Valmet has expanded its IQ Quality Control System by launching four new measurements for raw material components, colour, and ash content. These innovations help optimise resource usage, reduce carbon footprints, and improve product quality. The new measurements include IQ Transmission Spectrum, IQ Reflection Spectrum, IQ Color, and IQ Total X-ray.

Web Industries will showcase its nonwoven materials solutions for medical, personal care, and home care markets at Hygienix 2024, held November 18-21 in Nashville. The company will highlight its slitting, spooling, printing, and modular converting capabilities, offering precision converting for flexible packaging, films, and medical-grade materials.

Wacoal Holdings has reported revenue of ¥90,167 million (~$586.1 million) in H1 2024, down by 5.2 per cent YoY. Gross profit fell 4.9 per cent to ¥51,056 million (~$331.86 million). Domestic revenue dipped 4.8 per cent to ¥45,006 million, while overseas revenue declined 1.4 per cent to ¥34,549 million. The company’s business profit was ¥2,304 million, down 39.6 per cent YoY in its overseas segment.

Gokaldas Exports has reported an 85 per cent YoY revenue increase in Q2 FY25, with total income reaching ₹941.8 crore (~$111.6 million) and PAT at ₹28.2 crore, a 19 per cent rise. EBITDA grew 48 per cent to ₹82.4 crore (~$9.77 million), though margins declined by 222 bps to 8.7 per cent. H1 FY25 revenue surged 82 per cent to ₹1,881.5 crore (~$223.0 million), with PAT slightly down by 2 per cent YoY.

Epic Group has restructured its leadership team, appointing Sunil Daryanani and Dinesh Virwani as executive vice chairmen, and Suraj Kalra as CEO to drive its strategic objectives. Led by founder Ranjan Mahtani, the committee also includes leaders in finance, HR, procurement, and digitalisation, aiming to strengthen Epic’s global presence, improve operations, and enhance stakeholder value.

H&M is partnering with Glenn Martens for an Autumn 2025 collection. Known for merging streetwear and couture, Martens joins a line of iconic designers H&M has collaborated with since 2004, when it launched its first designer collection with Karl Lagerfeld. This initiative has made top-tier fashion accessible, reflecting each designer’s unique vision and values across two decades of partnerships.

Parallels RAS Now extends the integration and delivery of applications from Azure Virtual Desktop to application delivery on Windows 365 Cloud PCs

KM experts joined KMWorld's latest webinar, Enabling Knowledge-Based AI, to examine key components and best practices for adopting AI-enabled approaches that evolve, extend, and power knowledge systems.

Look at your organization and consider the unstructured text or audio data you gather and the possible revelations it may hold. That data reflects the voices of those you serve and holds the potential to help you deliver better experiences, improve quality of care and enrich human engagement. There are powerful stories to be told from your unstructured text data. And the best way for you to find them is with natural language processing.

I'm entranced by old technologies being rediscovered, repurposed, and reinvented. Just think, the term artificial intelligence (AI) entered the language in 1956 and you can trace natural language processing (NLP) back to Alan Turing's work starting in 1950. Text analytics has its antecedents in data mining. Data mining itself has a long history, all the way back to Thomas Bayes, who died in 1761, and his eponymous theorem that still informs algorithms regarding inference, probability, and predictions.

Text analytics and natural language processing are not new concepts. Most knowledge management professionals have been grappling with these technologies for years. From the KM perspective, these technologies share the same fundamental purpose: They help get the right information to employees at the right time.

Cognitive/AI technologies for customer engagement are white hot. No wonder professionals, who had removed AI from their resumes, are scrambling to add it back in!

I am a firm believer in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. If you've not read this book, it is worth the time. I mention this because my focus at BA Insight is around Covey's second habit, which is, "Begin with the end in mind." Seems simple, right? Well it is, but it's also quite rare. When approaching any enterprise search project, at any phase, I always try to come back to this idea. What is success? When are we done? What does finished look like? These are all different ways of saying, "Make sure you have goals!"

While interactive voice response systems (IVRs) have been invaluable in reducing contact center costs, we need to be honest: not many are delivering experiences that meet consumer expectations. It's no surprise given the rise of digital channels.

Enterprise search projects start with intentions to provide ?Google for our organization' but too often fail to deliver on that promise. In our experience, these projects fail due to a lack of sustained effort and governance. The commercialization of next-generation search technologies allows you to fulfill this promise if you take a systematic approach to implementation.

The data, information, and analytics economy runs on well-curated, structured data. No matter your industry?having good curated data and content is critical. It's increasingly important as more data and content are generated. Intelligent tools to sift through content are more robust and at the same time, more "needy." That means modern technology platforms, systems, and even content consumers require well-structured data and content to perform well. As most artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners state?"nothing starts without good data."

Unstructured data, which comprises almost 80% of any enterprise's data, holds untapped value when it comes to addressing challenges and embracing opportunities.

AI-Powered Search Engines?referred to as "Insight Engines" by Gartner and "Cognitive Search" by Forrester?can deliver significant value to organizations these days, provided certain risks are avoided.

For decades, organizations have tried to unlock the collective knowledge contained within their people and systems. And the challenge is getting harder, since every year, massive amounts of additional information are created for people to share. We've reached a point at which individuals are unable consume, understand, or even find half the information that is available to them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one?if not the?key technology of our decade. Technological advances in this field are not only fundamentally changing our economies, industries and markets, but are also exerting enormous influence on traditional business practices, many of which will disappear, while others will be transformed or completely reinvented.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of a wide variety of businesses. I have this image of CEOs in boardrooms around the globe declaring, "We must have AI! Our competitors use AI! We can't be left behind!" There might be some table-pounding associated with this scenario. There will certainly be corporate minions scurrying around to fulfill the AI dreams of their CEO.

