“But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both—must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.”
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

The Others

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

“Fundamentally, it’s an art of composition, the same way that, if you’re a musician or a composer especially, you’re trying to compose something that is coherent and holds together, the same way that our memories are coherent and hold together, but our experiences are not. We take in our experiences and then put them together in a way that makes sense to our personalities and explains our lives and our friends. But the experience itself can be very incoherent and sort of uncomfortable”

Interview with Chris Ware

Look at that, a just-about-perfect definition of the creative process in three sentences. It’s all about organizing: taking each experiencing, processing it and framing it, and then making something new and real and true.

“Don’t forget who you’re doing this for”

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.

“Science has two goals. One is to order the world, and the second is to extend experience.”

—Niels Bohr

Sounds to me like science and design are trying to achieve the same things.

The Value of Design

Seth Godin on pricing power:

The goal, no matter what you sell, is to be seen as irreplaceable, essential and priceless. If you are all three, then you have pricing power. When the price charged is up to you, when you have the power to set the price, there is a line out the door and you can use pricing as a signaling mechanism, not merely a way to make a living.

I’ve been thinking about the value of design lately. What is it exactly that clients pay us for? What exactly are we selling?

I was a guest speaker in a portfolio class at Northampton Community College last week. I talked about building a quality portfolio, networking, and how to get into freelancing. There were a lot of questions about how to charge for your work and how to deal with those clients who try to push their aesthetic into the design trying to make you, more or less, a production artist just doing the grunt work while someone else (less skilled in design) directs the aesthetic. You know these types of clients. I think I answered them fairly well but I kept thinking about them day later and realized some things I said helped me answer some of the questions I had been thinking about.

If you really (REALLY) simplify the design process down, there are two basic steps: thinking and execution. The thinking involves the problem solving, the concept development, the organization while the execution is getting into the Photoshop and actually executing those things. There is a disconnect here between designer and client. Designers usually think their value lies in the thinking, the problem solving; but clients tend to think they are paying us for the execution. It’s interesting that as communication designers, we can’t clearly communicate what it is we are paid for.

But for our work to be truly irreplaceable, essential, and priceless, I think it needs to given as a gift. As I wrote a few months ago:

Gifts do something for both the giver and receiver. Gifts are given in the hope of enriching someone’s life, and finding our life has been enriched too. Gifts are given with the intent to change someone, and finding we’ve been changed.

Perhaps the real value in what we do isn’t in the thinking or the execution, but in the experiences we create after the work is complete and out in the world. Maybe the value of design is in the gifts we get to give, when we change someone and add something lasting in the world. If that’s the case, the true value of design only emerges after the money has exchanged hands. And you can’t put a price on that.

On Happiness

Liz Danzico, on designing experiences that amplify happiness:

Findings show that spending money on experiences over material goods leads to longer-term satisfaction, and spending money on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness. In 2008, for instance, at the downturn of the economy, Wal-Mart noticed a stay-cation trend and started grouping items in its stores to transform any space into a “vacation.” No longer just selling objects like grills and tents, it was selling entire experiences — barbecue foods, inflatable pools, and outdoor furniture at a reduced price. By focusing on the larger story, it was able to focus its design and make a larger impact by creating an entire vacation rather than providing just the pieces. Assuming a consumer’s goal (vacation) was aligned with the outcome (purchase), his or her ultimate happiness had more of an opportunity to flourish.

Experiences — those that we have the potential to create opportunities for — can amplify happiness. While we can’t predict or control what people will or won’t do, we can create potential.

Related: Frank Chimero on letting happiness emerge:

[M]aybe happiness is a bit paradoxical like that: if you stop pursuing it, there are fewer places for it to hide. You just have to be listening when it says “I’m over here!”

Mixed Feelings about Facebook

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.

“If I were living in NYC in the ’50s, I’d be a modernist painter, in the ’60s I would have been a documentary filmmaker, in the ’70s I would have been in a punk band, in the ’80s I would have made music videos. Today it’s all about having a social-media presence…and that’s just lame.”

—Richard Blakeley, editor-in-cheif of Gawker.TV, as quoted in “Is Social Media Bad for NYC?”

I think the questions posed here can be applied to anyone living anywhere, not just New York City. The question is: is our obsession with tweeting, status updates, TwitPics, Gowalla-ing, etc. preventing us from actually experiencing life? Again, I think it’s too early to answer these sorts of questions but it’s something we seriously need to be asking. I do think, however, that Kevin Balktick, an art-events producer, has the right idea:

I get a hard time about not being on Facebook, but my reputation doesn’t come from virtual social networking, it comes from the actual time I have spent with people and the personal experiences I create for others to enjoy.”

As a side note, I think what’s more interesting is the narcissism that comes with it all. Like the article states, these platforms allow us to be the star of our own story and we expect people to be paying attention.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty

I practically demolished this article on beauty from Arthur Krystal. It sort of a half review of Umberto Eco’s book History of Beauty and half rumination on what beauty means. The history part, of course, was interesting, but it was the second half of the article that really got me excited. The definition of beauty proposed here is about a perfect a description I’ve read:

“Beauty” seems suited to those experiences that stop us in our tracks. Whether it’s a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie or a scherzo by Paganini, the beautiful is conducive to stillness. It doesn’t excite us, or necessarily instill in us the desire to replicate it; it simply makes us exist as though we’re existing for that very experience.

I like that a lot. Beauty stops us in our tracks. I’m not sure if it doesn’t excite us, I’d like to think it does, but I think we are often too overwhelmed by what we are experiencing that maybe we can’t even process emotion. All we can do is stop and admire and take a deep breath.

Beauty is everywhere; it’s just not omnipresent. One can find it in the line of poetry, in a line of prose; it may be in the faces of people we see for an instant, and it forever in the face of Charlie Chaplin at the end of City Lights. And yet when we try to account for moments like these, words seem a poor choice for language. Perhaps this vulnerability to beauty, as well as our inadequacy in explaining it, stems from the fact that beauty is fleeting.

Again, brilliant. Stanley Kubrick said “The test of work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to describe why it’s good.” I love that. My favorite art, movies, books are my favorite not because of technical proficiency but because I experienced beauty. Because it affected me on a deeper level. It stopped me in my tracks and I just sat there. Deep breath.

Trying to describe beauty with words just doesn’t seem sufficient. Critiquing and dissecting robs it of what made it beautiful in the first place.

None of us exists in a state of perpetual delight or wonder, and even the most exalted works of art and nature do not always affect us with the same intensity. Indeed, the paradoxical question arises: If beauty were not temporary, would it last? Beauty may, in fact, exist only because it disappears, because it offers a glimpse of redemption in a world where such redemption is just an idea. That’s why we spend so much time talking about it. (If we existed in a state of grace, talking about grace would be irrelevant.)

Holy wow. Read that again: “Beauty exists because it disappears. It offers a glimpse of redemption.” Beauty brings light to dark world. Beauty provides hope amidst a broken world. It’s in those moments where we are stopped in our tracks when we are reminded that we just might be okay.

Deep breath.

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