Last Thursday we had several hours of straight interviews, all but one of them were outstanding candidates. The first round of interviews for us is a “get to know” session. In 1 hour we have to get at the essence of the person. We actually put a good chunk into the person’s “blink factor.” If we aren’t feeling just a little bit of love in the first 2 minutes, then the candidate is going into an uphill battle.

After the “blink factor” we really want to know the person. How did they come into their career choice? What are they passionate about? Are they multi-dimensional? Are they a ridged or free-thinker? etc… Then we start analyzing the skill and experience level. Resumes don’t amount to much; just because a candidate lists every single program they’ve worked on doesn’t mean they are qualified for the job. Likewise a track-record of short job stints doesn’t mean they hop from company to company. In fact, one of the candidates in the last round of interviews didn’t list a job which lasted longer then 1 year. However, during the interview it became clear this candidate was very passionate about his line of work and the stints were not by choice but by circumstance.

The next part of the evaluation is the 4 staple questions which apply to everyone we hire at Imulus:
1. How do you rate your organization skills?
2. From 1 to 10, where are you with your writing skills and can we see samples?
3. Do you like formal meetings or ad-hoc gatherings?
4. How do you like to be managed?

Sure, they can lie their way through these questions but if they make it back to the second interview then the WHOLE OFFICE will have a shot at uncovering the real truth. At that point someone will smell bullshit. Anyone at Imulus has veto power, it needs to be a unanimous decision.

The last part of the evaluation is asking the question, is this person the best fit for the job? I would have hired several candidates if we were looking for an mid-level .NET person or Web developer, but we are looking for senior level experience. With just interviews and references to go off of it’s often tough to gauge how the candidate will respond to a real-working environment with our office dynamics, workload and management style. This is the part of the interview where I believe you have to trust your gut. I’m a big believer in quantifying data and looking at things scientifically but sometimes that feeling in the pit of your stomach is often the best judge of a situation.

I’ll guess you’ll see shortly who we’ve decided on.

Perhaps one of the most enlightening discussions we’ve had at Imulus was in regard to the following question.

Starting now if you had to read all type for the rest of your life in one typeface, what would it be?^*

My answer: Gotham. The font is profound, clean, inescapably strong, yet different enough in weight to convey emphasis and prowess. Gotham is the sort of typeface that a type-designer becomes famous for. It’s Helvetica with out the genericism^**.

So while Gotham is used frequently (pdf) it deserves credit for being a landmark typeface in the twenty first century^***.

In the end a typeface is much like wine, if it tastes good to you the complexities and price don’t mean much. However, you may just find that over time your tastes refine. And as far as Gotham is concerned, it’s about as refined as it gets.

^{* Note: This means an entire font family, not one particular weight.
** I’m a wannabe lexicographer.
*** Gotham was released from H&J in the year 2000.}

It seems that the notoriously tightwad ICANN is now relaxing domain naming conventions. Now any combination of letters, numbers and non-Latin text will be able to resolve to a Web site. Personally, I think this is a serious mistake.

There already are plenty of domain name suffixes to select from but time and time again .COM is the most selected suffix. It’s what people know and they are used to. I remember a few years ago there was a huge stink over whitehouse.com going to a porn site rather then to a government site. Those who understood domain names would have gone to .GOV. At the time there were only a handful of suffixes to choose from, this new direction by ICANN will change all that.

Personally, I think this adds more confusion to domain names. I already see plenty of challenges, even with technical folks understanding the differences in subdomains such as blog.imulus.com vs imulus.com vs www.imulus.com. Usually there is a 50 / 50 chance that if I give someone a domain name containing a subdomain they will usually add www to the URL; for instance bet.rmi.org then becomes www.bet.rmi.org.

This will surely benefit search engines more then the average user. I guess the lawyers benefit also because it sure will be interesting to watch the copyright and trademark lawsuits for all the domain name variations which will be gobbled up by the name registers.

Nice move ICANN!

Netflix recently announced that they are eliminating the Profiles feature from their online movie rental service. For a company that built it’s business on customer service, this is a seriously bonehead move. For families or small businesses this was the feature that made the service work for them. Without it, it isn’t a very good solution at all. I can only assume that some bean counters at Netflix think that all those profile users are now going to have to signup for a full account and they will increase their profits. On the contrary, this is going to make the service unusable for a lot of people and they will try something else. If Blockbuster can add profiles they will destroy Netflix. If you want to voice your opinion, I suggest you email Netflix and sign the petition here: http://www.savenetflixprofiles.com/

Update: Netflix has reversed their policy on this topic and will be keeping profiles for single accounts. This is wonderful, and a great example of users making their voice heard. Way to support and respect your users Netflix!

As an interactive agency we pride ourselves in our ability to keep in the forefront of the latest trends and techniques. We get so wrapped up in keeping up with the techno-Joneses that we often don’t realize that there is a huge line behind us of others struggling to keep up with just the basics of what we take for granted.

FTP
I’d like to assume we’ve all used FTP software before and we all understand how to login and send a file to a remote server, but this isn’t yet the case. In just this year alone I’ve ran into several clients and friends who aren’t familiar with FTP services. I’m sure there are several of you out there who can relate to people trying to send you multiple 10 Mb files via email only to wonder why they are bouncing back. That same person is often likely lost when you go on explaining how to FTP rather then emailing them.

The HOME button
Clicking on the logo takes you back to the homepage, right? No, not according to many we’ve spoken to. Many times either during the initial homepage design or just prior to launching someone always asks “How do you get to the homepage?” Often, I have to be the home-button-Nazi and say “No Home button for you” but is that correct? Certainly it depends on the site, information rich CNN uses the HOME button but product based Amazon uses the logo. Can we get a standard here?

New Browser Windows
OK, this one is a tough one to justify to a client. I for one hate the idea of a site opening new windows unless I asked for it. I’ll CTRL-Click or Apple-T my way to a new window but countless clients demand that we pop open their externally linking content in a new browser window. Their logic is “if someone comes to my site and I offer them links, then they might leave my site”…. yes… exactly! That is what browsing the Web is all about. Can you imagine how awful the browsing experience would become if every click of a URL spawned a new window?

The Web is not Word
Granted, the Web-based WYSIWYG editors have come a long, long way over the years but due to CSS and inherit limitation these editors aren’t as feature rich or flexible as word-processing applications for the desktop. To the chagrin of many designers / developers clients love to use all sorts of colors, fonts and sizes in their copy. This is evident in a short reviewal of all the PowerPoint presentations out there. How do you explain to a client that an online Web-based editor is going to give them what they need to make changes, but there are inevitable some changes which will need to be done by a trained developer?

Sometimes You Have to Scroll
At some point long ago the idea of a scrolling pages of content was seen as the 8th deadly sin. I believe those days are long gone. This concept was replaced by the notion of developing layouts which cater to varying browser / display settings. For instance, you still want to have the important content fit into an 800 x 600 display but even those dimensions are going the way of the Dodo bird. Let’s go back to CNN, here is a site where you aren’t going to see the full content in 800 x 600, you’ll need to be at 1024 x 768 and even then you’ll scroll vertically and that is OK. I don’t subscribe to the notion that people are too lazy to scroll… get real, if they are too lazy to scroll then they are likely to lazy to move a mouse in which case you are marketing to a vegetable.

The bottom-line is we have to do a better job at educating the public, our clients, and our friends. It’s always good to remember that many people aren’t in this industry and many just don’t care about most of the things we designers / developers and programmers are passionate about.

I’ll append this list again in the future but for now I’ll end my rant.