Harvard Business

The Madness of Mission 6 via Masturbacon.

A few months back I tweeted “20 years of web and all we have is forwards/backwards? (Cue information architects lining up to Karate Kid my head).” I tweeted this while designing the navigation for my then Kripy Tumblr but I also had your stock standard blog in mind and, what, six months later, I think it still holds true. A lot of this has to do with the way the applications have been designed (the backend databases of the likes of Tumblr, Wordpress, and Movable Type to name the engines I’m familiar with) but it also has to do with the way we, as humans, have decided to classify or mark up data on the net within these applications, namely in the form of tagging and categorisation. And look, I agree with this and my Delicious account is a testament to my fastidiousness in saving and tagging things I find on the web. My issue/problem is twofold.

First, a lot of the base templates that come with Tumblr and Wordpress out of the box set out the information in a way that makes perfect sense and leverages the metadata in a logical way yet it removes any form of introspection. Architecturally it works but it leaves a lot to be desired. And unfortunately getting in under the hood and messing around with the templates and the code isn’t an entry-level exercise. It requires some knowledge of coding and an amount of hair that you’ll largely lose to the pain that goes with trying to understand and tweak someone else’s code.

Second, and this is where the information architects start lining up, that it’s NOT okay NOT to have a clear and consistent navigation path and/or structural navigation. (Although after consulting “Da Oracle” aka Jakob Nielsen maybe I’ve come to this conclusion on my own without having a proper, thorough investigation first. I was looking for a fight and may have ended up punching myself in the face). What I’m trying to get at here in a mega-longwinded way is that I like figuring out things for myself. I used to take apart the family toaster and pretty sure I destroyed my first ever computer, the good old Sinclair ZX81, and for this same reason I enjoy “taking apart” websites. When someone says to me – in regards to website wireframes or information architecture design – “it isn’t clear”, I usually retort with “so what”? Introspection is awesome because it leads you to new ways of seeing and doing, and thereby learning, possibly figuring out a new way yourself or a solution to a problem. I never walk to work the same way twice. I have three different ways of driving to the same place. (Framling can back me up on this one). I do this to find new things, like re-reading a book or re-watching a movie, and possibly have a new challenge thrown up in my face. And I think the web should be more like this.

I don’t want to come out sounding like these applications suck or were designed poorly. Far from that. For these applications to be readily available in the public domain, for free no doubt, is a testament to the openness the web was built upon. I use these systems because I don’t have the time to roll-my-own anymore but I think we should be squeezing as much as we can out of them in order for us to learn, innovate, and continue to push both the applications and the data that runs through it, in puzzling, challenging, and ultimately interesting new ways.

Every coder’s worse nightmare brought to life by the kids at Amusement.

Now that Pitchfork have taken the scalpel to “Phrazes For The Young”, coming out swinging with a link through to a Letterman performance of The Strokes’ “Take It Or Leave It”, I thought I’d jump in and level things out. (And for the record the irony of comparing the old and the new is not lost on me, it’s obviously “The Forks” at their very best). This isn’t a Strokes record. Casablancas could have put together another rock record – by himself as he did with the first two Strokes records – but then what would have been the point? “Phrazes For The Young” does go all over the place – I’ll give you that – but that’s probably a good thing. The opening keyboard riff of “11th Dimension” feels like a preset from an old-school Casio keyboard, a guitar solo running through the second verse from the album opener, “Out Of The Blue”, sounds like melodic cock-rock, “4 Chords Of The Apocalypse Young” is a laidback bluesy blowout, again featuring those duelling guitar riffs. It’s not an album that will hook everyone, but it is full of fun summer jams probably best consumed baking in the sun, drinking cider. And it does leave the door open for Casablancas to next do what he wants, hopefully bringing back that fire that so consumed him when he fronted the Strokes.

“Phrazes For The Young” is out now on Sony. The Julian Casablancas website is more Bladerunner than you. And for the record I work for Modular and don’t do record reviews.

The Oatmeal lovingly flowcharts the rights and wrongs of the humble apostrophe.

So taking a cue from the The New Yorker I hunted down Gibbs’ latest offering, “midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik”, and have found something as refreshing and insightful as what the article delivered. Well noted is the fact that this “mixtape” is pretty much a completed album, readily available for download, as apposed to new rhymes over other peoples’ beats. The labels must hate it as much as the amount of sniffing they’re doing though The New Yorker quotes: “Gibbs does not currently have a record deal, and he isn’t looking for one.”

There I was finding it easy to keep my desktop trashed: enter Kitsune Noir and Steven Harrington.

The New Yorker

Mister Mittens’ Big Adventure now immortalised by Threadless.