First off, I want to show my support for “Stop Cyberbullying Day”, today, 30 March 2007.

Technorati tag stopcyberbullying

Related to that, two days ago I posted a short “news” item on Digital Web with some of my thoughts on recent instances of the Internet’s “underbelly” rising up to shock the web-standards/blogger community. It took me a good long while to research and write, but I felt compelled to try to find some conclusions from the disparate events. Primarily, I wanted to look at the momentum added by the crappy events to the growing need to shape web-standard design/development into a solidly defined craft. During my research, I had the good fortune to chat with Kerri Hicks—an extremely talented fellow staff member at Digital Web—about the state of the industry. Kerri has a rich background and a very smart perspective about our industry, and its current state of waffling between what’s almost cults-of-personality and a real, defined industry.

The way I see it, we’re at a crossroads. Define it as a true discipline, like its sister industries, or risk leaving behind those of us who do web-standards web design/development in a corporate environment. To my perspective, the industry is led by the freelance/consultancy mentality—that’s the path to the comfort, good work and glory of web-standards. But considering the impact of the sub-group on the acceptance and business momentum for web-standards and progressive web ideas, the ignoring that segment seems dumb. But we do it, to some extent, in conference panel topics, blog posts, even articles in our community publications like Digital Web. How do we better address people on the fringes of web-standards at our conferences, events and in our day-to-day geek interactions?

I’m sure I’ll post more on this as the week and conversation continues.

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I’m far from coining a style, but I want to add a note about my new navigation style you can see just up above this post if you’re not reading this via RSS. I call it “broadsheet”, as an echo of the old “wild west” broadsheet newspapers, which featured hand-built printing equipment and sometimes hand-lettering for the really low-budget papers. I can’t find good examples on the Web—books are better—but some of the hand-detailing is gorgeous and brassy at the same time. I blame “Deadwood” entirely for the increase in my aesthetic fixation with the Wild West. That being said, I’ve always liked it, so maybe it was just gasoline-to-fire.

Since this site is my own toybox, I use these pages to tinker with new CSS effects until I think they’re ready to go into my professional UX work. One effect I have in development is borders on page elements and links, and how they work throughout different interactive states. Browser support for advanced border effects isn’t stellar, but it does graceful degrade down to IE6 and alt stylesheets can cover beyond that in business settings. Based on the accessibility/usability notion that one shouldn’t rely on color alone to convey interactivity, I added border density changes and background-color changes to emphasize each interactive state distinctly.

One of the style goals of “broadsheet” is to mimic old wild-west typeface flourishes, best summed up in Larabee’s typeface “Vanilla Whale”. Top and bottom borders comes pretty close, in my mind. Eventually, I’d love to either get CSS to create the signature diagonal linking words like “&”, but I might also just sIFR select pieces in Larabee’s typeface itself, because I love his work. Lastly on the aesthetic side, I have a “low class” design idea brewing, in response to B-movies and Christopher Fahey’s “class” panel at SXSW. Think of “broadsheet” as the first salvo.

Another goal for “broadsheet” was to pack my navigation elements full of links to things I want referenced/linked/crawled. I didn’t want it to distract too much from the major pieces, so I tried to use size to indicate main components and supplemental information or sub-categories. I tried to visually mark links that open external sites, but also collect them into meaningful groups. The end result is really a “sentence” style, with B-movie, tabloid wording, to boot. Final steps: I need to complete work on my “digital self” page, which is supposed to be an “about me” page, but I’m having trouble writing anything satisfactory, so for now it’s all external links.

Coincidentally around the same time as I started my little project, Jeffrey Zeldman posted about the redesign of Happy Cog, which uses “sentence” navigation. And another friend, Garrett Murray, recently redesigned his blog Maniacal Rage with a similar “sentence”-based style and a killer hover effect. Garrett, in turn, credits Megnut for his design, which also uses ellipses and begins to wrap back to my “broadsheet” derivative.

One happy, segmented circle of people experimenting with navigation.

