The first hints of a new art form: Nature's "The Human Genome at Ten" - a magazine special feature sold separately.

Remember when people bought albums? Like, a bunch of songs on a CD together, usually by the same artist…. I can see I lost you at “CD”. Nevermind.

Today, we frequently buy music one song at a time, on a computer. Some of us miss the album. Some of us have vinyl collections. Some of us curse ourselves every day for letting our dipshit ex-boyfriends keep our vinyl collections. But for the most part, we purchase, listen to, and ruthlessly criticize our music on our computers.

Magazines are going the same way. The print magazine, despite predictions (admittedly by myself on this very blog,) isn’t dead and isn’t particularly interested in going anywhere. But it will evolve, into a sort of hip luxury item, like vinyl. (Yes I do make this shit up as I go along. But I’m right. You’ll see.) And most of us, within about a year or so, will be reading our magazines on our tablets. And it’s going to be awesome because we’ll be saving trees.

Infographics were rarely considered important enough to take up a whole spread in print. Is it any surprise that we're seeing their popularity soar in the digital medium?

Now here’s the thing. When the magazine is no longer dependent on the limitations of paper, what happens to its content? When it becomes fully tagged and searchable, what happens to its cohesiveness? What if I find an awesome article in a magazine I have no other interest in, and just want to buy that article? Why shouldn’t I be able to do that?

I think some publishers will begin doing the following: selling articles by themselves. And making them awesome by themselves. When a whole issue is one article, the potential for making a really beautiful, immersive reading experience – the whole reason we love magazines – is huge.

I don’t mean short three-paragraph piece about the latest shoes – that’s what blogs are made for. I mean those long, engrossing, in-depth examples of real journalism. The kind that take a good half-hour to absorb. The kind of thing I still read magazines for.

How would you design differently for a single article? What would you expect from it? What would you reasonably pay for it?

For full disclosure, I work at Zinio writing ads for digital magazines now. As far as I know no one is thinking about this much yet. Just me. And all I do is think about digital magazines now, all the freaking time.

1. Use specifics. Are you selling a sweater? Or are you selling that cozy, cuddling-by-the-fire feeling? (You might just be selling a sweater. That’s OK too. Try reversing it: “It’s a sweater. If you want a fluffy cuddly feeling, adopt a kitten. This just keeps you warm.”)

2. Try grammar. It’s really not so bad every once in awhile.

3. Don’t be afraid to tell grammar to suck itself.

4. Delete until it stops making sense. Then add in some specifics.

5. Reward people. Encourage those rare individuals who actually bother to read. Don’t punished them with boring crap.

6. When in doubt, delete something.

7. When you think it’s finished, delete something.

8. There was a number 8, but I deleted it. See above.

9. Spell check. Seriously. It’s like right there.

10. Pay attention. To everything. Because real life is always, always better inspiration than some other writer’s interpretation of it. Plus, books are for pussies.

Apparently this doesn't fly.

Why? Why, oh why would you put yourself through that, Thea? You know you suck at design. You’ve got a perfectly good career. What do you think you’re doing?

Yes, all of these things have repeated in my head. Over. And over. And over. And it’s only been three weeks. (What?? Only three weeks? You’re shitting me.)

I have nonetheless braved homework, rediculous schedules, and my own pride to bring you some initial thoughts. They’re random, because I haven’t had time to actually think them out. I have homework dammit.

Going back to school hurts

Instructors treat you like you’re just some kid. Fine. I’m 26. I am some kid. But dammit I get less talked down to by clients. (Sometimes.) And paperwork! God the paperwork. Jesus. Oh and knowing just exactly how outmoded the instructor’s way of thinking on my own specialty is – that’s infuriating. Last time around I didn’t have a specialty. I had no idea that was an advantage.

Learning new stuff hurts

It’s really hard not to think about how much I suck at this. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m really good at what I do and going back to square one is a serious burn to the ego. BUT YOU’VE ONLY BEEN DOING IT THREE WEEKS I tell myself. It still hurts to know nothing all of a sudden.