The consumer has spoken. Forrester Research asked 5,000 of them, "What created the biggest pain when you contacted a business for customer service?" They answered lack and consistency of agent knowledge, followed by the difficulty of finding relevant answers on company websites. So, what is driving this dissatisfaction?

There may be several generations that a KM system appeals to in different ways, but there are no generational differences when it comes to expecting high quality customer service and knowledgeable agents.

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Ganezza’s Visual Identity: A Dynamic Branding Journey

Bien-Être Simple’s Vibrant Branding and Web Design by Impulso

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The world has changed. Everything we do is more immediately visible to others than ever before, but much remains the same; the relationships we develop are as important as they always were. This post is a few thoughts on self-promotion, and how to have good relationships as a self-publisher.

Meeting people face to face is ace. They could be colleagues, vendors, or clients; at conferences, coffee shops, or meeting rooms. The hallway and bar tracks at conferences are particularly great. I always come away with a refreshed appreciation for meatspace. However, most of our interactions take place over the Web. On the Web, the lines separating different kinds of relationships are a little blurred. The company trying to get you to buy a product or conference ticket uses the same medium as your friends.

Freelancers and small companies (and co-ops!) can have as much of an impact as big businesses. ‘I publish therefore I am’ could be our new mantra. Hence this post, in a way. Although, I confess I have discussed these thoughts with friends and thought it was about time I kept my promise to publish them.

Publishing primarily means text and images. Text is the most prevalent. However, much more meaning is conveyed non-verbally. ‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.’

Text can contain non-verbal elements like style — either handwritten or typographic characters — and emoticons, but we don’t control style in Twitter, email, or feeds. Or in any of the main situations where people read what we write (unless it’s our own site). Emoticons are often used in text to indicate tone, pitch, inflection, and emotion like irony, humour, or dismay. They plug gaps in the Latin alphabet’s scope that could be filled with punctuation like the sarcasm mark. By using them, we affirm how important non-verbal communication is.

The other critical non-verbal communication around text is karma. Karma is our reputation, our social capital with our audience of peers, commentators, and customers. It has two distinct parts: Personality, and professional reputation. ‘It’s not what was said, it’s who said what.’

So, after that quick brain dump, let me recap:

• Relationships are everything.
• We publish primarily in text without the nuance of critical non-verbal communication.
• Text has non-verbal elements like style and emoticons, but we can only control the latter.
• Context is also non-verbal communication. Context is karma: Character and professional reputation.

Us Brits are a funny bunch. Traditionally reserved. Hyperbole-shy. At least, in public. We use certain extreme adjectives sparingly for the most part, and usually avoid superlatives if at all possible. We wince a little if we forget and get super-excited. We sometimes prefer ‘spiffing’ accompanied by a wry, ironic smile over an outright ‘awesome’. Both are genuine — one has an extra layer in the inflection cake. However, we take great displeasure in observing blunt marketing messages that try to convince us something is true with massive, lobe-smacking enthusiasm, and some sort of exaggerated adjective-osmosis effect. We poke fun at attempts to be overly cool. We expect a decent level of self-awareness and ring of honesty from people who would sell us stuff. The Web is no exception. In fact, I may go so far as to say that the sensibilities of the Web are fairly closely aligned with British sensibilities. Without, of course, any of our crippling embarrassment. In an age when promoting oneself on the Web is almost required for designers, that’s no bad thing. After all, running smack bang through the middle of the new marketing arts is a large dose of reality; we’re just a bunch of folks telling our story. No manipulation, cool-kid feigned nonchalance, or lobe-smacking enthusiasm required.

Consider what the majority of designers do to promote themselves in this brave new maker-creative culture. People like my friend, Elliot Jay Stocks: making his own magazine, making music, distributing WordPress themes, and writing about his experiences. Yes, it is important for him that he has an audience, and yes, he wants us to buy his stuff, but no, he won’t try to impress or trick us into liking him. It’s our choice. Compare this to traditional advertising that tries to appeal to your demographic with key phrases from your tribe, life-style pitches, and the usual raft of Freudian manipulations. (Sarcasm mark needed here, although I do confess to a soft spot for the more visceral and kitsch Freudian manipulations.)

There is a middle ground between the two though. A dangerous place full of bad surprises: The outfit that seems like a human being. It appears to publish just like you would. They want money in exchange for their amazing stuff they’re super-duper proud of. Then, you find out they’re selling it to you at twice the price it is in the States, or that it crashes every time it closes, or has awful OpenType support. You find out the human being was really a corporate cyborg who sounds like you, but is not of you, and it’s impervious to your appeals to human fairness. Then there are the folks who definitely are human, after all they’re only small, and you know their names. All the non-verbal communication tells you so. Then you peek a little closer —  you see the context — and all they seem to do is talk about themselves, or their business. Their interactions are as carefully crafted as the big companies, and they treat their audience as a captive market. Great spirit forefend they share the bandwidth by celebrating anyone else. They sound like one of us, but act like one of them. Their popularity is inversely proportional to their humanity.

