Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly podcast about changing technologies and the future of the web. This is episode 75 and I am your host Jen Simmons. I first want to say thank you to today's sponsor, lynda.com, and then jump into the show. Today I've brought you Andy Clarke back to the show. Hi Andy.

Andy

Hey.

Jen

You were [a guest] on, what episode was that? 45 I think.

Andy

I think it was. I hadn't realized until Jeremy Keith mentioned it a week or so ago, but we seem to be in sync with our episode numbers. All of a sudden, because you've done 74, this is 75, and I'm coming, and I've just done 74, so I think 75 is what I record tomorrow.

Jen

Wow.

Andy

Woah, I know. Spooky.

Jen

Well now I've got to not miss any weeks and keep up with you. [Andy laughs] Because I've been doing the show a lot longer. [Laughs] I started in September, 2011, but I missed... I've missed some weeks and months in there.

Andy

Trust me, I've missed decades. I had a whole lost 5 years. [Jen laughs] I think it was drugs.

Jen

Hey, well, that's life. That's what happens with life. [Andy laughs] I lost 6 years. But anyway, I thought... Jeremy was on your show, which one? "We've reached peak burrito," episode 73, and for people who don't know, your show is called Unfinished Business and it lives at unfinish.bz [pronounced "dot bee-zee"], as we would say.

Andy

Bee-zed. Unfinished dot bee-zed.

Jen

Bee-zed as you would say. But if I had heard bee-zed years ago I would have any idea what that meant.

Andy

In the Queen's vernacular.

Jen

Dot-bee-zee. So you guys were on that show, you talked about a lot of things, but the second half of the show was very... interesting. Extremely interesting. Extra interesting to me. And, let me see, I took notes. It got started around minute 44, if anybody wants to listen to that episode and jump in where I'm talking about. You two started talking about advertising and you started talking about design and you were disagreeing. It seems like you were trying to say, there's something amazing about messages and creative work in the advertising world that you appreciate and wish for on the web. And Jeremy kept saying, advertising is evil, everything advertising does is evil. And I agree with Jeremy, actually. And I don't really want to have that debate about pro-con advertising but there was another thing in there that you were trying to get at, that I thought was fascinating, and that's what I want to talk about today on the show. It had to do with this idea, and I think for you, you have seen this idea in the advertising world, but I have also seen this idea in many, many other worlds in other medium. In film, in theater, in all kinds of other places. Where there's something about the design process and something about creating a design where maybe the person, the creator, is doing that work with a desire to create an impact, telling a story, making something that has a kind of emotional resonance. I think you said in there a "memory," like it's memorable. Some kind of a thing that happens when someone consumes that content or that they have that experience. They see or read or listen or watch or feel your... the thing that's been created. Then there's a kind of moment there. There's an experience there, that a person can have. And sometimes it might happen with a great television commercial or a great print ad back in the day when print ads were very special. But I think it also happens in many other places. And I kind of agree with you that perhaps it doesn't happen on the web as much as we'd like or maybe we're not pursuing that as directly, we're not thinking about that. I wanted to have you on the show and sit here and chat about that and try to get at it. Is there a thing that's missing? What is it? Why is it missing? Where did it go? What can we do to get it back? How can we describe it better than I just tried to describe it? You know what I mean?

Andy

I do know what you mean. I can't believe that you suggested that listeners should skip the first 44 minutes of the podcast. [Jen laughs]

Jen

My apologies. They should listen to every episode, all 72, and then listen to the first half of 73 and then listen to the part that I'm talking about.

Andy

Exactly. Just skip the waffle at the beginning, let's get straight to the meaty parts.

Jen

Yes! Get to the meaty parts. I'm a big believer in that.

Andy

Oh, no, you see, we like to waffle on our show. It's a big part of what we do. It was a very good conversation with Jeremy. He's always brilliant to talk to. It's the first times, actually, that he's been on the show. Not quite sure how we've got to episode 73 and haven't had him on before. It was a fascinating conversation and we both came at things from, I think, a very different perspective but there was a little bit of misunderstanding, I think, mixed in there somewhere. In terms of perhaps what we were both either excited about or interested in or disgusted by, as Jeremy was [laughs] with a lot of stuff. I think a little bit came and got lost in translation, perhaps. So it's quite nice to be able to talk about it a little bit more. I don't want to become a broken record, though. I don't want to be banging the same drum.

Jen

Yeah, no, and I'm a little bit stealing your show's thunder on this. Maybe you feel that you've already said everything there is to say. But I wanted to have you say it again or just say it... because I think there was a little bit of a, not misunderstanding, but you were kind of having two conversations at once and one of them was precluding the other one from getting going, I felt.

Andy

It's nice to be able to go back over things actually. Because, particularly, as you know, when you talk to Jeremy, he's so bright and so clever and so fast and so quick-witted that it's almost impossible to keep up with him. He's one of the most intellectual people that I know. When I was editing the show a day or so later, I kept thinking, "Ah, damn, Andy, why didn't you say that?" And I thought, "Can I be really cheeky and edit myself back in?"

Jen

[Laughs] No.

Andy

Maybe a little bit more lucid. Or I could improve on a point somehow. I thought, "Can I do that? I could do that."

Jen

I always feels that way. It's part of why I haven't listened to this show in awhile but when I listen to my, I do a lot of presentations, and if they're ever recorded I definitely watch them back and I always feel that way. Like, "I didn't even explain that. I just said some words into the air and I didn't even make the point I was trying to make."

Andy

Sometimes when I talk to clever people, which I do all the time, I sort of feel that I start a sentence and then I get halfway through and to the end and I forget what it was that I started off talking about. And I did feel that way with Jeremy. It is very nice to be able to maybe elaborate on some points.

Jen

Yeah, so what is it that you're talking about? Describe what it is that you wished we had more of in the web industry, in the web design industry, that we don't.

