Well...How Did I Get Here?

While I already spoke a bit about my blog's visual evolution in this post, I'd like to take some time to reflect on my overall development as a "blogger." When I first created this blog, I was a bit hesitant and unsure about blogging as a whole-- it seemed to me a little more informal than the writing I had been used to doing. However, I soon found that it was possible to maintain a formality and seriousness to blog postings, while still having room for lightness and individual personality. As a blogger, I've tried to find the right balance between these two extremes.

My main concern has been to make sure that my writing sounds professional but is also thought-provoking and interesting. Rather than just summarizing and regurgitating information, I've tried to explore engaging concepts and make original observations. As I've gradually become more comfortable with the entire process, I think my blogs have become more engrossing and memorable. I feel that I am on my way to settling into my own blogging "voice," though as always there is room for improvement and growth.

One of the most striking differences between my original postings and my ones now are in the use of visuals, most notably screenshots. Embedding screenshots directly into posts are a great way to enhance the content and make the argument more powerful and persuasive. It took me awhile to realize this, but I have come to see that this is one of the great advantages given to writing in an online forum such that blogging provides. It only makes sense to embrace these technological capabilities.

Hyperlinking and making direct references to other online articles is another important feature of blog writing that should be utilized. While I have done quite a bit of this in my postings so far, I would have liked to include even more links to established and widely read blogs in the field. Unfortunately, I have not really had too much time recently to discover and read up on many of these other blogs, but it is something I hope to do more of in the future. While a lot of the content out there might not be totally essential, I'm sure there is enough worthwhile and interesting material to last a lifetime.

Because this blog is on the Web and theoretically open to anybody, I've tried to write with the broadest possible audience in mind. This means not making any assumptions about the prior knowledge of the reader and backing up all claims with explanations and examples. I hope that I have been able to do this and that somebody stumbling across this blog ten years from now will be able to enjoy and comprehend it without needing to look up too much information themselves.

Looking back, it's pretty amazing to see just how much I've written in the last three months or so. By doing about one entry per week, one can really develop a pretty healthy and robust portfolio. While I plan on continuing to add entries to this specific blog, I am also open to the possibilities of creating new blogs that pertain to other topics of interest. The mission statement of this blog included a focus on the music industry, but unfortunately, there wasn't too much room for this in the topics I explored. Perhaps I should create a new blog concentrating only on this? This aside, I have learned a great deal and thoroughly enjoyed writing about the topics covered here, and I hope you have too.

What I've Been Working on Lately...

Recently, a startup company called defero came to me for advice on how they can utilize social media and other communication platforms to get their company up and running. After a lot of hard work, I was able to deliver to them this proposal, via using the Blogger software. I chose to deliver it this way so that the proposal itself would in effect illustrate how an online communication medium can be used to deliver content. I am very proud of the work I did for them and felt I should share it with a wider audience.

First, a little background on the company. Defero is a new company with roots in old media and looking to expand to the Web 2.0 world. They plan to consult with other businesses to help them utilize social media and other online communication tools to create and deliver compelling content to their customers. It was perhaps a tad ironic that defero plans to provide to other companies the very services that they asked from me!

That aside, I was able to devise a fairly comprehensive strategy for the business launch. I started with an ad campaign, since they were a new company and had to first get the word out and brand themselves. This campaign was designed to drive people to the corporate website, which would then lead people to the blog and social networking accounts. Through this online media saturation, defero would develop contact and dialogues with potential business clients, which would eventually lead to sales.

As part of the ad campaign and overall branding efforts, I first set out to develop a "slogan" that would help to identify and set defero apart. I wanted a fairly short expression for maximum impact. After considerable thought, I came up with - "unleash your message." This gets to the core of what defero offers and describes it in a strong and memorable way. It implies that companies may already have a message, but defero will help them "unleash" it and truly get it out.

After coming up with the slogan, I set about to design a corresponding logo, and came up with this:

I found a pretty cool looking 3-d font and colored in the faces of the letters in blue. The blue and black together created a very visually appealing color scheme. The font had little white specks on the black shadow, which I kept because I liked how it gave it a feeling of being hand drawn. In keeping with this theme, I chose a handwriting font to be used to write the catchphrase. I doctored it up a bit to connect all the letters, and then I connected an image of an open leash on the end. The handwriting theme adds a personal touch, which complements nicely with defero's technological expertise.