Extreme examples, I know. This is me exploring thoughts though, and harsh light helps define the edges. Feel free to sound off if it offends, but mind your non-verbal communication. :)

That brings me to self-promotion versus self-aggrandisement; there’s a big difference between the two. As independent designers and developer-type people, self-promotion is good, necessary, and often mutually beneficial. It’s about goodwill. It connects us to each other and lubricates the Web. We need it. Self-aggrandisement is coarse, obvious, and often an act of denial; the odour of insecurity or arrogance is nauseating. It is to be avoided.

If you consider the difference between a show-off and a celebrant, perhaps it will be clearer what I’m reaching for:

The very best form of self-promotion is celebration. To celebrate is to share the joy of what you do (and critically also celebrate what others do) and invite folks to participate in the party. To show off is a weakness of character — an act that demands acknowledgement and accolade before the actor can feel the tragic joy of thinking themselves affirmed. To celebrate is to share joy. To show-off is to yearn for it.

It’s as tragic as the disdainful, casual arrogance of criticising the output of others less accomplished than oneself. Don’t be lazy now. Critique, if you please. Be bothered to help, or if you can’t hold back, have a little grace by being discreet and respectful. If you’re arrogant enough to think you have the right to treat anyone in the world badly, you grant them the right to reciprocate. Beware.

Celebrants don’t reserve their bandwidth for themselves. They don’t treat their friends like a tricky audience who may throw pennies at you at the end of the performance. They treat them like friends. It’s a pretty simple way of measuring whether what you publish is good: would I do/say/act the same way with my friends? Human scales are always the best scales.

So, this ends. I feel very out of practise at writing. It’s hard after a hiatus. These are a few thoughts that still feel partially-formed in my mind, but I hope there was a tiny snippet or two in there that fired off a few neurons in your brain. Not too many, though, it’s early yet. :)

Yesterday, Cameron Koczon shared a link to the dingbat font, Pictos, by the talented, Drew Wilson. Cameron predicted that dingbats will soon be everywhere. Symbol fonts, yes, I thought. Dingbats? No, thanks. Jason Santa Maria replied:

@FictiveCameron I hope not, dingbat fonts sort of spit in the face of accessibility and semantics at the moment. We need better options.

Jason rightly pointed out the accessibility and semantic problems with dingbats. By mapping icons to letters or numbers in the character map, they are represented on the page by that icon. That’s what Pictos does. For example, by typing an ‘a’ on your keyboard, and setting Pictos as the font-face for that letter, the Pictos anchor icon is displayed.

Other folks suggested SVG and JS might be better, and other more novel workarounds to hide content from assistive technology like screen readers. All interesting, but either not workable in my view, or just a bit awkward.

Falling down with CSS text-replacement

A CSS solution in an article from Pictos creator, Drew Wilson, relies on the fact that most of his icons are mapped to a character that forms part of the common name for that symbol. The article uses the delete icon as an example which is mapped to ‘d’. Using :before and :after pseudo-elements, Drew suggests you can kind-of wrangle the markup into something sort-of semantic. However, it starts to fall down fast. For example, a check mark (tick) is mapped to ‘3’. There’s nothing semantic about that. Clever replacement techniques just hide the evidence. It’s a hack. There’s nothing wrong with a hack here and there (as box model veterans well know) but the ends have to justify the means. The end of this story is not good as a VoiceOver test by Scott at Filament Group shows. In fairness to Drew Wilson, though, he goes on to say if in doubt, do it the old way, using his font to create a background image and deploy with a negative text-indent.

I agreed with Jason, and mentioned a half-formed idea:

@jasonsantamaria that’s exactly what I was thinking. Proper unicode mapping if possible, perhaps?

The conversation continued, and thanks to Jason, helped me refine the idea into this post.

Jon Hicks flagged a common problem for some Windows users where certain Unicode characters are displayed as ‘missing character’ glyphs depending on what character it is. I think most of the problems with dingbats or missing Unicode characters can be solved with web fonts and Unicode.

Rising with Unicode and web fonts

I’d love to be able to use custom icons via optimised web fonts. I want to do so accessibly and semantically, and have optimised font files. This is how it could be done:

1. Map the icons in the font to the existing Unicode code points for those symbols wherever possible.

   Unicode code points already exist for many common symbols. Fonts could be tiny, fast, stand-alone symbol fonts. Existing typefaces could also be extended to contain symbols that match the style of individual widths, variants, slopes, and weights. Imagine a set of Clarendon or Gotham symbols for a moment. Wouldn’t that be a joy to behold?

   There may be a possibility that private code points could be used if a code-point does not exist for a symbol we need. Type designers, iconographers, and foundries might agree a common set of extended symbols. Alternatively, they could be proposed for inclusion in Unicode.

2. Include the font with font-face.

   This assumes ubiquitous support (as any use of dingbats does) — we’re very nearly there. WOFF is coming to Safari and with a bit more campaigning we may even see WOFF on iPad soon.

3. In HTML, reference the Unicode code points in UTF-8 using numeric character references.

   Unicode characters have corresponding numerical references. Named entities may not be rendered by XML parsers. Sean Coates reminded me that in many Cocoa apps in OS X the character map is accessible via a simple CMD+ALT+t shortcut. Ralf Herrmann mentioned that unicode characters ‘…have “speaking” descriptions (like Leftwards Arrow) and fall back nicely to system fonts.’

Limitations

1. Accessibility: Limited Unicode / entity support in assistive devices.

   My friend and colleague, Jon Gibbins’s old tests in JAWS 7 show some of the inconsistencies. It seems some characters are read out, some ignored completely, and some read as a question mark. Not great, but perhaps Jon will post more about this in the future.