Andy

It falls down to two main areas, I think. One is to do with what we do and the process that we follow when we're doing it. I still believe that there is a difference between what I will loosely term "creative work" and the kind of process-driven, product-oriented approach to web design that we see so much of and read so much of. So that's the first point. We should talk about that. Secondly, it's about voices. Because I believe that, like any industry, but the web development, design, whatever you want to call the web industry, has evolved very rapidly and has absorbed a lot of other disciplines along the way. You know, when I started 10 years ago as, my friend Sean Johnson would say, "a webmaster," I wasn't paying attention to a lot of the things that obviously we pay attention to now. Anything to do with usability, particularly, or content, information architecture, content strategy, whatever. We weren't doing those kind of things. The web has absorbed a lot of other areas. With that has absorbed a lot of voices. The voices that we hear more often these days, I think, the voices that are amplified by the organs of our industry, magazines or whatever, tend to be the voices that are from the so-called "user experience" side of things. They're not talking about, and they're not amplifying the voices that talk about creative work. Creative messages or strategy or even pure creative work in terms of visual design and proportions and typography and layout and color and all of those things. Those conversations are as important, if not more important, depending on the context, than so-called "user experience." My issue is that those voices, our voices, our creative voices, are being stifled somehow or amplified less than others. I think that's it's important for everybody in the industry, particularly people that are coming into the industry new, to realize that actually the web is a place where we can do that work. It isn't a place where we just focus on the mechanics of a product and whether it works and whether people can use it. And that's my issue.

Jen

The whole time, everything's been changing so fast, and it feels like there are these eras and we go through, focus on a certain thing that ends up feeling like an over focus and then we focus on something else and then we're over focusing on that and then we focus on something else. Maybe a little bit of it is that there's a lot to say about user experience design right now. It feels like for a long time design was not valued enough and so I'm glad to see it finally valued more. That instead of everything being about, and I'm thinking especially right now about big clients with big budgets instead of it all being about the business folks deciding what to do and then the developers building it and then, oh yeah, in the middle we had some designers come along and they checked off some checklists and pushed pencils around and they didn't really do much. Now it feels like design is getting to be more... inserted earlier into the process so that when the project or the thing is imagined in the first place it's imagined with a bit more design intention and as things are developed the designers are still involved and the developers are involved earlier so there's a bit of a blending between the, what the medium can actually do and what it actually feels like once it's built and the ideas about what that's going to be. Get out of Photoshop, prototype in the browser, blah blah blah. But it feels like even that rise of design is something that's more central to the creation of the work. It's still this idea of design as a bit of a fixed process. A bit of a fill in the blanks, it's a spreadsheet, you need to do this and then you do four of these and you do one of those and you follow it up by six of these things and you do two of those processes and then you... squish out the end result and deliver it. I think in some way, of course it needs to be that. We're handling big budgets and big clients on tight deadlines and there has to be a process and we need to codify the process and maybe that's all that a certain slice of the web will ever do, because that's a business part of the web. And I'm guilty of this on the show, still assuming that the whole web is that and that's the only thing that's going on, on the web.

Andy

We need to remember that our, if we're thinking about my corner of the web, if you like, web standards. That I still think of as my corner of the web. I always used to have to remind myself that people that were fascinated by CSS and were interested in accessibility and web standards were not the whole web design industry. That there was a whole area out there of, a whole group of people out there, that were creating work which was completely different to the sort of stuff that I even coming across on a daily basis. Often it was Flash, that kind of thing. Where you would think about a big brand or you would think about a car or you think about a fashion brand or something like that. A lot of that stuff was highly visual, usually Flash-based at the time because that was how they could control and do the whizzy things and to use that awful phrase, "create experiences." Man, if I see another web design company that says they "create experiences," I'm going to go... can I say "punch them in the face" on your show? Um, I don't mean that literally.

Jen

You can say that. [Andy laughs] I don't know what other words to use. I agree with you, anytime anything becomes trite and part of a brochure it gets annoying. But I feel that is what it is. It is about creating an... it's hard to pin this stuff down because it's not necessarily reading. It's not necessarily watching a video. It's not necessarily listening to a podcast. It could be any of those things, right? So we need these generic words. I feel like we're not thinking enough about creating experiences. We're thinking about drawing rectangles on a 960 grid and deciding which teasers and which hero graphics go in which slide, but what about the experience of the whole thing? What about, back up from the 960 grid and hero graphic boxes and go back to, like, why does someone come to your website at all? What is it you're putting out into the world? Are the design decisions that you're making really honoring the thing that you're building in the first place and putting out into the world in the first place?

Andy

What do people coming onto your site... what's going to go into that hero graphic, for one thing? Who decides, and how do you decide, on the message that you're communicating to a potential customer, for example? How do you, for example, to use my website, why do we decide that a bunch of apes in our header is a good idea? What's the story behind that? What's the message that we're telling our customers? We have a new header in the works, we're just about to commission Josh Koerner to do another illustration for us. It will take us 2 or 3 months just to get it out there but we already have a plan for what we are presenting through that new header. And that's linked to some new copy that we're writing, it's linked to a whole new message, it's linked to the fact that we are focusing on creative work as a studio. And we're not focusing on what everybody else says that they're focusing on. It's all part of creative thinking. It's got nothing to do with user experience. It's got nothing to do with the actual experience itself. It's got to do with, what is the story that I am telling my customer? How am I... I hate the word "engage". [Both laugh] How am I drawing, how am I getting that customer's attention, or potential customer's attention? How do I make them understand what I am saying within a glance because we know that people have a short attention span? And to make them smile and to make them think, "These are cool guys to work with." Now, that to me, that's creative work. That's got nothing to do with creating an experience or whether or not the machinery of my website works. That's the kind of thing that I'm getting at, and that's the kind of thing that fell between the cracks when I spoke to Jeremy. Because Jeremy got very adversarial when I started talking about advertising. Because, like many people, me included, the method of putting advertising in front of people is often objectionable. It interrupts you. This is what he got fixated on. It interrupts you when you're watching TV, it interrupts you when you get a spam email, it interrupts you when... we have this, the BBC iPlayer?

Jen

Yeah.

