The Lab

About the Advocacy Working Group

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:01 -0700

The Advocacy Working Group will be focused on advocating Symphony and its core approaches and technologies.

Goals

Our main goals as a group are to:

Get the word out about Symphony CMS
Promote the benefits of XML and XSLT
Advocate for better XSLT support in PHP
Develop ways of building and strengthening the community of designers, developers and users

Priorities

Raising the Profile of Symphony CMS

Build compelling sites with Symphony
Create case studies
Write tutorials
Publish books
Win awards

Promote Best Practices with XML, XSLT and HTML

Build sites demonstrating best practices
Create libraries of code
Create exercises and challenges
Stimulate discussion
Publish tutorials and books

Advocate for XSLT support

Join standards organizations: W3C, Web Standards Project, XSL mailing lists, etc
Actively advocate for better XSLT support in PHP
Advocate for better integration with other systems with XML APIs and XSLT support

Build Community

Create better methods for group interaction with Symphony
Enable the community to share knowledge and code
Host events, workshops and hack days to network and increase knowledge and skillsets
Host awards for design and development
Build hosting environments customized for deploying Symphony

Strategic Content Management

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:26 -0700

@nickdunn, the idea of Google Docs API integration in Symphony sounds very interesting. Our team members are transferring a lot of our processes to Google Apps, so that would be a good fit for us.

@newnomad, thanks for reminding me of @czheng’s reference to A List Apart’s article on Strategic Content Management. Kristina Halvorsen’s talks at An Event Apart have articulated a challenge that we often run into in getting sites to launch: content is often an after thought. The traditional process usually means that shoehorning content into a design, which doesn’t fit actual content requirements and forces a redesign after the fact. Obtaining or creating content early, so as to be able to design around the content, opens the door to endless iterations.

I’ve wondered how well Symphony is able to perform as a means of facilitating the collection of content. Can a basic install of Symphony be used as a means of collecting data before there is a chance to model the data appropriately for developing designs, templates and utlimately a production-ready site? Or is it better to use other tools and use Symphony to integrate.

If it can be shown that Symphony can adapt to different processes and easily pull data into different forms, that would be a huge draw for people dealing with the pain of pulling content out of clients.

Tools for Offline/Synchronized Content Creation

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:44 -0700

I’m curious to find out what process others are using to create content for their sites. The reason I ask is that I just came across a web application called Simplenote that synchronizes with the Simplenote iPad application and a desktop application called Notational Velocity. The API is not currently public, but you can sign up for access.

I’m interested to see how this could be adapted into a Symphony CMS publishing workflow, so I’ve applied for membership to the Simplenote API group on Google Groups.

It would be interesting to see whether it would be possible for Symphony to adapt the API as a means of publishing content to different sections based on the tag applied to a note.

Do you use Google Apps, Dropbox, etc. or compose directly in Symphony textarea fields?

http://symphony-cms.com/discuss/thread/51819/#position-1

Finding My Voice

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:00 -0700

I look for other people who share my ideas. When I don’t find common ground, I hold onto those ideas even tighter. I have an experience that validates those ideas. The things I have learned have come through a great deal of trial and error, but also successes. I have gleaned much wisdom from those who have come before, but I have also been blazing trails in the wild, in obscure places, where I have been trying new things.

Returning to civilization, I discover that the landscape has changed. People seem to be speaking a different dialect and I need to learn new vocabularies, phrases, inflections and intonations. As an alien, an exile in a foreign land, I have a constant feeling that I am different, a social misfit, disconnected from the wider community. If I assimilate, I fear that I will lose the part of me that makes me unique, the distinct differences that I have come to value. Others do not appear to have the same appreciation for the rituals I follow and the goods I have to offer. They have difficulty imagining how to integrate these strange tools and practices into their daily lives. In fact, the thought does not cross their minds. They have their own culture and customs, their own dietary practices and traditions, their own daily rituals and ways of living.

To find my way in this city, to survive, I need to learn the language of the people around me, to find something that I can do, that I can make, that I can offer in the marketplace that offers people something of value, something they need. There in the market square, I discover people like me who share stories of walking the same trails and learning the same dialects. We band together to share ideas and we make stuff together. Still, our experiences are different and my own individual voice gets lost as I listen to the voices of others who are more forceful in their speech, more persuasive in their rhetoric, more eloquent with their stories and experiences. I remain quiet to soak in the wisdom of the community. But then I am surprised by the stories and experiences I hear, of problems and challenges, of venturing into new territory. I think to myself, I’ve been there. I know how to get there. I learned how to live in those places, how to survive in the wild. Perhaps there are better ways, but I have some ideas that can help others find their way. So, I speak up. I challenge the conventional wisdom. I find my voice.

Don't Design Websites. Design Systems.

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:56 -0700

This morning, I received an email that was forwarded from a colleague at Domain7, where I used to work as Senior Designer. I have been forwarding a reasonable amount of traffic to Domain7 from a project I had experimented with on my own time: 960 Fluid Grid System, based on Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System.

The request went something like this:

I’m on a project where the client just wants us to deliver responsive templates CSS/JS/HTML and not actually build it as Drupal templates.

I recommended that they use the Omega theme, but I’m worried that using a grid system outside of Omega wouldn’t match easily. I’d like to use your fluid 16-column grid system for my templates, but I’m really hoping to get your opinion on this.

Should I push the idea of delivering a Drupal theme or should I use your fluid grid system and let the client deal with the conversion?

The request apparently touched a nerve with me, because this was my reply:

Grid Systems

I am assuming that you are referring to the 960 Fluid Grid System. To be honest, I haven’t used that grid system for a very long time. It can probably be easily adapted to work with a responsive web design approach. I have since worked on other grid systems as well, to experiment with different approaches:

But there are other more flexible systems that are available now.

You might want to look at the grid system used by Zurb Foundation, which allows for nesting.

My biggest issue with the 960 Grid System has to do with baking in the width of the gutters. For this, the 960gs doesn’t seem to be as flexible as I would like. That’s why I started to look at Nicole Sullivan’s OOCSS grid system as an alternative and used that as the basis for experimenting with FluidGrids, then later with the Markup Library templates

With the Markup Library templates, I really like the way I can set margins that remain consistent regardless of the width of the viewport. Modifying the margin width is really simple, since it just means changing the value for the padding of the .content container. This is the main reason I abandoned the 960 Fluid Grid System.

Nathan Smith has recently released Unsemantic which is the successor to the 960 Grid System.

He is able to reduce the markup necessary by relying on the box-sizing: border-box property to be able to apply the padding directly to the grid container without impacting the width of the box. This technique won’t be backward compatible for older browsers unless you add a polyfill for the box-sizing property.

Update from the Inquirer

Doing more research with Drupal in mind it seems that “Zen Grids” might be the most friendly. The Drupal Omega theme actually has a zen grids sub-theme with a good amount of documentation.

http://zengrids.com

http://drupal.org/node/193318

Integrating Designs into a CMS

I actually don’t know much about Drupal, other than that Domain7 uses it for most of their CMS implementation projects. What I have experienced when working on projects for implementation into Drupal, is that designers don’t have as much control over the code, since the modules often define the output. Some Drupal developers I have worked with insist that the markup should be created in Drupal to avoid the headaches that arise when markup does not align with what Drupal expects. Other Drupal developers say otherwise, that, while it might take more time and care to accomplish, it is possible for Drupal to output very clean markup. This approach might require avoiding certain modules that dictate the markup structures.

I’m more of a Symphony enthusiast, where designers and developers use W3C standards to build page templates. This is far more flexible and places much more control into the hands of the designers to structure the markup as they see fit. There is then a contract between the developers and the designers to maintain a strict separation between the data layer (XML) and the presentation layer (XSLT).

I think the answer to your question about the deliverables for your project should take into account the needs of the developers who will be integrating your design into the system. You will need to determine the approach that they are comfortable with, unless you are able to encourage a more progressive approach and they are open to stretching themselves to allow better control over the markup.

In an ideal world, I would deliver HTML/CSS/JS, similar to a project I worked on at Domain7 for Claremont McKenna College. It was the client’s responsibility to integrate the markup into their proprietary CMS. I documented parts of the process on my blog:

However, in the context of a Drupal implementation, you may have to compromise your standards somewhat.

