Eryan Cobham

People on the web like to criticize and insult others. That’s a pretty obvious statement, but I might not mean who you think I mean. I’m not referring to the usual anonymous discussion thread or bulletin board trolls. I mean that the people who go to work every day actually building the web like to criticize and insult each other. I’m also not referring to legitimate constructive criticism–you know, the type that offers helpful suggestions about how to improve something. No, people that build the web just like to call each other idiots a lot. You’ve probably done it too and not thought much about it. Maybe you’ve had to work on a redesign for a site where it seemed like it was the first site previous designer/developer had ever worked on. “What kind of person still used tables in 2006? He/she obviously had no idea what they were doing and doesn’t deserve to even have an email address, much less make websites.” It’s almost second-nature, many of us care pretty deeply about what we do and we hate to see someone else do it poorly. Not only because it reflect badly on everyone else, but also because we’re generally nerds that like to see things done “the right way” (whatever that means to you).

I had been thinking about this phenomenon a while ago, early last year sometime, when I noticed the disproportionate contempt I had for some websites. I’d go through sites picking at all of the little errors that I noticed, wondering how they slipped through, and thinking about how of course I’d be able to do a much better job. Then I started getting a lot busier and started looking at some of the stuff I was putting out, and wondering what the next person that has to work on the site I just finished going to say about me? Yeah, there may be some things I couldn’t quite smooth out before the deadline to launch the site came up, but I had reasons! My successor has to take into account the time it took for the client to respond, or their irrational color preference I couldn’t budge, or their requirement that I everything be crammed onto the home page with terrible copy and spacing!

Actually, no. Your successor won’t take that into account, the same way you didn’t take it into account when looking at someone else’s work.

What made me think of all of this was this little controversy in the web design community due to a blog post by Andy Rutledge critiquing the design of news websites and using the New York Times, specifically, as an example. I definitely respect Andy as a designer and for the many posts he writes explaining some of the things that designers should be doing. I read that post and thought some of his ideas were pretty good. While they certainly wouldn’t completely work for the Times, maybe some news organizations would be able to implement some aspects and make reading news on the web a better experience. I’m not a fan of his outspoken, and in my opinion somewhat combative and inflammatory style, but I can usually get past that stuff to focus on the helpful parts. After reading the post, I didn’t think about it too much, until I saw this blog post by Khoi Vinh that seemed to refer to Rutledge’s post. Vinh is a former design director for the Times, so he and a lot of his friends and former coworkers built the site.

Vinh praises some of the ideas and the execution of the blog post, but he makes a critical point at the end that I found most important.

I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it
helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even
though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay
attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.

Basically (in not so many words) you can disagree without being disagreeable.

Apparently Rutledge has been receiving a lot of criticism for his redesign, and he wrote another post addressing such criticism, once again written in the same tone. I read some of the articles which he linked to. Most certainly didn’t fully get across what he was trying to do with his analysis, but I didn’t think they were quite as bad as he seems to think (this seems natural, since they weren’t attacking me personally). However, when people (including employees of the Times) took to twitter, blog posts and news articles to attack Rutledge, I don’t know if they were responding to his points so much as they were responding to his tone and some of the content around his points. From the first paragraph of his post, he basically primes people to start coming up with an a response.

Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in
place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what
passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

Maybe he was trying to draw attention to the post, or maybe that’s just how he feels, nobody knows but him. Either way, this brings me back to my original point. People don’t seem to consider (or care) that there are actual people on the other side of the screen. As the worker bees trying to grow the Internet every day, you would think that we’d would be much more cognizant of this on a daily basis, but it doesn’t seem that way.

This isn’t about not hurting people’s feelings. That has to happen and can’t be avoided. Any kind of criticism hurts, even the constructive kind. But at least constructive criticism shows you a path to improving, so that’s what you latch on to, and you grow and get better. But if you go to work every day, trying to improve nytimes.com, what kind of lesson can you really take from someone saying “[i]t is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity”?

