Clear Design: Icons (part one)

The birth of the graphical user interface (GUI) also spawned the graphic icon. The ground-breaking move away from text-based systems was one of the prime differentiators between the Macintosh operating system and those that had come before it. The next year, Microsoft Windows 1.0 released, followed quickly by Word for Windows 1.0, and there was no looking back to text-based computing.

Icons at that time were 32 pixels square, rendered in no more than the sixteen system colors (when available), and these little darlings made the difference between a drab, workaday interface, and a more inviting, more intuitive work environment. My first icon project was in 1992, while working for Microsoft. The first version of the Microsoft Windows Sound System was being released with a bundled package of sounds, each of which needed a distinctive icon. I had fun putting together the sixteen tiny images in flat or isometric perspective showing bells, chimes, saws, jackhammers, and other noisy things.  I do feel compelled to confess that with eighteen years and hundreds of design projects in between me and those icons, my memory has faded, and I’m not clear on what all of them were intended to represent—the jackhammer is clear enough, but the smartly rendered foot coming down on a banana peel is mysterious to me. I’m hoping it was a slide whistle.

Over the years, operating systems, hardware, and information graphics became more sophisticated. Better designers than I am devoted hours to telling stories or giving direction in those 32×32 pixel squares. With each version of the Mac or Windows operating system (with contributions here and there from outliers like NEXT or OS2, the art of the icon got more sophisticated. Then in November 1993, a funny thing happened.

For designers like myself who were internet-savvy (and up until then, that meant that we were working with text-based USENET applications like Telnet, or FTP protocols for transferring files) and who’d worked on multimedia projects for proprietary systems up until then, the ability of a designer to present graphics on the Web opened a world of possibility for online design. Although the neutral gray background was a drawback at first, and the necessity for having text left justified (the ‘center’ tag was a year or two out at that time) was a limitation, we designers could put artwork up, have control over headline fonts, and offer interactivity with a relatively simple bit of coding.

Of course there were other limitations: in 1994, everybody looked at the web through phone line modems of varying slowness. Worse for designers, there were still a lot of really lousy monitors around. Around that time, I remember going in to talk to someone about some freelance work and seeing my online portfolio up on a sixteen-color monitor. All of the lovely continuous-tone scans that I’d included had dithered into the sixteen system colors. Horrifying.

Fortunately, that state of affairs didn’t last long. Paragraph justification options, background colors and photos, frames, tables, streaming media, and cascading style sheets were soon to come, and the graphic web environment has just gotten richer and richer. There’s still one thing that connects contemporary Web design projects to the earliest days of computer interface graphics: the icon.

(Part Two to follow sometime soon…)

The Chocolate Bunny

I’m a fan of metaphor as a shortcut for expressing concept in brainstorming and general operational conversations, and I came up with this one a number of years ago. The Chocolate Bunny has done a lot of heavy lifting for me in business discussions over the years.

The concept is simple: the chocolate bunny is made of delicious chocolate, but once you bite into it, you find that it’s hollow inside.

The first application was in reference to a website that we were evaluating. We realized that although it was beautifully designed, and took great advantage of the then state of the art in technology, it had absolutely nothing to say. For all of the skill and effort put into the superficial package, there was no content…a chocolate bunny of a website.

From there, I discovered that there were chocolate bunny companies—nice logo, great offices, no business plan. Even people, sad to say, could be aptly described that way—think of the sales rep with a great beginning, but no follow-through, or worse, great skills, but with no solid product to sell.

I’ve used it as a management tool to help encourage design staff to stay current with technology: “You don’t want to be a chocolate bunny—you’re going to have to keep up to speed with Action Script to keep your career going.” It’s also another way to describe vaporware; software with a strong press release, and maybe even a logo, but no release candidate.

There’s even an advanced application of the metaphor that brings in another axis: that the chocolate bunny is not only hollow, but what looks like delicious chocolate is actually pretty bad mass-produced chocolate. If I remember correctly, I’ve even worked the concept of eating the bunny’s ears first into a business context.