Giving Back Control of Markup to Designers

This is one of the reasons I would like to write a book about XSLT for Designers. The web standards community has ignored an important standard, and designers are facing the challenges that arise with the lack of a standard for templating systems across web development systems, frameworks and scripting languages. Developers have taken control of the markup with systems that ease their processes but make the work of a designer much more difficult. I would challenge the popular misconception that XSLT is too difficult and not widely supported. XSLT is available on any UNIX-based system, such as Mac OS X and Linux as xsltproc on the command line. PHP supports XSLT with the libxslt library. Ruby has several gems that are able to process XSLT (Nokogiri, ruby-xslt, libxslt-ruby). Nokia is currently working on an XSLT 2.0 implementation in C++. It would actually make the work of developers and designers much easier to be working with the standard that the World Wide Web Consortium has recommended and is actively improving as there would be a true separation of concerns, and each could focus on what they do best.

XSLT is to proprietary templating systems what CSS is to tables-based design.

I don’t think your problem is an isolated one. Designers are handcuffed by systems that favour a particular developer methodology and philosophy rather than the need for machine-readable, semantic data in the form of XHTML. The lazy coding practices that HTML5 has encouraged have been a huge compromise and a step backwards because the cowpaths insist that the web is just a series of strings rather than well-structured XML that can be easily processed into a myriad of output formats. The crowd has run down this path with little thought regarding the long-term consequences.

The Content Management Problem

Karen McGrane’s talk at BDConf 2012 is an excellent resource for gaining some understanding of the mess in which we find ourselves.

Karen McGrane - Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content, BDConf, April 2012

Some of her main points involve the changing technology landscape that has been centred on optimizing experiences on desktop screens but has been completely ignoring the user experience on mobile devices, leaving that to device-specific applications. In contrast, she advocates a different approach:

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere.
Launch an API

Quotes from Karen McGrane’s Presentation

A semantic content publishing system creates well-defined chunks of content that can be combined in whatever way is most appropriate for a particular platform. All display issues are addressed by delivery applications, rather than by a content management system earlier in the process.
Content Authoring != Content Management != Content Publishing
Thinking about content that will ‘live’ on a ‘web page’ is pretty 1999.
We are making the exact same mistakes that these print dinosaurs are making.
We are not in the web page publishing business. We are in the content publishing business.
“Truncation is not a content strate…”
We have content management systems that create blobs of content with WYZIWYG editors that allow people to design their content for the only display format they can think of: the desktop web. “I want it to work like Microsoft Word.”
We are in a war between giant unstructured blobs of content and clean well-structured fields of content with meta data attached.
Metadata is the new art direction.
Use business rules to decide what content to display, so the robots will know how to construct a page.
Beautiful software, even for back-end users, is becoming an expectation. We’re moving in this direction because we now understand that better content management systems foster better content. — Matt Thompson
It’s time to start separating content from form.

Take a look at the system created for NPR using the principle of COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere. What is the foundation of the API? An XML Repository. This structure allows for content modularity.

We Design Systems

As you think about the grid system for the site design, be sure that you are thinking in terms of building a modular system.

A Philosophy of Restraint - Slideshare: a presentation by Simon Collison (see slide 16: We don’t design web pages. We design systems.)
A Philosophy of Restraint - Vimeo: a presentation by Simon Collison (see 22:11)

I don’t think we design web pages. I think we design systems. The concept of systems in industrial design has been around for a long time, but it took web designers a while to catch up and realize. We design these modular systems that expand and grow in a site’s lifetime. We have this wonderful thing where we don’t do print design, where there is a deadline and we send it on a CD to a printer and then it’s done. We build these things that evolve and grow within an organization, and it’s our responsibility as good designers and developers to put in place really strong systems that can cope with whatever is thrown at that website through its lifetime.

Take, for example, the advent of new devices. Not many people really saw the iPad coming. But if we built sites in a good way, we build them where they can cope with the different realms of viewing. TVs now, all manner of different things, projectors, printing—all the wonderful, different things we’ve got with our websites and how they’re used. We should build systems that effectively cope with what this crazy industry’s going to throw at them.

— Simon Collison, A Philosophy of Restraint

I found a couple more resources about designing web systems. The second resource is a presentation focused on designing and developing a web system with Drupal.

These are some of the reasons I would choose different technologies than those that are considered popular, because there are more flexible systems available for building web systems that will better serve the needs of web content creators and their audiences.

Getting Things Done

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:12 -0700

David Allen has written a book, Getting Things Done, that has been immensely helpful to many people. I’ve heard the book mentioned many times around the office. I have been using applications that were created with the GTD philosophy and methodology in mind. But I hadn’t actually read it until last Friday (and I’m not quite finished yet, because I skipped to the end).

I had been thinking about reading the book and was putting it off because I didn’t want to spend more money than I really needed to at this point. I discovered a podcast called Back to Work by Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin on 5by5 that had a series of talks about Getting Things Done.

Episode 95: She’s Five for a Living
Episode 96: Compensatory Muscles
Episode 97: Pope of the Office
Episode 98: Bagged and Boarded
Episode 99: Nobody Wants to Live in a Scaffolding
Episode 100: Go Ahead, Caller.

I was intrigued by the title of the first talk, She’s Five for a Living, in the GTD series. Merlin relates a story about how he and his five-year-old daughter were deciding what to do with their day. He listed off a whole bunch of options and one of them included the word “cookie.” So, what she heard was “Blah, blah, blah, cookie, blah, blah blah.” By the time the day was over, they had enjoyed a cookie, but they weren’t able to do all the other things, so this was a little upsetting to Merlin’s daughter. Well, “she’s five for a living,” so she doesn’t understand that by choosing one thing this will mean that she’s choosing not to do the other things. We, being more mature, need to get organized and get focused to do what we want to do in life.

The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, is divided into three parts:

Part 1: The Art of Getting Things Done
Part 2: Practicing Stress-Free Productivity
Part 3: The Power of the Key Principles

This roughly breaks down to theory, application and benefits.

Each part of the book is divided into chapters:

Part 1: The Art of Getting Things Done
- Chapter 1 - A New Practice for a New Reality
- Chapter 2 - Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow
- Chapter 3 - Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning
Part 2: Practicing Stress-Free Productivity
- Chapter 4 - Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space and Tools
- Chapter 5 - Collection: Corralling Your “Stuff”
- Chapter 6 - Processing: Getting “In” to Empty
- Chapter 7 - Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets
- Chapter 8 - Reviewing: Keeping Your System Functional
- Chapter 9 - Doing: Making the Best Action Choices
- Chapter 10 - Getting Projects Under Control
Part 3: The Power of the Key Principles
- Chapter 11 - The Power of the Collection Habit
- Chapter 12 - The Power of the Next-Action Decision
- Chapter 13 - The Power of Outcome Focusing

How does it work?

David Allen wants to help us shed the mental weight that keeps us from being effective. To be a “black belt” in the area of productivity, you need a “mind like water” so that whatever anyone throws at you, your pond will return to a restful equilibrium rather than generating a wave pool that is blown about by the winds of external pressures.

You can get things done by:

collecting your stuff, organizing it and thinking about what to do with it:
- defer it
- delegate it
- do it
focusing on the outcomes to define projects to commit to
deciding what the next physical action is and doing it

But why so much paper?

The bit that I found a little off-putting was David Allen’s reliance on physical organization systems. For example, the “tickler file” is a set of 43 folders (p. 174). This bit was such an important idea to Merlin Mann that he created a site dedicated to the idea: 43Folders.

My initial thought is: wouldn’t it be friendlier to the trees to not cut them down for things that I intend to discard anyway? If I’m going to follow this system, I’m going to use text files for ideas and folders on my hard drive for projects. I am trying to avoid paper as much as possible these days. I am more of a web designer than I am a print designer because I have always felt uncomfortable about killing trees for a living. I’m sure that’s not a new thought, but I have yet to delve deeper into the ideas that Merlin has to offer.

At any rate, the theme of this month is about getting things done. While I am writing a blog post, I am not getting other things done.

Insomnia

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:00 -0700

I couldn’t sleep after I woke up close to 1:30 am (I think—I can’t remember exactly). I don’t know if insomnia is something that just happens more when you get older, but I think I’ve always had problems with insomnia for as long as I can remember. Thankfully, it is intermittent. If I’m awake one night, I am so tired by the next night that it is not a problem getting to sleep.

