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The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible frankchimero.com

What is a book in the age of the iPad? An interview with Craig Mod theverge.com

An Important Time for Design alistapart.com

The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible

by Frank Chimero

frankchimero.com/blog

March 13, 2013

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I rarely say this, but Timo Arnall’s dismantling of the “invisible design” ethos is essential reading. There’s too much I want to talk about in the essay, so I’ll settle and highlight one choice bit that runs parallel to something I’ve been considering myself.

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong.

A metaphor can clarify or obscure. The most dangerous ones do both. They illuminate one characteristic of a concept, but also throw another (usually less favorable) aspect into shadow. “The Cloud” is one of these complicated metaphors, because it’s a clear description of the user’s experience, but overlooks its costs by misrepresenting the situation. Storing data on servers is light, accessible, and omnipresent for the user. But The Cloud is not a dissolution of data’s “weight”; it simply outsources its handling, in much the same way your garbage doesn’t disappear when it’s picked up from the curb. It’s a complicated transaction, because the true implications are hidden. Still, I wouldn’t want to get rid of the Cloud or my garbage pick-up. All this stuff has to go somewhere, and generally it’s better if I’m not the one toting it around. So, my garbage goes somewhere in New Jersey, and my data goes to Douglas County, Georgia.

One of Google’s Data Centers in Douglas County, Georgia. Thousands of feet of pipe line the inside of the data center. The bright pink pipe in this photo transfers water from the row of chillers (the green units on the left) to a outside cooling tower. How industrial. Please note the strong resemblance to an oil refinery.

It’s worrisome that The Cloud as a metaphor clarifies the benefits of its user’s experience, yet hides the repercussions of that convenience. (Of course, it’s old hat in capitalism to conceal the unsavory bits of production behind a curtain.) What kind of energy does that data factory use? Where does it come from? And how does it compare to the energy used if we kept all this data locally? How does that building affect the community where it is built? And what are the repercussions of having all that data in one place?

The answers to these questions don’t need to be awful. For instance, many of these data centers are blanketed with solar panels to collect energy and offset or eliminate its dependence on the grid. Google’s not trying to hide anything. In fact, the image above comes straight from them. Yet, I believe it’s important for users to ask these questions, if only to understand their dependencies. Still, it is hard to know what to ask if the topic’s complexity and requirements (infrastructure) are concealed by the metaphor that names it.

All of this is well-trodden territory, so I’ll sheepishly confess that I’ve backed into the real reason I wanted to write a bit. There’s another loss from this kind of obfuscation, one more miraculous in nature, which also undermines the “invisible design” ethos.

Look back up. Isn’t the picture of Google’s data center marvelous, in a complicated Dr. Seuss machine kind of way? It is like a Pipe Dream level come to life. The ethos of invisible design suggests you shouldn’t see this design. I think you should look again.

Sometimes I wonder if the desire to obfuscate production and make the resulting design invisible or seamless to users diminishes their appreciation for the craft of building systems. I think there’s a strong likelihood that metaphors like “The Cloud” and sayings like “It Just Works™” reduce a user’s appreciation of the software/hardware they are using. “Magic” is a great word for selling product, but it also can cheapen all the sweat it takes to get there. If the seams have been covered, you can’t admire how things connect.

Design doesn’t need to be showy to prove its value, but it shouldn’t be invisible, either. Designers mistake invisibility for elegance and simplicity for clarity at their peril. The best design speaks not only so it can be understood, but also in a way it can be admired by those that use it. What if you were inspired by the things that you used, simply because they were impressive in a way that was evident to you? And why is it bad to try to build things like that? I don’t think it is.

What is a book in the age of the iPad? An interview with Craig Mod

by Sam Byford

theverge.com

February 06, 2013

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Craig Mod is a writer and designer who splits his time between Japan and the US. Formerly of Flipboard, much of his writing is concerned with ebooks and digital publishing — the pitfalls the industry falls into, and how best to avoid them. His most recent essay, Subcompact Publishing, sparked a lot of online chatter last November over its vision for a minimal, service-oriented publishing future. I sat down with Mod in December during his latest stopover in Tokyo to talk about these ideas, Japan, and more.