The world is full of metaphors, but this one’s my favorite, and I’m able to apply it in a variety of situations. Baseball metaphors are the utility player of conversation (you see what I did there?) but I think that it’s possible that the chocolate bunny might be nearly as useful. Prove me wrong, and I’ll freely admit that my argument is hollow.

British Petroleum – the Early Years

In 1995, when we started Saltmine, we developed the concept of a conduit client—an organization that served as an introduction to other companies who needed our services. I had been doing freelance work for CompuServe’s Seattle office and site design for affiliated companies Spry and Freerange Media, and when Saltmine got rolling it was a natural progression. We were able to do a much greater range of work than I had been able to handle as a solo designer.

We got the work, and CompuServe got the ability to throw in websites as a value-add for their corporate systems clients. In 1995, the web was still just starting to show up on peoples’ radar, and it was a great thing for CompuServe to be able to offer as lagniappe—a little something extra to help seal the deal.

What was a little something to CompuServe was a big deal for us. This arrangement gave us a steady flow of work at a crucial time in our company’s development, and even more importantly, gave us access to large organizations that we wouldn’t have been able to get close to otherwise.

One day in the fall of 1995, we got a call from one of our CompuServe clients, saying that we’d be getting some information about a new client faxed over. Pretty soon the ancient, third-hand, thermal-paper fax machine beeped and started spitting out pages. We watched as the client logo appeared: British Petroleum.

It was an exciting time—we worked up concept, came up with a variety of comps, and before we knew it (well, actually after a bunch of hard work) we found that we’d built and posted British Petroleum’s first website. Although the relationship started out oddly (at first, CompuServe wanted us to represent as part of their company, but after a few days of answering the phone ‘CompuServe!’ we managed to convince them that it was better to let BP know that we were independent.

This was the beginning of a great relationship for Saltmine (and for BP) that lasted for many years, and had many high points, including the establishment of our London office, and, sadly, Jayson losing the entire state of Kansas to a group of BP executives in a bet on a drunken bowling competition…but those are stories for another time.

Company Growth

Watching companies grow and change over time is fascinating. I’ve noticed over the years (and had my guesses confirmed by stories told by many friends) that companies, large and small, have an arc that seems to consist of 1: Plucky Startup, 2: The Sweet Spot, and 3: Institutionalization. The characteristics of these stages vary a bit from company to company, but the stages are roughly accurate.

The Plucky Startup is populated by the person or people with the original idea—along with the folks who they can win over with the power of that idea. The company is most fragile in this stage, and the most fun. There’s never enough money, each meeting is an adventure in bringing on a customer or investor, and each day’s work is an exercise in getting an idea that was a concept last week to become a reality this week.

The uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of the startup reflect the personalities of the founders and the first employee base. Think of the stories of Amazon building its first desks out of tables (our ritual at Saltmine was requiring each new employee assemble their own prefab desk). This is the time that the personality of the company is forged, for good or ill. If you visit this company to sell them goods or services, you’ll likely meet with at least one of the owners.

The Sweet Spot is when the idea comes to fruition, when the idea is proven right for the market, place, and time. The employees are holdovers from the Plucky years, friends of the company, and toward the middle and end of that period, people who have heard about what a great place it is, and want in. At this point, the company is still intimate…it’s possible for someone to remember the name of everyone who works there.

The Sweet Spot buzzes and hums. It moves fast, and there’s enough of a legacy employee base to remember mistakes, to know what works well and what needs to change. A meeting at this company will usually have no more than four or five people.

Institutionalization is the stage that I find sad—when a company outgrows its original mission, and begins to become a primarily financial entity, a vehicle to ensure continued employment of its managers and benefit to its shareholders. The employee base is a different one—folks from outside of the original industry are brought in, people who are valued for business knowledge, rather than a knowledge of the industry, or a passion for the work or the customers.

The company can no longer turn on a dime, middle management and bureaucracy begins to take hold, and the place turns into Just Another Company.  Meetings grow to be routinely at least ten people. If you’re a vendor or supplier for this company, you could sell a half million dollars in services to this company without the owner knowing who you are.

