Stemato.com - Stephen Tompkins’ Blog

Last week, I went to the NASDAQ to attend the Microsoft closing bell ceremony. It was quite an honor and a great way to spend my afternoon. Not to mention Windows 7 is a great product! I have been using it for a couple weeks now on my work PC and its really sharp. It is so much easier to use  and packed with great features that have made me more productive at work But I digress.

I don’t want this to be a shining endorsement of Windows 7 but a congratulations to all the folks who put such hard work into turning out this product. It was truly an honor for me to be able to represent you as a fellow Microsoft employees at the NASDAQ for the closing ceremony!

PS- Can you spot me in the Photo?

In the past I have used my blog as a forum to both praise and criticize my college. Well today, I am proud to say that I am a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Why do you ask? Well, I was reading Bruce Nussbaum’s Innovation Design blog and I noticed that Businessweek had ranked the world’s top design schools. That is right I said WORLD’s Top Design schools. And SCAD was amongst the handful of North American schools that were chosen.

So without further adue, I will let SCAD shine today. Congrats Savannah College of Art and Design and thank you very much for the top notch education that you gave me. I am forever indebted to you.

Here is a link to the SCAD section.

Here is a link to all the College chosen.

I wanted to write a quick thought I had about the relatively new Facebook Highlights section. I have been using the new redesign for quite awhile now and for the most part its still as annoying as it was when it rolled out. I do like some of the features but the chat is still horrendous, the constantly updating feed is distracting and photos are harder to upload. But the one thing that is so annoying and just a complete waste of good website space is the ubiquitous Hightlights section.

It sits on the right hand side of your screen eschewing more useless information than the United Nations at a security counsel meeting discussing Iran.  Have you hidden folks from your normal feed? Not to worry they will eventually find their way to your highlights section! Its kind of like the kid you don’t invite to your party but he shows anyway.

Before I start to rant too much. I wanted to mention a curious behavior I noticed about this feature. It has become so useless to me that I have developed a form of banner blindness to it. I barely if ever even take a glance at it and even click on the links less.

Oh - how I wish I could just turn it off or replace it with some relevant advertising…

Lately, I have been reading tons of data about everything from ad revenue plummeting to the health care verticals fast exit from the search business.  All the data we have provides us with supposedly crucial insights into the current state of situations within our economy or otherwise. But lately, I have wondered if we have so much data that it is starting to contradict itself. For instance, what does it mean when Comscore says Google has 77% marketshare? Is that even true? What does it mean? Does it mean that only 3 out of 4 searchers use Google?

Then I read this article in the Wall Street Journal that left out a crucial point about the data it cites. In it he states, “Display-related advertising–which includes display ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship–totaled nearly $3.8 billion in the first six months of 2009, a 1.1% decline from the same period in 2008, the IAB said.” While this may be a decline from year over year spend, it neglects too mention that CPM prices have plummeted in the past year while volume has increased. With these increased volumes has come a seemingly endless supply of ad space across millions of niche sites that can leave a media planner stumped.

This significant uptick in both quantity and inventory, while prices decline, is leading to a hyper deflation of online ad valuations and an overall obscured view of the landscape. So when the Wall Street Journal posts that ad revenue dropped year-over-year it’s not exactly telling you the whole story. In fact, it’s only one part of a much more complicated story.

I would be curious to see the difference in prices today, as opposed to three years ago.  I would suspect it costs more than 50% less than three years ago. This, along with rising inventories, is a perfect storm for destruction and ultimately redefining the entire market. But one can only hope…

Ok….I admit the title is a little misleading. Maybe it should have read “almost everything I learned in design school was wrong” but it does not have nearly the staying power. Anyway, I went on a Bruce Nussbaum reading frenzy yesterday and found out that design education in America really could improve.

First the good stuff about my design education. As I have stated before here, I am so proud to have received a BFA and how it helped me to be innovative to adjust my career path. I do not think a typical business education would have done the same for me but that is just me. I needed a different type of education to learn to adapt and to process different orientations.  Plus it was really cool to make pretty pictures and exercise my right brain muscle to the fullest.

Now the bad stuff that I believe needs improvement. As Nussbaum correctly points out, design is everywhere not just the touch points they teach you in school. Contrary to what I was taught, design is a journey not an finishline. We spent an entire semester learning how to make Rubylths, amberliths and ink drawings. A complete waste of time! Think about how much more effective it would have been for us to learn design as an experience instead of a process to an end.

All the blame cannot be thrown on SCAD as they did the best they could in the time alloted. I do think that they could have made the education a little more adaptable to current trends though. For example, I graduated in 2001 and attended most of my classes during the middle of the web boom and they still emphasized print design as a primary focus.

What if we did not spend time on a specific aspect of design and learned about how people experience design around them before stepping into techniques. Then gradually built up those techniques based on design as a journey from which people experience their lives. Almost a reverse concept of what was taught to us in school but definitely something that would have shaped a new type of designer.