A Closer Look At Font Rendering

The Web font revolution that started around two years ago has brought up a topic that many of us had merrily ignored for many years: font rendering. The newfound freedom Web fonts are giving us brings along new challenges. Choosing and using a font is not merely a stylistic issue, and it’s worth having a look at how the technology comes into play.
While we cannot change which browser and OS our website visitors use, understanding why fonts look the way they do helps us make websites that are successful and comfortable to read in every scenario. Until recently, there were only a small handful of “Web safe” fonts we could use. While offering little variety (or means of expression), these fonts were very well-crafted and specifically adjusted—or even developed—for the screen, so there was little to worry about in terms of display quality.
Now that we have a great choice of fonts that can be used on websites, it becomes clear that the translation of a design into pixels is not something that happens naturally or consistently. OS makers apply different strategies to render how typefaces are displayed, and these have evolved greatly over time (and still continue to do so). As we now look closer at fonts on screen more than ever before, we realize that the rendering of these glyphs can differ significantly between systems and font formats. What’s more, it has become clear that even well-designed fonts may not look right on Windows if they are missing one crucial added ingredient: hinting.
This article presents the mechanisms of type rendering, how they were developed, and how and why they are applied by the various operating systems and browsers—so that when it comes time to choose a font for your next project, you know what to look out for to ensure the quality of the typography is consistently high.

Rendering Strategies

Ideal shape, black-and-white and grayscale rendering

Rasterization

In digital type, characters are designed as abstract drawings. When a text is displayed on screen, this very precise, ideal shape needs to be expressed with a more or less coarse grid of pixels. As screens turned from mere preview devices for printing output into the actual medium we read in, more and more sophisticated rendering methods were developed in order to make type on the screen easy and pleasant to read.

Black And White Rendering

The earliest method of expressing letter shapes was using black and white pixels, sometimes referred to as bi-level rendering. Printers are still based on this principle, and thanks to their high-resolution, the result is a very good representation of the design. On screen, however, the small number of available pixels does not transport the subtleties of the drawn shapes very well. And although we might not be able to see the individual pixels, the steps found in round contours are noticeable.

Grayscale Rendering

In the mid-1990′s, operating systems started employing a very smart idea. Although screens have a rather low resolution, they can control the brightness of each pixel. This allows more information to be brought into the rasterized image.
In grayscale rendering, a pixel that is on the border of the original shape becomes gray, its brightness depending on how much it is covered by the ideal black shape. As a result, the contour appears much smoother, and design details are represented. The type on screen is no longer merely about being legible—it has its own character and style.
This principle—also called antialiasing—is the same that is used when photos are resampled to a lower resolution. Our eyes and brain interpret the information contained within the gray pixels and translate it back into sharp contours, so what we perceive is fairly close to the original shape. A similar effect is at work when a relatively coarse newspaper image that can appear nicely shaded if we hold it far enough away (or similarly, in the art of Chuck Close). Recently, Gary Andrew Clarke took this to the extremes with his “Art Remixed” Series.

Subpixel Rendering

Apparently colored pixels increase the resolution.
The third generation of rendering technology is characterized by apparently colored pixels. If we take a screenshot and the edges appear red and blue when enlarged, then we know that we are looking at subpixel rendering.
On LCD screens, the red, green and blue subpixels that control the color and brightness of the pixel are located side-by-side. Since they are so small, we don’t perceive them as individual colored dots. Having a closer look at the “red” pixel marked by the white dot reveals the strategy: all subpixels are switched on or off individually, and if the rightmost subpixel of the “whitespace” happens to be a red one, then the corresponding full pixel is technically red.

Subpixel rendering on an LCD screen.
The benefits of this technique become clear if we desaturate the image. Compared to plain grayscale rendering, the resolution has tripled in horizontal direction. The position and the weight of vertical stems can be reflected even more precisely, and the text becomes crisper.

