After we graduated and turned into pseudo-adults, Matt and I made a pact to keep this tradition alive—to be brave and try new things, even with no GPA or course outline to guide us.

Our businesses, Things That Are Brown and Second & Park, were part of this plan. We started them because we love creative work, but also because being entrepreneurs was one of the most challenging things we could imagine doing.

We were right. There’s nothing quite like running your own business, which is somewhere between a carousel ride and Mr. Toad’s wild ride, depending on the day. It teaches you how to make tough decisions. It grants you loads of freedom, while forcing you to know that the dream of “having freedom” is a mixed bag. Entrepreneurship has people-growing machinery built into it.

It’s been a fantastic trip. But, like all proper semesters, this one has to end.

Recently, Facebook invited us to join their team as a Content Strategist and Communications Designer. The idea of upending our life and moving to San Francisco shocked us a little at first, but after some soul-searching it hit us that this, too, fits in with the plan.

So, come February 21st we’ll be full-time employees of Facebook who live and work in California. We’ll be collaborating with some of the most talented folks in our industry on projects that will force us, once again, to stretch and grow. We’ll still write on our blogs and go to conferences, but we won’t be taking on new client work.

I get teary thinking about leaving our friends in Seattle, but I couldn’t be more excited about Facebook. The bottom line is, when an opportunity makes you want to sprint and fist-pump, you sprint and fist-pump—even if it makes you dizzy. Especially if it makes you dizzy.

For now, it’s finals time. We have a week to pack our bags and point ourselves & cats in the direction of San Francisco. Onward.

Like everyone else with a head and a heart, I love Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. I’ve read it a couple times, and return to it whenever I need reminding that our work is as much common sense as it is genius. It’s a classy, smart and grounding book.

Each time I go back, though, I’m struck by how much space is dedicated to content—the wording of buttons, the best approach to writing taglines, the tendency of readers to scan, using inverted hierarchies and what properly grouped information looks like.

There’s also an entire chapter dedicated to omitting needless words. Krug talks about killing happy talk and instructions, deleting mission statements and getting the 3-second gist of your website across with solid messaging. It’s wisdom straight from Strunk & White.

What I’m getting at is that the seminal book on usability & web design is also at least 50% about content. And I’m not just talking about web writing; I’m talking about planning for and sourcing content, too. There’s a chapter that urges designers to attend to and plan for designs for pages 3 or 4-levels deep instead of focusing on just the home page, for example. Krug is careful to note that these pages should be designed with real content in mind.

One lesson is, you can’t address usability without addressing content. Another is that content strategy & web design are inseparable. When you write & plan content, you design. And a designer’s job is to be logical, economical, simple, clear and user-focused—just like a writer.

Proving once again that CS and UX do their best work together.

In any case, here’s more MBA bashing from today’s Business Insider.

My friends majored in subjects like spiritual eco-humanism and communications & culture—so it turns out I don’t know anyone who’s actually gone to business school. If you are one such person, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the MBA stomp du jour.

I was reminded of this while reading the introduction to Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field. I hate to pick on one part of this mostly helpful book, but I think it’s a good example of how reader-hostile writers can become when we try to communicate complex ideas.

Problem #1: Ambiguity

Here’s a quote from the book’s intro:

At the same time technology is empowering a new collectivity, it is also redefining universality.

An absence of definitions is the biggest problem here; multiple ideas and words whose meanings are unclear are packed into one sentence. How does technology empower a collectivity? What technologies do the empowering, and how? What does ‘collectivity’ mean? What does ‘universality’ mean?

Unless they’re clearly defined and integral to your piece (not the case above), I think it’s wise to avoid words like ‘collectivity’ and ‘universality’. Better to sub in concrete examples.

Problem #2: Fluff

Here’s another sentence from the intro:

Today, countless designers, named and unnamed, at work both inside and outside the profession, are contributing to a vast new visual commons, often using shared tools and technologies. Through this new “commonality” the paradigm of design is shifting.

This paragraph’s problem is fluff. You could edit it down to:

Today many designers are contributing to [new visual commons] using shared tools and technologies, such as X.

‘New visual commons’ still needs to be defined, but you get my idea. Clauses like ‘named and unnamed, at work both inside and outside the profession’ don’t contribute to the bottom line, so we may as well strike them.

The Reality of Editing

As I said, I hate to pick on this one introduction, because I run into sentences like these all the time. To phase them out completely involves a time-consuming editing process.

For practice, I decided to take an obsessive stab at editing the introduction, and managed to reduce the page count by more than half. I struck a truckload of sentences, removed ambiguous words and made the last paragraph the first. Here’s a picture:

Here’s some business advice I’ve recently gotten: Work hard, play hard. Never work with your family. Let the universe guide you. Early to bed, early to rise. Follow your passion. Find your true north. Maximize profit. Maximize freedom. Do what’s right.