   Elizabeth Pyatt at Penn State university did some dingbat tests in screen readers. For real Unicode symbols, there are pronunciation files that increase the character repertoire of screen readers, like this file for phonetic characters. Symbols would benefit from one.

2. Web fonts: font-face not supported.

   If font-face is not supported on certain devices like mobile phones, falling back to system fonts is problematic. Unicode symbols may not be present in any system fonts. If they are, for many designers, they will almost certainly be stylistically suboptimal. It is possible to detect font-face using the Paul Irish technique. Perhaps there could be a way to swap Unicode for images if font-face is not present.

Now, next, and a caveat

I can’t recommend using dingbats like Pictos, but the icons sure are useful as images. Beautifully crafted icon sets as carefully crafted fonts could be very useful for rapidly creating image icons for different resolution devices like the iPhone 4, and iPad.

Perhaps we could try and formulate a standard set of commonly used icons using the Unicode symbols range as a starting point. I’ve struggled to find a better visual list of the existing symbols than this Unicode symbol chart from Johannes Knabe.

Icons in fonts as Unicode symbols needs further testing in assistive devices and using font-face.

Last, but not least, I feel a bit cheeky making these suggestions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Combine it with a bit of imagination, and it can be lethal. I have a limited knowledge about how fonts are created, and about Unicode. The real work would be done by others with deeper knowledge than I. I’d be fascinated to hear from Unicode, accessibility, or font experts to see if this is possible. I hope so. It feels to me like a much more elegant and sustainable solution for scalable icons than dingbat fonts.

For more on Unicode, read this long, but excellent, article recommended by my colleague, Andrei, the architect of Unicode and internationalization support in PHP 6: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets.

Analog, Mapalong, more tries at trans-Atlantic sleep, Cuba, Fontdeck, and my youngest son entering school; it all happened in the last year. At the end of 2007, I wrote up the year very differently. After skipping a couple of years, this is a different wrap-up. To tell the truth I put this together for me, being the very worst of diarists. It meant searching through calendars, Aperture, and elsewhere. I hope it prompts me to keep a better diary. I give you: 2010 in pictures and words:

Analog.coop is still fresh after launching in December. We’re still a bit blown away by the response but decide not to do client work, but to make Mapalong instead. We jump through all kinds of hoops trying to make it happen, but ultimately it comes down to our friend and colleague, Chris Shiflett. He gets us going. It snows a lot in Bristol. The snow turns to ice. I slip around, occasionally grumpy, but mostly grinning like an idiot.

My family and I go to Cuba on our first ever all inclusive ‘package’ holiday. It’s a wonderful escape from winter, tempered by surreptitious trips out of the surreal, tourist-only island, to the other Cuba with an unofficial local guide. My boys love the jacuzzi, and sneaking into the gym. Z shoots his first arrow. Just after we return, he turns 4 years old. Now, he wants to go back.

I visit Chris in Brooklyn to work on Mapalong. We play football. Well, Chris plays. I cripple myself, and limp around a lot. At the same time I meet the irrepressible, Cameron Koczon. We all get drunk on good beer at Beer Table. Life is good. Cameron comes up with the Brooklyn Beta name. It starts to move from idea to action.

Just before Brooklyn, a discussion about First Things First opens during a talk at BathCamp. The follow-ups become passionate with posts like this straw man argument and a vociferous rejoinder.

The sun comes out. The garden becomes the new studio. Alan Colville and Jon Gibbins stop by as we work on Mapalong. The hunt starts for a co-working space in Bristol. I write pieces about self-promotion and reversed type. Worn out from the sudden burst, I go quiet again.

We find a place for our Bristol co-working studio studio. Mild Bunch HQ is born! I design desks for the first time. Our first co-workers are Adam Robertson, Kester Limb, Eugene Getov, and Ben Coleman. Chris and I meet again across the Atlantic; he makes a flying visit to Bristol. The gentle pressure mounts on fellow Analogger, Jon Gibbins to come to Bristol, too. Something special begins. Beer Fridays have started.

Fontdeck comes out of private beta! Almost 17 months after Rich Rutter and I talked about a web fonts service in Brighton for the first time, the site was live thanks to the hard work of Clearleft and OmniTI. Now it features thousands of fonts prepared for the Web, and many of the best type designers and foundries in the world.

For the first time in around 15 years I visit Belfast. At the invitation of the Standardistas, Chris and Nik, Elliot Stocks and I talk typography at the Ulster Festival of Art and Design. We’re working on the Brooklyn Beta branding, so talk about that with a bit of neuroscience thrown in as food for thought. Belfast truly is a wonderful place with fantastic people. It made it hard to miss Build for the second time later in the year.

June was busier than it felt. :)

Summer arrived in earnest. X has a blast at his school sports day. I do, too. Mild Bunch HQ is liberally dosed with shared lunches from Herbert’s bakery and Licata’s deli, and beers on balmy evenings outside The Canteen with friends. That’s all the Mild Bunch is, a group of friends with a name that made us laugh; everyone of friendly disposition is welcome!

8 Faces number 1 is published and sells out in a couple of hours. I was lucky enough to be interviewed, and to sweat over trying to narrow my choices. The .Net interview was me answering a few questions thrown my way from folks on Twitter. Great fun. Elliot, Samantha Cliffe, and I had spent a great day wandering around Montpelier taking pictures in the sun earlier in the year. One of her portraits of me appeared in both magazines. Later that month, I write about Web Fonts, Dingbats, Icons, and Unicode. It’s only my fourth post of the year.

