I’m reading Coco Chanel: an Intimate Life, which is a historian’s view of Chanel’s somewhat murky origins, based on primary sources.

Chanel had a habit of obscuring her early (dirt-poor) life; she was a canny marketer, and understood that her wealthy customers would be more willing to buy her daringly simple clothing if the clothes were associated with her own rather glamorous and arty lifestyle. This was revolutionary at the time. Designers were generally seen as servants, certainly not as people who dictated how the upper classes should live.

The book describes the earliest instance I’ve seen of giving product away to gain market share:

…She was quite willing for her clothes to be copied…In 1932 Gabrielle presented a fashion exhibition at the Duke of Westminster’s London house in aid of charity. The idea was that dressmakers and manufacturers should come along with the express intention of copying Gabrielle’s designs. Five hundred or so society and entertainment personalities attended over the course of several days. The Daily Mail reported how “many visitors bring their own seamstresses because this collection is not for sale…Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized it being copied.” The other designers in Paris went to great lengths to protect their designs and were absolutely opposed to Gabrielle’s initiative.

I ordered a macbook sleeve from Freitag and was pleased to receive a very entertaining email confirming my order.

Dear Anne of idyllic Boston your Ordernumber is: [redacted]

We‘re honored to announce that you soon will be proud F84/W MAC SLEEVE AIR white owner. We do everything within and beyond our power to make sure that in no time a charming delivery man will ring your bell to hand over your personal piece of FREITAG!

Later this evening we‘re going to celebrate your shopping skills till dawn and we will drink at least 17 times to you. Therefore again, thank you very much!

Best regards
Your FREITAG Online Team

Making me laugh = one million brand points. I wish more people would drink to me seventeen times for ordering a laptop case.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching a few really great design-related videos lately.

First up: Noah Iliinsky (@noahi) presents on information visualization at the SameAs event in London.

Information visualization (a.k.a. “infoviz,” if you swing that way) is a big topic in web and application design lately, for reasons that have to do with lots of data being available to crunch from industries like healthcare and finance.

The idea seems to be that if you filter and present data in innovative ways, it will improve understanding and help to create products that point to things that users can do to improve their lives (health, savings, whatever).

It isn’t adequately clear to me that this is going to revolutionize the UX industry–simple graphs and charts have been in use for years, and overly complex and novel ways of representing data can confuse users within the context of an in-app workflow, in my experience–but it’s an interesting topic to explore, especially when it becomes clear that it’s easy to completely misrepresent the meaning of data, either accidentally or deliberately. See especially the example from Apple cited in the video.

Next: Mike Monteiro (@mike_FTW), design director and co-founder of Mule Design Studio, presents “F*ck You. Pay Me,” a profane, entertaining, and very useful examination of the business of doing design.

He covers things like contracts, working with lawyers, selling design as a business service rather than as a fun thing that designers would totally do for free, and various other things that designers (and other people who sell services) are uncomfortable talking about.

This was presented at an event called Creative Mornings that happens in San Francisco, Zurich, Los Angeles, and New York. Why not Boston? I do not know. We could really use it.

Finally, I streamed “Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight” on Netflix last weekend. It was inspiring primarily because Milton Glaser is an artist who chooses to work as a commercial designer, who doesn’t allow the mystique of design-as-art to interfere with getting the damn work done. His work is beautiful and supports the aims of his clients. And that is what good design work is.

His essays are worth reading. Here’s the trailer for the film.

“But won’t that be below the fold?”

The “fold” is an inherently physical concept from the world of newspapers, the horizontal bit halfway down a paper’s front page destined to become a hinge. The content of a newspaper above the fold is displayed to the world, while the lower half of the front page of the newspaper–the area below the fold–is hidden until the reader unfolds the paper in order to read it.

In the case of a newspaper, the articles and headlines above the fold provide the impetus to buy the newspaper. If the material above the fold doesn’t capture the reader’s attention, the paper will languish at the newsstand, unsold. So this part of the front page is extremely important, and it deserves a lot of attention from the paper’s editors.

On the Internet, there is no fold. The Web is not a newspaper. It’s not even an analogue for a newspaper. The Web is an infinitely flexible medium accessed with browsers on screens. Yet some people still assume that their users will deal with Web sites in exactly the same way as they would a newspaper: they will judge the site based on a fixed, horizontal slice of the home page.

Actually, make that a fixed, horizontal slice of every page, because:

“Users don’t like to scroll.”

I’ve heard that one a lot, too.