The number of employees at each stage in the arc doesn’t matter. With Saltmine, I remember looking around in wonderment as we all of a sudden had ten people working for us—then a few years later, 100. Then post-sale, nearly 600.  On the other hand, when I started working at Microsoft, in early 1991, the company had 5,635 employees. When I left in 1993, they had nearly tripled, with 14,430 people worldwide. Looking back now, that feels like the sweet spot (though those who came and left before me would certainly argue that). It was still a leading innovator, an interesting and educational place to be. I remember celebrating with everyone else as the company rolled past that magic 10,000-employee mark.

I continued to work as a freelancer, then vendor, for Microsoft in the years that followed, in the fascinating position of working with many different groups, visiting and participating without a formal tie to the organization.  Over time, we discovered that as Microsoft employees were promoted, reorganized, or otherwise moved on, our company would sometimes be the holder of group or corporate memory, the thread of continuity in projects begun years earlier.

I had a ringside seat to some aspects of their corporate evolution and change. I was able to watch as the meetings grew larger, and as the process grew slower, and as the people we met with changed from software developers to marketers—and then to purchasing representatives brought in from traditional industry, purchasers making decisions for the 94,000 Microsoft employees all over the world, buying design and development services using the same formulas they used to purchase toilet paper in bulk.

There’s nothing wrong with success, nothing wrong with growth. My feeling is that the different stages attract a different sort of individual. Some folks love the predictability, stability, and anonymity of a large organization. Me? I’ve always had a fondness for the startup that is heading toward that Sweet Spot.

More Words About Health Care

I don’t pretend to be qualified to hold forth on the relative merits of the health care bill that’s currently grinding its way through the House and Senate like so much delicious, artery-clogging sausage.

I am qualified to comment on what it’s been like as an employer, responsible for providing private insurance to hundreds of people and their dependents over the years.

For the fifteen or so years that we were running Saltmine and Lux, my partners and I felt that it was part of our duty as employers to provide the best medical plans possible to our employees—we felt that was part of the compact, part of what was expected of us (or more to the point, what we expected of ourselves) in return for the hard work that people were putting in on the company’s behalf.

In practical terms, this meant educating ourselves (with the help of various insurance brokers) about the relative merits and costs of different plans, selecting and paying for a plan, and then maintaining it for our employees. At first, this meant that we had to spend a lot of time researching and meeting, and as the company grew, it meant that we needed to hire someone to administer the plan for our employees.

Once up and running, everything was pretty much smooth sailing. We just had to write an enormous check every month, and our folks got their dental care, prescriptions, and all of that stuff. However, there was the yearly ritual when our broker would show up with a sad look on his face, and hand us each a folder of graphs, charts, and spreadsheets. He’d explain to us that the insurance companies had raised their rates, and to maintain the same coverage we’d had, we had to pay XX% more. Our half of the ritual was to look at each other, shrug, and keep paying them. We finally broke down during the last year that Lux was running, and passed half of the increase (13%, if memory serves) to the employees.

We always accepted health insurance costs as a cost of doing business. In the same way that a fish doesn’t notice the water, it was part of the environment in which we had to do business. We didn’t have the time to spend thinking about how odd it was that the United States was the only first world nation that pushed the cost burden of health care onto its businesses, and let the unemployed, underemployed, and uninsured fall through the cracks.

The current legislation (which I hope passes, warts, compromises, and all) has gotten me thinking of what the process was like.  As you can tell, I didn’t care for it much, but being able to provide health care for our employees was one of the things that made us proud as employers—we viewed it as a mark of success.

What I Learned in the Basement

I’ve been playing drums in bands of various sorts (and of varying quality) since I was in my early twenties. Some of the bands have been good, others not so much, but they were almost always fun. For many years I’ve joked that everything I learned everything I know about business in the practice room. This is a little bit glib, but has roots in reality and experience.

