One of the main focuses where we’ve collaborated on is maps. Over the last 3-4 years they have steadily produced some incredibly high-quality maps of Reykjavík, Iceland, and other cities around the globe. Recently, the publisher Gestalten approached Borgarmynd about publishing a few of their maps in their newest book, A Map of the World. Two different maps produced by Borgarmynd made it into the publication, the TOC San Francisco map and the Reykjavík Center Map.

Our role in the creation of these maps was low. Having been to San Francisco for several month-long stints, we made recommendations and comments about the city and all its peculiarities and wonders. Some of which made it into the final map, giving it a local feel. The original map was printed on a Tyvek material. It is water-proof and tear-proof making it idea for any map. The other crazy aspect of the TOC San Francisco map is the fold. It is a Muira fold which means it pops open and closed easily! It is a fascinating thing to hold in your hands and play with.

The Reykjavík Center Map is one of the longest running projects for Borgarmynd and we’ve worked together over the years getting off of paper and online. We built an online, slippy map version at reykjavikcentermap.com which has continued to evolve and proven a steady source of income and traffic for new projects. The original hand-drawn and water coloured map has plenty of life in it. We’ve made plans to re-use many of the files for other projects ranging from other custom maps, to a base-layer for a video game and a board game already made from the design.

Some of the designs that didn’t make it into the publications which we’ve also collaborated on is the IcelandIllustrated.com map. This is another hand-drawn map, but this time all of Iceland. We helped create another custom slippy map solution for them to add in locations, advertisers and photos. For this project we also began to create a better framework to more easily roll-out custom, online maps like these which are also accessible on smart phones by re-arranging some of the menus and adjusting the sizes and controls.

At (optional.is) we’re big fans of maps and it is always a pleasure to team-up with others who have the same interests.

In our current office space the kitchen sink’s faucet has got to be the worst design I have ever come across.

Donald Norman wrote a book about badly designed objects called “The Design of Everyday Things”. In it he discusses affordances and how lousy we are at getting the design of a simple door right. Pull handles when you are meant to push, etc. These are affectionately called “Norman doors” after him. This sink could easily be the quintessential “norman sink” it is that bad.

Firstly, let’s look at the layout of the components. It is an incredibly simple design to have gotten so wrong. There is a neck where the water comes out. You can grab the neck and swivel it around. We understand the affordances. So far so good. Next we have a leaver which controls both the flow and the temperature of the water. Again, we’ve minimised the choices as well as made it pretty obvious what to grab and what can be manipulated. Now comes the bad news… the layout.

You have to reach under the neck where the water comes out to grab the controls to turn the water on. In doing so, you instantly get your arms wet because they are in the way. To turn it off, you have to reach through or around the stream of water to get to the controls. Who thought this design was a good idea? Looking closely, I almost wonder if it was installed incorrectly.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the control to adjust the temperature have labels which are completely counter intuitive and poorly explained. As you rotate the handle the indicators of hot or cold also rotate. This means as you turn the handle anti-clock-wise the ‘blue’ dots (which I assume is meant to symbolise cold, but tell that to color blind people) rotate to the 12 o’clock position and force the ‘red’ dots to rotate to the 6 o’clock position. You’d assume that now that the ‘blue’ dots are showing this would mean the water would be cold. Nope! You turn the handle toward the hot ‘red’ dots, so that means you wanted hot water. This goes against intuition. As you inspect the current state of the system, all you can see is that water is running and the color blue is at the top most prominent position. You would naturally think it should be cold water. The converse is true as you rotate the control clock-wise until the blue dots are at the 6 o’clock position and the red dots are at the 12 o’clock position. That means cold water!

Every time I am forced to use this sink I either get the temperature wrong and/or get wet trying to use it. It is a masterful creation of not-thinking nor designing. Now the original industrial designer might throw their hands up and say that the plumber installed the hot and cold water pipes incorrectly. While that might be true, the design should never have allowed for that confusion in the first place! A well design, or simply labeled, product should not be installed incorrectly. Text saying HOT and COLD on the internal parts of the faucet should have been present and prevented the incorrect installation. Having that text out of view would not have taken away from the astectic of the faucet.

There are several other simple labels and rearrangements that could have been changed to avoid this kerfuffle. The simplest solution could be to swap the colors (or the pipes) so the visual state of the system at any given time represents what is happening.

If this were a complete redesign, then rather than the temperature indicators also rotating with the control, they should have been encoded onto the faucet portion that does not rotate. Then as the leaver control is moved from right to left to change the temperature it is acting as a pointer to the desired outcome; hot or cold. We’ve all seen a better sink design and can imaging how to improve on this layout without having to try too hard.

As for having to reach through the stream of water to adjust the controls, that needs a complete rethinking of the design. Looking closely, I keep thinking it was installed backwards. Given how the pipes representing the temperatures are mixed-up, this might have been a DIY job or some frankenstein faucet of various parts.

Whenever you use a device and don’t understand it, you should never blame yourself for being stupid. It is the designers job to either make the interactions as understandable as possible or explain clearly what needs to occur. If you can’t figure it out, then they didn’t do a good enough job teaching.

As for this sink, I refuse to blame myself for getting wet. It is a train wreck of bad design, engineering and installation.

As a small agency, this was our first big year in operation and we wanted to be sure that the company was healthy and was doing well rather than secretly haemorrhaging money. The simple and most logical system for us was to track our time. We couldn’t improve our minimum hourly rate if we didn’t even know our productivity or costs. This first year set our baseline to better get a handle on how and where our time and money went.

One of the early questions when starting your own company or going freelance is always where does my time go? Lots of professionals stop working at a set time. It creates a separation between life and work. Others have different advice. Some companies expect you to have 6 hours of billable time a day, others want you to log 8, but someone else is determining what is billable and what isn’t. We didn’t tie hours worked or logged to a salary, everyone’s needs and abilities are different. More importantly, we want to know what an average day or week looked like.

This article is going to be a very open-book about how and where our time went in 02012. We honestly can’t tell you if this is normal, or good or bad. It worked for us and should at least be a wake-up call to anyone interesting in making the jump. I would guess that no matter your industry, your results won’t be that far off from ours.

Daily Hours

After logging time in 02012, we averaged around 125h per person per month. Which means we were logging about 29h a week on average. We can now put this value into our equation to better estimate an hourly rate since we know we’re logging around 30 hours. The downside now is to estimate how many of those 29h are actually billable and how many are sunk costs. Billable hours is the real number we need to calculate a minimum hourly rate.

Even though we managed to track 30h a week, there were certainly weeks with more hours than others. A few conference trips which were hard to estimate where that time went as well as some work just plain forgotten to be logged or even more realistically, banal work like checking email in the evening not being recorded as ‘work’ even though it is. So if anything, we’re under estimating our hours worked, hopefully not billable hours.

This is certainly something to keep better track of in 02013 and try to monitor this month-by-month so we don’t get lazy in reporting or punching the clock, or more likely we’ll accept that we are not even 80% productive and adjust our rates accordingly.

Work Categories

Every hour spent in 02012 was put into one of eight categories: Administration, Consulting, Design, Meetings, Presentation Preparations, Programming, Research, and Writing. The actual percentage breakdown was surprising. We think of ourselves as a software solutions company. We mostly focus on working with clients to solve problems by using the Internet. This could be in the form of surveys, maps or static websites. It didn’t surprise us that we spent more time Programming than Design, but the amount of time spent in Meetings and on Administration was shocking!

