Pixels from the Edge

I’ve only really come to terms with this fact over the past year. For the longest time I was confused about the issue and during my teen years had built up a stigma around the whole idea of me not being creative. See I went to school with some really awesome creative talent, guys that went on to graduate with honors from schools like the Royal College of Arts, and are now illustrators for respected newspapers and magazines, top architects in their field, and producers of music videos for some of the worlds top recording artists. And back then in high school I just couldn’t compete with that, so I didn’t. And then these guys went to their fancy art schools and I went off to tech college, and when we met back up in the summers they’d become real anal artsy types (not so much my old school boys but the friends they’d made), the kind that know everything about everything and try and belittle those who aren’t as privileged with their education. They’d ask me who my favorite artist was and I’d say “Picasso” and they’d snicker and call him main stream and mouth-off like 100 more artists I’d never heard of. Well guess what douche bags, I’ve now been to art galleries all over the world and I’ve seen the artwork of all your fancy artists first hand, and I still think Picasso fuckin rocks. If I could be there right now I’d tell them something like 83% of this planets population has never even seen a snowflake, and 43% of the world has never tasted butter. I don’t know whether that has any relevancy here but it just seems damn appropriate. In fact I’d just tell them to go with their sheep, even though remembering myself back then I probably threatened to bop them on the nose which I’m sure didn’t help the situation much. Anyways what I’ve eventually come to realize, and it’s taken me a long-ass time, is that Gustav Eifel architect of the Eifel Tower and the Statue of Liberty probably couldn’t paint for shit, and Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel but he probably couldn’t sculpture a damn. Or maybe they could. But my point is that I’ve accepted that while I can’t design I can definitely creatively direct.

I’m a cool CAT
Okay maybe I’m letting it get to my head a little but I’m not letting it make me big headed. Allow me to self indulge for a moment as I step out of the creative closet. I’m Creative And Technology, and whilst I myself have only recently come to terms with this, others have known for much longer. I was hired into the agency as an engineer to bridge the gap between the Technology and Creative departments (that should have been a big clue right there). And when I first got here designers would thank me for making the build-out match the comp exactly, which I always thought was weird, like isn’t that my job? Sure it was my job but no one told the other engineers that. See there was a perception in the Engineering department that an engineers primary job was to build out the functionality, and then secondary was the design, and getting it vaguely similar to the comp was more than acceptable. Shit back then the designers weren’t even allowed to talk directly to the engineers, my managers would be pissed that I’d have designers in my office. It wasn’t part of the process, it wasn’t in the project plan, the process was more important than the product. Well shit I’d say, it’s part of my process and my project plan and I’ll be here till midnight getting it right if I have to, and if the product isn’t the most important thing then what the hell are we all doing here? And if Creative ever came at us with something new, something we’d never done before, well the MO of the Engineering department was to say we didn’t do that and reject it, but I was like hell yes bring it on and I’d figure it out – research it, learn it, create it. And if I ended up realizing it was impossible I wouldn’t go back to them with “No”, see I lived by a mantra I’d picked up at a former employer – “Offer alternatives not obstacles”, and I’d go back to the Creative Director with other options, alternatives I’d come across or dreamed up while researching. And more often than not they’d go with it, and you know what? Sometimes we’d look at it after and think it was better than the original direction. That’s right, ideas I was having were making their way into the design and I didn’t even realize what was happening, see I was like the ugly duckling on the Engineering team, I was a maverick and a trouble maker and I didn’t fit in, but when I went downstairs to the Creative floor I was popular and I thought it was just because they liked me, I didn’t realize it was because they saw me as one of their own. And all along I was a fuckin white swan with the rest of them, just that they could see it but I couldn’t.

There’s a million more examples and stories I could talk about during my journey to get here. And maybe I haven’t even picked the best examples to tell you but I’ve made my point. Earlier this year I was promoted to ACTD – Associate Creative Technology Director, the first one the company has ever had. Shit they created a position for me and I still didn’t get it. I saw it as an honorary position, like a lifetime career achievement award at the Oscars, acknowledgment that the actor had given a lot but had never been great enough in a single moment to win the big prize. And when it was announced I had Creative Directors telling me it should have happened a long time ago and yet I still saw it as more of a pat on the back, a thanks for all your help and hard work. See I was still screwed up in the head, those damn college art students still messing with my mind, the Engineering department making me feel less than worth for caring too much about the quality of my product, me still not understanding what it means to be creative, my own insecurities of my abilities.

So how did I snap out of it? In the end it’s really quite simple. I started working on putting together a portfolio site. And that entailed getting together all the work I’d produced over the long years all in the one place for the first time. And it then involved thinking about that work I’d done and doing write-ups on it, and those write-ups involved looking at that work and actually taking credit for what was rightfully mine. And that’s how I realized it, by going back, all the way back to the beginning, I was and had always been responsible for creating some kick-ass shit. Sometimes it was kick-ass technology, and sometimes it was kick-ass creative, and more often than not it was both, shit I develop websites for a living so is there really a difference? I realized everything I’d done, just about everything I’d touched was for the better because of it, because of me. I realized there’s no shame in being creative without being able to design, all those ideas that I’d thrown out there that had made their way into the wire frames, into the comps, into the products. Yes if I hadn’t had that idea the design would have still rocked because the designer was a rock star, but the product wouldn’t have been as good. And there’s nothing wrong with giving a designer direction even though you don’t have the skills to design yourself. No I can’t start with a blank canvas, I don’t know how to use Photoshop effectively and I don’t understand all the theory behind the hue and saturation and such, but give me a starting point and I can take it from there, show me a design and I’ll give good advice and critique, I’ve proven this to myself and my peers many times over, and they respect me for it and finally I respect myself. I now know there are kick-ass designers that can’t creatively direct, just as there are copy writers that can’t design for shit but can creatively direct. And I now know there are techies that can creatively direct too.

Something going on at Pandora that I came across today really struck me. They’re automatically rotating homepage takeovers as you interact with the site. It makes sense really, it’s a radio station so you load it up, minimize the browser and forget about and the songs play on and on, and therefore there’s no point in showing ads. So when they know you’re looking at the page, on interaction, is when they start showing ads (and try and get some revenue for the amazing service they offer for free).

Just in case you are not familiar with the term ‘homepage takeover’, it’s advertising talk for when a homepage is taken over by an advertisement. I think historically it was more of a roadblock, which is when there’s an obnoxious overlay and you have to click ‘close’ to continue browsing the site, but these days it can also be when the entire page is branded (or rather co-branded) with a product. A good example is this ask.com homepage from a few weeks back that was branded with a movie which quite possibly has the longest title of all time:

So back to the Pandora website. I was initially fascinated to see this going on, that when I interacted with the site these big colorful and sometimes animated backgrounds were changing. This is something I’m used to seeing change on a page load, as I navigate from page to page, or at least refresh the page I’m on. But really what’s happening with Pandora is it’s a self contained web application, so the page itself doesn’t change but the content within tabbed navigation areas gets updated. The core of Pandora is actually a Flash app, though it’s contained within HTML, the footer is in HTML for example, and so are the ads I’m talking about here. I’m sure this is a model that will be adopted by self contained web apps that bring content to the user instead of the other way around, if it hasn’t been already.

So here’s a few examples I came across:

The Black Eyed Peas example above is probably the most visually stunning I saw.

Vitamin Water looks good.

Some Microsoft ad, not really appealing to me. This also shows an example of an inline ad badge within the playlist (Alltel).

Canon Power Shot above, it’s alright, and has an interactive movie area (which pauses the radio station). This also shows how the Alltel ad badge moves along as an item in the playlist.