Current Implementations

For the display of text, almost all browsers rely on system rasterizers. When looking at Web font rendering, the key distinction we have to make is the operating system. However, there are differences between the browsers in terms of the support given to kerning and ligatures, as well as the application of underline position and thickness, so we cannot expect perfectly identical rendering in all browsers (even on one platform). What’s more, on Windows, the browser can have the font rendered by either of the system technologies—GDI or DirectWrite.
Before we look at these in detail, lets first get an overview of where each one is to be used:

Rendering modes used by Windows browsers.

Windows

On Windows, the font format has a significant impact on the rendering. The crucial difference is between PostScript-based and TrueType-based fonts, and not the way these are brought into the browser—JavaScript vs. pure CSS, raw fonts vs. “real” Web fonts, etc. We will see identical rendering as long as the underlying font is the same.
File formats can give us a clue as to what underlying rendering technology is being used, although it’s best that one doesn’t completely rely on the naming conventions. For example, EOT and .ttf files will always contain TrueType, whereas .otf fonts are typically PostScript-based. But then there’s the wrapped format WOFF, which can contain either “flavor” of font format. So we don’t know which one it contains (and therefore, what kind of rendering may be used), just by looking at the file name. Unless you’re using EOT or .ttf files, and can be sure it’s a TrueType, more investigation when purchasing fonts is always recommended.
TrueType and PostScript fonts differ in the mathematics used to describe curves—something that rasterizers don’t care about too much—it only makes a difference for the type designer when editing the glyph shapes. What is more relevant is the different approach to hinting. PostScript fonts only contain abstract information on the location of various elements of each letter (and rely on a smart rasterizer to make sense of this), whereas TrueType fonts include very specific low-level instructions that directly control the rendering process. Curiously, however, the effective differences in rendering are not due to these differences in concept, but rather stem from Microsoft initially deciding to apply their new rendering engine only to TrueType fonts.

Windows: TrueType Fonts

TrueType font rendering with Windows grayscale.
On Windows XP, text is rendered as grayscale by many browsers. Although not as crisp as the subpixel rendering used by Mac OS, the letters are nicely smoothed and look great in large sizes.


TrueType font rendering with Windows GDI ClearType.
ClearType is Microsoft’s take on subpixel rendering. It was first made available for GDI, the classic Windows API. Although available in Windows XP, it is not used by all browsers. In Windows 7 and Vista, ClearType is the default, which makes it the most widely used rendering technology (if we were to consider all internet users). However, it is important to note that this applies only to TrueType-based Web fonts—GDI-ClearType is not applied to PostScript-based fonts.
One curious property of this rendering technology is that along with adopting the advantages of subpixel rendering in horizontal direction, Microsoft gave up smoothing in vertical direction entirely. So ClearType is effectively a hybrid of subpixel and black-and-white rendering. This results in steps within the contour, which is particularly noticeable in large sizes. These jaggies at the top and bottom of the curves are unpleasant, but unavoidable—even the best hinting cannot make them disappear.
For type in large sizes, ClearType is a step backwards in rendering quality. The gains in horizontal precision are not significant, while the rough contours spoil the overall result.


TrueType font rendering with DirectWrite.
The future is bright, at least in terms of Windows font rendering. In DirectWrite (the successor of GDI), Microsoft added vertical smoothing to ClearType. This new rendering mode (so far used by Internet Explorer 9), gives us smooth and precise rendering in all sizes. The main difference to Mac OS that remains is that it still tries to align contours to full pixel heights, which leads to even better rendering given that the font is well-hinted. What’s more, DirectWrite allows for subpixel positioning, which gives the characters exactly the spacing that they have been designed with, improving the overall rhythm and evenness of the texture.

Windows: PostScript Fonts

PostScript font rendering with GDI grayscale.
In GDI-based browsers, PostScript-based Web fonts are displayed in grayscale. Unlike the prevalent GDI-ClearType, this gives smooth contours. And unlike TrueType hints, PostScript hinting is easier to create, even automatically.


