Tell me, where are the automobile dealerships where the cars and trucks are free for the taking, but in order to get one you must navigate a carnival midway maze of booths where hawkers from partnering jewelry companies, tax services, and sportswear brands ply you with offers along the way? There are none. Auto makers and their dealerships aren’t that stupid. Their profit model is based on selling their product. Oh, and what about the grocery stores where everything on the shelves is free for the taking, but the aisles are filled with shoe salesmen, credit consolidation service agents, and pharmaceutical reps who follow along with you, working to get you to purchase what they’re offering? There are none of these either. Grocery companies are smarter than that. They’re invested in their products.

Well, digital news and magazine content publishers are that stupid. They pay armies of skilled reporters, writers, editors, designers, programmers, artists, and researchers to produce their distinctive product…and then work to sell it according to an ethos that proclaims the product has no value.

As you might expect, there are consequences to this destructive approach. You see, when an industry profit model does not include the product, the industry and its market get rather turned inside out and upside down. It becomes a race to the bottom.

Dystopian Publishing

Online publishing is largely broken because media outlets are built to seek profit not from their product, but rather from the distractions and obstacles they conspire to place between the customer and the product. It’s a strategy that destroys quality, destroys confidence, and destroys the product consumption experience. It’s irrationality on parade: publications set up to destroy the very things they are supposed to deliver. It should come as no surprise that such a product tends to sell poorly.

This model is the ideal for digital publication success today. Expend enormous energy and capital in producing a product, and then devote nearly all of your strategic energies toward the advertising value model that will deface and obscure it.

Digital publishers don’t need a cleverer and more elaborate ad strategy. Digital publishers need a value and UX strategy for their product. But they’re oblivious and disinterested. This fact becomes clear when you ask a couple of very simple questions:

Here are a few questions I think are fairly interesting: Why do writers write whole articles? Why do publishers publish whole articles? Why would a publisher publish something that they don’t believe will be consumed fully? The answer is that digital publishers are merely going through the motions while their actual business is to throw lots of ads onto web pages. Avoidance of the substance and consequences of this activity compounds an irrational and destructive situation.

Publishers: There’s nothing wrong with fitting ad strategy and revenues into a publication profit model. But why rely solely on strategies that work to destroy and deny content quality? Why concentrate on strategies that, despite whatever success they generate, are 50% destructive? Why not work on strategies that are inherently 100% productive? Why so willingly concede your industry to advertisers at the expense of your own quality?

Publishers: Advertisers do not currently have your interests at heart, for they can currently succeed as you fail. As with everything else in the world, a strategy based on healthy self interest is the only one that can allow for mutual success. Why not build an enterprise founded in and dependent upon the quality of your own product and let the success of your partners flow from that?

The Answer: The Emperor Has No Content

If the content is valuable people should pay to read it. Modern publishers don’t care about content. They nearly all acknowledge they’re headed for a cliff, and they’re relying on a destructive and hypocritical strategy, which they do not control, to save them. That race to the bottom is gaining momentum and everyone but the publishers and their readers are profiting from it. And rightly so.

Here’s a bit larger version.

No matter, the 2008 election of an unvetted candidate brought with it inevitable consequences. Mr. Obama’s character and propensities have been clearly revealed. I therefore submit my counterslogan: Forewarned.

Your success allows for the success of others. Those whom you employ work just like you to meet their own responsibilities and the salaries you pay them facilitate their ability to do so. So long as you run your business smartly (and are allowed to do this), everybody wins. This includes your customers.

Like all insurance companies, yours allows people to invest in their own responsible preservation and perhaps even realize a sizable bonus return in times of crisis. Your customers enter into a voluntary agreement with you to pay a comparatively small amount each month, so that in the unlikely event of flood damage to their property you’ll pay to have it repaired or replaced. While few of your customers actually sustain flood damage, even when many at once do and you’re required to pay out enormous sums, those events are typically separated by many years. This allows for the accumulation of revenues used to meet your contractual obligations. In fact, your business is based on the idea that you stand a good chance to make a profit from your customers’ contractual payments. By the same token, your customers live with the peace of mind that their responsible, voluntary monthly payments buy them. Here again, everybody wins because of the mutually-profitable exchange.

The nice thing is that one need not have flood insurance in order to hire a contractor to perform home repairs or landscaping. Industry costs are reasonable for peoples’ common needs and insurance is required only for catastrophic circumstances. So each homeowner can choose to or choose not to purchase flood insurance. It’s all voluntary and workable.

