Many moons ago I found myself walking down a narrow, crowded street in Brussels. Brussels is a vast city full of mixed cultures stemming from the Dutch, Belgian and, of course, the French. We all know what they say about the French.

I was a youngster at the time, about 19 years-old, fresh out of my first year at the University of Minnesota. At the time, I was an aspiring broadcast-journalist. I wanted to absorb all of the diverse culture I would encounter in my voyage across the pond. My home in Europe was the one and only - the home of Anne Frank, a never-ending chain of canals, windmills, tulips, red lights and those ridiculously funny looking shoes. Yes, oh yes, Amsterdam.

Contrary to popular belief, Amsterdam has much more to offer than just coffee shops, women, thick dark beer and euthanasia. But, only in Brussels do you see the Dutch and French butting heads and challenging each other to see who can be the most inappropriate. Only in Brussels would I find the most outrageous form of advertising. In my voyage, it became clear that Western Europeans are not afraid to show naked bodies and use profanities and drugs. There is nothing but honesty – sugar coating is absent and unheard of.

I peered up at a brightly lit advertisement in a store window. I did not take a double take, not a triple take, but a quadruple take. That’s right. Had I sat at that coffee shop too long? Because I swear that sign says… (insert your favorite curse phrase consisting of f!%$ing h$ll).

That was the single most eye-catching advertisement I had ever seen! How many times do you look at a banner ad four times? How many billboards have made your jaw drop?

At the time, I had no clue that three years later I would be working for a digital media/advertising agency. Today I look back at this moment and consider how censorship impacts advertising and society on various levels throughout different countries.

In the U.S., we would never use profanities to attract professional attention because we are a society driven by political correctness. It is a commonality throughout the U.S. that the media must avoid offending any person on any level. Are people really offended or harmed by the use of profanities and nudity or is the nation, as a whole, a little too sensitive? Consequently, does this sensitivity hinder or help society? It is as if through this “principle” of political correctness we create our own version of a naïve bubble-cushioned reality.

It is essential to point out that this meticulous censorship does not only impact advertising strategies, but also journalism. For example, I once attended a lecture given by a photographer for a well-known Minneapolis-based newspaper. He was in Iraq when an Iraqi family got blown up in a land mine. One small boy survived with critical limb injuries. The boy’s legs were gone. There was nothing but blood and tears. This was all captured by the photographer. The photographer was determined to have these photos in full color on the front page of the newspaper. But, they were not. Instead, the photos were cropped, faded to black and white and put on page 7.

Media, specifically journalism, is supposed to be society’s gatekeeper. News organizations are supposed to be bi-partisans reporting the truth and facts. But, how can this happen if our culture is so sensitive to the brutality that honesty may bring?

History and media coincide with one another as our media tactics and tendencies have evolved over time. Events in American history have dictated a large part of our media’s characteristics as the media consistently reached turning points as the nation did.

(Please note that it is not only in the U.S. where such censorship is found. But, there is stark contrast between censorship in the U.S. and Western European countries as mentioned.)

Censorship impacts our perception, knowledge and awareness. It may prevent personal offense, but it ultimately neglects society because it deters media from relaying the truth and demonstrating honesty.

After a month in Europe I became accustomed to the bluntness of the culture. It was something short of culture shock to return to the bubble cushion that is the U.S. Perhaps it is all perception, everyone’s perception is different and every perception is questionable. But, it is these varied perceptions that create the necessary discussion to mold the future of our media’s landscape.

So, let’s butt heads (oops, can I say butt?).

Being a designer is a full time job – and by full time job I mean 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One’s inner designer can never be turned off, no matter how heroic the attempt to ignore it. Each and every thing - from the Chinese take out menu on your refrigerator to the pattern on your sister’s tank top - triggers some sort of designerly critique. You can call it whatever you want - designer’s insomnia, the designer zombie, designer intuition, or just plain observation - but you can’t make it go away.

In many ways a designer’s ability to constantly absorb visual inspiration is a great asset, but for every spark of creative mojo that comes my way, there is always a counterpart that ruins a perfectly good conversation with friends or romantic moment with a loved one. What follows is my most recent account of the many ways my inner designer has tried to sabotage my life outside of work:

The Ice Cream Incident

A few weeks ago I spent the evening walking around one of our city’s great lakes with some friends. We stopped for ice cream afterwards, and that is when the trouble started. My eyes became affixed to the pattern on my sister’s tank top. I couldn’t keep myself from staring rudely at her chest, trying to decipher where I had seen the pattern before. Was it one of the pages from Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament? Or had I seen it on the website of a restaurant I recently visited? I could not wrap my mind around where this familiar pattern was haunting me from, and in a moment of frustration I finally blurted out “WHERE is that pattern from!?”. I was completely zoned in to my sister’s shirt, and equally zoned out of the conversation the rest of my friends were engaged in. Naturally, I didn’t realize that my call of distress came at a most inopportune moment in the conversation. Silence followed, along with some blank stares and laughs. How could I have missed out entirely on what my friend was talking about because of some pattern on my sister’s shirt? Was the origin of this graphic subconsciously more important that what my friends had to say? Doubtful. But how do I explain my deep frustration over this pattern to an actuary, teacher, and event coordinator? After an unsuccessful attempt, a few sighs, and shaking heads the interrupted conversation continued. Secretly, my mind still searched and searched for the source of the pattern.