For every two hours of programming, we spent one hour in a meeting. Every day, we spent around 30 minutes on Administrative issues. This includes time spent creating invoices, chasing invoices, responding to email requests, and time with the accountant and lawyers. This is probably the largest group of non-billable hours and that’s 30 minutes a day. In 02013, we certainly want to minimise time or at least get paid for as much of it as possible. Knowing that ~6% of the time on any project is administrative means when we are done estimating the number of programming hours we’ll need to add 50% for meetings and another 6-10% for administrative time. This will keep us from undervaluing our effort.

Presentation Preparation was a bit over 2% of our time which is not directly billable either. This was time taken out of the normal work day to either create slides for a talk or seminar. Reusing slides cuts this number down as well as getting some money to give the talk. We also spent around 5% of our time writing. This was for this website, but also on books, articles and for other customers. Some of these hours were compensated for, but the majority were not. These are acceptable sunk costs because giving a presentation could be thought of as part of a marketing budget, whereas spending time with your account or lawyer is less like to generate new leads and revenue.

So what was the biggest take away knowing our hourly breakdown by work categories? We never expected to spend so much time in meetings! After talking to a few people this is exactly what they told me. The best way to kill a great programmer is to promote them into a manager. I’ve seen it several places, people who love to code start a company and become the CTO and then spend the vast majority of their time NOT doing what they love. If you are going to make the jump to freelance or a small company you can’t just hide away and do your thing. Almost a quarter of your time will be spent in meetings, there is no way around that.

Client Workload

We tracked the time we spent for each client. This is the obvious thing to track so you can invoice them. Now, for us, we have several different rates depending on the customer, the type of work, the exchange rate and other factors. So simply knowing the number of hours or the percent of time one client demanded doesn’t directly mean they were the most or least profitable. We spent a few, very lucrative hours with a few clients and would love to do more work like that, where as we’ve spent longer times with other clients but we were guaranteed a steady income at a lower rate.

According to the data, we were our own 3rd best client! Which is nice that we could spend nearly 20% of the company time on internal projects. My guess is that even more time was spent here that was not recorded. With few exceptions, none of this time directly generated revenue. It might have generated leads, new conference invites and even directly to work, but it is hard to attribute this. I have no idea if this is ‘normal’ or not, but when we are looking at the total number of billable hours we expect, we can see that 20% won’t be. In an 8h day, an hour and a half will be spent on internal projects.

If we look at the categories that were attributed to just (optional.is) as a client, you can see we spent a large percentage of our internal time programming. Some of this is code to get the website, the contest page and newsletter all up and running, but much of this is also projects which may or may not turn out to be products and therefore this sunk time might pay off in the future. It is a small risk we’re willing to accept as long as it doesn’t hurt the bottom line too much.

Writing was logged more than programming, which means we’re trying to be very active in our communications and sharing with everyone, much like this article. It is also something we can recommend to anyone, no matter your profession. Spend time becoming a better writer and communicator. We know how much time we spent on that last year and don’t see it getting any smaller this year.

The 3rd largest internal time sink is Administrative time. This is probably because we are such a small team we need to spend a lot of time on silly things like payroll, but as more people come on board, they won’t be directly adding to this number and the percentage will slowly get smaller in relation to everything else.

Effort vs. Income

We do have a variable billing rate, so not every customer is getting the same price per hour on the invoice. Luckily we don’t have that many customers or rates, but it could easily get out of hand if we’re not careful. What this does mean is that we can look at which clients are sucking-up loads or our time without having a good return on investment. This doesn’t mean they are bad clients, but they are a target for a rate increase or hours decrease. If the best use of your resources is purely to generate revenue, then you should chase the best paying customers for more hours. Hopefully, everyone will see that there are some projects which are rewarding, yet not the highest ratio of pay per hour. Also, the worst performer doesn’t mean you are losing money, they could be paying a great hourly rate, it’s just the others are paying even more.

You can see that Client 2 has the worst ratio. We’re spending more time with them than we are getting paid for! Some of this is slow invoices, we did the work in 02012 and will get paid in 02013. I am positive we are not losing money on Client 2, the hourly rate they are charged is still above our minimum. Since this all relative to the other clients, it looks bad, but what it means is that some clients are at a much higher rate which skews the percentages. Remembering Edward Deming’s quote, “We can’t manage what we can’t measure”. Knowing who the clients generating low revenue and high work load allows us to examine them more closely to make sure everything is going well.

Product vs. Hourly

One of the advantages of having a digital product you can sell, is that you get more income as you get more customers. That 1h meeting still needs to happen, but it now can be amortised over several customers making it more profitable. In 02012 we had a pretty good split between income from products versus hourly invoices. This also means we are spreading our risk. If we were only a product company and a competitor entered the market we might lose customers and revenue, but at least we have some invoiced customers to make payroll. And vice versa, if a customer pulls out, we’re not scrambling to get more contract work because we have a steady income from the product to keep us afloat. Which is a good position for anything in life, not just a company.

Expenses

Over the course of 02012 we spent a lot of money on various things besides salary. One of our goals for 02013 is to better categories these expenses and run similar breakdowns, but we can tell you what percentage of our expenses were salary versus various other costs like rent, office supplies, flights, hotels, etc.

Office Supplies is probably on the low side in general. Our rent was either free, working from home, or cheap desk rental with other companies. This includes insurance, accountant fees, legal, general office supplies, banking fees and other non-salary/tax/travel costs. Most of the travel expenses were reimbursed by conference organisers, but there were additional costs incurred through out the year for travel to meetings, etc.

We didn’t spend any money on marketing or attracting more customers. We had plenty of great work, so there was no need to spend the time and money seeking anything more. We’re also virtual, so beyond a computer, which we already owned, there wasn’t much we bought. If you are looking to start, I would probably over estimate on Office supplies to be on the safe side.

The tax percentage was so large due to fees from our first year of incorporation. You pay your previous year’s taxes the following year. So we got hit with lots of first-time costs in our second year. Now that we were up and running, these were payed more frequently during the year and therefore in 02013, this should be a smaller percentage.

02013 Annual Report

If people find these numbers interesting and useful for comparison to themselves, we’re happy to continue to remain open about how our time is spent and begin to compare, year-by-year, to see how it is shaping-up. We’re in no way saying this is ‘normal’ or even if there is a ‘normal’, but we found some surprises and want to share these with anyone else thinking about making the jump. If you are better prepared and know what to expect, you can better budget your time and adjust your hourly rates to compensate. That gives you a better chance of survival and sharing with the world your great work. Good luck!

Notice how this article is entitled “Getting to your minimum hourly rate”. You can charge what ever you’d like as an upper bound and depending on the client you should! Working for non-profits or for large corporations, your rates should and will change. The most important thing to know is that every hour you are billing you are not setting yourself back!

(In this post I am always talking about to get an hourly rate, some people are billing in half-day or full-day increments. Everything below applies the same for you, just tweak the equations as needed)

Calculating your hourly rate

So how do you calculate your hourly rate? That’s easy, it’s the salary you want to make, divided by 52 weeks a year, divided by 40 hours a week. Simple!

For instance, if you want to make $50,000 a year, divided by 52 weeks that’s about ~$962 a week. Divided by 40 hours $24.05 an hour. That was easy.

That is an incredibly naïve and incorrect equation. It is a starting point, but it isn’t sustainable as a business. There are plenty of additional costs that this equation won’t cover. You’ve forgotten about your phone and internet bill, what about rent or a new computer? What about a lawyer, paper work fees or taxes?

