas to comprehensively identify everyone who pursued any idea, and to sort out which of them knew of what work others were doing.
MSFT abandoned the ideas. My GM cut the sitemap feature, the only real use of web collections. And CDF was known mostly for the ill-fated Channels feature, part of the push technology (which Wired proclaimed would end web-browsing altogether). The uses of the standard's Microsoft made faded – and standards only thrive if they are manifested in software people use.

But this is not an unusual story – the complexity of origins, competitive approaches to a similar idea, and failures of acknowledgment or comprehensiveness is the norm. It's just inconvenient to take a close look at the origins of things, so mostly we never know.

Of course I didn't invent RSS. I almost did, along with many other folks. But I did work on something like it around the same time. Such is the life of people with ideas.

The impact ratio (why it's hard to know what's important)

We like to think we know how important everything is when it happens. But looking backwards, it's clear some events that seem minor in the moment have  large consequences. While other events that seem major in the moment have small consequences. I call this the impact ratio: the relationship between your initial perception of the importance of something, and how important it turns out to be a year or ten years later.

Consider the pretty girl, with the sad brown eyes, you see on the train one ordinary Tuesday morning, whose presence you somehow remember 10 years later. That experience had more impact than seemed possible that very afternoon. More impact than all the meetings that week, all the lunches that month, and maybe even the majority of waking hours the entire year.

We're not built to be good at evaluating the significance of most events when they happen. Since we can't know the future, it's hard to know which things will turn out to be valuable, forgettable, pivotal or trivial. Depending on what happens tomorrow, the value of past experiences changes.

An old fable called "We shall see" illustrates this well:

A farmer's horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck.

He said, "We shall see."

The next day the horse returned, and brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune.

He said, "We shall see."

And then, the following day, his son tried to ride one horse. He was thrown down and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer sympathy.

He said, "We shall see."

The next day, conscription officers came to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer's son was rejected. Then the neighbors came to say how fortunately everything had turned out.

He said, "We shall see."

You are Don Draper: Pick the ad

You can be Don Draper and help pick an advertisement. I can't offer you bourbon or a smoke, but you can weigh in and give judgment, which might be a fun break on a boring day.

Some books on amazon.com are allowed to put a video ad on the book's page to help promote the book. Myths of Innovation is one of them. The current video is broken and was mediocre anyway.

To help promote the paperback edition of Myths, I hired Bryan Zug to make a new video to appear on amazon.com and on youtube. We edited two different versions and wanted your feedback: which is stronger? Which will get more people to watch all the way through and seek out the book?

If you have 3 minutes to opine, please do the following:

Watch both videos. They're similiar but different.
If you were born on an even day (10, 12, etc.) please watch B first, then A (to help counterbalance order bias).
Vote below on which version is stronger

Version A: TJ

Version B: Spike

Vote
View Poll

Designer job: updated!

The designer role job description has been updated (and one magic variable has changed):

Help wanted: Designer for my next book

The arguments over work for free are interesting, and I'll respond later. I didn't buy many of the arguments, but there was one that did sway me.

10,000th comment: thanks

A few days ago we hit a milestone – Dorian Taylor's comment on my review of The War of Art, was the 10,000th comment left on this blog. He leaves many excellent thoughts here, so it's fitting it's him.

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has ever left a comment here, even if it was to tell me how wrong I am or that my words smell funny – I read everything that gets posted, sometimes twice, and it helps me continue this adventure in writing.

I hope you'll keep commenting – as it helps me to keep writing.

Thanks.