These two assumptions–that there’s a thing called a “fold,” and that people who use the Web are ignorant of the use of a scrollbar–are absolutely wrong. I’ve sat through hours of usability sessions that have proved these assumptions invalid. Yet they persist. Why?

1. Design for an imaginary usability issue, and the issue becomes real.

If you design a site with the assumption that there’s only 600 pixels of available vertical space, you will create a site that (a) presents no useful content “below the fold” (assuming your users all browse using exactly the same vertically-sized browser windows, more on that later) and (b) discourages scrolling, because you’ll probably arrive at a design with a very strong horizontal emphasis right around 600 pixels down the page, because that’s where people stop scrolling, because that’s where the “fold” is. Right?

Congratulations: you’ve created a site where there isn’t an incentive for users to scroll.

2. There is no “fold.” There is only a “false bottom.”

Fact: users don’t mind scrolling. They often need to be prompted to scroll, though, by understanding that there’s more content below the lower edge of their browser’s window. If there’s a strong horizontal emphasis in the design somewhere below, say, the top third of the page, users might take that as a hint not to scroll. If the page avoids this issue, they’ll understand that there’s more to see beyond the confines of their little window, and they absolutely will scroll. I’ve seen it.

That horizontal emphasis is called a “false bottom.” If there’s a false bottom, users won’t scroll. No false bottom? No issue. They scroll.

3. Browser window sizes are unreliable.

Most humans using the Internet have lots of things open at once. A typical office worker might be working on a document while checking email while chatting on IM while listening to music on iTunes. Each of these applications takes up screen space, so people are very likely to change the size of their browser window (or windows!) to make room for their other activities.

So, the concept of a consistent “fold” that is related to the standardized size of a typical user’s browser window is completely imaginary. And to spend design time to accommodate this supposedly standardized and universally applicable window size is (a) a waste of money and (b) a guarantee that the design won’t use the available real estate very well.

4. I blame PowerPoint.

Lots of people blame PowerPoint for various horrible things, but I blame it for forcing designers to design Web pages that look nice in it. What looks best in a PowerPoint presentation? Screens that have a strong horizontal emphasis and end at the bottom of the powerpoint page, which is always set to “landscape.”

This is not how the Web works. Most Web pages have a portrait orientation. Go look at the New York Times if you don’t believe me. Keep scrolling until you reach the bottom of the page. Is it a landscape orientation? Go look at a bunch of other sites with great content. You’ll find the same thing.

This is why designers should avoid showing wireframes or comps in PowerPoint. It’s a good way to get client approval; clients are businesspeople, after all, and PowerPoint is the presentation platform of the business world, so it’s something they’re probably comfortable with. Also, it’s really easy to sell a client a nice-looking but very short page if it’s presented in PowerPoint, because a 600 pixel page height is a natural fit for a typical PowerPoint screen. It looks great, in PowerPoint. And only in PowerPoint. The same design will do clients a great disservice in the wild world of the Web.

5. Conclusion: the “fold” should die in a fire.

It’s one of those crazy American over-the-top Internet expressions, “die in a fire.” But it applies. The fold fallacy costs people money, drives designers nuts, pays legions of usability consultants, and is probably hurting someone’s business somehow, somewhere. It should die in a violent and irretrievable manner. It’s a stupid and costly myth, and it needs to go.

A friend recently invited me to provide IA and visual design for A. B. Smeby, an artisanal bitters manufacturer in Brooklyn, NY. The site is up, and I’m happy to have been involved with such a cool little enterprise.

It’s a small (one-page) site, but I did do a quick wireframe for it.

You can click the wireframe to make it bigger.

The wireframe helped to define where things went, what those things were, page width, icon needs and placement, product shot needs and placement, number of columns, links, and copy. It also helped my development partner to gauge whether the ideas I came up with were within development and maintenance scope.

This was the second wireframe I did for the project; the first one implied a design that was way out of scope. Wireframes are a great sanity check.

Sometimes I show these to clients, sometimes I don’t. In this case–since we had arrived at a one-page site, and the visual design was more than half the impact–I didn’t. It was just a means of defining the work to be done on my end.

Here’s the final product (click to see detail).

If you compare the screenshot with the wireframe, you can see how the design evolved.

A note on the site’s visual style: the client had requested a design that followed the current revival of interest in old-fashioned type and Victorian flourishes. This was a great fit for the brand, which is all about old-fashioned production methods. For this design, I researched bottle labels from the Victorian era. The yellow in the banner is from an 1890s Chinese ink bottle label, and the typography is related to the look of an old bitters label from 1900 or thereabouts.

I suggest you order some bitters. They’re tasty.