Hope everyone had a great New Years and have thought about their resolutions for this year. For myself, I want this year to be my year of creativity. With that in mind, I’m launching my first creative project of the year called the Daily Fugue.
What this creative project allows me to do is the following.
Be a little bit creative daily (so I can do it on the side).
Lets me express myself without having to say a word.
Makes people aware of things and other people they may not have known.
Allows me to relay my values and culture (what’s important and meaningful to me).
Shows the connectivity in the world.
In a nutshell, I’m interpreting the hidden meaning in what’s being said (for good or bad). Thus some politician may say something he or she thinks is great but I’ll take those words and show the real meaning of what’s being said. On the flip side, I’ll take something simple someone has said and try to show the profoundness in their simple statement.
As for the site itself, it’s still in its infancy, so it will grow over time. For now, I think I have the layout I want but I’ll probably adjust the visual design slightly (i.e. add a background image) without going overboard, since I want the words to be the primary emphasis.
BTW this is my first site that I may consider adding advertisements to it in the future (assuming enough interest is generated with it). If I do add them though, I’ll want them to be minimal and to the side and also be incorporated into the design somehow (as again I want the words to be the primary emphasis on the site).
I was reminded this week that one of the main reasons I enjoy playing computer games so much, especially online massively multiplayer games, is the community aspect. I just love being part of a community and helping others out. However, I quickly realized that it wasn’t just being a part of community that did it for me, it was being a part of a community that shared the same values and culture that I believed in. This is why I’ve been going in frustrating circles lately because while the game itself may be fun to a degree, the people and community around it just left me frustrated because they often didn’t share the same values that I believed in (i.e. Team Fortress 2).
I’m not going to give up though. I mean you can’t go the rest of your life ignoring people and thinking them all the same because of a few bad relationships. You need to have hope that out there is a place with people that are like you. You will find it. It just takes time and a little bit of determination. And even more so, if you can’t find it, don’t be afraid to step up to the plate and build it yourself. Now while I’ve got some ideas in my head for communities I’d like to build (some even unrelated to games), I also realized something very very important this week as well. Don’t ignore the communities that you are already in.
Before I elaborate on what I mean by this, let me clarify something. Communities to me are not isolated environments that we interact with independently. Instead communities are layered one with another, with each one influencing and affecting the other (similar to how cultures influence us and we in turn influence the cultures around us). For example, your home is like a little community in itself. The relationships with your husband/wife, kids, and even pets are all part of this. Even more so, you yourself are a community within yourself. The different aspects of you (mind, body, spirit) all work together to comprise the culture that is you. Thus if you haven’t been eating right, aren’t physically active, and thus feel emotionaly strained because of it, this lack of attention to the community that is you can in turn negatively affect and influence the other communities you are a part of (i.e. home, work, friends, family, etc).
Thus I realized that instead of being so focused on trying to find a new community to be a part of, why not spend more time on the existing communities already under my nose. For example, these past two weeks, my wife has been extremely busy at work, to the point of being exhausted when she gets home. Now normally I make her tea and breakfast in the morning when she heads off to work and I also have dinner ready for her when she gets home but I realized that this wasn’t enough during this difficult time for her. Knowing that there were little things all around the house that needed to be done (which probably stressed her out even more), I spent the entire day cleaning the house so that she could get those nagging things out of her head and just be able to relax.
And you know what, it worked. Not only did she feel a whole lot better, but I felt a whole lot better as well because I gave of myself to a community that I valued which made me feel more valued in turn. Therefore, here’s wishing you a very happy and giving Christmas within the communities of your life. And remember, it’s not so much what you give but the simple act of giving itself.
The Christmas carol controversy began earlier this week when teachers who lead the school choir decided to drop the word Christmas from Silver Bells and replaced it with “festive” to eliminate a reference to the Christian holiday. The move caused a national furore, and school officials and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board scrambled to control the situation.
Instead of continually trying to homogenize the holidays, why don’t we start celebrating the diversity of it instead. If I wish someone a Merry Christmas and they inform me they’re Jewish, I have no problem wishing them a Happy Hanukkah. To me it’s no different than respecting someone’s choice to not drink alcohol or not to eat meat. I respect their choices as an individual and accommodate them as best I can, so that everyone can enjoy themselves as they are.
