Featured Projects from Thinking and Making

The producers, making things, and monsters

Austin Govella — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:58:00 GMT

I've been _producing_ things for a long time. In college, I managed an art gallery and produced art shows and openings and cultural events. Haranguing a capoeira group, a grip of Brazilians on percussion and beer, an artist, his hangers on, catering, press releases, reservations, hanging and lighting the show, designing posters, ads, and a brochure for the show... that's an event of some scale. Lots of moving pieces, a chess game where you move each piece across the board until the day of the opening when you hope it's checkmate. I've produced several club nights where success depends on a long line of successful experiences that slowly build off each other so the community grows until you're overflowing a space full of happy, sweaty, sparkling people having a great time. Book shows, book DJs, book artists, celebrate birthdays, play requests, bounce assholes, guest-list nice people, smart people, special people. Pick films, drink specials, wardrobes, dates, event names, ticket prices... that's an event of some scale. Unlike an art show, this chess game is much longer, and instead of worrying about schedules, promotion, and competition on one day, you're looking at six months, and then a year, and then two years. And you don't need checkmate every night, but you need to maintain checkmate -- as much as possible -- over that entire period of time. Nothing I have ever done has ever matched the scale of putting together a book. Life-consuming. Grab a handful off your shelf and flip through the dedications. There's a reason so many are dedicated to spouses and families. These kind people pretend to look the other way for months while you read, write, research, celebrate, mourn, write again, edit, re-edit, start over, re-research, edit again, scream, stare mindlessly at the screen... and then? Then you go into layout where you edit, edit, annotate, change, delete, redo pictures, diagrams, captions. You repeat this process for every chapter. I've produced many things of some scale -- art shows, zines, literary journals, web applications, club nights, a poetry festival, concerts -- but nothing has prepared me for the massive scale of a book. And to be clear, it's really only half a book. The sheer amount of work, the vast expanse of detail, from commas to cover, pictures to precepts. It's not the writing. I wanted to be a writer when I was younger. I wrote a lot. My last semester at U.T. I produced a novella, two one-act plays, and two research papers. And it's not the editing. That same semester, I edited a literary journal, a zine, and a newspaper. It's not the design. That semester I produced a series of posters, newspaper ads, brochures, postcards, and several websites. It's not the quantity of work. It's the size of the body the work creates. I could fit a bunch of small things inside my head, comprehend their wholeness. But I can't fit a similar amount of work for a larger body inside my head. I can't fit the book in my head, much less all the moving parts that need attention. My entire life, that's how I've worked: cram everything about something into my head, take it part, reassemble it, and produce something. This project has been immune to that approach. And it's been driving me nuts. An important part of my writing process up till now was to read and re-read the entire piece from start to finish over and over again looking for the rough places. Where is the reader bumped out? What's too cute, too academic? What's not clear? What's missing? Does it flow from start to finish? I can't do that with this book. We can do that with individual chapters, but not with the entire thing. I expect that's what really scares me. The first edition was this wonderfully wrapped story about designing better websites. I know each chapter is pretty good. The content's fucking awesome. But, what if instead of one book it's just a collection of chapters? I think that's what worries me most. On the scale from the world's most beautiful man to Frankenstein's monster, I have no clear sense of where we are. I'm still going to bolt the neck on. And I think we're sewing on a different, nicer pair of hands. But I have no clue of whether the townspeople will scream or smile. Madness is always a matter of hindsight.

Two questions about Information Architecture

Austin Govella — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:43:37 GMT

So, we're working on the second edition of this book, and we had two questions for all the information architects out there... If you can spare a couple of seconds (and have already done the A List Apart survey), I'd like to hear about common questions you deal with as information architects. You can take the quick survey by clicking here.

A new design

Austin Govella — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:02:51 GMT

Just launched a new design. I'm proud. Not because it's the greatest design ever, but because it really matches who I am with what I need. I'm a contrarian at heart. My design is driven by what others aren't doing rather than by what it needs to do, but as someone who believes so much in the user experience, what's a contrarian to do when the prevalent style becomes clean, usable, readable websites? That's my style! So, the post page becomes this crazy mash of colliding elements before slipping into quiet order below the fold. Then the elements start colliding again in the footer. I love it. The main page and everywhere else are oddly utilitarian. But, at least they're overseen by the mummyhead. It's either a sad or disturbing icon about the self. Stolen from the Situationists and adorned with grungey, paint splatter angel wings, it floats over a logotype set in a classical style. I'm not sure what that says, but it's me.

An Armani Casa ad from this Sunday's New York Times Style Magazine.

In this Sunday's New York Times Style Magazine, a slew of furniture ads seemed to reflect an underlying fear of globalization present in much of the Western world. Each ad represented an onslaught of the different, the foreign, and the strange, and each onslaught was kept back by a reliance on the super-clean lines of modernism; those same lines that reflect education and class as the West's cultural redoubt against all things foreign.

All that wasn't in my head at the time, but this is my response. It's odd. Despite feeling so disconnected from the Design world, you can describe my work the same way. I’m a contrarian, but even I fall victim to the same fears. In the West, everything is changing, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. Seems like everywhere I look nowadays, you can sense that society is reacting to that.

Fancast officially launches

Austin Govella — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:11:00 GMT

Tuesday at CES, Comcast officially launched Fancast, a next-generation, personalized, cross-channel entertainment website.

So far, work on the project has run everywhere from ecstatic to calamitous, but it's definitely been one of the most interesting sites I've worked on.

But Wired rewards all the sweat and tears in one sentence: "Fancast turns out to be surprisingly well-designed -- and useful enough that the biggest complaint is likely to be, what took so long?"