20x200: When Art Meets Commerce, An Industry Shifts

Here at Six Apart, we've always had one foot in the world of design and the other in technology, so it seems logical to us that a robust content management system like Movable Type can be used to create something beautiful - something that looks, well, nothing like a blog.

For those in an industry that prides itself on aesthetics and has long withstood digital innovation, that can be hard to imagine. Of the few industries that have resisted taking part in new media, none is more glamorous than Art. Long the province of whitewalled galleries and mysterious pricing schemes, art has historically been accessible only to a privileged few.

In January 2007, when gallery owner and entrepreneur Jen Bekman had her middle-of-the night revelation that the Internet was a perfect vehicle for making art available to everyone, she was instrumental in ushering the art market into the digital age. Jen named the venture 20x200, and devised the following formula: each week, she would offer two limited-edition prints - an edition of 200 for $20, an edition of 20 for $200, and an edition of 2 for $2,000. The entire business would be conducted online.

To build out the 20x200 site, Jen enlisted the help of photographer and web consultant Raul Gutierrez. Both Jen and Raul had extensive backgrounds in technology; Jen's career included leadership roles and Netscape and Disney, while Raul, himself an accomplished photographer, had built and produced a number of successful websites.

When they decided to use Movable Type to build out the site, they agreed on one thing: it couldn't look like a blog. The entire 20x200 site was built in Movable Type, using multiple custom plug-ins and integrating Google Checkout to make buying simple. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, Jen sends a newsletter to the 20x200 mailing list, in which she announces that day's edition and discusses its context and relevancy within the art world. The newsletter acts not only as a sales tool, but also as a rich source of information for new and seasoned collectors alike.

The newsletter contains links that lead to the page on the 20x200 site where the edition is displayed. Next to each edition sits a real-time inventory number, indicating how many pieces remain.

Movable Type demonstrates its abilities as a flexible, powerful CMS, allowing 20x200 to easily manage their growing catalogue of artwork. The site uses many custom fields to enable administrators to enter data for each edition quickly and simply; fields such as artist name, artist statement and website URL are consistent across each entry, so that visitors to the site can browse artists and find facts with ease.

Less than a year after 20x200 launched, the site has been an unqualified success: over 14,000 prints have been sold to date, to a customer list that includes artists, celebrities and respected collectors from around the world. The site has become an important corollary to Jen's New York gallery, and a vital part of her ongoing mission to champion emerging artists.

When we talk about Movable Type, we often say: "you imagine it, we enable it" and 20x200 demonstrates that maxim - dare we say - artfully.

One of the fundamental goals for Movable Type for almost seven years now has been to advance the state of design on the web. Some of the recent developments from the MT community highlight how that attention to aesthetics is alive and well.

First, as we described on the company news blog recently, we've made the Design Assistant for Movable Type available as a completely free design resource for the MT community. While the process of creating the Assistant was gratifying, we think it's just as important to look at the design-oriented philosophy behind its creation:

It's easy to make tools to create a design, but it's far harder to create tools that help you get in the mindset of making good tradeoffs.

So today we bring you the Design Assistant for Movable Type. Sure, you can click through it and knock out a cool custom design really quickly. But along the way, you'll start to see how a few common grid/column layouts can impact the way your content is perceived. The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources.

But as with everything in design, it's not merely about the ideas that influence the work, it's about the experience of seeing a design in action. So try out the Design Assistant for yourself and see what it inspires you to create.

Of course, in a community full of smart designers, inspiration can come from the creativity you find in other MT sites. It's something we think about for the Movable Type community worldwide, as our European team has shown recently on its blog, too. And Aaron Bailey of 601am, the highly-regarded blog development shop, has helped make it easier than ever to find and share beautiful Movable Type-powered sites, with the launch of Movable Love.

Movable Love is brand new, but already features tons of clever and unique MT sites, each of which can help inspire your own designs to new heights. And once you've got that beautiful new site built, you'll want to make sure and submit it to the growing collection over at Movable Love.

