Search with Design

Every designer has heard the story about the lady in the park asking Pablo Picasso to sketch her. She loves his drawing and asks how much, he says 50,000 pesos or dollars or pre-euros or whatever. She gasps why, it only took you five minutes. He says I’ve worked my whole to be able to do this. Boom.

Lessons

1. Work your whole life.

2. Sit in parks with bohemian women waiting for them to recognize you.

3. Inflate your prices and hope some finally pays up.

I’ve always tried hard as a designer to understand why other designers love this story.

I try and think logically, but quickly fall into self loathing and despair. Does this mean I’m not a designer because I don’t get it?  Should I work hard or smarter? Or am I too stupid to work smarter so I might as well toil my days over? Or should I pretend I understand it? “Yeah, it’s art, so you wouldn’t get it.” Or can you just call it like you see it, regardless if its an urban legend or not.

Pablo understand one thing very well, to be an artist you needed to sell your work. To do that professional for a living you needed an audience. So he found one in several different ways. He had initial talent, which got him some attention. Then he branched off and created something new among his close peers. This made him stand out, which gave him more attention. But he, like many artists before him, realized that just being and thinking differently wasn’t enough, you needed something more than stories and ancedotes, rumors and headlines to be a professional artist, you still needed works. Which means you needed to work.

Many artists had talents understudies that would learn under the masters and help finish up certain painters or even copy a work completely and then have the original artist sell those copies using their name. But some works take more than just hours, they take weeks or even months. So what did Picasso do, create an artistic painting in the least possible brush strokes. He didn’t create minimalism. He created worktheleastism. More paintings in front of more people at the same time, during his lifetime afforded him the maximum exposure that would allow him to remain a professional artist, doing whatever he pleased with his time, money and women.

Pablo Picasso was a brilliant marketer, acting on the timing of his previous success to push him in front of a larger and larger audience. He didn’t spend his lifetime perfecting his fine brush strokes. As he aged, his hand and eye both became thick and lazy. He mastered the business of art. He captured attention, produced quantity and charged heavily.

June, 2007 marks the date I officially switched tribes and joined the Ubuntu crowd.

As far as I can tell, Ubuntu is an African word with no direct translation, but which embodies the concept of “being completely inscrutable, yet self-congratulating and better than Windows”.  The truth is that it is a distribution of Linux, favored by many due to its easy install, and similarities to the Windows environment.
But why go all the way to Linux from my previously favored WinXP?  Glad you asked…

To be honest, I saw the release of Windows Vista approaching and realized that I was getting sick of playing a (small) part in the empire-building of Microsoft.  As much as I had hated the switch from my trust Win98 to WinXP, I had learned to live with it after a lot of slipstreaming CDs, backups and tweaks.  But Vista’s DRM-pushing, close-to-spyware using, sanitized like a mental hospital hanging from a cliff feeling just wasn’t going to cut it for me.  So what if it’s pretty?  Nothing runs on it and it will mark every file I create as illegal.

So why not go with a Mac?  After all, they’re powerful, chic, nerdy and they look like a hip young rock star.  Here’s where things get complicated.

I have a serious dislike for laptops.  I’ve never been able to find a laptop which fit the bill for a computer I could actually work on.  I need lightweight, power, small screen, excellent keyboard, durability, battery-life…the list goes on and on.  I’m a laptop snob.  There is only one line of laptops on earth that I will buy and use, and that is the IBM Thinkpad.

I love my little Thinkpad.  The keyboard is great, the battery and weight are good.  Also high on the list is the thumbstick, which is tough to master at first, but once mastered, makes a touchpad feel like drawing in the sand with a stick.

I need my desktop and laptop to sync fairly effortlessly, and because IBM doesn’t make a LeopardPad, I had to shoot the middle.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have my trusty copy of XP dual-booted (although I haven’t seen the familiar green ‘Start’ button in weeks).  I keep it around for one reason, and one reason only: Battlefield 2.

