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

The Grinch tried to steal my family’s Christmas this year. But in the end, we were the ones who discovered the true meaning of the day.

It all started when my husband and I decided to spend the holidays with extended family out of town. Knowing we’d be gone for a while, we started to strategically empty our pantry in the days leading up to the trip. Because there’s no point in having a house full of food if no one’s home to eat it.

It seemed like a good plan – until the night before we were scheduled to leave.

Just as my kids had cleared the pantry and were licking the last few crumbs of stale granola bars from their fingers, he struck.

The Grinch. Or, as the weather service calls him, the bomb cyclone. And you know it’s serious weather when the meteorologist uses words like “bomb” and “cyclone” to describe it. In a matter of hours, our holiday plans were buried under a mound of snow and ice.

We had nowhere to go, no family to see, and no food to eat.

I’m not going to lie. For a while, there was no joy in Whoville. My family spent Christmas Eve moping around the house, complaining about the weather, and begrudgingly ordering takeout.

But by Christmas morning, we’d found our holiday spirit.

Four hours (and one long trip to the only supermarket that was open) later, we finally sat down to a lovely, if makeshift, Christmas dinner. And it was wonderful. No one even seemed to mind that the table was decorated with grocery store flowers and the wrapped gifts all came straight from the magazine aisle.

In the end, it turned out to be one of the nicest holidays I can remember. And we learned the very same lesson as the Grinch himself.

Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more.

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

Get ready to have your mind blown. I’m about to share five obscure punctuation marks that you’ve always needed in your life but never knew existed.

Let’s jump in.

interrobang
I’ve used this one for years, but I didn’t realize it had a name until recently. The interrobang is a question mark followed by an exclamation point. Or vice versa. It’s used to express disbelief or ask a rhetorical question. The name is a combination of “interrogate” (to question) and “bang” (printers’ lingo for an exclamation point).

Back in the 1960s, typographers experimented with designing a single glyph for the interrobang by superimposing an exclamation point over a question mark. The result is hard to decipher, so I’d stick with the two-mark version. People experimented with lots of things in the sixties. Doesn’t mean it was all genius.

certitude point
The certitude point (AKA conviction point) is an exclamation mark with a hyphen through it. When you use it at the end of a sentence, you’re essentially saying, “End of discussion, capeesh?” If punctuation had a mike drop, this would be it. Use sparingly.

percontation point
Every bit as pompous as it sounds, the percontation point – or reversed question mark – has been mocking people since the 1500’s. Consider it the refined way to punctuate a rhetorical question.

Sadly, in our crude modern world, the percontation point has been replaced by the eye roll emoji. Isn’t it time to return to a more civilized era and use a respectable mark to insult strangers on the internet?

snark mark
The snark mark is simple – it’s a period followed by a tilde. And since the name is self-explanatory, it doesn’t need further explanation, does it? Does it?!

I feel like it doesn’t. Just use it already.

acclimation point
After so much aggressive (and passive-aggressive) punctuation, it’s only right to end with a friendlier mark. The acclimation point appears as two exclamation marks that share the same period – like little punctuation BFFs. It’s a nicer, more approachable way to express excitement. (Because exclamation points aren’t amiable enough already?)

Think of the acclimation point as the exclamation point’s more sensitive cousin. Which might make it the perfect mark for younger generations.

If only they used punctuation.∼

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

Look, I don’t want to freak you out, but graphic designers are hiding something from you.

They secretly tell people where to go and what to do.

Don’t expect them to admit it, of course. They’ll use innocuous words like “signage” or “wayfinding.” But it’s more like mind control. They’re guiding you, and you aren’t even aware of it.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Just visit the newly remodeled Central Library downtown. If you pay close attention, you’ll practically hear the signs and graphics telling you what to do.

“These aren’t the books you’re looking for.”
“You will take the elevator to the third floor.”
“You want to go to the café and rethink your life.”

How do designers pull this off? With design choices so subtle and attractive that you’d never suspect a thing. They’ll use a clean font choice, a consistent color scheme, sophisticated graphics, or – the sneakiest of all – a directory disguised as art, in a place where you’d need it the most but expect it the least.

Like an elevator door.

Graphic designers use all these techniques – and more – to seamlessly guide people through complex spaces. Their work combines beauty and function to welcome us, delight us, and make us feel comfortable. They even help us create mental maps to navigate the space, so we know where we are, where we’re going, and the best way to get from one place to the other.

We follow their guidance without ever giving it a second thought.

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design calls it “spatial problem solving.” Yeah, right. Don’t be fooled. It’s more like the power of the Force.

And graphic designers? They’re Jedi Masters.

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