I spend way too much time every day sitting in front of a glowing laptop screen, moving pixels. It’s good to change focus every so often. It’s good to get into something tactile.

I play music under the name Sky Histoire, and I recently released a record. One of the cool things about creating a physical release of a piece of music is that the process of doing so is actually a combination of seven or eight mini-projects in one: writing music, rehearsing, recording and mixing instruments, shooting and editing video, booking concerts, getting vinyl pressed, designing record covers, and – in my case – screen-printing those record covers by hand.

The 7-inch single sleeves for the vinyl release of this record were hand-printed at Vetomat in Berlin (by two Toms – Tom from Vetomat and yours truly), over the course of two evenings in November last year.

The records themselves were printed with a basic layer of black paint (for all the text), and then subsequently given another layer of paint (for the branches motif) in red, blue or silver paint. All of them were then numbered (again by hand) and packed into boxes.

One of the aspects of web design which seemed so appealing to me, all those years ago when I first started learning HTML, was the instantaneity of the creative process: a HTML or CSS file (or a thought, or an image, or an idea) could be on a hard-drive one moment, and then visible to the world the next. That still motivates me today.

However, the downside to this is that ideas and designs can seem ephemeral and fleeting. In contrast, there’s a great feeling of satisfaction that comes from creating a tangible physical object – taking an idea for a design and ending up with a finished thing that can be held in the hand (part of what makes labels like Constellation so inspirational).

These records can be played on record players that were manufactured almost a century ago, and a well-cared-for copy of the record should work fine a hundred years in the future, once I’m long gone, if anyone wants to listen. In an era when we create more and more stuff, but with less and less regard for its permanence, it’s nice to put some effort into trying to create something that will, hopefully, outlast me.

In the most recent episode of the Critical Path podcast, on 5by5, Horace Dediu made some fascinating observations about the long-term aims of modern technology companies.

His basic point — summed up in the episode’s title, ‘Getting to Know You’ — is that these companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and others) are building ‘data mountains’ on their users, in order to ‘get to know’ them. This information can be transformed into profiles that can be used to make money, through advertising or other targeted marketing. A by-product of this process is the essential obliteration of the personal privacy of all users.

As Dediu acknowledges, this in itself is not a new insight — there has been plenty of coverage of privacy controversies at Facebook, Google and other companies. What was interesting, however, was that he linked this to a larger historical context, referring to the process of institutions (state and private) gathering information about individuals over the last few centuries. This reminded me of an interview that Cabinet Magazine conducted with Valentin Groebner in 2006, about the medieval and pre-modern tracking of individuals.

Groebner,
 Professor of History at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, is the author of Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, and his interview with David Serlin talks about the history of passports, in the context of larger historical surrenderings of privacy in the last two hundred years.

It is possible that the current wave of institutional data-hoarding may in effect be the last. The companies who are leading it are far more efficient than previous authorities — historically, state and church authorities. They are taking the data from people who are apparently far more willing to give it than in previous eras. And they are going to be able to analyse and process personal data far more finely than anyone else ever has. This is not really an alarmist conclusion — although the situation itself is alarming — but simply an acknowledgement of existing reality. Dediu’s comment that “this will become a political question” and that “these things are doomsday issues for some” is interesting in the context of the recent successes of the privacy-advocating Piratenpartei (Pirate Party) in the 2011 Berlin state elections.

Of course, one reaction to this erosion of the private sphere is to, in effect, be your own hoarder, by controlling your online persona — to own your identity, as Marco Arment recommends. An extension of this process is suggested by Apify.me, a recent project by Marco Hamersma. Hamersma’s project extends the idea of an API to people. It implies an inversion of an API’s usual purpose, producing a data feed for a person. Is this an effective way of reacting to an unprecedented loss of privacy? Or will it just make people into targets?

I’ve been working for a short while on a new design for my own websites, which is now pretty much done. I have two parallel ‘personal professional’ websites. This one here, tomodoherty.ie, is for design-related work. The other one, tomodoherty.de, is for photography and audiovisual work.