Andy

Which is fabulous, absolutely fabulous for catch up TV. We have the iTV, the independent television one, which you don't pay a license fee for. It's paid for by advertising, as independent television is in the UK. And it makes the thing unusable. I just can't bare to watch it because you can't skip the damn ads. I buy TV shows on iTunes so I don't have to watch the ads. It's not that I love the mechanism for delivering adverts [laughs]. What I love is the creative thinking that goes into them. What are the guys doing in that beer ad? Clever imagery, copywriting, that kind of thing. Jeremy was talking about how corrupt advertising is in terms of potentially selling things or helping to sell things that are objectionable. Cigarettes included, for example. But you have to admire the creative work that goes into... if you think about the classic Marlboro ads, or you think about, particularly in the UK, had some fabulous cigarette advertising in terms of Benson & Hedges and John Black. Back in the 70s and early 80s, I think, before they banned cigarette advertising. You have to admire the work. Because the work was people going, "That's really clever." Or, what they might do is, they might see an ad today for confused.com, which is an insurance comparison website with a stupid robot. And you want to smash it with a hammer because it's a really terrible idea and really badly implemented. It's about getting people to connect, I suppose. But the creative work, the creative thinking, that's not what we do on the web. And it's not the voices that we hear. All we hear about, day in and day out, is user-experience-this and user-experience-that and it's completely drowning out the idea that actually we should be thinking in a different way.

Jen

I worked in theater for quite a few years. Designing shows, producing shows. Some of them a small role in a big project, some of them all the roles on small projects, and I feel like that's where I approach design from. Is from a completely other industry, completely other field, completely other process, and there is something about, what does it mean to do a lighting design for a play, a classic play? Or to do video projection design with a team for an opera about Nikola Tesla, which we worked on for 3 and a half years? We wrote our own software to do these projections and we had 7 channels of video, 4 computers. Well, 5 computers at first, 1 computer later, 4 projectors. Inventing the medium, inventing the techniques, inventing the ideas about how to... what were we going to put on the screen and why? What would that do for the audience? How would that help everything else that was going on in the opera? How would that help with the costumes and the set? What would happen with the libretto? The music of course was central, the video projections were on the side, so how did our work augment their work? There's a whole way in which that kind of design... you're not serving your own personal... to me, it's not art in the way that, I'm an artist and I'm painting a painting because you're not free to do anything you want, you're serving a larger group. You're serving that I think a way a designer serves a client or a client's project.

Andy

Well, that's exactly what it is.

Jen

And clients' users. But there's something there that is very much like, ok. We're standing in a field in Croatia trying not to walk into the places where there might be land mines left from the war. With cameras, shooting, trying to figure out, "What are we going to shoot?" We haven't decided what we're going to do with any of this footage but there is Nikola Tesla's house and there's the church that his father was the pastor of. This is where he grew up. Let's just shoot as much of this as we want and then we'll go to Belgrade tomorrow and we'll go to the Nikola Tesla museum and we'll shoot all the stuff over there. Then we're going to take all of that footage, we're going to go home, we had like, I don't know, 100 hours of footage or something. And we just sat there for a couple of years [laughs] and played around with it, messed around with it, what do we want to do, you try this, you try that, you play with this, you play with that. That kind of creative process or artistic endeavor or pursuit of creating a moving moment, an experience for the audience to have. None of which can be confirmed in any sort of way until you get to opening night and you stand behind the audience opening night in the back of the theater and you just feel the room. You feel how people react and then you just kind of know. You don't know in a logical way, you didn't walk around with a sociological survey of the audience and blahty blah, you just are like, "Ah, that did work!" Or like, "Yeah, that didn't work so well." That kind of artistic design process I feel like, it’s been a long time since I've felt that on the web or experienced that on a web project.

Andy

Jeremy was talking about whether or not the sort of creative expression that I was trying to explain was because I should have been an artist rather than a designer. And I don't feel that's the case. I feel that actually you do put some of yourself, whether it's your own preferences or your own taste, that does get transferred into your work. I mean, that has to, there's no other way that a designer can not leave pieces of themselves behind.

Jen

Yeah, it does, even when you're trying not to. It's there. Your fingerprints are all over your work.

Andy

I came from an art school background and a lot of friends at the time, and some people now that I know, are artists. And of course they're not constrained by budgets or time or client preferences or any of the practicalities that, as a designer, we have to face. It's not about expressing, necessarily, my own idea about something. It's actually thinking about solving the client problem but it's solving a different problem, perhaps. That's how we should be thinking about it. Because, you know, you talk about this photographic image that you just painted there. Well, if you are selling a car, doesn't matter whether this is online or on TV or whatever, you will be presenting that product in a certain way. Now, do you present that product in one location or another? Do you present it lit one way or another? DO you present that set of headphones stuck on the top of an elephant? [Laughs] I'm just making this stuff up as I go along. [Jen laughs] Elephants might appreciate beats, perhaps.

Jen

Right. [Laughs] No, you're right, even the way you light it. You could light something in a very shiny, on hard-edges and, like, "Bam! Bam! Zoom! Zoom! Look at this thing!" Or you could light it very soft and more romantic and like, "Ooo, it's like this," kind of thing. Just with the lighting alone you're making a decision that gives an impression and that impression conveys a message.

Andy

Exactly, and it's conveying that message which is important. That comes down to marketing, potentially, certainly marketing messages. What image you chose, will give people a totally different impression than potentially another image that you chose. Putting that together with, for example, copywriting, so that we are really delivering that message. We're talking about tag lines, we're talking about clever, creative copy. Where does that stuff come from? Ok, we might say, well, that's somebody else's job to create.

Jen

But to have those things created very separately is part of what's wrong and part of what doesn't work about web projects, I feel like.

Andy

I think so. I think so.

Jen

And when those people, and they might be different people, because different people have different skills and if you have a big budget you've got a big team, but maybe it's the same person. But they should be able to work together and really collaborate in the way that people collaborate in theater. You've got your costume person and your set person and your lighting person and they're all very separate and yet they have meetings together, they work together, they see each other's work, they share their samples. You've got the director who's overseeing the whole vision and then you put it all together on stage and everybody keeps changing what they're doing through what's called "tech week." There's a week when you actually just load everything onto the stage and things get adjusted and changed and especially the timing of things or the ordering of things or the beats. Does this come on fast or does this happen slowly? Those kinds of things get fine-tuned. But they're only fine-tuned when all the pieces are together. You can't do those separately. It's a bit of a dance.

Andy

Sometimes we're lucky enough to work on big budget projects. A lot of the time we don't work on big budget projects. We work on the same kind of level jobs as anybody else, so we are our own marketing team, if you like. To give you an example, and we're going to be starting a job in a few weeks for a really lovely guy. I met him last week and he runs a development shop and freely admits that the logo he has on the site is something that he kind of cobbled together many years ago and it stuck but he knows that it needs work. The website itself is pretty much a template. It served the purpose for awhile but he needs something different. What we were talking about last week was not necessarily the branding, we weren't talking about graphic design, because sometimes people would say, "Ah, but what you're thinking about is graphic design." Well, it isn't. Graphic design plays a part but it isn't what I'm talking about.