PostScript font rendering with DirectWrite.
DirectWrite not only gives smoother outlines, it also applies subpixel rendering to PostScript fonts. Unlike TrueType rendering, however, it allows for more gray pixels in order to reflect stroke weights more realistically. That makes it well-balanced, and similar to Mac OS rendering.
At some point in the future—browser makers and users will not switch as quickly as we wish—DirectWrite will succeed the older Windows rendering methods, and we will indeed be spoilt for choice between TrueType- and PostScript-based Web fonts.

Windows: Unhinted Fonts

Unhinted font rendered with grayscale.
In the old Windows grayscale mode, completely unhinted fonts look surprisingly good. Since the font does not “align itself” to full pixels via hinting, and the rasterizer does not enforce this either, we have a rendering that is similar to that of iOS. Unfortunately, unhinted fonts are currently not an option, as the next example shows:


Unhinted TrueType font in GDI-ClearType rendering.
As noted in many discussions on Web font rendering quality, GDI-ClearType is extremely dependent on good hinting. Horizontal strokes have to be precisely defined by means of hinting, otherwise they might be rendered in an inappropriate thickness. Even in larger sizes, hinting is crucial. Unhinted fonts will show “warts” sticking out where contours are not correctly aligned to the pixel grid, like in the example above.


Unhinted font rendered with DirectWrite.
In DirectWrite, unhinted PostScript and TrueType-based Web fonts show virtually the same rendering. Text fonts of either flavor will still need good hinting in order to keep the strokes crisp and consistent. Display fonts may even get away with sloppy or no hinting, since this does not show much in large sizes.

Mac OS X

Font rendering in Mac OS X.
On Mac OS, all browsers use the Quartz rendering engine. TrueType and PostScript fonts are rendered in exactly the same way, since hinting—the biggest conceptual difference between the two formats—is ignored. The subpixel rendering on Mac OS is very robust, so this platform is typically the one we need to worry about the least. The rasterizer doesn’t try to understand the strokes and features that make up a font, as everything is represented by more or less dark pixels. Since the letter shapes are not interpreted, they cannot be misinterpreted. Quartz rendering is reliable because it doesn’t try to be smart. As a side note, Apple does seem to apply some subtle automagic to enhance the rendering, but this is entirely undocumented and beyond our control.
In some cases, however, this leads to less-than-ideal results. In the above example, the large size “T” has a fuzzy gray row of pixels on top because the theoretical height is not a full pixel value, and Mac OS does not force its alignment. Unfortunately this cannot be controlled by the font maker. However, the blurriness occurs only in certain type sizes. So typically, choosing a slightly different font size fixes the problem. With a bit of trial-and-error, one can find a type size that looks comfortable and crisp.
Another difficult-to-control phenomenon is that on the Mac, type tends to be rendered too heavy. This difference is most noticeable in text sizes, where the same font can look a bit “sticky” on Mac OS while appearing almost underweight on Windows.

iOS

Font rendering in iOS.
The rendering on iOS follows the same principles as on Mac OS—the main difference is that it currently does not employ subpixel rendering. The reason might be that when the device is rotated, the system would have to re-think and update the rendering because the subpixels are physically oriented in a different way, and the makers wanted to minimize CPU use.

Conclusions

Website visitors use a great variety of systems and browsers. Some are not up-to-date, and sometimes it’s not even the user’s fault, but rather a company’s policy to stick with a certain setup. My personal opinion is that we should try and give them the best rendering we can, instead of blaming OS makers, or demanding users to switch to better systems.
On Mac OS and iOS, we hardly have any control over the rendering, which is acceptable (since it’s generally very reliable). One problem is that fonts generally render too heavy. Maybe some day, Web font services can improve the consistency by serving slightly heavier or lighter fonts depending on the platform.
On Windows, hinting matters—especially for TrueType-based fonts (the only Web fonts Internet Explorer 6–8 will accept). Apart from that, one significant control we have over the rendering is the choice between TrueType and PostScript. Except for very well-hinted fonts in smaller sizes, the latter is equal or superior in rendering, and easier to produce. Even though DirectWrite is making Windows rendering more pleasant, it will not remove the necessity to provide well-hinted fonts.

Practical Application: Improving Display Font Rendering

Some Web font providers (such as Typekit or Just Another Foundry), have started serving display fonts in PostScript-based formats.




