His post is full of some great quotes pertaining to the silly things we do:

straining for novelty

Graphic design is easy, of course, so we kill ourselves trying to make it hard.

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

It’s a humorous post, aimed namely at graphic designers designing for fellow graphic designers. But it echoes loudly into the industry as a whole. It seems that all too often a design firm is hired and spends much of its time avoiding the obvious. I recall early in my web career when the firm I was working at was given the opportunity to develop a large site of an HMO. I was excited for once. This wasn’t going to be a brochure site! I was thinking about learning much more about accessibility, tackling a big customer focus component, exploring the many facets of their target audience, researching content management solutions, etc. I was ready. Then, of course, came the design team meetings. I believe the first one consisted of 5 minutes of me asking about resources that we could gather regarding accessibility testing and then about an hour and a half debating the qualities of stock photograph ‘a’ vs. stock photograph ‘b’.

That’s when it first hit me that I’m a graphic designer who honestly doesn’t find graphic design that important. To be fair, I should say that graphic design is terribly important…it’s that a lot of the industry just isn’t focused on the important aspects of graphic design.

And I suppose that’s not necessarily all bad–provided a balance is kept. Yes, a big part of graphic design is the ‘fun’ factor…both for us as the designers and for everyone else, as the consumer. We just need to remember to maintain that critical balance between the obvious and the frivolous.

United there is nothing we can’t do, divided there is nothing we can.

Congratulations, Blaine, and congratulations New York Mills Regional Cultural Center for another year of the competition which, from what I’ve seen, gets a bit more publicity each and every year. This is good for thinking, as well as the rural/small town landscape of MN.

And, finally, a proposal if anyone at the Think-Off organization reads this: give the contestants a blog!

it is always wise to err on the side of life
-G.W.

Which, I think, can only be accurately rebutted with a quote from John Stewart:

Wha-Wha-Whaaaa…!?

The only sure way to failure is to try to please everybody.

And a variation here:

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Everyone loves Bill Cosby, right? This will come in handy at my next management meeting where I explain the pitfalls of ‘design by committee’ once again.

Open source content management software sucks. It sucks really badly. The only things worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it really doesn’t have to be that way.

He’s absolutely right. The state of the CMS software market is one of bloated crappiness. It seems as if there are as many CMS products out there as there are web sites, and none of the products really address the core needs of web site owner.

Now, this isn’t necessarily the fault of the CMS vendor. In many ways, CMSs simply can’t be made into a commodity. Everyone has a unique need.

That said, CMS vendors could do a lot more to not only improve their products, but–and perhaps more importantly–improve their marketing/sales skills.

I recently had a conversation with The Head Lemur about what makes all CMS vendor sites universally crappy (IMHO).

Quoting myself from his blog:

When we spent a year researching CMS products for our organization, most of the information I truly wanted was nowhere to be found on most sites:

• is it a hosted solution? shrink wrapped? Both?
• what is the true cost? (NOT the ‘call for quotes’ crap)
• what is the admin interface?
• where is the free download to try it on our own servers?
• what is the technology platform it is built upon?
• is there a documented API?
• is there documentation?
• where is the user-to-user support forum (if there even is one)?
• how do does it work (step-by-step overview from making templates to
  setting up user roles…)

Seems simple enough. The basic specs of the product would seem perfectly suited for a web site that supposedly is trying to sell said product.

Well, as it turns out, the head lemur is one of id To Blog’ bloggers (see Google). An interesting marketing idea. Well, Marqui picked up on the list and actually responded.

The answers were…OK. Yet, reading through the article, I still was hit with a sense of “we’ll use lot’s of vague terms to describe a rather technical product.” (Campaign calendar? Paperless brochure?) I concede that a lot of CMS solutions are sold to middle management where noncommital, dilbertesque terminology is a wicked sales tool. But it seems like they’re spending more time trying to vaguely define Content Management in non threatening language rather than explicitly stating why their product is any different than the other 1000 products on the market.

In the end, I still think the best advice I can give anyone looking at CMS products is to look, but don’t buy. Build your own from scratch. It won’t be perfect, but it will be yours and from the start it will be infinitely more tailored to your needs than any of these other products.

I really don’t want to have a conversation about the shit I buy, and I wouldn’t have to if everything thrown on the market wasn’t beta quality in the first fucking place. I’d be fucking amazed if everyone stopped presuming that I want a relationship. I don’t. Any more than I want messages. I want anonymous sex. No talking.

- Brian Moffat

and, my favorite:

Writing about marketing without losing all self-respect is harder than it looks.

- Hugh at Gapingvoid.com