Sam Byford: What are you up to these days — anything interesting?

Craig Mod: I'm partially just kinda escaping, I like to take the end of the year and just take a couple weeks and just kinda work on some writing projects that I'm kinda working on in the background. I find the end of the year is a nice time — it's very free of distraction, news is kinda winding down, nobody wants to have meetings anymore. I feel like you have about two weeks after Thanksgiving to do things, and then everyone shuts off, so I like coming out here. I have my apartment out here, so it's easy for me to come out. I was in the woods of New Hampshire last year right now, working on some writing projects and year, thought I'd just come out here this year. Japanese New Year is great. It's quiet.

My favorite thing to do is climb a mountain on December 31st. So you can go to Takao-san — it's not too far away, the trains run all night, and so you can just go out to Takao at 11 and climb up and there's a temple at the top, and there's sort of little yatai stands (food stalls) the whole way up, and you can get your amazake (sweet sake) and get all sorts of little food, you can eat your toshikoshi soba (Japanese noodles traditionally eaten on New Year’s Eve). It's great, I don't know, it just feels like a very spiritually healthy way to celebrate the New Year.

S: The trains even run out to mountains?

C: Yeah — I think Takao has a specific "Lets go to Takao-san and celebrate the New Year" sort of thing. Also, I'm having all my essays translated to Japanese right now, so I'm giving a talk at the Apple Store January 10th, I'm gonna have 3 or 4 of my most recent essays in Japanese released on Kindle, and hopefully iBooks — if iBooks ever launches in Japan, which is weird, right? I think it's coming, little elves tell me it's coming very soon. So I'm out here kind of working with my translator trying to get the language right, I mean the Japanese digital publishing industry... the Kindle just came out a month ago.

S: It’s weird to me that such a technologically and book literate country is really behind on those things. Why do you think that is?

C: It's strange, because Sony released their e-reader, their E Ink based e-reader, back in like 2003, and I remember being out here in the early 2000s, going to Bic Camera, picking up a Sony e-reader, and thinking it was a cardboard display model, and then you hit a button and the screen flashed — it was just like "holy shit, this is amazing, I've never seen anything like this before." They did nothing with it.

One of the problems is is that the industry is so tightly controlled by so few people. It's like a lot of the industry out here. Dentsu controlling a lot of the advertising, a lot of the publishing happens in backrooms and there's a few individuals making those decisions, I think that makes innovation a little bit more difficult.

"I think nostalgia is very quickly replaced with convenience."

S: You once wrote about Japanese book covers, their minimal style. It seems like that kind of aesthetic is something that would really translate to digital.

C: I think it will. I mean I think part of the reason why you didn't see Kindle take off here as quickly as it did in the West is that the Kindle is a non-Japanese company, Any outside platform that's going to disrupt an entire industry, it's going to be really hard to get in — they're not going to make it easy. Publishers aren't going to bend over backwards to license their content to Kindle. Amazon's been negotiating for years to get out here.

So, I don't know, I think it's an inevitability, and I think that the the port has been opened, so to speak. Just sitting here even an hour ago, a businessman, maybe in his 40s, 50s, was reading his manga on an iPad mini. I don't know, I think nostalgia is very quickly replaced with convenience. I think in a year or two from now, we'll probably see a lot of digital book activity.

S: How do you think that Subcompact Publishing will go down in Japan? Do you think it's something that Japanese publishers would be receptive to?

C: I've already gotten a lot of emails from Japanese publishers, and it's gotten picked up on a couple blogs, despite being in English, which I think is encouraging. I just want to get it out there as quickly as possible, put it in Japanese. I think it's in an interesting positive right now, the Japanese publishing ecosystem. I left for California two years ago because I felt like it was really hard to make any progress here, and the industry was very reticent to push on digital books and build the systems — there wasn't enough of an entrepreneurial start up culture here to build the tools and systems that were going to define the future of reading and future of publishing. But I think we're in this inevitable inflection point where everyone is going to have a tablet, everyone has tablets, everyone has smartphones.

"Subcompact Publishing is just saying 'Hey. Blank paper. Maybe 200 pages. With a nice binding that isn't gonna fall apart. Slap it all between two pieces of cardboard.'"