A fast count gives me the names of about fifty people who I’ve played with regularly so far (not counting auditions and casual goofing around with musician friends).  This means that there are fifty people of varying temperament, goals, and skills who I spent hundreds of hours with (usually in a dank basement), working on writing, arranging, and rehearsing original music.

Getting along well with others in a group like this means developing strategies for working and playing well together. Imagine that you want to write something or to paint a picture, but that you needed three or four other people to show up before you can begin—you need them to show up on time, to collectively agree about the charactaristics of the end result, to be prepared to work on creating the piece, and then to agree on an ongoing basis about the direction to take the final work. It’s an improbable equation even before it starts, and it only works well if all, or most, of the people are dedicated to making it work. And we haven’t even factored in talent…

It was years before I realized that I’d developed a whole subset of social and creative skills to accommodate a creative group environment. These include negotiation, communication about aesthetic intangibles (music in the practice room, design in my above-ground career), constructive, non-confrontational criticism (“that’s really cool, but have you thought about…”), and just enough self-delusion to keep our spirits up (“we’re sounding great!”). There’s even HR management at a root level—I’ve had many conversations dealing with practice room problems ranging from ego, to bad interpersonal chemistry, to substance abuse (bad chemistry of a different sort, I guess). The practice room is the place where I learned to negotiate complex relationships with others that affect the group as a whole.

More important than anything, though, is the understanding that in a group of people who have embarked on a creative venture (and no mistake, creating a business is a fantastically creative activity) everybody involved has a part to play, that interdependence will create a stronger group than diva-like individuality, and that earning and giving respect to each other is a key not just to success, but to enjoying the process, whatever the result.

I figured out early on that I was not going to be making a living at music. Once I was at peace with that, playing in bands became a lot more fun. It’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever give up—something I don’t think I can give up—and it’s something that continues to delight me and instruct me.

The Art of the Pitch

When you send a team out to represent your company, how will they show the client that your organization is the right one to work with? Will they present a generic, canned set of material, material prepared based on assumptions of client needs? Is your team rehearsed and organized, with their canned presentation planned from beginning to end—or are they prepared to enter an unfamiliar environment and adapt their approach and information to the situation, the attendees, and the actual (not perceived) needs of the prospective client?

When developing business with new clients, I’ve gotten the best results with advance analysis, discussion, and preparation—but not in rehearsal. You can anticipate and plan for a meeting, but you don’t know what will happen after the meeting starts. An essential element of business presentation is that the pitch team be experienced in ways of talking together, in passing the conversation gracefully back and forth as they express the company’s proposition. This, coupled with perceptive listening, will go farther than rigid preparation of presentation materials. (It doesn’t hurt if the individuals in question are smart, well-versed in their area of expertise, and think fast under stress!)

Of course it’s important to prepare content and information to present to the client, but it’s even more important to be prepared to abandon that prepared material based on client need and response (and to be ready to guide the meeting back to your materials as appropriate). I found success over and over again with a willingness to allow the conversation to move as the client directed, based on the client needs that we perceived while talking (rather than assuming that we knew what the client needed or wanted and speaking only to those points—another argument against over-prepared content).

A well-seasoned team, in tune with each others’ individual speaking and presentation styles, will be able to gracefully improvise, to pass the conversation back and forth, and to determine and address the clients’ needs during the course of the conversation.  An ability to read the room—understanding body language, the nature of the stakeholders you are speaking to, the relative areas of power and dominion over the project that each of the clients have—is invaluable, and is a skill that comes with time and experience.

The pitch is perfected over time with analysis: after a meeting, my team would discuss in detail the aspects of what we felt did and didn’t work. We would break down and discuss the factors in and out of our control. When factors were controllable, we would talk about how to do better the next time (because there’s always a next time), and when factors were out of our control, we would talk about how to turn those things to our advantage. Reactions of the prospective client teams were discussed, opinions compared, and followed by a brutal self-examination of our individual. There are some notable pitches that we still discuss and analyze years later.