Sometimes, some things strip me of words. Thank you.

The whole of Analog heads to Brooklyn for a Mapalong hack week with the Fictive Kin guys. We start to show it to friends and Brooklyn studio mates like Tina (Swiss Miss) who help us heaps. It’s a frantic week. I get to spend a bit of time with my Analog friend Andrei Zmievski who I haven’t seen in the flesh since 2009. Everyone works and plays hard, and we stay in some fantastic places thanks to Cameron and AirBnB.

Just before I head to NY, Z starts big school. He looks too small to start. He’s 4. How did time pass so fast? I’m still wondering that after I get back.

The whole of Analog, the Mild Bunch HQ and many others from Bristol, and as far away as Australia and India, head to New York for Brooklyn Beta! A poster whipped together my me, printed in a rush by Rik at Ripe, and transported to NY by Adam Robertson, is given as one of the souvenirs to everyone who comes.

Meanwhile, Jon Gibbins works frantically to get Mapalong ready to give BB an early glimpse of what we’re up to. Two thousand people reserve their usernames before we even go to private beta!

Chris and Cameron work tirelessly. Many, many fine people lend a hand. We add some last minute touches to the site, like listing all the crew and attendees as well as the speakers. Cameron shows off Gimme Bar with an hilarious voice-over from Bedrich Rios. Alan narrates Mapalong and we introduce our mapping app to our peers and friends!

It’s something we hoped, but never expected: Brooklyn Beta goes down as one of the best conferences ever in the eyes of veteran conference speakers and attendees. ‘Are you sure you’ve not done this before?’ I hear Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler Frere-Jones ask Cameron. It makes me smile. The fact one of our sponsors asked this question in admiration of Chris and Cameron’s work meant a lot to me. I was proud of them, and grateful to everyone who helped it be something truly friendly, open, smart, and special.

The BB Flickr group has a lot of pictures and links to blog posts. Brooklyn Beta will return again in 2011!

X turns 7. I realise he really isn’t such a toddler anymore. It took me a while even though he amazes me constantly with his vocabulary and eloquence. His birthday party ensues with a trip to Legoland on the last weekend of the season to watch fireworks and get into trouble. Fun times finding Yoda and the rest of the Star Wars posse battling each other below the Space Shuttle exhibit.

8 Faces number two is published after being announced at Build. Much of the month was spent juggling Mapalong work, and having a great time typesetting the selections spreads for each of the eight faces chosen by the interviewees. That, and worrying with Elliot how it might print with litho. It all turned out OK. I think.

The .Net Awards take place in London. Christened the ‘nutmeg’ awards thanks to iPhone auto-correction, I’m one of millions of judges. We use it as an excuse for a party. At the end of the month, lots of the Mild Bunch go to see Caribou at The Thekla. Good times.

Mapalong goes into private beta! We start inviting many of the Brooklyn Beta folks, and others who’ve reserved their usernames. Lots of placemarks get added. Lots of feedback comes our way. Bug hunting starts. Next design steps start. We push frequently and add people as we go. Big things are planned for the new year!

The Mild Bunch Christmas do goes off with a bang thanks to Adam Robertson making sure it happened. Folks come from far and wide for a great party in The Big Chill Bar in Bristol. Lowri sneaks shots of Sambuca for the girls onto my tab, and we drink all the Innis and Gunn they have.

A few parties later, and the year draws to a close with a very traditional family Christmas in our house. Wood fires, music, the Christmas tree, and two small boys doing what kids do at Christmas. It’s just about perfect; A tonic to the background strife of the month, with a personal tragedy for me, and illness in my close family. Everything worked out OK. Steam-powered fairground rides, dressing up as dinosaurs, and detox follows with a bit of reflection. New Year’s Eve probably means staying in. Babysitters are like gold dust, but I just found we have one for tonight, so it looks like our celebration is coming early!

In the new year, I’ll be mostly trying to do the best I can for my family, my colleagues, and myself. The only goals I have are to help my children be everything they can be, make Mapalong everything we wish it to be, and feel that calm, quiet sense of peace in the evening that only comes from a day well done. Other than that I’ll keep my mind open to serendipity. (…and do something about some bits of my site and the typesetting that’s bugging me after writing this. :)

If you made it this far, thank you, and here’s to you and yours in 2011; may the best of your past be the worst of your future!

Stories are everywhere. When they don’t exist we make up the narrative — we join the dots. We make cognitive leaps and fill in the bits of a story that are implied or missing. The same goes for websites. We make quick judgements based on a glimpse. Then we delve deeper. The narrative unfolds, or we create one as we browse.

Mark Bernstein penned Beyond Usability and Design: The Narrative Web for A List Apart in 2001. He wrote, ‘the reader’s journey through our site is a narrative experience’. I agreed wholeheartedly: Websites are narrative spaces where stories can be enacted, or emerge.

Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies, and Professor of Literature at MIT, wrote Game Design as Narrative Architecture. He suggested we think of game designers, ‘less as storytellers than as narrative architects’. I agree, and I think web designers are narrative architects, too. (Along with all the multitude of other roles we assume.) Much of what Henry Jenkins wrote applies to modern web design. In particular, he describes two kinds of narratives in game design that are relevant to us:

Enacted narratives are those where:

[…] the story itself may be structured around the character’s movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory.