There's a point where the friction of not publishing on digital platforms is going to be outweighed by the economic incentive that is lost by doing that. It's kind of a nice time now — it's like, in the West, we've gone through a lot of painful gesticulation, especially around iPad magazines, and what a lot of the early magazines looked like and how they did it wrong. So the Japanese industry seems to be right at this moment now where they're going to be moving into this space where the West has solved a lot of the question marks, or at least, answered a lot of these question marks. Maybe they don't have the precise, perfect solutions to what digital publishing should look like, but there's certainly a lot to learn.

S: So in the US too it seemed that Subcompact Publishing resonated with a lot of people. Do you think that this is something that's really going to take off — is it going to be a movement? Are you going to see a lot of people thinking the same things you're thinking, launching publications in the next year — or is it a pipe dream, so to speak?

C: No no no no no... I mean, it's not even a movement. The Subcompact Publishing ethos, I don't know, it feels like saying "A book should be made of paper and have a cover." There isn't anything particularly innovative about it, it's just making very clear these inevitable foundations for what digital publishing should look like, how it should function. Imagine everyone's doing all these weird prototypes of what a book should be. It scrolls, and now it's like "Oh, let's put together a book." Everyone's just making these weird, overly complex books. The paper unfolds, it's kinda like a scroll, but it's not. Subcompact Publishing is just saying "Hey. Blank paper. Maybe 200 pages. With a nice binding that isn't gonna fall apart. Slap it all between two pieces of cardboard." That's it.

S: So I guess the example that seems to best embody that is The Magazine. But if you look at that app, it's super minimal, very spartan, it's very well-thought out, but it seems really obvious to the point where you wonder why it hadn't been thought of before, right?

C: Yeah, exactly. And that's what got me so excited to consolidate that thinking, get it out there, because it seemed like this is as obvious as breathing air. You know, sometimes when you're so close to a medium, as we all are — to books, to the way magazines work, and the way distribution works for physical things, and the way publication cycles are for physical things — and then a new device comes out that requires you to take a step back and disconnect from everything that's part of the incumbent industry, it can take a little while to create the proper distance. And I just think we've played around for two years, we've made a lot of mistakes for two years, some people have been doing exactly what Marco's doing, but they didn't quite get the physics right, so to speak.

"What Marco defined is literally just sheets of paper, a binding, and a hardcover, that's it."

What Marco defined is literally just sheets of paper, a binding, and a hardcover, that's it. That's what The Magazine is. And just in the same way, a book, fundamentally, is composed of these universal attributes. Marco's magazine is just defining those universal attributes. It's not the end of where these things should go, this is just the absolute base. From there, you can start looking into how do you incorporate photography, how do you incorporate design of the page, how do you incorporate different publishing cycles.

S: I guess part of it is semantics, because you're comparing The Magazine to a book — but The Magazine's calling itself a magazine. And if you look at all the digital magazines on an iPad, they're almost all terrible; they're super heavy designs, very focused on “interactive content” that doesn't make for the best reading experience. Is The Magazine the new way to make a magazine, or is it a new thing entirely?

C: [long pause] Even the very notion of a magazine is sort of anachronistic, isn’t it? The bundling together of X number of articles and having a certain number of pages and everything. The Verge is effectively an internet magazine, but it doesn't have the same form as traditional magazines, for example. The thing that The Magazine does well, and I talk about it in the article, is that it provides a service. What it does is it packages it in a way that is super easy to use.

I think what The Magazine's done, what Marco's done inside The Magazine, what I've tried to outline in Subcompact Publishing is just "How do we create as minimal as possible a space, so that you can add interactive content on top of that if you want to." I think that there's something nice about having a packet of information delivered, and part of in Subcompact Publishing why I talk about chunking together groups of articles is because I'm kinda of the mindset that users shouldn't be forced to constantly pull to refresh, constantly be sucking on the teat of information, for an endless stream of new content. It should come to them when a certain amount of great content is read. That’s the idea.