Sometimes you get the desired result from a meeting, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you never know what made the difference between success and failure. One thing that I’ve seen over the years in successful pitch teams is a love of the process, and an enthusiasm for analyzing the components and figuring out how to make the meeting go even better the next time.

Not Caring Much for the Recession

Everyone knows that the business climate recently has stunk to high heaven, but it seems to me that it’s been getting a little stale for the past few years. At the risk of sounding like one of those old farts who talks about how everything used to be better, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that doing business in the tech space used to be a lot more fun. There was a Wild West aspect of working with companies like Spry and encoding.com (or even developing content for the beta versions of MSN) that seems harder and harder to find.

It was an environment where people were eagerly working to adapt to new technology, as opposed to grudgingly coming aboard because they felt that they had to. There was vigor and an energy that drove conversations and deals. When there’s a business/technology space that’s full of new tools to work with and new mediums to explore, the possibilities seem endless, and some of them actually are. People speak dismissively of the dotcom era, and although it turned out notable failures like pets.com and Quokka, it was also the crucible that formed Amazon and this generation’s tech monolith, Google.

It wasn’t that there was more money floating around, although that was part of it—it was that people seemed to be having a lot more fun spending it and making it. In the late nineties, the internet was new, and there was potential being unlocked right and left. When we were touring a multimedia company located in the former Nabisco factory in New York’s Meat Packing District and saw the 360 degree green-screen room, it made perfect sense that someone would build it; it seemed that that was the sort of thing that would certainly come in handy.

When I was telling people in 1995 how important the web was, and that it would change everything, I was pretty sure that I was right. Now the web’s all grown up, a mature medium. Everyone’s got a website—or even better, a web presence on aggregated social media. I had planned on writing more about that, but Roy Edroso of the Village Voice beat me to it, and did it better than I could have.

Recession aside, where’s the exciting stuff happening these days? Who’s working on stuff that’s so crazy that it just might work? Who’s coming up with the stuff that’s going to Change Everything? Who’s having fun staying up late and figuring out something that nobody’s thought of yet? Who’s putting their shoulder to the wheel—not just to monetize the technology, but to come up with something genuinely cool? Wherever they are, and whoever they are, I’m keeping my eye out for them, because I miss the Wild West.

About the header font

I chose a font called Windsor for the header here (and on my website) for several reasons. I grew up in the seventies, and have always enjoyed the bold, tightly-kerned display fonts that were used then (see George Lois, etc.) and I knew that I wanted to come up with something that was a nod to the era when I first started to think about type as type, rather than just words on a page. A post-Victorian font, Windsor went through a resurgance in the early seventies, turning up in a variety of contexts, most notably as the title font for the ‘Whole Earth Catalog.’

There’s another, more personal reason. When I was growing up, my father was the director of publications at Whitman College. He was charged with creating the look and feel of all of the public documents for the school, from letterhead to catalog to alumni magazine. He chose Windsor as the root font for the school’s publications, giving them an elegant yet informal look that set the feel for the college’s printed materials for the decade.

Of course, this was years before any sort of desktop publishing, and the state of the art at the time resided in the typesetters’ shop, or with a variety of awkward photocompositing tools. The quickest and easiest, method was using transfer lettering–a whole alphabet on a plastic sheet that you’d line up, letter by letter, and rub down onto a piece of bristol board. Sheets came in various font sizes, and although the sheets were populated with a nod toward the letter frequency table, the sheets would end their useful life with a number of letters still ready to use. At this point, Dad would bring the sheets home for me to play with, and of course there were a lot of sheets of Windsor around…but not very many with the letter ‘e’ still on them.

There were a lot of things that led me to become a professional designer (including being unfit for any sort of other profession) but the things I remember most fondly involved being ten or eleven years old and playing with hand me down design tools, some of which I still have on my desk today.

So yeah, Windsor bold with an agressive crop to give it a little bit of a weird, modern twist. Thanks to Elisha Pechey for designing the font back in 1905, and thanks, Dad, for bringing the Letraset sheets home for me to play with!