Now imagine that in addition to insurance against unlikely, unforeseen events, people want “insurance” to cover the currently ongoing damage their property sustains due to the fact that they’re unlucky enough to live on a sandbar in a powerful river. The river rises and damages their homes on almost a weekly basis, requiring an equally sizeable river of cash to maintain their homes. Here, flood damage is not the unlikely and unforeseen event one might insure against, but rather a daily factor in the lives of these people. It’s simply an ongoing fact.

Given the circumstances, you can’t very well insure these peoples’ homes because the only possible arrangement is that you’d be continually paying out many times the sums you could possibly charge in premiums. What’s more, it’s not insurance if what you’d be insuring against is already a sustained, ongoing situation. In such a case, “insurance” is a non sequitur. Business, just like society, cannot work without a rational basis for relationships.

You’re assuming rationale. You assume too much.

Those who want to pay a small monthly premium in order to escape their own large and ongoing financial obligations are not looking for insurance; they’re looking for a subsidy. They just seemingly want to call it “insurance” while demanding that someone else take on their financial responsibilities. In other words they want a free handout, but insurance is not—cannot be—a handout. No responsible, intelligent, rational person believes that to be an appropriate arrangement.

Now imagine that in contravention of rationale and of the U.S. Constitution, the government proclaimed that your business must cover these peoples’ pre-existing and ongoing flooding. No, you don’t get any choice in the matter; the government has simply mandated that you must engage in unprofitable, illogical, unsustainable “business.” That’s not business at all, but rather slavery. Your rightful profits and property no longer matter. Morality no longer matters and neither does the fundamental basis for your industry. You are required to do as you’re told or you will be fined and/or imprisoned. In such a case, what you offer is no longer insurance, either. It’s just subsidy. You no longer own a business. Now you merely operate a doomed and unprofitable enterprise, the function of which is to destroy your property and wealth.

When your demise becomes a surety and your customers logically will be left in the lurch (but not due to your actions), the government may step in to shoulder your “responsibility,” …and all they require is that you become a wholly owned subsidiary of The State. At which point you become a mere conduit mechanism between the confiscatory State and the needy, enabling, and irrational public.

The way things will work from now on is that your financial sustenance will come from the process of The State stealing from citizens—whether they require your services or not—and then feeding that ill-gotten revenue through your office according to an incomprehensibly obtuse and complex set of regulations. You now have a new mandate: ensure that you pay out as little in claims as possible so that you may survive on the meager stipend your new overlords have conceded to you.

This means that many legitimate claims must go unpaid, and that in order to receive any payments from you, the contractors who invoice you must be diligent in properly filling out and processing claim forms and citing specific, arcane codes for repair procedures. This also means that they have to balloon their own staffs in order to meet the new paperwork, form processing, and code intelligence requirements (but don’t worry about this. They’ll simply pass that enormous cost increase to their customers and it’ll get washed in the tax/spend laundry cycle. Getting “permission” to raise taxes is a snap. Besides, that’s someone else’s problem, not yours).

Yes, yes, the homeowner-contractor relationship is destroyed; replaced by the government oversight committee-insurer relationship. True, those who have modest needs and simply want to pay a contractor to put in a new window are now beset by a dizzying array of regulatory requirements…and the costs for even the simplest of procedures is now so astronomical as to require a comprehensive insurance plan to even begin that conversation…and ANYONE who ever may want to have any landscaping or home improvement or repairs of any kind done must now purchase expensive flood insurance.

But this is a small price to pay for “allowing” anyone to claim anything from you in order to avoid financial inconvenience. You’re serving the greater good now. Take solace in that profound fact, but remember who you work for. Or else.

You Have a Pre-existing Condition

This has all been allegory (for now). What I really mean by all of this is, welcome to the world of modern medical care and medical insurance. Tyranny, to be concise. The doctor-patient relationship no longer matters and the medical professions have been destroyed in favor of bureaucracy. This is what you have allowed to happen. This is, in fact, what you’ve demanded happen.

See, if you’re an American you have a pre-existing condition. It’s called colossal stupidity. Oh, and your claim is denied. Good luck with that.

Yesterday, designer Paula Scher published an essay in Imprint magazine that took issue with the reformatting of the principal annual AIGA design competition, newly renamed “Justified.” This competition will apparently do what no AIGA competition has ever done: have the jury consider the results and effectiveness of the work as a part of its evaluations. This is bold and odd new territory for AIGA, but better late than never, I guess.

