When Jeff and I chatted, we talked about his project at Sherbrook, his recent speaking gig at TEDx in Saskatoon, and his life in art.

A: Tell me about your job at Sherbrooke.
J: I don’t like the term Artist in Residence because it implies that it’s someone doing their own work, like a monkey performing at a zoo. When the project originally started, Saskatoon was named the cultural capital of Canada, the Saskatchewan Arts Board had created a program called Artists in the Communities.

Whenever I tackle something, I want to go big. I want to make it a huge success. I saw the potential in health care, and my fundamental belief is that we are ALL ARTISTS. I really believe that. It’s something that we can all communicate if we let ourselves. And I knew that individuals with limited mobility—with a cognitive disorder, dementia, Alzheimer’s—were going to make incredible sh*t, like, blow-you-away stuff.

A: Did they initially bring you in to be an art instructor?
J: They didn’t have a clue. I showed up and asked, “Where’s the studio?” and they said, “What’s a studio?”

Within the 9-month residency, we went from “What’s a studio?” to having that incredible show at the Mendel—which took everything to the next level, because nobody believed it could be that big. And that exhibition, for me, was a wake-up call to health care: Let’s stop treating residents as infants. We don’t need craft rooms anymore. Let’s raise that bar, let’s push the art, let’s see how far we can go.

A: So what does an Artist in Residence do?
J: I’d like to change the name. I spend a lot of my time building partnerships. I want to see community organizations come together. I want to see partnerships happen with local businesses….it’s about what everybody can bring to the table, and perhaps bringing together groups that you would not normally think had anything in common.

I believe there has to be a revolution. There’s got to be a revolution in health care, there’s got to be a revolution in our education system, the art institution needs a revolution. Things have to change.

A lot of what I do at Sherbrook is go out into the community, working with at-risk youth, with high schools, elementary schools…where we’ve got students coming through the studio, where the studio becomes a playground, where you learn skills and you build confidence and you’re able to express yourself visually.

I work with groups of people that feel at a dead end, that didn’t know what else to do. They come into the studio, we work with them, they learn a skill set by working with the resident artist….and then they’re able to move on, they are off medications, they have jobs, they’ve moved out of social housing and have their own apartments, have boyfriends and girlfriends.

The studio is that powerful tool, a powerful place where things can happen. That’s why I’m steadfast in protecting the integrity of the studio and the rules: there are no mistakes, and we never want to create for somebody else.

So if you come in there, you might be very self-conscious [but] you work through that self-consciousness and know that the marks that you make are just as valid as the marks that I make. The point is, that it is your mark and you are the only one who can make it.

A: What are some things you’ve learned while working there?
J: It’s not just about making great paintings—this is what I got to learn in this whole process—I just wanted to see great art made. That’s all I wanted to see. What I learned was that art was the vehicle for change.

It was like, how can I shake all of that up? I want to shake up everybody and let them know how important art can be and that there are people are sitting on the margins of society, who nobody knows exist ’cause they are safely tucked away in their long-term care homes. Who cares, right? We wanted to bring these people into the spotlight and showcase their art and blow everybody’s socks off. And that happened.

I watched the confidence of people who were once contemplating suicide move on to “I can do things again,” “I can teach,” and “I can have a relationship.”
Through something as simple as the art studio, there is this confidence—by being able to create something—that’s huge. That’s fundamental, and—now able to share this creation and to give—that’s human. As soon as we aren’t able to give, I think we lose something. When you become institutionalized, it means somebody else is doing things for you. When you are in long-term care, specifically, that’s a lifetime of people doing things for you. So flip it around, and now you’re able to do something.

A: There’s always someone you can help.
J: It’s not my studio, it’s their studio. I just work there. The studio is an environment where it is safe, you are encouraged to express yourself. Once you did your mark it is about how can make a better mark. It took a lot of your energy to make that one mark, so how can you do ten, or twenty. I’m kind of a coach, a cheerleader.

I don’t like seeing how art has separated itself from the real world. Life is art and art is life. There shouldn’t be any separation. It sounds naïve, but I think it is that simple.

A: You talk about standardized creativity. Can you elaborate on that a bit more?
J: It is the most heartbreaking thing to see. I’ll tell you a story, and I’d like you to point out where the creativity is. This takes place in a long-term care home with an art program. One of the recreation staff members has a ship-building kit and assembles a group of residents around the table. I don’t know if you have seen one of those out-of-the-box, ship-building kits but the instructions are intense and there are tons of very small parts.

What’s wrong with this picture? Who will put the ship together? The rec staff. What have we turned this into? Something that could have been, should have been, a creative act—a creative moment, a moment of expression—has now become a spectator sport.

Standardized creativity begins when we start looking to others to tell us how to do things.

A: You said you were a ditch digger.
J: I am a ditch digger. I’m a pathfinder. I’m not going to teach you how to paint trees the way I paint trees—that’s my way. What I’m going to do is help you dig down to wherever you buried your creativity and help you pull that out.