I think part of what makes The Magazine or Newsstand interesting is that it is a delivery mechanism. It's a delivery and payment mechanism — I think the payment component is really critical. Because that's something that's always been hard to do on the web, on the open web. How many sites have you ever paid for for content? Zero, right?

"Users shouldn't be forced to constantly pull to refresh, constantly be sucking on the teat of information, for an endless stream of new content."

C: What have you paid for?

S: I've paid for the New York Times... I've donated to some things?

C: Yeah, that's the thing, you have to donate, there's no formal structure, recurring payments is kinda difficult to pull off on the web. Just the whole system is a little bit janky. So there's a certain potential in the Newsstand. On one hand, it would have been great if Apple had iBooks and Newsstand combined into one formal reading environment. But because they haven't done that, at the very least they've created a sort of abstract distribution and payment layer, that you can add to your applications.

S: So there's one thing you’ve written about that The Magazine doesn't really do, which is put stuff online for free, outside of the app.

S: A few weeks after the fact. I don't think it's clear that it's going to be a standing thing going forward. (Note: as of writing, only the first two issues are available outside the app.) Do you think this is something that Marco absolutely needs to do? I know you put out Art Space Tokyo, and you took the time to do a really nice web version for free. How's that worked out? Do you think you've been vindicated in doing that?

C: I'd love for Marco to do an A/B test and see what the conversions are like. My gut instinct tells me that having the full articles online would produce more conversions, because you'd be more inclined to link to things that are being written for The Magazine. Marco has frequently said that he wants to hire more high profile journalists, more "real" journalists, pay the rates that "real" journalists should be paid, and so if that's the case, then there are actually these amazing articles that are living inside The Magazine's ecosystem. Having the full articles online is going to get ten times more links than having a truncated, three paragraph version.

And I think people aren't paying for the content explicitly — what they're paying for is that package, what they're paying for is the convenience. They're paying for the fulfillment of a certain job that that app brings, which is this consolidated sort of thought list, in the sense that I as a user don't have to think at all about “how do I get to content?” “where do I read it?” “do I have to go and grab new content?” No, it's just going to be there. If The Magazine has a little badge on it, that means "Great! New candy for me."

If I open it up is it going to take 20 minutes to download a 500 meg .pdf or chunk of images? No, you just know it's going to be quick and it's going to be right there. And that's worth paying for. If you put the full article online it just acts as marketing, like the best kind of marketing.

"Apple created this great, abstracted payment and delivery method, and the only thing they've showcased it with are these clunky uncomfortable-to-use old media apps."

But really the funny thing is is that it's so weird that Apple has done so little promotion around the potential of Newsstand. Apple created this great, abstracted payment and delivery method, and the only thing they've showcased it with are these clunky uncomfortable-to-use old media apps, super apps, super magazines. It's very strange.

S: Well I think it's kind of like gaming — when are they going to promote it? When it gets to this tipping point where they realize people are buying the device for that reason.

C: It doesn't take a genius to know that we're going to be reading our magazines on these devices going forward. This is it. It's like Apple has one of the most important publishing hardware platforms going forward. They have the digital book. It's kinda strange that they didn't define the reading guidelines for something like this — not more strictly, they didn't define them at all. It's kinda willy-nilly all over the place. That said, I think there's still opportunity for someone else to come in, another company to come in and own this space.

I quit Flipboard a year ago, so I can probably talk more candidly about it. But Flipboard is a great example of a company that has amazing content, amazing reading experiences. They have a great table of contents to read or to discover stuff, to discover new publications, new magazines. Flipboard as the kind of company poised to own that sort of space to me seems like a no-brainer. And even guys like Instapaper. If Marco was of the mindset to say "I'm gonna own this space. I'm gonna hire some people, and we're going to have a great table of contents, and you're going to be able to subscribe to publications inside of Instapaper."

Pulse is another company that is clearly trying to own this kind of holistic "This is where you come to read great content." And there's no reason why they couldn't build some sort of payment system or subscription system into their ecosystem as well. And they're on Windows, Android, iOS. It could be the one-stop publishing place, the so-called "moveable type" for tablets, moveable type with a payment system built into it for tablets. Pocket is doing really well, I think they're killing it, I mean their desktop app is great, all their widgets have been redesigned, they look and feel awesome, I love spending time in Pocket. Pocket's great, right?