So in light of this clearly un-AIGA-like departure from what she has grown to love, Paula Scher put pixel to screen and wrote a response piece that artfully combined soaring condescension with flimsy straw men to craft a grand, hydra-like, multi-headed insult to AIGA administration and members, competition participants, and all of their professional clients. She called her essay, “AIGA: Unjustified.” Yep, clever (she’s a designer, after all).

You should read it; it is a petulant and myopic tantrum disguised as an obtuse essay that repeatedly tosses jibes at everything and anyone who detracts from or does not serve the ego-fueled cultivation of design celebrity among an insular clique of peer artists ever consumed by the fetish of artistic self flagellation. Basically, it’s a defense of traditional AIGA culture. But I repeat myself.

One designer summed up her arguments rather concisely and appropriately as: “Having objectives is hard. Just reward me for making things I think are pretty.”

Indeed.

A comedy tragedy of errors

Given the competition description and criteria for “Justified,” Paula responds with the obtuse question,

“…did you notice that words like beauty, creativity, surprise, innovation and inspiration are nowhere to be found?”

Really? Her question here begs another compelling one: why should anyone suppose that these admirable qualities are unwelcome or irrelevant in an effective design effort, or should be considered outside the context of the “Justified” competition? Indeed, should we each propose to imbue our client-project design work with these qualities only if they’re listed in the RFP or creative brief we’re offered at the start of a project? No, it’s simply stupid to make these obtuse assumptions. Yet, this is precisely what Ms. Scher has done.

She goes on to completely miss the point and then beat up her own mistake- (or purpose-built) straw man:

“‘Justified’ changes the goals of AIGA’s only remaining competition. The goal of the new competition is not to inspire the design community to better design, but to ‘explain design’s value to clients, students, peers and the general public’ by ‘justifying’ the work. The justification is part of what is being judged.

I’ll just come straight out and say it: if educating clients is the goal here, this competition probably won’t achieve it’s goal [sic], and moreover may have bad consequences for the designer who hopes to enlighten their clients about the ‘value’ of design.”

No. Either Paula misses the point entirely or she purposes to flog her own fiction. I’m going to surprise myself and give AIGA the benefit of the doubt here by pointing out that, contest specifics aside, they’re endeavoring in this contest to encourage the development of actually useful skills among their members. For, in fact, the ability to convincingly describe the beneficial results of one’s efforts at cultivating success IS a professional responsibility and must be developed through practice. Paula Scher disagrees. Odd.

It requires a willful pessimism to assume that the presented case studies will have no impact on potential clients, and a certain willful myopia and distortion to assume that the contest itself is meant to do nothing more than “educate clients.” I’m no fan of AIGA and even I can find the genuine value in the exercised results of what AIGA is doing here; yes, even if they’re missing the point, too.

I agree that design contests are a waste of time and distract from what matters in the design professions, but it is the substance of Paula’s criticisms and what it reveals that is so shameful and disappointing. She goes on to criticize, malign, and marginalize, in various ways, all of the imagined goals and possible outcomes of a results-oriented endeavor (she does know that design is a results-oriented endeavor, right?). The result of which is that she betrays her (and the traditional AIGA) fundamental definition of design and what purpose it should serve. Her clear view is that design for prescribed aims is a naïve and worthless endeavor; design should be eschewed for artistry, and so should simply be beautiful, daring, innovative, and surprising for its own sake—client’s interests be damned. Screw the client; I need to work on my celebrity status and get some accolades from my peers, yo!

Not surprisingly, Ms. Scher demonstrates her obviously shallow understanding of results, of customer habits, of clients, and of the designer/client relationship with this vacuous statement:

“The ‘Effectiveness’ criteria are scarier. It’s rare that clients and designers will totally agree on what makes a design successful. That’s because, for the most part, clients and their audiences are most comfortable with things that already exist. Relying on sales as a demonstration of success or popular response as a criteria ensures a predictable mediocrity. It’s counter to AIGA’s goals toward better design.”

Firstly, why on earth should it matter that a client agrees with the designer’s professional understanding of design success? Initially, this is a matter for the competent designer—who should only ever take up with clients who are willing to invest in the designer’s expertise rather than be limited by their own ignorance. Later, the success will be self evident. So, again, the straw man argument. And the market public has demonstrated time and time again that it will respond to excellent, new, disruptive design. Secondly, sales ARE the appropriate measuring stick for retail success. There are other measures of market success, and these should be accounted for, too. It’s a shame that a lauded design professional would assume otherwise. Thirdly, aiming for market success in no way ensures predictable mediocrity. Rather, a designer working with clients who demand success-destroying practices and deliverables that obviate the designer’s professionalism and expertise is what ensures predictable mediocrity. No designer should entertain such unprofessional relationships or projects. Yet Ms. Scher assumes that this is all to which a designer can ever hope to aspire.

