F'd Ad Fridays: The suicide hotline site that seems to want you to do it

There's nothing funny about depression and self-harm. Nothing, that is, except the official web site of the United States' National Suicide Hotlines.

This was featured today on Cracked's list of 5 Official Websites You Won't Believe Are This Bad. Most were just poorly designed. This one, well...

It is very, very strange. And amazingly dark and depressing, considering people visiting it must be a heartbeat away from their last hope.

It also has well-meaning, but tragically misplaced, rhetorical questions throughout it.

Who on earth was responsible for approving this design and content? I won't ask "who designed it?" because if there's one thing the internet has taught us is that human weirdness is deeper and more diverse than any individual could ever fathom.

Believe me. I do not want to make fun of a suicide hotline. But maybe if a little constructive mockery can get through to the right people and get them to do something... anything... to put this site out of its...

You see what this site has done to me? I did not want to make that joke. 

No! Make it stop!!! I take it all back. This site does not look like it was designed by a teenage girl in 1996. It is a sensitive and appropriate handling of a very delicate topic that it no way should provoke ironic thoughts from cynical bloggers. Okay?

GAHHHH!

I thought I just did. Although I'd love to know where I could get one of those cool vintage phones.

Five words that should be banished from the communications industry forever...

.

... then slaughtered, burned, stomped on and salted.

If there's one thing the communications industry should be good at, it's communicating. But whether you're a client, in-agency, or a partner, I'll bet you've encountered these weasel words on more than one occasion. You've probably even used them. Now let's all agree to stop.

Edgy

I get this one all the time. "Be edgy!" It's not that the word is so bad, it's that everyone has their own ideas and tolerances when it comes to "edge".

To me, edgy means risky. As in, "we might get in big trouble for this". That might involve purposeful political incorrectness, blatant sexuality, political or religious outrage, foul language, or making fun of something people hold sacred.



This ad was on The Ad Graveyard, a old gallery of rejected creative. The accompanying story makes the point quite clearly:

"A slightly less graphic but still controversial advert by the same individual which showed a girl with a pierced tongue and a number of other facial deformations was run instead, all in an attempt to show the "wild side" of Alteon's gigabit routing technology. One suspects that the rejected advert was simply a little too wild for the marketing department's tastes."

Were you offended by the bare breast, the use of one of the most intimate aspects of motherhood to sell technology, or simply because it's completely random? Take your pick. But someone considered it "edgy" and someone else considered it "inappropriate".

Just ask WWF...

Wordsmith

I'm a writer, not a smith. But the worse problem here is this word's use as a verb. When someone says I need to "wordsmith" the copy "a bit", they're just saying that they're not happy with the copy, but they don't know exactly why. Unless I know exactly why, I can't really do the specific revisions, edits, or rewrites they should be asking for.

It's a meaningless word that makes what I do for a living seem like something vague and superficial. And it doesn't lead to better copy.

Tweak

Tweaking refers to fine-tuning or adjusting a complex system, usually an electronic device.

Tweaking is also a repetitive or ritualistic movement, posture, or utterance seen in people with physical and mental disorders.

In advertising, design and Web development, excessive requests to do the former often lead to the latter.

Dynamic

One of our industry's most abused words, "dynamic" seems to now mean "garish, animated, energetic and/or cool". It's particularly confusing in the digital world, where "dynamic" has a very specific technical definition.

If you think the creative is powerful, say so. But if giving constructive feedback, "make it more dynamic" is neither precise nor helpful.

Pop

The Oatmeal covered this best:



Have a great weekend. And don't forget to forget these words by Monday.

Fail saving throw versus nerdgasm

Dave Arneson died this week. Nerds everywhere put on their mourning robes and wizard hats. And I'm one of them.

Arneson was a co-creator, with the late Gary Gygax, of Dungeons & Dragons. Begun in the '70s, it launched a revolution in paper-and-dice role-playing games that led to many lost nights' sleep for the adolescent boys of Generation X. You may now point and laugh...



...okay, now to the point. I didn't actually play that much D&D. I wanted to, but never got around to organizing the giant "campaign" that I dreamed of. Instead, I found I spent most of my time reading the dungeon modules and writing my own. Creating worlds in my head. It was the best training I could have had for the years to come.

You see, D&D trained a generation of young minds to create stories for other people to live. You came up with the backstory, mapped out the sets, the props and the background cast, but you left the actual plot development to others. You drew, for example, an underground maze full of monsters and treasures, but you had to leave it up to your friends to decide how to go through it, and in what order.

This new, non-linear, user-centred storytelling quickly made its way into the adolescent books of the time. "Choose Your Own Adventure" was a popular series where every page gave you several choices of where to take the story next, creating almost countless possibilities (even though they tended to shepherd you to only three or four quite predictable endings).

The parallels with computers and programming are hardly accidental. (Especially when we had to draw flowcharts for our BASIC programs.) The home computer revolution was going on at the time, and the technology of the early '80s was stretched to its limits trying to create text-based role playing games that didn't completely suck.



And thank God that our Commodores weren't up to the challenge. Because having to do all of that non-linear storytelling and handing all the plot decisions over to users in our heads is what trained the minds who created the Web, 10+ years later. It took us a while to get the hang of it, but writing for Web in the '90s was very much like mapping out a dungeon without knowing which route the players would take through it, or authoring a Choose Your Own Adventure where every page had to create a random but continuous flow with every other one. Same as when I map out labyrithine social media engagement strategies in 2009.

I still consider those early days with graph paper, a pencil, and my dog-eared copy of the Monster Manual (with its ridiculous carnivorous jellies and line art naked lady demons) to be the beginning of something important in communications that's still playing out today.

R.I.P., Gary and Dave.