Hi, I’m Matt Balara.I solve design problems with my head.

Consider a feeling every blogger knows: an idea appears; something important, meaningful and complicated enough that you can’t quite write it yet. So you think, instead of writing. And just as it gels in your head, you read what you wanted to write on another blog.

That other blog belongs to Andy Budd: founder of Clearleft, smart & funny guy, interview victim and totally slack blogger. I’ve been pretty slack myself of late, which is why Andy’s “My blog is dying, long live my blog” took the words right out of my mouth. His situation’s changed (lots of work and new colleagues to discuss ideas with), and a combination of too much input from too many sources, and new modes of expression like Twitter, has killed his urge to blog.

Slack Like Andy

This blog’s suffered some slack moments lately too. When Blogger’s Guilt has raised its ugly head, I’ve been telling it, “I just moved to the other side of the world. Give me a break.” Buying furniture, adjusting to working freelance, getting to know new friends, falling back in love, lying on beautiful beaches and exploring an exciting new city have been in focus – I’ve just had too many compelling reasons to spend time away from the keyboard. But now that I’ve started to settle into a routine here in Sydney, other reasons have been fueling my Blogger’s Block.

Scraps

Like most edglings, my online presence is pretty widely distributed: on this blog, my Tumblelog, Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Flickr, and quite a few more sites. It often takes a moment before I’m sure where to post what. I’ve been feeling dispersed rather than distributed. I’m rethinking how, why and where I present what, and such thinking tends to clog the content production arteries for a while.

Personal? Professional? Both?

For the last 12 years, I’ve worked for The Man – my online activities were solely personal and off the clock. As a freelancer, I now am The Man and I’m on the clock 24/7. “Matt Balara” is not only my person, it’s also my brand and my business. What I write, shoot, tweet and collect online are all me, but are also marketing and a potential client’s first impression. I’m becoming more conscious of what I’m doing online, and thinking through how combined or divided my activities should be, and what it might mean for my business. Also artery clogging.

Write About…

Part of leaving the clearly structured agency world and diving into the freelance pool is redefining what you do, or who you are professionally. Since arriving in Sydney, I’ve been lucky enough to have plenty of “whatever pays the bills” work, but haven’t had much time to think about those questions. Now that I have a little breathing room, that redefinition is rolling around in my head, but until it’s a bit further along it’s also hard to answer the “what should I write about?” question.

What Next?

My summary’s similar to Andy’s: I’ve got some questions I still haven’t answered. I’m leaning towards a single cohesive presentation on this site, whether it be life-streaming or clearly divided sections (blog, portfolio, photos, etc.), with all the other sources relegated to a clear data storage role. But the big questions above are the more important and difficult ones, and until I’ve got some answers there the changes will wait.

Considering the distributed (or dispersed) nature of our digital lives, I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been going through these thoughts. What’s your feeling about personal vs. professional presentation? How has your online persona, content and personal brand evolved in the last few years? How separate or cohesive are you in the web? Do tell.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

There’s not much worse than reading a blogger’s self-flagellation about how long it’s been since he’s written anything, and his pathetic excuses as to why not. So I won’t be doing that here and now. But a few people have asked, so I’ll just say this…

I made it to Sydney, and everything is absolutely wonderful.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

No lengthy witticisms, no in depth analysis, no lovely designs. Just my first test post from the new Wordpress app for the iPhone.

So far only one little problem: when I’m writing a new post and tap into categories, once I’m done, the “done” & “save” buttons have disappeared from the top bar, and all the buttons from the bottom, as you can see in the screenshot. This makes it impossible to set categories and save them as the only option is to tap “Posts” and discard changes. This process also seemed to have killed the image I’d already added. Surely just growing pains…

Otherwise it rocks! Looking forward to the next version.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

I failed to mention a pretty important event in my online life a couple weeks ago. Without us actually knowing each other at all, Stowe Boyd invited me to not only redesign his blog, /message (I did mention that), but he also invited me to write with him and a growing cadré of smart people over there. In case you missed it, I wrote my first post, “Why Aren’t You Talking to Me?” on the disconnect between my meatspace friends and my online social life. My second post, “Hello New Social App. Why Should I Use You?” just went online.

From now on I’ll be focussing more on design here, and shifting the whole social/web 2.0 stuff over to /message.