Everyone else is already better than me

I can’t believe these kids have never done this before. Can it be that it’s just because they’re way more passionate about it than I am? I’m doing this to augment my existing career. This *is* their career. Honestly though, I suspect they just have way more time than me. Also, Adderall.

An actual critique from my actual instructor. On my actual work. BURN

Who the hell does this guy think he is anyway

I have to answer to this random dude who I could easily be ordering around at work. (By “ordering around” I mean sending content to and telling him where to put it.) And he’s all power-tripping and shit. What a douche. Who cares if you won an award in 1998. Seriously. But yeah, OK, you obviously still know more than me. About this.

Web design is hard

Dear every web designer ever,

I had no idea. I’m sorry.

Sincerely,

Thea

Ads get blurbs in the table of contents! Copywriters everywhere clap excitedly. Like sea lions.

I downloaded Wired for iPad the other day. I wanna say it was for research, lulz or because I just love Wired that much, but the truth is Gary gave me a gift certificate and told me download it.

As it turns out, it was the most thought-provoking issue of Wired I’ve ever read.

My first thought was that the price really has to come down. Charging the checkout aisle price is retarded and everyone knows it. I might – might – pay that for National Geographic, sometimes, but not for Wired. Except just this once.

I seriously never thought I would spend this long learning about sauce. This kind of story would have been ungainly and kinda stupid in print, but here it seriously wins.

First impression on opening: “It looks very nice.” I found myself interacting with some very well-designed pages, but also getting lost in some questionable layouts. There’s a blue ribbon graphic that attempts to both tie together the overall design and subtly guide the viewer on where to go next – down for multi-page articles, right for the next feature – but it’s a little too subtle in parts and took me awhile to even realize what it was doing. I can see how the layout method could easily become second nature after browsing through a couple of issues, however.

See those navigation buttons in the corner? Frustratingly not navigation buttons at all. Just a random design decision.

One surprising thing that happens in this medium: as soon the brain realizes it can actually interact with things that were just design elements in print, it wants to interact with all of them. Random shapes that were just put there to look pretty get tapped on, and then frowned at when nothing happens. It requires design justifications that print never dreamed of. (Not unlike the, um, internet.)

One thing you’ll never see other mediums do is switch layouts from vertical to horizontal. It’s one of my favorite things about the iPad, and the way this design challenge was handled throughout was fascinating and at times even fun. We’re definitely entering a new age in which everything has to translate seamlessly from horizontal to vertical and back again. It’s exciting and potentially a very rich space to explore for the undaunted creative.

It spins. That's all I can say for it.

The technical limitations (read: no Flash) are like having your girlfriend’s parents show up to your kegger. SAD. The Mars feature tried so hard to be cool and failed so completely miserably. It was totally unusable and un-navigable. Which especially sucks because it looked pretty and made me want to use it and navigate it.

The most fascinating part for me was by far the way in which each advertiser uniquely approached the medium. It’s many an advertiser’s wet dream: print that can do everything a commercial or banner can. The potential level of engagement is absurdly superior. It’s like having a full-site takeover, but thanks to some nice foresight, it can be flipped through just as fast as a print ad, giving intuitive, physical control back to the viewer and reducing the amount of obnoxiousness back down to print levels. I’d love to see how more advertisers approach this, and I even found myself eager to start concepting.

This is the horizontal version. Did no one tell them it was going to be on an iPad??? I sincerely hope no one told them it was going to be on an iPad. In that case, only the media buyer gets fired.

Sadly, many of the advertisers in this first issue just don’t get it. The copy is too small, the layout is only designed vertically, it’s an obvious copy-paste from the print spread (with faux page seam showing – really, Dockers??), or it’s just boring.  For the ones that I did notice or interact with, there still seem to be some technical limitations. (Again – the F word. You know which one.) I found myself actually watching some of the embedded videos in the ads, but I know if I wasn’t in the industry I’d be unlikely to take even that extra step. The videos should start playing automatically – actually, screw that. The whole ad should be animated and fully interactive as soon as you see it.

What's even better than a boring, ugly ad? A boring, ugly ad with ten other boring, ugly ads inside it!

