Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical. - Howard Schultz, Starbucks
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Giving a Boost to the Best of Boston — Bostonia Online, Campaign12
This is a short article that I designed for Bostonia Online, the alumni magazine put out by my day job in Boston University’s Marketing and Communications Office. The print issue is beautiful, and our department (Interactive Design) wanted to make something quick, highly templatized (other articles use the same format), and well-designed to match.
I hope you enjoy it! Especially the quirky slider at the bottom.
Thought via Path
Between the overheating, crazed shopping, and heated dinner arguments, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are the two most American days of the year!
So Happy Obesity Day, from my insane family to yours. with Anthony at Villages Of Urbana – Read on Path.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
I have had this song in my head for days. I think about it every time a design client asks me to do something stupid and won’t take no for an answer.
“There’s a roooooooooooad we’ve been traveling. Lost so many along the way…”
Ke$ha’s “Die Young” music video looks like it was shot on an iPhone 3GS by a first-year art student. Ick.
Regular Content Creation - who needs it?
This week, in an effort to bring this Tumblr back for real (as previously promised) I queued seven posts and told this blog to update once a day around noon. Tumblr says that this is “the best way” to make the blog look healthy and well-updated. Never mind that I just threw down an editorial calendar that has nothing to do with current events or what I’m actually thinking when those posts go live… but I digress.
Making Things for the Web, or What Matt Inman Just Said
Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal just posted an interesting discussion about content creation. Tumblr bloggers who actually post (as opposed to those who silently “ghost”) fall into two categories: creators and sharers. Creators are the designers, photographers, writers, live experience-ers who compose hilarious or moving content that the sharers will then push around the web. Of the seven posts that I put out, I tried to make at least half of them “creator” posts and half “sharer.”
We also know by looking at Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr itself that most people who post at all are sharers, creating a raucous din of noise drowning us out with the 1,000th Instagrammed photo of someone’s food or a link to The Atlantic’s photo gallery of Hurricane Sandy photography (the same 25 photos being used everywhere, by the way).
It makes you question “constant content creation” at all. If the Internet were a barren wasteland where nothing was every being posted, then constantly updating would be valuable; there’d be a market for stuff, and you would be the stuff-er.
But that’s not the case. If 99% of the Internet shut up, it would still be too loud and too full of things for you to look at; you’d never see it all. So if I shut up and don’t post to Tumblr for another year-long hiatus, what would it matter? The void would be instantly filled. It’s not important that I put 7 days worth of posts (or 700) in my Tumblr queue, nor does it matter if they post once a day or every 10 minutes. It all gets swept away by the next round of content “creation” (read: “content sharing”) that is about to fight for your attention.
We Can’t Keep Up
The problem is that we don’t create enough content fast enough. Sharing is so much easier for bloggers who are looking to put something under their audience’s nose every day. Consider Gizmodo (or any Gawker blog). They have gotten better about crafting proper editorial and opinion pieces, but most of their efforts go toward sharing something geeky or interesting or controversial or trivial with their readers who will gobble it up mindlessly, not even bothering to check out the source link to see the original creation.
Matt Inman made a good case for creating content when you have it. Maybe I’m one of those people who he says just shouldn’t be a writer? As a graphic designer, it takes a long while to put together something worth sharing… and it’s not like it’ll necessarily get seen amongst the deluge of streamed information that fly by your faces every hour.
So I am going to let these seven posts go (one per day) and see where I am. When I have a design that I want to share, I’ll pass it on. For now, enjoy the next six posts (they’re real winners… at least, I think they are).