Let’s look at a slightly more complex equation, but one that is still easy enough for you to plug-in your own numbers to get a minimum hourly rate that you should never go below.

We need to determine how many hours of your time you plan on working are billable. This is important because you are at work for ~40h a week, but you are not 100% productive, no one is and we should accept that. A portion of your week will be spent doing non-billable things, such as making coffee, sitting in meetings, doing administrative work or watching YouTube. So if we revisit the total number of hours in a week, we can get a new equation.

There are 12 months a year, 52 weeks a year, 40 hours per week. Now, lets be honest with ourselves, everyone deserves some vacation time – it might even be mandated in your country how many days a year. Then there will be sick days, plus public holidays. For a nice round number lets say you are only planning on working 45 weeks a year.

45 weeks * 40 hours = 1,800 possible billable hours a year.

Again, 40 hours is certainly optimistic, give yourself atleast an hour a day for lunch, maybe more.

45 weeks * 30 hours a week = 1,350 possible billable hours a year.

Over the course of a year, you have 1,350 hours to bill out to pay your salary.

Salary isn’t your only expense. Those 1,350h need to cover your salary, rent and plenty of other expenses.

To get an overview, we created spreadsheet with a few tabs for data entry. One tab is for monthly expenses, these are things like phone, internet, rent, salary, salary tax, retirement fund, etc. These all get summed-up and multiplied by 12 so we know our annual total for these monthly expenses.

Then I have another tab with annual expenses. These are things like insurance, banking fees (yes, I have to pay for the privilege of having a company credit card), domain renewals, accountant fees, government paperwork, hardware refreshing, etc. I can then divide these by 12 to get the monthly cost for these fees.

I recommend that you do the something similar. List out all the items you pay for on a monthly bases and items you pay for on an annual basis. (You decide if things you pay semi-annually or quarterly go into which tab) After you do some multiplying and dividing, you can get to a much better estimate of your monthly burn. This is an important number to know, if you are not atleast bringing in this much each month, you won’t be able to keep the lights on for very long!

With all these totals, you are getting closer to calculating your hourly rate. You know the total hours you want to work per year, 1,350h and you know your total annual expenses (monthly x 12 + annual). You can simply divide total costs by the total hours to work out your hourly rate. This gets you the minimum you need to charge each hour to keep the company on par for the year.

See, it wasn’t so hard, but there is a catch. At this hourly rate, it means you aren’t earning any profit, you are running the company at cost. That doesn’t allow for ANY wiggle room for new projects, bring on more staff or unforeseen problems/costs. If you wanted to branch out an buy some ads or print new business cards, these weren’t in your expected annual budget and therefore are putting you in the red financially. The easiest way around this is to budget in a 10% (or more) profit each month as another line-item. Sum your monthly expenses and add 10%. This will trickle through the equations and recalculate your hourly rate.

Obviously, the more days, weeks, months and years you run your business the more accurate your expenses will become. Over time you’ll learn how productive you are each week and how many days/hours it takes you to land your next project. All the downtime in between projects where you aren’t billing needs to be covered by the hours you do bill.

Using this equation, you can now estimate a more accurate minimum hourly rate:

((12 * monthly expenses) + (annual expenses))/(weeks worked * hours worked per week) = minimum hourly rate

If you go below this number, even for a friend or charity, you are hurting yourself and your business. There is no shame in passing on work, if you are putting yourself in financial trouble.

The sigma of your rates

It always feels uncomfortable when someone asks what your hourly rate is. If you are having this problem, then maybe freelancing isn’t right for you. It seems that no one wants to be honest about their hourly rate probably because of two reasons:

1. They really want or need this project and saying an hourly rate which is too high could immediately invalidate them from a chance of getting the project.
2. They are worried that what ever comes out of their mouth will be so low that in the future they can’t go back on it and increase their rates.

If you are worried about losing a job because you are too expensive then you have two more problems. If you go below your hourly rate, then you are losing money. If you are too expensive even with your minimum hourly rate, then so be it and walk away. If you are worried about being too expensive and all the customer is worried about is cost, then they aren’t the best customer to have anyway. People are happy to pay a premium if they feel they are getting premium work. Sure, your rates might be higher than the competitors, but you are willing to answer the phone at strange hours or go out of your way to help or suggest new projects. You are worth your price. You can never and should never compete on price, that is just a race to the bottom. If you properly sell yourself to your customer, they might balk at your rates, but go out of their way to find the money to still work with you.

Never worry about being too high if you know your rates are reasonable.

What if your minimum hourly rate is too high?

This is certainly a possibility. You might have unreasonable expectations for yourself and therefore an unreasonable price. Someone new to the field can’t charge an expert’s fee. Maybe you are assuming you are worth more that the market thinks? We’d all love a million dollar a year income, but that’s not feasible. If you reduce your salary, then your hourly rate will also be affected. You might also look to cut some of your other costs, such as rent or wait longer to refresh your hardware. Do you really need to be paying so much or pay at all? Cutting your overheads reduces your rate, which gives you the ability to increase your rates slowly upwards at a later date after you’ve established your company.

Worrying about being too low

Worrying about being too low is also a non-issue. From a psychological point of view we are very loss averse, if we knew we could have made more money we kick ourselves for not. This is partly why you figure out your hourly rate in the first place. Much like going to an auction, you have a price in your head you are happy to be paid or to pay for something. At an auction, if it becomes too expensive you don’t chase it until you can’t afford it. You stop. With your hourly rate, you should be happy if they accept. Maybe you could have gotten more, but you should be entering into a relationship and for the next project you can potentially increase your rates or as we’ll see later, there are other options. Settle on an hourly rate which you would be happy receiving and don’t lament over what you could have milked out of a client, you’re in this together.

Things to watch out for:

• Multiple currencies: If you accept different currencies be sure not to lose when there is a converse charge and if/when the exchange rate fluctuates.
• Inflation: Keeping your rate the same year and year, and you are losing money when you consider buying power and cost of living. $5 today is not worth the same as $5 was 50 years ago.
• Administrative work, non-billable time: There are plenty of hours in the day that can not be directly attributed to a client and therefore are ‘lost’. Knowing roughly how many of these hours you have each week/month will help you in your equations.
• Famine and feast: there will be downtime between clients. It has happened to us. We’ve had great clients who loved us, then they get a new boss in their division and all projects stopped. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but income we expected suddenly dried-up. Having a cushion so you can afford payroll is important.
• VAT/Tax: These are constants, but people tend to forget about these fees when estimating their rates.
• Legal Fees: You should ALWAYS have a lawyer, it will save you. Knowing how many hours and what their rates are can be difficult. Just like you are building a relationship with your customers, you should build one with your vendors.
• Products and deferred income: When you aren’t billing directly to a customer, but some of your income is coming from other sources, such as income from selling something en masse, it muddies-up your hourly rate estimates.

Some of these issues can be rectified in charging a higher amount to some clients than others. For every dollar you charge over your minimum to one client, don’t assume you can go below for another. Keeping you absolute base-line minimum across all clients means more profit into the company, which means you can bring on more staff to take on more work, try new projects, take some time off and still support yourself or save some for a rainy day.

Cost+

Everything we’ve been describing here is sometimes called ‘cost plus’. The idea behind cost+ is that you find out how much it costs to make a widget, and you add the profit you want to earn onto that price. For example if your widget cost $10 to manufacture, and want to make a profit of $1 on every sale, you sell it for $11. That is the basics of cost+. For a freelancer or small company, your costs are mostly salary. This directly equates to your minimum hourly rate. That is the cost of running the business. Now you just need to figure out the plus portion and add that to your hourly rate.

