Don’t worry, this blog isn’t dead – just sleeping. I have no WiFi in my new home yet, which isn’t quite an excuse for not updating. I took a week-long break to move into my new flat, and have been amiss from most other social things too – with the exception of Playful last Friday. (See Roo Reynold’s excellent notes here.)

I’m very excited about version 2 of Trutap (keep an eye open for the launch announcement). Trutap has been taking up most of my time at Future Platforms since I joined in March. The new version was demoed this morning in the office at Future Platforms, and it’s looking great. It’s a great feeling to see all of our collaborative hard work pay off! Trutap has been a great project to work on, and is a real example of synthesis of content and digital tools. I learned a lot about visual design and interaction design in the process. I will write more about this later.

Apart from Trutap, here are other things occupying my mind and time:

• Writing. I’ve been thinking up possible proposals to submit to Eye Magazine. Writing is something I love doing and it has always been one of my ambitions. There was also a culture for writing about design at Reading University, and practitioners are also expected to be able to write and research: something I regard highly.
• Language. Stephen Fry wrote this great, meandering blessay on language, which got me thinking. I loved the introduction of translation: “English (Pirate)” on Facebook, which made me wonder if language used online is a little too sterile. Stephen makes excellent points. I’m not sure what my point is yet, but I’ll come back to it…
• Mobile design. Bryan Rieger, who I worked with at Future Platforms, and is now at Yiibu, has just launched Mobile Design UK. The aim: to be an “open forum for UK designers working with mobile technologies to share knowledge, encourage exploration of technologies, tools and ideas, and showcase the UK as an influential hub of mobile design to the world.” Exciting stuff, and I’m looking forward to being involved. If you’re a mobile designer in the UK, you should be involved, too!

As the tangible newspaper trade has started to defect to the digital, the subject of journalism vs. blogging, or rather, the old vs. the new, has become topical: recent interesting examples of this debate can be seen here, and here.

There are plain differences between blogging and traditional journalism. Differences, as they often do, create conflict. The main difference can be summarised as open vs. closed. Blogs are free, limitless, and open. The newspaper trade is steeped in convention and tradition, which blogs threaten.

(There is another aspect to this debate, one of high vs. low culture. There was snobbery towards newspapers when they first became mass-market, but how many blogs can be considered ‘high-culture’, or accused of intellectual snobbery? Have blogs democratized writing?)

Here, I’m a one-girl team: I am entirely self-edited, self-directed, and I have the wonderful freedom to write on whatever subjects I desire, in whatever style I want. This is a blessing and a curse: I’m saddled with the responsibility, and paradoxically freed, from deadlines and editorship. When I started writing, my main concern is how personal, how authentic I should be when I post. For once I am not using a pseudonym or username to hide behind. I am writing in propria persona, and my audience could include any of my friends, family, colleagues, and employers. Yikes!

Unlike traditional journalism, I’m not reporting news, and there’s no guarantee if I’m going to write a post tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe I’ll even skip a week, as I’m not on a schedule, and my readers aren’t paying me. Admittedly, my business with my blog is selfish: I’m writing first and foremost because I’m an incorrigible content-maker. I like making and publishing content. I benefit from the process of writing, as writing down my ideas forces me to think them through more clearly and carefully. If I aim to write posts with genuine value, then readers benefit too. All of this motivates me to write.

My basic aims are to:

(1) Be authentic as possible, in the hope that I can, eventually, contribute content of genuine value
(2) To avoid clichéd topics and phrases where possible
(3) To use the ‘open’ medium of blogging to its full potential
(4) To develop a consistent writing style, and
(5) To learn.

A lot of graphic designers are writers about their subject as well: Michael Bierut springs to mind. It’s said that an aptitude for design is transferable to writing. It’s true there are similarities between writing and designing. Both disciplines are concerned with the ordering of information: a well written essay is also a designed piece of writing. That is to say, a ‘designed piece of writing’ is not concerned with the typography of the writing, but with the arrangement of words themselves into cogent, clear sentences; sentences which fit into paragraphs; paragraphs which fit in a longer piece of writing.

A successful piece of design is one that can benefit neither from something added or something taken away. A good piece of writing is the same: words are carefully chosen and balanced, unnecessary and platitudinous words are removed. There is no decor in good writing, much the same there is no decoration or aesthetic frills in good design.

A good piece of writing is one that leads the eye and interest of the reader into the subject and topic, beginning with an introduction, leading on to the central remarks of the piece, and finishing with a conclusion. A skillful piece of design should do the same thing, especially if it is concerned with arranging information. The eye should be led to the right places; more complicated, perhaps, because there is no linearity in the ‘design-reading’ process. We don’t ‘read’ graphic design, or a website, the same way we read a document. Areas can be ‘flagged’ to prioritize attention, size can be used to indicate a hierarchy, but how a user might behave on a website may largely be down to individual decision.