With the logo and slogan, I now had all I needed to derive other marketing materials, such as magazine ads, Internet banner ads, and mock-ups of the website:

After I did all this, I could now include them in my proposal for visual enhancement and to use as examples of my ideas. From here, the process was simply about actually writing the proposal and convincing them of the merits of my plan. The key point I stressed was that in order to best market itself as an "expert" on new communication tools, defero must themselves show a mastery of them. Thus, the point of establishing the website, blog and social networking. Where possible, I backed up claims with research and references to other articles. One of the benefits of submitting a proposal online via a blog was that I could simply hyperlink to referenced articles or websites. I found this to be very useful, as seen here:

I think the proposal pretty much speaks for itself. While it was a rather long process, and there were many points where I wasn't really sure if I would reach the desired endpoint, the experience gained was well worth the time and effort. Hopefully this will be the first of many similar type projects, in which I can lend my skills to real-world business needs.

Let's Collaborate!

The Internet, perhaps more than anything else, is a tool for collaboration. Its entire structure is based on the linking of individual computers (and the users behind these computers) to create a network that together can do more than each component can do alone. Information is transferred, ideas are shared, and the network grows exponentially more powerful with each new link in the chain. I recently got to experience the collaborative possibilities of the Internet on two separate occasions.

The first of these experiences was at Writeboard.com, in which I collaborated with a group to create and revise a "writeboard," which according to the website, are "shareable, web-based text documents that let you save every edit, roll back to any version, and easily compare changes." I found the software on the site to be both intuitive and easy to use. The group leader started us out with an initial, rudimentary document, and from there it gradually grew to the rather robust size it is now. Anyone from the group was allowed to edit and add to the document, and if significant changes were made, it was saved as the "newest" version. The older versions were all kept and displayed to the right of the page in chronological order, and a circle to the left of each version indicated how big the change was from the previous version, with a bigger circle signifying a bigger change:

Having these older documents accessible and capable of being referenced at any point in the process was quite handy in illustrating the gradual evolution of the document and all the different permutations it took. There was also a function available that let you compare two different versions of the document and see the specific differences between them:

I found this tool to be quite useful, and I used it for three important functions. The first was to compare the newest version with the next most recent, to get a sense of what the latest changes were. The second function was to compare any two chronological documents in the series, to see the specific contributions that were made by any one person. And the final function was to compare the newest version and the original version to really get a sense of all the changes that were made since the beginning of the process.

The one complaint I did have about the software was that the comments on the bottom of the page were not displayed in order of the most recent, meaning that the first comment was always shown on top. This seemed counter-intuitive and also at odds with the software feature that correctly displayed the most recent version of the document on top.

I also happened to be directly involved in what I felt was one of the more successful instances of collaboration that occurred during the process. In one of my comments, I made an observation about the lack of parallelism in the two main sections of the document, and another member of the group acted on this suggestion to make the necessary changes. This really opened my eyes to the potential power of collaboration and teamwork. As someone who usually likes to work alone and have autonomy over his work, it was somewhat liberating to (1) communicate an idea and have somebody interpret it correctly, and (2) to not have to do the work myself!

This same group and I also collaborated together to analyze a document using the website Co-ment.net. This experience was somewhat different than Writeboard because we were not actually creating content, but rather commenting on it. I found the software here to be rather effective and useful as well. To make a comment, you merely had to highlight the text, write something and then save it. All the text that was commented on stayed highlighted, and all the comments appeared on the left side of the page, in order of where the section of the document was that they were referring to. Clicking on a highlighted section displayed all the comment made about that section, and clicking on each comment also caused the highlighted text to be underlined, which I found pretty helpful:

However, one suggestion I would make about the software is that as you scroll through the source document, the "Comments" section should automatically scroll with you as well. That way, you won't need to scroll down through the entire "Comments" area to see the specific ones that pertained to the section of the document that you are viewing.

While the software on this site was pretty effective, this type of exercise seemed better suited for both a smaller group than we had and a larger document than we were working with. With so many people commenting, it became overwhelming at times, and by the end, most of the text was highlighted:

This seemed to almost defeat the purpose of the software--you couldn't really get a sense of the sections that were pointed out because they all were. It would have perhaps been more effective for the group to have set guidelines beforehand so that we would only focus on a specific idea or concept and not whole paragraphs of text. It also got a bit confusing because since there was so much overlap with the highlighted text, clicking on a section caused multiple comments to be displayed on the left:

All this seems to support the claim made here and here that smaller groups are usually better for collaboration, with the ideal number usually being three. While these articles refer more specifically to the process of creating a computer application, I'd imagine that this theory would extend to most types of collaborative work, as they seem to be similar in nature. For any type of collaboration, the key seems to be to make yourself open and willing to compromise. There is no way for something to turn out exactly the way you want it, but you must embrace the benefits and advantages afforded by collaboration, rather than harp on any of the potential drawbacks.

