Uncle Pete

I just found out that my Great Uncle Pete has died. He was 81 and still quite vital. He had driven around to see his Sister-in-Law, felt a bit off-colour, and told to lie down. When she returned an hour later he was dead. If only everyone had such a dignified death in this age of death-support machines.

My encounters with Uncle Pete were always brief and uncomfortable. He was a gritty Northerner who had risen up from being the son of a Butcher to one of the founders and President of Asda. In comparison, I was an effete Southerner who was squandering his life reading books. I always felt a little uncomfortable at the gulf between us.

Uncle Pete was my rich uncle, who would give my Sister and me £100 every year at Christmas. In response, I would dutifully write a two page thank you letter detailing what I was going to do with the money, what I had done at Christmas and my hopes for the new year. I never heard from him or had any inkling of what he thought of me, but I like to think that he looked on these letters with a kind of fascination. If, that is, he could read my handwriting.

Pete is dead now and I am reminded that we will die also. It’s sad but kind of bracing. I tend to think of humanity as being arranged in a pyramidal — with the children at the base and the very old at the tip. With each birth and each death you find yourself shunted further towards the summit. The higher you get, the more you tell yourself to relish what’s left, the more you feel impelled to make some kind of mark.

Customer Service

The best marketing that a company can do is to wait for things to go wrong and then make them right in a way that far exceeds the original fault.

Did I ever tell you about the time my Dad found a Kit Kat with no biscuit in it — just a solid mass of Kit Kat-shaped chocolate? He complained and they sent him a box of Kit Kats.

Or what about the time we bought a Scrabble set which was missing a couple of letters? We wrote off to Mattel and they sent us the replacement letters. When these letters happened to be from the new version, rather than the old version we had they sent us an entire new bag of letters!

And who can forget the time we bought a Muller Corner which had nothing in the corner? They sent us £3 worth of Muller vouchers.

It pays to be generous when you’re at fault because not only will you make the customer happy, but they will also be more than willing to mention your generosity in any conversation about things going wrong.

At work, we subscribe to .net, a monthly web design mag, which always has things to read in it. I had lobbied for the subscription and was delighted when we started getting it. Previously we had Computer Arts, which until recently was devoted to the most wanky, florid Photoshop excesses imaginable. Both magazines arrived monthly, except that Computer Arts appeared to arrive more often than .net. I looked back at the archives and discovered that we only had about half of the .net magazines we should have. So I wrote an email to the head of distribution and the editor of the magazine and they agreed to send me the missing copies.

So far this is just the bare minimum customer service you’d expect from someone you had gone into an agreement with. However what made it special was that, although the customer service chap was being querulous and difficult, the editor of the magazine, Dan Oliver, insisted I get my mags. Thanks Dan!

Top 10 Job Titles for the Web Design Specialist

I read this great interview with Andy Budd this morning as part of my research into usability testing. In amongst consigning CSS to history and envisioning a world dominated by Flex, I was struck by Budd’s idea that you can’t be a generalist anymore:

. . . what you need to do is specialise. I think gone are the days of the generalist, because I think that, sadly, if you’re a generalist, it does mean that you’re doing everything not to the highest possible quality.

This is true, but it doesn’t seem to stop anybody trying. Indeed, here we are encouraged to keep our fingers in many webdesign pies, rather than have the three of us dividing into specialisms. It does make you think, though: what would your specialism be? Should you choose one now and hope that it fits with who you are? Or should you wait for it to choose you (if it hasn’t already)?

What are the options for the web designer in the age of the specialist?

1. Interface designer
The word ‘interface’ includes the sense of interaction, user experience and aesthetics. Unfortunately, it implies you work on interfaces other than websites.

2. Web Developer
I could, at a stretch, choose to be a developer . . . if I knew how to program. Which I don’t.

3. CSS Guru
The days when CSS was the hot new thing are long gone, but it is probably quite a good description for what most small scale web designers actually do. If you don’t like the word guru, replace it with Monkey, which is the catch-all for people who think they are funny.

4. Web Typographer
With the current fashion for elegant typography, there may be a role for the web typographer specialism. However, all that working out em values to keep your vertical rhythm correct might give you a headache.

5. Usability Consultant
Merely calling yourself a consultant is a way to distance yourself from the nitty-gritty of markup and code. If you like doing usability testing there could be a decent niche to be had here.

6. Information Architect
All-too-often content is left to the very end of a project. Mistake! Crafting content into hierarchical structures that satisfy the eye and the accountants could be a very interesting.

