State of the Word 2011

Last Sunday Matt delivered his yearly State of the Word presentation at WordCamp San Francisco. It’s a real humdinger, and they’ve even cut in the slides throughout for the full experience. You can catch a video of the presentation over on WordPress.tv, or here:

Vintage record covers, revisted

I worked (remotely this year) with Matt and fellow exile of the British isles Pete Davies on shaping up the narrative flow of the presentation and then experimenting with ways to visually represent it. Much fun was had. This year Matt decided it would be cool to revisit the vintage jazz LP cover theme for the slide design, so I went about picking out some covers to adapt to our purposes. I stuck mostly with jazz labels, as with last year’s Blue Note theme, but strayed occasionally into other genres where the temptation was too great not to. All of the designs fall somewhere within a decade or two of mid-century modern, arguably the golden age of jazz LP cover design.

Full Gallery

If you’re interested in seeing all of the slides in full-sized glory, I’ve uploaded them to a separate gallery page. Bear in mind that they were created at high speed, and were meant to be viewed that way, so you may find the odd kerntastrophe or grid insurrection (although hopefully not).

Inspiration

The idea was to allude to classic (mostly) jazz album covers, adapting them somewhat to suit the different aspect ratio of the Keynote slides and the considerably different usage. Here’s a slideshow of the source covers that I worked form. You can also check it out slightly larger images on the SOTW 2011 inspiration gallery page.

Huge shout outs to  Project Thirty-Three,Vintage Vanguard, and Cover Jazz for lovingly gathering hundreds of great cover designs together for me to ruthlessly plunder.

Likewise, to Christina Warren’s WordPress UI history on Mashable.

Process

Once we’d settled on the idea of revisiting the vintage jazz LP theme I had about two weeks to source, template up and populate the slides. Within the two weeks the presentation was being adapted and updated daily, up until the day itself. As is quite usual with any presentation, we cut, changed and even started over on around half of the 100+ slides about a couple of days before Matt was due to go on stage, so as I mentioned above, these were put together at high speed.

I made pretty much everything in Photoshop, with a bit of Illustrator and After Effects on the side. All of the slides were remade from scratch (no scans or clips from the original sources) with the exception of the image from the Jazzville cover and the central looped arrows of the Innovation loop slide, above. This mostly involved lots of vector tweaking, textures and layers-within-layers, tucked inside smart objects.

I’d love to have done everything in Keynote, but alas it still doesn’t support blending modes, which was a pretty much essential part of the process here, especially where dealing with vintage textures and the kind of overlays and colour blends so prevalent in this type of design. The downside of this is that tweaking a slide can be somewhat more longwinded when it involves finding, opening and navigating a multi-layered photoshop file per slide, rather than clicking on some text and quickly changing it in Keynote. The upside, I hope, is that the results aren’t really something you can really get with Keynote alone.

Challenges

The main challenges, beyond the tight deadline and iterative updates to the content throughout, were essentially:

• Adapting square-format LP covers to 4:3 layouts, which meant either significantly adapting the whitespace and design elements, or taking liberties with typography and layout
• Trying to do a fair job of staying true to the essence, if not the exact decisions, made typographically and visually in the original covers and estimating which typefaces were used in each case. With a month to research it, I could probably have done a better job here, but think I did okay given the approximate hour-per-slide timing and hopefully there aren’t too many typographic blunders scattered throughout. I’m putting the larger deviations down to the first point – adapting to the more vertically squat and horizontally spacious aspect ratio of the slide format
• Working from pretty small, far from original-sized screenshots of the album covers often meant that high speed creative liberties needed to be taken, as enlarging the originals for a better look at the details led only to pixelmush.

The most important thing was that the slides didn’t just reflect Matt’s rabid love of jazz, which works it’s way into a lot of the messaging and storytelling in and around WordPress releases, but also supported the key themes and narrative of the presentation. This year the focus was on the emergent, ever evolving, open conversation between WordPress users, core developers and the larger community of plugin and theme developers pushing the platform in new directions.

Keeping things simple (and apparently open source), the NoteSlate folks throw out the ability to surf the web, listen to your tunes, and everything else in favour of doing one thing and doing it well. I actually find that appealing, its tantamount to the WriteRoom, iA Writer, or (closest) 37S Draft way of doing things.

And while ostensibly it’s the bastard love child of an Etch-a-sketch, Kindle and legal pad, there’s something Teenage Engineering-esque about the industrial design — minimal, spare, functional, but in that understated Dieter Ramsian way. It actually makes my iPad look a bit chubby and oldschool, while at the same time triggering latent memories of whiteboards, blackboards and the simple tactile pleasures of paper.

Admittedly, I’m one of those people from the alternate dimension where people use tablet pcs – there’s something entirely different about interfacing with ideas with a pen rather than through a mouse, finger or trackpad, at least at the ideas stage. I use a Thinkpad x201 tablet for a laptop, have a Cintiq 21 for my desktop/mac, and read and watch a bunch of stuff on my iPad, but NoteSlate falls into a different niche for me and will likely appeal to people that aren’t compulsive about this stuff.

