At the banquet of creativity, no one breaks the bread for you.
—Frank Chimero, via Twitter

Dotcomrade Grant Blakeman (you should be reading his blog) recently gave this excellent, short, illustratively-inventive talk at a regional TED event in Boulder.

I threw this out to Instagram on Twitter last week:

@instagramapp popularity only breeds popularity. I want more discovery. Show me diamonds in the rough, not in the store.
—@blankenship

They responded:

@blankenship Can you add your ideas for how we can make photos/users more discoverable here http://getsatisfaction.com/instagram thanks!
—@instagramapp

I appreciate how engaged Instagram has been with users and their willingness to listen to ideas from the community. But something feels off to me about a small company funded with half a million dollars in VC money crowdsourcing improvements to their product.

I’ll be the first to admit I have little understanding of the obligations Instagram (or any funded company) has to their investors, or how they’re having to spend that cash to scale the app. But where I’m from $500k is a lot of money, no matter how you slice it. Money changes things, at least subconsciously. If Instagram was a team of two bootstrapping a great app and pushing out changes in their spare time, I’d think differently about giving them ideas on how their product could be better. But they’re not, and so I perceive them differently (whether I’m wrong in that line of thinking or not).

I’m trying to figure out if this is some kind of bias against VC-funded companies (too much reading 37signals anti-VC rants maybe?), a perception of crowdsourcing being similar to spec work, or if I’m just in a snarky mood that ends with, “you have $500k of someone else’s money, why should I do your work for you?” The first is likely my ignorance showing, the second is wholly understandable, but the third is just plain nasty.

One of the things I love about the web and the people creating good things for it is the desire to share ideas and knowledge in an open-handed fashion. I hate scarcity mentality, I don’t want to operate from it or let it creep into my subconscious and affect the way I interact with others. I know building great things typically takes money—and the more people along for the ride, the more money it takes to scale it. But Silicon Valley designer shortages aside, I wonder if tapping the user community for ideas is the best way to move forward?

My assumption is that hungry intelligent people who talk wealthy intelligent people into giving them half a million dollars will have razor-sharp focus and vision for their product. I assume they are busy in the depths of the proverbial laboratory making that vision happen. I assume they’re balancing user feedback with their own goals and gut to write the roadmap for their product. I assume they have clarity and are fearless in ignoring the voices that compromise it, even if those voices are from their own user base.

So am I assuming too much? Or generalizing too much and looking for patterns where they don’t exist? Am I just reading too much into a tweet from a classy company who wants to improve a product they’re proud of? Does money change things? Or does money just change things for me? I obviously have more questions now than I did when I started writing this post. I’m getting used to that.

I’ve been toying with social photo (photo social?) app Instagram for a few days now, along with the other reported 100,000+ users it scooped up in its first week. Instagram has the requisite film-like filters, easy social-sharing, simple UI (though not without its share of kinks), and built-in community from your contacts list.

If you’ve got an iPhone, sign-up and start sharing. There are some incredible users on there already. My username is blankenship if you want to follow along with my photos.

Apt artistic/design commentary from the immensely talented Jessica Hische.

[Music is] a religious experience and the people on stage are Gods. They can choose to act like that or they can choose not to.
—Sufjan Stevens in this interview

This kind of attention-to-detail is exactly why Hoefler & Frere-Jones fonts are worth every penny you should pay for them.

From Gap’s Monday press release (emphasis mine):

Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo…ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand.

The outpouring of comments wasn’t in support of their iconic logo. The outpouring of comments was because the proposed redesign was horribly unimaginative and lacking in any supporting collateral to show how the identity might be successfully implemented. The outpouring was a gigantic, crowdsourced “seriously, this is not an improvement.”

Don’t mistake outrage at a new solution for unswerving support of an old one. Sometimes new ideas are just so bad that the old ones were a lesser evil. And lesser evils are not the same thing as energetic support.

Being incapable of resisting Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher, Atticus Ross, and Trent Reznor (and Justin Timberlake) in one place, we matinee-ed The Social Network on Saturday.

Artistically, I’m a sucker for Sorkin’s unique brand of rapid-fire, no-one-is-this-consistently-unstoppably-clever-and-articulate-in-real-time-in-real-life dialogue (see A Few Good Men and the first four seasons of The West Wing). So, much to my delight, the poorly-initially-dubbed “Facebook movie” is actually quite good—a highly-fictionalized*, tense, engaging story about friendship, business, cash, class, exclusivity, and openness.

Like any good film, the conversations and thoughts that follow have expanded outside the scope of the movie’s plot and taken on a life of their own.

For the last year I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the creative tension between ideas and execution. Reading Behance founder Scott Bleksy‘s excellent book Making Ideas Happen helped me articulate and understand that tension better. Being on a leanly-staffed, high-capacity, project-intensive team has put those articulations to the test. And unsurprisingly, watching The Social Network has given me a lot to chew on in terms of what is valuable—is it the mythical million dollar idea, or the actual million dollar execution of an idea?