This is how most people have worked, you give a quote for the estimated hours and cost of the overall project. I have done this and probably will do this in the future, it is the safest way to make sure you survive another day. But it isn’t the best way to run a business.

Now that you’ve learnt how to estimate your minimum hourly rate, forget all about it. Keep that number handy, you can’t go below that, but it isn’t the way you should price yourself in the future.

Value-based Pricing

The preferred and more difficult way of pricing is something called ‘value-based pricing’. Some professions have been really good at variable pricing on their work. The rest of us need to learn from them.

Photographers have managed to get this right. For instance, they have one fee if an image used in an article, but a different fee if that same image is used on the cover. They are acutely aware that there is more value to the photo if it is a full-page spread or whether the circulation of the magazine is 1,000 or 1,000,000. Why should your work be any different?

Back in 1971, Carolyn Davidson created the iconic Nike Swoosh logo. She charged her hourly rate fee and was properly paid $35 for her time. That image went on to be one of the most recognized logos worldwide! She has since been paid an undisclosed amount of money, which is good for her. It goes to show that there can be a huge different between cost+ and value-based pricing.

There was a story about the great artist Piccaso at a cocktail party. A woman recognises him and goes over to make small talk. She finally asks the artist to draw her a sketch. So Picasso doodles out a sketch in 5 minutes and says, “That will be $10,000″. She looks at him and says, “But that only took you 5 minutes” and he replies “No miss, that took a lifetime”.

If you look at your skill set, we are all very talented individuals who are specialised in something, yet we are selling short a lifetime of hard work based on a few minutes or hours of work. Isn’t it better to work with a customer and succeed when they succeed? Doing so is more risky, but much more fair in the long run. You have a vested interest in doing great work and actually solving the problem rather than looking at the project brief and simply making the logo bigger like they asked.

Value-based pricing is much harder to sell than cost+, which is why so many people are still using cost+. Trying something different does give you the excuse to raise your rates or risk a chance at a better pay if you feel the project is truly something great. Just keep in mind your minimum hourly rate so that you are never losing on your hard work. I’m sure they will be times that you work closely with customers on a value-based pricing model, do the work and then the project is a flop for some reason beyond anyone’s control. You want to avoid dragging your financial problems into the mix if your rates were below your minimums.

Overall, value-based pricing is something to consider for your next project. Setting-up a new website for the local bakery shouldn’t be priced in the same way rolling out a website for a large company would – even if it is the same number of hours.

Now you’re ready

Go collect a list of all your monthly and annual expenses and put then into a spreadsheet to calculate your minimum hourly rate. You might be surprised at what you see! Take some time to do this because you’ll tend to forget expenses, like a new computer every 24-36 months or the annual company christmas dinner or maternity/paternity leave. Once you have that magic number, work to avoid having to use it. Experiment with figuring out what the customer’s real problems are and how you will work together to solve them and work for a percentage or the reach and audience. That’s the fair way to start a relationship.

We also started a newsletter to reach out to everyone with more information that didn’t make sense as long-form articles. Short, interesting topics, crazy links, upcoming conference appearances, and promotion for orbiting projects. You can read through 02012′s newsletter archive and sign-up if you like what you see. It is quarterly, so very low volume, but dense with information.

Connected with the newsletter, we’ve also started a quarterly contest. We make a lot of prototypes, which sometimes get made into real products. We tend to only have a few left-overs, and we want to get them into the hands of our readers. A random draw made the most sense, but we wanted to tie it in with something we love, cartography.

Conferences

In 02012, we were represented at 8 conferences in 4 different countries and over the internet. We were an invited expert in Boston, Massachusetts for Lady Gaga’s launch of the Born This Way foundation. After that we spoke at WhiskyWeb in Edinburgh, Scotland. Next, we presented at the UIE virtual seminar on “The Design choices you make“. A video is online if anyone wants to see it. We attended dConstruct in Brighton, then helped the next day at Indie Web Camp UK. After a few weeks we were back in the UK for Web Expo Guildford. They recorded the session on “Designing with data“, which you can watch online. Closer to home, Reykjavik, Iceland had an “unconference” which was a lot of fun to attend and meet folks, give advice and listen. Finally, a return to Lisbon, Portugal for the annual CodeBits conference. This year was a brand new talk about “Bits to Business, how to sell your software“. The session was well received and will get better with time. Before heading home, we made a short detour back to the UK for ClearLeft’s hack farm were we spent a week building a demo product called Politmus.

Article Updates

This is where we catch-up on updates to older articles. As time passes, more and more older information becomes relevant again, but needs a refresh. These are a selection of articles:

Blank Business Cards

Still one of my favourite ideas in the last year was the blank business cards. Since writing the article, I experimented with short-run printing with Moo.com and handed them out as I went to meetings and conferences. I was nervous that the recipient would feel uncomfortable with the cards, but they were always well received. People loved the idea and always were kind enough to fill it out with the information to keep the conversation going.

Seeing how well the idea worked, I started to look around to to get a larger batch printed at a cheaper rate. Moo.com is perfect for prototyping, one-off ideas or variety, but now that I knew what the cards looked like, how they functioned, it was time to scale it up. In the end, I decided for a better quality even more impactful design and opted to get the cards properly letterpressed rather than silk screened. I removed the branding from the design and had 2,000 letterpressed blank business cards created. I will never need another business card for a long time. These are multi-purpose, white-label cards that anyone can use.

If you are interested in getting a pack, contact me and we’ll see what we can do. Ideally, in the near future they will be fore sale with a few other items created in 02013.

City Swatches

After cleaning-up, I managed to find an old brochure from the Estonians about their country. In it, was the map which inspired the idea behind City Swatches. A simple diagram of what cities are on the same latitude or longitude as the source city. An amazingly simple idea, but with a big impact. To see such dis-similar cities as mine on the same latitude was amazing.

This is one of those projects which could easy become an interesting site in itself. A place where you enter your city name and it can easily display other interesting cities and locations along your latitude and longitude.

The key is augment this with some additional services to make the layout, design and fun-facts even more interesting.

It was a great discovery to find the source for this inspiration. It was even more interesting than I had imagined it in my head. As part of the 02013 road map, we want to improve this idea further and make it even easier for anyone to create and see some city swatches.

Skólapúlsinn: At the intersection of education and technology

Since the last blog post, Skólapúlsinn has been very busy rolling out new products and features. As we wrote about back in 02009 when we introduced Skólapúlsinn as an Education Assessment Tool, we are now also surveying staff and parents about their feelings about the school. Since the start, we’ve been trying to explain that a school is much more than just the students and the building. We’ve avoided the clichéd icons of school buildings and the teacher’s apple because we wanted to build a system which monitors all aspects of school life. By the end of this academic year (June 02013) we’ll have completed this and have more exciting results and case-studies soon after.

We’ve also rolled out an entirely new product as well, Skólavogin. This combines public data with the school’s Skólapúlsinn data. For instance, taking many of the inputs a school has; funding, income, staff, students and other public information and ranking each municipality based on some devrived metrics. For instance, summing up all the students and teachers in a municipality and dividing the two we get a student-to-teacher ratio. We can then rank all the municipalities based on that ratio.

The more interesting data comes when you begin to place that next to their own private results. Viewing the students’ responses to classroom engagement and the staff’s all next to salary or other public variables. Now, this certainly does not preclude any cause and effect or correlation or causation, but it does help to highlight outliners which need investigating. Many times they are easy to explain away, such as a high cost per student in special needs schools. This new internal tool is only a few months old, but already shown its worth. Over the next few months we’ll continue to improve upon it and I’m sure there will be more to write about.

