All Points North

ALL CAPS, missing apostrophe, images in an email footer, all crimes that should be referred to the European Court of Human Rights. I’m not kidding, they seem to cause so much harm and misery to so many on Twitter, Facebook and blogs that I have come to the conclusion that after child exploitation, pedophile rings and war crimes they should be next on the list of things to fix.

Get. A. Fucking. Grip.

A PR missed an apostrophe in a release about a new mouse and you find it necessary to take to Twitter and state categorically that you have binned the release on those grounds? For. Fucks. Sake. Please, please stop with your moral justifications, right now because if an email came from the Apple PR office and it said:

HI [INSERT NAME] we have some interview’s time with Tim Cook and thought you might like to speak to him for five minutes on any subject you choose, on the record naturally, PLEASE BE TO EMIALING ME BACK.

YOU WOULDN’T GIVE A FLYING FUCK. Even if it was set in Comic Sans.

Now, go get a life and stop moaning about things that barely matter a jot. Yes, there’s a standard and a tone and all those appropriate things that you should do, but for the sake of all humanity please put those things in perspective. So there was an apostrophe missing or someone wrote to you in all caps, ask yourself this: Does it really, truly, completely matter*? If it does to you then I pity you.

*it does and that’s ok, but most of the time it is not a matter of life and death.

I read with much interest this post from Matt Gemmell about simplicity the other day and agreed with all of it. I disagreed with all of it too, but I’ll get to that. It’s not that I think Matt is wrong in his conclusions, but, well, I do and here’s why. To me the important thing is the outcome of your work not the method or surroundings of its creation. That’s what I mean by him being both right and wrong. He makes stuff in his way. I make stuff in my way. Neither is correct or best.

The picture below is of my office, it doesn’t always look like this sometimes it’s much less tidy.

I’m not entirely sold on the idea that simplicity is any more powerful than complexity and too many times people have told me that what I need to be creative is simplicity and focus perchance some elegance in my life. Well, I don’t write well without some distractions, I find that if I sit down to write with no sound, no diversions, I fidget and lose track or the voices in my head become too loud for me to concentrate. As I write this Twitter is constantly updating on the left screen and I can hear my children playing downstairs. The amount of ‘rubble’ on my desk means that I have little room for manoeuvre. Were my room spotlessly clean with few distractions I’d simply hate it and I’d be less productive. When I sit in an empty room my mind goes as blank and flat as its surroundings.

When you’re creating a piece of work, your audience is your readers, or your viewers, or your listeners, or your customers. You still have the right to say no. You’re free to delete an email, and to filter the sender straight to the trash. You’re free to unsubscribe from a blog. You’re free to mute, unfollow or block someone on Twitter. You’re free to not talk to someone who’s consistently, unproductively negative.

I agree with the sentiment here, but all this changes radically when you are creating work for a company and not yourself. As an employee of a magazine the option to delete an offensive email without reply or the option to not talk to a consistently negative and unproductive customer isn’t always there. I speak as someone who had to reply to a customer outraged by our choice of font in a publication. 23 emails. Twenty. Three. Learning how to deal with the unproductively negative is a great lesson and in my opinion is better than simply pushing it way and ignoring it. How do you know you’re not missing their point without entering into discussion? The printed word can be very confusing and is easily misunderstood. Not dealing with those people is simple, I agree, but better? I’m not so sure.

… provide much-needed perspective, or allow you to declutter your workspace and your thoughts. It can also make you happier.

I think perspective is often warped by simplicity, binary distinctions are what kill debate and the endless need for our political classes to define everything as simple option a vs. simple option b is a prime example, but I fear I’m taking Matt’s simple mantra to it’s most extreme and being a bit unfair. However, as I’ve already mentioned decluttering my thoughts and workspace is the last thing I need. By far and away and I  mean by an order of magnitude the two things that have made me happiest are Niamh and Toby. Two of the most incredibly complex and clutter inducing things known to man. Or, as I like to call them ‘The kids’

There’s nothing better for your work and your life than a quiet, focused mind.

As I said, I don’t buy this assessment I think there’s nothing better for your mind than some chaos and pressure, that focusses the mind. Perhaps I should I say it focusses my mind.

Years ago, someone, I forget who, described the British attitude to the EU something like this:

“Britain is like the angry drunk husband locked out of the house. He bangs and bangs on the door demanding that he be let in, shouting all sorts of obscenities through the letterbox at his family inside and then when the door is eventually opened for him to enter he stands defiant, arms folded refusing to come in until those inside apologise and bend to his demands”

I wish I could remember where I heard that. It just rings so true.

Is it just me or is there a new trend in being absolutely right about everything? I’m not talking about the normal level of circle jerk, but a new more subtle circle that pretends to be less jerky, but somehow still is? Feels to me like the cool kids have discovered the Internet and they aren’t afraid to use it the way it should be as defined by them. Right phone, right applications, right way to browse, right way to listen to music, right way to make iPad magazines. Let’s group together and be right together back-slapping sites?

Snarky, tedious and self-righteous all knowing bullshit is oozing out of the primordial soup of the comments section and slowly but surely crawling up the page. I know I’m right about this. Maybe.

I’m going to be a judge for the Global Mobile Awards 2012, there’s lovely.

See you in Barcelona?

Padder, the digital magazine I originated and edited for a short, but sweet five issues is, as you’ll probably already have guessed unlikely to see an issue six. I, of course, am very disappointed about this. Don’t worry though, this isn’t one of those melt down blog posts where I blame everyone but myself and claim that there was some super-conspiracy from the outset. It simply wasn’t like that. Apologies also to those who came here looking for one of those melt down blog posts where I blame everyone but myself.

