Towards the end of Finding Meaning in the Technium Cave — Francisco Inchauste’s essay for Distance 02 — he urges us to be more cognizant of the lasting impact of our work:

What we create today will become the baseline for future generations. In the future, explorers will find our technium cave, filled with the artifacts of our present. What will they find in there? What will our creations tell them about what was meaningful to us? I can only hope it’s not what I see today. I know it can change, and I hope you see it too.

This is the theme that echoes through Distance 02, a collection of three essays on the topic of “Extracurriculars” — how to take ourselves out of the daily grind and think more clearly about how the things we make impact the world around us. It’s a topic that I see more and more designers touch on, starting with Wilson Miner’s excellent When We Build talk, all the way through Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, parts of Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job, and smaller essays like Dmitry Fadeyev’s Moral Design. I’ve also touched on this before:

I wonder what would happen if we felt the weight of responsibility a little more when w’re designing. What if we go into each project as if the design will be around for 100 years or more? Would we make it fit into the web environment better, aim to give it a timeless aesthetic, and spend more time considering the consequences of our design decisions? Would we try to design something that “makes life worth living”?

The cynic in me worries that this vitally important topic is getting a bit too trendy, which brings with it lots of attention but also hoards of Internet critics. But before the possible backlash gets into full swing there is still time to read Distance 02 and be challenged to be better designers, not just people who design things better. For example, Sharlene King urges us to do more side projects in Do Your Homework:

I believe success comes through homework: the projects we do separate from our day-to-day work, that help us live design rather than simply work in design, allow passionate designers to break through.

And in The Embedded Designer, Cassie McDaniel talks about designers’ ability to influence adjacent industries in a positive way:

While design processes are available to anyone, regular experience with the creative process makes the designer particularly adaptable to new environments. An eagerness to understand the nature of our design challenges is part of our mandate. We ask tough questions of our clients and their industries. We need to know: Why are things done this way? What problem is it solving? What can we get rid of to make this simpler? Designers are receptive to new input by definition, and that makes us inherently more malleable than other kinds of workers.

What I found pleasantly surprising about Distance 02 is that it doesn’t stick to the philosophical. There is plenty of practical advice on how to make these ideas real in our everyday design work. Francisco’s framework for measuring meaning will come in particularly handy in all my projects.

Like any publication, Distance 02 is not perfect. It buckles under the weight of its 100+ citations, which sometimes makes it hard to follow the authors’ own story threads through the essays. Either that, or I’m just very easily distracted.

But that is a small complaint, and certainly not enough to make me discourage you from reading the book in any format your heart desires. In fact, at $5 for a digital copy and $15 for print & digital, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. You can buy Distance here.

n+1 Magazine has a wonderfully-written editorial on the ups and downs of using Twitter, appropriately titled Please RT:

Look at your Twitter feed at the wrong moment, however, or send a dumb tweet yourself, and a bad infinity opens up onto the narcissistical sublime. What tweet is that, flashing, subliminally, behind the others? In exactly 140 characters: “I need to be noticed so badly that I can’t pay attention to you except inasmuch as it calls attention to me. I know for you it’s the same.” In this way, a huge crowd of people”Š””“Š40 percent more users since last year”Š””“Šdevalue one another through mutual self-importance.

They’re referring to other people, of course. You and I are very different! It’s this part that scares me the most though, because the evidence proving their point is starting to pile up all around us:

Soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.

I’ve been a fan of Alex Charchar’s work for a long time. He is a designer whose essays on Retinart have always inspired me a great deal. Yet none of his previous work could have prepared me for his essay The Colors of Grief, which was published in Issue #2 of The Manual earlier this year.

In this gut-wrenching piece of work Alex describes, in honest and heartbreaking detail, the ongoing healing process he and his wife are going through after their daughter passed away less than 12 hours after her birth. He explains the role that design and creative work are playing to slowly bring color back into their lives, and in doing so, he teaches us about the power of Design as a force for good in the world. It is, simply put, one of the most impactful essays I have ever read.