This morning, I got up just after 3:00 am. I grabbed my iPad and headed down to the basement, which is where our family relaxes. Last year, we thought we might be moving to Vancouver. We put our house up for sale and we were looking around for somewhere closer to Downtown Vancouver to move to. Our realtor provided a service that included staging the home to increase the chance of a sale. We decided that this would be a good opportunity to buy some new furniture that we would take with us to the new home. And, since we would very likely be downsizing, we would get rid of furniture that we did not intend to take with us and use the some of the remaining furniture to stage the rest of the rooms. In this way, we finally made our basement into a much more usable and comfortable space.

As it turned out, the house didn’t sell and our plans to move fell through. This was a good thing, since our daughter’s plans to go to the University of Victoria also fell through, and she has been living at home this year while attending Trinity Western University, which is about a half hour drive from our house.

So, here I am, in the basement, in the dark of the night, waiting for the light of the morning, looking for things to read.

Al Gore: The Future

As it turns out, today is the day that Al Gore released his new book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, in the iBooks store. It promises to be an assessment of the world in its current state and the trends and momentum that are propelling the world forward into the future, with all its dangers, challenges and uncertainties.

Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Tofler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends.

According to the video trailer that accompanies the book, the six drivers of global change are:

global economy
instant communication
shifts in power
growth
genetic manipulation
humans & the ecosystem

The video trailer ends with Al Gore’s hopeful challenge:

No matter where in the world we live, we face a choice: either to be swept along by the powerful currents of technological change and economic determinism into a future that may threaten our deepest values, or shape the world in ways that protect human dignity and reflect the aspirations of people and nations throughout the world. Mapping the future is a risky undertaking. Perhaps the only thing riskier is doing nothing.

A Sustainable Life

I was actually looking for a couple other books. I am trying to solve the problem of how to get things done without taking on too much. I know myself pretty well. I know I have a tendency to take on too many things and to lose focus to such an extent that I find myself looking back and wondering what happened to all the time. How do I strike a balance between making the most of my time and preserving my health and sanity? How do I live a good life?

Getting Things Done by Dean Allen
Margin by Richard A. Swenson

Being Wrong

Another book I came across while looking for Margin, and not finding it in iBooks, was Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz. The book looks like a very interesting investigation into what keeps us holding onto ideas and beliefs in the face of information and evidence that challenges and undermines these convictions.

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origin of the universe to how to load the dishwasher.

Choices and Habits

All of these things that I am thinking through involve the habits that I have formed, whether they are thought patterns, assumptions, ways of working, or general approaches to life. Perhaps these are the things that keep me awake at night. It’s not so much a sense of guilt, that maybe I should have done things differently, but perhaps the thought that I have an opportunity to do so many amazing things, but I might miss out on those things if I make the wrong choices. This can be a paralyzing thought.

I am in this mode of trying to figure out what the right choices are. I think that I can learn from the wisdom of others. That is one of the major reasons I love to read. But this literate life has a way of pulling oneself into a world of abstraction so much that the world of ideas becomes more real than the concrete, physical world of people and geography, time and matter, actions and reactions.

In some ways, the life of the mind can be an escape from a life of choices, risk, courage and action. Fear of failure becomes an excuse to put things off just a little longer. Sometimes, you just have to decide that you know enough.

All You Need

The Beatles sang, “All you need is love.” If love is enough, what is it? Can it really be considered the foundation for every good choice? Love is a very confusing term. It means so many different things to so many different people. People sing many different songs about love. You might say that it is the topic that receives the greatest amount of attention in art, music and drama.

The canonical Christian literature goes as far as saying, “the greatest of these is love” and “God is love.” In philosophy, it is important to define your terms. It is the best way to ensure that your ideas will be understood properly. Of course, that opens up an entire debate about the relativity of truth and meaning, in which some might argue that there is no basis for a shared understanding. Individuals differ so widely in temperament, experience and knowledge, which may be formed by an infinite number of variables involving biological, chronological, geographical and cultural contexts. Given these differences, how can there possibly be enough shared meaning between anyone to assume that a person can understand or be understood?

I came up with a definition for love that is probably a little too abstract or philosophical to really do the word justice. But I think that there may be enough shared meaning in these terms to make it intelligible.

Love is truth in action.

I like it because it combines abstract ideas with physical reality. Some would say that the opposite of love is hate. But it’s funny how hatred can often be the emotion that becomes a forerunner to love. Hate has a subject and an object. Hate has an intensity of feeling that cannot be ignored. The friction will spark emotions and actions that are difficult to quell. No more intensity could be attributed to any conflict in this world than the Arab-Isreali conflict. But the actions of one graphic designer, Ronny Edry, have led to a campaign that has flipped the conflict on its head: Israel loves Iran.

I believe the opposite of love is apathy and indifference. Nothing says that you don’t care more than neglect. To be ignored, not even acknowledged can be more painful than outright hatred. Perhaps that is why the name Israel means, “he struggles with God.” As U2 sang, “Jacob wrestled the angel, and the angel was overcome” in their song, Bullet the Blue Sky. Struggle, whether it represents love or hate, is the opposite of indifference. Struggling through the night, Jacob earned his new name, Israel, when daylight broke through. And just to make sure he or any in his family never forgot about his struggle, he would walk with a limp from that day forward. He was on his way to meet his brother. Now, somehow, the whole world has become involved in this family squabble, a disagreement between two brothers over who should have inherited the birthright.

My parents owned a Christian bookstore. The bibles, books and music have left a legacy in my mind that I can never shake. The power of the written word has left an indelible mark on me, like the mark of Cain that served as a warning to all who might have had cause to harm him. As all roads lead to Rome, every sentence I read—it doesn’t matter whether the literature is sacred or profane—every word, every character, every symbol, every jot and tittle, every mark leads back to the creator.

To most moderns (or should I say postmoderns), the Bible is a fairytale; Genesis is a myth. The postmodern world has dismissed the metanarrative as the decorative embellishment of the past, an archaic reminder of the fickle mind of the ancients, who lacked the technology and depth of insight to know any better.

But, what if, in that ancient story of creation, God was merely defining his terms and giving people some context to understand their shared experiences. He spoke in simple terms of the physical world, of light, water and land—three elements that are essential to sustain every form of life on earth. Yet he hid in those words the understanding of abstract truths that pointed to the world of the spiritual and the eternal, to the things that would last beyond the collapse of the universe, of gravity, of the bonding of atoms, of the polarity of protons and electrons, of the existence of waves and particles.

Day 1: light
Day 2: water
Day 3: land
Day 4: light
Day 5: water
Day 6: land

What are the eternal elements?

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.

If faith is a light to the world, and hope waters the land, the land is the nutrient-rich soil where the creator plants the seeds of life. Then, we are the fruit of that seed, the carriers of the truth hidden in our DNA, information that reveals the mark of our maker, data that could not exist apart from the existence of a creator, an innovator, a designer, a coder.

Perhaps we bear the image of our creator as pixels of light with such hue, luminosity and saturation that we either illuminate his presence or distort, obscure and darken it. Then, we reflect or distort the image of our creator depending on whether we choose to act in love or out of indifference.

Perhaps now is not the time to sleep. Now is the time to act.

Derailment: A Cautionary Tale

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:29 -0700

The first course in the Adult Degree Completion program that I am taking at Trinity Western University explores leadership as a learning process. Bill George’s book, True North, starts by describing the journey to authentic leadership, but before delving too deeply into the why and how, warns us about the risks that come with a leadership role.

We can learn from our own mistakes, but it would be far better not to repeat the same mistakes others have made, but to learn from the mistakes of others.

Chapter 2: Why Leaders Lose Their Way

Two cautionary tales are offered to illustrate two different ways to fail. To a great extent, it is impossible to avoid failure. Often, it is how we respond to failure that determines the outcome. The chapter takes us through these two narratives using the following outline:

What causes leaders to lose their way?
- Losing touch with reality
- Fearing failure
- Craving success
- Turning failures into successes
- The loneliness within
Derailment: losing sight of your true north
- Imposters
- Rationalizers
- Glory seekers
- Loners
- Shooting stars
- Heroes of their own journeys

The tale of Philip Purcell, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, illustrates the reaction of the glory seeker, who, upon finding himself in the top position, spent his time securing his power by eliminating any challenges to his leadership. This ultimately leads to his forced resignation. (p. 28)

The chapter ends with the story of Kevin Sharer, who had been a rising star at GE. But he was so enamoured with his own success that he figured he would be a shoe-in for the CEO position at MCI, so he resigned at GE and attempted to take a shortcut to the top at MCI. Instead, his inexperience in the telecommunications industry was all too evident when he proposed a restructuring of the MCI sales organization, and his credibility plummeted. Patience, humility and an eagerness to learn were the lessons he was able to take with him into his role at Amgen, where, in time, he earned his position as CEO.