S: Yeah. It's kind of counter-intuitive that the desktop app would be that good, in a way. I feel like the reason Pocket works as a concept is you're thinking "This is something I don't want to read on my computer, it's something I want to take to a sofa on my iPad." And that's what I have been doing, but then the desktop app comes along and I find myself on the train using it, if it's a shinkansen (bullet train). If it's a long train.

C: It's funny, the length of the train ride determines what device you're gonna use. Also the comfortability — the presence of tablets. Yeah, I mean all these companies. Apple built Newsstand, and it just so happens that The Magazine built what is effectively the bare-bones version of what a comfortable reading environment feels like on iOS, and Marco used Newsstand to build that. It doesn't mean Flipboard or Pocket or Pulse or any of these other sort of reading spaces can't become the Newsstand, the universal Newsstand.

S: Speaking of, whatever hardware any of those companies chooses, they're tied to whatever OEMs can produce. Do you think there's any limitations to the reading experience by the technology of today? Is there any advance that you think we would need to see?

C: I'd love to see E Ink be as responsive and feel as fluid as what we have here on like the iPad mini. I've stopped using my Kindle entirely now that I've got the mini.

I got my Paperwhite before the mini, and there are a few usability problems with the touch Kindles that drive me nuts. The E Ink, you never know what's happening when you swipe, there's no grounding, there's no — did we just move right, or did we just move left?

S: I really wish it had the buttons, too.

"They need the buttons. The only thing you do with the freaking device is switch pages."

C: They need the buttons. The only thing you do with the freaking device is switch pages! 99.999% of all your interaction, switching pages. Those things kind of drove me a little bit nuts. But I do love the feel of E Ink, and I would love if we could get E Ink that looks and feels as responsive as LCD and it’s in full color.

The main reason I was using a Kindle was that the normal iPad was just too big. The iPad mini, the weight is right, the battery life is right, it just feels great to read with, and every day I've been doing one or two hours of reading on the iPad Mini, it's been awesome. I think the iPad mini is really a breakthrough device. The iPad mini, the Nexus 7, the Kindle HD — all these 7-inch-ish tablets — that's the breakthrough comfort zone for reading devices. It's no longer an issue of hardware for a lot of these things. It's a problem of tools, it's a problem of distribution mechanisms.

For example, social reading inside of Kindle. I would love to be able to do a small reading group with a few friends, I'd love to be able to say "Hey, Sam, let's read this book about this weird technology together," and we can go in there, and I open the book and it shows me where you are in the book, you almost race each other along the length of the book, you can drop notes for each other, you can do highlights, I can see exactly what you've really spent time digging into, and the only reason we can't do that is because the Kindle ecosystem is locked up.

You have some startups that are trying to fix that: guys like Readmill are trying to build better social reading platforms, but it's also not a — keep following this thread through — business development problems, getting rights to content. How do you get access to all of Random House's backlog? Developing that relationship, and getting access to that firehose is a non-trivial problem, so it makes it hard for startups to innovate in that space.

So, no, I mean all limitations out in reading and publishing, journalism, magazine publishing, book publishing, it's all about systems, ecosystems, tools. It's so hard for a publisher to put out a digital book, it so hard! Why is it so hard for a publisher to put out a digital book? Creating an .epub is still freakishly difficult, to do it well, and to feel like you understand what's happening under the hood and you have control over the final output.

"Why is it so hard for a publisher to put out a digital book?"

S: Maybe that'll be fixed by the time we have a retina iPad Mini.

C: Probably! This ecosystem's always been about chicken and egg problems. The iPad comes out, and suddenly there's an awareness that tablets are a thing, we're probably going to be reading on these things going forward. Great. Okay, now we have tablets. Then we have to build the software for it, but before we build the software for it, we kinda do all these really clunky versions of how do we take all this existing print infrastructure and shove it into a tablet. So we spend two years doing that.

