What a DAM Mess

“Hey, Paul, you and your team know information architecture. Ever work with Adobe Assets?”

That’s how it started, humbly and simply, with a question from a business development lead at my agency. He had been working on a few deals that included Adobe Assets, one of the popular Digital Asset Managers – or DAMs – out in the market. I answered to that colleague, simply, “Not yet, but I’ll look into it.”

Digital Asset Management – also DAM – holds the promise of centralizing all of an organization’s assets… things such as images, content, PDFs, working files, and so forth. It was something that I had a basic familiarity with at the time, but once I learned more, I recognized how powerful a centralized set of assets would be for just about any organization.

While standalone DAMs exist, integration with a broader Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is where the real power comes into play. An example of that promise is: I can have an asset that is on a content maintenance cycle, well-tagged, in a folder and place that makes sense in a DAM… that can then be associated with a particular component or template in a CMS… that can be measured for performance in a test-and-learn personalization program, and adjusted accordingly. It’s the end-to-end “Hey, how is this doing?” question that any marketer worth their salt has.

Many DAMs offer significant integration points beyond that (extending this into broader organization workflow management, and existing creative tools) but that’s the gist of it. Organize your stuff, maintain it, and you’re setting yourself up for a bright future of serving up totally personalized experiences to customers on their phones, tablets, computers, watches… you name it.

Well. Maybe.

Where do we put our DAM stuff?

I started working with my team to understand how information architecture (IA) could or should play a role in the DAM work we were selling.

The start of untangling any mess – as information architecture (IA) expert Abby Covert might suggest – is understanding what you’ve got. An inventory and audit, addressing both qualitative and quantitative aspects of content, is the start of so so much work. And in working with DAMs, by delightful coincidence, starting with an inventory and audit makes a ton of sense.

This is where organizations start to get wide-eyed and realize how much of a challenge moving to a new DAM (or simply organizing their assets) can be. When I worked with a large-scale retailer several years ago, we opened a discovery by talking about where they stored their assets today. Great news: they had a shared creative server, internally!

But the creative team also regularly dropped things on their local computers – desktops were full of icons. They also had another shared server for some production assets. And a SharePoint instance where some things lived. And they also used Box for a few things. One marketing team had a totally different process. Yet another department had designed a full lifecycle process built around catalog production that worked well for them, but isolated all of their work from everyone else.

Inefficient? Don’t be so sure. These teams all still produced displays, catalogs, digital ads, 4 websites in 2 languages, and more on a seasonal basis. That’s not trivial work and they got it done, every time.

But they recognized that having a centralized library of all of their work could lead to efficiencies, both in organization and processes around content and asset production. Did they need to have an asset from a photo shoot in 24 different places? No. Did they need to manually create contact sheets in PDFs for approval by creative directors? Also no. Did they need to manually create variations of an asset for display ads, the website, and the mobile website? No!

This is all to say that the way most organizations handle assets today is likely very, very inefficient from a broader enterprise perspective, even when everything happens on deadline and on time.

Enter the IA

That brings me back to the question posed by my colleague. Organizing a DAM is all about figuring out where to put things, how to name things, how to not name things, how to account for modalities, how to support various users’ needs, and almost everything else in a space I typically define as information architecture.

What I’d seen anecdotally at that agency and elsewhere was that developers would handle everything about assets because it was seen as a development task. And while developers absolutely incorporated a degree of IA in their work, it was usually the “best practices” that had been used elsewhere. Anything else around deeply investigating relationships between these pieces of information was left to the client. It felt like a real opportunity.

This isn’t where I’ll say an IA came in and was a superhero and resolved it all. But it’s important to note that with a dedicated information architect involved in the process early on, the shape of the work got a little different.

We started to apply information architecture principles and heuristics to DAMs. In the work my team does now, once we complete the audit, we review it fully with the client in a workshop setting. We talk through how things are organized, any peculiarities, and definitely add in a lot of “nice job on this!” too.

From there we start to analyze their organizational structure and workflows to inform the folder structure. In my experience a DAM is one place where an organization’s structure internally (teams, departments) can make sense for where to put things. But even talking through and reviewing how work gets done in a collaborative, workshop setting is essential.

And while workflows lead into a richer, more governance-related bent of this work, I’ve found that many organizations haven’t taken the time to simply write down, step-by-step, how they do things. These aren’t small companies, either. These are monsters. Big ones. And them seeing things like, “Oh, wow, this gets approvals from 8 people in email” and “Huh, this department puts their stuff here but it really should be there, maybe” is revelatory.

And yes, the development team is naturally involved in this work. They're getting a front row seat to the blueprint for a migration and setup of a DAM.

Ultimately we deliver a full set of recommendations on folder structure, taxonomy, tags, metadata, and naming conventions. We typically include workflow analysis and recommendations too. This culminates in a framework for these teams to take and run with as they look to reorganize, migrate, and implement a new organizational system. Not small work, but important work.

The DAM of the DAM

There’s a slight cautionary tone in my words here, because one other risk I typically see is assigning ownership of the DAM to an already-busy marketing team, an IT team, or a creative team.