Quotes

Learning from failure:

When you’re successful, you take it for granted and move on to the next thing. Failure forces you to reflect. What went wrong? How could I have done this better? It’s an opportunity for you to take responsibility. The path of least resistance is to blame it on someone else. I failed many times but learned from each experience and usually managed to come back stronger. I kept plugging away and eventually was successful.
— David Pottruck, former CEO of Charles Schwab (p. 31)

The role of a leader:

The role of leaders is not to get other people to follow them but to empower others to lead. (p. 36)

Do what you love, and you’ll do it with passion:

It is vitally important that you love what you do because if you don’t, you won’t do your best.
— Kevin Sharer, CEO, Amgen (p. 41)

A journey, not a destination

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:47 -0700

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a leader. On the other hand, I wouldn’t call myself a follower either. “I am a rock. I am an island.”

I am an individualist looking for a community. But I’ve been living in my own head for way too long and I often don’t know how to play well with others. That’s not to say that I don’t try my best to be a team player and get along with others. But there is a point at which I start to say to myself, “There has got to be a better way.” And I feel myself starting to disengage when I make my opinions known and I feel like I am not being heard. Am I being too abrasive or annoying, or am I simply an ineffective salesman? Perhaps, influencing is not my gift.

I might have grand ideas about being a Renaissance man, but the reality is that I can only accomplish so much on my own. When I have reached the limits of myself, I won’t be able to go much further. Burning the candle at both ends just means that I’m going to burn out sooner than the rest.

So, why am I finishing a degree with a focus in leadership? It’s not so much about aspiring to be in a position of leadership as realizing that I am already in positions of leadership without actually recognizing it. If I’m leading unintentionally, I’m probably not doing it well. So, I need to learn what good leadership looks like, and if I see a discrepancy with what is and what should be, I need to have the courage to step up and lead, especially if no one else is willing. It’s no use saying to myself, “Someone should do something about that.” If not me, then who?

The Journey

Chapter one of Bill George’s book, True North, starts out with a quote by John Donahoe, President of eBay:

Leadership is a journey, not a destination.
It is a marathon, not a sprint.
It is a process, not an outcome.

This leads into the rags to riches story of Howard Schultz, Founder of Starbucks. Schultz’s story is a chronicle of overcoming his fear of failure and a feeling of being an underdog to becoming a star high school quarterback and receiving a scholarship to Northern Michigan University, becoming the first in his family to earn a college degree (p. 5). The idea for Starbucks came when he was selling coffee filters.

On a buying trip to Italy, Schultz noticed the unique community experience that Milanese espresso bars played in their customers’ daily lives. He dreamed of creating a similar sense of community in the United States, using coffee as the vehicle. (p. 6)

Schultz was determined not to repeat history and sought to overcome the difficulties that his father experienced, trying to make a living for his family, but losing his job as a result of an injury at work. Vowing to create a company with compassion as a foundation, Schultz built Starbucks with the vision that he would take care of his employees with fair wages and health care benefits.

George highlights the stories and comments of several leaders in this first chapter, exploring the journey to authentic leadership:

Howard Schultz, Founder of Starbucks (p. 3)
Dick Kovacevich, chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco (p. 8)
Ellen Breyer, CEO of Hazelden Foundation (p. 10)
Reatha Clark King, named Director of the Year, 2004, by the National Association of Corporate Directors (p. 12) (See Wikipedia.)
Jack Brennan, CEO of Vanguard (p. 15)
Jonathan Doochin, Assistant Dean, Harvard University and founder of Harvard’s Leadership Institute (p. 18)
Ian Chan, founder of U.S. Genomics (p. 19)
Ann Fudge, CEO of Young & Rubicam (p. 21)
Dan Schulman, Virgin Mobile USA’s CEO (p. 21)
Martha Goldberg Aronson, executive vice president, and president of Global Healthcare for Ecolab Inc. (p. 22)
Jeff Immelt, CEO, General Electric (p. 23)

A Map for the Journey

Your life story defines your leadership
The journey to authentic leadership
- Phase 1: Perparing for Leadership
- Phase 2: Leading
- Phase 3: Giving Back
The winding path: there will be ups and downs
- Character formation
- Rubbing up against the world
- Stepping up to lead
- Crucibles
- Peak leadership
- Generativity: wisdom and giving back (Erik Erikson)

Quotes

A journey, not a destination:

Of all the leaders over forty we interviewed, none wound up where they thought they would be. (p. 15)

Adventures in uncharted territory:

Vanguard CEO Jack Brennan believes that the worst thing people can do is to manage their careers with a career map: “The dissatisfied people I have known and those who experienced ethical or legal failures all had a clear career plan.” (p. 15)

Friction creates the spark:

As Randy Komisar, former CEO of LucasArts, says, “This is your opportunity to rub up against the world.” (p. 17)

There will be challenges:

“Struggle and tough experiences ultimately fashion you.”
— Ann Fudge, CEO of Young & Rubicam

Working up slowly to greater responsibilities:

You need those early experiences to learn the lessons that will help prepare you for challenges later in your career. Those who move up the ladder too quickly find themselves in a precarious place. They think they are heroes, but when real challenges and the realities of failure hit them, they’re unprepared to deal with them.
— Dan Schulman, CEO, Virgin Mobile USA

On hitting the wall:

In truth, it is the difficult experiences that prepare you to lead your organization through the challenges you will face.
— Bill George

Have you been living in a cave?

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:56 -0700

I wouldn’t recommend asking this question of anyone other than myself. It assumes a depth of knowledge about a particular subject that is expected to be of common knowledge.

And I wonder if people these days would be less prone to ask such a question, since the choices for entertainments and media consumption are so vast that we can longer assume shared experiences as we may have in the age of mass media. We are moving well beyond the borders of the age of mass media, where the power of the media came from its ability to direct the flow of public discourse to some degree by the choices made in the editing process. When newspapers were a dominant form of mass communication, the daily question was about what should occupy the coveted position on the front page of the paper?

In web design, we have often come across phrases such as “above the fold” that were a throwback to the mindset of the newsprint age, to which one might respond, “Have you been living in a cave? That does not matter anymore. In fact, the lovely slideshow that you have gracing your home page is a useless distraction for your audience. User experience professionals tend to agree that carousels are not effective, except to appease the marketing department. Research appears to be sparse, but further discussions lean heavily toward the ineffectiveness of carousels.”

Of course, one would not say that. It is rude (even if you’re right).

So, back to cave dwelling, it may be quite a viable and perhaps even preferable option to many alternatives. While my wife may not wholeheartedly agree, the option of building our own DIY cave home should be on the list of possible future domiciles.

I am an absolute cave dweller when it comes to popular culture and current events. Ask me a question. I most likely won’t know what you’re talking about. I remain blissfully unaware. So, when I have a question, I ask my wife. She is my litmus test of what’s relevant in popular culture. Ask me about something obscure and I might have some idea of what you’re talking about. Ask me about my area of expertise and you’ll have opened the floodgates. Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry. Did I mention monologuing?

People love to talk about themselves, when given the chance. In the movie, The Incredibles, the retired heroes reminisce about the old days, when the villain usually can’t help but start monologuing.

Lucius: [Bob and Lucius are sitting in a parked car, reminiscing] So now I’m in deep trouble. I mean, one more jolt of this death ray and I’m an epitaph. Somehow I manage to find cover and what does Baron von Ruthless do?

Bob: [laughing] He starts monologuing.

Lucius: He starts monologuing! He starts like, this prepared speech about how feeble I am compared to him, how inevitable my defeat is, how the world will soon be his, yadda yadda yadda.

Bob: Yammering.

Lucius: Yammering! I mean, the guy has me on a platter and he won’t shut up!

Susan Cain, in her book Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, refers to research regarding the performance gaps between students from different countries where Asian countries consistently rank at the top of the list. These countries tend to be culturally introverted and students can more often than not display traits to which their ability to excel may be attributed.

In other words, excellent students seem not only to possess the cognitive ability to solve math and science problems, but also to have a useful personality characteristic: quiet persistence. (p. 201)

As a self-professed introvert, I do enjoy the cave, where I can concentrate on working through the difficult challenges of developing a solution to a design or technical problem, or researching different approaches and ideas related to code, design and creativity, or taking time to formulate my own ideas in writing. The process usually requires patient persistence, but the end result is often a new approach to an old problem, a different way of thinking about a particular narrative, or a discovery of some interesting connections between disparate fields of knowledge.