I must admit, the invite took me by surprise (floored me actually) and I’ve been very plesantly surprised by the response to my first post both on FriendFeed and in the comments. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Stowe for giving a relative stranger and unknown blogger a chance.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

A discussion (in German) the other day in the foyer of Sinnerschrader (translated into English for my readers).

Blogger 1: You wouldn’t believe what just happened! I’ve got to blog it right now!

Blogger 2: Nice thought, but I was there too, thank you very much. Do you know how hard it is to find subjects to write about? This definitely belongs in my blog!

Blogger 1: Forget it, this one’s mine!

Blogger 3: (in passing) normally I’d never blog about work, but you’re talking about some thing very general…

Blogger 4: And anyway, you guys have always got stuff to write about. My blog hasn’t had anything new in it for ages, so I deserve to write about this!

Blogger 5: (me) I don’t care about any of it. I blog in English, so no one in Germany reads me anyway.

Blogger 6: (aside) Screw it, I’ll just blog it secretly, whatever they do. I twittered it ages ago anyway.

Blogger 2: I’m getting the hell out of here, before even more bloggers hear about it!

Blogger 7: (says nothing, but shrugs and thinks) Nothing’s worse than Meta-Blogging.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

As part of the Naked Relaunch, I’ve tweaked a few invisible things which had been irritating me for a while. While it’s unlikely that anyone would notice them at first, they’re likely to bite someone in the ass at some point.

Feed

If you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, please update your subscription to point at http://feeds.feedburner.com/MbFeed. There is also a feed for all comments, and every article has a feed for its own comments.

Link-breaker

Old links to specific articles are now well and truly broken. The old structure:

http://mattbalara.com/category/articlename.html

started to irritate me especially since I’ve stopped using categories. Links now look like:

http://www.mattabalara.com/YYYY/MM/articlename.html

I hope the new 404 page picks up all the lost folks. I vaguely remember hearing about Wordpress plugins and/or php tricks which redirect misguided users who’ve followed a broken link. If you’re Wordpress savvier than I am and know of an elegant way to deal with this, let me know.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…

Other than that, I’ve been quietly tweaking some details. The typography has gotten a little more readable, the short text way up at the top looks a little more like what it is, namely navigation, the comment form now has a nice simple little “are you a human?” check for spam-protection and I’m working on getting the tumblelog into the same simplified state as this blog. More relaunch news as it comes.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

Warning: if you’re reading this in the feed, it won’t make much sense. You might want to have a look at the site.

Gah! What happened?! Suddenly my blog looks like crap! Right? Don’t panic. Your browser is not broken. I didn’t delete my stylesheet either. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and this is indeed a relaunch — an experimental one. I’ve reduced the blog down to (almost) pure content, stripped everything except the most basic structure out of my CSS, and removed all the unnecessary crap like tags, categories, etc. Over the next few weeks (maybe months), I’ll take on different areas of the site and first clear up their structure, and once everything is working correctly and is well-organised, I may add some decoration.

What brought this on are three things that have been spinning around in my head for a while: Ryan Singer’s workshop at the Future of Web Design conference in New York last November, the ongoing influence over the last year of Oliver Reichenstein and his consistently intelligent blog entries in the iA Notebook, and my own thoughts on the role of design and content in the web.

Ryan’s Concept

For those who don’t know, Ryan Singer is a designer at 37signals, a company focussed on agile development of easy to use web apps. Ryan unfortunately doesn’t blog (I told him he should, since we need more blogs by smart designers) but he’s got a tumblelog running. Ryan’s FOWD presentation was great, and workshop was the high point of the entire conference for me. His answer to the question “how do you guys do concepts at 37signals?” was the high point of the workshop.

Before giving you his answer, I should say that, in my experience a concept is a stack of text and sketches which takes days to create, simulates something we haven’t done yet, is used primarily to give the client and our team the feeling that we all know what to do and expect, and can be thrown away after the project’s finished, if not earlier. So, back to the question. Ryan said, “ok, let’s say we want to make a blog. What’s the essential element of a blog, and what’s it made up of?” Well, text, obviously. And there are things like headlines, dates, links, etc. As people in the audience gave him these answers, he opened a text editor in the terminal, and started writing markup. We all scratched our heads a little. After ten to fifteen minutes, he had the markup finished, opened it in a browser, and said, “that’s our concept”.