Sites like Amazon, New Adventures, or your portfolio are enacted narrative spaces: Shops or service brochures that want the audience to move through the site towards a specific set of actions like buying something or initiating contact.

Emergent narratives are those where:

[…] spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players.

Sites like Flickr, Twitter, or Dribbble are emergent narrative spaces: Web applications that encourage their audience use the tools at their disposal to tell their own story. The audience defines how they want to use the narrative space, often with surprising results.

We often build both kinds of narrative spaces. Right now, my friends and I at Analog are working on Mapalong, a new maps-based app that’s just launched into private beta. At its heart Mapalong is about telling our stories. It’s one big map with a set of tools to view the world, add places, share them, and see the places others share. The aim is to help people tell their stories. We want to use three ideas to help you do that: Space (recording places, and annotating them), data (importing stuff we create elsewhere), and time (plotting our journeys, and recording all the places, people, and memories along the way). We know that people will find novel uses for the tools in Mapalong. In fact, we want them to because it will help us refine and build better tools. We work in an agile way because that’s the only way to design an emerging narrative space. Without realising it we’ve become architects of a narrative space, and you probably are, too.

Many projects like shops or brochure sites have fixed costs and objectives. They want to guide the audience to a specific set of actions. The site needs to be an enacted narrative space. Ideally, designers would observe behaviour and iterate. Failing that, a healthy dose of empathy can serve. Every site seeks to teach, educate, or inform. So, a bit of knowledge about people’s learning styles can be useful. I once did a course in one to one and small group training with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. It introduced me to Peter Honey and Alan Mumford’s model which describes four different learning styles that are useful for us to know. I paraphrase:

1. Activists like learning as they go; getting stuck in and working it out. They enjoy the here and now, and are happy to be dominated by immediate experiences. They are open-minded, not sceptical, and this tends to make them enthusiastic about anything new.
2. Reflectors like being guided with time to take it all in and perhaps return later. They like to stand back to ponder experiences and observe them from many different perspectives. They collect data, both first hand and from others, and prefer to think about it thoroughly before coming to a conclusion.
3. Theorists to understand and make logical sense of things before they leap in. They think problems through in a vertical, step-by-step logical way. They assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories.
4. Pragmatists like practical applications of ideas, experiments, and results. They like trying out ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work in practice. They positively search out new ideas and take the first opportunity to experiment with applications.

Usually people share two or more of these qualities. The weight of each can vary depending on the context. So how might learning styles manifest themselves in web browsing behaviour?

• Activists like to explore, learn as they go, and wander the site working it out. They need good in-context navigation to keep exploring. For example, signposts to related information are optimal for activists. They can just keep going, and going, and exploring until sated.
• Reflectors are patient and thoughtful. They like to ponder, read, reflect, then decide. Guided tours to orientate them in emergent sites can be a great help. Saving shopping baskets for later, and remembering sessions in enacted sites can also help them.
• Theorists want logic. Documentation. An understanding of what the site is, and what they might get from it. Clear, detailed information helps a theorist, whatever the space they’re in.
• Pragmatists get stuck in like activists, but evaluate quickly, and test their assumptions. They are quick, and can be helped by uncluttered concise information, and contextual, logical tools.

An understanding of interactive narrative types and a bit of knowledge about learning styles can be useful concepts for us to bear in mind. I also think they warrant inclusion as part of an articulate designer’s language of web design. If Henry Jenkins is right about games designers, I think he could also be right about web designers: we are narrative architects, designing spaces where stories are told.

—∞—

Wow, this has been a busy period. I’m just back from the Ampersand web typography conference in Brighton, and having a catch-up day in Mild Bunch HQ. Just before that I’ve been working flat out. First on Mapalong which was a grass-roots sponsor of Ampersand, and is going great guns. Then on an article for The Manual which is being published soon, and on 8 Faces #3 which is in progress right now. Not to mention the new talk for Ampersand which left me scratching my head and wondering if I was making any sense at all. More on that in a subsequent post.

In the meantime two previous events deserve a mention. (This is me starting more of a journalistic blog. :)

First of all, an interview with Simon Pascal Klien, the typographer and designer who’s curating the Design Festival podcast at the moment. We talked about all things web typography. Pascal cheekily left in a bit of noise from me in the prelude, and that rant pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. Thanks for your time, Pascal! If anyone reading this would care to listen in, the podcast can be downloaded or played from here:

Secondly, Daniel Bogan of The Setup sent me a few questions about my own tools. My answers are pretty clipped because of time, but you may find it interesting to compare this designer’s setup with your own:

I should note that in the meantime I’ve started writing with Writer, and discovered the great joy of keeping a journal and notes with a Midori Traveler’s Notebook. The latter is part of an on-going search I’m having to find Tools for Life. More on that, too at some point. Here’s my current list of topics I want to write about shortly:

• Ampersand, the aftermath
• Marrying a FujiFilm X100
• No-www
• Tools for life
• Paper versus pixels

There, I’ve written it!

The first Ampersand web typography conference took place in Brighton last Friday. Ampersand was ace. I’m going to say that again with emphasis: Ampersand was ace! Like the Ready Brek kid from the 80s TV ads I’m glowing with good vibes.

Imagine you’d just met some of the musicians that created the soundtrack to your life. That’s pretty much how I feel.

For a long, long time I’ve gazed across at the typography community with something akin to awe at the work they do. I’ve lurked quietly on the ATypI mailing list, in the Typophile forum, and behind the glass dividing my eyes from the blogs, portfolios, and galleries.