I think that kind of language immediately obscures the point you were trying to make and potentially forecloses the possibility of a reasonable debate about the issues. It makes it easy to argue and difficult to learn anything when you just think the person you’re arguing against is stupid and wrong. All I’m really trying to say is that I hope in the future we all think a bit more about who did the hard work to create the thing that we’re so casually insulting. I happen to think that’s a better way of operating. I intend to do my part here and on Twitter to make what I say more productive, and closer to something I would actually want to spend time reading. Hopefully others do too.

White celebrities move in a space of white privilege that allows for both forgiveness and forgetfulness on behalf of the ever-present mainstream media machine. This is a space that Black artists are shut out of. As racial identity continues to be negotiated through images and representations, Black celebrities continue to be subjected to the deeply embedded archetypes and stereotypes of Blacks in this country. Read: Chris Brown as the “angry black juvenile delinquent” and Janet Jackson as the “hyper-sexualized, overly promiscuous black female.”

- Leigh Davenport, writing for News One

I’m a little torn about this article, which you should go and read first. On one hand, I definitely agree with her larger point—that black celebrities can be subject to very different standards than white celebrities. On the other hand, this seems to be a particularly bad situation to use as an example of such differences.

Google released a new project into the wild a couple of days ago, it’s called Google Buzz and in the announcement, they describe it as “ a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting,” and that’s essentially what it is. You can write a buzz about whatever is on your mind and your friends and family and whoever you’re connected to can see it and comment on it. There’s plenty of talk about them trying to compete with Twitter and Facebook, but that’s not really my point here. It’s an interesting service, but the problem with it is that the default setting of all of these updates and comments is to be Public. This has some potentially scary privacy implications that make it very problematic, since at some point it’s going to be automatically enabled in every gmail account. Google has tried to address some of those concerns, but I have my doubts about whether they’ll succeed.

For those of you that don’t know, for the past six months I’ve been working on getting back into doing web design and development/programming (which I did before law school) and get a portfolio together. I started this journey by working on my very own wedding website in the middle of last year. Then, I was introduced to a couple of non-profit organizations that needed new websites, which I agreed to work on for free as favors to friends. One of those organizations seems to have lost interest, but the other project is moving along, which should give me something to announce in another month or two. Around the same time, I also signed up to volunteer for The Taproot Foundation and through them ended up working on another website redesign project for Mujeres Latinas en Acción, a Chicago non-profit. That project just recently wrapped up (the new website should be launched by the end of January). Along the way I also managed to pick up another client, The South Side Housing Digest and launched their site last week. Keep an eye out for it, as we add more features and expand some of the sections, especially if you’re thinking about living in Chicago.

These six months have culminated with me finally launching my own company website, Cobwebs Consulting LLC. I decided that the three things I want to work on are web design, technology consulting, and technology project management. Web design is pretty self-explanatory, I’ve always enjoyed well-designed sites and want to bring as many more into existence as I can. I’m not just talking about sites that look pretty though, I’m talking about sites that people actually enjoy (or at least don’t hate) using and that help accomplish some purpose for the owners. Those two things should never be in conflict. My interest in technology consulting arose because it seems like a lot of business really have no idea what they should be doing on the internet. They wonder if they need a facebook page, a twitter page, or an iphone app. They don’t know how to put their inventory online and take orders, or whether to build an intranet, or how make sure that their employees all have access to the information they need to do their jobs efficiently. I’d like to be the person that helps them figure out these issues. Project management seems to me like the next logical step after giving the consulting advice. The organization may have a plan of what they want to do, but they’re good at running the organization, not necessarily in choosing the right vendors and make sure the vendors are doing the job to the proper specifications. I can be the person that watches over the project to make sure it progresses properly.

So as of now, I’m fully open for business and looking for new (paying!) projects. If you have know of anybody that needs a website, please give them my info or send them to my website or my Sortfolio profile.

