My most recent podcast interview
In my most recent post, I wrote that there was a new podcast on the way. Well my last post was 3 months ago and the podcast interview occurred around the same time. This time it was me who was the subject and former Burson colleague Allie Osmar, of the blog/podcast The Creative Career, who was the interviewer.
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Wow! What an interesting week it has been. At Burson-Marsteller (B-M), we just completed the first Digital In Action program at our offices here in NYC. Just to provide a bit of context, Digital In Action is an intense, 2 day seminar aimed at helping B-M employees from disciplines across the company to be able to apply Digital to the way they help their current rosters of clients.
While the first phase of digital training that took place in early 2007, Digital Bootcamp, was designed to bring everyone in the company up to speed with the new digital landscape, Digital In Action took those efforts to the next logical step in showing them how to apply that knowledge to the way they help their clients. In other words, phase I was “this is a Wiki/blog/social network” while phase II was “here are the tools you need to go out and put all of this new knowledge in action.”
It was a great 2 days. I had the pleasure of being a faculty member and team leader for the 2 day session and the group I led was so inspired, they immediately began work on a digital action plan they hope to propose to an existing client within the next 2 weeks! What’s remarkable about this is that these individuals are not from our digital practice. They are traditional PR, advertising and communications professionals who work within B-M. Many of whom began their careers prior to the start of the Internet age.
This week’s program was the first of many to come. Eventually these sessions will be rolled-out globally within B-M. I’m excited about the change we can bring and the prospect of really helping to shape B-M so that the company can help define modern PR in the 20th century just as it did in the 20th century. Judging by the level of excitement generated this week within the company, I have no doubt that will happen.
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Wow! It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged! And the perfect first thing to get me blogging again is this video (I stumbled upon it on David Armanios’ blog, Logic + Emotion), where a couple is breaking up over dinner. More specifically, the woman (who represents “consumers”) is breaking up with her boyfriend (who represents “advertisers” and definitely traditional advertising in general).
This video is hilarious! Especially the part where the smarmy advertiser insists “What do you mean I don’t know you? I know you, you’re 28-34…” or “I know what you want….. COUPONS!”
Oh, and I can’t forget to mention that one of the most remarkable things about this video is that the creator is a Trade Marketing Manager for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions!
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I saw this on the Mashable blog earlier today and instantly was hooked. OnMyList allows you to create your own top 10 (or whatever the number) lists that you can share with others and allow them to vote or comment on.
Here are my top 5 lists for vacation destinations and favorite sports teams.
More to come!
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The other day, the creative director at my company who is my counterpart on the print design side overheard a discussion between me and our digital senior art director and blurted out “You web guys have it sooooo easy!”
When we asked him why, he replied “You don’t have to spend so much time dealing with typography, kerning, widows, etc. because that stuff is not possible on the web.” Of course, our digital AD shot back “You print guys have it easier than we do because what ends up on the printed page is the same for everyone whereas we have to deal with varying monitors, fonts, browsers and bandwidth.”
Of course, being the only one of us three who has spent at least 8-9 years in the print world and then also in the interactive world (3 of those years overlapped the two worlds), I can honestly say there are unique challenges that designers in both worlds face. Having said that, I would say designers who design for the digital space have it a bit harder. Here’s why.
Designing for a moving target
Every designer, regardless of which medium they design for, faces their own unique sets of challenges. However interaction designers must also design for a medium in which the technology, expectations and user habits change every six months or so. Just think about some of the assumptions about user behavior from not even 7-8 years ago that were accepted as fact as far as the web is concerned:
There is much we know about how humans interact with the printed word on a page. While habits are shifting, we know a great deal about how humans interact with the medium of television. But just when we think we have human interaction on the internet pegged, a shift occurs. The increase in broadband access has created shifts in human behavior on the web that has turned what was once accepted conventional wisdom on its ear.
5 years ago, who could have predicted the YouTube phenomenon?
Who would have imagined, back in 2000, that Steve Jobs would become a major influence in the music industry?
Who would have imagined that on Friday at lunch hour in cubicles across America, employees would inhale sandwiches at their desks while catching up on “Grey’s Anatomy” on the web — for free?
And yet during this sea of constant change, interactive designers are expected not only to stay one step ahead of the curve but to do great work in the process. Of course, advances in browser technology and the movement of a great many web designers and web developers to adopt web standards has allowed web designers to exert more and more “print-like” features to HTML text than previously imagined, like leading (known as line-spacing), hanging bullets in list items, indented copy and initial caps.
Lovely web page design. Will it look just as good on my Blackberry?
Where this becomes tricky for the web designer is that the web is all about putting the control of the display of content into the hands of the user, rather than the designer. I have to admit, the print designer in me struggled with this for a long time. Print designers get paid to control the final display of printed content. Every copy of every printed material should look alike. The ink coverage, color intensity, registration and trapping on the very first brochure out of the carton had better look the same as the ink coverage, color intensity, registration and trapping on the very last brochure out of the carton or there will be hell to pay.
In the web world, while there needs to be a certain degree of uniformity of colors and layout, the expectation is that depending on which system and browser a user is on, that content will differ. The print designer in me saw this as a huge drawback until I saw the opportunity in it: the ability to deliver unique, interactive content to users on the web! You go from “Sh*t, what he sees on his computer is not exactly the same as what she sees on her computer” to “YES! What he sees on his computer is not exactly the same as what she sees on her computer!”
When I was doing print, how cool would it have been to offer up personalized brochure content for each user who viewed it, depending on their tastes, region or buying history? Better still, how cool would it be to simply and inexpensively tailor this content to be viewable by the visually-impaired? Those on mobile devices?
Today, we do that by lunch time.
Of course, being a print designer is no picnic either. 8 years ago, when I made the move 100% into the interactive world and left the print world behind for good, one of the things I was glad to leave behind was the late night press run. Or the inevitable call you get from a client, 2 months after printing thousands of materials, that a phone number has changed or a team member has left or changed positions and that now we must find a way to reflect these changes without incurring the costs of re-printing everything again.
And it’s not like printing technology has stood still in the last 10 – 15 years either. Digital and database-driven, short run printing has changed the way designers approach projects today as well. And certainly knowing that some things are probably better tackled on the web has changed the rationale for what gets printed and in what quantities.
Be that as it may, as a designer for the web I realize that what I’m really designing is human interaction on the web. And the only thing I know is that in 6 months — and most certainly in 6 years — a lot of what I accept as standard practice today will be changed. And I have to keep up with all of it, or start driving a cab.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