A: Give us an idea of the setup you have a Sherbrook.
J: It’s like walking into a room where a paint bomb went off. It is a place unlike anywhere else in a long-term care facility. It is loaded from top to bottom, it is cluttered, it is chaos. And it is gorgeous, ’cause as soon as you get into the room, it changes. Your mood changes. When you walk in, you can start breathing.

A: Tell me about TEDx. Your talk was one of the many highlights, some say the TED Talk of the day. Were you a TED fan before?
J: I was. I knew what TED was but I didn’t know the rules. Just that there were these incredible ideas and talks. I like the storyteller aspect, because I think that was what I saw from TED, that…it’s not about dumbing down, it’s about being a good storyteller, being able to express yourself.

I wanted to talk about health care because we will all come in contact with health care at some point in our lives. And that’s a scary place for a lot of people. Let’s face it, if you are going in for cancer treatment, it’s not exactly a fun place to be. But if we can introduce something that will make your stay better…if you are able to create, to express yourself, that’s important. And if it’s diversionary, if that’s all that it is, fine—if it keeps your mind off having that chemo IV stuck in you. Rock on.

A: How is the whole reception of the Ted Talk?
J: You know, it was like this huge orgasm and then it was done. The whole day, the response was great. As an artist you just hide away in your studio but sometimes you just want to get out there and talk. The greatest minds weren’t necessarily on the stage. I mean, that was a roomful of people who are like-minded individuals.

A: Give me a bit of your history as an artist.
J: I’ve always been an artist. My very first art class in University, I had the realization—19 years or however old I was—that I will always be a student of art. I just took it seriously and hit a level of success very young. I had dealers and collectors at a very young age and was selling my work quickly, and I was getting shows in New York and Chicago.

I just began my practice and never looked back. I worked hard. I would have jobs when I lived in Calgary, I was starting a job at 5am as a groundkeeper at Mount Royal College picking cigarette butts up. Just so I had some money to pay for my studio downtown. I put in eight hours there and then another eight at my studio. I was cranking out work and I had discipline, and that discipline paid off. I had faith in myself, some luck, and produced a body of work. I was very fortunate. And the career just sort of took off. What’s interesting is I was so prolific I was doing five solo shows a year and twenty group shows a year. That’s huge, like, that is absolutely huge.

I was just constantly producing and I loved that. But it turned to a grind, and the more successful I became the less rewarding it was. So my prices would go up or I’d have another show, or this critic wrote about it or that collector bought it or this gallery was showing it, and it started to become hollow. I was living in Toronto and…I was feeling empty. I needed to walk away for a bit.

I moved to Saskatoon. I was actually in Saskatoon when I made the decision. It was a really tough thing to do, because you spend a lifetime building a career. I found out very quickly that it’s called a spotlight, not a searchlight, for a reason. When you step out of the spotlight you are done.

So now I am reintegrating myself into the art world. But I am making my own choices about how I want to do it. I’m not hungry to please, I do my work how I want it done, and if you feel you can show it, then we can have a relationship—but I don’t need to do things to impress you.

A: So, what’s next for Jeff?
J: The new work is incredible. I’m working with spray paint and stencils. I’m returning to my roots. It was in Regina in the early ’80s and lot of graffiti culture was making it’s way up through films and music, and there was a group of us that just started expressing ourselves that way, emulating what we saw. We were dumb because we would spray our names. My last name is Nachtigall, there are about three Nachtigalls in Regina and we are all related. I got caught. Now I combine found and salvaged materials with images depicting obvious Canadian stereotypes… they’re big and ugly and fun.

Now I’m working with the City of Saskatoon, specifically the Saskatoon Police Service, and also with the Anti-Graffiti Unit to come up with programmable space—we need some free walls in the city. You would be surprised at how much money is spent on the grey paint they use to cover tags. And, we need to educate people about the difference between gang tagging and Street Art.

In early 2011 I partnered with a local artist and opened up a project space in the Riversdale district in downtown Saskatoon. Make Work Projects is a  2000 square foot store front studio and sometimes gallery/think tank/ residency/ arts incubator. Follow us on Twitter @makeworkproject for updates.

A: Who better than you to do this?
J: Art needs an advocate. The best way to do it is not to run around telling people that this is what it’s like being an artist, what it means to be an artist, what you should do to be an artist. We should go and turn people into artists.

A: I’m speaking to a high school soon about careers and pursuing your passion. Any tips?
J: Stick to your guns. The path of individuality, doing what you want to do, is the most rewarding but it’s the most difficult. And there is no life like it. When you do what you want to do, the payoff is huge. And it’s not always monetary but the quality of life is incredible.

If you are talking to a group of kids, it might be their last stop. There are a lot of incredible kids out there, but they’ve been told that this is the last stop. I think that’s focusing on limitations again. Focus on what you can do. Limitations are everywhere. Get over it. Deal with it. Find how to chart your way around the tree instead of hitting it.

