made a few changes, adding links and more

_posts/transcripts/2014-06-26-075.html

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
 <dd>Hey.</dd>
 
 <dt>Jen</dt>
-<dd>You were on, what episode was that? Forty five I think?</dd></dd>
+<dd>You were [a guest] on, what episode was that? <a href="http://5by5.tv/webahead/45">45</a> I think.</dd></dd>
 
 <dt>Andy</dt>
 <dd>I think it was. I hadn't realized until Jeremy Keith mentioned it a week or so ago, but we seem to be in sync with our episode numbers. All of a sudden, because you've done 74, this is 75, and I'm coming, and I've just done 74, so I think 75 is what I record tomorrow.</dd>
@@ -31,19 +31,19 @@
 <dd>Trust me, I've missed decades. I had a whole lost 5 years. [Jen laughs] I think it was drugs.</dd>
 
 <dt>Jen</dt>
-<dd>Hey, well, that's life. That's what happens with life. [Andy laughs] I lost 6 years. But anyway, I thought... Jeremy was on your show, which one? "We've reached peak burrito," episode 73, and for people who don't know, your show is called Unfinished Business and it lives at unfinish.bz, as we would say.</dd>
+<dd>Hey, well, that's life. That's what happens with life. [Andy laughs] I lost 6 years. But anyway, I thought... Jeremy was on your show, which one? "We've reached peak burrito," episode 73, and for people who don't know, your show is called Unfinished Business and it lives at <a href="http://unfinished.bz">unfinish.bz</a> [pronounced "dot bee-zee"], as we would say.</dd>
 
 <dt>Andy</dt>
-<dd>B-zed. Unfinished dot b-zed.</dd>
+<dd>Bee-zed. Unfinished dot bee-zed.</dd>
 
 <dt>Jen</dt>
-<dd>B-zed as you would say. But if I had heard b-zed years ago I would have any idea what that meant.</dd>
+<dd>Bee-zed as you would say. But if I had heard bee-zed years ago I would have any idea what that meant.</dd>
 
 <dt>Andy</dt>
 <dd>In the Queen's vernacular.</dd>
 
 <dt>Jen</dt>
-<dd>Dot-b-z. So you guys were on that show, you talked about a lot of things, but the second half of the show was very... interesting. Extremely interesting. Extra interesting to me. And, let me see, I took notes. It got started around minute 44, if anybody wants to listen to that episode and jump in where I'm talking about. You two started talking about advertising and you started talking about design and you were disagreeing. It seems like you were trying to say, there's something amazing about messages and creative work in the advertising world that you appreciate and wish for on the web. And Jeremy kept saying, advertising is evil, everything advertising does is evil. And I agree with Jeremy, actually. And I don't really want to have that debate about pro-con advertising but there was another thing in there that you were trying to get at, that I thought was fascinating, and that's what I want to talk about today on the show. It had to do with this idea, and I think for you, you have seen this idea in the advertising world, but I have also seen this idea in many, many other worlds in other medium. In film, in theater, in all kinds of other places. Where there's something about the design process and something about creating a design where maybe the person, the creator, is doing that work with a desire to create an impact, telling a story, making something that has a kind of emotional resonance. I think you said in there a "memory," like it's memorable. Some kind of a thing that happens when someone consumes that content or that they have that experience. They see or read or listen or watch or feel your... the thing that's been created. Then there's a kind of moment there. There's an experience there, that a person can have. And sometimes it might happen with a great television commercial or a great print ad back in the day when print ads were very special. But I think it also happens in many other places. And I kind of agree with you that perhaps it doesn't happen on the web as much as we'd like or maybe we're not pursuing that as directly, we're not thinking about that. I wanted to have you on the show and sit here and chat about that and try to get at it. Is there a thing that's missing? What is it? Why is it missing? Where did it go? What can we do to get it back? How can we describe it better than I just tried to describe it? You know what I mean?</dd>
+<dd>Dot-bee-zee. So you guys were on that show, you talked about a lot of things, but the second half of the show was very... interesting. Extremely interesting. Extra interesting to me. And, let me see, I took notes. It got started around minute 44, if anybody wants to listen to that episode and jump in where I'm talking about. You two started talking about advertising and you started talking about design and you were disagreeing. It seems like you were trying to say, there's something amazing about messages and creative work in the advertising world that you appreciate and wish for on the web. And Jeremy kept saying, advertising is evil, everything advertising does is evil. And I agree with Jeremy, actually. And I don't really want to have that debate about pro-con advertising but there was another thing in there that you were trying to get at, that I thought was fascinating, and that's what I want to talk about today on the show. It had to do with this idea, and I think for you, you have seen this idea in the advertising world, but I have also seen this idea in many, many other worlds in other medium. In film, in theater, in all kinds of other places. Where there's something about the design process and something about creating a design where maybe the person, the creator, is doing that work with a desire to create an impact, telling a story, making something that has a kind of emotional resonance. I think you said in there a "memory," like it's memorable. Some kind of a thing that happens when someone consumes that content or that they have that experience. They see or read or listen or watch or feel your... the thing that's been created. Then there's a kind of moment there. There's an experience there, that a person can have. And sometimes it might happen with a great television commercial or a great print ad back in the day when print ads were very special. But I think it also happens in many other places. And I kind of agree with you that perhaps it doesn't happen on the web as much as we'd like or maybe we're not pursuing that as directly, we're not thinking about that. I wanted to have you on the show and sit here and chat about that and try to get at it. Is there a thing that's missing? What is it? Why is it missing? Where did it go? What can we do to get it back? How can we describe it better than I just tried to describe it? You know what I mean?</dd>
 