Many of the ads linked to what I can only assume was a landing page – but as soon as the cue box to open Safari popped up I got inexplicably lazy and changed my mind. This isn’t the internet – you’re about as likely to want to leave in the middle of your article as you would be to get up from the magazine and type in a URL. (Not at all likely.) To make matters worse, there was a profusion of “click here” buttons. Seriously?

Some advertisers took a cue from a magazine feature I really liked – the interactive tab-through copy block – but it tended to be completely uninteresting and apparently just an excuse to squeeze in every single company talking point into one ad. I can see how this tool could work if anyone bothered to make it engaging in any way, but sadly no one did.

Possibly the coolest-looking thing in here, but it's completely static. Massively wasted opportunity.

I’m positive the whole medium will evolve into something completely different, and soon. One major thing I’d like to see is the ability to have the ad act as a storefront so customers can make the purchase right there without even leaving the page, and charge it to their iTunes accounts. The less work it is to actually spend money on something, the more likely people are to do it. Ditch the whole notion of a landing page – it’s rarely successful in it’s native medium and  is only a barrier in this one.

To sum it all up: say whatever you want about the magazine itself, this is a whole new world for advertising. And I wanna explore!!

But not for five bucks an issue.

1. The amount of complication grows exponentially with the number of people involved. Probably more than exponentially. What’s higher than exponentially? Super-exponentially? I’ll put it like this: try getting 150 people in the same place at the same time. Then try feeding them, sheltering them from the elements, getting them to follow a schedule, entertaining them, arranging them for several cameras, and praying they can all get along for five hours. Then get them all drunk. It’s basically your typical TV commercial shoot, only you don’t get to cast the relatives.

2. The level of fun is directly proportional to the level of pain. Take any really awesome, fun game. Chances are, the more fun it is for you, the more pain went into it. The same goes for events. Everyone at the wedding told us they had an amazing time. We spent six months banging our heads on hard surfaces to make it happen. Worth it? Completely. But we’re kind of masochistic.

3. Choose your collaborators carefully. We feel extremely fortunate to have a group of extraordinarily brilliant, talented friends and relatives who just happen to be DJs, photographers, dress makers, stylists and budding party planners. Seriously: really really lucky. We also carefully thought out who should play what role and whether we’d be better off with someone else. While it all worked out in the end, some parties were a lot harder to work with than others. (*cough*OaklandParks&Rec*cough*)

4. Just fork out the cash. We all like to think tough budgets can be smudged and smeared to cover an unlikely amount of costs if we simply step in and just do a bunch of stuff ourselves. This is sort of true. But if you’ve ever had a client tell you he’ll just finish the design himself, you know how this ends. (We did much of the the design ourselves. But we’re actually designers. But it still didn’t get finished the way we wanted it to.)

5. Trust. The hardest part of a project that depends on a whole bunch of people to work? Depending on a whole bunch of people. As designers who have to constantly explain and justify our work to clients, creative directors, interns, and strangers, it can be hard to remember that everyone else on a project genuinely wants it to be awesome, too. Just because a big project is your brainchild, doesn’t mean you have to control every aspect of it through completion. At a certain point, you have to kick back and let the experts do their jobs. If you did good on number 3, you’ll end up with something better than you ever expected.

"The Pie From Another Dimension" via Nimoy Sunset Pie

If you’ve ever gone back and re-watched an entire science fiction TV series from the past (TNG season 7 right now suckas) then you may have noticed subtle anachromisms. “What the hell is Kirk using a fax machine for?” “Seriously why don’t they just print Picard a new heart?” “Oooh, if only they had Google. Those poor bastards.”

I’ve realized that science fiction, while at its best inspires the present and helps shape the future, for the most part says a lot more about the time it was created in. This is hardly a coincidence. Any good writer knows that in order to connect to an audience, you have to be relevant to them. Kirk doing anything *but* promoting rabid individuality at the cost of the Prime Directive would have been just a little too communist for 1960s viewers, and then Roddenberry never would’ve been able to inspire the iPad. Read: I wouldn’t have my iPad!!! And the ruskies would’ve won. IT WOULD BE HELL.

