"Architects and Software Developers" American Institute of Graphic Artists Design 2 Business Conference New York City (sometime in the mid-late 1990s) Good morning. I'm going keep this brief and give the real experts a bit more time for later in the morning. When I was asked to give this talk, I spent some time meditating on what I thought life would be like today for a graphic artist. And one of the first things I thought of was a piece of Net Humor that a friend sent me who knows I'm interested in the idea of designing information. The humor is wry, but I think it's appropriate enough that I'm going to read some of the highlights to you. It's called: IF ARCHITECTS HAD TO WORK LIKE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS And it's in the form of a letter from a client to an architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. € My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. € When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one. € Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house. € Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that the kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator. € Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue. P.S. My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions that I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. P.P.S. Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case. Sincerely, The Client Now, it strikes me that the Internet and the Web may have already shaken your world to some degree, probably along the lines I just described. I'll get to "how" in a few minutes, if you don't already know ... And if it hasn't yet, I'm sure it won't be long before it does. And what I've come to understand over the past couple of years -- since the World Wide Web has drowned us in a sea of ugly, useless and expensive corporate Web sites -- is that there's no escaping it. We all have to learn to adapt. The bottom line today is that all media circles intersect. Everyone who has a magazine or a newspaper or a -- grocery store circular wants to see their name or brand on the Wonderful World Wide Web. A lot of them want to see their brand on TV, too. Yes, let's do a TV show about our product, or our magazine! Or maybe we should do a magazine about our TV show! Or a magazine about our ad campaign, or our products! Let's have a Web site, a product, a magazine AND a TV show! No matter where we go, there we are! (pause) Everyone wants to be everywhere, and WHY, I do not know. Maybe it's me. But at the most basic level, it is still true that very few -- and I mean VERY few -- people who consider themselves to be doing business on the Web are making money -- or making themselves useful, for that matter. Cheap computers, cheap connection costs, and the fact that anybody, really, can put up a Web site, doesn't exactly set up a business proposition where you get to stand out. Not to mention that the primary means of driving traffic is word of mouth or links from other pages. Traditional advertising does not seem to hold dominion on the Web. Unless you're REEALLY something special, you'll get a few thousand -- or maybe even a few hundred thousand -- hits on a site when someone lmentions it in the Times or the Journal or on TV or something. But the hits die off quick. There's really not much THERE there, yet. (pause) Anyhow, all this action is probably already GOOD for you. Most of your clients -- maybe even all of them -- have probably already asked you if you can design them a web site. And they probably want it to perfectly extend their brand, to somehow fit in with everything else you've done for them. Which, of course, is MUCH easier said than done. So, how do you stretch your business to accomodate them? Ultimately, that's for you to decide. But there are a few things that I've discovered -- kind of a new way to think about the web, maybe -- that might help you with the new and baffling world of interactive media. IT'S SOFTWARE What I've discovered about the Web, despite the pretty pictures and all the hullabaloo about a New Publishing Medium, is that it's software, plain and simple. Ones and zeros. And like it or not, if you want to play, that fact changes your life radically. It means that user interface design -- how people interact with YOUR design on THEIR computer -- becomes a deep and fundamental concern. It means dealing with software programmers, people whose skills and mental processes -- and work schedules, for that matter -- are absolutely incomprehensible to most human beings. It means learning to adapt your skills to a world where you cannot design AROUND content. In the world of interactive media, content DICTATES design, to a degree that is inconceivable in any other medium. In fact, in the best web sites or interactive media, the design is the structure -- it provides context, it provides a means to seek and find information. It provides many different ways and means to imprint brands. My colleague Suzanne Stefanac, who is the executive producer of the Web site for my TV show, The Site, sees a successful Web site design as a 3D chess game. You have multiple ways to get in and out, and multiple ways to move around once you're there. The model seems to work very well. But if a designer hates to put navigation buttons on a screen, for example -- because they don't LOOK good -- it's like putting out a picnic banquet on a beautiful day and nailing shut all the doors and windows so people can't go outside. Individual goals do vary -- one client wants a retail site, another is doing entertainment or news or social commentary or whatever. But the basic idea of being able to move freely inside an information space is still the most important design concept going. FINDING OUT WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW Now. I am going from the assumption that you're all really smart and good at what you do. But I am also going to assume that not all of you have integrated the ideas I've just outlined into your daily lives on any kind of a fundamental level. This is not a condemnation. I can count on maybe two hands -- with fingers left over -- the people I know who actually do "get" interactive media on a deep level. I certainly don't. I'm still trying to figure it out myself. So even though this may sound about as trite as it gets, I have found it absolutely critical to invest time finding out what I don't know. I've been amazed at the number of people -- some of whom are extremely talented graphic designers -- who do design work on the Web WITHOUT trying to figure out what the hell it is. For me, the more time I spend there, the more I get a feeling -- an