Data Shadow

There was an article this year in the NYTimes about Target’s use of data mining to determine if were pregnant before you knew. The article was entitled, “How companies learn your secrets“. It came across as a very spooky article, but there is no magic behind it, just loads of number crunching. As our data shadow gets longer and darker, it will come back with unexpected assumptions and truths even before we know about them.

What’s in store for 02013

We’ve decided  to take a theme for this year. Many of 02012′s ideas revolved around utilities, office supplies, maps and notebooks. The next twelve month in 02013 we’re going to take the theme of “paper” and move a few of our prototypes from an idea, to prototype to actually manufacturing some of the designs. A few are already underway, others need to be perfected, but either way, spending time learning about atoms rather than bits is our goal. Focusing on paper means we already have plenty of tools at our disposal, from great local resources like Reykjavik Letterpress to other start-ups like Newspaper Club and beyond. With our list of ideas and content, we’ll be making more prototypes and more objects to give away and potentially sell. So stay tuned and be ready to print.

The quality, layout and design are all fine. It is professionally laid-out in two languages. The problem is that they missed the point and opportunities on so many fronts! In this article, we’ll have a look at everything they got wrong and how you can avoid it and improve any fliers you might be making the future.

We’ll start at the top. In Icelandic, the title is “Fáðu RIFF í Vassann”, which translates roughly in to “Get RIFF in your pocket”. It is a catchy title. Now let’s see what it is in English: “Get the official RIFF app here”. A bit strange that the text is different between translations, but OK, you need to localize and change things. My biggest point of confusion and contention is the word “HERE”. For years on the web we’ve been told to NOT say “click here”. There are problems with accessibility when every link is read out as “click here”, “click here”, “click here”. Not to mention clicking is a mouse/pointer action not a tapping figure gesture. Your links should always be descriptive of what they do and make sense out of context, like when printed. You can’t “click here” on a piece of paper, it interrupts the flow of reading and is a rookie mistake. (I know that research shows that people are more apt to click something that says “click here”. Atleast meet people have way and link the full descriptive text “click here for information about X”)

But let’s get back to the flier. Why, oh why does it say “get the official RIFF app here”? Here, where? At the ticket office, not from the paper? Where is the HERE you mean? This could have easily been fixed by saying “Get the official RIFF app online” or “… at the iTunes store” or “… from our website”. It doesn’t take a copy editing genius to fix or offer up alternatives that make sense.

When in print, never say “HERE”, you can replace it with something that is much more descriptive. It is lazy to use terms like ‘here’ or ‘there’, even online you should always think about being more descriptive. You don’t need to treat your readers like a child, hand holding them all the time, but you do need to be explanatory in your use of adverbs.

As we move down the flier, we see 3 very nice white iPhones (all with bizzarely different times and with no button or speaker) with some examples of the app. Fine, no problems here, nice preview of what you’ll get when you download the app.

This brings-up the whole discussion of whether or not this even needs to be an app. I won’t go into all the details, but the minute you couple yourself to an app, which is a proprietary technology, you are at the whims of the device creators. If Apple doesn’t like you app for any reason, you are dead. If you movie has a tiny bit of nudity, your app could get rejected from the store. Websites do not have this problem. You can update a website any time you like without permission from the device creators. The other great thing about websites is that they work on more than just the newest versions of OSes of the newest versions of smart phones. And if your app needs to go online to fetch data anyway, you have really just built a custom browser at a much higher expense than a web developer. Technologies such as local storage and app cache can get your webpage to run offline and mimic an app. The difference between apps and websites is an article or two by itself.

As we move further down the flier we see a QR code. I love the idea of QR codes, but in practice they are a disaster. I’ve written about them before in previous articles called “What are 2D barcodes” and “What 2D barcodes aren’t” and this flier fails the test. It says:

That’s it. No more. So that “Get the official RIFF app here”… we still have no idea where HERE is. No URL, no mention of a website, no mention of any place to go download it. Just a big, uninviting QR code.

I’m a pretty tech-savvy guy, but I don’t even have a QR code reader on my phone. I understand the technology, I can create QR codes and I can’t even be bothered to download an app to decode them. The average person now needs to download an app to read the QR code to go download an app! That’s insane.

I know the phone company did a big push a few years ago where they bought ads space through out the local newspaper Morgunblaðið and sent it to everyone’s home for free. It was a corporately underwritten newspaper as an advert with news articles in between the phone company’s QR code push. That was their adoption push and they’ll probably fall back on that saying “People know what QR codes are now”. But that logic makes no sense. People know where your office is and they have called you on the phone, but yet you still put your address and phone number on all your business cards, letter head and other print information! There is zero explanation of what that QR is on this flier, what it does or how you are suppose to interact with it. From a user experience and interaction point of view, you might as well not even have that QR code if you aren’t going to explain or help the reader get to the point where they can decode it.

The whole point of this ad is to get people to download the app and ~1/16 of the flier is the QR with no explanation of how to use it.

If you are going to use up the space to put an ugly machine readable QR code in my face, plus now some explanation text to tell me what a QR code is, how to download an app to scan it to download your app, wouldn’t it be MUCH better for everyone to have simply put a URL there? Something like, “To download our RIFF app, please visit http://exmaple.com/mobile” or something. Then you can redirect people to the right platform.

In fact, let’s look at this from marketing point of view and see all the opportunities. A person picks-up the flier and wants to download your app. You have people who are very interested in your product, they want to give you money, in fact they want to learn more about your events so they can give you even more money. So what do you do? Confuse them with the QR code, then send them off to some 3rd party site to download your app!

Let’s think about that for a moment. What if we had a URL that ANYONE, not just smart phone users could visit? On that page, have links for the smart phone folks to go download the app. On this landing page, you control the branding, the experience, but wait, while they are on the site, why not let them know about discount passes, the mailing list, and the plethora of other things you want to get in front of your customers. That makes sense. Spinning them around and pushing them to a 3rd party sites doesn’t. It is a missed opportunity to engage with your fans.

Beyond the app idea versus webpage, there is an often overlooked technology called “A calendar file”. You can download ICS files which work in any calendaring application. This means you could browse RIFF on your desktop calendar app (Microsoft Outlook), an online calendar app (Google calendar), your phone’s calendar or anything that accepts ICS files. It is trivial to create an ICS and sure, it doesn’t have all the fancy swooshes of a mobile app, but it works and people can consume it and remix it into their workflow.

An app is an interruption, you need to remember to look at it, to download it, to deal with the settings, notifications and preferences. An ICS file works itself into the routine you already have, it is more flexible and passive. It isn’t as sexy, but then sometimes the most useful things in life are the ones you don’t notice.

In fairness, I did go online and download a QR reader and scanned the QR code on the flier and this was the result:

Coming soon. They have 4 days before the event starts. I bet this is a recycled app from Síminn’s AirWaves app, and it is waiting for approval from Apple. A part of me says if this had been a webpage, it would be ready by now.