Just read on Massively that a new privately funded game developer called 38 Studios will have both Todd McFarlane and R.A. Salvatore as artistic directors in the company. Even more so, it looks like their MMO fantasy world will have quite a different gameplay approach to it compared to the typical MMO games of today (like World of Warcraft) as noted in this Gamasutra interview.
This all seems very character focused both from your side, and with Todd McFarlane creating things for the universe as well, it sounds at least very character driven. Is that true?
RS: No, I wouldn’t say that. I would say that it’s going to be character focused in the manner that it’s going to be focused on the character you create, but you want to have iconic characters. You want to have people in the world that you know, or you get to know, and can say “hey cool, I just read about this guy”, or whatever, “and here he is!”
I’ve been playing MMO’s for years, I love them, and the one thing I know as a player is that I don’t want anyone to hold my hand and walk me through something. I want to write my own books with my character. I would never – as a dungeon master and as now a game designer – I would never want to take that away from the player.
BC: If anything I’d say it’s maybe event-focused. In terms of the larger world what’s important to the –
RS: I’ll just cut you right off here, he’s getting into areas we really don’t want to discuss. [laughs]
This sounds really really intriguing. When he slipped “event-focused”, I immediately thought of an open storyline similar to Privateer versus a linear storyline that most MMO use to day (as you progress through your character levels). However for this to work, you need a game that doesn’t limit your movement based upon your character level (similar to how quests in WoW only show to those of appropriate level). Will this new MMO fantasy game be without levels? Not sure but the following almost hints at it.
There’s nothing out there that really has this story overlay that keeps sucking you further and further through the experience, that presents this larger entertainment experience that keeps you engaged. You still have the other two: you still go wanna hook up with your friends, you’re still going to grind a little bit – although, there won’t be grinding in ours – but the larger pieces present an entertainment experience, with the story that unfolds as you interact with it. You’re going to see changes that impact the story, you’re going to see the story in a larger scope of what’s going on in the world, so you have context to get what you’re doing. Nobody’s doing that. It’s sort of the difference between basic 3D shooters, and say, Half-Life 2.
“Although, there won’t be grinding in ours…” Interesting indeed. Without a doubt though, it seems like they will create this world as a dynamic ever changing one. Even more so, it appears they will cross market a variety of things to coincide with the ongoing changing storyline within the game (i.e. new fantasy novels that provide detailed stories and backgrounds on major personas within the game). Pretty cool indeed!
Just discovered Tumblr last week and I have to say I’m pretty impressed.
So what is Tumblr?
Blogs are great, but they can be a lot of work. And they’re really built to handle longer-form text posts. Tumblelogs, on the other hand, let you easily and quickly post and share anything you find or create.
To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
So is Tumblr something I’d use instead of Squarespace? Probably not. However, Tumblr’s simplistic features and design are something I’d definitely like to see emulated within Squarespace though.
Funnily enough, when I used to work for Squarespace, I actually had a discussion with Anthony about something very close to this. In effect, the idea was to have different content types for posting. So if you were going to post about a book in your journal, you’d select “book” as the content type, and a very simplified entry form specifically for books would appear. If you were going to post about a photo, you’d select “photo” as the content type and so on. If you look at Tumblr’s content types below, you’ll see how this idea comes quite close to what I envisioned.
Of course the biggest problem with this approach, as Anthony relayed at the time, is that it would basically destroy the module approach to Squarespace which is it’s foundation. I fully understand why he couldn’t do it because it would probably confuse a lot of people. I guess I was just looking at ways of rethinking how blogging works and instead of thinking of different content types on your site as being static (i.e. Squarespace gallery or Amazon book list), I saw them as more like “streams” of information, always updating (i.e. similar to how Flickr works which still allows you to create galleries from your stream of photos).
Therefore, for me it was more about creating multiple streams of information and then figuring out ways of dynamically displaying this information on the fly. For example, viewing my specific book stream would show you all of the books I’ve ever read. You could even view the books by time period (i.e. books read this month or year) or by rating or both (i.e. show me the best rated book from each month of this year). The power of this approach is that the information no longer is static but becomes flexible and usable by the person viewing the content, so that they can manipulate it and view it in different ways depending upon what they are interested in. I think the closest thing that compares to this would be something like a pivot table in a spreadsheet program.
