Frank Chimero:

[T]he value of design is less established by the quality of the work, but rather the presence of the audience. They’re the ones that imbue value to what we do and determine whether or not we are successful. Design is meant to be seen, to be considered, to be interacted with and used. Each one of those things creates an experience, so in its essence, it’s the job of design to make meaningful, memorable experiences for people.

See also: The Value of Design

Frank Chimero on the don’ts of design:

Wow, I had to contort that sentence to make it work. Ugly writing. Regardless, it’s not you. It’s not the client. It’s the audience.

It’s easy to get fooled into thinking that you’re serving the client. It may seem so because they sign the checks, but really great clients have the same needs as the audience. It’s good business to give people what they want in a way that they want it.

100% yes. This fits right in with my recent post on the value of design.

Matt Thompson confesses he has mixed feelings about Facebook over on Snarkmarket. Of particular interest to me is how being on Facebook has changed his perception of the world, specifically when it comes to photos:

For me, the service has replaced the notion of a photograph as a shared, treasured moment with the reality of a photograph as a public event. I realized all of a sudden that I can’t remember the last time I took a candid photo. Look through my photos, and even those moments you might call “candid” are actually posed. I can’t sit for a picture without expecting that the photo will be publicized. Not merely made public — my public Flickr stream never provoked this sense — publicized. And although this is merely a default, easily overridden, to do so often feels like an overreaction. To go to a friend’s photo of me and untag myself, or to make myself untaggable, feels like I’m basically negating the purpose of Facebook Photos. The product exists so these images might be publicized. And increasingly, Facebook seems to be what photos are for.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. I have a decent following on Twitter and a fairly large readership here and I’ve noticed I often approach things through the lens of this blog. When I read, I look for passages I can quote here. When I watch a video or a film, I look for analogies I can use in essays. I wonder if this is in some way preventing me from fulling enjoying whatever I am doing because I approach with the idea that I’ll pull something from it to share.

In the end, I think Matt does a great job of summing up how I feel about Facebook as well:

With Facebook, I’m persistently reminded that I am always serving it — feeding an endless stream of information to the insatiable hive, creating the world’s most perfect consumer profile of myself.

I don’t trust Google for a second, but I value it immensely. I trust Facebook less, and I’m growing more ambivalent about its value.

I don’t think I want to give up Facebook. I value the connections it offers, however shallow they are. I enjoy looking at photos of my friends. I like knowing people’s birthdays.

But I am wary of it, its values and its defaults. How it’s changing my expectations and my experience of the world.

Frank Chimero is seriously KILLING IT lately. His blog is easily in my top five daily reads every day. His piece today on knowing your audience is something I’ve thought about quite a bit:

My “dream sequence” forced me to flirt with the idea that everyone around me is sometimes bored when listening. Talk about being brought down to scale. No one likes to be minimized or excluded. But, as a maker, it becomes crucial to exclude some others if you want to make good work. You can’t please everybody. And, as a consumer, you will be excluded from things you wish not to be. You can’t have everything. And you’ll have to swallow being excluded, if you believe in quality. Sometimes, removing you from the equation makes things better for everyone else.

I wrote about this idea a few months ago in regards to the films of M. Night Shyamalan and knowing your audience.