The standard way of presenting information in blogging tools today was virtually defined by Movable Type's innovative user interface touches half a decade ago, with lists of blogs and entries and comments taking a position of prominence. Those lists were backed by a few utility screens for managing things like authors and permissions. But, having led the revolution in blogging since then, we've learned from our community exactly what information helps bloggers make their sites successful. Whether you're aiming for community interaction or simply to get the highest possible number of readers, we thought there was a better way to present insights into how your blogs are succeeding.

It's become clear: Serious bloggers don't just need raw data on the entries they've written -- you need understanding into what your audience wants.

As a result, Movable Type 4's most immediate improvement is the pervasive use of smart data displays, starting with the powerful new Dashboard. the Dashboard is topped with an intelligent dynamic chart showing recent commenting and posting activity for one blog or across the unlimited number of blogs that can be published with a single Movable Type instance. A simple click reveals a tag cloud display for one or more blogs, and you can easily explore your own blog entries by tag, for review or as inspiration for new entries. You can even use a range of new plugins to include data like the number of visitors or feed subscribers for your blog, by connecting to popular third-party services like Google Analytics or FeedBurner.

The graph of blog activity isn't merely an attractive way to look at your blog's success; It's also a powerful visual way of understanding what inspires your community of authors and commenters. See a spike in commenting activity recently? Just click and drag to select a range of dates, and the system automatically provides statistics about that subset of information. Point to any individual data point for more details on that day's activity, and then with one click, reveal a list of just the comments during that period of time.

There's far more than can be done with Movable Type 4's new graphical blog reports, especially with the new generation of plugins and system extensions designed to work with MT4. But we think you'll find the immediacy and interactivity of the new user interface compelling right from the first time you log in.

We owe a very special thanks to the MeasureMap team, friends of ours who spun off from the esteemed Adaptive Path team and helped design the excellent new version of Google Analytics. Their date slider widget, released under a Creative Commons license, shows the fantastic potential for collaboration between teams working on open platforms.

There are lots of discussions about how newspapers need to evolve, and many of them focus on the lessons traditional news outlets can learn from blogs — how to update more frequently, accept submissions and comments from readers, or how to make archived content easier to discover and share.

Well, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser in southeast England has taken those lessons to heart in relaunching its web presence: The newspaper’s site is now published entirely with Movable Type. And that makes the Buckinghamshire Advertiser today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares? The important thing is that the Advertiser’s staff has an easy way to share news and updates with their community, and the Buckinghamshire community has a simpler way to keep up to day. The Press Gazette offers an astute analysis:

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.

Just as sites like thePlatform and Seed Magazine show us, content that’s created with blogging tools doesn’t have to look like a traditional blog. All that matters is that a site connects with its audience in way that’s meaningful and useful. The Trinity Mirror team that’s relaunched the Advertiser has achieved exactly that — and the new Buckinghamshire Advertiser is ample evidence.

Today’s Movable Type Featured Blog is a special one: It’s Ze Frank’s The Show, one of the most popular video blogs in the world, which is signing off tomorrow in the end of an amazing one-year run that’s culminated with Ze being widely recognized as one of the key innovators in the young medium.

Now, Ze’s How To Dance Properly was already knocking around as one of the then-young blogosphere’s favorite links half a decade ago when Movable Type was first created. And I had the chance to see Ze’s first public presentation at the Gel Conference a few years ago, where his skills as a performer were already strongly in evidence. So Ze Frank’s bonafides as someone who really gets the web were already well-established long before The Show ever launched; In fact, Ze’s been posting updates in Movable Type and embedding videos on his site for years. But what’s impressive is how well he’s understood the unique artistic requirements of the nascent video blogging medium, and used experience from one era of blogging to help kick-start a new one.

So as Ze gets ready to retire The Show, it seems there is a parallel to a comedic talent who helped define an earlier video medium’s first forays: Lucille Ball. Because, though there are lots of video bloggers doing great work today, only one year ago there had been very few breakout stars. And many of those who were creating video blogs had simply tried to bring their text blogs into the video world.