I will often retreat to a cave, in terms of social media, as the distractions become too overwhelming to be able to work effectively and to feel creatively inspired. I have been taking the time to recharge, to research, to organize and to prepare. So, I have been taking a while to reengage with the online community, still feeling that I need to get to a point where I have worked through the necessary steps to be able to find my bearings and find my focus. I also have a tendency to want to spread myself too thin. So, I want to take the time to establish a set of habits that I can effectively sustain over the long term.

Being my own worst critic, I also need to learn to have patience with myself. Anything worth doing, is worth doing right, and this will take some time.

Perspective

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 10:24 -0700

Perspective is one of the first things that you learn when you begin to discover more about drawing and art. I think it might have been when I was in elementary school in grade 3 that I first learned about the idea of a vanishing point on the horizon which serves as a reference point for the angles in a drawing, giving the image a sense of depth and the illusion of realism. As drawing technique becomes more advanced and complex, artists may further enhance their work with two-point and three-point perspective drawing.

As you learn more about the concept, you discover how revolutionary the idea was in the development of art. Now, we take for granted the craft of image making, as cameras have become ubiquitous. At the time of the Renaissance, the discovery, or rediscovery, of perspective was a very significant advancement in the science and mathematics of optics and its application to the art and craft of painting.

Over time, perceptions change, and technology overcomes the need to painstakingly depict the illusion of realism in paintings when photography can so easily capture an image that far more accurately represents the physical world. Artists had always been concerned with metaphysical themes, but these themes were usually expressed through representations of the physical world. However, with the advent of photography, art needed to find new ways of perceiving that went far beyond the physical. Modern art shatters the constraints of the traditional approach to painting, which served as a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world. Art became more interested in the process of creativity itself, the expression of human emotion, the exploration of the metaphysical, quite literally, that which is beyond the physical.

Film shatters the constraints of time. No longer is the image a static representation of the physical world at one moment in time. A moving image is able to capture a series of moments in a particular space and time. The picture itself does not move, but by viewing a series of images taken in chronological order and playing them back in the same sequence and at the same rate that they were taken, an illusion of reality can be created. The viewer or audience is, in a sense, able to experience the world through the eyes of another person. It is then possible to travel through time and space and beyond, into the imagination of the mind of those who conceive stories and experiences. As Tolkien’s Galadriel might have said, the images are reflections of “things that were, things that are and some things that have not yet come to pass.” Often, the images are explorations of what are beyond the realm of normal human experience.

Computers, being bicycles of the mind, as Steve Jobs explained (make sure you start at the beginning of Steve Job’s condor story), enhance our inherent ability to conceive and imagine a different world: what our world could be, and perhaps what worlds we could conceive and create, even beyond the constraints of the physical. The network shatters the constraints of both time, space and matter, able to process, store and retrieve information at a far greater rate and quantity than the human mind is capable of on its own. The world becomes instantly smaller, through technology, and the mind begins to imagine what might be possible if all of these human minds could unify themselves with a common purpose with such a tool at their disposal.

So, here is where perspective is needed again. Without a reference point, there can be no common purpose. The image cannot be properly resolved if every pixel is not in communication with a central processor that understands the big picture and is able to decode information into a cohesive image that can communicate the idea residing in the mind of the creator. At least, that is my perspective.

The Best Laid Plans

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:20 -0700

Ideas are not innovative unless they are realized (Johansson, The Medici Effect).

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!

“To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785, a poem by Robert Burns.

Things don’t always go according to plan. When I was reading about how entrepreneurs got started in their businesses, it seemed that, more often than not, there was no plan. Usually, something unexpected happened, which forced people to quickly make decisions about how to make the best of the situations they found themselves in. Often, there is a moment of insight that leads to other opportunities. Success often happens without any grand idea about how to get from small beginnings to amazing feats of teamwork and innovation.

The story of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and how Apple started tells something about how innovation happens. It usually doesn’t start with a plan.

When we started Apple we were out to build computers for our friends. That was all. No idea of a company.

Later in his life, Steve Jobs talks about passion, about, in a sense, the lack of sanity needed to persevere when things got tough. You wouldn’t keep doing it unless you really loved it.

I came across a series of videos by some independent filmmakers in the UK, who have been working on a project for several years called The UnderWater Realm. It is an impossibly ambitious project to film a series of five short films under water, which was ultimately crowdfunded through Kickstarter and produced through the passion and volunteer efforts of the cast and crew. It is an intriguing storyline that is meant to pique an interesting in the mysterious world below the surface of our oceans and to possibly raise more awareness about the need to protect this rich, hidden world of life for future generations. The expressed goal is to continue working toward the creation of a trilogy of feature length films.

Even more interesting for myself was the story of how the project began and the persistence and perseverance of the cast and crew to realize their ideas. The Making of The Underwater Realm documents the determination of the team to give everything they had to bring the project to life. Things did not go according to plan, and there were several times when the project seemed at the point of failure, and there seemed to be little hope of finishing. But an intense commitment to the project and to the supporters drove the work forward, and they were able to finish the five short films.

This is the same passion that I would like to bring to the Symphony project. I have many ideas that I would like to pursue, but the amount of work required is far more than what I might be able to accomplish on my own. The vision I have is much larger than a single open source project. It involves the changes that I sense need to take place across an entire industry. I may be proven wrong in the process, and I want to be open to adapting and learning to change along the way.

Still, I am disturbed by the fragmentation of the web design industry by proprietary templating systems that separate the community into factions loyal to specific technologies, frameworks and scripting languages. As a designer who codes, I have needed to adapt to different development environments that have varying levels of respect for the art of front end web design. Ultimately, the separation of the roles of design and development in the process of building websites has often resulted in a loss of control over the design and a decrease in the quality and maintainability of the code. Basic web semantics are losing out again to flash without substance, that is, in respect to the data and to interoperability of the web.

I don’t know that I have a solution to the confusion of languages, but I am willing to offer what I have learned. Most may not care at all or see any problems, but that’s not enough for me not to care. Someone ought to do something about it, and if no one else will, I will. Simple code and elegant approaches have the potential to unite the community with a common language based on standards. Let’s start with what works and enhance from there. Large agencies may not be in a position to make these changes. They may already be set in their ways and be less adaptable to change. It will take a passionate group of independent thinkers and doers, designers and developers, to change an industry. But change has happened before. It may yet happen again.

Identity Crisis

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:49 -0700

So, let’s not pull any punches here. I am facing an identity crisis. It’s been a long standing issue. I have this strange feeling that I do not belong here: a stranger in a strange land.

I am half east and half west.
I am half spiritual and half secular.
I am part religious zealot and part scientific realist.
I am part print designer and part web developer.
I am creative and I am analytical.
I am over the hill and I am starting over.
I am a traditionalist with subversive leanings.
I am an introvert and I am compelled to tell everyone.
Half one thing, half another, but not quite whole.
I am all these things and none of them.

Questions of identity

Who am I?
What do I want to do?
When will I know I have arrived?
Where am I going?
Why am I here?
How will I get there?

Is it professional suicide to admit a lack of certainty, a lack of confidence, a lack of direction regarding one’s role, position, knowledge and skillset? Or is it fair to say that the more we know, the more we know how much we don’t know?

Do I bite the hand that feeds me if I speak of corporate communication with derision? Should the corporation be aided in using clever words and images as messages that serve to mask or conceal sociopathic behaviour?

Was the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) successful in poking holes in the mass media establishments? While the movement provoked derisive accusations of cultish idealism wrapped in unintelligible arguments, was it able to accurately forecast the changes that would be brought about by the human conversation enabled by the internet, or are things mostly business as usual?

Questions of value

What is valuable?
What do I value?
How do I create value?
Do I have value?
How do I value others?
Are ideas valuable?

According to Frans Johansson, creative ideas are valuable (Johansson, The Medici Effect). An idea is innovative if it is new, valuable and realized. This innovation often comes from people Steve Jobs referred to as the thinkers and the doers. It’s fine to come up with a new idea, but you also have to work through the hard intellectual problems and realize that idea in concrete form.

Steve Jobs used Leonardo da Vinci as an example of the thinker/doer in one person:

Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist, knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy, and combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.