I guess around this time of year everybody is required to do a post looking back at the year that’s ending and forward to what’s to come, right? So here’s mine.

My retrospective kind of starts in 2008. I decided pretty early on in that year what my plans for ’08 and ’09 were going to be. I wanted ‘08 to be the year when I created some kind of foundation for myself, kind of like a starting point. So I saved up for an engagement ring, proposed to my girlfriend and started saving money like a madman so I could have some more flexibility in my choices. I basically transferred any money that was in my checking account the day before payday into savings, every time. I wanted ‘09 to be a year when I started doing the things I wanted to do.

It seems like the general consensus is that 2009 was a fairly shitty year. With the economy like this, that’s no surprise. Things just didn’t turn out the way people intended or would have liked. This is one of the few years I haven’t shared that same sentiment. I lost a few people this year—a couple uncles and an aunt—but for the most part, 2009 ended up being pretty close to what I wanted out of it. It was full of some fairly major transitions, from beginning to end.

First off, my nephew ended up being born on the day before my birthday. Obviously starting fatherhood was a much bigger transition for my brother than for me, but I think it still counts. The next big thing was no longer working at the law firm. It feels a little weird not to be practicing after 3 years of school, 2 years clerking, and another almost 2 years at the firm. Law school and everything that followed took up the majority of this decade for me, but I think I’m happier now than I’ve been at any point since 2002, despite the uncertainty. Somewhat related was taking the next step of filing the paperwork to start my own business. I managed to realize what I actually enjoyed doing, and start figuring out a way to make a living doing it.

Lastly (and most importantly) I got married. This easily could have been something I said a year ago, because I was ready to marry her on the day I proposed. Most of this year was just leading up to October 3rd. All that planning culminated in one, really fast, day. I don’t think there’s any other time that I’ve been able to have that many friends and family all in one place, and it was even better than I had hoped. The pictures don’t do it justice, so I wish it wasn’t as much of a blur in my mind. I’ll still be savoring it for a long time though, and enjoying the married life.

If ‘08 was me getting my foundation in order to prepare for ‘09, and ‘09 was mostly a transitional year, then I’d like 2010 to be the year that I build on the things I started in ‘09. There may be a few transitions, but nothing close to the level of upheaval in ‘09. So far, I’ve identified 3 areas that I want to work on. The first area is design, something I never paid much attention to. I knew some posters/websites/objects were appealing, but I didn’t think about why things were placed a certain way. This past year I started paying attention. I starting following more designers that I can learn a lot from, and also asking more questions to my brother when I need help. In 2010 I design as much as I can.

The second area is music. I’ve wanted to learn how to play the saxophone since high school. During the summer of 2003 I briefly had both the money and the time to rent an alto sax and pay for lessons, but I couldn’t keep it up. Now, thanks to my lovely wife, I have my very own tenor to practice with, and I intend to work at it throughout the year. So regular practice is my goal.

The third area is photography. I don’t necessarily want to take more pictures, but I definitely want to take better pictures, and that will certainly involve taking more pictures. I want to bring my camera with me to more places and be less nervous about taking pictures when I do. I’ve enjoyed photography since my undergrad Intro B&W class, and that interest exploded once my wife (then girlfriend) got me a wonderful present a few years ago. For the past few years I haven’t been in many pictures because I’m always the one taking them. I haven’t taken photography as seriously since that class though. I haven’t thought about the composition, the lighting, and learned how to really use my cameras. Next year I take more more photos and better photos.

Obviously this list doesn’t include a bunch of other things I plan on doing in the next 12 months—getting and staying in better shape, improving as a husband/son/brother/uncle/friend/person, continuing to get my business going, etc. I’m leaving those out because those are pretty much constants. I’ve always been trying to work on those areas, and hopefully I always will.

It’s amazing to see what can happen in a year, and I can’t wait to see where I’m at in another 365 days. I hope 2010 is good to all my friends and family members, as well as yours.

Happy New Year.