Anyways, the simplified content entry types I think are one of the gems of Tumblr. It’s something I’d like to see in other blogging platforms. For example, you could emulate something like this in WordPress but you’d be doing it in a cludgy way by using custom fields. The beauty of Tumblr is that the entry interface itself becomes part of the simplicity and design of the application which in turn draws people to it.
Oh, almost forgot. The other important thing about Tumblr is that it shows us the need for content in different sizes. For example, when someone is researching a book, they’ll often jot down small notes here and there in a notebook. Then these notes are aggregated into structured thoughts and ideas, eventually becoming longer articles and then eventually a book. This is how blogs should work in my opinion. There should be variety of input types and sizes to meet your demands. If I only have a second, I can post a bookmark about a new site I found. Then tomorrow, I can follow it up with a small note or two about the site (observations in using it). And then finally I may write a detailed entry or article on the site that gives a full run down of it. The beauty of this approach is that it allows me to continue my thought flow and write how much I want, when I want.
If you haven’t checked out The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard yet, I highly urge you to head over to her website to check out her incredible video presentation. It’s probably one of the most profound and informative videos I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing.
What’s The Story of Stuff about? I think the audacious quote below by retailing analyst Victor Lebow will give you a pretty good indication.
As per this developer interview, it looks like the upcoming Age of Conan MMO game will actually have some of the gameplay features that I’ve always dreamed about in an massively multiplayer game (particularly those that focus on more larger community involvement and cooperation).
Is there a system in place to hire mercenaries?
Yeah, in the Siegeing. Other players. So you can be a mercenary in the game. If it’s a siege battle going down, and you see you’re about to lose, or if you wanna take someone out, you can actually send out a call for mercenaries, and give them in-game credits to join the battle and they will be teleported into the siege battle. Those are other players, and there are five mercenary levels as well.
In my dream MMO, the idea is that there are community goals for your realm that allows solo players to participate in the larger battles and wars as well. With Age of Conan, being a mercenary allows you to do this. Others can hire you out to be a part of their battles and you’re profession as a mercenary develops depending on how well you do. Not exactly what I had in a mind but a step in the right direction.
So you can build, say, a barracks or something …
Let’s say you build a stable, which will boost how fast you can travel, but if you build all stables, you lose the benefit of an armory. And you can upgrade some of them, and of course, you need resources to gather to build them, four base resources, and that’s where the crafters come in, for those who like to play that part of the game, and obviously the killers would defend it. So this is the beauty of the MMO, I think, you can find your role in it.
This is almost exactly what I had in mind. Basically the idea is taking the old Warcraft II RTS game and make each unit a real player. Therefore if you want to improve your guild or realm, you’d build a barracks for soldiers which improves your soldiers armor and so forth. Definitely looking forward to this. Sounds incredibly as it lets each player help out as they want to do so (i.e. warrior, builder, craftsman, etc).
My sister, Robbin, who lives in the Bahamas, got the opportunity to interview Daryl Hannah and Sir Sean Connery recently at a career tribute ceremony for Daryl Hannah. You can find the full details over at The Bahamas Weekly, an online community news site that my sister works on.
BTW I thought Sean Connery was awesome in that he’s still not afraid to speak his mind, indicating how he’d like to see the Bahamian government get more involved in contributing to the film industry. This is something that a lot of the local people have been pushing for a very long time, especially as it’s becoming more and more noticed as a great place for film shooting (i.e. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3 were recently filmed there).
I have now viewed over 782 “best of the best” (as they are titled) website and blog designs for CSS. They are all remarkable and well done. Since I am not a designer, I felt lost and out of place trying to meet the demands of the constantly evolving array of web standards. I felt frustrated. Then I looked closer and I asked myself the SAME question every time I saw something I liked at first sight, but knew I could not imitate in any way for lack of skills to do it; and the question was: “Let’s just assume you could build something like “this snazzy thing over here”. Can you look at this regularly or daily and work with it? Does it suit your purposes?”
Surprisingly, my answer was NO every time.