And then finally, publications like The Verge start launching and everyone starts doing mobile-optimized web versions of their websites, and slowly — it's actually pretty quick, when you think about it — slowly but surely, everyone is moving to a very tablet aware mindset. And the saturation of the devices after this winter season is going to be at this tipping point where it doesn't make any sense to not ask, even if you have no interest in publishing, "How big is the market, how much money is there to be made in this market?"

Every six months we're going to see kind of a new daub of where there are 3 or 4 very obvious things that we weren't doing that someone's going to start doing, and then the whole industry shifts and follows that. Two years ago, hardware was more of a limiting factor — now it isn't.

"Kindle Fire was like the worst consumer electronics device ever released on people."

It's a good time, it's an interesting time, the market has moved so quickly. A year ago, all there was was an iPad. There was an iPad, there was some Galaxy stuff that no one knew anything about, and there was a Kindle Fire. And Kindle Fire was like the worst consumer electronics device ever released on people. It's one of those things where you just wonder "Did Amazon lose any credibility because of how bad that device was?" The Kindle HD, I haven't touched one, but I'm assuming it's better.

S: Yeah, we gave it a pretty good review.

C: Yeah, I'm sure it's a lot better. And you have the Nook tablet now too. The baseline is kind of like everyone has figured it out now, and all the specs are up to par. iOS is definitely not the only game in town either. If your app is dependent on growing your user base, you have to be on Android — there's just no way around it. If you're working inside the traditional VC system and you need to show a certain amount of user acquisition, user growth, you have to be on Android.

S: Because The Daily managed to get what, 100,000 paying subscribers? I feel like their financial issues weren't really down to the subscriber count, it was more like the incredibly large staff they were maintaining.

C: No, I mean, it was incredible — they were pulling in, what, 3 million dollars a year? Something like that, just on subscriptions alone, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially considering that it was iPad-only, single device, single platform.

"You just want one place to build and send your article, send your data, and have it look great on all platforms."

The whole promise of tablet publishing is to be able to produce your content in one place, and then be able to say “hey, I'm going to push it out everywhere.” And the nice thing about reading, about text, about magazines, about a collection of articles is that the UX doesn't have to be complex — as we've seen with The Magazine — in that a minimalist user experience should translate fairly universally across any platform.

There's nothing specific in The Magazine that couldn't be brought over 100% on Android, and so wherever you are, the design and the user experience could be identical on every platform. It's something a publisher shouldn't have to worry about. As a publisher, I don't want to think, OK, I'm pushing out to iOS with some set of rules, and now we have to redesign something and push out another app for Android. You just want one place to build and send your article, send your data, and have it look great on all platforms. That's the dream. We'll be there, soon.

Interview condensed and edited by Sam Byford and Thomas Houston

Photos of Japan courtesy Michael Wayne Goodman and Gary Cycles

An Important Time for Design

by Cameron Koczon

alistapart.com

March 13, 2013

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Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups such as Kickstarter and Airbnb are taking center stage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that design has a massive role to play in the evolution of the web and the next generation of web products.

This has not gone unnoticed in the startup world. Nearly every CEO and VC I’ve met in the last six months is on a wild hunt for designers. This demand is a powerful tool: it can be used to get more selective with clients, bring design to new markets, and get higher rates—or, it can be used to take aim at something bigger.

The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone.

— Ben Pieratt, Svpply

Ben is right. You’ve been given a blank check. On it, you can write an hourly rate, or you can band together as a community and change the way design is perceived, change the way products are built, and quite possibly change the world.

All eyes on design

The startup world has pinned a great deal of hope on design and is watching to see how it plays out. It’s ready to believe that design is going to change the world—all we have to do is show that it can. If we succeed, we change the way design is perceived and valued forever. If we fail, design will lose its luster and misguided ideas about what design is may prevail.

The challenge is that while most of these folks know that they want design in their products (because, you know, Steve Jobs and shit), they don’t really know what that means or how to effectively incorporate design into their MVP / Lean Startup culture.

This lack of understanding is compounded by designers’ history of client services, a history that makes it easy for other communities to view design as a commodity rather than an essential partner. As such, the default position in the startup world has been to bring designers onboard to decorate existing products. Very little attention has been given to the possibility that those same designers might become founders or co-founders of their own companies.

