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...

A year ago, I decided to lessen my reliance on Twitter. Here’s my progress so far…

This post was originally posted on January 3, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post pondering what would change in my workflow if Twitter disappeared. At the time, Twitter was actively looking for buyers and had just shut down Vine. I identified what I would miss without Twitter and decided to start looking for options to address some potential pain points.

In the last year, the narrative has shifted from Twitter’s possible sale to issues with abuse and hatred. Twitter increased the character count to 280 and that’s worked out fine,...

I’ve used this phrase for years to describe changing jobs. Maybe I was wrong…

This post was originally posted on May 8, 2017 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Every place we work has its own dysfunctional elements. And when you change jobs, you move from one group of challenges to another. Every job has challenges. You choose which challenges you’ll face.

I had coffee a couple of months ago with some friends and one of them was in the midst of a job search. I relayed my standard “choose your dysfunction” advice. One of our friends piped up:

“I don’t know. I think that sometimes, we bring our dysfunction with us."

I still haven’t been able to get that thought out of my head.

Yes, it’s true that each job brings unique challenges. But it’s equally true the...

What would happen if Twitter disappeared tomorrow?

This post was originally posted on November 9, 2016 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 on Twitter since 2007. It’s part of my daily routine and probably my most vital social media channel for finding and sharing news. But Twitter has had some lingering financial issues and when they recently tried to sell the company, no one stepped up to make an appropriate offer.¹

Also, a couple of social media experiments have crashed and burned lately. Twitter announced that they were closing Vine.² Talkshow had a bunch of potential but didn’t make it six months. And while Twitter is much larger, it’s not...

This post was originally posted on September 12, 2016 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Real jobs have deadlines.

As a designer, I hear “As Soon As Possible” an awful lot. Most people are shocked to learn that ASAP is actually my lowest priority. Jobs with concrete deadlines are always in line ahead of jobs with no real deadline.

Understanding why the client needs something ASAP is the first step in understanding whether you are dealing with a crisis or a “crisis.” There are a couple of reasons why clients avoid giving you a real deadline:

When can you get it to me? If the client is asking you to set a deadline, the project probably doesn’t have a firm due date. It likely needs to...

This post was originally posted on March 23, 2016 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

All professionals need a personalized email address and a home on the web. And Gmail accounts and Facebook pages don’t count.

I saw a branding consultant recently without a branded email address. Who hires a brand consultant who doesn’t invest in their own brand? I saw a company trying to recruit managers… just email an AOL account. (In case you are wondering, the company wasn’t recruiting for AOL.) I was trying to find out information on a store in town and all they had was a Facebook page that hadn’t been updated in a couple of months. I don’t really care what your business is — from a home-based...