“Re-envisioning AIGA Moving Forward Together”

Today, AIGA sent an email out to all members announcing the departure of their executive director and the beginning of a new attempt to reimagine AIGA. (If you don’t know, AIGA is the professional organization for design, formerly known as the American Institute of Graphic Arts.)

I’m been an AIGA member for much of my professional career. I was active at a chapter level for over a decade. Over that time, people repeatedly tried to reimagine the central organization, its chapter system and its funding mechanisms. No one was ever satisfied. They wanted to make it better, and then every designer would want to join and help change the world.

And yet, the organization got smaller.

AIGA has meant a lot to me and it definitely helped my career, but structurally, it’s been broken for a long time. It was built in a pre-Internet era. A time...

Worth every penny

It seems like everything is going to subscription pricing. I subscribe to a whole host of streaming services, bundles, news sites, and software. Many of them don’t always seem worth the money, but as I look at what I subscribe to, I realize that I don’t mind supporting products and creators that I love. So here are a list of services that I really, really like and happily pay for:

Micro.Blog $5/month

I backed the Micro.Blog Kickstarter and I’ve had a paid subscription ever since — even when I wasn’t using it every day. I’m happy to support a product with a viewpoint that aligns with my values, and Micro.Blog is that type of service. Now that Twitter is unstable, I’m glad Micro.Blog is my home base.

Upgrade+ $5/month

I’ve listened to Myke Hurley and Jason Snell talk about Apple and the larger tech industry on Upgrade since 2014....

Preparing for a future without Twitter.

I’ve been preparing for the demise of Twitter since long before Elon Musk made the offer to purchase it. In 2016, I wrote a post — Twitterless — about what would happen if Twitter “disappeared tomorrow.” I outlined a couple of key areas that would be problematic for me and possible solutions.

A year and a half later, I wrote a follow up post — Twitterless, Part II — that noted my progress on replacing the role Twitter plays for me, and the challenges that still existed.

Times are changing, though, and I honestly believe that we all need to be diversifying — and if possible, owning — our social media presence. Becoming less reliant on the big social media behemoths is the first step.

I ended that post with a promise to follow up on my progress, but as Facebook became more and more...

One thing that Twitter excels at — which will be difficult to replace — is commentary during live events. Last night, I was able to follow a range of commentary on several college football games and the World Series all from my Twitter feed.

It’s not just who I follow, it’s also the way the service is constructed. When following a bunch of live events, you need to use the non-algorithmic timeline. Twitter still, begrudgingly, allows for that. Facebook has many of the people I follow on Twitter, but the comments are jumbled, appearing whenever the algorithm decides, often incoherently out of order. And I can’t see following my South Carolina Gamecocks on another large service, like Linked In. 🤣

Perhaps the real question is if I need the stream of commentary at all? I get value out of live commentary from sports journalists and other fans. I feel like it ads...

Two notable logo trends from Apple

This post was originally posted on April 22, 2021 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Apple has one of the most recognizable logos in the world. Which isn’t surprising because they are the largest company in the world. I’ve been watching a couple of trends over the last few months about how Apple uses their logos and this week, those trends have become even more apparent. For brand managers and designers, I think there is something interesting going on and it’s worth digging into the mystery.

The logo is “missing.”

Apple isn’t afraid to use their logos. All of their computers have prominent logos. They include logo stickers in all of their boxes. Apple’s logo is everywhere. But on their new iMac, which was released this week, Apple’s logo is...

Detailed, up-to-date and authoritative

This post was originally posted on July 4, 2019 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

I grew up loving magazines. Any time I’d be interested in something, I’d head to the magazine aisle in the bookstore or grocery store and look for magazines on the topic. Computers, cars, boats, science, model railroads, photography, sports, baseball cards, comics, design and more. It didn’t matter what I was interested in, there was at least one magazine on the topic.

Growing up in the pre-internet days, these magazines provided the info I was looking for. Detailed, up-to-date, authoritative info about whatever geeky habits I was interested in. Even the ads were informative and useful. I subscribed to some of them. Others, I’d buy if the...

Language matters.

This post was originally posted on January 13, 2019 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the language we use to talk about social media and content creation on the web. And as I’m writing about social media — especially microblogging and the indie web movement — I feel like we need a phrase to refer to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others that try to lock in users and leverage their private data to sell more ads, compared to the other newer services with revenue models that are less interested in ad sales or lock in.

I know that we already use “indie” and “indie web” as a way to differentiate between the two approaches, but I’m not sure that meaning is clear to a broader...

Designers don’t want to admit it, but math is important to the profession.

This post was originally posted on September 29, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

My first class in graduate school was a quantitive research class and I really enjoyed the statistics side of things. As I’ve told my designer friends this, they typically respond with something along the lines of “Ugh. I became a designer so I wouldn’t have to do math.” I’m not surprised. I’ve heard the same from designers and students over the years, but I’m increasingly irritated by it for a few reasons:

Designers use math every day. I’m not sure where the myth that designers don’t need to understand math comes from, but it’s not true....

It never runs out of soap…

This post was originally posted on August 9, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

The bathroom at my office has four sinks and three soap dispensers. Each soap dispenser has a clear plastic front so the cleaning crew can see how much liquid pink soap is left and refill it if necessary.

Sometimes, the first two soap dispensers are low on soap, but the last one, furthest from the door never seems to be low on soap.

You could draw conclusions from this single data point that no one uses the dispenser. And you would be right.

But why? Maybe people prefer the sinks closer to the door? Maybe it’s not in the most convenient location? Maybe there are too many soap dispensers?

The...

This post was originally posted on January 7, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

I made a red velvet cake last week.

From scratch. It was a recipe that my mom made when I was growing up, but it was originally my Grandmother Wertz’s recipe. My grandmother died when I was very young, so to me, red velvet always makes me think of my mom.

My mom passed away almost 17 years ago. She taught me to cook many things, but this red velvet cake was not one of them. All I knew was that it was difficult, and that she messed up the icing the first time she tried to make it. I can make pretty much anything that she made, but I had never tried to make the red velvet cake. I’ll be honest...