Jen

You're talking about the thing that happens before the graphic design.

Andy

What I'm talking about, and what I'll be sitting down with this guy in a couple of weeks and talking about is, listen. How are we going to present you so that people that visit your site, whether they're referred to you by somebody else or whether they're coming to you cold, leave with the impression, not only that you know what you're doing and that you can take care of their projects for them, because everybody's going to say that. Every development shop is going to say more or less the same thing. Every development shop is going to do pretty much the same job of presenting past projects, you know, thumbnails with a description underneath it. But how do we present a different message? How do we give the user or the customer the impression of your personality? What do we say there? Is there a picture of a banana on the front of the homepage? Why is that banana there? What is that banana actually saying? How does that banana play into some clever wordplay that draws people in? That kind of thing. Could we use that banana in another medium? Does that banana go onto banana... this has nothing to do with bananas, by the way, don't know where bananas came from. [Both laugh] But that kind of creative thinking, and it's, to me, you would use the web as just another medium alongside everything else that they're using. I think one of the issues is that people are... when I started working on the web, that's how I thought about it. I'd come from print, come from advertising, and the web was another way of presenting content, albeit slightly different. Today I think that people think that the web is much more of a product. Much more of a technical challenge in terms of building. I mean, people do refer to product design all the time. I even see people that have "digital product designer" as their job title. And at the end of the day, that's something different. That's something very different. What I'm talking about is, why are we doing that? Where does that idea come from? What's making somebody... what's going to draw somebody in and make them really excited, with that kind of clever combination of different elements? And that's the kind of thing that I admire about advertising. I admire the clever imagery and I admire the clever wordplay and the way that things all fit together inside a strategy. How we then use them on the web, well, that's a different matter. but we mustn't forget that those things must exist. Because otherwise, what's my friend going to end up with? Am I going to go to him, and I can say, "We're going to design you a new logo and we're going to put some clever layouts together." And we'll probably talk about, "What would your users expect to come onto the website and find?" That's always the first question, isn't it? "What are your users looking for? Because we need to make sure that we have that." Ok, maybe we do need to make sure that they have that. But as well as them sucking up information we are actually giving information. It's as much a 2 way thing as anything else. And people forget about this when they start banging on about user experience or putting the user first. It's like, you know what, sometimes the user doesn't come first, because it ain't a free world. It ain't a fair world. Sometimes we have a message that we need to tell people. And whether they like that message or not, well, that's down to them. But sometimes that's what we have to do. And that's what I'm going to be doing with this guy. To hell, at the beginning, with "What do his user's expect?" We'll come to that. We want to be going, "Why are we different? What are we saying to our customers?" That is going to really drag them in. Does that make any sense?

Jen

It does and I'm thinking of 2 things at once. One is the splash page. Remember the era of splash pages?

Andy

Yeah, I do.

Jen

[Laughs] And for anybody who missed it, this was back in the 90s where, when you went to a website usually there was basically no quote-unquote content on the front page. The homepage. The homepage was, sometimes it was just a graphic, sometimes it was music, like music would start playing. And in the era of the Flash movies, it was an intro movie that you had to, like...

Andy

"Skip intro."

Jen

... Like wait through this, it was like a 1 minute or a 30 second or it felt like 5 minute long little preview film. Kind of like the things at the very beginning of a film-film, where they're like, showing you the logo for the production company and you have to watch these things before you get to the film. It was almost like that, a little, "Zoop, zoop zoop," and then people would put buttons to skip them because they were really annoying and they drove us all crazy. But even before Flash, lots of times the homepage was simply 5 or 8 big buttons that would take you to the next... it was just navigation. All that you would get was a big graphic with navigation. And there was a lot of thought put into, "What kind of art do I want to put here? Do I want music? Do I want animation? What buttons are going to go here? What's my first impression going to be? I'm going to give a first impression, and then I'm going to let people go to content on the website." And clearly that was bad. I'm not advocating the return of splash pages.

Andy

Really not. No.

Jen

[Laughs] No. And neither are you. But there was something there where, as creators, and this is where I think we got to user experience being such an emphasis, because the clients always wanted to make an impression first and then present the stuff that people came for. It took us a decade, two decades, to try to tell people, "It's not all about you and it's not all about you making an impression first. It's about what those other people need. No, we're not going to do be a minute and a half long Flash introduction that everybody has to watch, every time they go to your website. You're going to drive people away." But in that very wise shift away from splash pages, perhaps we also lost something else. Maybe there was something in there about making a first impression and really thinking through and crafting and shaping what it is that people experience when they come to your page for the first time, without getting in their way of getting to what they want. Without making it hard for them. But making it fun or exciting or easy or simple or peaceful or whatever the impression is that you want. And that experience could be different. For this site, it's peaceful and for this site, it's exciting, because those are two different projects with two different purposes.

Andy

I think if you boil it down to the actual mechanics of it, then you sometimes miss the point. Splash pages themselves were inherently bad. [Laughs] They may have been very good at creating an impression, but, you know...

Jen

The impression was usually, bad. [Laughs]

Andy

Exactly. And everybody sort of famously hit the "skip intro" button because they did want to get to where they wanted to go, they didn't want to be interrupted. I can just imagine Jeremy Keith thinking that my idea for this kind of resurgence of creative work is somehow calling for, I kind of liken it to advertising, is somehow calling for a return to something which basically just gets in people's way or gets up people's noses. And that's exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about. That was swinging really too far. What it was, for anybody that doesn't remember it, because I remember why we did them and I remember why we enjoyed doing them. Is because we were hung up on the idea, clients were hung up on the idea, that somehow they were like a front cover of a brochure or a magazine or something like that.

Jen

Or a book.

Andy

Or a book. We hadn't quite realized that we should be treating the web in a slightly different way to everything else. Having said that, there were beautiful pieces of work. Just like those massive Flash websites that nowadays we would go, "God, could you imagine what it was like when there was Flash all over the web?" It would be a little bit like... I used to smoke a lot. I haven't smoked now for three and a bit years.

Jen

Nice.

