DISQUS

Here's an article I just sent all my clients and friends:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofe...

As a nearly complete convert to a variant of hard-core direct marketing known as 'Kennedy-style' or 'GKIC' (see http://dankennedy.com) that is only now, grudgingly, admitting that decent design does not, in fact, depress response rates when we keep our eyes on the ball, I walk a fine line almost every minute between design for its own sake and design to help make the sale. So I love it when I get ammo from reputable sources like alap.

Because I just can't do ugly.

Oh - as to Times Roman: It doesn't have to suck. Just set it biggish, in light weights, and kern it to a fare-thee-well. 'Course, it's hard to kern web type, but that's why you set it big, so you can tighten the letterspacing to the point that nobody notices. Use the light weight for body text at about 14px and h1 heads at about 24px or bigger; mix with h2 and h3 heads in Arial Bold or Trebuchet Bold. The h3 subheads should be the same size as the p text; the h2 subheads can be somewhat bigger, maybe 16-18 px.

On the subject of type running acrosse the browser window, I agree absolutely. Type gets hard to read at about 52 characters long; even a bare-bones, no-style design should still at least have a container that declares the main-content column won't make anyone read farther across than that.

And, finally, if we listened to every one of our esteemed male colleagues over 40 on the subject of readable type, we would never design anything except 12-point black type on white. Or 18-point black type on white.

Guys, I went presbyopic starting on my 40th birthday and today can't see the lines on my own hand. (The fingers are going fast.) I wear bifocals with two strengths of close - one for the computer and one for reading papers. When I drive I look over the top to see the road and the rest of the panorama in the distance (and look through them to see the speedometer and the rest of the in-car controls) and take them off to play tennis, at which point I can no longer read the numbers on the balls, to return strays to the next court. All of this is prelude to my most earnest entreaty: If you can't read the type, please, just put on your glasses - your wife spent hours picking them out and I'm sure they look great on you!

Whew. I just restarted Safari, thinking it had finally eaten too much memory for the moment and wasn't loading your css. I should be seeing naked xhtml, right?

I'm about to email your post to my client in the 401 (k) business -- I see this as highly relevant, especially to the new generation of workers. One thing that hasn't totally hit us yet is that one of our new target audiences is those Gen-Y-ers that BNET and everyone are telling us it's so hard to manage. Well, if we're going to get them to contribute to their 401(k)s, this Facebook strategy is probably how it's gonna happen.

As for all the other products in the universe: Near as I can figure, kids who grow up on Facebook are staying on it past college and into young adulthood -- that's how they relate. As they grow up and have kids of their own, those kids may migrate to a different network, or they may regard their admission onto Facebook as a ninth-grader as a rite of passage.

It's only this generation of parents of the classes of, say, '09 and older, whose FB lives are at all circumscribed. And we're not going to dominate the marketplace in years to come.

But whether Facebook or another, newer network for the children of the current FB generation, I do believe the social-media, peer-reviewed shopping paradigm is here to stay.

I love Evernote! I downloaded it from the App store thinking it would be a good tool for my 12-year-old son to use for writing down homework assignments (and for me to keep tabs on them with the automatic syncing). Instead it's my new best friend! (At least until I find I have a gig's worth of old meeting notes on my phone . . .)

BTW -- want to get a blank stare fast? Use the word 'cloud' in a conversation with normal people.

Here's someone I think you'd love interviewing: Harry Webber. (Disclosure: I'm working with him on something called the Institute for the Advanced Practice of Advertising, a nonprofit think tank we're recruiting ad people for.)

Harry is a traditional ad guy -- he's in the Clio Awards Hall of Fame for lines like "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." But he's also a very solid web 2.0 guy, so he sits exactly at the crossroads of old and new communications. Here's a post from his weekly column that shows the contrast between old and new: http://www.madisonavenew.com/mad187.html

I like the idea of Minggl. But I have limited interest in tools that don't support Safari -- Firefox gets unusably slow if I have it open for more than about an hour.

Then why do you suppose brands happily support the op-ed sections of newspapers, Fox news (which won a federal court case explicitly affirming its right to lie on the air), Comedy Central (I include this for balance, but it in fact has a better record for accuracy than some other supposedly more reputable outlets) and talk radio? To name two, Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have made personal attacks based on lies and innuendo their stock in trade, and neither of them have ever gone to jail.

I propose two other reasons. One is that media-buying agencies don't want to deal with the complexity of putting together several million eyeballs at a time online when they can get the same reach with a single network television/radio or national print buy. Number two is that, given the rather sorry state of broadband penetration and declining adult literacy in the US, even the biggest blogs, even aggregated in networks, may not be delivering audience numbers in the millions in the first place.

Technology-wise: Terminating SCSI cables and being worried about too many text boxes in a document in a page-layout program.

In general: Card catalogs at the library and paying 15 cents or more, each, for black-and-white copies.