Apparently, the Onion A.V. Club smells what I'm steppin' in. They are picking up what I am putting down, and clearly my VOX blog is the most important source for their articles.
Yes. I am a big deal.
15-12-12-10-(14)
My arms feel like Jello. Today was the most difficult yet, and I had to take longer breaks in between each set. Depending how I feel at the end of the week I may have to repeat.
I blogged about one of our great weddings over on my other blog, and forgot to post about it on Vox, whoops!
I started working 10 years ago today. Or, at least, this Monday of the month 10 years ago.
It all started with a football match and probably some beer and ended up with me and a friend named Gareth walking up Liverpool Road to an interview at something called a "new media" company. Which sounded terribly Wired.
This was back when Wired was still very, very cool. Especially if, like me, you were arse deep in a course at Imperial College - the UK equivalent of MIT but with, if it's possible, even fewer women. Staring down the barrel of a job in investment banking, IT consulting or something in the vague but yet horrific-on-a-Lovecraftian-scale world of Java B2B I was rapidly starting to fear that the jig was up and that I was sometime soon I was going to be exposed as a consumate slacker.
Walking in front of us was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - poised, ethereal and, I swear to god, glowing. I was completely smitten.
She turned out to be Fiona Brice and she was the office manager for the rather generically named New Media Com.
Remember that all interviews I had up until this point were in typical corporate offices - bad carpet, ceiling tiles, harsh overhead lights and cubicles as far as the eye could see - stuffed with stressed looking people in bad suits.
Therefore the New Media Com offices came as a bit of a shock.
The floor was polished hard wood and all the light came from a floor to ceiling patio windows with organicly shaped window panes. Since then it's been turned into a rather hip dance studio
And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"
Rather suprisingly they hired the both of us as employees number 9 and 10. It soon transpired that they were blagging it as much as we were. No-one new anything about new-media back in 1998 - you made it up as you went along and if it worked then you pretended that you'd known it would all along and if it failed you came up with an excuse on the fly and lied until you almost believed it yourself.
During the boom I hired everyone I knew and Profero, as it was soon renamed (the name being chosen, literally, by thumbing through my old Latin GCSE dictionary until we found a word we liked) started doing much actual, real, important campaigns such as Sky Digital and CNN. I tried my hand at everything - there's an old joke that goes "Can you play the piano?", "I don't know, I've never tried" and I was 20 years old and some combination of fear of being found out and youthful arrogance meant that I'd give anything a go - build a website for Miss World including a voting script in a weekend? No problem - the team came in on Monday morning to find me asleep on my keyboard. Client wants a promotional screen saver? Of course. I've never written one before but how hard can it be?
I worked there for over 2 years, juggling college work and usually 3 days in the office a week. Profero survived the bust that afflicted many of the bigger, trendier agencies out there and now has 12 offices from London to Madrid to Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and, as of this year, New York. The last friend I hired (who came in to do 2 days of HTML work 9 years ago and forgot to leave) finally quit - albeit to work for one of the original 9 employees. Gareth's doing clever things with television in Australia and I'm here in San Francisco with a CV that once caused someone to remark that it reminded them that "... career was a verb as well as a noun".
Whaaaaat.
Erica Hall of Mule Design gave her presentation on Copy as Interface last Friday at Six Apart. There were some pretty interesting concepts she shared.
The main concept is that words are a very important part of an interface and seriously effect the feelings users experience when using a site.
She pointed out that in an interface "we aren't writing, we are speaking in text". She had an interesting slide noting that before literacy we had an oral tradition, now we are evolving to a "secondary orality" as she put it.
Oral Culture --> Literacy --> Secondary Orality
She offered some guidelines when choosing how to speak in a user interface....
Five ways to get words right:
- Be authentic
- Be engaging
- Be specific
- Be appropriate
- Be polite
7 things to avoid
- Vague
- (Too) Clever
- Rude
- Obvious
- Inconsistent
- Presumptious
- Unnatural
Copy as Interface Slides on Slideshare - A longer review of the presentation
Just did my end of week 2 exhaustion test and could do 17 push-ups! That's a far cry from 100, but a hell of an improvement over 2 weeks when I could only do 4. I took an extra day off this weekend because I helped move a couch on Friday and that made me more sore than any of these push-ups.... I'll start week 3 tomorrow.
The recipe, by popular demand:
- 3 cans refried black beans
- 20oz plain Greek yogurt
- 1/2c chipotle in adobo (blended to a paste)
- 1c minced leftover vegan sausage (optional)
- 4 green onions (fine chop)
- 1/2 bunch cilantro (finely minced)
Great Package Design from www.welovejam.com (at Rainbow Grocery, SF)