What we’ve learnt to prevent this from happening to you

• Avoid the word “Here”, be descriptive in what you mean. Hire a copy editor. Apple has done a great job with catchy writing, from talking about their new Retina displays as “resolutionary” to the help manuals of their touch devices being called “Finger tips”. They are little phrases that make you smile. “Get RIFF in your pocket” is so much better than “Get the official app here”. Micro copy editing isn’t easy, try writing something short and catch and see if you can do even better than the RIFF headline.
• QR codes are a disaster. They are designed for machines, not humans. Just use a printed URL. The benefits out way the techy-side of barcodes. Printed text is more accessible to more people, it is human friendly and improves the branding much more than black and white squares.
• App versus Webpage? Depending on your needs, a webpage is probably suitable. You can make webpages work offline, look just like an app, it’s much cheaper to develop and work across more devices than just “iPhone and Android”.

All of these points are designed to increase your brand. It isn’t an anti-technology rant, it is about putting customers first, by being more inclusive to your audience and reinforcing your business.

Let’s think about what it means to try and use your services. Avoid cryptic technologies, don’t use them because they are cool, use things that work, work well, and work across as many devices and platforms as possible. The goal of your flier isn’t to show off how smart and cool you are, but to make your customers feel smart and empowered. If your they aren’t doing that, it’s time to rethink the design and start over.

Ignoring digital calendars, our old friend the analog calendar still has many uses in today’s culture. Keeping the calendar compact and minimal is certainly key if you want to be able to carry it around everywhere. I have seen a few attempts at putting an entire year calendar into a compact space. The logical size has been to get them onto everyday objects, such as sticky notes, calendar margins, or even business cards.

On a standard size business card, you don’t have much room. Trying to squeeze in 365+ days, some month headers, the year and a logo and you run out of space quickly! I have seen a few examples, and they are over crowded, difficult to read and are attempting to have all the ability and services of a larger calendar without the space.

I wanted to explore a new type of calendar on a business card, but with a twist. Rather than be the conventional business card with a space for every single day, I wanted to achieve the same thing but without the waste. If you think about it, on a big day planner style calendar, it is important to have space for every day because you want to book meetings, write notes and deadlines, see the holidays and generally keep tabs on the running of things. This is back to relieving your cognitive load. When you shrink down the calendar to fit on a business card, you can’t really have any space for each day, let alone each day with space for notes. So why do we keep emulating the same format at different scales? We need different tools for different tasks. Some tasks are bound by the limitation of the medium, yet we still continue to shoehorn them in as if they would be useful.

If we revisit why people use a calendar, we might be able to create a very compact design which solves that need! Rather than focusing on the date, what if we focused on the day of the week? Rather than telling the story of time flowing by day by day, we looked at figuring out in the future what day of the week the 15th would be? What day does Christmas fall on this year? What about your anniversary or birthday?

I have seen a few interesting calendar formats which forego the whole date first concept and instead simply list out 1-31 and rotate through the days of the week rather than the numbers. Traditionally we see calendar designs where the start of the week is Sunday or Monday and the 1st falls were it falls, creating some leading and trailing boxes from previous and next months. An alternative view is to start the 1st in the first possible box and reflow the days accordingly. This creates a tighter calendar, but now months start and end in the middle of rows.

It is possible to condense this even further by simply listing out the days of the week for each month, shifted accordingly. Since the days of the week are cyclical, we only need to know what day of the week the 1st of each month falls on, everything logically flows from that.

There are twelve lines, one for each month. On that line is the rotating weekdays, starting with the day of the week the 1st of that month falls on. January 1st, 02012 is a Sunday, whereas February 1st, 02012 is a Wednesday. Since the days of the week ‘wrap’ back around at the end of the week, we only need 7 columns for each month. To accompany these weekdays, we also need a matrix of 31 numbers wrapping over 7 columns to represent the dates.

Here is how it works. Let’s find what day of the week Christmas will fall on in 02012. First, we go to the number 25, because Christmas is on the 25th of December. Next, we look vertically up to the December row and see the letter ‘t’. This means that December 25th, 02012 will be on an Tuesday. With this simple matrix, you can find what day of the week your birthday, anniversary, or any other important day will fall onto.

A subtle edition to the calendar was a small icon to the far right. It is either a dot or a square. The other place these shapes appear is in the numbers below. The dot is on the 30, so now you can see which months have 30 days, and the square is either on 28 or 29, depending if it is  leap year or not.

The colors selected for each year are chosen using the getColor() algorithm. The text is also then computed using the maximum color contrast. You can read more about how to compute the maximum color contrast.

This calendar is a horrible substitute for your day planner, it is useful in a different way. It isn’t designed to schedule an appointment in 3 weeks time or list out all the public holidays, but that’s ok. It is a different type of calendar for a different type of use. Once we accept that it plays a different role, we can make the best possible calendar for that need.

Open Source

After designing the layout of the card and getting it to the point were the look and feel were changing, it made more sense to generate them in code rather than by hand. Putting any year into the program correctly shifts the days of the week, corrects for leap years, any other anomalies and outputs a card.

The original design of the cards was done in Adobe Illustrator, which means that it’s possible to export as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). This format is XML based which means you can open, inspect and edit the file in any text-editor. This was the basis of the output of the code. We wanted the two to match.

With the target output solidified, I then wrote a small PHP script which would take a year and using the date() function, figure out what day of the week the first of each month would be. The code then would update the values in the SVG file for the entire year. When it was finished, it did a few other checks for leap years, and would then output the SVG to a file. This makes creating a card for any year a breeze.

The code is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/optional-is/Calendar-Business-Cards), this allows you to take the design, tweak the logo, the colors or any other aspect as you please.

The Centurion

As a test print, I used MOO.com, a short-run, print-on-demand service which does business cards in as small runs of 50. Since it is a digital print, it is also possible to print each one differently! This got me thinking, using the API you can submit 50 card designs with 1 year on each side, making 100 years of calendars. I call this the Centurion. A small box with the next 100 years describing every day between Jan 1st 02012 to Dec 31st 02111. That is a strange thought that somewhere in that deck of 50 cards is the day I will die. It is a slightly morbid thought, but at the same time it shows how compact 100 years can really be.

With data visualizations as well as calendars or other utilities, you really need to focus on what story you are trying to tell. Rather than trying to be a calendar you try to book appointments on, what would a calendar look like or just holidays or days until your next break? That is a very different design than a day planner.

Part of me says, “Wow, that’s attention to detail”, another part is thinking “What a waste of CPU cycles. They could have made the battery life longer, the memory footprint smaller and the rendering even faster if they weren’t wasting time updating the reflection on a button”, then a third part of me thinks that these sorts of new features have diminishing returns. It is an awesome new “feature” now, but as it becomes standard, we only notice it when it doesn’t change the reflection.

The Kano Model is the framework which helps you plot where your feature is located on the larger plane and helps you realise when it excites versus when it is status quo. Intercom.io’s article “Sustainable advantages for start-ups” describes how, over time, a great new feature becomes a basic expectation.

The interface as the product versus the actual code or device is an important distinction, because we programmers, designers, usability experts see the world through our own lenses. As developers we complain about performance, as designers we complain about skeuomorphs, as usability experts we complain about other aspects to the design. At the end of the day, we’re not the customer. It is the millions of house-wives that buy the iOS devices because they are shinny. They never install apps or back-up their data (which is why there is a big push for iCloud and wireless syncing). To the end-user, the interface is the product. Not the tech specs, not the features, not phone provider, just the interface. Which is why you constantly see this cargo cult in design, trying to copy interfaces. The end-product is certainly more than the interface in the big picture value chain, but to most people, they don’t care. Having an awesome interface is necessary, but not sufficient for success.

Strangely, iOS6′s use of the accelerometer to augment the interface isn’t the first example. The Square app apparently did something similar well before iOS6. (I have the square app, I have a US bank account, I have a square account, but can never use the service because it is geographically locked to ONLY work inside the USA, so I can’t confirm.)