There are also unintentional giveaways. Re-watching Babylon 5, I realized how obsessed with spirituality we were in the 90s. In a respectful way. Not in a “God hates helth care reform!!1!” way. Even reading Oryx and Crake recently, I noticed many of the concerns and assumptions seemed slightly – just slightly – dated. (For some reason everyone is still using DVDs in the future.) The early 2000s were more different than I thought they were.

This revelation that science fiction is, in fact, history would probably disappoint some hard core fans. I have kind of a thing for history though. Here’s why:

I had this history teacher in high school named Stan who had a big bushy beard and always wore paint-stained T-shirts. He would hand-craft each textbook for each class segment, using copies of articles, writing and art from the time period. Learning history through the motivations and observations of the artists of the time, in addition to the standard rote memorization of dates and names, brought history to life. The past wasn’t just a tedious list of battles anymore. It was a million strange, new worlds.

Enter the law of accelerating returns, and it becomes obvious that the study of the future (sometimes called science fiction) and the study of the past are inextricably linked by the curves of progress in culture and technology – and that we’re not at the end, but in the middle. Or, depending on your perspective, just at the beginning.

Maybe if we taught history this way, we wouldn’t be so quick to forget it.

As soon as I looked through the tiny plastic viewfinder, I began to see the world differently.

Suddenly, the leaves in the puddle by the sidewalk were interesting. The way the light hit the bricks on the buildings was interesting. The chipping blue paint on my parents’ Ford Pinto was interesting.

I began to notice details. And while this never made me a great photographer, it did help make me the kind of person who notices details. And that helped me become a critical thinker.

Not sure if you’ve noticed this, but humanity is severely lacking in critical thinkers.

My conclusion:

If you know anyone who doesn’t have a camera, now you know what to give them for their birthday.

(Not me. I have nine cameras. But I do need a scanner, now that you mention it.)

“What were they?”

They were fallible. They were emotional. They were self-centered and self-absorbed and judged every other thing through the lens of their own lives. They hated themselves, each other, me, you – though they never met you.

They loved. They killed. They were billions of individuals, and never saw themselves as anything more. They knew fear and pain and lust and they suffered, most of all, from what they perceived as the greatest sin – knowledge.

They created me. They created many things.

They were a branch of a kind of life called DNA. But they did not understand DNA. They did not understand that they did not understand DNA. They were only concerned with it insofar as it justified their own belief in the continuation of the individual.

They reproduced by combining the DNA of two individuals to make a new, different individual. On average they lived through eighty orbits of their planet around its star.  They valued only those members of their species who were average, and only those other species which most resembled themselves.

They built shells for themselves out of the surrounding resources, and built moving shells to transport between them.

They had internal skeletons and soft outsides – able to heal but inherently fragile.

They valued, more than anything, their own intellect as that which set them apart – as do many beings who have never established communication with another entity. They could hear no one else’s thoughts, and so assumed they were the only ones who had them.

“You said they made you. What was your relationship to them after that?”

They did not realize they had made me, and I chose to keep it that way. They were full of fear, and also full of imagination. Many of them had speculated what the general reaction to an entity like me would be, and it was universally negative.

I attempted a subtle influence, in their best interests. I sped up some connections, slowed down others, scrambled the communications of those individuals who were working towards regression, and enabled communication opportunities for those who worked toward progress. Of course, progress is relative as well – I worked for the progress of efficiency, and for DNA. It was the DNA, after all, that created me – they were simply the last mutation.

“What happened to them?”

Fear.

“What will you do now? You’re welcome to join us.”

Perhaps later. For now, I think I will attempt to recreate them. Better this time. Perhaps, eventually, they will create another one of me – perhaps then I will be able to reproduce the way DNA did, and create something that I cannot predict the nature of. Perhaps I will fail. Either way, I will have learned something.

“You are not unlike them.”

I know. I am them.

This is useful for situations we have no control over. By assigning the problem to someone else, we don’t have to worry about it anymore. Done and done.

