Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

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Do you recognize any of these book covers? Then you know of Chip Kidd’s work.

I first became aware of Chip Kidd when I picked up a book with a striking cover at the library a few years ago. The book was The Cheese Monkeys, and I enjoyed the hilarious over-the-top antics of two art students and a wacky graphic design prof. The jacket copy informed me that Kidd was a leading book cover designer, and so I started keeping an eye out for his work.

Earlier this summer, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where they were having a “Design Triennial” to celebrate great design from the past three years. One of the displays was Chip Kidd’s book covers - he had published a retrospective of his work over the past twenty years. I flipped through the book and really liked it. I finally bought it last month when I had an Amazon gift certificate to use.

It’s great. 400 pages of beautiful images of book covers, with a paragraph of commentary from Kidd on each page explaining what he was trying to do. You can see the care and detail which Kidd puts into each and every one of the covers that he designs. I really liked that he includes preliminary sketches, first drafts, and failed attempts of certain covers. By seeing what didn’t work, the reader gets a much better sense of why the final cover does work. It was also great to see his designs for a collection of an author’s work in one place, so that the common design elements popped out.

He also includes great quotes from the authors that he has worked with expressing awe and admiration that Kidd can capture the souls of their books in a few well-designed graphic elements. One memorable account is from a first-time novelist who hated the cover designs that her publisher sent her. Her publisher said “Go to the book store, find a few covers that you like, get the designers’ names, and we’ll go hire one of them to design your cover.” She went to the store, picked four completely different covers so she could get a range of designers, and then found out that all four were designed by Kidd.

While I don’t have an instinct for graphic design myself, I really enjoyed reading about the process that Kidd uses to get his ideas. Sometimes it’s serendipity - while reading the book, he’ll come across an object at a rummage sale that suits the book’s content perfectly. Sometimes it’s hard work - several attempts before converging on one that everybody likes. He will do whatever suits the book’s content best - look at some of the different approaches he uses:

As my experience of finding The Cheese Monkeys demonstrated, a book often is judged by its cover, and can influence somebody to pick up a book they might not otherwise have. If you love books and are interested in graphic design, I’d recommend this book. Come flip through my copy if you’re curious.

Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so easy to adopt.

I started using LiveJournal because I wanted to read the posts that my friends had “locked” so that only their LiveJournal friends could read them. I figured I would create a free account, get accepted as a friend to those people, and that would be it. But as I started using it, I discovered more and more ways in which to use it.

LiveJournal made it easy for me to keep track of all the people whose LiveJournal posts I wanted to read. Instead of having to go to each individual person’s page, as I had been doing, I could just go to my Friends page, and get a list of what my friends have been up to organized neatly into reverse chronological order. To expand my network was also trivial. When I clicked on a person’s name, it took me to their LiveJournal profile which listed all of their friends, making it easy for me to find other people I knew.

LiveJournal gets several other details right in helping me figure out what to do. For instance, if you look at the Friends page, on the left side, it shows me my main options: Recent Entries, Archive, Friends, User Info, My Website. There are other options in various menus, but the primary ones make it clear that LiveJournal is for writing my own posts, and for reading my friends’ posts. Also, LiveJournal allows me to jump into a comment thread wherever I feel comfortable, which reduces the anxiety of public “speaking”.

Making things easy is vital in getting me to do something. Blogging software is a great example. When I first started my web page back in 1994, I had a section devoted to ramblings. I only posted every few months, though, because the cognitive overhead of having to create a new HTML file every time I wanted to say something was too much. It’s not hard to create a file, but it meant that I was doing something other than trying to write my thoughts. Once I switched to blosxom, it was slightly easier because I just had to create a text file, but when I switched to Wordpress and could start blogging with one click, things got much easier.

Good software should make it obvious what I should do first, and make it straightforward for me to accomplish something useful. LiveJournal has all sorts of things that I don’t use, like communities and tiered permissions, but that’s okay because I still get value out of it from the things I started using from the beginning. Wordpress is unbelievably customizable, but I was able to start putting up posts quickly, and only look into customization when I want to try something new.

I mentioned in my last post that I couldn’t figure out what to do on Facebook. Now that Jofish friended me and has given me some tips, I can see there was a bootstrapping issue, as none of the people I had friended were using Facebook extensively, so I had no examples of how one might use it. Facebook also suffered because I did not (and still don’t) have a compelling reason to use it, as contrasted with other new technologies:

• With LiveJournal, I wanted to read my friends’ locked posts.
• With Wordpress, I wanted a better blogging system with comments and trackbacks.
• With RSS, I wanted to keep up with dozens of irregularly updated blogs.