Andy

But I can remember what it used to be like when you could smoke on the London Underground. [Jen laughs] Can you believe that? You couldn't smoke on the platform but there was a smoking carriage on the train. You think, "How the hell did people deal with that?" [Both laugh]

Jen

It's hard enough to breathe in the tube already.

Andy

Exactly. There's the same thing when, "How the hell was... how did people cope when the web was just big movie-style Flash sites?" Having said that, there was a lot of beauty and a lot of very, very, very good creative work that went into those kind of things. What was missing, was what was wrong, was that they were inappropriate. Often. Because they got in people's way. And splash screens were, you know, particularly inappropriate for the most part. What I'm not saying is that we should make something that's inappropriate. We certainly shouldn't want to be interrupting people or stopping them from doing what they're doing. But what we've lost along the way, somehow, is that emphasis on the marketing message. It's almost as if we've sort of forgotten that part. Maybe that goes on in different places. But in the conversations that we have in our corner of the web industry, we're not talking about that anymore. And we used to talk about those things. I can remember my first Cameron Moll, and others, talking very much about those kind of design principles and design ideas and why certain things were chosen in terms of the visual and what that meant to them. Jason Santa Maria was another one for explaining that kind of creative thinking very, very well. Maybe it's a generational thing but we don't hear voices that do the same thing. Not right now.

Jen

I should jump in here with a sponsor, I just remembered. Speaking of advertising.

Andy

Who's the sponsor?

Jen

Lynda.com is the sponsor today.

Andy

Oh, I love lynda.com.

Jen

Gosh, Flash. Yeah. So, right, Flash movies, evil. Why? Inaccessible, extremely hard to update, which was the worst part, slow, they're not going to work across all browsers at this point. Don't do it. But that said. [Laughs] One of the things that I really miss about that era is that it felt like there was more experimentation and more willingness to look at the webpage as a blank canvas and to say, "We've got this empty space. It's a three dimensional empty space with a timeline. It can be different states at different moments in time. Let's figure out something. Let's do something interesting in this space." It feels like at this point that we're just, probably temporarily, but we seem to be in this little era of, "Well, let's download Bootstrap, we know we're going to have a header graphic. We know we're going to have a horizontal list of links for our navigation. We're going to have three columns and we're going to have these boxes in these columns." It feels a bit like everybody just makes that assumption so quickly without even imagining anything else as a possibility. Some of what you're describing around, what is that being communicated? What is it that's being communicated as someone is coming to this page, the website, the webpage and doing stuff there? There's so many things that feels like it's just, they're just packaged and pre-packaged into this set of assumptions that, like, you're going to get that, it has to be that. That stuff is going to give off a certain kind of impression and you're stuck with it. There's nothing that you can do except convey that and that's a good thing to give off. Part of what I love about the web is that it really could be anything. It's more than a television set, it's more than a radio, it's more than a TV screen and a movie screen. It could be all those things and even more. Instead we're stuck in this blog, 960 layout shape where things load in this very specific way and they move in this very specific way.

Andy

Have you got Squarespace as a sponsor today?

Jen

Not today but we have many other times, yes.

Andy

Ok, phew. So they can cover their ears then. [Laughs] Friend of mine came to see me a couple of weeks ago and he showed off a prototype of a new site that he's designing for himself, he's a designer. This site looked really nice. It was technically accomplished and everything seemed to be in the right place. The typography was good, the layout was fine, and on the face of it, you'd think to yourself, that's a very tidy piece of work. But it was just a very tidy piece of work. Actually, what it looked like was a million and other Squarespace-derived websites. He wasn't building it on Squarespace but it was following very much that kind of aesthetic. The point that I'm making is not about the fact that he was following design trends. It was the fact that there was nothing in that design which said anything about him or his clients at all. It was purely a tidy piece of work and it had all the right things on it. I'm sure the contact form will work beautifully, I'm sure people will be able to browse his work and get everything that they need to get from it. But the thing was soulless. And it didn't have any of his personality. I really wanted to shake him and say, "Where is you in this? Where is your personality? Where is the experience that somebody's going to have when they work with you?" Because you're a fun person and I don't see fun in this design. What I see is just, safe. Predictable, tidy, design. Where everything is perfectly accomplished and perfectly usable and the web is Squarespace. And, hopefully, you know, he went away and rethink things. So hopefully I didn't make him cry because apparently that's what I do to people. [Laughs] But, there's nothing there. I want to shake other people up and say, "Listen. It's about much more than you are putting into it." And we need to push beyond this obsession with user experience or frameworks or process or whatever and get back to the thing that actually gives your design some soul. Because nothing that I've seen recently has had that. I think it's a shame, it's a real shame.

Jen

I mean, and it's not, I don't want to blame Squarespace. It's medium.com and it's... there seems to have been maybe in the last two years, a sort of... and I get it. I get it because there's responsive design and typography kind of hit at the same time. It's so overwhelming that it's just kind of like, look, if I can do anything that's responsive and have some kind of clean, simple typography then I'm winning. So let me just do those two things. I don't really know what to do, it's all so hard. Let me go look at what everybody else is doing, ok, let me do that.