Now You See It...Now You See Something Else

I first created this blog about 3 months ago, and at this point, it seems appropriate to look back and reflect on how it has evolved visually since that time. I initially chose a pretty simple template, since I felt that the emphasis of a blog should be on the actual text, and I did not want to distract or take away from this too much. I figured that I would get my feet wet with the whole blogging experience before I tried any visual enhancements. Here is what my blog looked like during its initial stages:


I am usually not too attracted to overly flashy or colorful visuals, so this minimalist design suited me as I slowly familiarized myself with the Blogger software and blogging as a whole. However, as I began to get more comfortable, I couldn't help but try my hand at a visual redesign of the blog. Below is the first redesign I made, which was nothing more than a simple change to the background and link colors:


It was pretty interesting to see how a simple and easy change of color scheme had a profound impact on the initial visual impression the blog. One thing I realized is that when changing the background color, you have to make sure the other color aspects on the page match the new color scheme. This might mean changing the link, title and text colors.

After making this first change, I decided to come up with a logo for the blog, which I did with this:


The background image is that of a music mixing board, which I found on the Internet. I changed it from a color image to black and white, increased the contrast, and then cropped it down considerably, all to hopefully have it fall under fair use. I chose this image since it went along with my blog's "music" and "sounding board" related theme. I then combined this with what I thought was a pretty "cool" looking font and uploaded the logo as an image file to replace the blog title, as seen here:


Eventually, I grew out of favor with the orange background, since it seemed a bit too heavy and had a "retro" feel that I wasn't really going for. I changed it to a nice shade of green that had a lighter hue and seemed to feel more current. It also brought out the text more and made the blog easier to read:


So as it is, I'm pretty content with the look of my blog right now, as it maintains a "minimalist" type feel with an emphasis on the words, but still has some visual stimulating elements to make it interesting and individually distinguished. There is, however, always room for further redesign, if nothing more than to break up the visual monotony and change things up now and again.

Is it Readable or Not?

Readability, as its name suggests, refers to the ease with which written text can be read by a specific audience. Readability formulas assign a numeric value to a given document, and this value identifies the reading level that the audience is expected to have. Among the various types of readability tests are the Flesch Reading Ease, the Gunning-Fog Index and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level. All of these assessments utilize some type of mathematical formula that is based on the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. Obviously, this is a very superficial way at looking at language, but it does have particular relevance in the field of usability.

A readability assessment of a given document can provide a pretty quick and effective way to determine its potential suitability for a specific audience. However, these assessments can really only determine if something is "not usable." If a readability test calculates that a document is beyond the reading level of the intended audience, then it would be safe to assume that the audience will have trouble getting through the text. It wouldn't matter if the other elements of the document are appropriate for the audience; if the audience can't read it, then it's not usable!

However, if a readability assessment determines that the reading level of the document is within the range of the reading level of the intended audience, it would not be safe to assume that the document is totally usable. This is because there are so many other factors that readability formulas can't take into consideration, such as the document layout, the complexity of the concepts, the audience's interest and knowledge of the material, potential gender or racial biases, and so on. If something is unusable in one area, then it is generally unusable as a whole; thus, one cannot only use a readability assessment to determine a document's usability.

What this means is that readability assessments don't really have much bearing or relevance beyond what they have specifically been designed to measure--that is, the readability of the text. They would not be very effective in assessing the visual design elements of a document. This is because design elements are generally subjective and much harder to define; as such, they cannot be mathematically quantified the same way readability elements are. Nor does the readability of a document imply anything about the actual quality of the writing. Just because a document is potentially readable doesn't mean it is any good or even worth reading in the first place. While readability assessments do have a role to play in the field of usability testing, it is a very specific role; attempts to make use of them beyond this could potentially yield unreliable results.

My Kind of Website

As discussed in a previous post, the design of a website should be heavily influenced by the intended audience of that site. I recently got a chance to put this theory into practice when I used Google Sites to create the website How To License Music. The intent of this site was to teach and inform about the process of licensing a piece of music for a visual project, and it was designed with a specific audience in mind--myself. That is, someone with a learning style similar to my own.

