All over this new A List Apart article on burn out.

“It’s not unusual for creative types to do their best work at the same time every day. By this I mean that it’s important to follow our own circadian rhythms. Hemingway began writing every morning at dawn and explained his choice this way: “There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there.”

Do your most important work (or the work requiring the greatest focus) during that time when you’re most energized and have the fewest distractions. Use the rest of your working hours to solve secondary problems or gather information that will fuel the next productive sprint.”

My primetime seems to be between the hours of 8pm and 1am. The kids are down. The wife is occupied by crappy tv that I refuse to watch, and last but not leastly, I’m not in the office.

When do you do your best work?

After being presented with a wonderful story from our intern,  (interns, it seems are the only people with time on their hands) and then spending 2 hours coding up inline css to help make it a more pleasant reading experience, I was again reminded that our current template isn’t working well for longer articles. Said more eloquently, our presentation is inhibiting the long-form magazine-style reading experience.

I’ve wanted to address this issue for some time now.  And I just so happen to have read a few interesting opinions on the subject of long-form writing for the web.   1: Whether it’s a good investment of time or not – and 2: What’s required to pull it off in an effective, well-presented format.

Starting off, a post from David Sleight, Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com expounded on the topic:

“You can’t do long-form writing online.”

“Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?”

And this morning a link from Harvard’s Nieman Reports website pointed to a Christian Science Monitor article titled: Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.

A juicy nugget about presentation in that article:

“Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.”

Back to WHY this kind of writing is important, I’ll pull a quote from Gerald Marzorati’s keynote address at the 2009 CASE Editors’ Forum:

We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts. Lots of facts. And facts are more compelling, easier to digest, when arranged narratively.

…this sort of magazine writing is stuff that the people who do it take very seriously, and they take it seriously for one reason, in the end – to engage you, the reader. The bet is that the narratives they so carefully construct draw you in, get you hooked, get you to identify with people and places,  keep you there to the end.  Pieces  like the ones I’ve briefly described may take up to an hour, or more,  for you to finish.  They  require a lot of you.  The payoff is that the facts you learn in the reading of such pieces stay with you, nudge your understanding of the world a little.  I worry that this experience will not survive in the Information Technology Age. I am not at all sure you want to or can stick with pieces like this reading on a smart phone.

In the end, what we all want to do is DIFFERENTIATE. Tossing up press releases on your homepage is a lame, impotent strategy to support that goal. Quoting again from the CSmonitor article:

“Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.”

It’s silly to hang on to that system of doing things. It’s a sinking ship. The challenge I’ve yet to accept as a designer/developer is to craft better, more appealing ways to present and package online stories. To give long-form writing an online house it deserves.

All this research and quoting of articles is meaningless of course, unless I um, start doing something about it.

Back to David Sleight’s post for a pre-design pep talk:

Bottom line? It’s a bald fallacy of presumption to hold that presenting text on a webpage ipso facto induces peripatetic behavior in your audience. The content itself, and the design used to present it, are the leading factors in shaping success. Not pixels or points. The hands that matter are those of the writer and the designer. If you’re a Web designer, you have incredible power (and a responsibility) to help further the case for this medium.

Among other things, two blog posts of note have been bouncing around my head the past few days.

The first one from Smashing Magazine’s post: 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People. It’s a short and simple reminder:

We should aim to expose users to our content, not our website.

The second:

The Altitude Branding blog says: I want to follow stories.

Your press release on your blog doesn’t inspire me to think of you in a different, fascinating, personality-infused light.

Your carefully crafted brand message doesn’t motivate me to see my world differently and change my perspective on how and where I fit, either with or without you.

…in amidst the noise, I want to hear your voice. I want you to stand out, to rise above your function and instead find your purpose. I want to know why you’re here, what makes up the fabric of you.

Won’t you put down your style manual, your brand guidelines, your notions of what you think will make me open my wallet or write something nice about you?

Won’t you stop trying to get my attention by waving frantically, and instead invite me to hear a quiet story that’s instead been written just for me?

An really amazing piece of student multimedia work from a great blog that you should subscribe to.

Innovative Interactivity:

“UNC masters student Eileen Mignoni recently launched her thesis project and it is a definite must-see. “Facing Deportation” is a multimedia documentary site about families impacted by North Carolina’s immigration policies.”

“Mignoni elegantly blended beautiful stills and video to tell the stories of three families affected by immigration laws, …my favorite video was, “Phone Calls from Papi,” an intimate story about three little girls waiting for a phone call from their incarcerated dad.”

Not to be missed is the extended interview with creator Eileen Mignoni.

“I chose to do a documentary project on immigration because I kept reading all of these awful stories in the newspaper about traffic stops that turned into deportations. I began focusing on this topic in my documentary photo class where I wanted to do a story on the life of an undocumented immigrant because I couldn’t imagine what it was like to live with the fear that at any moment one could be taken from this life and sent home.”

Topics covered include her process gaining trust with her subjects, her choice on using music, and her achievement in teaching herself graphic design to incorporate graphics in the package.

Innovative Interactivity is a great blog from Tracy Boyer, an award-winning multimedia producer, specializing in Flash development and multimedia production. She is obtaining her masters degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying Human-Computer Interaction in the School’s Information Science program.

Obviously a student prankster on campus. Got an email this morning with the subject line: “The University of Arkansas taking steps to combat swine flu.”