A Dynamic Life

To be dynamic is to be characterized by constant change, activity, or progress. Tony Schwarz writes about David Brooks and his book The Social Animal, and how, with this book, Brooks differentiates himself from his peers:

It’s his unwavering willingness to grapple with issues rather than simply pontificate about them; to embrace nuance, ambiguity and paradox rather than choosing up sides; and to be forever open to learning and to being changed by what he learns.

—Tony Schwarz, We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

To say that I don’t know who I am may be the first step to beginning to understand myself and to prepare myself for transformation. Questions lead to further questions, and a quest to find the truth becomes an adventure of discovery. This is the beginning of a dynamic life.

Liberal Arts

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:46 -0700

The theme of the last few days has seemed to revolve around higher education and the liberal arts. I have been entertaining the idea of finishing the degree I started at Trinity Western University back in 1992-1994. At the time, I was working towards a BA in Communications with a minor in Fine Arts, but I didn’t finish, as financial independence became a higher priority and I started work at Force Four.

For the past couple years, Trinity Western University has been offering an Adult Degree Completion program, which can be completed in as little as 18 months. Students graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Leadership. The courses are taken one at a time, and each course is about 6 weeks long. Classes are three hours, once a week. Homework is estimated to be around 8 to 12 hours a week.

It’s not inexpensive, but because the timeline is relatively short in comparison to other alternatives, it would seem to be a good investment of time and money, given the potential increase in earnings. However, that potential may not necessarily be realized within my line of work, since experience and portfolio can often count for much more in the design field than a degree. The real benefit would be the opportunity to develop leadership skills and to do this in the context of a group of highly motivated adult students. The experience might possibly be something akin to Morgan Spurlock’s idea of a failure club. I have also wanted to reestablish connections in the area of higher education, because I am insatiably curious. And, according to Frans Johansson in his book, The Medici Effect, the opportunities for innovation are found at the intersection of very different fields of knowledge and expertise. If innovative ideas are what I am after, then I may be limiting myself by hanging around people who are just like me.

On Monday, TWU Extension held an information session about the Adult Degree Completion program. I signed up that night, and today I have received my learning plan. Orientation is next Monday, and I start classes on 21 January. As a life-long learner, my education is definitely about to intensify.

The Age of Reason versus the Age of Innovation

Last night, I watched a movie on Netflix, Liberal Arts. It was more of an exploration of the theme of aging, and the different approaches people take at pivotal moments in their lives to either face the march of time with grace or to desperately try to skip ahead or to reverse time to deal with the discrepancy between desires and reality.

While my decision might seem like a move backwards to relive another time of my life, it actually feels more like an opportunity to forge ahead with a greater sense of identity and purpose than I had 20 years ago. It seems oddly appropriate to bookend my experience in the design industry with explorations of the state of the art of communication at these two pivotal moments in the evolution of the design field. As people are discovering more about creativity and the science of innovation, I want to arm myself with the knowledge and vocabulary to influence the world as a creative individual, especially given an unreasonable bias against creatives as leaders.

Content Creators and Creating Value

I was reading through Paul Boag’s controversial article, The Inconvenient Truth About SEO, and found myself agreeing with him whole-heartedly. I have experienced the headlong rush to implement content management systems in a production-oriented environment, where we were often disappointed to find out that the client often had no content to manage. Clients did not understand the idea that a nicely designed website would not necessarily be the silver bullet to gain exposure for their endeavours on the web without some significant work on their part. A content strategy must be in place to ensure the hard work of designing a site is not wasted on poor marketing. I really like Paul’s to do list for creating content that is useful to real people:

Publishing white papers,

Writing a blog,

Sharing research findings,

Producing detailed case studies,

Encouraging user-generated content,

Creating useful applications or tools,

Running a Q&A section,

Posting interviews

If content is king, it’s likely that there is a mountain of data trapped in the ivory towers of higher education. Universities have become divided into faculties that may not necessarily interact as much as they could, where once they represented unity in diversity. Creatives are the people who are able to think through the data, structures and processes to find innovative solutions to real world problems by exploring the unexpected intersections between fields of knowledge. And who of us is not inherently creative? These tendencies may have been surpressed by modern education and business, but there is an opportunity to reawaken creativity, and Dan Pink would argue that this will lead to a far greater drive to innovate and create value in an economy that has devolved into the manipulation of abstract monetary values while ignoring the value of being human.

Getting Creative

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 05:17 -0700

I’m staring at the words, “getting creative,” on a blank screen. For writers, it is called writer’s block. Others might call it getting stuck. And wouldn’t you know, there is an app for that: unstuck.

This is a free app offering free life coaching for anyone who feels stuck. And that’s the beauty of the web these days. If you can afford the initial barrier to entry of a device that can process the information and a connection to that network of data, people and opportunities, there are people just giving things away. How does that work? Why do they do it?

The Long Now Foundation sums up the philosophy in reference to Tim O’Reilly’s seminar:

The global mind is not an artificial intelligence. It’s us, connected and augmented.

What keeps driving it is the generosity and joy we take in creating and sharing. The global mind is built on the gift culture of every medium of connectedness since the invention of language. You gain status by what you give away, by the value you create, not the value you take.

(Losing something is a terrible feeling. Finding that thing is such a relief. Like this quote I read yesterday, lost and just found again. Thank you, Google.)

Many people seem to be trying to figure out how to make money. Truth be told, so am I. People say that “money is the root of all evil.” Unfortunately, that is a slight misquote of the original, I think, which goes, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

It is interesting to discover that research appears to support the view that money is actually a very poor motivator (see Dan Pink’s RSA Talk, Drive—The surprising truth about what motivates us), at least when it involves any rudimentary cognitive skill. As an incentive, the power of money only goes so far. But, if someone is able to find some greater value in what they do, they’ll do it regardless of whether they get paid or not. Money is still a factor. But passion (see Steve Jobs talking about passion) is a far more efficient fuel than money.

Getting creative means tapping into those passions, igniting the fire, fanning the flames and fueling that passion with time and effort. Collaboration goes a long way, too. Just as a glowing ember can be removed from a fire and quickly turn as black as coal, it is all too easy to lose one’s passion. Bring these embers together, and you can set things ablaze, and people are drawn to the light and warmth.

I’ve been involved with a community of web designers and developers who have been working hard to improve some software that helps them collect, create, publish and sell. It is a little known system, but has garnered a very loyal following. These are people with passion, who are helping build an open source system that helps them do what they love. And in some cases, it has become a passion in and of itself. It is an XSLT-based web publishing system called Symphony. Some call it a framework or a content management system.

Something about this community and this small bit of code has fueled a flame of passion in me that won’t go out. I have been encouraged to give up this folly to invest my time in endeavours that align better with what is more popular and more successful. But that would mean giving up the community that I have come to know over the past several years and to abandon an approach to design and development that I strongly believe in. And there is nothing wrong with being small. Obscurity is good. It keeps the community at a manageable size, and the quality of the code and the interactions in the community very high.

I was willing to entertain the thought of giving up the connections I have built over these several years if there was another community of creative individuals that could live up to the same expectations I have about a creative collaboration. Unfortunately, I felt there was more lofty speech about creative processes and collaboration than actual effort and movement in that direction. There has been movement, but in a different direction than I have been moving. As these paths have continued to diverge, I felt I needed to make a decision about what to do with my time, rather than let someone else make that decision for me. Money ceased to be the motivator for me. The primary motivators, if we go back to Dan Pink’s book about Drive, are:

Challenge
Mastery
Purpose

When the work assigned to me seemed unchallenging, repetitive, arbitrary and uninspired, I did my best to infuse the work with creativity by giving myself a challenge to develop something innovative, by turning the work into a means of mastering a skill, and aligning the work with the purpose of demonstrating a high level of craft in everything I do.

There is a fundamental difference in my perception of the role of design in the work. Design has often been considered a necessary intermediate step in the process, fitting somewhere between content strategy and development. I believe that design encompasses the entire process. It is not merely about aesthetics. But that puts greater responsibility on the designer to understand the entire process. That has been my purpose for the past quarter century.

There has been a move away from a production-oriented assembly line process to a more collaborative approach involving interdisciplinary teams. This is great to see, and it is a necessary step in the evolution of the web design and development process. I am excited to see how this evolution can contribute to more innovative and creative work over time.

