Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, dad jokes serve a higher porpoise. Er, purpose.

If you find that hard to believe – and you probably do, unless you’re a dad – then trust me, I get it. My husband deals dad jokes regularly and without apology. Here’s one he shared recently:

Q: How do strawberries party?
A: They pump up the jam.

Sadly, our kids missed this one. But I guarantee that if they’d been around, the joke would’ve evolved into a full-blown performance of the famous Technotronic song, with dance moves.

Which would’ve elicited a look of disdain from our 17-year-old daughter and a comment about being “so cringy” from our 12-year-old son. (This comes from a kid who wears orange Crocs with knee-high socks and shorts every day.)

Their responses only encourage my husband. In his eyes, any reaction is a win – from a giggle to an eye roll to a full-on groan. He gets plenty of each at our house. Just don’t ask him to dish out dad jokes on demand. Apparently, they are as spontaneous as their source is mysterious:

“I don’t bring the puns, Denise. The puns come to me.”

Here’s the thing. Contrary to what most kids (and many adults) believe, dad jokes aren’t necessarily lame and uncool. Puns especially can be quite smart and witty.

“They can be a demonstration of wit, of cleverness,” says Peter McGraw, director of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “You’re relying on a person’s ability to parse language, to understand the nuances and complexities of words.”

And, more importantly, the lowly dad joke plays a surprisingly positive role in parenting. According to humor researcher Mark Hye-Knudsen, dad jokes teach kids to be more resilient.

“It is worth considering dad jokes as a pedagogical tool that may serve a beneficial function for the very children who roll their eyes at them. By continually telling their children jokes that are so bad that they’re embarrassing, fathers may push their children’s limits for how much embarrassment they can handle. They show their children that embarrassment isn’t fatal.”

So, we should probably give dads a break. After all, they’re sharing their best material.

For the kids’ sake, of course.

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

We’ve all seen them.

Design mistakes so embarrassing that they make us laugh.

They’re everywhere – from the logo that resembles a body part to the typeface that makes it look like the local bakery sells “farts” instead of “tarts.”

Then, there’s the copy that’s oddly uncomfortable. Like the old Yellow Pages tagline to “let your fingers do the walking.” Oof. This one practically begs an awkward innuendo.

It’s the stuff memes are made of.

Let’s face it. When it comes to design, pitfalls abound. Especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Take the basic restroom sign, for example. Of any design project, this one seems the most straightforward. Heck, we’ve already got universal symbols for restrooms. So, all you need to do is stick them on a door, right?

Au contraire.

Even the humble restroom sign requires a surprising amount of thinking, planning, and intention – not to mention a keen eye for visual details.

Now, take our design solution for the restrooms at the downtown Spokane Public Library, shown below. These vinyl graphics are clean, modern, and simple. They even allow the natural beauty of the wood to show through.

And, best of all, their placement won’t make you feel like a middle schooler whose voice just cracked in front of the entire class.

Hey, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

Some things are just better left to the professionals.

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

My husband is fluent in geek.

He’s a software engineer, so he obviously learned it on the job – along with Python, C++, and Java. Heck, even the names of those programming languages are geek speak.

To most people, a python is just a snake, C++ is a grade barely below a B- -, and java is a cuppa joe. But to programmers, ordinary words take on new meaning.

As a word nerd myself – which, to be fair, is related to a geek – I’m amused and sometimes irritated by the words my husband uses at work. Today, I’m going to share some of my favorite geek words, and by the end of this post, you’ll be able to speak geek too.

Let’s start with my husband’s job title: he’s a backend software engineer. Which basically means he works on the part of the software system that users don’t see.

I’ll be honest. My immature side finds the term backend a bit funny, and I’m happy to say I’m not the only one. Recently, my husband mentioned his job title to a gastroenterology nurse, who replied without skipping a beat:

“A backend engineer? That’s what I am too.”

Touché.

When it comes to speaking geek, portmanteaus – aka frankenwords – are common. That’s when you blend two words to make a new one, like spork (spoon + fork). Here are a couple that programmers like to use:

DevOps, or development operations. This makes me think of the word cyclops. But I’m pretty sure everyone who works in DevOps has two eyes. Or most of them do, anyway.

Mutex, or mutually exclusive. Um, no. This is destined to be the name of a nasal spray.

In geek, it’s also perfectly acceptable to make up new words altogether. Usually, this means adding prefixes and/or suffixes to otherwise respectable words. I’ll admit, this bugs me quite a bit. Here are a few examples I’ve heard from programmers:

intentful
redocumentation
evolvability
robusticize

So far, the folks at Merriam-Webster haven’t officially recognized these words. But it’s probably only a matter of time until they do.

Geek also uses tons of acronyms and initialisms. In the programming world, these can get excessive. Here are a few you should know:

PO, or product owner. Ordinarily, this just means that someone’s peeved, as in, “Programmers hate it when their PO gets poed.”

MVP, or minimum viable product. Usually, an MVP is a rockstar. But in this case, it’s pretty much the opposite.

WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get. Seriously. Could this acronym get any longer? Thankfully, it’s pronounced whiz-ee-wig, and that’s plain fun to say.

BOTW, or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I guarantee this one’s been showing up in the Slack chat for weeks now, since BOTW 2 was just released. (Or would it be TOTK?)

MTFBWY, or may the force be with you. You can’t even make this stuff up. Hey, I call it geek speak for a reason.

And finally, there’s this one – which may or may not apply to this blog post:

TLDR, or too long; didn’t read.

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: random thoughts the writing life  |  make a comment

Typically, I don’t use salty language. So, if you hear an expletive while I’m editing, I guarantee it’s because of one thing.

Abstraction.