This echoes my recent revelations on how I want to be real. Simply put, no matter what cool design layouts I saw out there, none of them connected or resonated with me. Thus in trying to emulate them, I was only putting a mask on myself and not really representing who I really am which in turn resonated this “wrongness” within me. Therefore, I knew that I had to stop trying to emulate others and instead just be myself. Easier said than done. For now, I’ve gone back to my Working Late design that I made for Squarespace (but with a few adjustments to it). I like it but it still really isn’t me, as it’s a little too clean. I definitely liking Sibyllae’s new header image though, as it has a real grittiness and texture to it, something I’d like to add to my own site to give it more of a ‘down to earth’ feeling to it.
And from this I learned that one of the most important things about using the web as a medium for any form of expression is: IDENTIFYING YOUR PURPOSE. So through trial and error I identified the following: I am not selling anything, I am not Apple or Microsoft, and I am not a professional designer seeking work. So what does that mean? That means that I can create and re-create my own personal space as the whim suits me. It is OK if it it’s not perfect and doesn’t validate W3C every page, it is OK that it is not pixel perfect. It is ok to violate (which I probably do and I am sorry), every design principle. WOOHOO! 🙂 Maybe the concept here is not just relevant to creating a personal “space; ie: feeling good about your own means of expression… words to live by in other areas of life?
Totally agree. Even more so, I believe this is applicable to professional designers as well. For example, sure follow the rules for layout and functionality, so that your site is usable and accessible but go crazy with your creative juices and do something different, something risky. That’s my current problem. I keep looking at all of these designs elsewhere and while they are nice, some even beautiful, there is no emotion or feeling to a lot of them. They just feel perfect, polished, and empty. Again as noted above, I want this grittiness and texture to my site (in certain areas) and yet also this defused softness as well (in other areas). So I guess a kind of tao ying yang sort of thing.
Anyways, Sibyllae in researching bad design eventually stumbled across Lings Cars and Ling’s WebSite Advice. I won’t go over the various website advice of Ling (as you can read it yourself) but I will say that I was definitely surprised by a lot of what she said. Not in the sense that I thought it was wacky but in the sense of how much I connected with a lot of what she said at a deeper level. In a nutshell, it’s about stop trying to be perfect and start being yourself. When you do this, people will see you as someone who is genuine and thus can truly connect and trust you. Again a lot of it has to do about the feeling you emanate or resonate to others (i.e. “Talk normally, express emotions.”).
One final thing that I really found interesting is Ling’s advice about creating a site that is “alive”, as I’ve been thinking about this for a while actually. For example, so often people get upset about their sites because their designs are so static and never changing (which is why people, like myself, change them so often). This is nuts because it doesn’t truly represent who we are as individuals. Yes, I can create different moods for different sections of my site but it doesn’t really go as far as I want. Instead the idea is to create a living design that is able to change with your moods, seasons, or even holidays. Two great examples of this would be the various alternating designs within Vox as shown below (Autumn Kyoto Moonlight, Midnight, Setting Sun) as well as Hybridworks (with it’s little ever changing pixel world that you have to see to believe).
So for a Squarespace site, imagine your site design is your layout which has specific visual elements within it that are static. Now within that layout though are a multitude of styles that are applied to these visual elements to resonate a different aspect, emotion, or cycle of your life. So one style could be a happy one, another a sad or reflective one, another could be for Xmas, another for Halloween, and so on. I mean if you really wanted to get crazy, you could even make it seem alive by automating a lot of this via javascript, in that at certain times of the year, your design would change automatically. However in all of these different styles the same visual elements would still be there but just displayed different (i.e. if the static visual element was a house scene, it would show snow outside when using the Xmas style or a night sky with moon and a pumpkin on a window if using the Halloween style).
To be honest though, I’d love to push this down to even the post level. So if I was writing a post at night, in a certain mood, that feeling could be conveyed and carried across when you read the post on my website. Don’t really think this is possible yet though, as you’d have to include those variables within each post somehow. I mean I could encode the CSS within each post but that’d be pretty messy, especially for the longevity and sustainability of the site.
Anyways time to stop, as I’m starting to ramble. All said and done, I’m glad Sibyllae posted her thoughts and discoveries on design because it has definitely given me a lot to think about and potential directions to take with my own site design. Thanks Sibyllae!