Books and people are full of pithy nuggets like these, and the abundance can make you crazy—spit, and you’ll land on the best advice you’ve ever gotten. The problem is, everything you read is exactly right at the same time or exactly wrong, depending on the day.

But truly, the best advice I’ve gotten comes from my business partner and husband, who’s fond of saying things like: Ignore most advice, do good work, stay open and have fun and the rest will come. (How simple, the kind of quiet, independent thinking I married him for. Although it turns out there are plenty of books with this advice in them, too.)

So far in the life of our two businesses, this approach has worked. I don’t feel like I’m overworking, our clients seem to like us, we exceed our financial goals, and we’ve got free time left over to travel and enjoy ourselves. There are stressful days and nothing is perfect, but in general business-ing is one of the smoother adventures I’ve had.

And yet I find myself standing up abruptly every day or so, my eyes darting around in search of some impending danger or unspoken ‘right’ or more optimal way of doing things. Shouldn’t I be working at full-tilt, most the time? Am I missing something right under my nose? I have to pinch myself to come back to reality. Evidence points to nothing is wrong, OMGWTF.

You could call this a personal problem. Or you could blame it on training and culture, which is what I like to do.

Blame It On School

Especially in school, and then again as most of us begin our professional lives, we are encouraged to look alive, to get f*cking motivated, to embody the Protestant work ethic and get things done. In environments where the metrics for success are stone-etched and where not abiding by them comes at a price, optimizing in this way makes sense—most notably because it keeps us from getting fired.

But when you run your own business, particularly in the beginning when you have just a few employees or none at all, nothing is stone-etched. Within loosely-drawn bounds, you alone decide what matters. In this environment of (ahem) radical self-determination, one question you will constantly bump up against is: Do I just try to do everything right and hit it out of the park, or do I ignore everyone and do what I think is right?

Crush It or Ignore Everyone?

Where you fall along the Doer-of-Diligence/Iconoclast spectrum will differ according to your personality, but I will offer up my own experience for good measure.

In the past year, I’ve stopped trying to do everything right, systematically shaving to-do’s I used to be convinced were necessary and paring my work down to the most important tasks—the stuff that really matters, like creating good designs and dealing well with clients. Everything else I file under Bullshit. Can you guess what has happened? Just about nothing. Except I have more time on my hands and more clarity about what’s important to do, all while making more money.

Now, before I go encouraging everyone to quit their jobs and hop the magic bus, I will say this: Part of the reason we don’t freak is that Matt’s been doing design and web work for 12+ years, and we spent a lot of time thinking through our business up front to minimize risk. It’s easier to be choosy when the basics are taken care of.

Still, every day presents an opportunity to give 150% and to stress myself out, just like any other job. And my point is that the the way many of us have been trained to handle our jobs—a training in which unapologetic, realistic prioritization is often viewed as laziness and where questioning hard work amounts to mutiny—is often wrong. I, at least, have been wrong about that in the past.

In Which I Break Up With My Own Dogma

I’ve now tried two approaches to business: One in which I keep my nose to the ground at all times, and one in which I go my own way, so to speak, and make tough decisions about when the nose goes down. Without a doubt, the latter has been more productive and personally fulfilling, though it has forced me to re-evaluate my most deeply rooted beliefs about work. It’s also forced me to purge much of the accepted wisdom I’ve internalized over the years.

I’ll admit that ‘bucking your own dogma’ in this way is not always possible. There are jobs to keep, mouths to feed and habits to support, after all. But until feces hits fan and failure proves me wrong, I’d argue that there are plenty of things we’re convinced are necessary, that actually aren’t. The challenge, especially for business owners, is keeping our eyes open so we can recognize what matters—and then being brave enough to take a definitive stance on what doesn’t.

We’ve all been talking about the trend toward content-driven design (that is, design in which the writing, messaging, videos, photos and related data—not the technology or look & feel—are considered first) lately, and for two good reasons:

The first is, it makes sense. You can’t write a paper without a thesis or paint a picture with any subject matter. Likewise, it’s a bad idea to design a website with no ‘thesis’ or ‘actual content’. Otherwise, it has been said, you are making a decoration and not designing.

The second is, what started as an industry trend has blossomed into a bona fide discipline that agencies, businesses and freelancers are taking seriously. Tons of cities in the US and beyond have content strategy meetups now, content strategy conferences are popping up everywhere, and who knows how many content strategist-web writer-IA-designer hybrids join our ranks monthly.