As devices such as the iPhone take off in popularity, we have the issue of touch interactions only occurring through a single shiny piece of flat glass. I know there are efforts to create tactile interfaces that morph and change, but for now, we have a gliseningly smooth surface. I bet this is partly why Apple is so keen on making it look like the physical counter part. We did this with early computers too, buttons look like real buttons, you can press them and they depress on the screen. It gives users feedback about their actions, which is a good thing. We have checkboxes and radio buttons which are also throw backs to an earlier analogue era.

Someone once remarked that there were only about 4 people in the world who know how a scroll bar is properly designed and they are all dead. If you think about the scroll bar on your computer window, there are hundreds of tiny interactions and thoughts that need to be taken into account. The size of the slider, when happens when you click on different parts, the bar, the button, the slider itself. The time and energy getting sliders wrong in early computers is all institutional knowledge built-up over years and years of mistakes. No one should try to re-invent the slider, they’ll just get it wrong! Which brings me to the reflection on these metallic buttons. There is a wealth of knowledge that goes into these, but are we actually paying attention to it?

3D button design has been around for awhile. On a two dimensional surface such as a screen, we can “fake” 3D by adding shadows and tricking our eye and brain into thinking there is depth when there really isn’t. Just take a look at any button, the bottom will be darker or have a thicker boarder than the top. This is because throughout our evolution, we have been walking around the savannah looking at 3D objects with the sun shining down from above. This makes the top of the object lighter and the bottom darker due to shadows and indirect lighting. This simple heuristic is what our eye transmits to the brain to process a 3 dimensional shape in our field of view. Buttons in our computer interfaces are faking that to make them more tactile than they really are. They are just a set of x, y coordinates which correspond to a function, but that doesn’t sound as appealing as “button”. Have you ever seen a button where it is darker on top than on the bottom?

On a side note, some objects have evolved to counter act this heuristic. Gazelles and other prey (and their predators) have evolved a lighter coloured belly and a darker coloured top. As evolution suggests, when the colour balance is intverted (dark on top, light on the bottom), plus the addition of sun light from above, the dark-light fur becomes more mid-mid when the sun and shadow are summed up. The effect is that the animal looks “flatter” not so 3D and hopefully predators and prey will have a harder time spotting each other. While it isn’t making the animal instantly 2D, every little bit helps in the wild kingdom. It is one example of nature evolving to counteract what Apple and others are trying simulate.

With more and more sensors in our devices, we can further augment these buttons to give them more than just a 3D feel, by starting to breath life into them. They are not a static paintings, but rather something “real”, it behaves and reacts to me and the environment. It knows what I know, as my point of view changes, the button too reacts and changes.

There is a really intersting book called Metaphors we live by, by George Lakoff. He is a congative scientist dealing with how we use and frame language. In the book he talks about some of the directional words we use in language and how they are associated to different feelings. For instance, “Up” is good and “Down” is bad. When we say things like “I’m feeling up” or “I’m feeling down”, we don’t actually feel up or down, but they are place holder words for good and bad.

As GUI widgets and other aspects of the user interface take advantage of the accelerometers and orientation of the device, will they take into consideration these directional terms and their implied meanings? And from who’s point of view will they focus? The shine on the metallic buttons simply keeps it’s “upward” orientation, so the change in angle of the shine will always be relative to your point of view. The difference is, in real-life when you move your head side to side the shine will move too, but in the virtual world where this is “faked”, we can’t change the shine or parallax or anything else when you move. Atleast not yet. Johnny Chung Lee has done some amazing stuff with the Nintendo Wii and sensors to change the screen based on your movement, but right now iOS6 can only change the screen based on its movement, not yours.

As our devices are packed with more and more sensors, it is logical that they becomes used for secondary purposes. Your iPhone can speak bluetooth, wifi and cellular, has a compass to tell which way its facing, a light sensor to detect if the phone is against your face or in low lighting, it has two cameras (three eyes in total), speakers and a microphone to listen and talk, a touch surface and some accelerometers to gauge balance. Putting all of these to work in unique ways to improve the experience certainly sets the bar very high. Previously, your laptop had a low-light sensor, maybe an accelerometer to lock the hard drive if you drop the machine, 1 web cam, a keyboard and trackpad. In the future we might see NFC (Near Field Communications) such as RFID, air quality sensors, radar/sonar/lidar to detect objects in the dark or convert them to a 3D representation. While this seams to be incredibly wasteful use of CPU cycles, the price of the sensors and hardware is halving every 18 month. What is wasteful today is cheap next year and expendable the year after that. If by tapping into these additional senses to improve the customers’ experience, I welcome the exciting new and interesting virtual worlds we’ll contain in our tiny devices.

I know this is a digital world, people “bump” their phones or high-four each other and pass contact details with RFID chips, but maybe I’m old fashion in thinking that having a business card in hand shows your personality, your attention to detail, your care and consideration for your brand.

I do my best to always carry around business cards and not in my wallet where they get squished and bent and rub against all the other cards and get dirty. No, I carry them in a business cardholder—they are cheap, buy one if you don’t have one.

The problem of me carrying around business cards is one of reciprocity. I’m ready to give you a card and start a potential business relationship, but that’s right you don’t have your on you… you left them in the room, you ran out, or forgot to bring them to the event. All excuses. Most good people are probaby self-concious, which makes them nice people by default. But it also makes them not always on the ball trying to sell themselves. If we have a great conversation, I want a small momento of that chat, preferably a business card for me to get your contact details to follow-up later. Maybe not the next day or week, but when something clicks and I say to myself, I met someone who did just that, let me find their card. I’d better have a copy of your card to find.

The rumor of why Johnny Cash always started his shows with “Hello, my name is Johnny Cash” is because he was horrible at small talk and never could get the courage to introduce himself. So he found a sort of catch phrase, it worked for him. Most honest people are probably the same way, they aren’t being that sleavy used-car salesman style person always pushing cards on people. I certainly don’t want to be that guy either, but after a good chat, I force myself to ask, do you have a card? Invariably, most people say they don’t.

For along time, I thought—that’s ok, I’ll give them one of mine and they’ll just email me. That RARELY happens. Maybe I am that pushy used-car salesman, but more likely they forget, lose the card, get busy or they are being polite and I wasn’t that interesting to start with. For awhile I was writting down contact info into a notebook, or on scraps of paper or napkins, but the problem then became an organizational one. All my past business cards are in a box or card holders, even if I digitally transcribed them. I keep the old ones for inspiration as well as tokens and proof of a meeting. Not having them on scraps of paper increase their likely hood they’ll survive longer.

That’s why I tried something new. A radical approach that I wasn’t sure would work. It has the makings of being more insulting and pandering than being helpful, but I took a chance and went with it anyway.

Since the problem wasn’t me giving away business cards, it was others giving me something in return, I figured, I’d force them to have a business card whether they liked it or not. So I spent some time designing a blank business card slug. A sort of fill-in-the-blanks card of all the info I wanted. When I gave someone my card and they remarked that they didn’t have one, I forced a blank one on them and made them fill it out and return it to me immediately.

I wasn’t sure if this would be completely insulting to the person I just met, not letting them leave until they surrendered their contact info. I made-up a batch of these cards using moo.com. That way if it failed, I didn’t spent a lot of money on cards and I could A/B test a range of colors and designs before getting something mass produced. Around mid-02011 I made-up a batch and took them on the road to see people’s reactions.