After taking this Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire, it was revealed that I was a highly Reflective and Global learner and a moderately high Intuitive and Verbal learner. Using these descriptions of the different learning styles as a guiding tool, I went about designing my website so that it would best be utilized by an audience with these particular learning styles.

In general, my website is designed to present information in a broad, conceptual manner. This is partially achieved by having the key important terms stand out, which are first seen on the page as bolded text, as such:


When these terms are "moused over," more information and an additional description is revealed. This is illustrated below, showing how the page looks when the cursor hovers over the the bolded term "Music Library" at the bottom of the page:

Bolding the text in this way causes it to stand out, which highlights these important concepts at a glance. This way of presenting information is conducive to the global learner, who prefers to see the larger, more important concepts first, as opposed to the tiny details. The ability to see the terms first and then find out more information about them will help the reflective learner, who learns best by taking things slowly and having time to digest and "reflect" on the information.

In addition, there is a separate "Important Terms" page that collects all of the bolded terms used throughout the site and presents them in a dictionary-like format. This uses language to enhance the visual aspects of the page, which aids the verbal learner:


In keeping with this theme, a universal aspect of the website's design is that all of the navigational icons are enhanced with text, as seen here:

And here, with the illustrations of various movie scenes having captions underneath:


Site navigation is also presented in outline format with clickable text, as opposed to images or icons. In terms of the background and color scheme, pale yellows and grays give the page a muted look, causing the text to stand out as hierarchically dominant. All of this plays to the strengths of the verbal learner, who generally prefer words to images. This does not mean that there is no use for visuals; rather, the optimum learning experience is to strike the right balance between both verbal and visual information. This is the point in having all the images enhanced with additional text.

I also employed design features that were helpful to the other ends of the learning spectrum. Attachments of actual licensing contracts give practical examples of the issues discussed, which encourages the "sensing" learner who prefers to see connections to the real world. In addition, pages are presented in a logical, sequenced order, which helps the "sequential" learner. Employing these design features helps to broaden the reach of the website and also challenges the other types of learner to overcome their limitations.

As this was my first foray into web design, it was quite useful to have this background knowledge on how to use design elements so that they are geared towards a certain audience. This helped me develop a focused site that should specifically appeal to learners like myself but also be accessible to a general audience.

Judging an Album by its Cover

Images have always had an important role to play in communication; perhaps even more so now with the rise of the Internet and all of its visual possibilities. When used effectively, images can create a meaning beyond what simple words can express. In the online world, images can also serve a functional role in aiding with navigation and maintaining the "authenticity" of the online experience with the real-world one. One interesting example of this is the use of album covers in music websites and online stores.

An album cover is a representational illustration that was logically packaged with a record or CD to enhance the overall artistic product. These images helped to create an iconography for what was otherwise a strictly aural experience, and they also defined and set apart each album in a visual sense. However, with the advent of the MP3 and digital downloading, album covers were no longer needed in the same way. One can buy and listen to an album without ever needing to know what the CD cover looks like, yet digital album covers are still frequently used in the online music marketplace.

Within digital stores such as iTunes, album covers can function as icons in helping with navigation. Taking a look at the screenshot below, we can see the album covers dominate the storefront:

By clicking on each cover, we are taken to the corresponding page where that album can be actually purchased, as seen here after clicking on one of the images:


By using the album cover as the means for online navigation and purchasing, the online music buying experience is linked to the real world, recreating the feeling of being in a physical record store and rummaging through the CD's and glancing at the different covers.

This use of album covers as icons for navigation can also be seen in music review websites such as Pitchfork, as seen below on a section of their homepage:

Each cover is a corresponding link to a review for that album or track. However, unless the title and band name are actually included within the image, you must scroll over the album cover to see this information. As seen below, when the album on the far right is scrolled over, the artist and album name are displayed along with the corresponding review score:


This does not seem to add much in terms of ease of navigation, as it would be easier to see the artist and album name by just listing it as text without the corresponding image. However, by using the album cover, Pitchfork is maintaining the visual traditions of the art being packaged with the music to create one unified product. This can also be seen in their individual album review pages, which all prominently display the album cover, as seen here:



This last online use of album covers fulfills their traditional role as representational illustrations that create a visual iconography to be associated with the music. By keeping with this tradition, Pitchfork and other music websites are maintaining the richness and credibility of music consumption by making the online experience similar to the real world one.