Weeks later, I still have not completely figured out where I recognized the pattern from. I have spent many wasteful hours searching the internet and racking my brain for an answer, but still haven’t gotten to the source. What I have learned is that the pattern is Persian in nature and based on a geometric system. Yes, a similar pattern is illustrated in the Grammar of Ornament (see above), but it’s not a dead ringer. So….if anyone has seen this pattern and can identify its origin…PLEASE…help my put my inner designer to rest!

Seems that we’re not the only ones to take issue with Cuil.

Eric Chabrow, a writer for CIO Insight, says the same thing. Seems like there’s a lot of hype and spin for the engine, and though it shows promise, it’s far from Google-Killer status.

Let’s set the stage:

a) Google buys technology from budding entrepreneur

b) Entrepreneur leaves Google

c) Entrepreneur launches competitive search service

Sound familiar?

Yesterday, Anna Patterson and a team of ex-Googlers launched Cuil (pronounced Cool), the latest in a line of Google-killer search services. The latest numbers from the Cuil team indicate they have over 120 billion pages indexed.

But apparently, the 120 billion pages don’t include our site (click that link for a Cuil search on Azul 7).

Hey Cuil - with so many pages, couldn’t you find space for our site? We have good search engine love from the other big boys - where’s the love from you? I’m in to page 4 of the results set, and I’m not seeing anything…yet.

See an article on CNN announcing the Cuil launch.

I am unfamiliar with the world of interactive.

There, I said it. Cat’s out of the bag. Or maybe it was never in the bag, because most of you have probably figured this out after the repeated, wide-eyed, blank expressions that result when anyone mentions things like wireframes, scripts, or coding to me. I have absolutely no clue what anyone is talking about.

So, you’re trying to tell me that when someone says javascript, they aren’t offering me some alien variety of coffee? Too bad, I have an insatiable coffee addiction. And when Liina says wire flames, she is actually referring to wireframes and, talented as she is, cannot spontaneously combust websites online? Thank god, I don’t need the CIA on my case. Again.

I’m a writer here. Who knew I’d have to learn an entirely new language to work with interactive? In fact, after my first day here, I left the building in a state of confusion far beyond the typical bewildered fog that surrounds me. I ran straight to my trusty Webster’s dictionary, which I affectionately refer to as Big Red (unless I have to carry the thing, in which case I’m something rather less than affectionate). Believe me, it’s big. Like bigger-than-my-physics-textbook big, a feat I hadn’t thought possible prior to the discovery of this sixty pound red dinosaur at a garage sale last summer. There is just one teeny, tiny problem about my good friend, the dictionary- it was published before I was born.

This really hadn’t been a hindrance before my first day at Azul 7, when I lived in a world shrouded by the pleasant belief that websites appeared magically from thin air. However, the time was finally upon me to look up all the outlandish internet terms I’ve heard of but never understood before. Such peculiar terms as javascript and bandwidth. So of course, I turned to Big Red and searched its dusty pages for enlightenment in the form of wireframes.

I found nothing.

I moved on to scripts. A passing mention of manuscripts and old documents. I tried interactive. Something or other about human contact. At this point, I was getting pretty frustrated with my former friend. I decided to look up the mother lode- the internet.

There it was, between internee and internist: internaught.

My dependable old dictionary did not even contain the term internet. Maybe that’s why it was sold for fifty cents at a garage sale, cast off the shelf in a fit of cruelty, only to be replaced by a newer, smaller dictionary that accepted and defined our digital future. I felt betrayed and deceived by my affable giant. There was nothing left for me to do but visit the source of my confusion- I went online and quickly found myself on Wikipedia.

There amidst pages and pages of user-produced content, I found clarification and subsequently lost two hours of time. I now understand that javascript is not my precious coffee but instead a language for coding websites, and wireframes are layouts containing descriptions of a website’s functionality. So, the next time someone slides down the slippery alphabetical slope from wireframes to wire flames, not a thought of spontaneous online explosions will enter my head (Okay, well maybe just one. It’s a pretty cool idea, after all). Not only this, but I’ve learned what the ‘dev’ team is and AJ shouting “SCRUM!” in the mornings doesn’t even sound like a strange German word to me anymore.

Thus far, this experience has led me to two conclusions:

1. I’m going to get the hang of this.

2. I’m going to need a new dictionary.

Nevertheless, don’t ask me to define the internet. We’re in the process of doing just that.

As a relative newcomer to the web design scene, one of the first things that an individual developer such as myself discovers is that not all web browsers are created equal. There are plenty of slick, standards-based, and forward-looking browsers out there, but for as long as web development has been a serious and profitable field there has been one Inevitable Exception.

Even standards-based browsers often conflict in their interpretation of the same HTML + CSS code due to differences in their rendering engines. Because of this, it is necessary to test a site across multiple browsers. This requires, first of all, having multiple browsers available for your use, which in turn requires having multiple operating systems.