 <dt>Andy</dt>
 <dd>I do know what you mean. I can't believe that you suggested that listeners should skip the first 44 minutes of the podcast. [Jen laughs]</dd>
@@ -216,10 +216,10 @@
 <dd>Not today but we have many other times, yes.</dd>
 
 <dt>Andy</dt>
-<dd>Ok, phew. So they can cover their ears then. [Both laugh] Friend of mine came to see me a couple of weeks ago and he showed off a prototype of a new site that he's designing for himself, he's a designer. This site looked really nice. It was technically accomplished and everything seemed to be in the right place. The typography was good, the layout was fine, and on the face of it, you'd think to yourself, that's a very tidy piece of work. But it was just a very tidy piece of work. Actually, what it looked like was a million and other Squarespace-derived websites. He wasn't building it on Squarespace but it was following very much that kind of aesthetic. The point that I'm making is not about the fact that he was following design trends. It was the fact that there was nothing in that design which said anything about him or his clients at all. It was purely a tidy piece of work and it had all the right things on it. I'm sure the contact form will work beautifully, I'm sure people will be able to browse his work and get everything that they need to get from it. But the thing was soulless. And it didn't have any of his personality. I really wanted to shake him and say, "Where is <em>you</em> in this? Where is your personality? Where is the experience that somebody's going to have when they work with you?" Because you're a fun person and I don't see fun in this design. What I see is just, safe. Predictable, tidy, design. Where everything is perfectly accomplished and perfectly usable and the web is Squarespace. And, hopefully, you know, he went away and rethink things. So hopefully I didn't make him cry because apparently that's what I do to people. [Laughs] But, there's nothing there. I want to shake other people up and say, "Listen. It's about much more than you are putting into it." And we need to push beyond this obsession with user experience or frameworks or process or whatever and get back to the thing that actually gives your design some soul. Because nothing that I've seen recently has had that. I think it's a shame, it's a real shame.</dd>
+<dd>Ok, phew. So they can cover their ears then. [Laughs] Friend of mine came to see me a couple of weeks ago and he showed off a prototype of a new site that he's designing for himself, he's a designer. This site looked really nice. It was technically accomplished and everything seemed to be in the right place. The typography was good, the layout was fine, and on the face of it, you'd think to yourself, that's a very tidy piece of work. But it was just a very tidy piece of work. Actually, what it looked like was a million and other Squarespace-derived websites. He wasn't building it on Squarespace but it was following very much that kind of aesthetic. The point that I'm making is not about the fact that he was following design trends. It was the fact that there was nothing in that design which said anything about him or his clients at all. It was purely a tidy piece of work and it had all the right things on it. I'm sure the contact form will work beautifully, I'm sure people will be able to browse his work and get everything that they need to get from it. But the thing was soulless. And it didn't have any of his personality. I really wanted to shake him and say, "Where is <em>you</em> in this? Where is your personality? Where is the experience that somebody's going to have when they work with you?" Because you're a fun person and I don't see fun in this design. What I see is just, safe. Predictable, tidy, design. Where everything is perfectly accomplished and perfectly usable and the web is Squarespace. And, hopefully, you know, he went away and rethink things. So hopefully I didn't make him cry because apparently that's what I do to people. [Laughs] But, there's nothing there. I want to shake other people up and say, "Listen. It's about much more than you are putting into it." And we need to push beyond this obsession with user experience or frameworks or process or whatever and get back to the thing that actually gives your design some soul. Because nothing that I've seen recently has had that. I think it's a shame, it's a real shame.</dd>
 