I’m not here to tell you if you should reorganize your team but I will say: you absolutely, positively, 100% need to make it someone’s job to be the Digital Asset Manager (DAM) of the DAM. They may be an Asset Librarian, a DesignOps expert, an Information Architect, whatever. Critically that person needs to have knowledge in information architecture. They may “live” in an IT team or marketing team, but having knowledge – at least from a business perspective – of the particular DAM being used is immensely helpful.

The cover of Murmur. DAM kudzu.

When I’ve worked with clients who have internal DAM owners, things are different. The discussion becomes more about how they can scale and grow a system for a team, and how they can enforce standards. The discussion includes not just the immediate work but what’s around the corner: governance, ownership, and maintenance, critical parts of digital work.

Without DAM owners? Well, you know the cover of R.E.M.’s 1983 Murmur, right? The kudzu? That’s what happens to the DAM. One department organizes things one way, another doesn’t tag anything, and soon you’re back in the same place you started. Not having a person in charge of DAM governance is a pretty bad idea.

Change is DAM Hard

Centralizing your assets is all about change. The way things worked may stay the same, but how things are set up is going to be new. And change is hard. I’m starting to say this more and more: all of this will lead to people being pissed off, upset, or discouraged.

Some people get very attached to their way of working and don’t want to change it. This isn’t something that shows up on a DAM feature scorecard, but you have to honestly and openly evaluate how ready your team is to change. It is absolutely a factor in moving to a different DAM, or any DAM, and absolutely should be considered. I’ve joked that workshops are like therapy but, sometimes, they end up leaning hard in that direction for just this reason. Don’t forget the emotional work, either.

IA is Essential

That simple question that came my way years ago led to a lot of good work with people and teams to figure out how they should better organize their stuff. So when you’re evaluating your DAM – either a current one or shopping for a new one – do not overlook the importance of information architecture. It’s DAM important.

Big Sur Sidebars: Design Critique

Big Sur is designed to frustrate me – I’m convinced of it!

I took a screenshot of multiple apps to compare and contrast. This is a window sidebar, and theoretically should work and look pretty identical. Instead… that is not the case.

Left to right in the screenshot, we have: Mail, Notes, Calendar, Music, Finder, and Reminders. (Reminders is the current window, thus the slight variation in contrast. The lack of contrast in Big Sur remains a disgrace.)

Here is what I notice.

• Numbers are treated differently. Sometimes numbers indicating items are in a little bubble, sometimes just text. Sometimes they’re aligned. Sometimes not.

• Some groups can collapse, some can't. “Library” in Music looks like a collapsable group, but it isn’t. An “Edit” option appears on hover… but despite looking the same as other groups, it isn't.

• Search is sometimes here, sometimes not. In thinking about it more, the sidebar is the best spot for a search field – having it in the upper right of a window (which happens in a number of apps) breaks the relationship between the search scope and the physical area of the app it is in.

• Window buttons aren't in the same spot. Incredibly, Calendar fucks this up.

• Controls in this sidebar are okay sometimes. Calendar, again, fucks this up. Buttons! In the old toolbar! And they only apply to the top area here. Notes adds “New Folder” to the bottom left just because, and Reminders add “New List”. Reminders also has those totally-off big buttons here instead of a damn list. WTH?

• Notes uses its own font for REASONS. They’re bad ones.

• Font sizes are different. Reminders and Calendar are smaller.

• Only Mail has groups within items. Look at “All Drafts”. I can expand that out. Can’t do that in Notes, which has nested items. Why not?

• All headers for collapsed groups are actionable and don't look that way. Every single header here in every app has some action associated with it, but they only show up on hover – and outside of the aforementioned “Library” in Music, they’re expand/collapse.

Let’s face it: Big Sur is a UI shitshow. It certainly looks like Apple put usability and consistency on the back burner.

Affordances are dead

I miss affordances.

Affordances in computing UIs… are nothing new! When we put words on a screen, we collectively needed to visually convey what one could do with those words. Menus? Buttons? Dropdowns? All of the fundamental UI elements we’ve had for 30+ years started with deliberate design decisions – good or bad – that became standards, or de facto standards.

And as the web and touch interfaces have matured, designers have collectively thrown them out the window. I blame removing underlines on links.

Let me explain, without getting nostalgic.

In the old days of the web, links were underlined and in blue (versus black and no underline for text). It was the standard. Over time, the ability to remove underlines was introduced – so links could be any color and not have an underline. But… how does one convey it’s a link? Some links sprouted icons. Some remained in a different color. Some grew on hover, or showed a background on hover, or did something only when tinkered with.

Even there, the ability to scan a digital thing and convey intent was lost.

But, as with changes, people adapted. We started to click and poke at more things on pages, even things that looked as ordinary as anything else, in the hopes – the hopes – that maybe this thing would make a page or an app do the thing we wanted it to do.

Touch interfaces escalated this change. When using a touch interface, more than ever, the only way to know what one can interact with is through experience. It is less and less conveyed by the UI itself. Thus, it’s shifting the mental burden of figuring out “how do I work this” to the user – fully. Now, it may not be a significant burden! But, a burden nonetheless. The UI no longer says, “This is clickable” or “This is a thing you can interact with” consistently. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’ll note: we’ve collectively gotten used to this.