Traditionally, this meant you either had multiple computers or multiple operating systems on the same computer. The first option required a significant investment in hardware, and the second required a reboot every time you wanted to use a different browser. In both cases, testing took you “out of the game,” as you had to drop what you were doing in order to use another browser. This loss of focus is a serious time drain, as any developer knows.

The only really viable, convenient way to test on multiple browsers was to develop the site targeted to a standards-based browser and then “back-port” it to the industry’s less-capable brethren once everything had been done. About 50% of the time this would be a relatively easy job, and the other 50% it would be a long, torturous journey with horrible conflicts and multiple redesigns. This process had many of the same properties as the old waterfall method of software development: most notably the tendency to overrun project deadlines because there is not sufficient testing early in development to catch bad design choices before they are thoroughly entrenched in the system.

Thankfully, this is no longer the only option available to us. Like the agile process broke the waterfall paradigm, a new technology has given us a solution to this problem.

A veritable revolution in virtualization has resulted in several high-quality and freely-available software virtualization options (especially for my fellow Linux users and me). It is now possible to run multiple operating systems on one computer simultaneously, so that switching between them is a simple as switching between windows on your desktop.

Want to make sure that new feature will work in IE? Just flip over to Windows XP and refresh the page. Once your done, check it out in Linux, too. If you’re running a Mac, you can have all three major operating systems ready to go at all times. The mental barrier between testing and development is blurred significantly in this arrangement, so much that they hardly seem like different tasks anymore.

You’ll be happier because you’ll catch your mistakes moments after you make them instead of weeks, and your clients will be happy because your deadlines won’t slip when you realize that your slick header design is completely broken in IE three days to launch.

Try it out. It will change the way you do development.

Welcome to As The Platform Fills, a series reporting on the latest sightings, observances, and events taking place right here — outside our office — in downtown Minneapolis overlooking the Nicollet Mall Light Rail Platform. The lives we observe are complex. The dramas we record are real. Things get weird. Stay tuned for more real platform action.

This casual male in a wooden rocking chair was observed by a coworker at Azul 7. I was out of the office one morning, and upon my return I heard murmurings of an interesting platform sighting. I was thrilled to hear someone took a snapshot of the occurance — a young guy, apparently waiting for a train — in a rocking chair. “Hmm… weird!”, I thought, as questions and theories started gathering in my mind, as I’m sure they are yours. Where do I begin?

:: continue reading this ocean post ::

I ride a bike to work most days. Earlier in the summer I was using a fixed-gear bike, where the freewheel - the thing on the back wheel that allows you to coast - had been replaced by a single, immobile gear. “Fixies” are designed for racing on a track, where there’s no traffic, so they don’t need shifters or brakes. Instead, the rider slows down by resisting the pedals as they spin. They’ve become popular with bike messengers and other people who ride all year because there’s less equipment to maintain.

Another reason they’re popular is the trackstand. This is the maneuver you sometimes see at a stop light downtown, where the rider balances magically without putting a foot down, until the light turns green and they fly off. This summer I vowed to learn how to do one.

On the fixie, it was easier than I expected. When you are nearly stopped, you turn the front wheel to one side so that any more forward momentum would take you in a tight circle instead of out into traffic. When your outside foot comes over the top of its stroke you resist with the other foot, and then slowly rock the pedals forward and backward so that you are just barely moving back and forth over the same spot. Cool.

So then I tried it on a regular bike. Holy cow, that’s a whole ‘nother thing. Did you ever see a biker tip over at a stop light with their fancy shoes still in the pedals? Yeah. I needed a little help from Team Estrogen. The trick, they taught me, is to keep your hands off the brakes as much as possible. Practice off the road first, pushing the front wheel against a stationary object like a bench, rolling slightly backward and then forward to the object. Back on the road, you want to use its natural slope as resistance, combined with shifting your body weight, to cause the bike to roll back against the pressure you are applying to the pedals.

Well I ain’t there yet, but it’s coming along. Keep the rubber side down.

Anheuser-Busch sold to Belgian beverage giant InBev for $52B.

Diese Bud is für Sie (This Bud’s for you).

Being one of the newest additions to Azul 7, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a great workplace lately. Here’s what I’ve come up with, in no particular order:

• Your opinions are valued, and you feel free to really speak your mind
• Your job and it’s duties are engaging (that means they stretch your capabilities and make you think)
• You respect your co-workers for many reasons (they’re really good at what they do, they’re brilliant, they’re helpful when you have a question or need a hand, and they’re just generally good people that you don’t mind being around for the majority of your day)
• The work the organization puts out is something you can really be proud of
• The environment is a healthy one
• The organization continually strives to improve communication and processes
• You are allowed the flexibility to do your job on your time (as long as it gets done, and gets done well, everyone is happy)
• You work in a true team environment (you want others to succeed and are free with your encouragement, compliments, and general pats on the back)

and my personal favorite…

• Work hard, play hard (we all have a life outside of work and it’s important to try to keep some balance in your life!)

I genuinely feel like we’re really blessed to have all of these here at Azul 7 and I am fortunate to be contributing!