This makes me nervous because it feels like design is getting set up for failure. It is difficult for design to flourish in organizations that don’t understand it. These organizations are no different than any client you’ve ever had: they have the same capacity to elicit or inhibit greatness in your work. The best clients are the ones who define their problems clearly and put their trust in designers to solve them. This model of defining constraints and enabling designers to come up with a solution within those constraints is a good one. But too many constraints can be suffocating.

If, for example, the designer is brought on after a feature set is solidified and a first version of a product has been built, there will be very little beneath the surface that can be done—and it’s what happens beneath the surface in product design that makes or breaks it. For design to work, at least one designer must be a part of the product team from the start. The design team needs to be treated like a partner, not a service provider.

Design as partner

If we want to really show what design is and what it can do, we need to get design elevated to the partner level. Partners have major equity stakes, real decision-making power, and are involved in product development from the beginning. The design team must feel that it has both the authority to make product decisions and the responsibility for the outcome of those decisions. If good design has an important role to play in the future of the web (it does), designers should work on their own terms and with a fair share of both the risk and the reward (read: cash money) set aside for them.

Remember the stakes. The products that take design seriously and incorporate it from the start are going to be the ones that connect with people in a way that really makes an impact in the world. As more and more products are built in this manner, people are going to notice the pattern. Designers will be seen as an essential ingredient in any startup team. The perception of design as decoration will start to show cracks.

I wish I could say that this designer-partner world was our inevitable future. We could all just kick back, relax, and grab a Corona like in those commercials. Alas, everything I’m seeing suggests the opposite. Designers—even some of the industry’s best—are routinely being pulled into existing startups as employee number four, five, or even later; as a result, they end up overly constrained and under-compensated. It’s going to be tough to turn that tide, but it can be done. As a matter of fact, it already has been done by another group of service providers: developers.

A semi-paved road

Even though the road from service provider to partner is a tough one, designers have the benefit of being able to examine the path taken by developers, who have done an enviable job of maintaining a strong community identity while gaining a tremendous amount of power and respect in the startup world.

If we go back ten to fifteen years, it was a common narrative for an MBA with a rich uncle and nothing more than a degree and an idea to raise some money and then hire a bunch of developers on a salary basis to do the work of building. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to raise money without a CTO or “technical co-founder,” and no one blinks at a startup co-founded by two developers.

It’s my belief that this transformation came about because developers undertook a wholesale realignment of their focus. There were many factors that enabled this realignment, but for my money ($17.43), Paul Graham (PG) and the folks at Y Combinator (YC) deserve a lot of the credit. They revolutionized how products were built and funded. Thanks in part to their efforts, we now have Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Heroku, and a whole lot more.

The money that Team YC set aside specifically for developer-entrepreneurs played a big role in all this, but the work they did to change the prevailing thinking in the developer community was even more important. PG wrote a series of essays encouraging developers to take the startup leap. In a 2001 essay entitled The Other Road Ahead under the heading of “Why Not?” he says:

E. B. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don’t have any current running through them. The cows apparently learn to stay away from them, and after that you don’t need the current. “Rise up, cows!” he wrote, “Take your liberty while despots snore!”

If you’re a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. One is that you don’t know anything about business. The other is that you’re afraid of competition. Neither of these fences have any current in them.

Paul let developers know that there was nothing to fear in building something on their own. The fences have no current. This is probably the single most important lesson designers need to internalize as they undertake a realignment of their own.

Realignment

The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven.

—Cameron Moll

It’s time for the design community to follow in developers’ footsteps and fundamentally realign its focus. We need to think about products over posters and people over page views. We need this to happen at every level: in design schools, in design writing, and in the things we celebrate online and in person. We have a new purpose: elevate design and help change the world. Let’s talk about how to do that.

Co-found a startup

The easiest way to become a designer-partner is to start something yourself. When you’re there from the beginning, you help determine the culture of the organization and you can personally ensure that design has a partner role.

This could be a side project that takes off, a la Instapaper. It could be a bigger idea that you decide to pursue full-time. It could also be an idea from someone you trust and would work well with. It’s ok to be patient and discerning when starting something new, but remember that conditions for a startup are never perfect.