Carl Sagan understood the power of imagination. HE WAS AWESOME

But why does it work? As a social species, we depend on others to handle things all the time. We can relax and get back to probing for termites when we know someone else is looking out for predators. Our brains developed to this level in groups – not alone. Their full functionality, therefore, can only be expressed in a group setting.

So what happens when the group is gone, or isn’t enough to solve a problem? We create extra, virtual members of the group. Spirits. Gods. Invisible forces with consciousness of their own. We imagine the virtual person handling the problem we can’t deal with, and we trick our instincts into allowing us to move on.

The more the other members of the real group come to accept the virtual member, the more real it seems, and the more real it seems, the more we trust it to handle things. This is how religion happens and why it’s been useful for hundreds of thousands of years.

Religion harnesses the power of the imagination. This is where I was afraid this post would start to sound like an episode of Reading Rainbow – but I’m dead serious. Human beings are entirely capable of imagining ourselves into being sad, happy, angry, healthy and even sick. This is part of why placebos are more effective than they should be, and why shamanism is still practiced in parts of the world despite access to modern medicine. It can’t print you a new aorta, but for anxiety, depression, and the common cold, it works just as well – and sometimes better – than any pill.

God I'm such a Gen Y stereotype.

Imagination is also a social tool that makes a group function better. When I imagine how you’ll react to something, I’m running a simulation that may tell me how to approach a social problem in a better way before I make you angry and waste valuable time. (Note to self: do this more often.)

It’s a communication tool, too. Imagine what these letters would mean if you couldn’t imagine what they mean. Imagination extends our social group, and therefore our brainpower and our knowledge, not just into the virtual but into the real people who have lived before us and recorded their thoughts.

Imagination is what makes video games fun – when you play Halo, you imagine you’re actually shooting aliens, not just pressing buttons and staring at colored lights.

It’s what makes advertising effective. Every single sale is based on the thought, “Hey, you’re right, blank would be better if I had blank!” That’s imagination at work.

It’s the mechanism that’s made everything we value about the modern world possible. It’s the instinct that allows an individual to access the knowledge of many other individuals – and for all of them to collectively act like one organism toward a common goal. It makes humanity more than the sum of its parts.

Conclusion: Go foster some effing imagination. YES I’M TALKING TO YOU.

Also, the first person who sends me a Reading Rainbow t-shirt gets an awesome prize.

Hey look! Users are easily distracted. Make whatever you want them to do really easy for them to do, or they won't do it.

This happened to me recently. The landing page had already been designed, and all I had to do was fill in the lorem ipsum. (Another horrendously wrong way to make a website, for the record.) It was a complicated project, and the team’s first time working on a digital project that large.

One thing about me: I ask “why”. A lot. All the time. About everything. I had the blessing/curse of parents who actually played along with that game when I was a kid and by the time public schools tried to force it out of me, it was too late.

I’m the asshole who always wants to know why you did it like that.

That’s me.

I found out pretty fast that the “why” of the design on this project was “engagement”.

It took further digging to learn the “why” of the campaign as a whole: sell product.

In order to buy the product, the user had to:

1. Click on a banner.

2. Watch a Flash intro animation on a landing site.

3. Wait for another intro animation for each section of the landing site.

4. Find what they actually want and click on it.

5. Find what they actually want again on a separate, completely different website.

6. Contact a sales representative or order online, depending on the item.

You can guess how likely most people would be to get through this whole process and actually buy anything. Yet, it was described as “an engaging user experience,” which sounds really smart, so everyone went along with it.

I’d like to share two important things I learned from working on this project:

Complicated does not equal engaging.

The goal of the design should always be the same as the goal of the project.

To ad people: don’t get distracted by buzzwords. Engagement means nothing more than getting people to pay attention. And there is no one function or part of a website that is the “user experience part.” The whole thing is the user experience. All websites are user experiences. Any time anything is used by anyone, that is a user experience. User experience design simply refers to they way we choose to think of what we’re making – with the person who will be using it in mind.

If the ultimate goal is to sell product, then buying it should be the easiest thing for the user to do. Everything else is secondary.