For more information about Jeff and his past and present projects, head to his website. You can also check out an article on Jeff’s most recent piece in the May 6th, 2011 edition of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

The essential missing piece is convergent thinking: taking all new ideas, isolating the best, and determining how to apply them. Knowing which ideas are best is where experience and expertise come in. Regardless of what issue is being solved—an aesthetic experience in art or a mechanical problem in engineering—determining the best solution means being aware of the environment in which the problem exists. This includes hard knowledge of concrete environmental factors—what has come before, the limitations of the medium, implementation and recurring costs—and soft knowledge, such as accurately evaluating how different solutions will be perceived by stakeholders and end users. A solution that doesn’t correctly assess the environment is not creative—it’s naïve.

Convergent thinking is why most boardrooms environments fail at generating creativity, since part of the process involves coming up with ideas and quickly discarding some (usually most) as impractical or outright useless. Everyone is more comfortable refining their own ideas than others’. Walking on eggshells around an idea that should be discarded drags on the creative process interminably.

If you want to be more creative, learn more about your problem and your industry. If you are stumped on a web project, then either you don’t know enough about your client’s and their end users’ needs, or you don’t know enough about the possibilities of your toolset. The biggest implication of this is the realization that creativity isn’t about a “spark” as much as it is about hard work. Once you’ve put in the work to understand your problem and its ramifications, the ideas will flow—and they’ll be good.

The further we have dug into this research the more we have come to realize that governments need to change their online approach as well as the way they do business. With shrinking budgets, aging employees and a skeptical public that is becoming more educated, governments need to adjust quickly or risk further tarnishing their credibility.

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital, wrote the foreword for a new book called Open Government. He says, “it is the next wave of innovation that presents a historic occasion to fundamentally redesign how government operates; how and what the public sector provides; and ultimately, how governments interact and engage with their citizens. It is truly a time when either government will play an active role in its own transformation, or change will happen to it.”

For governments to control their own destiny online, they will need to follow the three pillars of a good website which I presented at zu’s One Government sessions last week (#1gov).

The first pillar is to adopt human-centred design. Too many government sites are built around the structure of government. Citizens do not care who the Deputy Mininster is or who reports to the Mayor. They care about booking a camping spot or paying their power bill. For One Government to work, websites need to be developed from a user perspective. Focus should be on the user, not the technology.

The second pillar for effective One Government is to create a unified vision in every department. This has nothing to do with the website, but rather with internal communications. Governments, like large companies, operate in vertical silos where staff communicate with their superiors and underlings. Imagine if they started communicating with their colleagues. They would save time and money, and provide an enhanced user experience.

The third pillar is to go where the people are. Governments that are still publishing print pieces and doing billboard campaigns are wasting money. For a fraction of the cost you can hit a larger audience online. More people, lower cost: makes sense to most people doesn’t it?

Of course, I have glossed over most of the details of the three pillars for an effective One Government. If you want to learn more, drop me a line and let’s talk. We are living in a once-in-a-lifetime period for government right now and we should all try to get it right.

Over the last 8 years, I’ve had the chance to visit a large number of offices. Few are fun, some are tolerable, and some are unbearably dry. “It’s as though they are missing a certain element in their air,” Tony notes. “Or they have too much ‘Bore-inium’ pumped in.”

On a local level, zu has garnered some attention for its culture. If you have done some digging around, you might be able to catch a glimpse of it on the web. Or, even better, you may have heard about it from someone else. But preserving this culture as the company grows has been a challenge that has cost zu a fair bit. However, I like to think the benefits far outweigh the costs and I’ll tell you why.

When I say culture, I’m really talking about the energy that exists day to day in the office. It’s a culmination of the people, physical space, social initiatives and projects that help make getting out of bed every morning a little bit easier.

After observing our efforts and comparing them to other places over the years, I’ve compiled some evidence behind what drives the creation of culture.

1) Try
This may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised at how little companies try or how feeble some attempts are at achieving any sort of culture. Rule #1, if your attempt to form any corporate culture comes from an HR textbook, you’ve already failed. We try really hard to look like we’re not trying at all (almost shamefully so).

2) It comes from the top
Now the co-founders, Ryan and Tony, are my close friends as well as my bosses, so I don’t want to sound like a Dwight Shrute, but it really starts with them. Some places really suck the fun out of great people with the wrong management. Their attitudes and personalities really set the tone for the entire company. The fact that Ryan wanted to hire George Wendt from the show ‘Cheers’ to sit at our conference booth and drink with the delegates, proved to me that no idea I could come up with would be off limits. (Norm never happened, but you get the idea.) Though R&T aren’t as involved in the planning of parties as they once were, you can still see their influence at all our functions. If you are the head honcho, it’s as much your job to help create a fun environment as it is those in it, so don’t leave it up to someone else.