Oliver’s Text

Complex discussions about simplicity are a waste of time. Oliver’s simple articles about complex subjects are a pleasure. Ever since reading his call for The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard, I’ve had to think at least twice about using 11 px Verdana, which I loved to do all too recently. He explains in no uncertain terms why text should be big, why whitespace is essential, and not just a matter of taste, and why graphic text is a pain in the ass. A straightforward quote, which you’d think wouldn’t need to be said, but definitely does:

Crowded websites don’t look good: they look nasty. Filling pages with stuff has never helped usability. It’s laziness that makes you throw all kinds of information at us. We want you to think and preselect what is important. We don’t want to do your work.

And another:

We want to be able to search text, copy text, save text, play with the cursor and mark text while we read. Text in images looks pretty, but pretty is not what the web is about. It’s about communication and information, and information needs to be readable and usable and scalable and citable and sendable.

Go read through the wealth of tasty articles at his iA Notebook, and see if it doesn’t change how you think about web design and business.

My Thoughts

A poster, hanging on a wall with twenty others, can only attract a viewer from a distance with design. A user who’s standing at a distance from your web site, i.e. Google, can’t see your design at all, only your content. For most people design means “how it looks”, or aesthetics (see this excellent post on Mark Boulton’s blog). But if your content rocks, and your design sucks, does it matter? And if it’s the other way around, who cares about your site?

I’m coming more and more to the opinion that (good) web design is 60% thinking, 30% structure and 10% aesthetics. I’ve thought enough about this relaunch, and the next step will be to establish a clean, navigable and readable structure. After that’s done, we’ll see about a little decoration.

The web is never finished. Regardless, we still spend lots of time and energy polishing and perfecting something hidden — which we can change every day at almost no cost — before whipping the curtain back with a fanfare as if it were a building or a car or a ship. I thought it’d be interesting for a change to use the medium itself to build a piece of the medium (instead of simulating it in Photoshop first) and to make the path of evolution a visible one. I’d be very interested in your thoughts and reactions to all of this. Hell, who knows, maybe I’m crazy.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

As soon as I wrote this, I asked myself how long it would take until someone use m-pathy to communicate with me. The answer: exactly 15 hours and 20 minutes.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

Back at Reboot I met the amiable guys from seto, Jan & Tobias. Reboot’s the kind of place where almost everyone’s got a project they’re endlessly excited about, and these guys were no exception. During a coffee break they whipped a laptop out and gave me an impromptu demo of their product, mpathy.

If website statistics is looking through a telescope at a crowd, then mpathy is standing in the crowd, staring at people as they go by.

It works like this: sign up for their service, embed a little Javascript in your site, and as soon as someone visits your site, you can login at mpathy and watch the show.

The “show” consists of a layer over your site showing real-time mouse movements, clicks, scrolling — whatever the user did is recorded and played back for you. Whereas stats give you a very general feeling for what users are doing on your site, mpathy puts the second to second user behaviour under the microscope. Of course it’s usefulness is directly related to your own ability to notice trends and reach conclusions based on them, but for an interface designer it’s a remarkable addition to (or substitute for) user testing.

So remember, as you’re reading this your every move is being recorded. Try not to look as crazy as this visitor from the 15th.

Fair warning: seto is a German company, and so far mpathy is only available in German. But don’t let that scare you: just click the big pink “Anmelden” button ad the rest should (almost) explain itself.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

Reboot was inspiring and gave me plenty of new blogs to learn from. This led pretty quickly to my suppressed dissatisfaction with my own blog rising to the surface. As is generally the rule for all agencies and designers, you never put as much love into your own site as you do those of your clients. There are of course exceptions.

I’d like to take advantage of the small readership I’ve got and get some feedback on the state of my blog today. Please take a minute and throw a few answers in the comments.

• What do you like/not like about the design?
• Has anything in the navigation/organisation of this blog every annoyed or confused you?
• Is anything useful/necessary missing?
• If this was your blog and you could change anyhting you wanted, what would it be?
• What’s the best designed blog you know of?

Anyone who leaves some useful answers gets a beer the next time you’re in Hamburg, or anytime you want if you already are.

What do you think? Leave a comment…