The Mechanical Turk

We have a client that is part of a large institution (both shall remain nameless to protect them). Like many in such cases, they’ve had a CMS thrust upon them. I won’t name the CMS, but you might be able to figure it out from this screenshot:

Behold in all its horror!

Look at this from a user’s perspective. OK, we’ve got a nested system of some sort. What are the radio buttons for? We can also delete “publication details” (notice the wastebasket at the right). Below the wastebasket is a tickbox. What does it do? And do you dare click it? How about the “temporary save” button—why is this not automatic, as in online apps such as GMail & Basecamp?

Let’s look at another example:

“Once more”? “Switch”? WTF?

This second screenshot comes from further down the page, from a list of publications. Clicking the “Switch” button lets you move the publication up or down the list; when you do this, the page reloads. It would reload every time you moved the position of the item (average page refresh time: 30 seconds).

Now imagine that you’re re-organising a list of, say, 20 publications so that the most recent publications come first in the list—a not uncommon task. Imagine that, previously, the publications were listed in order of publications (i.e., that the oldest one was first). To just move the latest publication, you’d have the page refresh 20 times. After each refresh, you’d have to scroll down the page to find the publication again so you could move it up one more position. Imagine that you have to re-order several pages’ worth of publications: now do it a million times!

After doing this for a couple of hours, finally imagine saying “Fuck it, it’s not worth the effort”. You have now reached the position of my client—and, indeed, the position of many people who have had CMSs thrust upon them.

A lot of things have gone wrong here. At my bitchiest I’d say that these screenshots showed the unholy marriage of Windows 1.0-style software design with all the flair of a Linux user interface. How did it come to this? Why was this software chosen? How do you get out of this situation?

I don’t have an answer to that last question, unfortunately—large institutions make their decisions on behalf of all departments & it takes years to move such a big ship. But I know how others can avoid this.

Let’s gain some perspective: CMSs became a big thing before the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. They were designed for the browsers of the day—Internet Explorer 4 & 5, perhaps even Netscape 4. Any web developer will tell you that these browsers are pretty limited—and that support of legacy browsers quickly reduces the options you have to design an intuitive interface, progressive enhancement techniques notwithstanding. So, CMSs were designed in an era when you couldn’t have asynchronously-updatable data on a page—yes, we’re talking AJAX here. In other words, many CMSs come from a less technologically-advanced world.

Mixed in with this is the glacier-like pace of large organisations in their technological adoption. Years ago I worked for a university & saw first-hand why the technological decision-making process took years: often for legitimate reasons. For example, if you are running a corporation with 10,000 computers, it takes a long time to produce all the tests necessary to ensure that you’re not going to bring down the entire corporate system in your enthusiasm to adopt new technology. Accordingly, many corporations start looking at tech products & it can take years for them to reach their decisions. (NB: many corporations are a lot better at making swifter decisions now, but it’s a rare academic institution that has matched this quicker pace.)

So let’s recap: many CMSs were originally built in a time when dinosaurs walked the earth & this is when large corporations might have begun eyeballing their products. Years go by, the corporation makes its (now dodgy) choice & then the corporations’ employees are stuck with the result for years to come—perhaps simply to justify a decision that cost millions of pounds even when that decision clearly was a bad one.

A major part of the problem is the decision-making process: after a certain cut-off point, no other options may be admitted. This is unfortunate (to say the least) because in the meantime blogging software has emerged not just as a niche player but as a robust solution—which solves many of the problems that CMSs were supposed to tackle. Publication control & template-based “unified” branding cross-site are allied with a significantly better interface. Moreover, many blogs allow for “static” pages (in this context, pages note defined by the date of the post but by their content). And while blogs may not automatically provide all the semantics required for, say, publications, most blogging software allows you to delve into markup to address specific concerns—or have plugins that would address the concern—or (as a last resort), you can tag content according to its semantic meaning. It’s a very good solution that solves 90% of the problems which CMSs were to address.