A while later I quoted a paragraph from The Colors of Grief in an article for Smashing Magazine entitled Designer Myopia:

I now know that it is through love and passion and happiness that anything of worth is brought into being. A fulfilled and accomplished life of good relationships and craftsmanship is how I will earn my keep.

Alex contacted me after reading the article, and thus began an ongoing email conversation that I have enjoyed immensely. Such is the way of the Internet — random connections can turn into lasting friendships if we just pay attention. But that’s a post for a different day.

I asked Alex if he’d be interested in answering some questions about his work and his writing process, and he generously agreed. What follows is more of a conversation than an interview as we discuss his thoughts on design, typography, corporate politics, and the process of writing his essay for The Manual. I hope you enjoy it.

What is your current role — how do you spend your days?

I’m a senior graphic designer at an in-house studio within a university, doing a lot of promotional materials for both internal and external audiences. For the last five years my focus has mostly been print based, but as the uni is currently looking at how we’re going to deliver content to students via smart phones and tablets, there’s been a lot more exploration, experimentation and research being done in terms of what’s worth pursuing. Luckily some people have realised that design will play quite a role in it all, so I’ve been in an increasing number of conversations and projects because of it.

It’s a good place to work and I work with great people, but there are often times when the usual drudge of being part of an in-house comes to the surface, mostly in the form of politics, overhead and repetitive basket-weaving kind of work in which we have to stick very tightly to established designs. It’s amazing how much gets in the way of actually being able to do the work.

Having worked at a university for a while as well, I’m all too aware of some of these challenges. Have you found ways to overcome some of the significant political obstacles you encounter in your day-to-day work? Have you been able to use design to solve some of the issues?

Ah! We share a pain and so I’d imagine we probably shared a similar approach to dealing with it! I first tried to keep up, which failed miserably. I just want to get to my work and not learn another half dozen acronyms and keep up with who is in which department this week, and what project is being explored by what committee who reports to which managerial group. Just too messy for me. So now I listen when it directly influences our group or work, play the game a little when it’s fun (and can get me onto good projects), and ignore everything else I can.

You have a strong interest in typography as well. Has this always been the case, or is it a recent passion? What draws you to typography?

It’s been something I’ve loved almost since the beginning. When I first began playing around with graphic design, I hated having to spend so much time sourcing good photos to play with (this was mostly for graphic art, not graphic design, but that’s where I started), and so I tried to focus on making type work well. It was more convenience than anything else ”“ when you use stock photography or illustration the design often suffers, but there’s nothing that suffers when you use a classic typeface. Nothing is lost by it having been used a million times before. This introduced new challenges ”“ establishing how to communicate emotion and generate interest using only type? Fun!

I had always respected typography a great deal ”“ Bringhurst’s classic has been used more than any other book and was one of the first I ever purchased and poured myself into. But when I started to look at design history and stumbled over European modernism I was hooked. A quick flirt with Tschichold turned into a passion that I still have today. It helps that using a good typeface can feel like cheating ”“ so much of the work has already been done by the type designer. The role of graphic designer is often to shut up and get out of the way so the typeface can shine.

I’d love to know a bit more detail around The Colors of Grief — the writing process, the editing, and as much as you’re comfortable sharing about all the emotions that went along with that.

It was rough and moved very slowly.

At first I knew I had to write just to move some emotions and ideas around. I came to realise that the only chance I had of being able to move in any direction was if I explored what was going on internally by stringing together some words and hoping some light would shine through. It ended up being quite an emotional purge as I wished to pour as much of myself onto the page as possible.

On occasion I found myself stuck in every sense of the word. I couldn’t move, nor think outside of a restrained sentence, staring painfully at the cursor, knowing what I had to tap out, what had to be said. It was important to me to be completely honest. I felt to hide any part of what I was going through, to pretend I wasn’t as hurt as I was (and continue to be) would be a small crime against what I was feeling and against anyone who might end up reading the story of my daughter. I would often use the pain as a guide, knowing that the more an idea mentioned would hurt, the more important it was for me to show it to people.