I always had a sneaking suspicion the web and type design communities had much in common: Excellence born from actual client work; techniques and skills refined by practice, not in a lab or classroom; a willingness to share and disseminate, most clearly demonstrated at Typophile and through web designer’s own blogs. The people of both professions have a very diverse set of backgrounds from graphic design all the way through to engineering, to accidentally working in a print shop. We’ve been apprenticed to our work, and Ampersand was a celebration of what we’ve achieved so far and what’s yet to come.

Of course, web design is a new profession. Type design has a history that spans hundreds of years. Nevertheless, both professions are self-actualising. Few courses exist of any real merit. There is no qualifications authority. The work from both arenas succeeds or fails based on whether it works or not.

Ampersand was the first event of its kind. Folks from both communities came together around the mutal fascination, frustration, challenge and opportunity of web type.

Like Brooklyn Beta, the audience was as fantastic as the line up. I met folks like Yves Peters of the FontFeed, Mike Duggan of Microsoft Typography, Jason Smith, Phil Garnham, Fernando Mello, and Emanuela Conidi of Fontsmith, Veronica Burian of TypeTogether, Adam Twardoch of Fontlab and MyFonts, Nick Sherman of of Webtype, Mandy Brown of A Book Apart and Typekit, and many, many others. (Sorry for stopping there, but wow, it would be a huge list.)

Rich Rutter opened the day on behalf of Clearleft and Fontdeck at the Brighton Dome. Rich and I had talked about a web typography conference before. He just went out and did it. Hats off to him, and people like Sophie Barrett at Clearleft who helped make the day run so smoothly.

Others have written comprehensive, insightful summaries of the day and the talks. Much better than I could, sitting there on the day, rapt, taking no notes. What follows are a few snippets my memory threw out when prodded.

Who knew the original letterforms for Comic Sans were inspired by a copy of The Watchmen Vincent Connare had in his office? Or that Vincent, who also designed Trebuchet, considers himself an engineer rather than type designer, and is working at the moment on the Ubuntu fonts with colleagues at Dalton Maag.

Jason Santa Maria declared himself a type nerd, and gave a supremely detailed talk about selecting, setting, and understanding web type. Wonderful stuff.

Jonathan Hoefler talked in rapid, articulate, and precise terms about the work behind upcoming release of pretty-much all of H&FJ’s typefaces as web fonts. (Hooray!) He clearly and wonderfully explained how they took the idea behind their typefaces, and moved them through a design process to produce a final form for a specific purpose. In this case, the web, as a distinct and different environment from print.

I spoke between Jason and Jonathan. Gulp. After staying up until 4am the night before, anxiously working on slides, I was carried along by the privilege and joy of being there, hopefully without too much mumbling or squinting with bleary eyes.

After lunch, David Berlow continued the story of web fonts, taking us on a journey through his own trials and tribulations at Font Bureau when re-producing typefaces for the web crude media. His dry, droll, richly-flavoured delivery was a humorous counterpoint to some controversial asides.

John Daggett of Mozilla, editor of the CSS3 Fonts Module, talked with great empathy for web designers about the amazing typographic advances we’re about to see in browsers.

Tim Brown of Typekit followed. Tim calmly and thoroughly advocated the extension of modular scales to all aspects of a web interface, taking values from the body type and building all elements with those values as the common denominator.

Finally, Mark Boulton wrapped up the day brilliantly, describing the designer’s role as the mitigator of entropy, reversing the natural trend for things to move from order to chaos, and a theme he’s exploring at the moment: designing from the content out.

The tone of the day was fun, thoughtful, articulate, and exacting. All the talks were a mix of anecdotal and observational humour, type nerdery, and most of all an overwhelming commitment to excellence in web typography. It was a journey in itself. Decades of experience from plate and press, screen, and web was being distilled into 45-minute presentations. I loved it.

As always, one of the most enjoyable bits for me was the hallway track. I talked to heaps of people both in the pre- and after-party, and in between the talks on the day itself. I heard stories, ideas, and opinions from print designers, web designers, type designers, font developers, and writers. We talked late into the night. We talked more the next day.

Now the talking has paused for a while, my thoughts are manifold. I can honestly say, I’ve never been so filled with positivity about where we are, and where we’re going. Web typography is here, it works, it’s better all the time, and one day web and type designers everywhere will wonder, perplexed, as they try to imagine what the web was like before.

Here’s to another Ampersand next year! I’m now going to see if Rich needs any encouragement to do it again. I’m guessing not, but if he does, I aim to provide it, vigorously. I hope I see you there!

Furthermore

• Rich Rutter back in May on The Ampersand Story
• Eye Magazine: Web typography comes of age at Brighton’s Ampersand conference
• Anthony Stonehouse: Ampersand 2011
• Laura Kalbag: Notes from Ampersand
• Dave Bushell: Ampersand Conference!

Last but not least, did I mention that Rich Rutter, Mark Boulton, and I are writing a book? We are! More on that another time, but until then, follow @webtypography for intermittent updates.

In 2003, my wife Lowri and I went to a christening party. We were friends of the hosts but we knew almost no-one else there. Sitting next to me was a thirty-something woman and her husband, both dressed in the corporate ‘smart casual’ uniform: Jersey, knitwear, and ready-faded jeans for her, formal shoes and tucked-in formal shirt for him (plus the jeans of course; that’s the casual bit). Both appeared polite, neutral, and neat in every respect.