And take a look at this year’s SXSW Interactive’s PanelPicker, where more than 50 submissions are categorized under Content—not including all those content-related panels moonlighting as Design Thinking, User Experience or Social Media.

Content is on like the break of dawn.

Content and The Design Agency

And yet, from a design agency’s or client’s perspective, there is much to be taught and learned. After all, the approach to content-driven design that works for big enterprise-y projects won’t typically work for smaller ones. What works for a landing page or microsite won’t work for brochureware or a web app.

Making matters more difficult is the fact that most clients aren’t aware of this trend, much less our daily #contentstrategy machinations. What seems obvious to us in our lofty Technology Tower doesn’t always resonate with the people who pay us for our expertise.

All of this accounts for why I think it’s important for design agencies—not just content strategy people—to keep churning on this topic of content-driven design, sharing their insights and advice all the while. Maybe we’ll find new words to describe and ways of thinking about what we’re doing. Web design is still new after all, and there are approaches eagerly waiting to be thunk up.

Our SXSW Panel

With that in mind, I invite those of you who think about these things to take a look at the SXSW interactive panel we’ve submitted for 2011: Design, Meet Content: Exploring Content-Driven Design. It’s about this very topic, and it will involve a designer (my husband and business partner at thingsthatarebrown) + a content strategist (myself) talking about the mechanics of weaving good content and strategy into the web design process. We’ll use a few of our recent projects and some others as case studies. We’ll get specific. There might be joking.

If it looks good to you, we’d appreciate the vote.

Others’ Panels

And finally, there are about a million awesome-looking proposals in the mix this year, the most shiny of which I’ve included in a SXSW Panel Roundup on the thingsthatarebrown blog. Review them and get happy.

Designer Frank Chimero talks about fighting to maintain high standards, even when your rich multi-national clients will pay more for an ice sculpture than for a logo. Foodie blogger Molly Wizenberg of Orangette talks about fighting against your beliefs about what you should do, and allowing yourself to change directions.

Any person who gets paid for doing creative work is bound to find herself hamstrung, from time to time, in that strange no-mans land where our work lives—somewhere between art, engineering and commerce.

Do we follow self-expression at the expense of profit? Do we make money at the expense of thoughtfulness? Do we become great engineers, only to regret not pursuing a more artful path later on down the line? Arrive at these questions with grand expectations about the purity of your art, or the thoroughness of your approach, and you will be disabused.

The reality is this: Not everyone cares about the design you made. Not everyone cares how great you are. Coming to terms with this is a cornerstone of client work, and it’s only natural to experience an occasional internal struggle.

But let’s not quit our jobs and join WWOOF just yet. There may be a tootsie-roll center to our angst.

Despite what Spartans bark, I’m convinced that our existential crises serve a purpose. We complain about clients because we’re trying to learn how to better serve / deal with them. We complain about losing creativity because we want to stay creative. We complain about sitting and staring at computers because we don’t want the whole country to die of Office Ass.

The struggle is a by-product of trying to move forward. We can’t move forward, though, unless we’ve assessed the situation, identified problems and devised some solutions. Since most of us work privately and can’t see one another’s workflow, voicing our frustrations is one of the best places to begin. To see what’s working for our peers, and what doesn’t. This goes beyond ‘relatability’ and ‘transparency’—collective self-disclosure helps us get stuff done.

And so I say: Let yourself fall into despair or elation from time to time, and feel free to publicly announce it. Take it outside. Fight it out.

Yes We Can

The 4-hour workweek and Purple Cow are NYT booklist best sellers. Gary Vaynerchuck, Seth Godin and Tim Ferris are internet sensations. Millions of people—including arugula-eating elitists like myself—buy their books.

“Hope” might explain why Tim Ferris can convince us that we can achieve success in 4 hours a week. We want to believe. Because, what if? What if I really could crush my purple cow in four hours a week and make a million dollars and be happy?

This aspirational thinking and pumping ourselves up are pretty adaptive—they make us aim higher and push our limits. Like when you were little, for example, and wanted to be on star search, and jumped off the roof for practice. Maybe you didn’t end up on star search, but did you learn how to take a fall like a man? Yes we can.

Of course, getting yourself amped over any one idea comes at a cost. Because in exactly 2 seconds you will land on the ground. And when you do, your knees will kill.

Beware Populist Propaganda!

Self-help business books may be aesthetically problematic. But the real problem is that they reduce the complexities of “being successful” to a single (marketable) thesis. Nothing is ever that simple.

For most people, there is no magic bullet for success, beyond persistence, resilience, intelligent risk-taking and riding inspiration when it hits.

Plus, it takes years of hard work to nail it in 4 hours a week. And it takes sacrifices in other areas of your life to CRUSH IT. And purple cows only get you so far.