3) Hire the right personalities
You don’t need a room full of extroverts to have culture. You just need people to believe in and contribute to the culture. We have many quiet introverted people around here, but when it’s time to bob for apples, everyone’s hair gets wet.

4) Fire the wrong personalities (or don’t fight to keep them)
Get rid of culture killers.  If you are trying to establish or foster culture and someone is actively bringing it down, then find ways to get them to buy in, or get rid of them. It doesn’t matter if they are talented. (Agree, disagree?).

5) Small things add up
On my first day here, I can remember filling out my first timesheet. A stark, one colour grid with one small twist – above the box where you filled in your name, read ‘Groovy Person’. This set the tone from day one and communicated to me what kind of place I was working for. It also made me wonder, “why don’t we ever see more of this?” So at your office, think of ways to spice up everyday things. For starters, change the name of your social committee to something that doesn’t use the terms ‘social’ or ‘committee’. You’ll be surprised at how even a little detail like that can have a trickle effect on your organization’s culture.

6) Aim for comfort
Most people have divisions between their work persona and who they really are. Try to foster an environment in which people can be natural. From the dress code, to flex hours, to the office space, to the language used around the office. It’s different for every company, but taking a good look at how to make your place more human is a step towards building culture. This is the service experience you give your employees.

7) Learn from other great environments
When you hear of other tales of success, don’t be afraid to copy them. We’ve been influenced by ideas employed at some local companies like Point2, VendAsta, EngComp and many of our clients. It’s exhausting thinking of new ideas for staff functions, so it’s good to listen to other fun ideas other companies are trying. Which reminds me, I just missed Point2′s Reggae Party.

So there you have it, piece of cake. I should state that this works better for companies our size, and I’m aware that some things are harder to pull off in bigger and more unionized environments. But to the people in charge, you should be asking yourself, “what’s stopping us from doing this?”

My intention here isn’t to showcase the zu environment, but to share some ideas on what we have found seems to work for us. ‘Real’ things still happen here after all. People get fired, people quit, and there is the odd Debby-downer once in a while. It’s the one side effect of not employing robots. But one thing is that we never stop trying to build up the culture, and I hope we can inspire your company to do the same.

I also hope this was the best thing you’ve read in the last 4 minutes.

These companies provide great entertainment or great products, yet they have become lightning rods for criticism. As the trendsetters, who were their customers years ago, saw the mass market adopt these icons, they moved on to smaller, alternative competitors.

It’s like the ‘alt-rock’ cycle. The XX gets great reviews on Pitchfork and the indie rock crowd eats it up, making The XX one of the coolest bands in the world. A few months later, they go mainstream and all of the alt rockers who loved them in the past move on to Charlotte Gainsbourg.

In Microsoft’s case, you are seen as ‘cool’ if you bash them. The trendsetters want to distance themselves from the mainstream so they use Google Docs, Mac OSX and an iPhone.

We were sitting around zu HQ the other day and we started talking about trends and market dominance. With Google and Apple now joining the mainstream, I asked everyone when it was going to be ‘in’ to start bashing Google. How much longer until it is cool to crush Apple’s strategy.

Albert Jame, our Creative Director thinks it will happen soon. “All of the thirty year olds who went to Lulu ten years ago aren’t doing that anymore because 12 year olds are shopping there,” he said. “When the guys with chunky glasses see the rednecks using an iPhone, they will find something else.”

“It is cool to be uncool and that is what the hipsters want,” zu’s Marketing Manager Michelle MacDonald said. “They want things that other people do not have yet because they are striving to be unique. They want to be perceived as innovators.”

For me, I think that Google and Apple are at the stage where we will start seeing the trendsetters bash them. However, both companies are still perceived as underdogs to Microsoft which is keeping them alt.

I’m interested in what you have to say, if or when, it will be cool to hate Apple or Google.Why?

One of the main points of my presentation was the increasing pace of change in technology. I cited numbers that showed that radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users; tv took 13 years to reach the same point; the Internet took four years and the iPod took three. Facebook reached 100 million users in only 9 months. The iTunes app store did 1 billion downloads in 9 months. The point is that technology is no longer taking years to develop, only months.

For a computer science student, this is good news as there are more jobs available in more fields. For businesses the increasing speed of technological improvement is something that you cannot ignore.

Organizations need to start spotting the technology trends earlier to remain ahead of the competition. Monitoring hardware blogs will let you know about new advances in devices. Following social media will provide you with real time information and allow you to stay tuned in to the world’s social network.

So as these students enter the work force and carpe diem, they should have faith in the outlook for technology. Maybe one of them will invent the new ‘Facebook’ and vastly impact the direction of information technology. Either way, they have finished their degree in an industry that is always changing and evolving. The future looks bright for these kids and for those of us who employ them.

AJ: How many different published sources are you currently in right now? What are some notable ones?
WN: To be honest, I have no idea who is publishing White Ninja. Perhaps this isn’t the best business move. But, neither Scott nor I have any clue how to run a successful business.