Ideas that never ship are never criticized.
—Seth Godin

I have a habit of coming up with ideas—a site that does this, an app that does that, a service that scratches a proverbial itch—but I rarely follow through on them, even though I believe all success is a matter of doing. “Talk doesn’t cook rice,” as the Chinese say. Is that fear of criticism? Lack of discipline? Lack of appropriately allocated time? Boredom? If nothing else, watching The Social Network gave me a good kick to continue the pursuit of building something great. To spend less time on idea-generating and more time on idea-executing. And if that’s all that comes out of Facebook taking over the world, I say it might be a good thing. We need more people inspired to build great things.

*Highly-fictionalized Hollywood aside, it’s quite strange to go to a movie theater and watch a film based on a company where you’ve interviewed—I think I’d prefer to keep my real world and my movie world quite separate from now on.

If you voice an opinion, it will be perceived as arrogant. If you don’t voice an opinion, no one will listen to you because you’re not saying anything that rises above the status quo.

Your call.

It occurs to me that in the grand scheme of 2002–present some of you might be new to this site. I think it will be helpful to save you from the hassle of rummaging through too much older content—I’ll just give you the highlights of the last year or so. That should set some expectations for what you might see in the future, should you decide to lend me your internet attention from time to time.

Sometimes I write about web design and development like How I Develop Websites Without an Internet Connection or how IE6 isn’t dead yet.

Sometimes I write about the web in more general terms and topics, like print vs web or the entitlement baggage of social media or how easy it is to complain instead of create or telling people they’re doing it wrong or the stupidity of social media without strategy.

Sometimes I share photos I take, like this one or this one or this one. Sometimes I share photos other people take, like this one or this one.

Sometimes I share music that I find particularly amazing, like pianist Eric Lewis or songwriter duo The Civil Wars or breath of fresh air Janelle Monáe.

Sometimes, rarely (and with good reason), I write about politics and a relentless fury of comments often follows.

Sometimes I write about life stuff like trying to get out of debt or how much salary is enough or how my wife’s grandfather dying made me think about John Steinbeck.

Sometimes I write about Christianity, like our crazy Pseudo-Christian/Hyper-Political American subculture (the comments on that one are stellar) or more personal thoughts about leadership and legacy.

I occasionally write about artistic copying/plagiarism, how it hurts you, how it confuses your audience, and how we totally mangle that Picasso quote about great artists stealing.

But lately, mostly, it seems like I write about work—the office, the team, the tools it takes to make extraordinary things with other people. Getting out of your own way so that you can build something worth spending the 9–5 (and beyond) on. Here’s a few favorites:

• Stop Saying ‘I Don’t Have Time’
• What Kind of Staff Culture Are You Exporting?
• Aspiring Leader, You’re Reading the Wrong Books
• A Thought on Hiring
• The Simplicity of Hiring and Firing
• Hiring Over Your Head
• On Vacations, Rest, All-Nighters and Planning
• It’s Not Your Tools, Blame Shifter
• Managers vs. Makers
• Giving Employees Permission to Fail
• The Death and Life of the Modern Job Title
• Stop Running From Conflict

So, if you’ve made it this far, perused even half of those links, and you think “I like this place, I think we could get along,” stick around, subscribe to the RSS feed, join the ragtag bunch of brilliant commenters who frequent the site, and know that I’m humbled you’d trade me your time for something I have to say. Onward and upward, new internet friends.

“[This was taken] while standing neck-deep & fully-clothed in the ocean, with a ziplock bag and some rubberbands over the camera. The waves were making such lovely shapes as the hands of the storm stretched overhead.”
—Cole Rise

I want this printed 4′ wide, matted and framed in my living room. Having some measure of the ocean in my house is wildly appealing to me.

On a November day in 2006, I took my then-girlfriend, now-wife to see as much of the 175,000 sq ft of the The Biltmore House as we could in a day. I distinctly recall it being obscenely cold. We looked ridiculous in all the photos we took, teeth chattering, bundled to our ears in enormous, ineffective scarves.

And then, during a slightly-warmer indoor tour, “You’ll of course notice that these thresholds are marble. Throughout the residence, any room that has running water, any wet room—bathrooms, showers, kitchens, even the indoor pool—is denoted by a marble threshold instead of the standard wooden ones elsewhere in the house.”

Actually, I didn’t notice it. Who would? It’s a threshold. No one is thinking that hard¹. They just want to walk through doorways and get things done. Like normal people.

Which makes me think about the way we build websites.

Listening to normals trying to figure out websites informs me that we still have work to do in making websites easier to understand for all.
—Naz Hamid, via the Twitters

There aren’t many professional web designers I respect as much as Naz. And he’s dead-on with this critique. Read Write Web wrote an article on Facebook logins that was the #1 Google result for “facebook login” for awhile. “WTF is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz,” is typical of the 2000+ comments on that article from people who, obviously, had a ritual of searching for “facebook login” instead of typing in a URL (what’s a URL, anyway? they might say), or saving a bookmark. Google interviewed 50 Times Square passersby and asked the question, “what is a browser?” The answers were somewhat less-than-encouraging, especially for those of us who get obsessed with pushing the boundaries of design and interaction on the web².