It’s the bane of my copywriting existence and the number one enemy of clarity. What do I mean by abstraction? It’s what happens when someone takes a simple, straightforward message like this:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.

And writes it in an impersonal, indirect way, like this:

The intention behind the scaling of the incline was the retrieval of a water vessel.
An unexpected descent resulted in the breaking of a crown, with an occurrence of tumbling thereafter.

Sure, it sounds ridiculous in a child’s nursery rhyme. Yet this style is commonplace in corporate, academic, and legal writing. What audience has the mental energy to wade through all that abstraction to get to the real meaning?

This is where I come in, with my brutal red pen and my cussing ways. As I edit, I constantly ask myself:

Who are the main characters? And what are they doing?

I’ll be honest. It’s surprisingly hard to answer these questions when I’m dealing with abstract writing. Still, I figure it’s better for me to find the answers than to force the poor readers to do it. The best would be to write clearly from the start.

So, for the public good and my sanity – and to save my coworkers’ tender ears – I’m going to share two ways to avoid abstract writing. (I learned them from this book. My own copy is dog-eared from use.)

1.  Express the main characters as subjects.
2.  Express their actions as verbs.

It’s as simple as that. Instead of saying, “A solution to the problem was achieved,” you would say, “We solved the problem.” In the second version, the characters and their action are 100% clear. There are, of course, many other tips for writing clearly, and you can read some of them here.

Nonetheless, I believe that these two are the best way to fight our common writing enemy.

And send that $*&@ing abstraction to &*%$!

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

My son has a love-hate relationship with puzzles. He loves figuring out how the pieces interlock to create a bigger picture, but he hates that he can only tell those pieces apart by their shapes – not their colors.

That’s because he’s colorblind.

It’s a common condition. According to the National Eye Institute, some form of color blindness affects 1 in 12 males and 1 in 200 females.

Yet, contrary to what my son’s classmates believe, most people who are colorblind do see color. They just perceive color balance differently – sometimes much differently. My son, for example, has red-green color blindness, the most common form. He confuses purple with blue, brown with green, and pink with gray. For him, it’s almost as if the color red doesn’t exist.

He simply sees the world a little differently.

A few weeks ago, I started looking for puzzles made specifically for people with color blindness. I was surprised and delighted to find several options by a graphic designer on Zazzle. Here’s the one I ordered:

You may notice that the designer used several techniques to make the illustration more accessible to people who are colorblind: high contrast, a limited color palette, and a variety of patterns and textures.

The result? It was my son’s first love-love experience with a puzzle. And now that I know what to look for, it won’t be his last.

I’ll admit that, while I’m familiar with accessible design, I didn’t really get its impact until I saw my son’s excitement over a simple puzzle. Sure, there are far weightier examples of accessible design. Still, this one made a difference in the life of an 11-year-old kid.

It wasn’t even the puzzle itself that made him the happiest. It was the fact that someone had purposely made a product for people like him.

And all it took was a designer who was willing to see the world a little differently too.

—————

This animation video by Yoav Brill offers an artist’s perspective on the experience of color blindness.

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

Have you ever tried a dish that tasted nothing like its main ingredient?

It happened to me once at an expensive restaurant on the Seattle waterfront. I ordered halibut, my favorite seafood, and the pan-seared fillet came heavily topped with a spicy fruit salsa. Rather than enhance the delicate flavor of the fish, the bold spices and tangy sweetness overwhelmed it. I got a mouthful of heat and fruit, but I could hardly taste halibut at all.

It was a meal that disappointed my taste buds and my wallet, so I never returned to that restaurant.

Marketing communication often suffers the same fate. We try to season our messaging with so many clever and complex flavors that we obscure the main point. The result is communication that’s confusing, distracting, or even overwhelming – and that can cause an audience to tune out.

Recently, I saw an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, the renowned filmmaker. In it, he shared how each of his films is intentionally driven by a single theme or idea:

“I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about, in one word. For Godfather, the key word is succession. That’s what the movie is about. Apocalypse Now, morality. The Conversation, privacy.”

Coppola’s films are built around singular themes, yet the plots are still complex and engaging, and the characters are multi-dimensional. So, while simplicity may seem basic or even unsophisticated, it’s at the heart of great storytelling – and great communication.

A clear message starts and ends with a single, driving idea.

A couple summers ago, I ordered my favorite seafood yet again, this time at an unassuming restaurant along the wharf of Juneau, Alaska. The pan-seared halibut was cleanly flavored with an herb rub, one that enhanced the mild taste and freshness of the fish. It was the simplest halibut dish I’ve ever tasted.

And, frankly, it was the best one too.

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I’m convinced that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who are navigationally gifted, and those who aren’t. Alas, I land squarely in the latter group. Which means that I’m just lucky to find my way out of a parking lot.

Fortunately for me and others like me, graphic designers possess a superpower that can save people from getting lost in a confusing world. Their power lies not just in the ability to make a space easier to navigate, but to make it more engaging as well.

It’s a superpower called wayfinding, and you can see it at work here:

At the newly renovated Shadle Park Library, wayfinding shows up in everything from the outdoor signs and vinyl studio letters to the checkout kiosks and bookshelf labels. Each design solution helps library visitors seamlessly navigate the space and find exactly what they’re looking for.

But wayfinding offers more than just utility. It delivers impact too. Did you notice the graphic pattern in the privacy vinyl on the library’s glass walls? This one-of-a-kind pattern was inspired by a street map of the post-war Shadle Park neighborhood. It subtly adds interest and promotes a sense of space that’s unique to this Spokane community.

Wayfinding may not seem obvious at first, but once you start looking for it, you’ll discover it in the spaces you navigate every day.

And – whether you’re navigationally challenged or not – you’ll have a graphic designer to thank for that help.

posted by: Denise Wilson  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment