Present Imperfect

I want a "Get hyphy" one. | May 26, 2006

Last month, my boss introduced me to my new favorite Dashboard widget, Oblique, which digitally recreates the Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies card deck. Click the widget and the card turns over to reveal a new strategy. You can’t control the random distribution of the strategies, but you can choose which edition you want to pull from and how long each card stays turned over. This comes in handy for taking screenshots of particularly amusing strategies. Case in point: the very first one I turned over today.

If you’re unfamiliar with the original deck, The Oblique Strategies website offers a brief history:

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend [painter] Peter Schmidt...tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure — either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you’re running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking — to jog the mind.

Writer’s block isn’t an option for me at work, thanks both to looming deadlines and basic professional courtesy, but sometimes it can be awfully hard just to get started. I’m a great believer in the power of digression, however, and the Oblique widget works like a charm in that department. Amazing what your brain gets up to when you’re not looking. Sometimes it just needs to be caught in the act.

Calling All Plumbers: Learn to Woodwork | May 24, 2006

Recently, Derek Powazek threw down the gauntlet on A List Apart. Now, my first reaction to this was “what’s Derek’s address, so I can send him a cookie bouquet or maybe a dozen Hoffa cupcakes?” But then I got all defensive. Because, hey! I didn’t just pick up this whole wordcrafting thing after reading a blog entry that told me to do it. I’ve been writing (and learning to write) my entire literate life. It’s an ongoing process and it takes time and devotion and enthusiasm to master. In other words, if you want writing done right, hire a writer.

A few comments on Powazek’s post say exactly that. But I’d like to up the ante. Powazek says that text is “as much a part of the UI as the colors, the pixels, the stuff that designers are usually concerned with. Perhaps more.” Definitely more. In fact, writing and the organization inherent in good writing goes much deeper than the UI. Before you have a website over which to push pixels and wrangle words, you need to decide exactly how all that content will be organized. And that’s why you should not only hire a writer to write, you should hire a writer to help design your information architecture.

I’m not the first person to suggest that writers and editors make great information architects. I don’t know if Jesse James Garrett, author of the brilliant “Elements of User Experience” is the first to suggest it, either, but he sure does. After all, Garrett explains, “throughout human history, the people most concerned with effective communication have been those who worked with language. Predating hypertext, predating plain old text itself, language is the original toolkit for ‘architecting information.’”

Of course, in an ideal world, your project already has its very own IA ninja. But if it doesn’t — and it probably doesn’t — I’d suggest getting an IA-happy writer involved at the beginning. Added bonus: copy as purposeful as it is clever is easier to craft if you’re intimately involved with content organization from the get-go. No point in changing “Submit” to “Get in there” if you don’t know what’s “in there.”