My idea was to have a single, minimalist visual identity across both sites. The design is based on a 14-column grid (similar to that used on my Extricate WordPress theme) with a full width of 960 pixels including the whitespace at the edges. The two main content columns are side-by-side on desktop and iPad, but are presented in a single column on iPhone, via a bit of media query magic.

Having the consistent visual identity across both sites might seem like it would cut down on the amount of work involved in doing the sites, but it’s not as simple as it might sound. Firstly, the two sites are actually running on different content management systems. Secondly, they have different site structures and purposes.

CMS fun and games
Through various historical hiccups and accidents, I’ve ended up in a situation where this site runs on Textpattern, and the other one runs on WordPress. Although this is not something that would make sense for most people running multiple sites, I kind of like having the two parallel systems. These are the two blogging and content management tools that I’m most familiar with, and if nothing else, doing things this way presented a couple of interesting practical problems to solve in the process of rolling out a design across both sites (getting the search form to ‘match’ took a bit of puzzling, for example). The Textpattern installation is running version 4.4.1 with no plugins so far. The other site’s WordPress install is running quite a few: Clean-Contact, Portfolio Slideshow, Improved Include Page and WP No Category Base. Will it make sense, long-term, to have two different systems running beside each other? Time will tell…

Structure
My basic idea for this site was to have zero navigation — all essential information should be available on the front page. Apart from Variations (i.e. this section — a design blog of sorts) there are no ‘internal’ sections to the site. The other site, however, does have sections and a main navigation. So, the layout had to encompass two different site structures while staying visually consistent. I’d like to think I solved this problem more-or-less elegantly, using the space at the top of the page for a slogan of sorts in one site, and for the navigation in the other. The content in both sites will be expanding over time, and I hope I’ve anticipated enough in the structure and layout of the sites that they will be able to accomodate these changes without too much tweaking. Let’s see.

Any attempt at reorganising an existing site can be tricky, especially one as familiar as a personal portfolio. If you have any feedback on the sites, or you’d like to get in touch, please let me know by email, or on Twitter; I’d be curious to hear more.

The bad user-interface design of Skype 5 for Mac is no secret.

It seems, however, that Skype’s UI problems extend further than the core application. Consider the following dialog box, which greets users during the process of upgrading Skype:

This box asks a moderately-complex question about an important core function of the application. It’s phrased as a yes/no question:

Do you want to allow the new version to access the same keychain items (such as passwords) as the previous version?

The answers given to users for this box should be a no-brainer — Option 1: “Yes, allow”. Option 2: “No, do not allow”. Clear, concise, and directly related to the question. Instead, the dialog box presents the user with two options (“Don’t Change” and “Change All”) which have no direct relation to the question as it has been asked, and which refer to a ‘change’ that has not previously been referred to.

This is at the same point in the upgrade where dire warnings are being given to users that “this change is permanent and affects all keychain items” — it’s not something you want to make a mess of. The user is left cut adrift — Change what? Where? It’s… permanent? But how do I… huh?

This single dialog box might not be actively noticed by many users as being unclear and confusing, but it does leave users with a queasy intuition about Skype updates — a feeling that upgrading Skype is a potential minefield, best avoided (indeed, this dialog box has been responsible for me not updating Skype in the past — in one of my earlier upgrades of Skype, I came across this dialog and was so terrified of clicking the ‘wrong’ answer that I actively avoided subsequent Skype updates).

I hope that, in future, Skype can not only clean up the design of their flagship application, but that they can also keep an eye on the finer details of their upgrade process UI, too.

• Recent work: current and recently-completed web projects (if you’d like me to do some work for you, please get in touch)
• Variations: thoughts on design and related things

• Slates: A minimalist WordPress theme for bands and musicians
• Extricate: A grid-based WordPress theme for writers, bloggers and journalists
• Occasional bilingual content strategy work (German-English), copywriting, and web editing work

• Tom O’Doherty: Photography and audiovisual art
• Silences: Collaboration with choreographer Kata Kovács
• Gestammelorchester: Music
• Sky Histoire: Music
• Haunting Europe: Occasional contributions to a group blog on the spectres of the Soviet century
• Snoother: Other things

• Email
• Twitter