Perfect video for site called Monkey Time, eh?

Been using WordPress as a CMS for a couple clients, and I’m thrilled with how easy it is to set and run. Just seems natural and intuitive to me — which is a far cry from most content systems I’ve played with and been forced to swallow over the last couple of years.

I bought the album at Best Buy last night, and ooh, cool, there’s a bonus song that you can download. “This Girl That I Know” by Beck. But shit, it’s in WMA format with DRM, so I can’t use it on my Mac.

But that’s cool. You can strip off the DRM, and then convert it to MP3. Here’s how:

1. Download the song from Beck.com
2. Download FairUse4WM. It’s free! (Yeah, I’m sorry. It’s a Windows only program. Couldn’t find anything to do this on my Mac.)
3. Use FairUse4WM to strip out the DRM.
4. OK, good so far, but it’s still in WMA (asf) format. Need to convert it to MP3.
5. Download FFMpegX and follow their installation instructions. It’s free!
6. Use FFMpegX to convert the WMA file to MP3 format.
7. Drag your shiny new MP3 file into iTunes, and re-enter the meta info.

Et voila! You’re done.

Graphic design is easy, of course, so we kill ourselves trying to make it hard. I should have remembered a lesson I received at one of my first job experiences, a summer internship in the design department at WGBH-TV in Boston. I had been assigned a rare design project. Given my status — I was the most junior of three interns — it was probably something like a hallway flyer for the annual blood drive. I labored over this 8.5 x 11 inch opus all day, never forgetting what I then held as the twin tenets of responsible design practice (one, create something absolutely without precedent; and two, demonstrate to onlookers how clever I am). Given my predilections at that point in my nascent career, this probably involved merging the home-grown rigorous modernism of Lester Beall and Will Burtin with the formal experimentation of Wolfgang Weingart and April Grieman. My only inhibition was the lack of a Macintosh computer, which would not be invented for seven years.

Late in the day, the station’s head of design, the legendary Chris Pullman, came by my desk. “What’s this?” he asked. Breathlessly, I described the visionary thinking that informed the yet-unfinished masterpiece before me. Pullman stared at the mess for a moment, and then his face brightened. “Hey,” he said, as if a great idea was just occuring to him. “Why avoid the obvious?” He then took away everything but the headline: GIVE BLOOD NOW. “Try that!” he said cheerfully, walking away.

Poor, poor Obvious. Come sit by me. I’ll be your friend.

From an article over at Design Observer. It’s a pet peave of mine, when designers reaching for clever end up in the dustbin of confusion.

It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create garganuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.

I love it when designers at least talk about holding themselves accountable, rather than having “an almost allergic reaction to demonstrating explicit business value”.

Care to guess the winner?