7. Web Director
If you can call yourself an architect, why not a director? The director, in films and graphic design, ensures that everything comes together in a satisfactory way. It involves people management, decision making and vision.

8. New Media Designer
This one sounds suitably vague so that you can take jobs involving things like mobile site design, flash, flex and all the latest buzzwords. It also means you have to explain what you do after telling people what you do. This itself could be something you want to do, rather than have people make the assumption that you’re a bungling hobbyist as they can do when you say you’re a web designer.

9. Accessibility Consultant
This would be my absolute nightmare job. Having read accessibility reports in the past, I would hate to have to nitpick constantly about unclosed break tags.

10. Web Decorator
We hear a lot about design being more than decoration, but what if you like decoration? You could design background wallpaper and beautify the merely functional.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions. And where do you see yourself in ten years time?

Redesign no.8

As you may have noticed, I recently decided to give this site a new lick of pixels, realigning the focus onto my words. In the process I have excised what I consider the fripperies of the internet twitter, flickr and del.icio.us. I didn’t like the way I felt obliged to periodically update them and hate the way they lingered meaninglessly on the page. Community is a wonderful thing, but it can get a bit noisy out there.

I had toyed with the idea of making the site ugly, but will save that pleasure for another day. For those who fancy something a little ugly and discordant, here’s a picture celebrating (?) blue tongue disease:

Long Hair

A few years ago I became contentedly happy with my haircut. It was short, angular, and very vaguely contemporary. I decided that it was MY haircut, it would be my trademark haircut, the one that the world would know me by, like Morrissey’s quiff or Quentin Crisp’s frizzy meringue. I didn’t even have to pay for it, I just asked my girlfriend to give me a number four all over every three months and few trims inbetween. It was so liberating to think that I didn’t ever have to worry about my hair again. I could, instead, concentrate on matters of more import.

Then, without any warning, I became gripped by dissatisfaction. That which had once seemed a liberation was now a prison. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my haircut had become a curse. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the door to my cell was actually open and that all of the guards had gone home. I could grow my hair!

The ensuing growth has been fascinating to observe. It has made me realise that short hair is inherently mediocre and that, although long hair can look really bad, short hair can never reach its heights. The trouble is, where do I stop? I am getting married in August and the photos from that event will accompany me until I die: what if I look entirely awful?!

See also: Wikipedia on Long Hair

DiScoMbObUlaTe

The above is a poster produced quickly for Rob Wringham to promote his literary gig at the CCA in Glasgow. I enjoyed making it, but wonder whether I shouldn’t have taken more time to make it flow a little better.

There is something about how centered it sits and the amount of fleurons that makes me slightly uneasy. Jan Tschichold, in The New Typography, derides the use of symmetry as vulgar. Indeed, when he finally came to employ the technique at Penguin it was because he was only creating templates and symmetry is easier for the less-gifted to make the covers look pretty.

I’m not particularly interested in prettiness at the moment, instead embracing the palate-cleansing effects of ugliness. I have been reading this essay by Jeff Keedy and thinking about the daunting sense of freedom offered by opening yourself up to the more outré formulations of graphic language.

The Last Holiday Before the Divorce

A couple of weeks ago, Rob from Luxembourg announced that the band had decided to go their separate ways. They had finally thrown in the towel after seven years hard slog on the indie circuit. In a final gesture of resignation/celebration, the band posted the demos of their aborted second album onto last.fm, allowing their loyal fans one last chance to hear new Luxembourg songs.

I wasn’t expecting much of The Last Holiday Before the Divorce, despite its great title. One of the formative moments in my life was observing, at the age of 17, lots of old people (though they were probably only the age I am now) in the Princess Charlotte clinging, despite the burns, to the embers of their youth. I wanted — and still want — to embrace the new, rather than wistfully evoke the sentimentalised pleasures of my youth.

When I first saw Luxembourg in 2003 they were fantastic, they renewed my faith in music, which lacked the catchy songs with sublime lyrics. The lyrics remained great (if somewhat solipsistic) but the music became more discordant and confused. You always got the sense with Luxembourg that they were throwing everything into the mix, which some might argue was evidence of a deeper malaise: that of desperation. Now, no one denies that you have to put in some effort in, but at least pretend to be a little nonchalent! We like our bands to be cool, not to try so hard they become resentful.

As such, it was a surpise to find that The Last Holiday Before the Divorce is really quite good. It is mature, stripped of all excesses, and unbearably poignant. Art is No Defence, despite being the roughest song on the album, is one of the best — experimental and atmospheric. How I Love You is a sharp dose of weimar indie; Steady Pressure is a light, airy piano ballad with a sublime pathos-laden chorus; and Crowd Scene a throbbing, insistent pop song with an addictive melody.