Andy

People often follow trends. We've seen this before. Whether it was people copying Apple's aqua buttons so everything looked like jelly that led into the whole web 2.0 thing. That led into something else. And now things are... there is a design aesthetic. It's quite hard to design away from, for a lot of people. Particularly when they base their work on some kind of framework that takes care of things like vertical rhythm or button styles or something like that. There will always be that and I don't think that it's necessarily somebody's fault, it's quite understandable that they would fall back onto something which is comfortable. Because the alternative is to challenge yourself. That's what we need to do. We need to find some way that we put personality into these things. And the other thing I want to mention. I'm not sure how you are for time today. But I think that the other thing... we've talked about all of these kind of different facets that go into producing websites. And I agree with Jeremy, I think the whole kind of web applications thing is a nonsense. If it's on the web, it's a website, no matter what the thing actually is. But I think we also need to remember that not everybody works on the same kind of thing or with the same kind of clients. A lot of the people that talk about this sort of classical, so-called user experience and stuff, they do work at Twitter. They do work on digital products. A lot of my best friends work at Dropbox. They are designing a digital product, if that's what you want to call it and user experience and whether somebody understands how to use a product intuitively, that's a very, very important skill. It's a very important work that they do. But that's not what I do. And a lot of people, for example, when you read, you know, "Research is everything. You can't do anything without researching it first or testing it afterwards." Is a message that we often hear. Everything that's meaningful, therefore, has to be pulled apart. We've heard this spoken many times. For example, a lot of people that promote this kind if process, they work at organizations like, for example, Government Digital Services in the UK, which look after all of our government websites. Well, of course, if you're wanting to create a website that makes it incredibly easy to find out whether or not I should travel to Iraq in a few weeks, I don't want to be hit with any kind of emotional messages, thank you very much. I want to get to where I'm going, literally. [Laughs] Without being blown up. Not by the website. Or I want to pay my car tax or I want to pay my television license or do whatever. But I don't work on those kind of sites. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned about voices drowning out other voices. What we need in this industry is we need people that will talk about the creative work that they're doing, whether it be for small agency clients or independents like me or larger agencies. I want people to talk about that work at the same volume as we hear people talking about user experience, if you want to call it that. I want the magazines, I want net magazine, or A List Apart or Smashing Magazine, or any of these other, amplifiers, to amplify the creative voices to the same extent that they amplify that user experience voices. That's not to say that UX is bad and creative is wrong or there's some kind of dichotomy or some kind of religious battle between the two, because I don't believe that for a minute. But what I care about is that the creative voices get lost. That's my message for this. I think I've said that more eloquently today than I did on my own bloody show, which is always the way, isn't it?

Jen

[Laughs] Well, that's why I wanted you to come on, that's why I wanted to talk about this more. The thing that I haven't seen either in a long time but when I think about the web as a medium and what is it that made me drop all these other industries and come over to this industry - what is it that I wanted? - is, and I don't see it at all anymore, kind of experimental art projects. Experimenting. It used to feel like people were using their personal websites, their personal blogs, even before they were called blogs, as places to fuss around and discover what this medium is. Now it feels like... I mean, please, I'm the worst. If you go to jensimmons.com right now, it's the worst. It's the worst. [Laughs] So I understand this is both hard, time-consuming, and it just feels so risky. "I want to redesign my website, let me go at all the websites of all the great designers that I respect. They all have a lot in common, so those are the things I'm supposed to do. Let me do those things." But what about when Rhizome was hot? Rhizome.org? And you'd go over there and you'd see these kind of, this is a website that's a weird digital poem experiment and this is a website where they're using photography in this crazy way and digital photography, which at the time was really bad and low quality. Or the whole video blogging movement, which we're going to talk about next week on the show, experimental videos and projects where just, putting video on the web was already so hard that just getting it up there, this was not hulu.com, this was not even YouTube. This is before YouTube. Where did that go? I feel like that kind of experimental, cutting edge, pirate whatever, on the forefront, let's go do something crazy, have we just all gotten too busy to do that?

Andy

I'm talking to my friend Brendan Dawes on Unfinished Business tomorrow. Brendon, if you know him, does that kind of crazy stuff. He's like Johnny Ball, do you know who Johnny Ball is?

Jen

No.

Andy

He was like a... he was a TV presenter in the 70s and 80s that presented a lot of almost science programs for kids, about how things work. He was always really enthusiastic about, "Woo! Let's see how this works!" This sort of mega-curious character. Brendon is like that. Brendon is like, "What happens if I take data from my tweets and I process it in such a way and then output it to a 3D printer so that I actually have an object on my desk that represents my tweets for a certain day, versus another day? What happens if I connect all these unconnected things to find out what I can make?" And Brendon is a wonderful designer but he's also an artist. That kind of stuff could well be described as, in Jeremy's case, as thinking about self-expression. Thinking about curiosity. Having said that, aspects of that kind of work is what filters down into mainstream design work. There could well be a situation where depending on the campaign or depending on the client or depending on the message that you are doing, that, for example, video or... I don't know, what else? The kind of stuff that we think of as potentially experimental. That kind of stuff, actually, yeah, used in the right way and not gratuitously and not because you're self-absorbed or self-indulgent, that's not what we want. Splash screens were self-indulgent for the most part. People try to out-do each other on their complexity until they became award winning things in their own right, and no one had even got to the website yet. I think that kind of creative stuff can come into it. But the other thing that you mentioned there, that I think is a good point, and again I think Jeremy might agree on this - well, I know that he agrees - is we don't do enough on our own sites anymore. We don't take care of our own sites in that way that we used to. I know people still look after their own sites to a certain degree. But we tweet so much more, god forbid we start using something like Medium. And all of a sudden our own independent publishing... I think that we lose our voice, in a way, when we don't publish on our own sites. If we're publishing to our own sites that whole time, then we will want the design of those sites to reflect ourselves much more. I know that it's like when I don't write for awhile. Often because I think, [sigh] I mean this has happened to me in the past, where I think, "Do you know what? I really need to redesign my site. I don't feel like publishing there anymore." And the more you're on it, the more you're publishing, the more you think, "I need to improve this. I need to work on it. I need to make it more like me." We used to do that. If you think about our old blog designs, going back to 6, 7, 8, 10 years ago, whatever. They were expressions of personality. In that case, they're expressions of our own personality, but we should be capable of expressing our client's personalities at the same time. And I don't think we do.

Jen

Yeah. CodePen came to mind along this. As far as playing. People use places like CodePen to play around with the technology and to say, "If I use this little bit of JavaScript and I use this little bit of CSS, here's a cool little technology experiment." But there's something more than that, that gets away from a little of, "Let me play with the toys and see what I can make." It gets more to, "Let me see if I can slightly alter the way we're using this medium to communicate."

Andy

I want to change the way that people think about things. CodePen is wonderful and other things do the same thing, I think. But that's very much like, "Ooo, blimey," it's technology driving the message.

Jen

Right.

Andy

We need to come back to actually figuring out what that message is at the beginning. It's why we are doing something. What are we choosing here? What are we saying to people?