Great as iPad is for consuming content, I’ve never really found drawing (let alone writing) with my finger an optimal experience. The sausage stylus suggests I’m not alone. On the other hand, lightweight as it is for a laptop, my ThinkPad is no featherweight, and just getting to my notes means delving into the distractions and processing cycles of a full OS (Windoze, no less).

I could see NoteSlate being used by designers, in schools and colleges, even by waiting staff, or as a little blackboard next to the fridge, for reminders about milk running low. At $99 that’s pretty feasible.

They’re bringing it out in a bunch of mono-colours (with a 4-colour version to follow), and selling it directly from the site. I’m quite partial to the black on white, white on black and green on black, but wouldn’t sniff at any of the offerings.

Looks like it will drop in June of this year, and pending this being some cruel joke/student prototype I’m grabbing one. Or a couple.

Aside: nobody paid me to gush this much, this just looks like something I’ve been waiting on for a long while, so hopefully it doesn’t have some massive sucky drawback/user experience gotcha

Everything & Nothing.

First impression – badly paraphrasing Sartre?

Google to the rescue, in spite of having the book on my shelf. It was, of course, the title of a short piece by Borges – at one time a favourite of mine – on the mercurial, multifaceted nature of Shakespeare, but with a sly wink at us, the reader. A beautifully written meditation on the self, fantasy, the tale of tales. You know, Borges.

Snip:

THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one…

Someone has kindly posted it in full online, but if Borges is your cup of tea, he reads more comfortably when removed from the lemon yellow confines of the proto-web, nestled among friends.

All of the presentations are being streamed live on Ustream.tv, so you can see them there if you’d like (or catch the recorded versions later). I should think we’ll also be adding presentation videos to WordPress.tv in the coming weeks.

I’ve also put up some additional resources from my presentation on Assaulting Indifference, which focuses mainly on using design thinking, storytelling and visual communication as tools to grab interest and attention for your blog, business, or whatever else you’re putting out into the world.

You can check out links for content and creators discussed in the presentation, along with a slideshow and gallery of the slide designs here. As always, your feedback is very welcome.

I’ve added a gallery of the slides in case you like to get up close and personal.

My slide designs for the presentation were heavily inspired by some classic Blue Note record sleeves. The thinking here was to bring out the WordPress/Jazz connection emphasized in the presentation narrative, and create a set of slides that reflected Matt’s shared passion for both. We were working with a very tight timeframe, so you might notice variations on a theme in several of the slides. All of the main slides are based on a template system I put together to speed things along and create variety within the limitations of the time available.

And if you’d rather go straight to the source, check out Vintage Vanguard where a huge number of amazing vintage Blue Note covers have been gathered into four galleries.

You can also see the full presentation (with the slides cut in to the video) over on WordPress.tv, or here:

I’d like to touch more on this at a later point, but in the meantime I’d welcome any feedback.

Beau

Niall

Ryan M

Noriyko

Terry

Rose

Raanan

Being surrounded by all these photogenic people makes me glad I’m usually on the other side of a camera

For the photogeeks, I shot all of these with a 5D Mark II and my Canon 85mm F1.2L (wide open, bokeh-whore that I am).

Update: I’ll be posting these again at blog-optimized sizes. In the meantime click on the pics to see them in their fully saturated glory (seems like the auto-resized version have suffered a saturation/contrast hit)

I’ve been a bit quiet here for some time, but behind the scenes, this is the pet project I’ve been working on, with the talented folks at Automattic (Noel Jackson rocking the house with design and implementation and some very late nights, Jane Wells helping to make things more user-focused, MT lending a watchful art-director eye, and Matt performing chief BBQ testing duties).

I joined Automattic back in August 2008, and it’s insane how fast the time has gone. But announcement videos and the hundred plus tutorials I’ve put together aside, WordPress.tv is kind of why I’m here, my raison d’etre at camp WordPress/Automattic. So this is a great day for me.

There’s a long way to go – like all WordPress projects WordPress.tv has been built with the philosophy that it’s better to get it out there and shape things up as we go than try to unleash perfection on day one. So at the moment you’ll find a whole lot of tutorials, but might not see the one you’re looking for. Ditto with WordCamp presentations.

That’s where you come in – if you have requests, ideas or know of WordCamp videos we’ve missed, screencasts or video tutorials that would feel at home on WordPress.tv, let me know via the WordPress.tv blog contact form, or even the spanking new WordPress.tv twitter account. I’ll be posting the latest releases there, too, alongside the WordPress.tv blog.

Hope to see you there – until then, enjoy the show!

I’ve been using 2.7 in it’s various builds for quite a while now, and assure you that if the huge change in UI initially shocks or confounds you, it won’t for long. Having been going back and forth to 2.6 for a few weeks, it gradually became harder and harder to give up the easy navigation, mighty pretty looks and new features that 2.7 has ushered in. Luckily, I won’t need to do that any more.

Thanks to the WordPress community, awesome developers and the good folks of Automattic (who really are an awesome bunch of people), it’s turned out to be a real beauty IMHO.

Hope you enjoy. Here’s the video I put together for the .org release. Most of what you see here applies to .com, but for the plugins and upgrades stuff.

For a full breakdown on what’s new check out Jane’s .com post, or Matt’s .org version.

Now, back to the zillion video tutorials you’ll be seeing around the place very, very soon