Schoolwork

Degree Project – Week Three

March 12, 2011


I apologize for not writing a blog post last week about my progress with this degree project, but I had mostly spent the week reading and researching, and I didn’t think I had made enough progress to justify a full blog post.

This week for class, we were required to make a presentation on our progress so far. I ended up beginning my presentation by showing the video I posted last Wednesday, about superficiality on YouTube, especially in the comments section. Most of the people in my class hadn’t actually seen any of my videos before, so it was fairly awkward sharing this one on the huge projector, while I was sitting right there. As much as I’ve gotten used to listening to my own voice and seeing my own face while editing, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to watching my videos with other people!

If you missed that video when I first posted it, you can watch it right here:

Some of the issues I’ve been thinking about were inspired by the book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. One of the problems with sites like Facebook is that they make it so convenient to define yourself by pre-set categories, such as favorite books or your job. They don’t offer much in terms of flexibility for how each specific person wants to present themselves. YouTube is definitely one of the social networks that gets closest to how people interact in real life, since we can see each other move and hear each other talk. However, with that comes an inevitable hierarchy, just like in real life, with some people becoming more popular and other people trying to reach that popularity. The thing that makes YouTube different from real life though, is that everybody has a number of subscribers, and a number of views on their video, and those numbers create a very clear, black and white hierarchy. It doesn’t take into account the quality of discussion, or the loyalty of a community to the video maker.

YouTube is essentially a level playing ground. Besides a couple of features partners have that non-partners don’t, everyone on the site has the same privileges. Every video page has the same layout and every video URL looks the same, no matter if it was uploaded by NigaHiga or your grandmother. In a way this is a good thing – it means that everybody has basically the same chance at having a hit video and getting a following. However, I’m wondering if there would be a way for trusted video makers and people with dedicated followings to “unlock” or gain access to more customizable features in order to more fully take advantage of the online video platform.

As part of my presentation, I organized a lot of my suggestions for changes to YouTube, some of which are small functionality changes, and some of which would change the dynamic of the entire site. About half of the ideas came from the comments on my video Big Changes Coming to YouTube?, while the rest were thought up by me. You can see that list here:



In the discussion with my class which followed that presentation, everybody was interested in the concept of the internal points system. This would introduce a new form of currency internally to the site, meaning you would be rewarded for contributions to the community and would have to earn the right to certain privileges. A benefit to this concept is that it would introduce a new form of hierarchy for the commenters and people who contribute to the community but don’t necessarily post videos themselves. However, it could also be very easily corrupted and skewed by spammers, so I will be trying to refine this idea a lot more in-depth in the upcoming weeks.

We also talked about new ways to organize videos, using RISD TV as an example of a more organic way of finding and sharing related videos, rather than just the straight list that YouTube’s algorithms come up with.

I’m also interested in finding different ways to utilize comments on videos, in order to promote a healthy conversation rather than the superficial one-off responses that are the norm these days. Some ideas include a time based commenting system, in which you can easily leave comments on certain moments in each video, as well as a public video response “conversation page,” in which several videos in response to each other could all be viewed on the same page, and comments could be left on the entire conversation.

One thing I’ve been struggling with in this project is how much I should be concentrating on the functionality of the site itself and how much I should be focusing on the community within the site. I would love to start a large project that would really utilize the people who watch my videos, as well as the much larger communities that have formed around friends of mine. I suppose that is yet another thing I will be brainstorming in the upcoming weeks.

If you have any thoughts about anything I’ve been talking about here, please leave them in the comments. I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

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Degree Project – Week One

February 25, 2011

poster

It is week one of the the spring semester, which means it is time to get to work on my degree project. If you’re a new visitor to the site or you don’t remember what I had posted a few weeks ago, my initial proposal is above.
(Click the image to see it larger.)

Since then, I’ve done some reading and some brainstorming, and I rewrote my plan in more detail, which is below.
(Click the image to see it larger.)



I will be documenting all my notes and ideas in this snazzy YouTube notebook I was given while at YouTube headquarters, and I will be showing you more of what I’m writing as my research continues.

I am also planning to read quite a few books over the next couple weeks, and you can see my reading list below (some of which I’ve already finished). If you have any suggestions about other books that might be helpful for my project, please leave them in the comments!

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption by Daniel Herwitz
Beyond Viral by Kevin Nalty
The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts by Alan Lastufka
Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business by Steve Garfield

Over this upcoming week, I will continue reading and brainstorming. I want to expand the last paragraph from the proposal above so I can have a clearer idea of the topics I will be researching. I’ll also continue to write blog posts about my progress every week, so you can follow along and give your own feedback!

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Musings from the Wood Shop

February 20, 2011

Last week, I finished my six-week stint as a woodworker after I took a Woodworking with Handtools class during Wintersession. This class was offered by the Industrial Design department, and I jumped at the chance to take a 3D class for the first time basically since freshman year. It was a bit of an adjustment, but once I became more comfortable with the tools (and stopped feeling like I was going to cut off my fingers with every move), I began to enjoy it a lot more.

The thing that stood out the most to me in the medium of woodworking is the time that must be put in to make a quality product. I’m used to the instantaneous world of Photoshop, where a thousand variations can be made and compared within minutes. However, with woodworking it is all about the imagination and trying to picture in your head what the finished piece will look like, without having the luxury of an undo button.

I also grew slightly frustrated at how long each project would take to complete. For example, I spent about six full days over the course of two weeks on the bowl you can see above, and while it is a nice bowl, I’m not entirely sure that it was worth two weeks of my life. When I was learning graphic design, I would be completing projects and moving on to the next challenge much more quickly, and while many of those early projects are not very well-designed at all, I learned a lot from each one. However, with woodworking, it takes much longer to complete each project and it was a big adjustment to get used to working at a slower pace.