The same was true of television in the early days — radio stars were often reading off the same scripts they’d used on the air, only now they were doing it in front of cameras. But I Love Lucy helped define a vocabulary that was native to the new medium. The sitcom genre that the show invented was uniquely of, and uniquely for video on television. And Ze’s Show shares many of the same traits as that show: It’s full of a strongly physical sense of humor, a canny understanding of how to frame and feature an extremely expressive face, and it has a pacing and timing that makes all the work that comes before it seem downright languid.

So, while it’s bittersweet to be featuring a blog that’s nearing its end, it’s also wonderful to recognize someone who’s already become a huge influence on a whole new generation of video bloggers. And it’s good to acknowledge one more similarity between a pioneering television show and a pioneering video blog — they both know how to exit gracefully while at the top of their game. Congratulations to Ze, and we can’t wait to see what he shows us next.

Learning Movable Type isn’t just today’s Movable Type Featured blog, it’s a cornerstone of our community and one of the best resources that exists for, well, learning Movable Type.

Elise Bauer has been maintaining the site for years as an indispensable reference for all of us who spend our days working and playing with the platform. Along with her collaborators Jesse Gardner and Arvind Satyanarayan (whom you might remember from our post a couple of weeks ago), Elise has been posting tutorials and how-tos that explain even the most technical concepts in perfectly understandable plain English.

But what’s really exciting is what the team’s done now: They haven’t just redesigned the site, they’ve reimagined it, as a truly community-driven effort. Everyone in the community who has something to share is welcome to publish their articles on the site and become a contributor. Most fittingly, Learning Movable Type shows off what Movable Type itself can really do: check out the smart organization of the site, grouped by topic (categories) or by subject (tags) or by contributor (authors). And new technology features like a community search make it easy to find the best Movable Type resources, regardless of where they are on the web.

We’re really excited to see the renewed level of energy around the Movable Type community these days, so it’s most appropriate that one of the flagship resources for the community has been reborn. But don’t take our word for it — go check out the all-new Learning Movable Type, maybe even contribute an article of your own, and see exactly what makes the site so special.

Blue Flavor is an established team of expert web developers, with access to every web technology that’s available. But when thePlatform came calling looking for a standards-based redesign that would produce search-engine friendly pages that could be easily updated, Blue Flavor chose Movable Type. We’re always thrilled when members of our Six Apart Professional Network have case studies to share with the community, so we were happy that Nick Finck, Blue Flavor’s Director of User Experience, had a few minutes to talk to us about the project.

Six Apart: So, to get started — who’s Blue Flavor:? I feel like I know you all since many of you have been in the blogging community forever, but maybe everybody doesn’t know the name yet.

Blue Flavor: Blue Flavor is seven people, myself, Brian Fling, D. Keith Robinson, Garrett Murray, Tom Watson, Kevin Tamura and Cyndi Fling. Brian, Keith and I make up the principals. Garrett is both the youngest age wise and employee wise… Sorry, he’s taken, ladies!

Six Apart: Hah! Great. So, the latest project I’ve seen your team launch is thePlatform. Before we get to the site itself — how do you end up in touch with a relatively large company, when you’re such a small (but admittedly well-established!) team?

Blue Flavor: They say it’s all about who you know. In this case, Keith has a pretty good relationship with the client. They knew we did web standards-based design and needed someone to come in and redesign their site the right way.

Six Apart: And the site they asked you to help with is thePlatform. What is it?

Blue Flavor: thePlatform is basically a broadband application service provider. They provide services that businesses use to manage and publish various kinds of broadband media. It’s one of those companies where you see their handiwork all the time as a consumer, but are not directly exposed to the technology. It’s all a seamless experience for you. The focus is mostly on business-to-business communication.

Six Apart: That sounds like a demanding audience — but if they all have broadband and presumably have the latest browsers and things, does it still matter that you’re building with web standards?

Blue Flavor: Of course, standards are always something we need to pay attention to. We always design and build our websites so that they are accessible to all, be it people with older browsers or people with screen readers. We like to layer the advanced technologies so that users who have systems or browsers that do not support those technologies can still access and read the content on the site. Just because the bandwidth may be there for your site’s audience doesn’t mean you should abuse it as a designer or developer.