In writing this essay I was asking people to come along a very personal journey with me, and to then hide things from them felt horribly dishonest ”“ if they were willing to have me guide them through this painful story, they deserved everything I could give.

It sounds like even early on, you had a sense that sharing your story will somehow become part of the healing process. Is that an accurate assumption? Did you spend a lot of time wondering how people will react, and did it influence your process in any way?

Yeah, that’s spot on. As alluded to above, I’m increasingly feeling that for anything creative to be memorable it needs to be brutally honest ”“ and I wanted this story to be memorable for both those who read it and myself. I wanted to know that I did the best I possibly could to heal what had been broken, no matter how small a step it might have been. I freaked out quite a bit about how people would react. There were a few moments where I thought it was getting too heavy and people might feel that I was exploiting their emotions and the story of my daughter for the sake of an article. Carolyn (my editor) talked me off that ledge a couple of times, normally saying something along the lines of “the people who would think that way aren’t the people you’re writing for.” In the end I think we cut out anything that got in the way of the raw elements of the story.

So how did it get from words on a page to being an essay in The Manual?

In the end I had a ‘draft’ that was several thousand words long and so I started the process of editing, occasionally complaining on Twitter, and I think I posted a photo or two of our kitchen table covered in print outs with red scribbles all over them. This is when something amazing happened ”“ Carolyn Wood, who I might have spoken to briefly once or twice before, asked if there was anything she could help with. I had only shown a couple of people very close to me what I was doing. Being that this was Carolyn Wood, I thought “why not?” This was perhaps one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

She looked at it as a personal favor, with no thought of The Manual on either of our minds (especially mine). It was one of the sweetest and most generous things anyone has ever done for me. What followed was many, many chats over Skype as we worked through the article line by line, sentence by sentence. She showed an amazing gift for getting the best out of my writing in an amazingly delicate way. The patience she showed me was unparalleled as she would guide me through the rough patches, and a great comfort was found in knowing that a laugh was only a moment away if we needed to reach for it. There were some days when we would work on only a single phrase, as we would laugh hysterically through stories and jokes, she would make fun of my Australian accent or my ability to use about a thousand words when three would do. There were a few moments, especially towards the end, where both our voices would crack and one of us would go quiet, most often myself, but I always felt very safe in the company of a trusted friend. I had never known what it was like to trust another person with your work so completely, but I knew that my words and ideas were perfectly safe and well kept. It was a very unique experience and one I still think about when I think of how generous and wonderful people can be.

When we were getting closer to finishing our work, she raised the idea of the article being in The Manual. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget that feeling. The authors who had been in the first one were amongst my favorites and the idea of having my words about my daughter printed in something so beautiful took my breath away. From there things moved quickly and before I knew it I was holding in my hands one of the biggest highlights of my career.

What kind of reactions did you get to the essay?

It was incredible. I got the kindest words from people who I had never met, old friends, writers and designers I admired, some shared very personal stories with me, others told me they cried, spent time with their family and friends because of what I had written. It was an experience like no other. All so incredibly positive. To know that, in a way, people cried with me and exposed themselves in such a personal way… that’s an amazing gift, one so generously given to me by Carolyn, Andy and their amazing audience.

It’s been quite a while since The Manual Issue #2 came out, so I’m assuming reactions to the essay have become a bit less frequent. Can I ask: how are you doing now?

One or two people have recently picked up a copy when I’ve told them I was lucky enough to be included and have come back with more words of support. Sometimes I get nothing, which I think is natural. It’s a topic that’s rich with awkwardness. The wave of feedback has long since passed.