I smiled and said hello, and asked how they knew our hosts. The conversation stalled pretty quickly the way all conversations will when only one participant is engaged. I persevered, asked about their children who they mentioned, trying to be a good friend to our hosts by being friendly to other guests. It must have prompted her to reciprocate. With reluctant interest she asked the default question: ‘What do you do?’ I paused, uncertain for a second. ‘I’m a web designer’ I managed after a bit of nervous confusion at what exactly it was that I did. Her face managed to drop even as she smiled condescendingly. ‘Oh. White backgrounds!’ she replied with a mixture of scorn and delight. I paused. ‘Much of the time’, I nodded with an attempt at a self-deprecating smile, trying to maintain the camaraderie of the occasion. ‘What do you do?’ I asked, curious to see where her dismissal was coming from. ‘I’m the creative director for … agency’ she said smugly, overbearingly confident in the knowledge that she had a trump card, and had played it. The conversation was over.

I’d like to say her reaction didn’t matter to me, but it did. It stung to be regarded so disdainfully by someone who I would naturally have considered a colleague. I thought to try and explain. To mention how I started in print, too. To find out why she had such little respect for web design, but that was me wanting to be understood. I already knew why. Anything I said would sound defensive. She may have been rude, but at least she was honest.

I am a web designer. I neither concentrate on the party venue, food, music, guest list, or entertainment, but on it all. On the feeling people enter with and walk away remembering. That’s my job. It’s probably yours too.

I’m self-actualised, without the stamp of approval from any guild, curriculum authority, or academic institution. I’m web taught. Colleague taught. Empirically taught. Tempered by over fifteen years of failed experiments on late nights with misbehaving browsers. I learnt how to create venues because none existed. I learnt what music to play for the people I wanted at the event, and how to keep them entertained when they arrived. I empathised, failed, re-empathised, and did it again. I make sites that work. That’s my certificate. That’s my validation.

I try, just like you, to imbue my practice with an abiding sense of responsibility for the universality of the Web as Tim Berners-Lee described it. After all, it’s that very universality that’s allowed our profession and the Web to thrive. From the founding of the W3C in 1994, to Mosaic shipping with <img> tag support in 1993, to the Web Standards Project in 1998, and the CSS Zen Garden in 2003, those who care have been instrumental in shaping the Web. Web designers included. In more recent times I look to the web type revolution, driven and curated by both web designers, developers, and the typography community. Again, we’re teaching ourselves. The venues are open to all, and getting more amazing by the day.

Apart from the sites we’ve built, all the best peripheral resources that support our work are made by us. We’ve contributed vast amounts of code to our collective toolkit. We’ve created inspirational conferences like Brooklyn Beta, New Adventures, Web Directions, Build, An Event Apart, dConstruct, and Webstock. As a group, we’ve produced, written-for, and supported forward-thinking magazines like A List Apart, 8 Faces, Smashing Mag, and The Manual. We’ve written the books that distill our knowledge either independently or with publishers from our own community like Five Simple Steps and A Book Apart. We’ve created services and tools like jQuery, Fontdeck, Typekit, Hashgrid, Teuxdeux, and Firebug. That’s just a sample. There’s so many I haven’t mentioned. We did these things. What an extraordinary industry.

I know I flushed with anger and embarrassment that day at the christening party. Afterwards, I started to look a little deeper into what I do. I started to ask what exactly it means to be a web designer. I started to realise how extraordinary our community is. How extraordinary this profession is that we’ve created. How good the work is that we do. How delightful it is when it does work; for audiences, clients, and us. How fantastic it is that I help build the Web. Long may that feeling last. May it never go away. There’s so much still to learn, create, and make. This is my our party. Hi, I’m Jon; my friends and I are making Mapalong, and I’m a web designer.

I’m pleased to be able to say that Analog is joining forces with Fictive Kin! We already work together on Brooklyn Beta and other projects. We share the same ethics and ambitions. We have fun together. We’re good friends, and often old friends, too. They asked, we said yes. We had a beer. That’s pretty much how it went.

The Analog adventure that started in 2009 continues, just bigger, and hopefully better, with more fun, inspiration, and collaboration. I like to think of it like assembling Dai-X from Star Fleet but Voltron may serve if that’s more familiar to you.

It think Cameron came up with the word ‘Anakin’ from our two brands in 2010. It’s been used by us ever since whenever we get together to work or celebrate. It made me smile at the time, and even more so now, just like the echoes of the Analog identity in the lovely new Fictive Kin logo.

If you fancy keeping an eye on what we’re up to, follow @fictivekin. There’s more on the Fictive Kin blog, and in a post by Chris. Thanks for reading. Onwards!

I’ve shot at this location a few times but for some reason I’ve never seen it from the other side. Literal proof that shooting with other creatives gives you new perspective. ???? (at Toronto, Ontario)

BIG NEWS: My custom Lightroom presets are now available and 50% off for a limited time with discount code HOLIDAY50. Link in profile!

This collection includes two styles (Everyday and Clean) that I use to edit every shot on this feed. I can’t wait to see what you all do with them! Stay tuned to my upcoming tutorials on how to put the presets to good use. ???? (at Toronto, Ontario)

Thanks for all the positive support and reception to my Lightroom presets so far, especially to those who pulled the trigger and became my first customers! I’d love to hear your feedback once you try them out!
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Still time to enter the giveaway or to take advantage of the 50% sale! See my last post for full details and the link in my profile. ❤️ (at Toronto, Ontario)