Jason Pontin, the editor-in-chief and publisher of the Technology Review has published a great and revealing post that shows that publishers are finally coming around to the understanding that the old, reliable print publishing model just does not transfer to digital media. Again.

I know. Didn’t we go through this lesson already? Well, kind of. The first web boom showed publishers that there was money to be made on the web, so they started tentatively trying it, and some figured it out. Most just ended up trying to cram as many ad units as they could onto web pages (most of our pagination technology comes from trying to drive up pageviews).

When the iPad came out, there was a flurry and rush to create apps that would give the publishers the same level of control as print. Ad revenues would be saved! The web would remain a marginal income stream! Hooray!

Or not. As Pontin points out, the economies of publishing apps never really made sense. In addition to Apple’s demand of 30% of sales through apps, there was the technological hurdle.

Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites.

And then, there was the real problem.

But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, “walled gardens,” and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media.

That paragraph speaks volumes about the hard, hard lesson that many publishers have been avoiding for the last decade. It’s a generalization, yes, but there was the distinct feeling that publishers were just holding their breath, waiting for the technology breakthrough that would return to them their beloved chokehold on both content and advertising.

And now here we are back at the web. The unpredictable nature of the browsing device requires the thoughtful and intelligent use of the most flexible coding environment available. Just as in 1999, that is HTML, not compiled code. Welcome back!

Written by David McCreath on May 7, 2012 with 0 comments |

What Clients Don't Know (...And Why It's Your Fault)

If you missed Mike’s closing talk at TYPO San Francisco, it’s now up on the TYPO site. Mike stresses the importance of empathy—how to work together with clients and draw upon your collective expertise.

Dangerously, we sometimes forget that helping [clients] through that process is an integral part of our job. We complain that they’re giving us stupid feedback, they’re evaluating the work wrong, that they’re breaking our process. We get irritated that they just don’t get it. As an industry, we’ve come a long way in embracing empathy for the users of our products, but we’ve a long way to go in developing that same empathy towards our clients. The very people who hire us, who trust us with our budgets, their futures, and whose success is ultimately intertwined with our own are often treated as an irritation.

Mike takes us through possible designer-client pitfalls and what you, as designers, can and must do to prevent them. It’s your job. Watch the video here.

Written by Tina Lee on May 2, 2012 with 0 comments |

Mule Profile: Small with Might (Plus One Chug)

We’ve got a studio profile in the June issue of .net magazine! Pick up your copy as we talk about more lore on Mule’s origins, the upsides of small companies, our approach to nonprofits versus large organizations, and what we’re looking for when we hire. Also: Rupert’s real office purpose, beyond presiding over any HR disputes.

Our clients are working with us as people, not us as an organisation comprising interchangeable resources. We can identify and solve problems quickly and directly. Each individual can have a huge impact on how we function as a company. —Erika Hall

Get your issue here or at your local newsstand/Newsstand. Thanks to Tom May and the .net team for the splendid interview!

Written by Tina Lee on April 30, 2012 with 0 comments |

I’ll do it if you do it.

A couple of years ago my son was working on a school report that he had to deliver in front of his class. He asked for help. He told me he was afraid to get up in front of the other kids. I told him it’s not a big deal, you just go up and do it. Be prepared and be yourself and everything goes well. And then I told him a line I heard in a movie that went something like “courage is what you get after doing the thing you’re afraid of.” And he asked me. “Have you ever spoken in front of a group?”

I hadn’t. My whole career I’d been afraid to speak in public. And I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t that kind of person. I was the quiet type. Working in the corner. The kind of designer the world also needed. Not everyone is a talker, right? And for the majority of my career I’d convinced myself that this was a noble choice. And being that I’m actually very good at convincing people of things, I’d managed to convince myself of my own bullshit.

But now, with my 13 year old boy in front of me, I had to admit that I was afraid. Afraid of failing. Of walking up there with my fly down. Of being discovered as a fraud. But, in that moment, with that 13 year old in front of me, I became more afraid of something else. Of failing him. Of passing my fear along to the person who needed me to be someone better.

So I told him “I’ll do it if you do it.”

And then Jeffrey Zeldman told me if I wanted to speak I had to write. People needed to know who I was.

And I started writing. And I ended up writing about the very things I was most afraid of. The things that never came natural to me. And the more I wrote the more I realized that in all the years of screwing up at those things, I’d actually learned how to screw up less. And I kept writing until I had a book. Which the good people at A Book Apart were kind enough to publish. And I think it’s a pretty good book, but I’ll let you be the final judge of that.

And I hope that while you’re reading it you’re thinking of all the things you’re afraid of doing. And I want you to stay afraid. And then I want you to do those things anyway. Because the thing it took me my whole career, and fatherhood, to learn is that you don’t get over the fear. You get over the fear of being afraid.

My kid got up in front of his class that day and he read his report. And he told me he was terrified. “But you did it anyway.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

My book, Design Is a Job, goes on sale today.

My son’s music blog is even better.