Now this doesn’t leave our clients in a good place—they still have to use a terrible CMS. My question is: why hasn’t the CMS vendor updated the working of its CMS? At the very least AJAX-based tools to move publications (as in the example way above) would ease so much of the pain. A less charitable person than myself would conclude that they don’t care that their software is so broken, so there is little impetus to fix it. A more charitable conclusion would be that they don’t realise that the software is broken. Perhaps when clients don’t renew their licenses they’ll wake up.

Steve Ballmer, chair-throwing CEO of Microsoft and

The Creature from Mel Brooks’
“Young Frankenstein”?

Update: Well, this is turning into something of a meme. One of the comments in the Fake Steve Jobs blog has a link to this awesome video:

I am very impressed.

It’s hardly a controversial position, but I don’t like spam. I really hate it, actually. Past email addresses eventually got so clogged that I had shut shut them down & create news just to regain sanity in my life. This approach is perhaps best called the “Slash and Burn” method.

But… you can’t deny that spam has come up with some wonderful things. Well, specifically, one: the spurious names that are appended to the “from” header. They consist of a combination of a couple of words taken randomly from the dictionary & a “middle initial”, all intended to bypass your spam filters. These random couplings sometimes beget glorious results:

• Double O Tedious (Irish, perhaps?)
• Urinate G. Coordinator (this almost sounds like a job title)
• Omens H. Absolutism
• Gunshots I. Senatorial (I’ve received this one many times over the years—perhaps these aren’t as random as I thought)
• Religiously H. Panacea (interesting combination there)
• Stultifies H. Putrescence
• Chuvash B. Residue
• Powering H. Kahlua (for the adolescent alcoholic)

The New York Times has a very interesting article on the development of “Clearview”, the new font being rolled out on the country’s highways (or motorways, if you prefer). The font is designed to combat the effects of phenomenon halation, where the reflective material that’s used to make the signs more legible at night blows out the letters & dazzles drivers. This is particularly an issue for the elderly, an increasingly large segment of the US population, but it also can effect those with common sight defects. The designers, James Meeker & John Montalbano, opened up the counter shapes (the interior shapes of letters) & increased the x-height (size) of lower-case letters while retaining the stroke weight of the letters as they currently are.

An interesting fact from the slideshow (well worth exploring if you’re a font nerd) is that the typeface achieved “approximately 40 percent gain, or 200 feet of added reading distance using a 10-inch heigh letter on the demonstration panel”.

Bloody hell! I pre-posted a few articles in our Typo-based blog & brought the whole blog down. Ian says permissions got munged. Perhaps the pre-dated posts did it, but it’s a bit of a mystery as to why.

I’ve been deep in the middle of fixing CSS bugs on one job & designing another site, so haven’t had much chance to write here. Here are some things which have looked very interesting:

• Under the hood look at the new Backpack—Interesting-sounding changes afoot for Backpack. Interesting to read about “Hover Observer”, which monitors the user’s mouse movements over a page & appends :hover classes on-the-fly as & when appropriate. A great idea, although I’d be worried about excessive memory usage.
• Apple’s new .Mac web gallery uses a 408 KB javascript library. Yikes! Apparently it’s based—at least in part—on Sproutcore. And Prototype. And Scriptaculous.
• “In other words, A = A”—A great Daily Show clip of Bush’s condescending [mis]usage of a stock phrase.

Proposed Japanese MOD logo: let’s hug!

So we’ve examined terrorist organisation logos from around the world. How about their nemeses, those of defence departments from around the world?

As the author notes, the proposed new logo for the Japanese Ministry of Defence is a bit Web 2.0. But we’re noticing common themes here:

• Oak leaves (they taste like victory!)
• Eagles
• Swords
• Anchors
• Creepy associations from the past (Germany)

Now, surely some artist out there can create a tableau of a sword-wielding, oak-leaf-chewing eagle dropping an anchor on a bone-and-gun-laden star. That would be awesome.