Post Script: Actually, maybe there IS a magic bullet. Read Get Businessing.

I mean, I like it. I like seeing what other people are doing. I like knowing there’s a great sea of people just like me, trying to succeed via business.

But the effects of collective peeking—that we can all see each other’s work and personal lives, all the time—are odd.

Peeping Toms and NorCal

There’s a strange sense of comfort (look how open and transparent—and human!—we all are!), mixed with a low-grade anxiety (look how much more open, transparent, and human X’s life/company is than mine!) that comes with x-ray vision.

It’s weird. And it’s no wonder some people refuse to join Twitter and Facebook. They turn all but the most confident of us into slobbery peeping toms.

While driving up the coast of Northern California recently, Matt and I stopped at a bed and breakfast. It was late and the inn manager was the only one there, so we drank and talked with her for a while.

She’d moved from tiny little city to tiny little city throughout the years, and now she and her four kids live in Westport. Population: 200.

She said she hated being in big cities. Hated feeling insignificant, hated racing around against people essentially the same herself. Hated thinking her kids might grow up where everyone’s looking at everyone else’s paper.

I kept thinking she’d never make it as a web designer. And I felt her pain.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

The miracles of social media allow me to know what about 100 people who I’ve never met like to drink. I know when they’ve had a bad day. I know if they have kids, and what parenting style they’re into. Their little humany quirks.

I also know what exciting projects they’re working on, how other people respond to their work and how much more or less successful, attractive and artistic they are than me.

This transparency has some very good effects. It’s easier to get to know one another, learn stuff, expand our world and build communities, for example. More people than ever have access to knowledge.

But as with all cultural changes, there are more sinister side effects going on, too. Our transparency—and talent for painting mostly positive pictures of ourselves and emotional states online—lay the groundwork for groupthink, envy, and for the Gargamel types out there, schadenfreude.

Things are getting more democratic and walls are breaking down—but this just means we can see how we really measure up now. Unlike medieval feudal lords, our competition’s only a few steps ahead.

The philosopher David Hume talks about this, in his Treatise of Human Nature:

It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him.

In other words, democracy and access give us more near-equals to compare ourselves to. As a result, we feel more envious.

Apocalypse Now?

Mass envy followed by active schadenfreude sounds apocalyptic. But I don’t think we’re facing the end of common decency, individuality or a healthy sense of alone-ness in the world.

I think we’re going through a little phase. Like, the world’s first year of college. We’ll have to just stop curling our hair every day and adjust. To deal with the fact that we’re not as special as we’d like to think. There are many people better than us.

And we’ll have to find other ways of being special. Whether it means moving to Westport or having the courage, as my friend Emily recently put it, to just be yourself—even in business, among the peeping toms.

Let’s say you’re funded by the gubmit, and the gubmint’s broke because it spent all its money on oil spills. Or maybe you’re funded by the Man, but the Man’s so busy crushing it, he can’t be bothered to study up on his UI/UE/UX/CS/IA.

That won’t be a problem for you.

Use this Extremely Cheap CS Guide to impress your boss and gain results. Without spending a single K.

The Extremely Cheap CS Guide

• Use Your Brains. There are many wonderful things like content templates, content strategy how-to’s, and content strategy wisdom nuggets in the world. You can read and learn those. Or, before you start writing, you can just sit down and let your brain engine do some thinking for you. “What are my goals? What message am I trying to get across? Who’ll write all this stuff?” she’ll ask.
• Shorten Everything. That means everything: the number of pages on your site. The amount of text on each page. The number of sentences in each paragraph. The number of words in each sentence. Make it little. Make it less. In your municipality, aggressive Completists are thrown in jail.
• Action First. On your website, brochures, tweets and everywhere in between: action is the reason for the season. Be your users’ benevolent steward. Usher them around. Your motto is “Keep them moving; make them happy.”
• Be Direct. You’re done with the wind-up. No more circuitous intros. Does your company build boats out of toothpicks? Then you say so, friend! WE BUILD BOATS OUT OF TOOTHPICKS! Any audio, video or market-speak standing in the way of your proud declaration will be swiftly removed. When it comes to flim flam, your policy is Zero Tolerance.
• Be Human. You might work for the gubmit, but there’s no need to adopt his language! Are you tweeting? Tweet like a (hu) man. Blogging? Blog like you talk. Writing copy for your website? See #1. Hail Orwell.
• Think About The People. You are a gubbner who gubberns for and with The People. That’s why everything you publish on the internet—your website, your social media bytes and your pop-o-matic mailers—is made with the people in mind. Since the people in the southern part of your world think differn’t than the people in the northern part, you always take time to consider and write for their special needs.

And there it is. Content Strategy for Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!