JAF Domus Titling in different rendering environments.
While the GDI ClearType jaggies are unavoidable for IE 6–8, all other scenarios produce nice, smooth results. This also means that we will still need fonts that have decent TT-hinting—the browser share of IE6–8 is still too big to deliver fonts that don’t at least render in a clean fashion.

Bello—by Underware on Typekit—served as PostScript-based Web fonts (right), which gives smoother rendering than TrueType (left).
Typekit has also started to implement a hybrid strategy by serving display fonts as PostScript in order to trigger smoother rendering in Windows GDI. This requires some decisions to be made on the basis of visual judgement.
“How do you define a display font?”, you may ask, and it is indeed difficult to draw the line. Some of the foundries offer high-quality, manually hinted TrueType fonts that look great in text sizes (and it would be a pity to lose this sophistication by converting them to PostScript). Some text fonts may well be used in very large sizes. So ideally, we would have to offer them in two different formats. However, increased complexity of the UI (as well as back-end handling) have so far kept us from doing this.

Future Developments

More and more type designers are becoming aware of the technical issues that arise when fonts are used on the Web, particularly TrueType hinting. As the Web font business grows, they are willing to put some effort into screen-optimizing their fonts. In the near future, we will hopefully see a number of well-crafted new releases (or at least updates to existing fonts).
With increasing display resolutions— and more importantly, improving rasterizers—we will slowly have to worry less about the technical aspects of font rendering. GDI-based browsers will certainly be the boat anchor in this respect, so we won’t be able to use TrueType fonts that aren’t carefully hinted for yet another few years. Once this portion of Web users has become small enough, the process of TrueType hinting (which is time-consuming and requires considerable technical skills), becomes less crucial. While most Web fonts currently on the market are TrueType-flavored, I am expecting that the industry will largely switch to PostScript, which is the native format nearly all type designers work in (the fonts that are easier to produce).

Other Resources

• DirectWrite Text Rendering in Firefox 6, Mozilla Blog
• JAF Domus Titling as Web font, Just Another Foundry
• New from Typekit: Improved font rendering on Windows, Typekit Blog
• The Benefits Of OpenType/CFF Over TrueType, Typblography

Stop Shouting. Start Teaching.

Imagine you are in a classroom. Let’s say a high school classroom. You’re sitting at your desk, listening to your favorite teacher—the one who inspired you, the one who got you excited about that thing you love for the first time.
You’ve stopped taking notes because your body just can’t quite function normally when your mind is being blown. You don’t feel the pen in your hand, or the surface of the desk under your arms. You’re somewhere in between your body and the blackboard. That’s the magic of learning; it’s transportational.
Now, deep breath.
Back to reality.
Perhaps your learning experiences were not like this, but I hope they were. And if they were, did it ever occur to you in those moments that you were being sold something? That the moment was approaching when you’d be asked to sign on the dotted line or open your wallet? When you’d kick yourself for being fooled into thinking that your teacher was offering something to you for free? When you’d learn to stifle the desire and ability to trust someone?
Of course not. What you received came without strings attached; it was a free gift of knowledge to change you, to shape you, to edify you. Not to compel you to buy something.
After all, your teacher wasn’t a marketer.
Right?
Or, was he?
It’s worth asking at this point: What, exactly, is marketing? Here I won’t quote a definition—not just because we’re all capable of looking it up ourselves, but because it really doesn’t matter anymore what the “official” definition of marketing is. Marketing, in its ubiquity, is something we all live and breath. We know what it is, though we may struggle with articulating it with any meaningful precision. In our culture, the distance between marketing and creativity is virtually nonexistent.
Every bit of that space has been filled with the promotional. What were once barely overlapping magisteria have become fully integrated. It’s not enough that we make beautiful things, or have brilliant ideas, or even have powerful experiences anymore; they’re hardly real to the world until they’ve been shared in some digital burst of “Here I am, you should pay attention to me.”