These days my wife and I are doing ok. Things aren’t nearly as dark for us as they were, but we miss our daughter everyday. We talk about her so frequently ”“ about the little buds of personality that were coming through even when she was in the womb, about what she would be doing now, who she would have turned into. But we’re doing ok ”“ many couples breakdown through such an experience, and we consider ourselves lucky to have gone the other way and gotten much closer and stronger as a unit. We tend to laugh and joke around a lot more than we use to (though we were always playful), while also spending more time together.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between writing and design? Do you feel writing makes you a better designer, and vice versa? Is there anything in particular that draws you to wanting to get your thoughts on paper?

This is an awesome question — it’s something I think about fairly often as the parallels come to light the more I practice either.

Personally, writing has made me a better designer because it’s forced me to do more research and make sure of any ideas before I published them. It also, and I’m stealing this from someone (I think Zeldman tweeted it, but I might be wrong), helps organise your thoughts so you know what you think. Writing isn’t necessarily solely about expression as much as it is about giving shape to your ideas so that you can easily mold them. In this regard it’s made me a far better designer.

In terms of writing, I think the process I’ve learned to produce a piece of design have adapted well to any writing I do ”“ collecting scraps early on, thinking about the problem at hand and what a solution might look like, sketching out a rough, filling in the gaps and then refining, refining, refining, while always trying to have something pretty come out of it all. And the last steps for either design or writing seem to be the same for me ”“ I go over what’s in front of me looking to find any pockets where a bit of spice can be added and what rough edges can be removed.

Writing tends to make most other elements of my life better. I’ve gotten amazing opportunities from it, have met great people and been challenged, almost always for the better. It makes the rest of my day feel better, too. When I wake up at 5am and write for a couple hours, no matter how the rest of the day unfolds, I feel as if I have already done what I need to in order to earn my breath. I begin to look at situations and people differently ”“ objectively looking at them and myself from the point of view of someone trying to understand what’s going on and what the reason is behind things said and done. Trying to find little pieces of wisdom in every experience started to come naturally after spending hours editing my writing to find the same.

Do you have any other writing plans in the pipeline?

Yes! I’m trying, anyway. I’m wanting to relaunch my blog and focus on writing in a very serious way, but discipline is a huge issue for me at the moment. I just haven’t found that perfect rhythm of reading and writing every single day. It’s that frustrating moment where you know what to do, you can see it and feel it and smell it and taste it, it’s right there, barely an inch from reach. But you just can’t quite get to it. That’s where I am. I’m hoping as long as I keep stretching my fingers out, I’ll stop tickling the edges and finally grab ahold of the writing habit and be able to keep it safely in my pocket.

You should follow Alex on Twitter, spend some time on Retinart, and of course, read The Colors of Grief.

I enjoyed Eddie Smith’s post The color of creativity:

The process of creativity isn’t glamorous. It’s simply about hard work, the management of emotions, and delayed showmanship. And it’s necessarily lonely. To want to be creative — truly creative — is to want to entertain, which is often depressingly opposite of being entertained. 

Real creativity is the dull and failure-fraught art of giving people things they never asked for.

The phrase “delayed showmanship” immediately jumped out at me. I think that’s something none of us are naturally very good at.

Paul Ford gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, and published the text in a fantastic piece called 10 Timeframes. He spends most of the talk discussing units of time, using rich and provocative stories like this:

I can never remember if we are supposed to live each day as it were our last, or if it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes. We make movies about it over and over again. The Bucket List and Terms of Endearment and so on. Or even zombie movies. And the core assumption of those movies is usually that your life is kind of inconsequential up until that moment, that now you’re going to learn what really matters. Of course these movies are made by people who are totally dedicated to making films. They give up their lives and neglect their children to make movies about the value of family.

He ends up reframing the way we view our time to think more about how the things that we do affect other people’s time:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

We have a responsibility to make sure that we create things that help others spend their time wisely. It’s a sobering thought. This is my favorite article of the week — so well written.

I wrote a new article for Smashing Magazine called Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK:

W’d like to believe that we use established design patterns for common elements on the Web. We know what buttons should look like, how they should behave and how to design the Web forms that rely on those buttons. And yet, broken forms, buttons that look nothing like buttons, confusing navigation elements and more are rampant on the Web. It’s a boulevard of broken patterns out there.