The first conference I got to use them at was Science Hack Day in San Francisco. Some people travelled an incredible distance around the globe to attend, myself included. Surprisingly without busness cards! So wearily, I asked the first person if they minded filling out a blank card for me to keep. They had no problems doing so and thought it was a good idea. I was quite releaved and I left him with a few extra blank cards incase he found someone interesting and wanted to offer his card (my blank ones with his info) to them.

I’m happy to give away a few extra blank cards here and there because it is a great story for them to tell and myURL is on every card. Hm… now I am sounding more like that used-car salesman.

Over the next few months, I handed out a few more of these blank cards here and there at conferences and everytime people’s reactions have been positive. They’ve been happy to fill it out and in a small way glad that they knew I had their contact info and was obviously on the ball enough and would probably be the one doing the follow-ups. My sample set has hardly been scientific, but I think my initial worries of people being shocked at the prospect of filling out a blank card have been quelled. I have yet to meet the person who truly does have a card and doesn’t want to give it up to me. They won’t be expecting my blank card scenario—unless they are reading this article, which is unlikely.

Now I always carry two types business cards with me, one with my info and one blank for the unfortunate soul who doesn’t have their own.

I have considered two potential different blank business card styles. The moo.com versions are two sided, side one has contact info, the back side has notes and branding. Getting one-color, two-sided business cards isn’t expensive, but printing on the back just for branding and the word NOTES, was debatably worth it. So I searched for alternatives. One option was to buy blank paper already cut to the size of business cards. This would be much cheaper than getting them printed, but they still lack the instructions. To solve that problem, I thought about getting a rubber stamp custom made. Then I could stamp out as many as I needed. The problem is that it doesn’t quite scale-up. For me to make 1,000 business cards takes twice as long as 500. For a printing press, it is a matter of seconds. The more you print, the cheaper it gets, the more I stamp, that’s lost billable time. The economics of the stamp didn’t really work out, but it was an interesting idea. The major advantage is that you can use it to hijack the back of someone else’s cards!

If we meet in the future, don’t worry if you don’t have card, I’ve got you covered.

The following is my section of the Data Journalism Handbook. You can read the full book online at http://datajournalismhandbook.org if this piques your interest. This article and the entire book is under the Creative Common’s Attribution Share Alike license, which means if you see something of value, you are free to repurpose it as long as you attribute the original author and allow your changes to be shared as well.

Different Charts Tell Different Tales

In this digital world, with the promise of immersive 3D experiences, we tend to forget that for such a long time we only had ink on paper. We now think of this static, flat medium as a second class citizen, but infact over the hundreds of years we’ve been writing and printing, we’ve managed to achieve an incredible wealth of knowledge and practices. While interactive charts, data visualizations and infographics are all the rage, they forego many of the best-practices we’ve learned. Only when you look back through the history of accomplished charts and graphs can we that bank of knowledge and bring it forward into new mediums.

Some of the most famous charts and graphs came out of the need to better explain dense tables of data. William Playfair was a Scottish polyglot who lived in the late 1700s to early 1800s. He single handedly introduced the world to many of the same charts and graphs we still use today. In his 1786 book, Commercial and Political Atlas, Playfair introduced the bar chart to clearly show the import and export quantities of Scotland in a new and visual way.

He then went on to popularize the dreaded pie chart in his 1801 book Statistical Breviary. The need for these new forms of charts and graphs came out of commerce, but as time passed others appeared which were used to save lives. In 1854 John Snow created his Cholera map of London, by adding a small black bar over each address where an incident was reported. Over time, an obvious density of the outbreak could be seen and action taken to curb the problem.

As time passed, practitioners of these new chart and graphs got more and more bold and experimented further, pushing the medium tword what we know today. André-Michel Guerry was the first to publish the idea of a map where individual regions where colors different based on some variable. In 1829 he created the first choropleth by taking regions in France and shading them to represent crime levels. Today we see such maps used to show political polling regions, who voted for whom, wealth distribution and may other geographically linked variables. It seems like such a simple idea, but even today, it is difficult to master and understand if not used wisely.

There are many tools a good journalist need to understand and have in their toolbox for constructing visualizations. Rather than jump right in at the deep end, an excellent grounding in charts and graphs is important. Everything you create needs to originate from a series of atomic charts and graphs. If you can master the basics, then you can move onto constructing more complex visualizations which are made-up from these basic units.

Two of the most atom chart types are bar charts and line charts. While they are very similar in their use cases, they can also differ greatly in their meaning. Let’s take for instance company sales for each month of the year. We’d get 12 bars representing the amount of money brought in each month.

Let’s look into why this should be bars rather than a line graph. Line graphs are idea for continuous data. With our sales figures it is the sum of the month, not continuous. As a bar, we know that in January the company made $100 and in February it made $120. If we made this a line graph, it would still represent $100 and $120 on the first of each month, but with the line graph we estimate that on the 15th it looks as it the company made $110. Which isn’t true. Bars are used for discrete units of measurement, whereas lines are used when it is a continuous value, such as temperature.

We can see that at 8:00 the temperature was 20C and at 9:00 it was 22C. If we look at the line to guess the temperature at 8:30 we’d say 21C, which is a correct estimate since temperature is continuous and every point isn’t a sum of other values, it represents the exact value at that moment or an estimate between two exact measurements.

Both the bar and line have a stacked variation. This is an excellent story telling tool that can work in different ways. Let’s take for example a company that has 3 locations.

For each month we have 3 bars, one for each of the shops, for 36 total for the year. When we place them next to each other, we can quickly see which month which store was earning the most. This is one interesting and valid story, but there is another hidden within the same data. If we stack the bars, so we only have one for each month, we now lose the ability to easily see which store is the biggest earner, but now we can see which months the company as a whole does the best business.

Both of these are valid displays of the same information, but they are two different stories using the same starting data. As a journalist, the most imporatant aspect of working with the data is that you first choose the story you are interested in telling. Is if which month is the best for business or is it which store is the flagship? This is just a simple example, but it is really the whole focus of data journalism, asking the right question before getting too far. The story will guide the choose of visualization.

The bar chart and line graph are really the bread and butter of any data journalist. From there you can expand into histograms, horizon graphs, sparklines, stream graphs, and others which all share similar properties and are suited for slightly different situations, including the amount of data or data sources and location of the graphic in terms of the text.

In journalism, one of the very commonly used charting features is a map. Time, amount and geography are common to maps. We always want to know how much is on one area versus another or how the data flows from one area to another. Flow diagrams and choropleths are very useful tools to have in your skill set when dealing with visualization for journalism. Knowing how to color-code a map properly without misrepresenting or misleading readers is key. Political maps are usually color-coded as all or nothing for certain regions, even if on part of the country only won by 1%. Coloring does not have to be a binary choice, gradients of color based on groups can be used with care. Understanding maps is a large part of journalism. Maps easily answer the WHERE part of the 5 w’s.

Once you have mastered the basic type of charts and graphs can you then begin to build-up more fancilful data visualizations. If you don’t understand the basics, then you are building on a shaky foundation. In much the way you learn how to be a good writer, keeping sentences short, keep the audience in mind, and not over complicating things to make yourself sound smart, but rather convey meaning to the reader. You shouldn’t go overboard with the data either. Starting small is the most effective way to tell the story, slowly building only when needed.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
—Strunk, William, Jr. 1918. Elements of Style

It is ok to not use every piece of data in your story. You shouldn’t have to ask permission to be concise, it should be the rule.