Everything we take for granted, every stride we make in learning more about the web, our computers, how technology works, etc. is not normal. You are not your audience, at least not all of the seats. When we design websites for us, we confuse more people than we help. For every “you’re an idiot for using IE6″ footer message I see on some young designer’s totally awesome CSS3+HTML5+JQuery whizbang website, there are at least 50 people walking around IN NYC who don’t even have a framework to respond for why you think they’re an idiot—not that they’d ever come to your website. (Which begs the question, who exactly are you writing that cleverly scathing footer copy for anyway? But that’s a post for another day…)

Take this site for example; it was a fairly basic, three-column grid with a minimum of images. It had been this way for three years. But would my grandma know what the “open navigation” link meant up there in the righthand corner? Would she have clicked on it? Would she have even seen it? How would she know there was more content hidden away under a Javascript slider? Because I did? I vote unlikely, so I changed it.

Make great work, but keep in mind who you’re supposed to be making it for.

*Unless you want to build websites for you.

1. Except maybe architects. ↩

2. I’m super-excited that there are people pushing the boundaries of web design and technology. It’s amazing to watch. I geek out. Just don’t forget we’re all freaks; we’re not normal people. ↩

Looks like today was a good day for launching things. Canadian designer Tyler Galpin has a gorgeous new site and portfolio—be sure to check out the classy layout on his Process page—and friends at Weightshift have unveiled Interhoods, helping SF, NYC and CHI designers and developers connect by neighborhood. Great work, chaps.

If you’re an RSS reader, come over and take a peek.

The best design is the one that launches, so while there’s much left to do (sorry about the comments section right now—so undone!), fix, tweak (a new grid means some off-grid elements in my content need to be righted), make better, add to, etc. I’m happy you can see something other than the default WordPress theme that was standing in for my broken theme (or even the almost three-year old former design). I haven’t done any cross-browser testing yet, but if you’re in a modern browser, all should be as well as it can be with two days of quick development from the non-developer.

I’m making hopefully good use of the Google Font Directory (PT Sans and Droid Sans). It’s a decent, albeit limited in variety, alternative to perfectly awesome services like Typekit. I’d love to explore more options down the road. I’ve also ditched (for the time being) the daily-changing colors until I can rewrite that code in better fashion. Of course, I’ll likely never give up my quest to do as much as possible with CSS borders, so I’m still the Mayor of Bordertown. Oh, and I have a logo now. More on that later.

As always, thank you for reading!

The challenges of growing an organization so quickly are numerous. Growing big is not success, in itself.
—Evan Williams, (former) Twitter CEO

To have a blog is to have some portion of your brain assigned to monitoring your audience.
—Jake Lodwick, Bloggone It

Like all writers, Jake’s got a subjective view of this (to have a blog is to have some portion of his brain assigned to monitoring an audience), but I understand the tension he’s talking about, between creating for the sake of creating and creating with the knowledge that people are watching. I try extremely hard not to worry about the latter category, but ultimately I fail. That push and pull—I don’t care what you think! But let’s talk about it in public!—is mildly infuriating, as much of my humanity tends to be.

I’m interested in the interaction and back/forth of civil online discourse, though I don’t want to make things with the sole intention of people responding to them. Trying to maintain imagined expectations to people who don’t have a vested interest in your creative process is a horrible master to serve. But the draw of community, however roughly assembled or tenuously held together, is still strong and, I believe, good.

I want to create from a place where I know the difference between monitoring (fretting about, obsessing over) an audience and simply being aware of an audience. It would be myopic to ignore the audience; clearly I have comments and people engaging from time to time, but I’m not built to be obsessive and monitor an audience or filter my work based on that. I want to spend my discipline and focus elsewhere which hopefully ends up serving my audience better.

I still view it as the TV accomplishment of the century that Fallon got The Roots to be his houseband, but HOW FUN IS THIS? And who knew Fallon had groove?

My little sketchbook site Prom Night Fist Fight goes through seasons of feast and famine, generally determined by work schedule, life schedule, and inspiration (or lack thereof). Work has been more typographically dense lately, and I want to create more pieces in that vein for fun. I think it’s helpful to have frameworks for such things, so…

I found a random site that listed all the possible Magic: The Gathering card names—I’ve never played the game, but a pre-determined “world” of phrases seems easy enough to pull from—and I’m going to take a few weeks on PNFF to typeset the ~50 card names I liked the most. With content like “Goretusk Firebeast,” “Merfolk of the Pearl Trident,” and the above “Zombie Assassin” on the list, this should be a riot.

Development can help great people be even better—but if I had a dollar to spend, I’d spend 70 cents getting the right person in the door.
—Paul Russell, Director of Leadership & Development at Google

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about hiring lately (I can’t help it—we’ve added three fulltime staff and an intern to our team in the last month) and some concepts have risen to the surface:

1. For senior positions, hire talent.

2. For junior positions, hire potential.

3. For every position, don’t hire people you don’t like.

Of course, it must be said, ignoring lists is also extremely important.

As far a design firms go, I’m a bit of a Pentagram fanboy. Their recently announced hire of new partner Eddie Opara (formerly running The Map Office) does nothing to curb that—he’s got an amazing track record.