I go on to the discuss the history of design patterns, and under what circumstances it’s ok to go off the beaten track and try something new. Enjoy!

This is not a good week to be calling yourself a curator. (Um, please don’t read the description of this site in the left column.) I’m fully aware of the irony of posting a pull quote from Mitch Goldstein’s Formally Concerned, but here goes anyway:

The result of this are blogs full of nothing but other people’s stuff. Pages and pages of other peoples photographs, designs, videos, etc. This is not inherently bad, but what I get curious about is how this affects how people go about making their own work — is there room to think about something new if your mind is filled with everything else? Probably, but I would not discount the distraction of seeing an endless stream of externalized, decontextualized imagery.

I imagine the natural reaction to my opinion of this is that these Tumblr blogs act as inspiration, as a scrapbook of ideas. I question this as well, since I think true inspiration comes from the questions you ask yourself, not from constantly looking at how other people answered their own questions. I hope that the reblogging and reposting of other peoples’ work — and reblogging other peoples’ rebloggings, ad infinitum — does not take the place of actual creativity. I mean, finding cool stuff and posting it sort of feels like you are making something, right? Tumblr can provide an illusion of creation — I wonder what people would make if they were not busy making this illusion?

I’ve actually written about this before as well in the context of the “post-literate society”:

I believe [sites like Pinterest and Instagram] give users the illusion that they’re creating something without the necessary work that is required to make something good. Sharing pictures is effortless. And if we know anything about online behavior, it’s that people hate doing actual work when they can just click a button instead.

This, of course, comes off the back of Choire Sicha’s rant against people who use the word ‘curation’:

You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator. You’re buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling””and you’re then reselling it on your blog. You’re nothing but a secondary market for someone els’s work.

I’m obviously conflicted about this, because a lot of what I do on this site is what’s considered link-blogging, adding a little bit of context and additional thought when needed. I certainly won’t call that “creating”, but I also don’t understand why there’s such a big backlash against this type of activity.

The first advice writers always give other writers is, read more. So I am comfortable with my approximately 70/30 split between posting links and writing longer, original pieces. I don’t think I’d be able to write the 30% if I didn’t spend the other 70% finding and reading great content — and why shouldn’t I share that with you? As long as the 70/30 split doesn’t become a 100/0 split, I’ll keep doing this.

On this particular issue I’m much more in agreement with Erin Kissane’s viewpoint in Bloggers and Bowerbirds:

We should stop treating the web like it’s zero-sum and start treating each other like colleagues. When people like Popova and Roth-Eisenberg show up and offer a standard, our response should not be to freak out about them wanting in on “our” cultural capital. Respecting the work of discovery doesn’t detract from respect for the work of creators. There is not a limited supply of civility and respect, so let’s stop being dicks about this stuff.

Preach it, Erin.

Oliver Reichenstein takes on the tendency to put social media sharing buttons all over a site in Sweep the Sleaze. This part in particular is something I’ve thought about as well:

If readers are too lazy to copy and paste the URL, and write a few words about your content, then it is not because you lack these magical buttons. If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it — Oliver’s team just did a gorgeous redesign of their iA site. Be sure to check out his post Responsive Typography, which goes into some of the details.

John Moltz is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers with his very nice web site. And he just wrote a thing about Windows 8 for Macworld where he really outdid himself. It’s hard to pick just one section to quote, so please, just go read Coming Attractions: Windows 8. A small taste:

Microsoft has declared Windows 8 a tablet operating system “without compromises” because it runs on tablets and desktops and toaster-fridges and can run desktop applications on any Intel-based hardware. Surely any operating system that has a matrix to let you know what features are available in which version can’t be compromised, right?

But running Windows 8, it often seems that what’s been compromised is your sanity.

I have such a weakness for snarky tech reporting.

(via The Loop)

Seth Godin sums up the dilemma of the digital age quite nicely in Dancing on the edge of finished:

Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.

Happy weekend, everybody!