09.19.07
The Value of Feed Readers
What site do you look at every day? I purposefully try NOT to look at any Web sites, if I can help it: The vast majority of them are incompetently programmed, unusable or inaccessible to people with disabilities (like myself, I am mildly dyslexic and have very poor eyesight) and, more often than not, badly designed or just plain tasteless and ugly. And, don't even get me started on glossy, slick Flash-only "infomercial" sites with annoying bandwidth-hungry animations, tiny fixed-size and unprintable text, unprompted thumping audio streams, etc.
So, instead of suffering all these Internet indignities, I use my trusty RSS reader, which brings to my attention everything I need every morning when I log-in, and spares me the clutter, the hassle and the despair.
What feeds do you subscribe to? I've bookmarked about 200 feeds that I check every day; they range from obscure geeky programming stuff and the New Yorker online, to YouTube insanity and Finnish furniture design. I have plenty of interests outside of multimedia; I find, in fact, that I NEED to maintain those interests in order to be able to think outside the often navel-gazing, Internet box.
What's so great about RSS feeds? What's not to love about clean, fast, compact information that's free and on-demand? The Internet should not be, in my opinion, a place to pander to over-inflated, over-paid egos or struggling graphic designers who don't understand the usefulness of technology or this incredibly powerful medium.
What makes the technology compelling? RSS is clean and unobtrusive and instantaneous. It takes you places, but you remain in the driver's seat. It has the same appeal of plain-text e-mail (how annoying HTML mail can be), but none of the perils.
How would you improve it? Or would you? I currently use the Sage RSS Reader extension for Firefox, which is quite remarkably useful. I'd love it to be a bit more flexible, but still...
What's your job? I am a creative director, information architect, restless bumblebee, whatever.
Where do you work? For seven years I had my own studio and divided my time between London and a beach house in my native Spain (whenever I need to re-charge my batteries and work quietly). However, this past summer, I was offered a creative director position at one of Spain's biggest IT companies, Barcelona-based Cesser Digital.
If you have a degree in what field is it? I read history of art and musicology in Italy, then received my BA in literature at the University of London, where I also completed my post-graduate degree and was a lecturer for a year (at UCL).
How did you get involved in this industry? Back in the early nineties, in addition to lecturing on literature, I was a writer and translator, so black ink on white paper was as far as I went technologically. Then in 1995 I set eyes on the Internet and fell hopelessly in love.
I started learning HTML, design principles, typography and color theory online, on my own, and tried my hand at Web design as an amateur for a few months. I landed, quite unexpectedly, a job as lead Web designer for the Financial Times Media & Telecoms, quit my lectureship at the University, and never looked back. After a year at the Financial Times, I moved on to a design studio, then to another, then became creative director at yet another agency in London. Your typical story: great brands, big projects, climbing the design ladder, blah, blah, blah...
What's your biggest Web (design) turn-off? Invalid, malformed code: Come on, how difficult is it to produce clean HTML?
And, as I said before, inaccessible, unusable, sloooooow Flash-only sites are also a pet peeve of mine: Flash is excellent for multimedia delivery, specifically audio and video, and on occasion, if needed, character/cartoon animation. It is great for its intended use. What I do not encourage or endorse is the (ab)use of the technology for purposes other than those adequate for the medium.
Unfortunately Flash is used abusively, mainly to peddle annoyingly intrusive advertising content, which, like most "multimedia" advertising, outside the design and media industries (and discounting bored teenagers with too much time on their hands), is universally derided, ignored, or barely tolerated by the browsing population at large. Granted, bored teenagers are a fairly large and juicy target for the ever greedy and increasingly panicky media / advertising industry, but still, Guys, you're ruining the show for the rest of us! OK, rant over.
Who, in this industry (or not), has been your biggest inspiration? For real inspiration, I turn to books and music. I try and discover new things, new references every day. I collect fonts and typographic specimens compulsively (I have thousands of them) and go to the cinema and the theater a few times a week. Pretty normal stuff.
What's the weirdest thing you've bought online? I don't know if this qualifies as weird, but I just bought 700 CDs in a single afternoon from a terribly cheap online store. Real CDs, in their crunchy plastic cases, wrapped in their crisp, new-smelling packaging. A wonderful bounty.
What do you do in your spare time? I enjoy my job so much that I really don't consider it "work," so "spare time" is a bit of a foreign concept to me. Also, since I'm the boss, I only take on projects that excite or interest me. I also devote half of my time to researching and developing new design or code techniques and ideas. And, of course, I read voraciously, talk to as many different people as possible, walk around with my eyes and ears open and generally keeping abreast of the wretched zeitgeist and its manifold horrors and diversions.
What music are you listening to right now? Hermann Scherchen conducting Mahler's 9th (a rare, 1950s live recording). Decidedly batty tempo, but exciting too. I like artists who indulge in slightly crazy creative choices; doing the "wrong" thing, rather than following perceived wisdom.
What product/gadget can you not live without? I don't have a mobile phone, nor an iPod, not even a wristwatch!. So, I'd have to say Skype; I use it all the time, mostly because otherwise I would never be able to liaise with clients or my design team. Oh, and my Thunderbird spam filters are great.
What's your dream computer set-up? The one I have now: a dual Pentium IV with 2G of RAM and a massive monitor for design and code work; a very ancient, coughing Pentium II (300 MH) with 128Mb of RAM running on Windows 95 for testing; and a Sony Vaio laptop with a huge screen for my (too frequent) idle airport trolling.