Toby and Banksy are here!

I’m often asked to create a wireframe for a site before I design it because the Account Group thinks it a really clever in-process sales tool - that also might reduces risk - or the number of non-billable hours that I run up.

It made me wonder: do others have the same problem with wireframes that I do? I Goggled “web wireframes” to find out; I wondered how others approach this banal task. I found a multitude of wireframe design approaches that look and smell an awful lot like post-design-rationalization . . . or bull-shit for short.

The image of all those wireframes reminded me of a chat I had with one of my mentors, Hugh Dow, about 30 years ago when I had seen one of my colleagues craft an enormous deck to sell a $2,000,000 media plan. I felt like I’d missed a few steps because I was selling much larger media plans with very short decks. Hugh assured me that I was on the right track: “if you can sell it with just one page, do it, but if you’ve got a client that needs to see all your work, append that too.”

I’ve never forgotten that valuable lesson:

• Do all the detailed work to ensure that you know what you’re doing - and why. Keep that work close at hand so that you can explain yourself if and when you need to with-out any hesitation. 
• Only say and show what’s needed to make the sale.
• Sell the benefits and excitement of sharing a great story: don’t bore them with your stupid process.

So, back to wireframes.

Stupid idea, except for VERY complex sites.

Likewise, it is good idea to provide mock-ups of key pages for a big catalog, but not for a little roll-fold brochure or a banner ad.

I’ve seen suffocation warnings on virtually every plastic bag in the U.S. including small dog-poo bags. They always get me wondering about the general demise of common sense.

Now this.

I just don’t even want to imagine the chain of events that led to IKEA stores concluding that notices like these are required on the toilets in their showroom display washrooms (which have no doors on them).

Yikes!   

My first languge was German. English came into my life in Kindergarten, five years later. Growing up, most of my friends' parents were immigrants as well. They spoke to their kids in their mother-tongue and we, the kids, replied in English.

Many words, thoughts and feelings often do not have an exact English equivalent - and visa-versa.

When I saw a rack of these signs for sale in the new PANDA MALL store in Scarborough, where everything is imported from China, I had to wonder about how much they paid for, or saved on their translation services, how much it cost to print and ship this stuff all the way from China, and how much of it will go into a local dumpster because it's just not selling.