The two ’singles’ — that is, the only songs to be properly recorded — Kick Me and Not Quite Right — get better and better with each listen. It’s melancholic, at times like this, to wonder what might have been if only they had been contemporaneous with the Longpigs and Mansun rather than Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines. The late-period Britpop they purveyed would have been signed and embraced, not ignored and scorned. Wrong place, wrong time: what a waste.

Disorder and the Second Plane

I woke up early this morning after a frenzied three hours of cleaning and tidying the night before. There is something about imposing order on chaos, purity on dirt, that grants the mind serenity. It stops wasting energy on low-level anxiety and displays its untrammelled, overflowing powers on whatever is the task at hand, which, in this case, was reading The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s collection of post-9/11 writings.

Martin Amis writes deliriously well. His sentences flow into paragraphs without ever getting caught on grammatical rocks or diverted by philosophical reeds. I can’t quote any of it because I’ve already took the book back to the library (although, of course, most of the essays can be found on the web), but it was a quick, sharp enjoyable read. Unfortunately, it also felt largely irrelevant.

Unlike Amis, I find it difficult to get as worked up about the Islam(ism)ic threat. One gets the sense that the news agenda has moved on. The immediate issue of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been overshadowed by the more daunting prospect of peak oil, climate change and rising food prices — none of which Amis mentions. The people involved, who Amis sees as having Clio* whispering in their ear, are pitiful bit part players in comparison.

The only time Amis’s imagination gets really fired is when he evokes the possibility of a worldwide Caliphate. Here, stoked by the writings of Islamists, he writes of a world of terror and boredom, of nine year old wives, humourlessness, and misogyny. It is a vision he should have taken further, London Fields was a good sci-fi novel, I don’t why he doesn’t write more. As it is, Amis’s mind is too occupied by low-level anxiety to really get a handle on what’s going on.

* Amis is obsessed with the idea of Clio, the muse of history, to the extent of naming his daughter after her.

The bleak future ahead

Could it have been different? Really? Could it? I imagine myself living another life completely. Not going to university, living by my wits, being in a band, following my dreams and the dreams of others as we skate through the clichés of modern rock and roll. Would it have been so bad.

I didn’t make my decisions, but I’m always glad to have made them. I know things that I couldn’t have learned any other way and not for anything would I lose these thoughts and feelings. It is a lack of understanding that would say otherwise. But counter-factual history is so tempting . . . I wish I could meet with some of my alternate reality mes. The ones that didn’t read Proust in bed, the ones that tried at school, the ones that played in a band longer, the ones that never designed a website, the ones that went fishing every weekend . . . none of these propositions sounds particularly appealing, but it is something to think about them.

Of course, you can be whoever you want to be now. You can espy patterns in your life that can lead to amazing realities. Or you can, like I do now, not think about them at all. Just live. Exist. There is something in being mindful, not thinking about the future, just focusing all of your resources on the task at hand. I am sure that being mindful is the reason that I am so energetic at the moment. Anxiety and worry, really drain people. Wow, imagine if it is true! I will have cracked the secret to being energetic all the time, wouldn’t that be something else!

I watched Soylent Green this evening, a not especially bleak dystopian vision of an overpopulated society that has polluted all its resources starring Charlton Heston. I like Heston, he’s such an oaf in the film, so vulgar and postmodern. It’s just a shame that they didn’t really evoke the misery of living in New York when it has a population of 40 million. I did like the ’scoops’ — riot vans that literally scoop up protesters — but the rest was fairly tame.

I’m not quite sure what the purpose or aim of my current ‘research project’ is, but it will no doubt become clear at one point. I can only hope that it isn’t just preparation for the bleak future ahead.

Laura chose the Libertine and I wrote this.

Laura asked me a question: “What should I read that would improre my writing. She gave me two less than promising options: a Lacan book and something called the Libertine Reader (nothing, thank Christ, to do with Pete Doherty). Rather than pass comment, I scanned my own shelves looking for something better.

Ballard? Too clinical. Home? Too wild. Schopenhauer? Too arch. Sinclair? Ah, Iain Sinclair’s Lights out for the Territory. Perfect. He is the perfect modern author of poetic prose: every sentence is soaked with allusions, his command of language is superb, visceral and unique. No one could fail to be inspired by lines like this:

“The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking.”

Sinclair is radical, uncompromising and wry. Alas, Laura chose the Libertine and I wrote this.