You see, we post a link to the latest comic that is free and open to whoever wants to publish White Ninja. I know that there are independent and college newspapers in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada and the USA that are using the link. We also have two published books out that are available at your local bookstore for your reading and purchasing pleasure. And, White Ninja has been affiliated with National Lampoon, Cracked.com, Virgin Airways, and Crave Online.

AJ: Does that blow your mind?
WN: No way. White Ninja is the greatest comic ever written about a White Ninja, ever!

AJ: What’s the weirdest fan mail or suggestion you’ve received? Any good haters out there?
WN: By far the weirdest email we received was a marriage proposal. This girl – this incredibly attractive girl, I suspect – wanted to marry White Ninja and have his babies. It was difficult to break the news to her that White Ninja is not a real person. She must have understood because days later she proposed to both Scott and I.

The second weirdest was simply a photo of a girl wearing a White Ninja t-shirt. The shirt, accidentally, was on a little crooked, and a single naked bosom was showing from underneath. Whoops!

AJ: Walk us through the process of how you guys produce one strip, from idea to execution.
WN: It all starts with a good night’s sleep. Before bed I drink two cups of lavender tea with whole milk. Scott has a warm bath with a glass of red wine. We wake up feeling refreshed and ready to work.

So we each go to work. Me, to my private clinic to do some physical therapy, and Scott to a school to teach children how to learn. When work is over, we’re usually too tired to draw cartoons, and we definitely don’t feel funny, so we put off writing comics until the weekend.

Saturday arrives. At noon or so, when we’ve awoken, we’ll get together over a pot of coffee and stare at blank pieces of paper until an idea strikes us in the brain. Sometimes a half hour will go by with nothing being drawn, written, or even said. And then another half hour. After an hour and a half we’ll pack up our stuff and head to the pub for a “business lunch.”

Magically, by the end of the day, we have somewhere between two and eight comics completed.

AJ: How long have you been doing this? What are your future plans for WN?
WN: We’ve been drawing the comic for fourteen or fifteen years! Holy bananas! That makes White Ninja fifteen years old! Unlike The Simpsons, White Ninja actually gets older with each passing year. When we started, White Ninja was zero years old. We stopped counting his birthday after the first couple years though. All along we said we would stop on the Christmas Eve of White Ninja’s 48th year. In this final comic, White Ninja will die on the streets from exposure. It will not be funny. It will make people re-think the whole White Ninja saga. They’ll ponder, “Was it ever a joke?” “Was there underlying societal commentaries that I’ve been missing?” Bahahahaha! So I guess we won’t be able to retire for 33 years.

AJ: Explain to me how you guys have managed to make money on this?
WN: Well, putting a comic on the Internet, for free, and giving it away to newspapers all over the world, for free, makes us roughly $0.00 a week. Times that by four, and then again by twelve… basically, we make nothing.

BUT, we’ve discovered that people like to wear clothes. Especially clothes which have pictures of animals killing each other on them. Seriously. So what we’ve done is, we’ve used the popularity of whiteninjacomics.com to link to another website that we made where you can buy t-shirts with some seriously dynamic wildlife happening on them. We design all the shirts. Some features Pterodactyls fighting with lazer-beam-eyes…in outer space! And Owls, madly chomping away on a piece of delicious taffy. Heck yeah! And Tigers firing automatic weapons! It has nothing to do with the comic, but we couldn’t sell dumb shirts if we didn’t have the comic first. The website is casasupernova.com, in case you’re interested.

AJ: Is this self sustaining? (i.e. are you working at Starbucks?)
WN: Starbucks?! Just because we draw comics for a living doesn’t mean we don’t have any other skills. For all you know I could be a brain doctor! This interview is over!

But to answer your question, we make barely enough to live on. That is, if we wanted to live on Saskatoon’s dangerous west side. No thanks! Seriously though, I enjoy having a couch, and a box-spring under my mattress, and a variety of cups to drink out of, and all those other novelties enjoyed by the upper-middle class. And for that, we have other jobs.

AJ: What do you have to say to the people who say WN isn’t funny?
WN: “It is too, funny!” Yeah, usually we say that.

AJ: I’ve tried to draw WN before, and I’m horrbile. Any tips for me?
WN: Trace your ‘F’ finger, and then add arms and legs. For the eyes you will need two dots. Practice these on a separate piece of paper first.

Ads: The more pages of content you are forced to cycle through, the more ads you are served. This is the reason articles are infuriatingly broken into multiple pages. Good from a business sense, perhaps, but certainly not good for user experience.

Legacy: When people still accessed the Internet with 2,400 baud modems, pages loaded so slowly it made sense to break content into easily downloaded chunks. Once it became ingrained that pagination was good usability, it somehow got lost that average Internet speeds are hundreds of times faster now. If your only reason for breaking content into numbered pages is download speed or tradition, you’re probably better off with the content on one page.