intuitive feeling, a feeling in my gut -- about what I like and what I don't like. How entertainment sites are different from information sites. What things they have in common, what kinds of features or activities give me pleasure, what things just annoy me. I've even learned a little bit about how you make the Web work with other media, like TV or magazines or even other electronic goodies like Internet newsgroups. But you have to SPEND TIME there to find out. Interactive media, the Web, is not like anything that's ever been done before. Why on earth SHOULD anyone already understand it? And if they think they do, WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WEB PAGES OUT THERE THAT LOOK LIKE MAGAZINE PAGES? Just an example. Don't take it personal. We've been so immersed in print and broadcast media for so many years that we need to really figure out what's different about interactive media and how to make it work, if it's going to. Think of it this way: it's probably better if one of you, you OR your client, isn't clueless. And on some level, I figure it's probably better if that one person is you. If you're already working designing Web sites, one really important way to increase your clue quotient is to TEST your designs on people who are going to use them. I'm not talking about focus groups to see if they like the logo. I'm talking about real, honest to God TESTING, like in software companies. Because you know what? If people don't click on it with their mouses, you didn't do it right. TECHNOLOGY SHOULD NOT BE THE FOCUS. So. If you spend enough time learning the genetic codes of interactive media, and start getting a sense for what really makes it sing, you'll begin to realize another really important lesson. Technology should never be the focus. The latest Java applet or the latest Shockwave plug-in -- or even the latest soldier in the browser wars, for that matter -- isn't going to do anything good, necessarily, for your clients. In fact, given the state of the industry, you're likely to just make them MAD because Shockwave and Java both are really good at crashing people's computers. What's important about interactive media -- why people get excited about it -- is that it is about COMMUNICATION. About EXPERIENCES. About creating COMMUNITIES. That's not about technology. It would be like you making a big point of a special ink or paper or nib of a pen, which of course you would never do. Thinking about communication and experiences doesn't come naturally to people who have spent a career creating IMPRESSIONS, rather than experiences. But it can be done. One of the smarter interactive media designers I know is Nathan Shedroff, who co founded Vivid Studios in San Francisco, and who started out many years ago working with Richard Wurman on some of his 2-dimensional information design ideas. Now he's into interactive media. And he's been trying to think about interactive design as a form of improv theater, of all things. But it makes sense. How can you engage your audience -- whoever they are, wherever they're coming from -- in what you're doing, especially when you ENCOURAGE them to have input into the process? It's a fascinating approach. Or think about Disneyland, or any other successful theme park. A good Web site should be able to engage you on a bunch of different levels, with a bunch of different activities. At Disneyland, whether you're a kid or an adult or even God forbid a teenager, they've arranged for you to have an EXPERIENCE. And it's certainly interactive. COLLABORATION So, great. You go out and you figure out the Web. You become a 3D chess genius and you're able to visualize the perfect Web site for every one of your clients' individual needs. How do you handle this inside your agencies? Do you go hire a phalanx of HTML programmers? Get your own Webmistress on staff? Well, I suppose if you're CKS and you've got access to lots of venture capital, you can. But you don't have to. Or if you're Bob Greenberg or Aubrey Balkind or Clement Mok and you're big and famous enough to be able to learn how to bolt together interactive media on your clients' dime, GREAT. Set up your own shop. But you don't have to do that either. I am a big believer in collaboration. In fact, the one truism about interactive media -- whether you have the whole team in-house or not -- is that you HAVE to collaborate to do it. The process itself is extraordinarily complex, even if ALL you're doing is design. As I said earlier, you won't need just a graphic designer for the overall look, but also a user interface designer, an HTML programmer, someone to design the back-end database software that keeps a Website running, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a real team effort. And here, like in San Francisco, there are lots of young, energetic people moving at breakneck speed -- and working at slave wages -- to learn all these skills. It does require that we all learn to work well with others -- something that may not come easily to those of us who have been sitting in our offices spinning our OWN little webs -- but I suppose in some ways, that is rewarding in itself. NO RULES I guess I'd like to wrap up by saying that the most important thing to remember -- as we all sally forth into this great interactive beyond -- is that THERE ARE NO RULES. Anyone who tells you there are rules is lying. No one has anything but the faintest idea what they're doing. They may have more money, and they may have more employees, and they may have more clients or clout or whatever, but EVERYONE is shooting in the dark right now. It is complete and total chaos. My boss Suzanne has another great way of thinking about this. She loves watching the Web develop what she calls feral intelligence. We're all like wild animals, figuring out what works by getting out there and pouncing on it. If it doesn't work, we change it. If we don't change it, we die. The good news for YOU is that graphic artists, people with strong design aesthetics, are really needed more than ever. But your challenge is to be willing to deepen yourselves professionally, really open yourselves up to a truly new medium, and embrace it for what it is, rather than trying to shape it into whatever you've done before. Since no one really knows what they're doing, it's hard to imagine a better environment for learning and experimentation. I'm a little jealous of you, actually. One of these days I think it would be really fun to dip in and learn how to DO this stuff, rather than just pontificate about it. That said, I'm looking forward to seeing what you all come up with. Thanks for listening. If anyone has any questions, I'll be back later.