Life and work has become noisy with marketing. And the noisier it gets, the noisier it gets, because we’ve bought into the lie that nothing cuts through noise better than the right kind of noise. But noisy marketing—of the parade for a naked emperor kind—is cheap; there is no there there, and we all end up feeling cheap for looking, anyway.
There is a better way, of course. But the better way requires that we get as far away from this sort of marketing as possible. In fact, it might be better that we call it something else entirely, because no one ever says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up.” So, why not call it education? If you ever experienced the free gift of education—whether or not as I dramatized it above—let that be your model for marketing. For your sake; for the sake of all of us.

Inception

Disparaging marketing is easy, isn’t it? What I just wrote came naturally; it flowed out of my experience struggling with my own value for privacy and the frequency with which it is violated, coupled with my job representing a company and the frequency with which I have to market our services. I know the kind of marketing I don’t like, and to do it differently is easier said than done. Frankly, it’s just far easier to do marketing than to have marketing done to you. Yet, there is no Golden Rule for marketing—market unto those as you would have them market unto you. Shouldn’t there be such a rule? There can be.
It starts with doing something good.

Quality

There is nothing wrong with selling things, or even with making lots of money selling things. There is something wrong, though, with selling a product or service that you know is not worth its price. So there are some questions we must ask if we are to follow any “golden rule” of marketing: Do I believe in what I’m selling? Is it good for people? Is it worth what I am asking people to pay for it?

Could you imagine a teacher answering “No” to any of these questions? “No, I don’t believe in what I teach.” “No, what I teach is not good for people.” “No, what I teach isn’t worth the time my class requires.” Could any teacher with integrity answer no to these questions and still manage to show up for class every Monday morning? I doubt it.
Alan Jacobs, writing for The Atlantic about the role of quality in the shifting sands of business success, had this to say:

“What goes around comes around; what goes up must come down. Microsoft has been gradually drifting to the margins of our tech consciousness; Google is scrambling to find a way to compete with Facebook. Everything moves faster in a wired world, including the pace of change in business… A decade from now the landscape of the technology business will sure look very different than it does today. Maybe by 2022 Apple and Amazon will be marginal companies once again—underdogs that I can feel good about supporting.”

What shifts the sands of the business landscape isn’t marketing, it’s quality. Apple rose to the top because it made outstanding products, not “just fine” ones with outstanding advertising. Microsoft, on the other hand, stumbled not because its advertising is terrible—though it really is—but because its products weren’t very good, either. And as for Amazon, Amazon rose to the top by offering a level of service that shocked shoppers: an easy to navigate store, with an unfathomably large inventory, and delivery that exceeded anyone’s reasonable expectations for speed. It reset those expectations.
If Amazon fails, it will fail because either someone else comes along who can do better—unlikely as that may be—or because we decide that we don’t feel comfortable with the costs of the level of service they offer. Many right now are already questioning that, whether inexpensive and immediate delivery are worth the working conditions that make it possible. Marketing will probably try to change our minds. It may even work on some of us, for a little while. But if failure is to be avoided, marketing will have little to do with it.
If you can do something truly good, you won’t have much of a marketing challenge. If you can keep doing something good without something bad subsidizing it, marketing will take care of itself.

Positioning

But what if someone else does exactly the same thing you do? What if you can’t beat their price? What if you can’t outserve them? This is typically where “savvy” marketing comes in. When labels carry claims that either overemphasize a non-differentiator so that it seems like one, or straight up lie.

Imagine the educational corollary: “The same easy A, now with twice the History!” or “Become a Quantum Physicist, Results Guaranteed!” Preposterous.
It’s a whole lot easier to avoid resorting to manipulation if you don’t have any real competitors. Competitors force each other to make less meaningful but more manipulative distinctions between one another. If you think you’ve got the “good” thing down, consider your positioning. Are you actually different? If not, how will you survive without being sleazy?