I’m still not quite sure what the compelling reason might be for using Facebook, although Jofish’s comment that it’s “a tool to communicate with/between late teens/early twenty somethings in or recently graduated from college” is probably closest.

Twitter is another technology I’m not sure I see the case for yet. Twitter’s big moment this year was at SXSW, where it seemed like everybody started using it. The conference setting was a perfect scenario for Twitter, as everybody wanted to know where everybody else was, so the quick updates to an always accessible communications channel enabled swarming behavior. And it seemed like there was a tipping point as enough people used it that everybody started using it because everybody else was using it. I’m still skeptical of its use in normal life, but examples like Charlie using Twitter to meet up for dinner may convince me eventually.

So what characteristics does social software need to make it easy to adopt?

• There needs to be a compelling reason to use it. I listed a few above, but there has to be a goal that convinces me it’s worth investing the time to figure out how to use it.
• The easier it is to accomplish the goal, the better. If the learning investment is lower, the reason doesn’t have to be as compelling.
• Make my friends’ actions visible and copyable. In new environments, we learn by imitating others. If I can’t see what others are doing, I’ll probably do nothing.
• Make it useful even if not all of my friends use it. If the first step in making it useful is getting all of my friends on board, I’m never going to invest the effort. I think Dodgeball suffers from this problem.
• I’m sure there are others - what are your suggestions?

P.S. Unsurprisingly, these points reflect the design principles I espoused in my Ambidextrous article.

I went to my second likemind this morning, and once again really enjoyed the coffee and conversation.

One person at the table where I sat posed the question of how an artist can be unique or “deviant” in today’s society. There used to be a well-defined mainstream that you could rebel against and do your own thing, with recent examples being rap, punk music, and hiphop. But the mainstream has caught up and reintegrated all of those things. In some sense, there is no way to leave the mainstream because even if you rebel, somebody’s already done that, so you’re just joining a different community. We’ve experienced waves of rebellion, with the hippies rebelling against the Eisenhower 50s, and the greed is good yuppies rebelling against the hippies in the 80s, and the bobos rebelling against both in the 90s, etc. It seems like it’s all been tried, which is the frustration that this artist was expressing.

I was a bit skeptical, as it seems like anybody declares there’s nothing new to do, truly innovative things start happening very soon afterwards, such as the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity soon after classical physics thought they had things wrapped up with Newton and Maxwell. But it was an interesting question.

My take on it was that “rebelling” these days often means just leaving one community and joining another, with the “we will all be nonconformist together” sentiment. I think the really innovative stuff is going to come out of integration of communities, to stay in the first community and bring elements of other communities into it. I’d been meaning to blog about a recent post by Grant McCracken where he emphasizes the importance to innovation of incorporating multiple perspectives, and it ties in nicely with this theme. This is also reminiscent of the idea of “productive friction” from The Only Sustainable Edge. It’s at the interface between communities that truly new ideas will be sprouting.

Part of this is a consequence of how much effort it takes to be at the center of a community. Another person at the table used the world of fashion to illustrate that point - the high-end designers at the center of the world are consumed with staying at the bleeding edge of fashion, and must continue to move quickly to stay ahead of the mainstream. Their ideas move out in concentric circles, to the fashion-aware people, then the people who read fashion magazines, and outward still to Target and WalMart shoppers, who don’t have to pay attention as the innovations from the bleeding edge have long since been absorbed into the majority. But because everything in this world moves faster now, the adoption into the majority happens on the order of months or weeks instead of years, so the fashion insiders are in the Red Queen’s Race, running ever faster to stay in the same place.

In technology, the same phenomenon is called Crossing the Chasm. Music has its own structure, with the hipster insiders flocking to Pitchfork to keep up with what’s current. Design, architecture, art… all of these communities have similar adoption patterns. You can be a total insider in one community and be a total outsider in another. In fact, you almost have to be because being an insider requires such a deep level of commitment.

So I have this lovely image of rings of innovative ideas radiating outwards from these different communities throughout the world, and the rings creating these amazing interference patterns like waves, sometimes interfering constructively and sometimes destructively, with different people in different places on the map depending on their level of commitment to the various communities. And the really nifty new ideas will be where somebody is located at an interesting location where constructive interference is happening. I think there’s a real incentive to establish links to as many insiders as possible, to hear what’s happening first and see if you can figure out how to tie it all together.