At least some of the employees of design firm A Gray Space collect Polish movie posters. This page shows some absolutely fantastic posters covering nearly 70 years.

Farewell to Autumn (1990s)

Working Girl (1987)

Behold, Melanie Griffiths vehicle “Working Girl” gets greater artistic treatment in a poster than it did in the original film.

All kidding aside, there are some beautiful designs here, including some that remind me of 1950s–1960s Ben Shahn. This page reads like a synopsis of European commercial graphic design.

We all need logos, it seems. Even your terrorist organisations need to differentiate themselves from one another. But where do you start? What are all the other organisations doing?

The Weather Underground logo

Ironic Sans has helpfully collected a large number of logos from terrorist organisations from the past 30 years or so, helpfully organised thus:

• Stars
• One gun
• Two guns crossed
• Other weapons crossed
• Crossbones
• Animals with multiple heads
• Other (which can also be called “WTF”)

Presumably, a logo consisting of three guns, a machete below crossbones, on top of a star, surrounded by the World-Snake would look as if it were designed by committee.

Contrary to the way things look right now, this blog is not dead! Ian has been hard at work on a project for a client & further refining resources_controller. He’ll have lots of news on that & other plugins once the job is done.

I, on the other hand, have far fewer excuses. While I’ve also been hard at work on a project for other clients & working on our business development & marketing, Finally, I’ve been working on the design for this blog, which will be implemented once we switch our blog engine. Work for ourselves, as so many designers can recognise, comes well after our clients’.

In the style of Spy Magazine:

Pope Benedict XVI and

The mystery man from David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”?

“Give me back my Latin Mass”

Argument from Design creative director & partner Ray Drainville will be interviewed on Radio Sheffield this morning at about 11 am about relations between South Yorkshire & the United States.

A US ex-pat living in Sheffield, Ray has been interviewed many times on the radio commenting on US–UK relations. This started back in the 2000 US Presidential election debacle when, at the end of a completely sleepless night, Ray had to explain the electoral college to the interviewer. His commentary continued throughout the next six weeks as the election eventually found itself in the Supreme Court & its sorry conclusion. Ray was also interviewed many times before the 2004 US Presidential election, which saw George W. Bush placed back in power after beating the hapless John Kerry.

Memorably, Ray was also interviewed on 11 September 2001 during the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York & the Pentagon in Washington. Being on the radio & commenting on these horrible events leant an air of unreality to the whole day, which wasn’t helped by the fact that Ray had only seen the attacks first on the televisions in the Radio Sheffield building.

Today’s interview is sparked by the building of a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge in Sheffield, a commemoration of the UK’s long (& Ray would say troubled) relationship with the US.

Our congratulations go out to Ian White, Argument from Design’s lead programmer, who got married to Tessa Mae Peasgood on Wednesday! We wish them the absolute best.

Raja Sandhu has written a FAQ regarding the development of logo — or, more accurately, corporate identity — design.

It’s good to see someone else taking a rational approach to design — or, at least, as rational approach as one can take. Many, if not all of Raja’s comments reflect our own experience of corporate identity design. In fact Raja’s comments can be expanded to cover graphic design in general. A good read!

So Ian’s been extolling the virtues of the Mac text editor TextMate for some time now. I’ve been dubious, because I’m a long-time BBEdit user — I’m a big fan of BBEdit’s HTML palette. But in a brief session, Ian showed me how easy it was to added “snippets” of code for long-standing quirks: for instance, “curly quotes” and other typographic titbits.

So he sold me on the application, and I’m making a switch to TextMate. The creation of bundles of typographic and/or frequently-used (X)HTML will make my life a lot easier. If you’re a TextMate user, you may be interested in the bundles we’ve got available online. They may be very helpful.

For fear that they''ll look like this: