The Designer Geek

Just some observations about the Obama win… It was all about the advertising. (Or at least a large portion of it.)

Comparing the two campaigns, I find the following things that cannot be overlooked:

• The Obama logo. Love it or hate it, it was everywhere. A unique, identifiable logo is essential to developing a brand.
• The Obama website was much better aesthetically.
• The Obama campaign had a unified theme of “hope” and “change” that was a sub-theme of its short-and-sweet tagline “yes we can”.

And it’s that last point that is interesting.

It is one of those things that I like to call a “blank tagline” or “blank message.” As in “fill in the blank.” It means something different to everyone. Compare it to Apple’s iPod Touch campaign: “The funnest iPod ever”. Well, what is “fun” to you? Playing games? Watching movies? Listening to music? Surfing the web? For each person, their definition of “fun” is different. It may be any combination of those things the iPod can do, or all of them. So the “blank” headline is effective, since when you get the iPod, you know that you can do those things that you consider “fun.” You expect the iPod Touch to deliver a good user experience, and it delivers because there are only 4 features to deliver on, and everyone buying an iPod knows what those 4 features are. So long as it plays music and movies and games and allows you to use the internet, it becomes seen as a successful product. While it’s a “blank message”, it’s one of managed expectations: No one who defines “fun” as “rock climbing” is buying the iPod Touch because they think it’s a piece of rock-climbing equipment.

By contrast, Obama’s message is one of open expectations. When people project their individual images of what “change” is onto Obama, and Obama embodies everything they “hope” for, he becomes more appealing and as a result he gets more votes. The problem is, while the iPod Touch has a list of essentially 4 features (movies, music, games, and web) that define “fun”, Obama has tied himself to an infinitely-long list of what all those people wanted to change: the war in Iraq, foreign policy, taxes, healthcare, social security, gas prices, social programs, government education funding, energy independence, “global warming”, unemployment, the economy, and on and on and on. By doing this, he creates an exceedingly high level of expectation which is now different for every person. Now, he is going to have to live up to those high expectations if he’s going to be seen as successful by the people who filled in the blank.

A very tall order.

Two months since I’ve last blogged. Seems like longer, actually.

For those who give a damn, The Designer Geek has been exceedingly busy. Things have been hopping at my day job, both design work and admin stuff keeping me more than busy enough. I did get a chance to do some stuff in AppleScript Studio… it’s neat, but the performance is a dog. I would release what I wrote for free, like I normally do, but the performance is so bad I’d prefer not to. Instead, I’m eventually going to re-write it using Cocoa and Scripting Bridge, and sell the sucker.

I’m nearing completion of my first commercial programming project (thanks, Corey!), and I’m in the finishing stages now, just last-minute bug-hunting and feature-adding. Nothing major. Except this one regression bug which is driving me nuts.

After that’s over, I have one Cocoa app that my wife and I are hoping to release ourselves. It’s currently about 75% done, but I had to put it on the back burner till the contract job is done. I have a list of about 20 people who are interested in beta testing it, I just have to 1) go feature-complete, 2) set up the main website, and 3) set up the beta test website. Simple! I should have it done in a weekend, right?

I wish.

After that’s done, there are a few other programming projects in the pipeline:

1. A friend asked me if I can write apps for the iPhone, and proceeded to tell me about an idea for an app that he has. It sounds pretty good, and seems relatively simple (don’t they all start off that way?) and I should be able to knock it out in a few weeks.
2. Another app that my wife came up with the idea for that’s *perfect* for a Core Data document application. More involved, but wickedly smart and cool.
3. The Windows version of the app we have 75% done. I’d prefer to use one codebase, and something like Cocotron, but I doubt that’s even remotely possible since we’re leveraging quite a few native frameworks and libraries. Between hardware integration and PDFs and database stuff…. at best we’d only be able to share the SQLite DB under the hood and that’s it. And that would mean spending time re-writing the existing code in the Mac version (and debugging it) just so we can share the same ANSI C-based DB engine? Not bloody likely.
4. Re-writing that AppleScript Studio app in Cocoa + Scripting Bridge.

As should readily be apparent, I’m getting really excited about code. Design has become such a chore. The main reason is because I find myself doing either 1) production-monkey work, which is a waste of my skills, or 2) design work for clients who want to do the design work. The ones in this latter group bug me the most.

If I’m doing production-monkey work, I can at least just kick back with some tunes or talk radio or whatever and just crank through the work.

But when clients try to do the design work…. that’s the worst. One client actually has their own set of Pantone swatch books, and will hover over my shoulder, telling me which ones to use for this and that, and tell me where to put things on the page. So, what is it that you’re paying me for, exactly?

Look. I know, everyone wants to be creative. But this is my job. This is what I get paid for. This is what I’ve spent the past 12+ years doing. I know that you know your customers and your market. But it is in my best interest if I understand them too. I also will take pains to understand your business, your competition, your product/service, and everything else about you and your company. Why? Because if I know all that, I come up with more effective advertising. The better my work is, the better your sales. And the better your sales, the more work you have for me. It is in my best interest to get inside your customers’ heads and figure out what appeals to them. That’s what I do. That’s part of my job.

So when you come to me for design & advertising work, trust that I’m not just going to hack something out that’s pretty for the sake of being pretty. Understand that I want to know about your business, and I put everything that I learn into developing the concept and the look. Your customers come to you because you make the best product or have the best service. Certainly you take pride in that. And certainly your customers trust you to do your job the best way you know how. So when you come to me wanting the best advertising, tell me what you want to achieve and then step away. Trust me to do my job the way your customers trust you.

Or else get your own damn computer and do it yourself.

If you’re like me, you have more web sites to read than you have time to read them. News, tips, press releases, product reviews, “hey look at this story” stuff sent by friends and family…. ugh. Keeping up is impossible because there’s just so damn many!

Tabs are great, because you can just open tabs of all the stuff you want to read, and get to them when you get a chance. But currently, I have over 50 tabs open of articles I’ll probably never get to. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just read, y’know, like a summary of each article to get the gist? Fortunately this ability exists, but unfortunately it’s buried in the powerful (but hardly used) “Services” menu.

The Services menu is full of all sorts of power tools that give you access to time-and-headache-saving features built into applications. One such thing is Apple’s SummaryService, which runs from within the feature-rich guts of OS X. Select the article’s text, then pull up “Summaraize” from the Services menu, and that 6-page article on Madagascar fruit bats is dynamically shortened into a new window. A slider controls how much of the article shows, using some behind-the-scenes magic ju-ju algorithm that works surprisingly well in separating the wheat from the chaff.

But isn’t it a pain to have to navigate through those menus every time you want to summarize a story? Wouldn’t a button — or better yet a keyboard shortcut — be better? Have no fear… the intrepid coders at Mothership Apple have concocted a solution.

1. Open System Preferences and click on Keyboard & Mouse. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
2. Click the “+” button at the lower-left of the column to add a new keyboard shortcut, and configure it like this:
   
3. Now, you can assign whatever shortcut you want, but I thought Command-Control-S was handy, since I already use Command-Control-D to look up dictionary definitions.
4. Click “Add” and close System Prefs.

This video sums it up nicely:

I found out from a client this past week that a campaign that I did for them won the 2008 Microsoft Distinction in Marketing Award. Microsoft is flying someone out to my client next week to interview them for a case study.

Needless to say, I’m really happy with this, and so is my client.

Sad to say, this is the only client that I work on where I’m given the opportunity to kick ass in the way I’m able to kick ass.

Needless to say, it’s a bittersweet victory.