Again, money is a factor. I am not independently wealthy, but I am by no means poor. I have opportunity, tools, skills and ideas, as well as bits and pieces of code and design from abandoned projects. I don’t have a plan, but I have a passion and a will to create. I have a strong desire to create something that I think the world needs. Taking a long view of things, I don’t mind taking the time to get things right. However, there is a sense of urgency to what I am doing, since I have only so much time. But it helps to know that I’m not doing this on my own. I have established some connections that will help fuel the passions I have to create something of value in this world. Only time will tell whether it will have been worth the effort. But at least I will have tried.

The Why Question

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:51 -0700

I’m getting into some new habits this year to exercise both my mind and my body.

Mind

I woke up and decided I would read, think and write, as I had planned the day before. I purchased a MacBook Air and an extended keyboard and mouse from my previous place of work. I’m trying to keep expenses as low as possible. But I have been fortunate to build up a collection of equipment that should keep me going for a while. So, I have an old Apple 19” Cinema Display to which I can connect the USB keyboard, which is in turn connected to the MacBook Air. This way, I can maximize the number of USB ports available and have a dual monitor set up.

I thought, “Why not use the Bluetooth keyboard to connect with the iPad.” Typing is so much faster for me on a real keyboard. While I was disconnecting the Bluetooth keyboard from the MacBook Air, I noticed that I had some unread emails. One was from a friend of mine from Vancouver, Andrea, who is the only other Symphony developer in know of in the Vancouver area. I had spent my time connecting with people to let them know I was going to be trying something new, and Andrea was one of them.

While yesterday didn’t go according to plan, I accomplished a few things.

Connected with people. Check.
Success!

Andrea had included a file of a Symphony application that he has been working on. That was pretty exciting for me, since I had worked with Andrea about the same time this year on a Symphony project for a client of Domain7. It had been a very successful collaboration, and I have been hoping to have a chance to work with him again.

Once I had the iPad hooked up to the Bluetooth keyboard, I was able to fire up one of my favourite apps, Simplenote, and whip off a blog post about getting creative. Simplenote is a fantastic tool, as I am able to create simple text files in Markdown format that automatically syncs with all my devices and are also backed up to my Dropbox account. And I can switch to Notational Velocity on my laptop and resume writing just where I left off with Simplenote on the iPad.

As nice as Google Docs are, they still trap me into a print-based workflow and a proprietary file format and application based on Microsoft Word. [Shiver.]

Body

I try my best to keep in shape, but some of the habits I once had have fallen by the wayside. I used to cycle to work (trying to do my part for the sake of the environment), but I didn’t want to let the extra travel time impact an important project I was working on last year. And I usually take the bus through the winter. Late hours at the office meant that I could not depend on public transit (are you listening, BC Transit?), so I have been driving (boo) this winter.

I also took up speed skating and rowing to be able to spend some time with my daughter, who was also involved in these sports. Rather than watch from the sidelines, I thought my involvement in my daughter’s sports might be a good way to make up for a very sedentary occupation.

We joined the Fraser Valley Rowing Club and now my daughter and I do some coaching there. While no one is using the ergs over the winter, we have borrowed one to keep in our basement, where we have set up a television that is hooked up to a PS3, a Wii, Apple TV, and digital cable. Our family spends a good amount of time there, playing games and watching television and movies, like Lord of the Rings.

The erg wasn’t being used very much, so I determined to make it part of my new workout regimen this year. It’s pretty unstructured, but I thought I should start slow, since it’s been at least two or three months since I have done more than lift a fork to my mouth or move a mouse across a desk. To keep things interesting, I thought it would be good to be inspired by creative work other people are doing, and I find Vimeo to be a good source of variety that opens my eyes to different places, people, sights and sounds (although the erg gets pretty loud).

Today, I forgot to eat breakfast while I was watching the end of a skateboarding video, The Killing Season, which was really about a scary motorbike ride from northern Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City in the south. So I grabbed breakfast and decided to watch just one more short video before getting to work.

I was sticking to the staff picks, and I was intrigued by a video called Wright’s Law.

Happy, crazy and unpredictable are the words students at Louisville Male High School use to describe their physics teach Jeffrey Wright. With his goofy behavior and intriguing experiments, Wright is able to maintain the attention of teenagers to teach them how the universe works. But only by sharing his personal life with them is he able to explain the reason why things work and the purpose of life.

After watching this, I feel some affirmation about my choice to try something new. It’s about the ultimate “Why?” question, and the answer that Wright demonstrates in his life.

Signed, Anonymous

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:29 -0700

Yesterday, I mentioned that I am okay with being anonymous.

I see myself as anonymous in the creative world. That may not necessarily be the reality. But, for myself at this time, it is the right place to be.

Perhaps that is an odd statement to make in this age of social media. But I have often thought popularity to be highly overrated. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson begin the Promotion chapter of their book, Rework, with the words, “Welcome obscurity.”

No one knows who you are right now. And that’s just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you’re in the shadows. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas. Try new things. No one knows you, so it’s no big deal if you mess up. Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence.

Alicia Britt Chole dedicates an entire book to the theme: Anonymous. She uses the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate the idea of a life hidden in the shadows. As much as 90% of an iceberg (see the new logo for The New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute) is not visible above the surface of the water. The book is about a strange man named Joshua who lived in complete obscurity for the first 30 years of his life, then had a very public life for about three years, but somehow left an indelible mark on history. We know him by his Greek name, Jesus. Some call him Christ.

I’d say popularity, in his case, was highly overrated. Of course, that depends on which version of the ending you believe. Setting aside that contentious debate, it does make one wonder what one does for thirty years to prepare oneself before stepping into the limelight.

Chole believes that these were formative years, building habits, character and a sense of identity that was able to withstand the onslaught of public scrutiny.

Celebrity is a much sought after commodity these days, but it seems a rare occurrence for a young person to be able to quickly reach star status and sustain a healthy sense of balance and a strong grip on reality.

There is something to be said for taking the time to build good character, good habits and a strong identity. Deciding what to do with the time is easier when one learns how to say, “No.” Self-control is formed by learning to choose what is best over what is poor or merely good enough. These decisions become easier to make when they become habits (see Hacking Habits: How To Make New Behaviors Last For Good).

I know what you’re thinking: “What hipocrisy to be talking about the value of obscurity in the most narcissistic of media formats: a blog.” (Okay, no I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it was good try, right?) It’s a bit of a catch-22. I really like obscurity. I became a designer because I like to observe. I have tended to take a fly-on-the-wall approach to life, fascinated by the world and the people around me, but not terribly fascinated by myself. This has made me who I am. (Have you ever wished you could be someone else?)

But here’s the catch: I think certain ideas are worth spreading. What if my idea is that someone should have the courage to be transparent about the whole process of creative failure or success? That would mean that the process needs to be publicly documented, and the experiment must have the potential to end in either failure or success. Of course, I don’t necessarily want to fail, but it is a well-documented part of the creative process that there will be failure. It is said that if you fail to plan, plan to fail. Let’s just say, I may be well on my way to failure.

Habit Forming

When I woke up this morning, I was wondering how exactly I was going to decide what to do with my time. Apple gave me a nudge in the App Store.

New Year, New You

How appropriate. Apple gave me four lists to choose from:

Your Body
Your Mind
Your Money
Your Time

Nice marketing. So, the question I had was about time, so what was the first app in the list for Your Time? A free app called 30/30.

I downloaded the app and created some lists, with the 99u.com article in mind, The Jeff Bezos School of Long-Term Thinking. Point six stood out in my mind: “Work backwards.” Rather than a “skills-forward” approach where people—and companies—let what they are good at determine next steps, I would like to look ahead to where I would like to be as a way to determine what I should do now.

I started in very broad strokes, with general, universal goals that focus on the following lists:

Mind
Body
Work
Play

Within each list, you can create tasks with a specific amount of time set aside for each task.

Mind

Read 30:00
Think 30:00
Write 30:00

Body

Work Out 30:00
Eat 30:00
Get Ready 30:00

Work

Read 30:00
Connect 30:00
Think 30:00
Write 30:00
Create 30:00
Build 30:00
Break 30:00
Innovate 3:00:00
Meet 30:00
Learn 30:00
Discover 30:00

Ambitious. And unrealistic.

Let’s just say that my day turned out very different from my plan. Without any clear criteria for determining whether today was a success of a failure, I’m just going to call it a day. Or I’ll just make up my own criteria. Attitude and outlook are major factors in one’s approach to success and failure, right?

Blog post written. Check.

Success!

Decide what to do with the time

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:47 -0700

Today is my first day of work on my own.

I decided that my last day at work for Domain7 would be December 31, 2012, so that the new year would be a completely new year for me.