Attract, Inform, Engage

So, let’s say you’ve got the quality and positioning stuff worked out. You do something good that nobody else does. Fantastic. That is, assuming people know about you. Taking a Field of Dreams approach—if you build it, they will come—won’t work. If you build it, and they know about it, they will come. But even if they come, you’ve got to make sure they understand what it is that they’re coming for. And then you’ve got to make them want to stick around. This is a three-step process: attracting prospects, properly informing them, engaging with them. That is what marketing should be all about. Attract, inform, engage; not attract, mislead, compel.
If you are well positioned, attraction is much easier. Imagine three hot-dog vendors at a baseball game. Two wander up and down the stands, shouting, “Hot dogs! Get your delicious hot dogs here!” Their success is going to come down to luck—who happens to be closest to the right people. But the third vendor sticks to the low seats. He’s shouting, too, except he’s got different dogs to sell: “Low-fat hot dogs! Eat two for the fat of one!” Now who do you think will have an easier time selling hot dogs? The more specific your audience is, the easier it is to attract them.
If you can attract a specific audience, informing is easy, too. You already know something about them and what they need. If you have a worthy solution to that need, all you have to do is tell them about it. That’s where the teaching comes in: Start generally—Introduction to Your Problem, then Our Solution 101—and be prepared to give them more detail as they need it. Incrementally informing, by the way, will also take care of engagement. Give them some, they’ll want more. Ask any engaged student sitting in Advanced Trigonometry 3 why they are there and you’ll likely hear many similar answers, all having to do with being attracted and informed by someone special back in their beginner days.

Know Your Role

If you make things, it’s difficult to avoid marketing. But if you can do it the good way—attracting, informing, and engaging—to serve that good thing you do, then that thing we’ve wanted to avoid no longer looks so bad. And even then, “marketer” is just one of many roles that people who make things play in some capacity. But it’s a role that should always be subservient to your primary one: making and doing good things. To keep that role connected to the good things we do, I’ve used teaching as a metaphor.
I know it’s abstract, but if there is one single characteristic of good teachers that could stand to make everything we do—as well as how we market it—better, it’s caring. Good teachers care. They care about the material. They care about how they teach it. They care about their students. If we care too—about what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for—then we’ll be OK.

Resisting the Dark Side

That’s the setup, anyway. But caring is hard. Caring requires a commitment to resisting the very things that currently seem to drive the culture of marketing—things like haste, deception, and even your own ego.

Slow Down

Slow down, please. Not everything needs to be right now. One thing I like to say that usually riles people up is that there are no marketing emergencies. Really. If there are, it’s because somebody screwed up or somebody’s expectations are out of whack.
But that doesn’t change the fact that other people feel differently. Open your email account and watch it fill before your eyes. Open Twitter and watch the nonstop flow of information push down your timeline. It’s incredible how rapid-fire online culture has become, and naturally, how marketing has followed suit. As marketing has become so predominantly digital, speed has become a defining characteristic of the experience. But when your blood pressure rises and you feel the anxiety of falling behind—that you should be blogging more, tweeting more, posting more on Facebook, Pinterest, and the like—ask yourself this: How good can it be if you’re producing so much of it so often?

Honesty

Honesty is the enemy of traditional marketing. It’s sad but true. It’s not because honesty isn’t possible in marketing, but that if companies were completely honest about their products and services—about how they’re made, what they do, their flaws, their shelf life, etc.—fewer people would buy them. That’s why creating illusions is so essential to marketing. But it only takes a tiny crack in the surface to destroy an illusion. As a colleague pointed out to me recently, a supermodel only has to stumble once before the illusions so central to fashion fall away and you are left with just people wearing clothes. If the quality is there, there is nothing to hide.