Six Apart: That makes sense — you have to have technology that works for everyone. Switching gears a little bit, this doesn’t look like a blog, in the traditional sense. But it’s powered by Movable Type. How did you make that choice?

Have you ever seen those t-shirts with a tuxedo printed on the front of them? I’m pretty sure the vibe that guys are going for when they wear them is, “Hey look, I’m classy but fun!” Unfortunately, the message that comes across is, “I want to seem like I’m presentable, but without having to actually exert any effort!”

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s worth mentioning because the same thing happens in software. Making a t-shirt can be fun, easy, even attractive. But it’s not the same thing as getting fitted for a real suit. (I learned the difference by reading blogs like the Movable Type-powered English Cut.) Making something that’s cool and fun isn’t the same as making something that’s durable, reliable, and ready for formal occasions.

Which brings us, in a somewhat roundabout fashion, to blogging. We’ve been working on Movable Type for a long time — more than half a decade. When we started, simply making cool stuff was enough. But as we’ve worked to make a reliable business tool, we sometimes have to make choices that balance coolness with reliability. For example, a few years ago, people really, really wanted support for Daypop and Blogdex built in to the platform. Those requests are… somewhat less common today. Fashion can be fickle. You can dress up your Hanes crew-neck, but you won’t be fooling anybody.

(There’s some kind of story here about plugins being like the Bedazzler for your t-shirt blog, but this analogy is getting kind of painful already, isn’t it?)

Still, sometimes you just want to throw on a t-shirt; It’s good enough for hanging out with your friends. And that’s why we’ve got different versions of Movable Type. Movable Type Enterprise is designed to be that custom-tailored suit, perfectly integrated with all your other professional tools. And at the other extreme is the free personal version of MT: No limits on what you can do with it, but probably not the one to use if you’re, say, talking to the Dalai Lama.

We figured it was worth taking the time to explain why we’ve got a few different versions of Movable Type, appropriate for whatever you’re doing. And we’ll talk a little bit more in the future about how we can make the personal versions of MT a little more human, a little cooler, while still keeping MT Enterprise a rock-solid, predictable platform.

So, if you’ve ever wondered whether the same wardrobe can support high fashion and just hanging out with friends, fret not. But if you think one size fits all and that you can just throw on a t-shirt and pretend it’s a tux… you might want to reevaluate your sartorial selections.

Update: Thanks to Mena for a quick correction — tuxedo t-shirts are totally okay for cute little dogs like Rudy, who is one of our favorite Six Apart office dogs. Sorry, Rudy!

Blogging presents an interesting tension between the drive to publish and the nagging desire to press “pause” and take some time to reorganize, retool, and re-examine the look of a site. Hopefully, good blogging software makes the publishing aspect so fluid that, for long stretches, the natural redesign instinct can take a backseat and just enjoy the ride.

That said, it’s always a pleasure to see a well-executed change of art direction. Of course, we expected nothing less from the maestros of cultural street cred, Cool Hunting. Adobe sponsored the redesign, which offers a very elegant new look to Josh Rubin’s beautifully customized Movable Type site. Bravo!

(And for those who wonder what kind of company would be so bold as to sponsor a redesign, look no further than Adobe’s own MT-powered blogs for clues. Oh yeah, that kind of company — a cool one.)

A few weeks ago, networking giant Cisco announced that it was transforming its communcations, with the most visible part of the makeover being the launch of a new logo. As the discussion on Movable Type-powered design blogs such as Speak Up and Strategic Name Development indicated, Cisco’s audience on the web was ready for a new visual direction for the company. The new logo was even designed specifically to be displayed correctly at very low resolution, as on a mobile device or in the little favorites icon in your browser.

But the bigger news was the larger communications initiative taking advantage of the new web-based tools for interactivity:

A transformation is occurring on the Web. The end user is more in charge, creating collaborative websites and blogs, generating, mixing and sharing content, and having more of a say in how companies do business with them. The potential of the Internet is being fulfilled by more than the physical network alone, it is the human network where people are connecting and collaborating, enabling ideas and opportunities. This represents an ideal time for Cisco to transform our website, into a platform for collaboration, interaction and innovation.