Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

GEL (“Good Experience Live”) conference recently posted video of a 2006 Seth Godin presentation discussing the idea of why so many things are broken. Seth provides hilarious examples of things poorly designed, why they were designed that way and how to fix and avoid these problems in the future.

7 reasons why things might be broken:

1) Not my job

2) Selfish jerks

3) The world changed

4) I didn’t know

5) I’m not a fish

6) Contradictions

7) Broken on purpose

Typography, like any other skill set, has its own terms and descriptions. Some of them are very common and accessible to everyone (letter, character, bold, italic), and some are more complex (ligature, ascender, spine).

Somewhere in between are terms that can be used by both professionals and amateurs to describe type. Describing the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts is one simple way to distinguish type.

So what exactly is a serif? To the everyday person, a serif is “the flared strokes at the ends of letters”. Technically, it’s not as simple as that. For this discussion, it will do.

Where do serifs come from? They come from the Roman alphabet, which was typically carved into stone. Before being carved, the letterforms were outlined with brushes. The ends flared, so the carvers followed the flares, and thus serifs were invented.  The term serif is Greek, a formation of two words meaning “together” and “projection”.

So what is a sans-serif? Simply put, sans is the French word for “without”. Sans-serif typefaces do not have serifs.

Why do we care? At the end of the day, typography is the creation of legible text for the purpose of communication. Separating serif and sans-serif fonts allows anyone working with type to quickly ascertain the legibility vs. the readability of the type in a given context.

There are numerous online resources for the appreciation and understanding of typography. This chart below was found on I Love Typography.

My role at LEVEL consists largely of monitoring things happening in our clients’ industries, researching demographic data or finding specific data like the average connection speed in India. Between monitoring client relevant information and researching other obscure tidbits, I read my fair share of blog entries. I’ve found that about 90% of entries are often repeats of something that somebody else said on another blog or article. One large, highly-trafficked blog will speculate about a new product, followed by about 10,000 smaller blogs writing about those speculations, hoping to cling on to some of that search traffic and not necessarily adding value to the reader.

To me, the most engaging and valuable entries are the ones that provide first-hand accounts about something. I like reading personal travel blogs and Forrester’s various blogs that share findings of recent research. For my first post on the LEVEL blog, I’d like to elaborate on what I think it takes to make a blog worth having (and ultimately reading):

- Personal experiences: Readers want to see personal stories about what their favorite band is doing on tour or how other small business owners are marketing with small budgets.

- Personal knowledge: Blogs need a theme. The LEVEL Blog concerns everything digital or agency. Sharing personal knowledge around a blog’s theme makes it worth coming back to and can position your company as being full of thought-leaders. We hope posts on this blog will reflect the knowledge and culture of our agency.

If you currently have a blog or are thinking about one, start by asking a couple questions.
Who is going to be reading it?
What kinds of things will they be interested in reading?
How can we make our own personal experiences relevant to our designated audience?
Who at our company (or personal network) has relevant knowledge to share with our audience?

Now that I’ve given blog guidelines, I suppose I have to keep them in mind in my future posts. Let me know if I get off track.

Instead of spending countless hours obsessing over what defines “Web 2.0/3.0”, or any other “dot-o” people may see coming, lets focus on a tangible, visible trend: web applications. Web apps have evolved from relatively useless novelties to full-scale software solutions that have the potential to entirely replace some software, while simultaneously offering a complete and more useful feature set. Often in the form of “mashups” that filter and selectively display content from the vast amount of data available on the web, or so-called “cloud computing”, these applications utilize the processing power of thousands of servers, rather than your measly desktop machine.

Adobe Photoshop, the professional standard in the image-editing world, is a great example. Now offered in an online version built with Adobe’s desktop-like Flex interface, Photoshop.com provides a variety of photo editing tools, online storage and even social sharing for your photos – all within a web browser. Will Photoshop.com replace the desktop version of the software? Probably not, but it will allow your Great Aunt Gertrude to rotate and share that picture of her new dog Fluffy, without requiring her to spend thousands on hardware and software.

LEVEL hosted a client reception to celebrate the opening of our new LA studio last week. I was fortunate enough to be in attendance; my intended purpose to spend some quality time with a few of our favorite So-Cal clients, but in reality I think we were all just there for the delicious wine (Justin Winery’s Isosceles). As I drifted from one group of wine drinkers to the next, conversations ranged from bongs (Michael Phelps, c’mon now) and the world’s smartest dogs (Border collie, German shepherd and Poodle) to social media and Razor scooter tricks.

Some pictures from the event are posted on Flickr.