If you want to take some of the risk out of the equation, you could apply to one of the many incubators out there. There’s Y Combinator (the most prestigious), The Designer Fund  (for designer founders), TechStars (on the rise), Rock Health (for healthcare startups), and Imagine K-12 (for education startups).

It’s important to note that being a co-founder does not necessarily mean serving as CEO. Design can be a partner without being the leader. Generally, the person who has the strongest hold on the vision of the product will fit best into the CEO role.

Join a startup

If you’re not yet ready to create a brand new product, you have another great option: you can join an existing startup. Just remember, all startups are not created equal.

It’s very important to join a startup that treats design as an equal partner, not just a service provider. Doing so is the only way to ensure that the startups most willing to take design seriously will get access to the best design talent. Startups currently unwilling to make design a partner will need to change their ways or do without.

Don’t be afraid to grill the heck out of any company that you might join and find out just how seriously they take design. How are product decisions made and where does design fit in that process? Is designer compensation on par with developer compensation? Are designers at equity parity with developers at every seniority level? These may seem like very forward questions, but they’re not. They will save you from joining a startup that only pays lip service to design.

Work on bigger problems

If we want to be taken seriously as co-founders and partners, we have to tackle problems outside of our insular design community. Don’t create the next Dribbble; instead, bring a Dribbble level of craft to a bigger problem. The kind of problem that has the potential to change the world and impact millions of people’s lives.

Build something that fixes the insanity of modern education. Or helps people weather the upcoming financial crises and rise in unemployment. Or improves the health of people around the world. Or brings neighbors closer together. Or helps people run small businesses. Or strengthens the bonds of families. Or puts existing abusive, mammoth institutions out of business (pretty please).

Need more problems to solve? Check out this most excellent list by the Y Combinator folks of problems they’d love to fund; or, better yet, get outside and away from your computer and talk to your family, local businesses, and community.

Support your peers

The design community lacks capital and that is going to hurt designers’ ability to co-found startups. We need to do three things to bring money to our community.

First, established practitioners who have achieved a great deal of success need to invest in the next generation of designers and encourage a startup focus. Seeing as very few designers have had partner roles at startups thus far, this will take some time.

Second, we need to welcome and actively invite a small number of the very best investors to play a larger role in our community. The kinds of folks who appreciate the partner role that design can play.

Finally, we need to do more of what we’ve been doing: supporting one another. Let’s continue to take advantage of the opportunity afforded us by Kickstarter. Let’s continue to buy pro accounts in apps that we find meaningful like Dribbble or Instapaper. A few thousand members of our community contributing $20 each can easily bring a product to life.

Designers and developers

It is difficult to rally for designers without making it seem like you are discounting the value of developers. It’s important to remember that what we’re trying to do is evolve the notion of the ideal team. The ideal team includes both design and development, working in tight communication and mutual respect from the beginning. This is an enviable dynamic and surprisingly uncommon.

In his Brooklyn Beta talk, Tony Fadell said that at Apple, “Everyone on the team is an artist.” This is the right outlook. If we want design to be seen as more than decoration, we must remember that development is more than plumbing. Great developers are “designers” in their own domain. Design can even be our common thread, uniting two groups with a shared love of detail, craft, and building things.

Nudge the world

I want to end with an excerpt from Wilson Miner’s wonderful talk at Build.

Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in.

We make our world what it is and we become the kind of people who live in it.

What do we want to spend more time with? What do we want to shape us? What nourishes us? What do we want to see grow?

You know what we get to do when we leave here? We get to go make things. Things that nudge the world a little bit in what we hope is the right direction. We get to put a dent in the universe. This is a great job.

The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by.

About the author

Cameron Koczon

Hi, I’m Cameron. Welcome to my bio. My real name is Cameron Koczon but I go by Fictive Cameron on the Internet. I run a web company called Fictive Kin based in Brooklyn, NY. We are currently working furiously on an app called Gimme Bar which is, as they say, neato torpedo. I co-created a to do list application called TeuxDeux and I co-organized a web conference called Brooklyn Beta. I like co-doing things because it’s more fun to work on awesome things with awesome people. I sometimes post to my off-kilter blog. I smoke a pipe.

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