Well, given that AIGA has ever been led with this manner of unprofessional ideal, distorted view, and distracted practice, one can understand how Ms. Scher would make such assumptions; despicable though they are.

The list of myopic, vacuous, and insulting observations by Ms. Scher is far too long to list here (read the article yourself). However, in her entire essay, she made but a single astute observation:

“There have always been many complaints about these kinds of competitions in general. Work that was awarded tended to be pro bono assignments, or personal promotion pieces, or in other areas where a client didn’t interfere much. There might be a lot of work that wouldn’t immediately — or perhaps ever — have a measurable effect in the marketplace. It could be dismissed as ‘design for designers.’”

Ya’ think? This is, in fact, the fundamental problem with design competitions; they tend to ignore anything practical or results-oriented and focus solely on the subjective artistry and masturbatory qualities of the work. Thanks AIGA—design as self pleasure is sure to have a grand impact on everyone’s rent payment and payroll this month. You stay classy!

Paula made her morality and ethos abundantly clear when she observed that,

“The AIGA membership never believes that their clients respect them.”

Wow, thanks, Paula, for encapsulating the predictable results of AIGA membership in such a concise manner. I’m sure the aspiring design pro community is now clamoring for inclusion in this august preparatory institution. Sarcasm aside: no, really; thanks. You’ve likely just saved the careers of an entire generation of design professionals by revealing what it means to be an AIGA member instead of a competent and prepared design professional.

Finally

Culture creates consequences. This is what you get from a celebrity-driven, art-misrepresented-as-design culture comprised by folks ever distracted by design competition (there’s no such thing as a design competition, by the way) and subjective peer accolades. There should remain no question why I have for years been a vociferous detractor of AIGA and the distorted values the organization represents and perpetuates.

I sincerely hope that Paula Scher’s exposure of what AIGA has for 100 years worked to effect has a consequential impact on today’s design aspirants. As for AIGA and its apparent referendum on design-as-art culture—you reap what you sow. Good luck with your new competition.

A denial of morality and commitment is not the clever trick many believe it to be for obviating shame or building unassailable character. Indeed such denial reveals the utter absence of character for all to see. Without the bond of commitment nothing can be built and growth becomes impossible. By avoiding commitment you ensure that no one remains committed to you. A life of avoidance is a shrinking life.

Live a life of commitment. Project your values and proclaim your highest standards, then do your best to consistently meet them every day. Face down your fear and make your word your promise, then keep your promises. When you fail—and you will—acknowledge the shame you’ve earned and earnestly commit yourself to doing better and being better. That is how you grow, and only in this way may you grow.

The primary purpose of the speech was for President Obama to heap accolades upon himself by describing his supposed many proclamations (“…as I have made clear time and again…” or “I have said that…”) of stalwart support of Israel as evidence that his administration’s commitment to Israel’s security “…has been unprecedented.” Whether or not the President has proclaimed unwavering support in words is certainly debatable. In deeds, however, he has a rather unblemished record of antagonism, criticism, and political sabotage.

Recognizing this fact, President Obama made a point to cite the obvious upcoming review of his record on Israel during the approaching US Presidential election, proclaiming that criticism on support of Israel will “not be backed up by the facts”…

As to those pesky facts concerning President Obama’s record on Israel, this video (below) published by the Emergency Committee for Israel lays them out rather clearly, revealing President Obama’s self-congratulatory platitudes in this speech to be a simple pack of lies:

Israel deserves a better friend than they have in the Obama administration. Proponents of liberty, truth, and sincerity must sincerely hope that in January of 2013 they’ll get one.

Given that Justice Ginsberg believes the United States Constitution is no longer relevant, her presence on the bench as one of only nine ultimate defenders of the Constitution is an affront to liberty. Her stated opinion of our founding, fundamental laws reveals that she lacks the capacity to fulfill her sworn duty to this nation. Congress must act now to impeach Justice Ginsberg in order to preserve and defend that which remains of our culture and our liberty.

Also amazing is that she is so out of touch as to believe that Egypt is “striving to achieve a genuine democracy.” It seems there are several reasons why our nation is imperiled by her continued presence on the Supreme Court.

Seriously, watch the whole thing. The breadth and flexibility of functionality here is pretty amazing.

Via The Verge.