The switch to Ubuntu wasn’t bad, the three biggest sticking points being syncing my iPod (done with Amarok and patience), enabling the ‘Back’ button on my MS Intellimouse (done with some extra drivers), and disabling my on-board sound in favor of the SoundBlaster 5.1 card (accomplished through some text file editing and a reboot).

All in all, the switch has gone great, and it’s only getting better as I play with Compiz/XGL effects and customizing my computer through clever use of Launchers and Terminal.
I think Windows Vista could be greatest thing that ever happened to the Linux community.  More users = more options.

Why not come over for a stay with the tribe?

My favorite quote of the day:

“I can continue my legacy of creating fiendishly complex spreadsheets and then leaving before training anyone it.

It’s like being a superior alien intelligence and leaving complex machines laying around populated planets”

Something strange must be going on over at the ‘plex.

My money is on ghosts, but I’m taking suggestions…

This question has resurfaced in the SEO-world, and in my world recently, and so I’d like to weigh-in. Here’s the latest situation presented to me:

My friend sent an email to 100,000 subscribers, of which 1,000 of them were GMail addresses, advertising “college widgets”. The link back to his site contained the anchor text “college widgets”. He went from ranking #10 in a Google search for [college widgets] to #1 in just a few days, then later he dropped back down to #4. I looked at my GMail account and the email page has a PageRank of the 7!

The first thing to understand is that the way the PageRank in your toolbar works, is that when it doesn’t find any data for your current page, it extrapolates an approximate value from the previous page you visited as well as the domain. Because the Google domain is a PR10, your toolbar extrapolates a PR7 for your mailbox.

So where did the resultant change in rankings come from?

Well, the page in question has a title tag whose first two words are “College Widgets”. The page also has 59,000 links pointing at it (according to Yahoo!) most of which are from the same domain, with the anchor text “college widgets”.

In a sample of 100,000 emails, I have to think that at least 1-3% would have the Google Toolbar installed. Add in the GMail subscriber base, and Google has 3-4 thousand pieces of user data to use about the page in question. I would estimate that amount of user data spread over just a couple days would be more than enough for Google to trigger a deeper crawl of the page, and potentially index or count more of the backlinks.

As RC mentioned, you can’t triangulate with only 2 points. Google uses user-data, it’s time to face facts and build your websites for users too.

I could program a computer in FORTRAN. But nowadays, if you can’t use a computer, you’re as good as luke-warm, curdling milk. Computers, and their programmers and designers are everywhere. Your TV, DVD player, Playstation, iPod, car, PDA, phone, alarm clock, even your toothbrush.

And besides all the modern day conveniences, such as having your $160 luxury toothbrush gently massage your teeth while you grow fat staring at yourself in the mirror, and then have a soft LED blue haze blink at your to let you know that 2 minutes are up, you might think to yourself, gee, this is the life. How did my parents make it up til now? But then, remind yourself of the 37 hours it took to program your toothbrush to remember daylight savings time and which default brush speed you liked on the first Wednesday of each month.

Computers don’t equal convenience. They offer automation. A series of yes’s and no’s. Nothing truly revolutionary. It is the designer who must first create the tool, and then teach its functionality and features to the end user. They must put the power and simplicity back into the hands of the humanoid.  Perhaps, “if you have to ask, it should be designed different”.

Design exists when forms follows function.
Design succeeds when it is approachable.

Both Ryan and I agreed that I could speak for both of us on the first post. So here goes.

Neither of us are new to the web. Or to blogs. Or to the Google. But we are both self-taught. And ambitious to break out into our own world of search with design. I bring a creative writing background, a love of (or for, not sure which) art, and the harmonious love of good numbers. I think in great design, the math plays just as important a part. When I meet Ryan, I knew we both had enough overlapping knowledge to be deadly. Like WMID. I is for Internet, and that’s good enough for me.

And while neither of us have a firm belief of what Search with Design or 97 Percent should be in 5 years, we do know what problems we can currently tackle and what problems we would like to solve. We would like to spend 97 percent of the time solving these issues, and not wasting marketing efforts and overcharging clients for needless crap.

First post. Check. More gooey from this 48.5% to come.