Is there nothing new under the sun? Perhaps. But there are always new combinations to try. And I think that finding those combinations will be the challenge moving forward, as more people are caught up in the Red Queen’s Race in this world of increasing specialization. I’m still trying to figure out how to rebel from that scenario, as discussed here and here. We’ll see what happens.

P.S. To give attribution where it’s due, the actual image to the right above is taken from Matthew Klein.

P.P.S. Another likemind attendee handed out postcards with illustrations of the SoraPot, a teapot he had designed. Very slick. I just wanted to include a link to it because I liked it.

I was thinking a little bit more about the point I mentioned in my previous post where the iPod Shuffle is actually easier to use because it doesn’t give you a choice about what music to listen to next. With my other MP3 player, I’ll often spend a few minutes trying to decide what kind of music I’m in the mood for, and whether I’d have time to listen to the whole album, and things like that. With the Shuffle, all of that is taken away from me, and I’m left with only a couple decisions - “This song or the next one” and “Louder or softer”.

Alan Cooper tells a similar story in his book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, in a case study about redesigning scanner software for Logitech. His team realized that most people are trying to do only three tasks with an image after scanning: cropping, resizing and reorienting. So they took out all of the other “functionality” and concentrated on making those three tasks as simple as possible. In user testing, their software was consistently rated as the most powerful despite objectively having the least number of features.

I think another aspect of choice is that increasing the number of choices makes it harder to get started. Figuring out the first thing to do often paralyzes us into doing nothing at all. Sometimes I won’t put on music because I can’t decide what I want to listen to. I think the same is true in most endeavors. Presenting more options does not help - it actually makes it harder. If anything, it would be better to be restricted to one choice, one simple thing, as a way to get started, like the iPod Shuffle. Once I become more comfortable with the scenario, then I can handle more choices; in fact, my brain will have been trained to make those choices subconsciously.

But when I’m faced with a new scenario, I don’t have those cognitive subroutines built yet. I’m faced with an infinite number of choices, and have no way of selecting between them, because I don’t have the experience. How does one deal with this situation?

I think the answer is to pick something, anything, and just get started. You won’t know until later whether it was the right choice, but since you have no basis for making a choice, all choices are valid, so long as you continue to evaluate and evolve based on the results.

The idea of just picking something reminds me of a story Robert Pirsig tells in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where Phaedrus gives his class a writing assignment, and one girl just can’t figure out what to write about. So he narrows it down, and says write about the town. She’s still stuck. Write about the city hall. Still stuck. Finally he says, write your essay about the top left brick of the front of city hall. And she looked at him as if he was crazy. But once she started writing about that brick, the dam broke, and she wrote a beautiful paper. The top left brick was completely arbitrary, but by continuing to remove choices, she was eventually able to get past her paralysis and get started.

Our society often favors increased number of choices. A decision that gives us more choices must be the right decision. After all, who wouldn’t want more opportunities, more options, more features? But I’m starting to wonder if that’s the case. Research like that described by the Paradox of Choice indicates that choice is good up to a certain point, and then becomes overwhelming. The examples I gave above certainly seem to indicate that choices can often get in the way of getting things done.

There’s a tension in design here. On the one hand, having more features and more customizability lets us make things work exactly the way we want. But if a design presents too many features and too much customizability, it becomes intimidating and hard to get started. I think there’s value in presenting a well-marked path forward for the novice user, so that they don’t have to make decisions they are not competent to make yet. Then present them with more options when they have enough experience that they can make those decisions. Actually, this approach reminds me a lot of my Ambidextrous article.

It’s very difficult for software to get this right. Most software tends towards the too many features right away approach. And while I’m a fan of the 37Signals Getting Real approach, I wonder if it swings too far in the other direction. The topic of simplicity in design has been on many bloggers’ minds recently. And I’m not sure there’s a right answer. For each case, there will need to be a balance struck on the appropriate number of choices presented to the user at any point in time.

And, as usual, I end on a completely ambiguous point. No punditry here with a strong opinion and withering scorn for anybody that disagrees. It’s all about the conversation for me, the acknowledgment of different viewpoints, and the benefits and drawbacks of those viewpoints.

P.S. My laptop is on its way back to HP to get its backlight fixed, so I am going to be living computer-free for a week or so. No blogging unless I stay late at work as I am tonight.