Jen

Yeah, there's something about having a soul or having a center. I do think about... and part of me, I was talking to some friends about this before we started recording this morning, at the dog park. We were having a little bit of a debate about, are there more experimental projects being made on the web, designs that are just innovative and interesting? Art projects, even. Not technology experiments but art projects. Where there's actually a piece of work there in the middle and that it gets expressed in this certain kind of way. Like, are they out there, and we're just not passing around the links? When we go to Facebook, is that just my friends, that's not what they're posting on Facebook or on Twitter? Or is that work not getting created? And is it not getting created because nobody wants to make it? Is it not getting created because we're so busy figuring out what the big brands need or figuring out how to do a responsive layout for Condé Nast magazine? Or is it... I don't know. Has the whole world become so commercial and so much about commercial enterprises and delivering jobs to these big clients that have tons of money that we've lost the potential of the web itself?

Andy

I think that we've become... there are a number of things that have gone wrong over the last few years, in my mind. We've become obsessed with process and we've become obsessed with tools. That's because a lot of what we do, not that it's what anyone intended, but that's because a lot of what we do is actually created and driven by engineers. And now I'm going to get howls from people saying, "Yes, but engineers understand aesthetics, too." And pat on the head for that. But a lot of the tools that we use and the processes that we follow are driven by engineers. I started talking... this a couple of years ago now, it was the development of something that I'd been working on for awhile. I wrote a chapter in Smashing Book 3, it was. About the idea that we can design elements out of context of the overall layout. And I called this thing "design atmosphere," which was really to focus on typography and color and textual elements and treatments of elements outside of the context of layout. Because, you know, in a responsive world, it's the layout that changes. But the look and feel of things, the atmosphere, the personality, the feeling, the impression that you get from a design, that tends to stay the same across all devices and screen sizes, et cetera. We worked with that process very successfully because to me, it was about, "Can we really get clients to focus on the thing that we needed them to look at?" Which often was type. Often was things like color semantics, et cetera. Running parallel to that was... you put a sheet together that just deals with typography and some people will say, "That's like a style guide. Let's make style guides a design deliverable." And all of a sudden there's a shift. Again, I believe driven by engineers, implementers, or developers, towards making style guides and pattern libraries into a very repeatable form. Even to the extent that, for example, our friend Brad Frost when he takes those words and coins "atomic design," all of a sudden it becomes a process. Now what we've lost in that, and I think Mark Boulton also made a comment about this in terms of the fact that that makes web design more like manufacturing than it does about actual creation. I can't find the link to that right now but he said something very similar. To me, that's what we've done. We took an idea that was to do with communication and we turned it into a process that all of a sudden people go, "That's how we do responsive stuff now." All of a sudden it becomes formulaic. Things lack soul again. It becomes mass production. That, I think, is what's partly wrong with our industry. I think that what's also partly wrong with our industry is that we do become very focused on making sure that we're doing the right thing. We don't want to take risks. We want to research something to death. We want to test it to death, to make sure that we're doing the right thing. Often, I'm not talking about long term testing so you make sure that your buttons are in the right place, I'm talking about testing something to even create something. To know that you're going in the right direction. I don't need somebody to test something to tell me that I'm going in the right direction. I know when I'm going in the right direction. I may be wrong, but that's what testing will prove, but I know what I'm doing and I know what I'm trying to communicate. Where it's actually, you know, user testing at that stage as part of the design process, that is the ultimate delegation. It's the ultimate passing the buck. Where have we gone wrong? Where are the people that are actually brace enough to say, "I have a really clear creative direction for this and I think you're going to love it. And I think our clients are going to love it, too." Now that is spirit, it's soul. It's everything that we are not seeing in the majority of websites that get put in front of me. Now, I'm sure there's stuff going on out there in the world that Andy Clarke isn't aware of. So please send me the cool stuff. But that's my impression. Maybe the fault is because that kind of work, that kind of creative, I'm trying to think of another word to "process." But that kind of, that making, we don't hear about that and we should hear much, much more about that.

Jen

Yeah. Because I feel like we're in danger of shifting this whole medium and industry into something that's so commercial and so much more of a kind of formulaic, manufacturing process.

Andy

But it can be commercial. It can be commercial. It doesn't have to be about art, because I'm not talking about it in terms of making an artistic impression. Commercial stuff is incredibly important to me. Selling is incredibly important to me. Not just selling a product, but selling an idea. Getting somebody excited enough so they actually want to buy your product or invest their time in doing whatever it is. It doesn't necessarily have to be buying a product, it can be using a service. It cane be Flickr, for example. I'm still much more emotionally attached to Flickr, believe it or not, than I ever have been to Instagram, despite the fact that I use Instagram more. It can be commercial. We're in a commercial industry, we're making things for clients for money. It's not art that we hope somebody will buy six months down the line. We're making something for a fee and there are all kinds of influences that go into what we make. It's commercial in the fact that, actually, there's a bottom line there, that the client needs to improve often by selling more things or getting more users or getting more signups or whatever. So it is commercial. It's not about the art. But to do the commercial right, you have to have soul. You can't have a webpage or a website which is perfectly functional that does every single thing right, that doesn't have soul. Because you're not going to sell.

Jen

You brought up testing and data and I feel like that's another, that is a thing that I keep saying. And I've had people on the show to come talk about data and testing and research. But I feel like I'm at a place where I'm ready to start to say, "Look, this is really disturbing me." A little bit, great. Do some research of course. Do a little bit of testing, ok. But the way in which our devices are collecting massive amounts of data about us. Facebook and Google and these other corporations are just collecting huge amount of data about our buying trends and about our habits and the way we live our lives and what time we go to sleep and all this stuff. They're selling it to major, massive corporations so that those corporations can pitch us goods, can supposedly design things for us, can figure out what we want, figure out how to get it to us, and figure out how to get our money in exchange for it. And I don't like that. I don't want to see the whole web industry say, "Yes, we should go get data sets like that from clients who've bought them and we should use those in our designs and have that drive our design process." That's one. I really have a problem with that. And then the other is, I think about, you want to know another industry that uses testing because they're risk-adverse and they want to mitigate risk and they want to take what would be an amazing, creative, artistic endeavor and turn it into something that's responding to testing and not to great experience, a creative person's, an artist's experience, life experience, being an artist? Is Hollywood. You'll see Hollywood do that. They'll have a multi-million dollar budget. They'll shoot, direct, edit a feature film and then they'll test the heck out of it. Put it in front of test audiences, change the ending, change the way it's cut, make decisions about what that film should be based on how it tests. Then put that film out there into the universe in the end. I think that some of the best work that gets made, the breakthrough work, the work that the studio executives maybe would have been way too afraid to do, but somebody else comes along and they take the risk, they put the money together, frequently has a much smaller budget because they can't get the budget because it's too risky. And they just do something amazing. Frequently, amazing that ends up winning awards, that ends up turning the whole industry, that ends up everybody is then trying to copy them and everybody's trying to be them in the next three years later. But they refuse to test. Louis C.K. is a great example of this. Louis C.K. made this television show called "Louis," tiny budget, he went with a certain, with FX, the television network, because they would give him complete and total creative control. They didn't even get to watch it before it aired. [Laughs] He would deliver each episode to them and they'd get to watch it and then just put it on the air. There was no changing it. There was no, they coming back to him and saying, "Hey, we don't like this." He didn't have to submit his scripts to them. He got to do whatever he wanted. And his show was absolutely amazing. I think if he had had to have that kind of back-and-forth, where the executives are saying, "No, we don't like it. We tested that, that didn't test very well. We think we need to change it this way, that way." He never would have been able to make the piece that he made. So I think testing is dangerous. It's not to say we should never do it, it's just to say, I think we should understand the complexity of it and we should look at these other industries and we should realize that too much of it is a very bad thing.