Laziness: Organizing information well can be challenging, and good information architects aren’t easy to find. Templated blogging platforms reinforce this bad usability with their architecture designed to accommodate any content while excelling at none. Far more useful than a link at the end of a post to an “older post” is a list of similar, relevant articles.

Disregard: If a website provides a service no one else does, it can survive for a time ignoring how people actually use their data. If users are trying to compare items in a list, or have the ability to resort tables based on different headings, you probably shouldn’t be paginating.

Scale: Sometimes there is just too much content to architect well, like Google search results, and the effort becomes pushing as much relevant information as possible to the first page. Though the other pages become unnecessary, they are still better ways to present this information, like loading in new content when the user scrolls to the bottom of the screen.  Cooliris is a dramatic display of how much better image searches could be without pagination.

A caveat in conclusion: test with your users.  Pagination may be greatly overused, but it still has its place, so think critically about why you’re using it and evaluate if it really is adding more than it’s detracting from the user experience.

Non-retail companies have a more difficult time determining what merits prominence, or even if information should be segregated. The former depends on the site’s target demographic, and the latter on how much information there is to present.

Well-designed primary navigation not only directs users efficiently to the information they want, but doubles as a sales pitch about the company. For retail sites, it tells the user what kinds of products they’ll find for sale. The primary navigation at CNN immediately tells you what kind of news you’ll find there, and gives you an idea of how important each type of news is to them by order of priority. The primary navigation may not even be a series of choices; Grooveshark presents a simple search bar that encapsulates the purpose of the site.

The difficult part is never deciding what should be primary navigation, it’s cutting out what shouldn’t, which comes down to determining the primary demographic and what their needs are. Of course, that’s easier said than done, and most clients want every possible visitor to be a “primary demographic”, but that’s another discussion entirely. Once a target demographic is known and their needs are identified, there’s still the potential to segregate navigation to primary navigation that informs and markets to the user, and secondary information.

zu has been working with Cameco on the redesign of their website. Many different target demographics were identified (employees, job seekers, regulators, the media, people looking for information about the nuclear industry, and many others), but the primary demographic was narrowed down to investors. The primary navigation specifically targets this demographic with information relevant to them and providing an overview of the company from an investment standpoint. The navigation highlights information specific to investing, shows the range of Cameco’s operations for those only familiar with their mining operations, and makes it clear that marketing the industry and good corporate practices are also top priorities for the company. So what was left out, and how were other demographics accommodated? Generic information about the company was moved to secondary navigation; the whole site is largely information about the company, so the “About” section serves as a quick overview for random information seekers. Job-seekers were considered an important demographic, but was kept as secondary navigation because having careers in the primary navigation didn’t help with the messaging to investors, and because people coming to the site looking for jobs don’t need to be sold to, they will seek out and find what they need.

The media is generally directed to a specific page, or, like job seekers, are looking for their specific information, and don’t need to be marketed to. The needs of regulators and employees overlapped with those of investors, so information targeting them is within the primary navigation. While the structure and terminology was chosen to target investors, these other demographics were also considered for clarity. For example, there were many possibilities for “Investors”, but other investment-related terms were rejected for potential ambiguity on whether it was about investing in Cameco, or investments Cameco has made; “Financial Information” is awkward and incomplete; and other terms were potentially confusing to secondary demographics.

It’s always a struggle to keep information out of the primary navigation (particularly convincing a client, who then has to pacify demoted corporate divisions). The utility of a website is greatly improved when not only is the primary demographic known, but spoken to directly through navigation that both informs and serves as the company pitch.

twitpitch: Best practices for well-designed primary navigation. Some good user experience examples from @zutweets Levi Myers http://bit.ly/2KR7U1

Way back when I was a client, I was tasked with helping our ad agency come up with tag lines for our brochures. I was a music geek who had a boring agriculture job and was milking my chance at any opportunity for creative work. I was naïve but not clueless. By the end, I submitted about ten suggestions for a tagline to accompany a photo of an old farmer talking to a golf-shirt toting rep. Sadly, my best one: “Quality you can trust”. The big boss man ended up forcing the agency to use this rice-cake flavoured title. Looking back, I can only imagine the frustration the professional copywriters and designers must have had using this extremely mild copy for their design. I wish that the agency would have taken me aside and explained how hackneyed my ideas were.

Bring them over to the dark side
I think you have to give clients a tiny glimpse into the dirty world of design; what’s overused, some common faux pas, and how they can avoid being the inside joke. Don’t be afraid to explain blasphemous design terms like: “Make the logo bigger”, collages, comic sans, etc. Once you’ve opened the door, their new sense of empowerment will allow them to look down upon cliché designs.

