A Rain of Frogs

While doing some routine purging and closet cleaning, he came across the box. It was a plain enough looking box, sort of a tan color, and slightly smaller than a shoe box. It had no markings or notable features, just a lid that flipped back to reveal its contents.

And so he opened it. No ills nor hard toils escaped, no heavy sickness leapt from the box. What fell out were a multitude of small silk-like ribbons.

1st place. Winner. Champion. These were ribbons he had won as a child, dozens of them. Not all of them were first place ribbons. Some were secon place ribbons, some third place, even one sixth place ribbon. But the vast majority of them were 1st place prizes.

He had earned these ribbons in games of endurance and fitness and sportsmanship. He had won chess tournaments, science fairs and public speaking contests. Some of the ribbons were academic achievement awards, and others were awards of recognition for public service.

Like the box suddenly opened, he discovered the child he had once been. And he promised himself he would never let that child be lost in the bustle of life again.

Hope in the form of childhood ribbons had sprung from the box.

Her mother would be horrified by the flowered apron she wore over the suit she had worn to the office today. Even more so by the matching oven mitts, no doubt. But this didn’t stop Cordelia from poring over the Joy of Cooking, nor did it stop the sweet smell of success from escaping the oven door and infusing the entire loft.

Her mother had been a card-carrying feminist – had burnt bras and protested. She’d been a single mother, and had raised her daughter to be a strong-willed, impressive woman that would take no grief from any man.

And she hadn’t. She was a successful lawyer, one of the most respected in town, and she had built her practice from the ground up into a profitable business that afforded her and her husband with this very impressive condo. Calling it a loft was a bit inaccurate – it was bigger than most people’s houses.

And yet here she was, in the kitchen, and “slaving over a hot stove.” She wanted to get this meal done, but more importantly she wanted to get it right. Her mother would roll over in her grave if she heard this (and if she were dead), but most of all, she loved the look of appreciation in her husband’s eyes when she cooked him a dinner he loved.

That’s right, this strong, proud, successful woman, the daughter of a hard-core feminist, liked cooking for her man.

But she’d never be able to explain that to her mother. Her mother wouldn’t understand. She’d only see Cordelia chained to the stove – and her husbands wishes.

She’d never understand how feminism had taken the kitchen away from women. And not just the kitchen. It had taken away stay-at-home mothering. And that was the key thing. Feminism had vilified being a woman!

Screw that, thought Cordelia as she fussed over the salad. Feminism could kiss her ass. She wasn’t cooking because she had to, she was cooking because she wanted to, because she enjoyed it. Because she chose to. And she wasn’t alone. Many of her friends, each successful business women in their own right, had expressed the same sentiment.

Feminism had taken away choice, and she wasn’t standing for it any more.

She was proudly taking the kitchen back.

I just found a list of design principles that the BBC has adopted to help guide the development of web properties. The list represents some very good thinking, and is presented in its entirety below (as per item 13):

The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles

We developed these as part of the BBC2.0 project. I’ve been meaning to publish them for a while since they were signed off by the BBC board. They’re perpetually draft.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.
6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users.
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site.
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale.
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.

I am so tired of this question. Does anyone else find it repulsive?

Does one’s career define the sort of person one is? Does being an accountant guarantee one will also be boring and introverted? Does being a musician and graphic designer automatically make me some nouveau-bohemian coolster?

I haven’t travelled much, but I am lead to believe this question is uniquely North American, and that Europeans wouldn’t have the audacity to ask something so tactless and ultimately meaningless.

How about we start asking more meaningful questions, like “What’s important to you?” or “What are you when you’re NOT an accountant?”

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”

– Lau Tzu

I was recently given the opportunity to demonstrate my graphic design skills by submitting to CSS Zen Garden. At first, I considered this a good way to demonstrate design ability – working with a known quantity, designing for a well known and relatively respected institution in the web-design sphere.

But something – a quiet voice – kept nagging at me. Something about this was wrong. It wasn’t that the whole procedure felt like working on spec, because it most certainly didn’t feel like that – I never would work on spec. It was a deeper flaw, one I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and as time passed, I became more and more bothered by it until suddenly I wrapped my head around it.

CSS Zen Garden isn’t about design. It never has been, and never will be.

Design is about message. It is about presenting information in a way that maximizes its meaning and impact. It is about content, first and foremost. Yes, design has a strong aesthetic component – it taps into communal cultural references to strengthen and focus message. But this aesthetic component – style – is too often mistaken for design.

Content cannot be separated from design. The two are intertwined, woven together to create something larger than the sum of its parts. Style plays a part, but style must be subordinate to design. Style must be subordinate to meaning and clarity

It is style that CSS Zen Garden is all about. It is about the look of the message, not the message. The entire purpose of the site is to educated web developers that style can be separated from content. That the meaning of the content is irrelevant to the meaning of design. CSS Zen Garden mistakes style is for design, and a whole generation of web designers has “grown up” worshipping at the altar of the false gods of style.

When it was introduced, the CSS Zen Garden was conceived of to help educate those who build the web about new techniques for crafting websites. It was created to evangelize standards-complaint web site creation. And as a vehicle for demonstrating to less savvy decision makers how style and content can be separated – how web site style can be updated without changing underlying HTML construction – it has been wildly successful.

But CSS Zen Garden is not about design. It demonstrates the styling abilities of those who submit stylistic interpretations of the site to its creator, but it does nothing to demonstrate design skill or knowledge. While it has been a valuable ally in the fight to make the web standards compliant, it has not promoted good design, and may have blurred the understanding between good style and good design.

HTML and CSS are our clay, web sites and applications are the pots we form. It is what is inside – the content, the message – that truly matters.