That’s the big-picture, but I think most honesty-erosion tends to happen on a smaller scale, where the line between truth and fiction can be pretty blurry. There’s a general impulse toward bending that line intentionally, one often motivated by our desire to bring attention to something we believe deserves it. Whether it’s a product, a service, or even a cause, we might be willing to “sex up the story” if doing so means bringing greater awareness to it.
This isn’t just a marketing problem, by the way. We do it when we believe the attention garnered by a thing or an idea or an injustice isn’t as big as it should be. Listen to the retraction issued by This American Life of Mike Daisy’s account of working conditions in Apple’s factories in China. Pay attention to how uncomfortable you feel. That discomfort is a measure of the distance between truth and fiction.
For the first year after graduating from college, I did freelance design work. I registered a business, created business cards, set up a website, the works. I wasn’t alone, either. Several classmates did the same thing, and we would often compare notes and even help each other get work from time to time. We learned all kinds of things by trial and error back then, but the one thing that left the greatest impression upon me had to do with how honest we were in describing ourselves. Every one of us made heavy use of the word “we” on our websites—though “we” was almost always just one person working from a room in a shared apartment—because we feared we wouldn’t be hired if it was clear that “we” was really “I,” a freelancer flying solo.
We believed that no matter how good our work was, we’d be ignored as individuals. So we created an illusion that we thought looked strong. “I” was just a kid on my laptop at a desk in his bedroom; “We” was a company, confident, experienced, secure. But that, of course, wasn’t true. I learned that there was no point in trying to convince potential clients of something other than that which would quickly become clear to them if they hired me. So, a simple rule: If you’re one person, never refer to yourself as “we.” That’s the kind of small-scale honesty we need to take seriously.

In, but not of

But let’s be realistic. Even if you change, you can’t expect everyone else to change too. It’s certainly possible that if enough people embrace a new way of doing things, the culture might shift overall, but that is unlikely to happen overnight.
The culture of online marketing is unhealthy—the lack of criticism of it is pretty astonishing to me—but the real tragedy is watching the forces of self preservation turn good people with good intentions into obnoxious, self-aggrandizing loudmouths that collect into BS echo chambers. Sometimes what you see accepted or celebrated around you is exactly what you shouldn’t do. I liked how Oliver Reichenstein put it in a post-SXSW tweet:

“Studied the SXSW talks to find out what not do as a speaker: 1. Don’t think you’re cool 2. Don’t preach 3. Don’t sell. 4. No false modesty.”

Why do we feel that the only way to survive is to do things like everyone else does? There’s no good reason for it. In fact, we’re all waiting for someone to pave the way for us by having the courage we don’t have, the courage to do something different. Why can’t you be one of those people? When it comes to doing the right thing, don’t wait for someone else’s courage to stand in for your own.

Ground control to _____

Remember those clumsy supermodels? They do us a favor when they stumble. They bring us back down to Earth, where we’re all just people wearing clothes. No matter how important we think we are, or how important we think the things we make or do are, we could all stand to stumble down the runway every once in a while. Especially when it comes to marketing.

A great example of this came in the recent blow-up over “Homeless Hotspots,” a campaign created by BBH (a marketing firm) that turned the homeless of Austin into roaming internet access points available to the throngs attending the South by Southwest conference. Needless to say, it was controversial. Plenty has been said about it—both in support and in criticism—but amidst the noise, one comment written by Thomas Wendt resonated most for me:

“In the end, everyone is full of shit—supporters and detractors—and it’s all a result of spectacle and denial. The entire system creates such dissonance that we lash out against it. We’re unable to reconcile the differences between image and the real, altruism and self-interest, trust and deception. So we gravitate toward poles: BBH is a charitable company or BBH is a lying capitalist institution. Of course, the truth in somewhere in between, but denial and self-deception keeps us from admitting it.”

Wendt’s post was titled, Staring Down the Spectacle, which really gets at the point: It is the culture—and the spectacle it creates—that is your adversary, not any specific action per se, nor any other person. Yet culture has a profound power to shape each of us, so just as much as we should scrutinize what we observe around us, we should bring equal scrutiny to what we observe within ourselves. When it comes to marketing, the most meaningful question I can ask at any point is, just how full of shit am I?

Guilty as Charged

I wrote this as an act of resistance, as a way of keeping myself from disappearing into the “dark side,” not as a prophet condemning from atop a mountain. I see myself struggling to maintain the integrity of an educational marketing model and I often don’t like what I see. But, I’ve also discovered that we must intentionally learn from examples—both good and bad ones. The bad ones are easy to study. We’re all close enough to them to do it. We’re among them. We may even be one of them. The question is whether we’re willing to do something about it.