Outside of the basic education you can give your clients about design, here’s an exercise I’ve found helps the design process with clients to eliminate cliche ideas:

Show a photo
Something very typical. Something like a set of green apples, with one red one. Ask everyone to write a tag line of what quickly comes to their mind, in the first 20 seconds. This example should produce gems like:

• Stand out
• Be unique
• Differentiate yourself

Ok. Make this your black list. Too many ads are built on these types of sentences and never get results, because it’s exactly what everyone else would come up with. It’s expected.

It reminds me of a ad I saw in Calgary for a value-based beer. Instead of the traditional-brewed copy, this poster simply said: “You don’t want to see the bikini models we can afford”. The unexpected got noticed (and remembered).

Show a tagline
Something like: “Meet & Greet” or “A step in the right direction”. Have everyone write down a description of picture they envision to match this tagline. Chances are it will be a person climbing stairs, a close-up of a foot on a ladder, the dreaded handshake photo, and the like. Once again, this is your blacklist of photos.

This is a great eye-opener for clients who don’t normally work with creative design, and can help you get them thinking like your designers. This isn’t just to get them thinking of copy or photos, but rather gives clients a better understanding how much effort and talent it requires to produce successful creative output. I should also mention that clients vary in their design experience and it’s important to acknowledge this early on. So, hopefully when you try this with clients, it will result in a better working relationship during your next creative endeavour.

twitpitch: How to get your clients thinking like designers. @zutweets @albertjame has tips to enhance your next creative project

The most recent wave of kinetic typography involves fast moving text, rotating camera angles, and an accompanying audio file to help the viewer digest the content. For SaskCanola, we recently launched a Maxtron (Jumbotron) animation using this sort of technique.

Not having the luxury of a voice over with the text presents itself with timing challenges. For high energy, you need quick transitions—and for the legibility, you need to hold the frame a little longer so the audience can actually get the message. In the end, we produced a 15 second typographic animation that airs at the start of each half at Roughrider home games. Welcome to the Jungle by Guns & Roses is the official kick off song played on the PA system, so we included it to give you a better idea of what the final version is like. So at your next Rider game, make sure to pay attention before the kick off, it could just be the best 15 seconds of the game.

twitpitch: Kinetic typography puts the jolt back in video advertising for @zutweets SaskCanola project http://bit.ly/14gw6l

Lately, our art department has been generating far more creative from photo shoot projects vs traditional methods of relying on stock photography assets. I’ve been asked to give my opinion on what type of shots to take. My conversations usually end with a rant professing my disappointment of creating ‘forced diversity’ shots. In light of this, I’d like to share some quick and easy things you can try for your next photo shoot.

Quality of photograph
Ditch watercolour backdrop or burn it. It’s hurting you more than doing any good. Stay away from things that point out how ‘contrived’ the photo shoot is. If your design relies heavily on the photo, take it seriously and hire a professional. This is recommended for any photo/design shoot. “No”, your new 5 .1 megapixel point and shoot won’t cut it, sorry.

Try an all ‘non-caucasian’ photo for a change
All Black, all Asian, all Indian, all anything. Try it. The main argument against this idea is that ‘it doesn’t represent us properly, we don’t want to give the impression that this is an all-XXXX school.’ It’s been done for decades the other way around, why not balance it out a bit? Plus I’m not saying to do ALL your brochures like this, but having one or two in the mix amongst your hundreds of design projects won’t hurt. I challenge an organization or institution to try this for a major cover shot that doesn’t have to do with a message of diversity.

New arrangement: Valley Girl, sorry, you’ve been bumped
You too—captain of the football team. You’ll probably notice that 90% of all group shots’ focal point are the two people in the centre. As long as I can remember, it was the Barbie and Ken of your school (I remember this because I could never relate to Ken and would wait for the day I’d see someone like me as the focal point). As your eye moves outwards you’ll see Asian girl, Indian boy, Aboriginal girl—and then maybe some ambiguous person or wild card at the end. Recently, this sort of arrangement is becoming less popular, but still; ‘take risks people, we can break up the happy couple for the photo and it won’t affect their Facebook status.’

Genuine friendships
Here’s a generalized truth: Wang-Xi Lu, the .NET programmer, probably isn’t best friends with Cindy from the cheerleading squad, nor has he even built up the courage to share eye contact with her. But yet, we’ll combine the two strangers in a room in hopes of getting a genuine shot. This is the definition of a shot that is ‘too contrived’. In a school shot, for instance, you rarely work with paid models, so get real friends together—people who are comfortable with each other. Stroll the hallways and you’ll surprisingly find real friends hanging out with each other. This isn’t the 50s, you’ll find actual examples of racially diverse people intermingling with each other. Start there. If they’re not good looking enough, move on. Repeat as necessary.

Bacon, ham and pork chops—all from one magical animal?
This, I say to clients all the time and they seem to get a kick out it. It might seem obvious but I’ve seen it happen. Don’t assume because you have a non-caucasian girl in a wheelchair you’ve magically covered three minority groups right there. That’s just non-sense (please do include her, but I’m just saying don’t think you’re done there.)