Written by Mike Monteiro on April 10, 2012 with 18 comments |

No Wrong Answers: Questions for Pre‑Clients

We make a practice of telling prospective clients to call us as early as possible when planning a potential project. This is to prevent them from going too far down a path that might have benefited from our input and making choices they can’t easily undo.

In other words, don’t start spending time and money before talking to us because we don’t want you to waste any, even if we aren’t ultimately the right people for the job. (Folks at startups might enjoy an older post on the topic.)

But, there is such a thing as too early. If a client organization doesn’t have their internal situation sorted, trying to have a reasonable conversation about a project—let alone go through with one—will just lead to tears and recriminations.

Continue reading "No Wrong Answers: Questions for Pre‑Clients" »

Written by Erika Hall on February 22, 2012 with 0 comments |

The Dialectics of Design

Black Sheep Meets White Sheep by Leon Riskin (For Valentine’s Day, a post about togetherness.)

There are two types of people in the world. Those who think in dichotomies and those who don’t.

For all that working in and around the Internet requires—and often celebrates—a broad and nuanced view of things, there has been a terrible trend of either/orism. In particular, this has been swirling around the “designers as start-up founders” theme.

A few examples:

Design is essential to the success of a start-up OR design is unnecessary.
Engineer founders rule OR designer founders rule.
Either you have designers in-house OR you outsource design.
If designers want to change the world they MUST work for a start-up.
The Internet is dead.

(And I won’t even get into the “Agile is awesome/Agile is unworkable” fights.)

Continue reading "The Dialectics of Design" »

Written by Erika Hall on February 14, 2012 with 1 comment |

A Bright New Home for Local News

Click to see the old MLive.com

Mlive.com is the leading source of news and information for the state of Michigan, incorporating the output of eight local newspapers in towns from Bay City to Grand Rapids.

Continue reading "A Bright New Home for Local News" »

Written by Erika Hall on February 2, 2012 with 35 comments |

Lament of the Delicious Librarian

I worked at a small Mac software company from 2008-2010 called Delicious Monster, founded by Wil Shipley and Mike Matas. Most people know the company for its hit software Delicious Library, but most people know me from the infamous booth at the 2009 Macworld Expo.

My boss Wil didn’t even want to have a booth. Those things cost a fortune and require tons of time to plan and operate. But I was a giant nerd, had never been to Macworld, and was worried by the buzz that it was Apple’s last year at the expo. We HAD to go to Macworld.

I did some thinking and came up with a concept to pitch: a booth modeled like a cozy library with bookshelves that look just like the ones in Delicious Library. We could dress as “Delicious Librarians” (don’t tell me that wasn’t clever!) complete with nerd glasses and name tags. My coworkers and I stayed up late one night planning everything out so we could present the idea to Wil. He loved it, and gave us the go-ahead to do the booth as long as he didn’t have to do any work on it; he was busy trying to ship an app, after all.

Continue reading "Lament of the Delicious Librarian" »

Written by Jessie Char on January 31, 2012 with 3 comments |

Advertising on a Responsive Web

I’m unabashedly excited about responsive design (see my review of Ethan Marcotte’s book). I believe that it has the potential to take web design in directions we haven’t considered. At Mule we’ve been applying some of the principles to recent project, seeing where things work and where they don’t, and we’ve run into one big hurdle that we haven’t yet figured out how to clear:

Advertising.

Advertising online has been pretty much the same since day one:

Take a block of space on the page
Put something eye-catching (animated and/or garishly colored) in that block
Count the clicks
Count your money

The only things that have changed are the size and delivery technologies to take advantage of bigger screens and bigger pipes. And that’s the problem. The general pitch behind web advertising depends on there being a block of certain pixel dimensions that is sold along with position and number of clicks. The web advertising world is not set up to deal in percentage widths, and they’re certainly not going to deal with ads that may or may not show up depending on the width of a user’s browser window.

Continue reading "Advertising on a Responsive Web" »

Written by David McCreath on January 17, 2012 with 5 comments |

From Constraints Springs the Wild: On Research, Anthropology, & Anxious Marketeers

In an interview with Shadoe Huard, Katie draws on her background as an advocacy filmmaker and anthropologist to give a better sense of how the fields twine and influence our research process at Mule.

Most people do not just hang out and think about web pages for fun, they’re there to do something, so we need to think about the very specific tasks that they want to do there and the information they need to make decisions or complete tasks.

…I’m engaged everyday in producing ‘research’ and ‘creative’ things like the Let’s Make Mistakes podcast or my own film work or stuff with the Disposable Film Festival, [and] no matter what I’m doing I am trying to make sure that everyone has a totally clear understanding of what and why we’re doing things and that the things I’m spending time on are making things better. So I approach the beginning of a research period the same way I approach production of a film. Obviously there are different tasks involved, but the same themes are there throughout: figure out who the audience is, figure out what they want, agree on the medium and general purpose and then develop an idea with those contraints.

Read the full interview here, which includes talk on the web as a giant system in itself, the relationship between researcher and designer, and the best sum-up/put-down of bad marketing tactics: “A click is not love, despite how much it feels like it at 3am when you’re looking at analytics.”

Written by Tina Lee on January 5, 2012 with 0 comments |

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