An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video:

What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)…

Now, as you can tell, the big problem with the design and execution of this video is that the producers failed to recognize the importance of point of view in telling this story. Now, perspective is already very important in any film, but it’s doubly important in a film for which one’s point of view in reality is also the subject. But this failure is present even in some of the more mundane parts of the film like the interviews that Mark does with various meta staff members. Now, as it’s plain to see, these are not real interviews. They’re fully scripted and staged – again, a classic mistake in corporate film. You can even tell that they’re not looking at each other. They’re clearly reading from a teleprompter. Yikes.

Of course, the entire premise of an interview is that two people are speaking candidly. So watching an obviously fake interview can be deeply unsettling as the speakers try to act out natural conversation and inevitably fail. This is why so many people in this video, including Mark, seem to not know what to do with their hands while speaking. It’s because they’ve been told to act naturally in a social situation that does not normally exist.

…and the meaning of these kinds of propaganda-esque announcements:

They are joined by some friends who are calling from Soho to tell them about some cool augmented reality street art that they’ve just discovered. […] And with a wave of his hand, Mark teleports the artwork into his spaceship so that he can appreciate it for himself, thus extracting this street art from any sense of place and context, which is the point of street art. I know this might sound like a nitpick, but I think it’s just worth lingering on the fact that, you know, in this high concept tech demo about how this technology will empower people to appreciate art in new ways. Nobody paused to ask what the social and cultural function of street art actually is.

The entire introduction video comes across as thoughtless and careless – “It’s not a product launch or even a demo. It’s just a cartoon about the world Mark Zuckerberg is telling you that you will one day live in.” – and some of the observations here will be relevant to other things, even in other mediums: UI redesign minisites, the font announcements articles, rebrand unveils, and so on.

I would love similar analyses of Apple’s stuff – not just the most obvious parallel which would be the 1987 Knowledge Navigator vision video, but some of the more recent scripted virtual keynotes, too.

I linked to this opaquely on Thursday, but it deserves its own entry. Michael Bierut’s 2005 essay called “On (design) bullshit” is one of my favourite design essays:

It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions. The functional requirements — the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth — are concrete and often measurable. The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation. These might be: I just like to set my headlines in Bodoni, or I just like to make my products blobby, or I just like to cover my buildings in gridded white porcelain panels. In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth — “I don’t know, I just like it that way” — simply won’t do.

So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals. As [Harry G.] Frankfurt points out, it’s beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” There must only be the desire to conceal one’s private intentions in the service of a larger goal: getting your client it to do it the way you like it.

“I don’t know, I just like it that way” is such a tricky part of craft.

I read Mike Monteiro’s book of pre-pandemic essays called The collected angers. The book has less to do with the subject of this blog, but I grabbed a few quotes that resonated with me and seemed relevant.

In order not to make it too reductive, I’m also linking to the original essays for those who want to follow up:

The worst feedback you can get from a client is “Wow. It looks like you worked really hard on this!” Stop using your work like a time card. If you did it right, it looks like it was effortless. It looks like it’s always existed. And the client will probably be irritated that they paid you for 30 hours of work to do something that looks like it took an hour. Which it did. They’re just not seeing the 29 hours of bad design that got you to that one hour of good design. And for the love of god, please don’t show them those 29 hours of bad design. A presentation is a shitty place for a sausage-making demonstration, and you’ll just come across as a defensive, unsure person needing validation.

—from 13 ways designers screw up client presentations. This sounds like a version of “My kid could’ve painted that” argument.

Learn how to steal. Be aware of your history. Design is the oldest profession in the world. You’re not the first person to tackle whatever design problem you’re tackling. See how others tackled it. Take the best solutions you find and improve on them. Don’t burn time solving things from scratch. Make use of what others have learned.

—from 10 things you need to learn in design school if you’re tired of wasting your money

The world needs fixing, not disrupting.

—from 8 reasons to turn down that startup job

And:

“The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.”—Joe Strummer