The bowl above was my first carving project, and the dish you can see below was my second. I remembered to take process photos for the second dish, so you can see it change from a solid block of wood into the finished piece.

Unfortunately I accidentally deleted all the process photos I took from here until the finished product. In between was a lot more carving and an entire day devoted just to sanding the surface to be perfectly smooth.

Neither of these projects are entirely done – I still need to add a protective finish to the wood. Both are carved from pine, using only handtools such as chisels and files. While I don’t think I will be spending a lot of time in the wood shop in the future, it was a great experience to be thrown out of my comfort zone for six weeks.

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Introducing my Degree Project

January 7, 2011



At RISD, every graphic design senior must complete a degree project during the spring semester. I chose to focus mine on YouTube, and the visual identities of the various members of the community. You can hear more about the project in the video above, and then check out the high quality version of the poster I designed to present my concept below.

poster

I can’t wait to get started on this project! Keep an eye on this blog over the next few months, since I’ll be posting frequent updates of my progress!

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VidNews: A New Website Concept

November 19, 2010

I haven’t been posting the work I’ve been doing for the Visiting Designers workshops I’m in this semester, because we only have about two days for each of the projects and I never got my projects to a point of completion where I was satisfied enough to share them. However, I do want to share the results of the first workshop, from all the way back in September. This one I didn’t share because there was a chance the website might actually become a reality. However, that doesn’t really seem to be a possibility anymore, so I can finally show you guys what it’s all about.

The assignment was to in some way re-imagine the news. This could be a newspaper, magazine, website, even Facebook – we had to really think about the kinds of news we digest every day and how they are delivered to us. I chose to focus on news about the YouTube community. I wanted to combine the plethora of information from VidStatsX with the headline news from the YouTube Blog and videos from TheWillofDC. The best way I thought to do this was through a separate website which would really be geared toward very involved members of the YouTube community.

*Quick disclaimer: While most of the statistics below were real at the time I designed this, some of them I had to make up due to time constraints. Don’t take any stats below as absolute fact.*

The three main sections of the website would be articles, statistics, and gatherings. Right on the front page would be featured channels, followed by daily statistics. You could very easily see the stats you care about for whichever channels you are most interested in. One of my favorite features of VidStatsX is the chart that shows you when you will hit a specific sub count, based on your daily average sub gains. So, I included a feature to track when any user would reach any number of subscribers.

Following that are the articles, which in theory would include both aggregated articles about YouTube from other tech blogs as well as original articles written specifically for this website. The design was inspired by Gizmodo, with a large photo to quickly show what the article is about.

On the sidebar we have quick statistics, which would be some impressive stat chosen by someone who runs the site, and would change every few hours. Then would be a link to TheWillofDC’s YouTube news show, and a twitter feed from the @YouTube account. Finally, upcoming meet-ups would also be displayed on the homepage. I also had the idea that in the same way as YouTube’s modules are movable and able to be hidden, the different modules on this site could be hidden or moved to the top, however each individual user would prefer.

As I was designing it, I spoke to Hank Green about the idea, and it turned out that he had come up with a similar idea independently about a month earlier. He gave me some suggestions of changes to make so it could be presented to YouTube themselves, to try to get funding so it could become a reality.

The first thing we changed was the title of the website to the simpler VidNews. We replaced articles with tutorials, which would be more unique to the site. We added a forum button to the navigation to provide a more interactive component. We got rid of the featured channels and simplified the statistics shown on the home page, so that there wouldn’t be quite as much information competing for your attention at once.

This is as far as the design got before we received word from YouTube that while they liked the idea for the site, they weren’t interested in funding it. So, unless somebody else would like to donate their money to helping it become a reality, these JPG images are as much of the site as will ever exist.

However, I did design more than the homepage. Read on for some of the features I thought up, that someone better then me at programming could hopefully have made actually work.

A dynamic feature of the site that I thought would be very useful is this roll-over pop-up bubble with further information about any YouTube channel. I’m not a programmer so I don’t quite know how exactly it would work, but in theory the website would recognize when text or an image should link to a username on any page of the site, and automatically pull this information from the relevant channel page on YouTube.

One of the most fun parts about the project was getting to come up with creative ways to redesign the statistics portion of the site. As useful as VidStatsX can be, the design is seriously lacking and could be a lot more visually pleasing.

As you can see in the example above, I consolidated a lot of the viewing options into drop down menus that take up far less space. The layout would be very dynamic, allowing you to quickly view the Top 10, 50, 100 etc. users by subscriber count, total view count, number of videos, and other different options. You would also have the option to view it visually by icon, or as a list with all of the statistics written out.

One of the other graphs that I came up with would track Subscriber Change for specific users over a set period of time. Another fun one would track when specific users joined YouTube in a grid-like calendar.

Another feature of the site would be a aggregation of large upcoming YouTube gatherings. There have been some attempts to do this before, but none have widestream popularity, an intuitive user interface, and integration with a site people already use regularly. One of the most important parts of this part of this feature is the ability to sort the gatherings by date and location, and linking to other sites like Facebook which have RSVP capabilities. Large gatherings that many people would be traveling to would be featured in order to draw an even larger crowd.

*None of these gatherings (besides VidCon 2011) are actually happening. Please don’t show up to any of them*

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this (very) long blog post. Please email me or Hank Green with any questions you have about any of this. Even if the site never becomes a reality, it was still very fun to design, and I hope you enjoy looking at it!

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