Ben Shoemate

When you design something, there are two ways to do it. You can go big, and invest your whole heart and soul into it. You can pour time, money, and passion into the endeavor and hope it pays off. Big design is risky. You take chances, and if your do it right, and create something special, the world will love you.

The other approach is to stay with the classics. It took me a long time to learn this. My first lesson was Halloween. Every year, Halloween at the Shoemate house brings performance anxiety. I get my knife out and I stare at the blank face of the pumpkin. I know that a REAL artist would go big. By the end of the night a real artist would carve this pumpkin into some kind of 3d masterpiece that would give neighbor kids nightmares and go viral on the internet. And if I took my time, planned it out, refined the design, thought it through, I could, and have, pull off something awesome. But the truth is, I didn’t plan, and I don’t have time to go big. I still don’t even have my costume picked out.

So if you can’t go big, if you lack the time, skill, or energy to do it right. Then fall back on the classics.

• Triangle eyes, square notch at the bottom for pupils.
• Triangle nose.
• Square toothed smile.

Simple. Fast. Easy. Classic. The classic jack-o-lantern works.

Getting dressed up for a wedding? Black suit, black tie, white shirt – classic.

Making content for a website? Don’t have time to make a fancy info-graphic? That’s ok. Headers, bulleted lists, simple images. Classic.

The classic is a classic for a reason: It works. It’s not boring, you won’t look bad, you don’t need an excuse and if anything, it makes a bolder statement.

Picasso often said: color weakens. So he used just black and white. If you use color, do it deliberately. Boldly. No grey. If you want black – go black. Know what you want and do it.

By the way: Picasso Black and White on exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts

I do not recommend books very often, but I recommend this one. Go read: Ready Player One. If you have a single fond memory of the 1980s, or liked any of the following movies: The Matrix, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the old good one), Star Wars (again, pre-prequel Star Wars), and if you ever played video games as a kid (and still do) – then you love this book.

I read it straight through over the weekend and I could not put it down and immediately started re-reading it as soon as it was over. I’m gushing about it on my blog because my wife doesn’t share my love for giant robots, virtual reality, or video games but I know that you (the Internet) share my passion for all things geek. Of coarse – you might need to lower your expectations. I had low expectations and only picked it up because Barns and Nobles had it on the buy 2 get one free shelf (yes I still ready paper books). Anyway – hats off to the author Ernest Cline – he wrote the book I wanted to write.

Read it, and let me know what you think.

I have created some presentations on various topics including one on Best Practices for Personalization with IBM WebSphere Portal that I am going to post shortly to Base22.com but before I do, I just give is away, I would like to at least collect the email address of users so I can send them updates or ask if they want to schedule a discussion. Theoretically, anyone interested in using personalization with IBM WebSphere portal would be potential clients for us since that is our speciality.

To get started, I’m testing it here, on my own blog.

Step 1: Installed the plugin Email Before Download - Email Before Download presents your users with a form where they submit information, like their name and email address, prior to receiving a download. This plugin integrates with the popular Contact Form 7 and WordPress Download Monitor plugins, allowing you to create any form you like and manage/monitor your file downloads.

Step 2: Installed Contact Form 7 - Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Step 3: Install Download Monitor – WordPress Download Monitor Even though it is no longer supported, it still works.

Ok. So now let’s test:

I uploaded a small image for the file.

Good design tells a story, and it is the story that maintains a website just as much as the help desk and developers. When authors and users believe the story the design tells, the system can practically maintain itself. Imagine if Wikipedia were destroyed. If all the databases were corrupted and all backups lost. If this happened the world could come together and recreate it in a month of patriotic wiki editing, every person contributing his or her own time and knowledge to rebuild it, perhaps better than before. This is possible because everyone understands the story wikipedia tells. The same is true of all great websites from Amazon and Facebook to YouTube and Craigslist (which could use a little CSS in the next iteration).

When we design a site, regardless of how many bells and whistles it has, it is important that it tell a story that is simple enough that people can hold the whole thing in their mind. This sounds hard, but imagine your local grocery store. If I emptied the entire store and then, as a test, asked you to put a loaf of bread on the right shelf, or milk, or an apple, you would probably get pretty close. The story of how a grocery store is organized is intuitive to you as a user. It something you could explain. This makes it easy for both users and those that manage the store to keep it organized.

If you can’t tell the story of how your intranet at work is organized, if it burned down and had to be rebuilt tomorrow (assuming you would want to rebuild it) – could you do it? If not, you should call us at Base22. We can help.