My wife and daughter and I spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Leading up to this day, I’ve been doing a lot of reading:

The Medici Effect
Rework
Wombat Selling
Entrepreneurial Leaders IV by Richard Goosen
Anonymous
The Jeff Bezos School of Long-Term Thinking and other 99u.com articles

I see myself as anonymous in the creative world. That may not necessarily be the reality. But, for myself at this time, it is the right place to be. I may never do anything great, and that’s okay. But I want to be able to do what I need to do. I have spent the last several years learning a little bit about how to collaborate with teams to produce technical and creative work. It has been a great experience.

What I have learned through those years is that I have a strong desire to create that does not seem to lend itself entirely to the type of processes and work flows that I have had the opportunity to be involved in at Domain7. I feel as if I was able to do the best work that I could, given the constraints, and I was able to do work that I could be proud of. But, as a generalist rather than a specialist, I have felt the roles that I was assigned to be somewhat confining.

The Domain7 team are a fantastic group of people to work with, and I feel it has been a rare privilege to have been involved in some small way with the tremendous growth that the organization has experienced over the past seven years. I want to make every effort I can to maintain connections with my colleagues and friends at Domain7.

But for now, I have decided that I would like to explore areas of creativity that are beyond the scope of the role I had at Domain7 as Senior Designer.

A different sort of RFP

I am considering a different sort of Request for Proposals (RFP). Money is not as much of a motivator for me (although it is definitely a factor). I want to work on projects that engage my sense of purpose in this world. I want to work on things about which I can say, “This is what I was made to do.” I will work for free for three months [or some other specific time frame] for anyone who is able to propose and provide work that I love. At the end of that term, if the work does inspire me and fire my imagination, I would then like to negotiate the terms of my engagement to continue doing work that I love.

For the moment, I am defining my own job description:

Meet new people and deepen the connections I have already made
Learn a new language, new skills and get better at my craft
Think, write, create, build and innovate
Decide what to do with the time

Decide what to do with the time

We don’t all get a Ring of Power, like Frodo did in The Lord of the Rings, but perhaps we have all been given a task that only we can fulfill. We each decide whether we will rise to the occasion, even if the task appears to be too daunting or overwhelming.

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.

In the case of Gandalf, his role was to guide and to encourage. And it might be safe to say that is a role we can all play.

You are a Ring-bearer

Gandalf helped set Frodo’s feet on the path, but it was only during the Council of Elrond at Rivendell that Frodo realized what he needed to do. He decided to take on the role of a Ring-bearer, having little idea about what the next step might be.

Frodo: Mordor, Gandalf, is it left or right?
Gandalf: Left.

It can be a lonely business, being a Ring-bearer, and there are a great many fears that can overwhelm us as we set our minds to the task. Galadriel provided some timely encouragement to Frodo.

Galadriel: You are a Ring-bearer, Frodo. To bear a Ring of Power is to be alone.
Galadriel: This is Nenya, the Ring of Adament. And I am it’s keeper. This task was appointed to you, and if you do not find a way, no one will.
Frodo: I know what I must do, it’s just that… I’m afraid to do it.
Galadriel: Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

In taking a different path, I will certainly face dangers and fears, but as small as I might be, I can take some consolation in the fact that I have the opportunity to change the course of the future. It may not be as significant as saving Middle Earth or “making a dent in the universe”, but it may be that I am the only one who can fulfill this task.

Still, if there is one thing that we can all do, it is to encourage.

Reinventing myself

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 10:51 -0700

I’m thinking about what I am going to do on January 1, 2013. I have given my notice at work, announcing that December 31, 2012 will be my last day at Domain7. A mixture of panic and excitement are fueling some crazy ideas about what I might possibly do with what previously seemed like such a scarce commodity: time. How do I make the best use of that time?

Time is Opportunity

In the film, The Little Black Book, the heroine recalls the words of her mother:

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity

The Port Mann Bridge has just recently been completed, opening a gateway, or at least a path of less resistance, to Vancouver from where I live in Abbotsford.

Joyent made a decision to cut off its nose despite its face in a public relations debacle over the summer, where Jason Hoffman referred to the original investors who made Joyent possible as an operational cancer. I am one of those cancerous cells of which he spoke. Dean Allen has come back to save the lifers from exile from Joyent by coming out of seclusion and reviving TextDrive.

On September 5, 2012, Twitter announced version 1.1 of their API, and with the new API, Twitter is dropping support for their RSS feeds. I have dropped support for Twitter. I did that a while ago, actually. But more because I didn’t have anything interesting to add to the conversation. And as much as I enjoyed discovering new and interesting bits of information, I found it to be a major time sink. Not that I won’t use Twitter, but that it won’t be featured prominently as a feed on my site.

Google has announced that they are no longer offering free Google Apps accounts for businesses. This feels like a missed opportunity in some ways, as I am hoping to use Google’s tools in my business, but it also leads me to believe that I may be better off owning my own data. It takes more work to manage my own data, but it’s also a lot more fun to figure out how to create interesting tools to help me in my workflow.

Facebook is just using me for my data and to add value to their own network, so I don’t really feel like giving them very much. In a world of social media, I am admittedly out of place, given my antisocial behaviour. I have never been that enthralled by the popularity contests.

So, while I talk about a new bridge and what amounts to burning bridges in a world saturated with social media, it’s not so much about burning those connections, but focusing on the connections that I can realistically manage and maintain and building real human relationships by working with real people.

Life as an Editing Process

I am adicted to Netflix, because film is about people and their stories. I love stories, because they are about people like us, people looking for an identity, for a place to belong. The documentary film, Life in a Day, was sponsored by YouTube, collecting events from a single day and editing thousands of hours into a snapshot of life on earth. The editing is what, in large part, makes the documentary so engaging.

As I think through how to make the most of my time and of this opportunity that I have to reinvent myself, I feel like the success of the process will be influenced by how well I can edit myself. Taking a picture or filming a scene requires attention and focus. The editing process focuses the attention even further still on the moments that are important in telling the story.

The decisions about what I leave out are just as important as those about what I keep in. In many ways, I have forgotten what I once regarded as most important. I need reminders to maintain my focus. In that way, I can spend most of the rest of my time on this earth doing what I am here to do, for as long as I have moments of time to focus on.

To say that I am reinventing myself is to display a great amount of arrogance, to assume a greater power over my situation, my environment, myself and my destiny than I might actually have. I do have to acknowledge that I don’t have control over the process of becoming. In this moment of time, I exist in a specific context, a place and time, with a shared history and a common future with other human beings. I don’t know to what I extent my actions affect other people, but I know that they do. It may be the first thing that children understand as they are birthed into the world. Actions provoke responses. A newborn’s cry invites a parent’s comforting touch.

What I do have control over is my actions and responses. In reinventing myself, I must acknowlegde that this is merely an editing process. But it is a process that happens in the moment rather than after the fact. What will I decide to do, and what will I decide not to do, to be or not to be? That is the question.

Rendering the Symphony admin with XSLT

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:28 -0700

@kanduvisla opened an issue about the possibility of rendering the Symphony admin pages with XSLT.

Symphony 3 had been developed to make this possible.

I have created my own experiments with this in mind. I’d like to continue those experiments, starting with a collection of all the Symphony admin page layouts, rendered as plain old HTML.

View the Symphony Demo in the Markup Library. Now, if anyone wants to find out more about Symphony without going through the trouble of installing (which is really no trouble at all), just look around the Symphony admin area and the debug pages to get familiarized with how the system works. Feel free to fork the html-symphony repository on GitHub.

No harm can be done, because this is just plain old HTML.

Debug Pages

One note about the ?debug pages: I have only rendered the pages for the Home page, as I was just doing a copy/paste from a local install, and I didn’t want to do the whole set for every page. I figured people could get the basic idea based on only the Home page Debug and Profile pages.

Building the Admin with XSLT

So, the next step is to rebuild the admin with XSLT. I already have some ideas about using Nick Dunn’s Section Schemas extension and Form Controls templates to dynamically build the Publish pages. But I would also like to dig a little deeper into how Symphony 3 proposed to do this.

Portability of templates between scripting languages

My ultimate goal with this project is to explore the possibility of the portability of XSLT templates between multiple scripting languages as a way of establishing XSLT as a standard for templating in the process of front end web design and development.

Discuss

Follow the discussion I have started on the Symphony discussion forum: http://getsymphony.com/discuss/thread/94553/.