“Thanks for remembering,” she started to say after I’d wished her a happy birthday. “I thought I was special but then you have that crazy memory for numbers.”

There is something about numbers — their exactness, perhaps — that once allowed them to embed in my memory as a pincushion, but the etchings of California addresses, reed strengths, sports statistics, and phone numbers from my life before the mobile-phone era, before the days when all of my contacts’ numbers were at hand, upon my grey matter are eroding. My once formidable random-access reservoir of numerical memory now traffics only the arrays that I utilize most often — airfare averages, Chinatown bus schedules, and of course, hexidecimal color codes and percentages and pixel values of the grids of projects in progress — the stuff of cascading style sheets.

So I’ve remade this site, two years older than when I first set to refashion this domain as a portfolio of past works and an ongoing documentation of works interminably ‘in progress,’ what R. Buckminster Fuller anointed a chronofile, what is in contemporary parlance, frumpishly, a blog. The former is still, I loathe to say, in progress, but the latter and the peripheral-personal are dressed, and the time seems right to publish the whole of it if only to open myself up to greater external pressure to finish the remainder.

Then again, if not for the two-year delay, I would not have been able to build the scalable site I’d envisioned so quickly and independently but for the aid of the people PHP-slinging deities who developed WordPress for the human race — further acknowledgments for other methods of presentation are included with Specifications. I certainly wouldn’t have approached the enterprise with the present humility — experience in the trade, harsh reality, and a bit of traveling have scrubbed away most of my notions of an existence above topsoil, innumerable hair follicles, and of course, that bit with the numbers.

But I was never a savant. The secret to my retention of birthdays — in my 2000 calendar, I wrote the names of family, friends, and acquaintances in the days corresponding to their birthdays. As I entered new social circles, I added names to the calendar, and as the years passed, I wrote those names again, and later initials. This year, I represented each person with a hashmark on the line above their date of birth.

My first graphic design commission was a calendar, 9″ x 12″, one signature with covers, four-color. The whole of it was set in Myriad, laid out in Adobe (nee Aldus) PageMaker. I was 15 years old then.

And this thing is, true to form, tautly coded standards-compliant XHTML at the content layer, manipulated by modularized CSS 2 at the presentation layer. Browser-formatted text is rendered in Georgia (or whatever your browser decides is the serif typeface du jour); graphical headings are set in Univers Bold Condensed. Voluta Script Pro is also among the proceedings, though intentionally illegible. Despite that, it still conforms to Section 508 of the United States’ Rehabilitation Act. (Note: the accessibility testing isn’t yet done. There are still test environments that haven’t yet been resolved: all Linux browsers, the iPhone, and super-high resolutions (2000+ x 1500+). A CSS kill yields some weirdness — mostly me learning WordPress as I go, but I think I’ve picked out most of it.)

For as seemingly fussy as the code is, the content, and sometimes, the presentation is left a little more to chance — chalk this up to the two-year delay. The clearest (and most fun, for me at least) example of this is on my categorized list of Bookmarks — when you visit that page, try refreshing it a few times. Each list draws randomly from two arrays that give it its typographical formatting in addition to its overall padding values. The latter are sequences of four random numbers (in a range from zero to 35) I requested from family, friends, and acquaintances, because the numbers I used in the original design didn’t appear random enough.

The original numbers? People’s birthdays.

“The Road to Clarity” reminds me of the assignment from The Cheese Monkeys where the students of Introduction to Graphic Design have to hitchhike on a snowy day—it’s a flash marketing, personal branding/image management, and hand-lettering exercise with life-and-death overtones. And if you don’t appreciate the article, you’ll probably never understand the scope of my ambition (or fathom the true depths of my depression at its unintended thwarting). It’s a 4500-word parallel to my professional profile: aesthetics, psychology, history, geometry, the primacy of text, glyphs as polygons, words as constructions, the value of slow and imperceptible processes, the unheralded influence of Helmut Krone, design as social activism, quixotic frustration with bureaucracy, battles against halation, and the open road.

Double bourbon. She looks back, waiting for a call. Make it hurt.

She sets a pint glass before me filled to a third of its height as I down the last of my blacksmith. And another one of these. Kill the bourbon, pen down on the back of the report.

1. Hypothesis
An ethical and existential crisis of web design.
The semantics of a “virtual” presence; the problem of “virtual.”

First three pages on modes of technology adoption and diffusion. Then it gets ugly.

There was strikingly little effort by offices to proactively assess what constituents wanted. In fact, only a single office indicated any type of research into what their constituents wanted.

She checks my beer, half down. “You alright?” I’ve had better days. “Work?” I take my beer down another inch.

To be better at my job requires my clients to be better at theirs. My clients are members of Congress. Being better at my job has tangible benefits for this world.

In short, search (and diffusion) largely takes place at the tip of the iceberg—offices looking at each others’ web practices, but not talking to each other frequently, and when they talk to each, rarely delving into issues beyond vendor-related issues. We do not have a definitive explanation for this. This may be partly because offices do not look at each other as prime sources of best practices, as one individual explains:

[Q: Have you talked to other people around the Hill who are running their websites] I haven’t really, because, to be honest with you, there aren’t a lot of people who really know web design that well.

2. Solution.
Core: empathy.
Ultimately, the process of building a better website relies on being a better person.

Two tumblers of Jameson. Another blacksmith, shrugs a “well, how did that get there?” as she passes. More Jameson, “I hope this puts the day in perspective.” Jagermeister for three as the fellow to my left closes out his tab—to the lady in black. We sing Sinatra with the juke box. For it’s hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind …

I am so rarely disappointed with research methods these days, though I don’t feel similarly about the conclusions these easy discoveries suggest. Join the right mailing lists and reports like this will find you. We do not have a definitive explanation for this … there aren’t a lot of people who really know web design that well. Pushed content, semantic web browsing, meta keywords, friend-of-a-friend algorithms—in the rush to customize and personalize, what is the value of a bad search? Look at all you’ll derive just by being alive.

What are the benefits of a democratic form of government?

And here is the best part: you have a head start … she lifts her left arm above her head, the handle of the umbrella tattooed over her radial and ulnar arteries just above a displaced lock of black hair, just as every incandescent bulb in the room dilates and my glass goes transparent.

“The name on the tab?” I paid cash for the first blacksmith, after: nothing. She disappears. Good money in cauterizing wounded minds if you’ve a blowtorch and charge by the ounce—it’s my fortune on this night that she minds the flame but not the bill, but before I can register my gratitude in cash, a tattooed neck above an A-shirt demands I leave the premises.

Anyone can pass their days with a modicum of sensitivity; to truly excel at anything requires empathy. Sometimes that manifests as real constituent service, and sometimes that leads to getting a customer kicked-out drunk for the price of his first beer. And sometimes, if a modicum of sensitivity pays the bills, it’s pragmatic to pass a few of one’s days rather than burn one’s goodwill for those who have little of their own.