Don’t worry about realigning your corporate mandate to match the United Colors of Benetton—I realize it is a double-edge sword when it comes to photo diversity. When talking to clients I try to give them these tips to think about. It really comes down to being genuine with your intent. If you truly don’t see colour and aren’t trying too hard to prove it, the authenticity will come naturally. If you have found other techniques that work, I’d love to hear about them.

Good luck!

Even so, opting for a lighter cover stock to reduce costs isn’t a novel idea. But what really got me was the increase in price per issue. Less for more.

In the publisher’s defense, I didn’t actually evaluate both issues to compare editorial quality vs. ads vs. quantity—but one can draw assumptions based on the changes to their production materials and newsstand price point. A lot has been written and blogged about the hardship in newspapers but it will equally interesting to monitor what happens with magazines.

Thinking back to that wonderful day, was it the glossy thick cover that got my attention as a curious 7yr old? With the new changes Easyrider runs the risk of alienating the younger demographic. We’ll have to wait and see…

The same thing can be said about websites—when you overload users with too much information and too many choices, you end up reducing the utility at the expense of catering to a minority user group; or worse, at the cost of satisfying internal corporate politics. The reality is the more choices a user has, the more uncertain and less satisfied the user will be with their choice. In the book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”, Barry Schwartz describes how even when the choice is trivial and reversible and the only cost is time, people are still more likely to stick with their first decision, even if it doesn’t fulfill all of their needs. Additional research indicated that people without choices were actually happier with a sub-optimal solution as opposed to those with many choices who ended up with a better solution.

Directing a user to information relevant to them is of high importance, and is the basis of information architecture, without which a website can’t succeed. But it’s also important to consider the psychology of decision-making, from which it’s clear that too many choices leads not only to dissatisfaction, but may even misguide users to areas that are not of interest.

One of the most overlooked areas of web navigation is having too many paths to the same information. Multiple paths add another level of choices, forcing the user to choose a navigation structure before choosing where they want to go. Clients rarely say, “there’s too many ways for the user to get to our information.” It would take great user testing before a user would say, “I saw three possible ways to the same information; I tried one and it wasn’t actually what I wanted, but I assumed the other choices were the same thing so I didn’t try them either.”

Usage statistics can also be misleading. The statistics may show that many users are reaching a page via a feature box, but if the site hasn’t been tested without the feature, there’s no way to know if all the users might still find the page through other navigation.

When a user gets to a page with one kind of navigation, that’s the navigation they’ll most likely try first when going to a new page. Does it have what they’ll be looking for? Feature boxes are, by design, limited to only a few prominent options; breadcrumb trails can only show you pages higher in the hierarchy. While a related information feature with highly-contextual links is very useful, it’s not possible to predict everything a user will want to view, so alternate, accessible navigation will still be needed.

I’ll end with an example. Breadcrumbs trails are now nearly ubiquitous, and often extremely useful. On a site like homedepot.com, the side navigation is constantly changing, so the breadcrumb trail serves as a record of how you got where you are. However, on many sites, breadcrumbs are added without actually evaluating their usefulness for that site. Sites with expanding hierarchical navigation are common, and often show the same information as the breadcrumb trail (sonystyle.ca is an example). Is the benefit of the simplified linear presentation worth the cost of adding another choice and more visual clutter? It needs to at least be considered.

Ultimately, every website needs a good compromise between maintaining interest with information upfront, and keeping the choices few enough that users come away feeling satisfied.

But by the time we became adults the bright colours were replaced with neutrals, sand was swapped out with carpet, toys evolved into keyboards and laptops–and our sensory intuition was surrounded by the white noise of office chatter. And now as adults, we are challenged to innovate.

Last week I was presented with a rare opportunity ‘to bust out of my creative rut’. In celebration of World Creativity and Innovation Week, Sasktel hosted a Creative Micro-Session workshop for Management and Senior Executives in efforts to bring creativity back into the workplace. I was one of the few creative professionals who were invited outside of their organization.

Working in teams, the purpose of this event was to explore many different aspects of creativity; we played games, wrote limericks, banged on drums, and collaborated on art projects–all within a precisely-run 3hr time frame. During the opening discussions, we watched Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on creativity and I really loved what he had to say. Most notably; we don’t grow into creativity–we grow out of it.

Imagine if you will–a room full of 50 suits, engrossed with gluing macaroni collages to cardboard. We were one trust-fall away from being very cliché. As I worked away on my projects in this summer camp-like atmosphere, I reflected on my own job and realized what I often take for granted.

In my career, I often feel pressure to be creative. But after hanging around with my awesome team, I am soon reminded that given the right conditions–we all have the potential to be creative. If anything, I would say that the Sasktel suits really brought a good mix of creativity to our session; which ironically, made my blazer and loud t-shirt seem almost desperate.

Big shout out to Krystal K and the ID Noodle Team at Sasktel for the invite and great appies!