I should say here and now that if you came here looking for insider knowledge and commercially sensitive information you’re out of luck too. Anything I discuss here will already be in the public domain and nothing that could be seen as commercially sensitive information will appear here.

Padder began life as an itch of an idea that there should be a magazine explicitly for the iOS. MacUser, MacFormat, Macworld and iCreate were all doing an ok job of shoehorning in the new arm of Apple, but I felt that consumers would jump at a dedicated iOS product. Seemingly, my arch nemesis (very good friend) Chris Phin had already been working on something very similar. Tap! was announced shortly after I’d sent the original pitch to Dennis.

So, a rethink. If Tap! Was already out there what should Padder be? Well, not Tap! was my view. It would have been easy to simply ape what Tap! was and bring out a product that was ostensibly the same, but different. What’s the point of chasing the same customer base? The challenge was to deliver an alternative, something that appealed to the iOS reader. Padder, or iPx as it was then called would have to compete in a different area.

Also, Dennis decided that they’d like to look at a digital product and not print so that cut the options down too. So, I started cutting everything. Instead of iOS and everything associated with that, it would be iPads. Instead of hundreds of in-depth reviews there would be short recommendations. The bulk of the content would come from columns, at least three decent sized ones in each issue. More where possible. But at Padder’s heart would lay the same mantra of ‘small’ a bite sized product for those idle iPad moments.

We used the Adobe Tools to create Padder and that’s just fine by me. A lot of crap (and I mean crap) is spoken by people who say things like ‘it HAS to be an app’. Bollocks. Bollocks I say not because an app isn’t the best solution, but because it’s simply one way of doing a digital magazine. Yes, there are things you can do with an app that you can’t do with the Adobe tools or other processes, but they are not the be all and end all. A digital magazine isn’t the tools it was created with its the stuff inside. The content and their character is much more important than the colour of their making, if you see my twisted logic. You could put out a shitty low res PDF and if people like it, they’ll buy it.

At this point I’m going to just take a short detour to talk about one of the lessons Padder has taught me personally. We used the Adobe tools and people were quick to say ‘why not build an app’ not a lot, but sometimes. Here’s the thing, if you make a choice the other options are irrelevant. We can talk about how great it would be to build a team of coders and make something unique, but that isn’t happening so let’s not spend four hours daydreaming about how option x, which we can neither afford nor has the support internally would have been better. Take the hand you’re dealt and make the best of it is what I’m saying. The desire to complain about how ‘we’re hamstrung by the thing we cannot change’ is strong. Avoid it at all costs.

Anyway, back to Padder. We had decided that Padder would be short and sharp it would be made on the Adobe platform and that our enormous team of me, a designer spilt across two other publications and a publisher with a large portfolio would be it. I can’t reveal costs, but anyone in the publishing industry will be able to look at Padder and take a rough guess at how much it cost to put together editorially. I’ll cut to the chase for those of you not in publishing the answer is: peanuts. One editor, one art director, three freelance pages, one illustration. Naturally there are other internal costs that I’m not taking into account here, but from a words and pictures point of view Padder was cheap to make.

So, we finally make it to launch and issue 1 is free. Issue 1 of Padder is incredibly well received. You might scoff at that, but here are the facts. Padder spent its first week at number 10, 11 and 12 in the OVERALL downloads chart. It took longer to drop out of the overall top 20 too. I’m not sure I can reveal the initial figure, but let’s just say if you were to write it down and redact it, it would look like this: XX,XXX Not too shabby for a ‘softish’ launch. And we had adverts, more of which later.

Then the wheels start to get loose. We party on to issue 2, but notifications don’t work, oh and we start to charge. The initial price is supposed to be £1.29, but the great Apple Arbitrary Repricing event of 2011 happens during the night and we come out at £1.49. Much air sucking through teeth. Is Padder worth it? I suppose we’ll find out. Issue 2 does not replicate the success of the first free issue. Issue 3 notifications fail too. Issue 4 notifications work! Yay! Except the app fails so people can’t get issue 4 even if they want to.

The wheels come off. That’s it. Issue 5 will be the last. Why? Well, I’m still not entirely sure. Of course, the relatively small number of downloads for issues 2, 3 and 4 will be a major reason, but what if we made Padder free? We’ll never know now. I have to be honest, the deal was we’d try five issues and see where we were and that is exactly what happened.

Paul, Bill and I worked really hard on Padder and there were others too who gave time, advice and pushed to make it a success, but for a plethora of reasons it wasn’t meant to be. As is nearly always the case in these matters I wasn’t party to the decision making process regarding the birth and early death of Padder and naturally I think stopping it is a mistake, but I refer you back to something I wrote earlier in this post which I’ll paraphrase here: Can’t do shit about it so move on.

Oh yes, I forgot abut the adverts. There are five adverts in issue 5 of Padder and that’s pure economics. If you are of the opinion that a paid for magazine app shouldn’t have adverts you need to be prepared to pay, handsomely, for it. At £1.49 Padder would have to sell multiple thousands of copies to BREAK EVEN editorially. And let’s not forget those tiny costs, eh? That’s not to say there isn’t method of making money from digital editions, there is, but it’s just not that simple.

Christopher Brennan Former editor of Padder, newly available for freelance writing gigs and digital magazine bullshit bingo caller.

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