 <dt>Jen</dt>
-<dd>I mean, and it's not, I don't want to blame Squarespace. It's medium.com and it's, there seems to have been maybe in the last two years, a sort of... and I get it. I get it because there's responsive design and typography kind of hit at the same time. It's so overwhelming that it's just kind of like, look, if I can do anything that's responsive and have some kind of clean, simple typography then I'm winning. So let me just do those two things. I don't really know what to do, it's all so hard. Let me go look at what everybody else is doing, ok, let me do that.</dd>
+<dd>I mean, and it's not, I don't want to blame Squarespace. It's medium.com and it's... there seems to have been maybe in the last two years, a sort of... and I get it. I get it because there's responsive design and typography kind of hit at the same time. It's so overwhelming that it's just kind of like, look, if I can do anything that's responsive and have some kind of clean, simple typography then I'm winning. So let me just do those two things. I don't really know what to do, it's all so hard. Let me go look at what everybody else is doing, ok, let me do that.</dd>
 
 <dt>Andy</dt>
 <dd>People often follow trends. We've seen this before. Whether it was people copying Apple's aqua buttons so everything looked like jelly that led into the whole web 2.0 thing. That led into something else. And now things are... there is a design aesthetic. It's quite hard to design away from, for a lot of people. Particularly when they base their work on some kind of framework that takes care of things like vertical rhythm or button styles or something like that. There will always be that and I don't think that it's necessarily somebody's fault, it's quite understandable that they would fall back onto something which is comfortable. Because the alternative is to challenge yourself. That's what we need to do. We need to find some way that we put personality into these things. And the other thing I want to mention. I'm not sure how you are for time today. But I think that the other thing... we've talked about all of these kind of different facets that go into producing websites. And I agree with Jeremy, I think the whole kind of web applications thing is a nonsense. If it's on the web, it's a website, no matter what the thing actually is. But I think we also need to remember that not everybody works on the same kind of thing or with the same kind of clients. A lot of the people that talk about this sort of classical, so-called user experience and stuff, they do work at Twitter. They do work on digital products. A lot of my best friends work at Dropbox. They are designing a digital product, if that's what you want to call it and user experience and whether somebody understands how to use a product intuitively, that's a very, very important skill. It's a very important work that they do. But that's not what I do. And a lot of people, for example, when you read, you know, "Research is everything. You can't do anything without researching it first or testing it afterwards." Is a message that we often hear. Everything that's meaningful, therefore, has to be pulled apart. We've heard this spoken many times. For example, a lot of people that promote this kind if process, they work at organizations like, for example, Government Digital Services in the UK, which look after all of our government websites. Well, of course, if you're wanting to create a website that makes it incredibly easy to find out whether or not I should travel to Iraq in a few weeks, I don't want to be hit with any kind of emotional messages, thank you very much. I want to get to where I'm going, literally. [Laughs] Without being blown up. Not by the website. Or I want to pay my car tax or I want to pay my television license or do whatever. But I don't work on those kind of sites. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned about voices drowning out other voices. What we need in this industry is we need people that will talk about the creative work that they're doing, whether it be for small agency clients or independents like me or larger agencies. I want people to talk about that work at the same volume as we hear people talking about user experience, if you want to call it that. I want the magazines, I want net magazine, or A List Apart or Smashing Magazine, or any of these other, amplifiers, to amplify the creative voices to the same extent that they amplify that user experience voices. That's not to say that UX is bad and creative is wrong or there's some kind of dichotomy or some kind of religious battle between the two, because I don't believe that for a minute. But what I care about is that the creative voices get lost. That's my message for this. I think I've said that more eloquently today than I did on my own bloody show, which is always the way, isn't it?</dd>