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For a number of years, I’ve been a big fan of the idea of the SXSW (South by Southwest) Music Festival. As a world-class, indie music event throwing down each year—like your Sundance festival, mom—it takes the gumption of both Seattle’s own Bumbershoot music weekend and San Diego’s Street Scene, plus probably a few others, and combine them into one Super-Festival. But, being far away in Seattle, I have yet to attend. Only in the last year did I become aware of the two sibling festivals that occur just before SXSW Music, SXSW Interactive and SXSW Film.

In the middle of March of last year (2006), suddenly the blogs of most professional web designers, web developers and geeks were awash in breathless reviews of SXSW Interactive (hereafter SXSWi), enthusiasm and a “see ya next year” summer camp vibe. I didn’t really see the connection or over-aching theme, so I chalked it up to general geekiness and self-reference among blogs I read, and went on my merry feed-reading away.

This year, I had the great good fortune, due to my role as Prod Mgr with Digital Web Magazine, to attend the pre-meetup to SXSWi, Web Directions North (hereafter WDN; everybody loves acronyms—you do, don’t lie). WDN was absolutely fantastic, and truly a top-notch event in its own right. Two days of fabulous event organization, high-quality panels, meeting talented web geeks and lots of Wii, beer, food and fun. Add in two more days of geekery on the slopes of Whistler/Blackcomb—with Microsoft generously covering the bar tab in a real, hearty, beer-fueled embrace of the web-standards community—and I really can’t think of a more enjoyable career-related thing I’ve ever done. Or, even, if you count it among my vacations.

After WDN, my Dig-Web boss, Nick Finck, started pestering me about “Southby”, as it is called by some indeterminate number of geeks too lazy to say the whole name. After a sprint session to find out if my day job would cover any of it, I ended up taking vacation days to attend. (I hope it’s not a trend, but I’ll still do it every year if need be.) Blue Flavor kindly loaned bed space, and I moseyed into Austin, TX, with a set of quasi-ironic authentic cowboy boots…and absolutely NO idea of what would come.

I’m not going to review individual panels and events, since the are so thoroughly covered by just about every other blog I read. But I would like to comment on the character and quality of geeks at SXSWi. I’ve never met such a warm, engaging, outgoing group, and I’m thrilled to call them my peers. Every individual I met was sincere, eager to geek-out about any kind of topic, and genuinely stoked to be at SXSWi. I met more people than I could list (or spell), including most of the talented geeks who write the books, blogs and articles that get my through my day job. I tried my best to express my thanks as the festivities closed, but undoubtedly I missed a few hundred. To all—you goddamn rock, “see ya next year”.

The reason I wanted to comment comes from an observation, then a discussion I had with the ardent Jeremy Keith. I’m still taken aback by the number of people I met who blow apart the mold that geeks are introverted and flawed, socially. Most people I met were so strong of character, personality and elan* it was genuinely surprising. Which leaves me to wonder why. What is it about the public-facing side of the Web that attracts such a diverse group of people, with such similar senses of humor, geekery, passions and personality quirks? Sure, creative types are often strong on opinion, and even front-end programming has a strong creative element. And geeks are compelled by an internal need to join any nearby geekery, which is where SXSWi gets its heart.

But I wonder if we are shaped in personality by the inanity of the browser-wars? Slogging through W3C specs? Internalizing the cascading nature of CSS? Tabled designs, and the latter purging of? I don’t think blogs are the commonality—those also seem to me to be symptomatic of a similar strain in personalities, rather than the spark. I’m sure I’ll continue to think more on the matter, as the year continues. But, the net effect is SXSWi was such a massive confidence booster to me, as a person, as a geek and as a career woman, that I will always be grateful. I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out awe-inspiring conversations with Nick Finck, Andy Budd, Dan Rubin, Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone and Bokardo, aka Joshua Porter. All those gentlemen took moments out of their socializing to have frank discussions with me about the nature of this industry, and I’m proud take their advice to heart.