Andy

Well, you know what you've done now. Because you started talking about films. [Jen laughs] And you know what comes next, don't you? You know what comes next.

Jen

Planet of the Apes? [Laughs]

Andy

I'm not sure how you even guessed.

Jen

How did we get from where I was to Planet of the Apes?

Andy

Because you started talking about films and there's only one film that matters this year. [Jen laughs] I don't care whether they remake Gone with the Wind, which is my favorite film of all time, by the way. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, out July 17th, kids. I can't wait. Cannot wait.

Jen

Do you them to just make the best movie they possibly can make, or do you want them to make a good movie and then test the heck out of it and change it based on the testing results?

Andy

I want the director and the writers to make the film that they wanted to make. Sometimes that works incredibly well and people will like it and sometimes it won't work incredibly well. I'm thinking about Ridley Scott and I'm thinking about Prometheus for example, which was a film that I was looking forward to immensely and hated.

Jen

Sometimes it bombs. Louis C.K.'s first television show was not nearly as good as his last one. [Laughs] His current one.

Andy

Some people will say, "Well, it's not your money, Andy. When you're designing for a client, they can't afford for you to make mistakes." That's not to say that you need to throw the baby out with the bathwater but what I mean is that kind of passion and understanding and experience, and I think people have called it genius in the past, that's the thing that drives what you produce. You don't make something out of... it's a component of parts. As I think I've said before, you cannot iterate a bad idea into a brilliant one. That, I think, is one of the messages that potentially we need to spread. You and me. Let's be the vanguard of this.

Jen

Well, I do want people, if they have websites that they like, that they think are great examples of kind of stuff that we're talking about, they should email me or tweet at me and point me the links. Because I would really like to know about them. I would love to check them out. jensimmons.com/contact or @jensimmons on Twitter or @thewebahead on Twitter. Because I do, I have this open question of like, "Did we lose the moment where we could do great, weird, artistic experiments and try stuff out and it's gone?" Or is it totally happening and I just don't know about it because I'm too focused on whatever.

Andy

I want to hear from people either through you or through Unfinished Business or Twitter or whatever. Sites that people think are fantastic, have fantastic marketing messages. That really communicate their purpose incredibly well. That have soul. Send me websites that have soul. And I don't mean pictures of David Soul, because that would be bad. I never want to hear, "Don't give up on us, baby," ever again. [Jen laughs] It was a sad and potentially desperate move, I think. Although it was commercially successful. I can sing it if you want because I do know all the words. [Jen laughs] [Sings] "But don't give up on us, baby..." No, I'm not even going to go there. So not David Soul. Or not even De La Soul. No, I don't want that. I don't want that at all. I don't want funk soul brothers.

Jen

That's the other industry that's going kind of nuts and not sticking to people's artistic vision or just going on people's real guts, real creative guts, is the music industry. Things become formulas, these songs, like, "If we have this kind of beat and we have this kind of tempo and we have this kind of thing in the middle then it will be a pop song, it will be great and we'll sell a ton of it. So we'll hire one of these and one of those and we'll get some cute kid and we'll do this," and boom, like, look we have a song manufacturing system that makes lots of money. That's a way to go. That's a choice. You're not going to get the kind of amazing, music, just, revolutions that happened in the past, that happened back in the 60s and 70s of the rock bands that came out then. Or the kind of weird funk, crazy stuff that happened in the 80s or the amazing music that was coming out in the 20s and 30s. You don't get that kind of real innovation and a new part, a new thing, of what's possible with the medium or just great, something that moves people, that makes people feel.

Andy

That's the kind of music that I like. [Laughs]

Jen

Formulas?

Andy

I do, I do, I love it. I love a good Stock Aitken Waterman. Always have.

Jen

Hey, it works. [Andy laughs] I guess I'm sounding kind of snooty and I shouldn't be, I don't want to sound snooty, but there's a way in which I think this sort of testing-driven decisions can be very dangerous. They've got Google testing shades of blue and stuff.

Andy

That's the famous and logical conclusion to, I think, what is a wider problem in our creative approach, our approach to creative work in the web right now. Let's get inspired again and produce things that have soul.

Jen

Well, I'm working on my website. I really mean it, that I'm going to launch something, kind of weird and crazy, so... we'll see. In bits. One step at a time. Because it is, it's a lot of work now. It used to be you could do something crazy in two days and now it takes two months. But thank you for being on the show. I think we've said enough, I think we're out of time. But this was really interesting. I wanted to kind of try to get at this, even though we don't even have the right words for it. All the words, they've been taken up. You can't use the word "experience," you can't use the word "creative," you can't use the word "art," all those words are already being used.

Andy

You can't use the word "visual," "visual" is an interesting one, too. People talk about "visual" design. So yeah, it is. The vocabulary that we have, I think, we need to design that as much as need to design anything else. [Jen laughs] Thank you for having me on.

Jen

Yeah. And next week, I do have three people coming on to talk about the video blogging movement, back when things were kind of weird and wacky. So we'll reminisce about that. And if people are not subscribed, they should subscribe to the show. You can go to iTunes or you can go to whatever kind of podcasting app/RSS feed catcher thingy you want to. It's free. Check it out. Thanks for listening.