So, until next year, I will see you all online, and continually lament I don’t get to see you all in person nearly as often as I like. Which would be daily. really.

* arch-nemesis, look it up.

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Over the last few years, an increasing number of friends scattered across a variety of industries mentioned that their employers discouraged—even persecuted—anything interpreted as job searching. One company (which many could guess if you know me but a little) even went so far as to demand employees take down long-running LinkedIn and Monster profiles, and ordered managers to stop giving—and even take down—endorsements or recommendations for employees.

Now, I think removing Monster profiles was probably a good thing—that job board has been spammed and mobbed into a C- or D-grade resource for anyone who works with a computer. “Cook Looking For Something Different in Computers”, indeed. But the anecdote repetition got me thinking about the ethics involved in these company’s tactics,hubristic as they are. Persecuting employees for perceived job searching activity is unethical. On company time, I can’t fault HR for the completely deluded notion that employes devote every minute of their time at work to the company’s bottom line. Ideally, that should be a hallmark of the professionalism and respect employees bring to a good, self-respecting job. But confronting employees about their out-of-work activities on career-related websites due to assumptions about job searching is wrong—wholly and with very, very few shades of grey.

As awareness of digital identities increases, employers are learning that the internet is a great way to research candidates for the stains bleached out of résumés. Awareness is only growing; the media love a good tech feature about college-fresh job candidates dropped from consideration due to the archive of their college bong-huffing, hazing, sub-human, foul-mouthed behavior on MySpace. As an infrequent hiring manager, I can see the appeal. But modern HR teams have yet to really describe (to me, at least) how googling a candidate’s past differs from asking questions that bring out potentially discriminatory information. You can’t ask a candidate, “what are your late-night hobbies”, but you can google it. Someone want to clarify where the line is?

Employees, on the other hand, are just as quick as HR teams to realize the trouble spot of questionable digital wake. As a result, we get an ever-increasing collection of websites and services catering to digital “self” management, like Naymz, ClaimID, Jobster and others. But beyond denying the fact you are a real flesh-and-blood-and-stupidity human being, employees quickly learn that managing their digital self also helps position themselves in their field. Search results concerning “’Tiff Fehr’ [vilified drug of choice]” might be of interest to future employers, but the results for “’Tiff Fehr’ web developer” is equally helpful to me. Most job boards these days not only address job opportunities, but also hit up identity management and networking. Any employee worth their salt sees the importance of the latter two. Passive, exploratory job searching is just another research angle. It’s in your careerist interest to keep tabs on shifting job roles, pay scales, team composition and education backgrounds.

To me, this is where it gets muddy—it’s okay for HR to do or hire out “compensation analyses” and “hierarchy level implementations” that affect your skills, position and pay, but it’s not okay for you to keep tabs on tools that help your career research (or at least get caught near them). I’m studying Ajax and DOM scripting because it showed up on peer resumes, education backgrounds, and, most importantly, job descriptions for companies and projects in which I want to be involved. No HR person made that benevolent recommendation to me, and none have ever expressed that level of interest in what I do, even if they hired me.

Passive job searching via RSS—or, hell, actively at the sites themselves—is now so intertwined with being aware of your industry and career that it’s laughable to think it can be quashed with questionably ethical company policy. Any company that does so should be regarded with skepticism, if not a bit of contempt for purely reactive policies. Which encourages job searching. And, in the immortal words of Tevin Campbell (á la Prince), we go ’round and ’round and ’round.

“Can you tell me where we goin’ to?
Can you tell me what it is
We really wanna find?
Is the truth really there?
Or is it right under our hair?
For all we know it’s been there all the time.

I say, nothin’ comes from dreamers but dreams.
I say, sittin at night all in our bowl (TF - ?!)
While everyone else is down the street.
Nothin’ comes from talkers but sound (oh yeah).
We can talk all we want to
But the world still goes around and round.

Round and Round.(Ooh hoo)
We go round and round and round
And what we’re lookin’ for still isn’t found.”

Goddamnit all to hell, now that’s stuck in my head.

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