Big Unsure

Like any UI snob, this came home to roost for me when I upgraded my family Mac to Big Sur, the latest macOS. This version has a UI shift that, when rifling through reviews, seems to be noted as significant but manageable. I disagree. Any change will be tough for people including myself, but the other side of that change appears to be… kinda crappy.

Probably the biggest shift is that everything in the OS is button-esque now. Menus are button-y things that open up boxes below them, without a strong visual attachment. Buttons? Are just icons now with no clear indication that they can be clicked, other than the fact that they’re icons. Look at this screenshot from Safari.

Icons? Or buttons? Who the hell knows? (These are… toolbar buttons in Safari.) [Image description: five icons in a row, with no background or border or indicator, from Safari]

I talk a big game about context. The above is out of context but this area in Safari is accurate. Five icons, in a row. No borders. No indicators of what they do. The colors? I believe they’re from third-party extensions, but who knows? And they’re blue because… Reasons, I guess.

There is a ton of guessing one needs to make to understand this. The only thing that helps is prior experience with Safari. There is almost nothing here, plainly, that indicates these are buttons. Who’s to stop a developer from just… putting icons there? That aren’t clickable? And just provide information? Right.

This is just one example, but it’s emblematic of Apple’s continued decision (that kicked off with iOS 7 and Jony Ive’s takeover of the OS… which I also liked at the time) to prioritize visual cleanness over usability.

A menu in Big Sur. Everything is just rounded rectangle buttons now. [Image description: a screen shot of the Finder menu in Big Sur, showing ‘About Finder’ selected with a blue rounded rectangle around it.]

Everything is Button, Button is Everything

Here’s a menu from Big Sur, from Finder specifically. Aesthetically? Not terribly different from prior macOS versions. But the button-itis of macOS extends here too: all of these text items are just buttons. The panel itself? Also looks like a big button now. Even the hover in the menu bar… makes it a button. Seriously, Apple, you get rid of buttons on devices and put them all on screen? Is that the deal?

Anyway. Why would you need to buttonize a menu? If you wanted to transplant an iOS interface into a menu, basically – and that’s what Control Center is. A UI train wreck.

Control Center suffers from a crappy visual hierarchy and a design for touch interface that doesn’t translate cleanly to a mouse-based interface. Here, have a look.

Control Center in macOS Big Sur. Someone approved this. [Image description: a screenshot of Control Center in Big Sur, showing multiple rounded rectangle items and controls.]

Since day one, Control Center – even on iOS – has been problematic. The great news is that now those problems are on macOS. This makes sense if one has limited space to convey information – then it becomes a real design challenge. But take a moment and look at this. Not everything can be interacted with in the same way. All of these controls, when hovered or clicked on, act differently. So they look somewhat consistent but don’t act that way. How do they work? What do they do? No one knows until they’re clicked on. Some morph into menus. Some are visual panels.

Again, here, the lack of clear affordances means this is a hodgepodge of controls that – honestly? – would be better served by a menu! Nice one, Apple, nice one.

Beyond that? The redesigned dock icons and app icons… are also buttons. No joke. Those shapes you memorized and used to differentiate apps are gone now, with everything surrounded by a rounded rectangle.

The future is dimmer

This is a rant, no doubt. And OSes change – they have forever. But the push that Apple has put in place with Big Sur is wildly unimaginative and short-sighted. How we use computers and computing devices has changed, of course, in the past 40 years! It’s a big difference. But in Big Sur, Apple’s thrown out so much of the UI standardization it helped usher in to computing. Our interfaces today are making us do more work, more figuring things out, and throwing away consistency and adaptability.

It's always infrastructure week

Thanks to Sarah Hopkins for sparking this idea / rambling

So, the election is over. Donald Trump lost.

The bad news? This doesn’t mean “Trump is over”. It really doesn’t. Because this, truly, is just the start. If we want to address the infrastructure and the behind-the-scenes stuff, the inglorious but necessary work, it’s going to take work.

With politics, I will happily admit that the past two presidential elections were the first two I really got involved in (and even that level, to be blunt, was pretty damn limited.) I text banked for a lousy proposition on the Colorado ballot that needed to be defeated, and it was. I texted and called for Hillary in 2016. But that’s been about the level of engagement I’ve had, other than sitting on a pot of outrage for the past four years.

This doesn’t work. And of course, I am going to pull in a parallel from content strategy work.

I talk a big game with clients about training and governance. I’ve heard that governance is not a friendly word, it’s scary, because it carries a lot of weight (and sometimes we head into “processes” land, which I personally dislike but whatever.) I’ve been articulating it this way: when you’re revamping a website or other digital touchpoint, unfortunately, it doesn’t come with a manual. So you’re given a CMS, a DXP, a CDP, and a bunch of other acronyms and told, “Well, good luck! Have a blast.”

And isn’t that how I, and a lot of others, have treated our federal government? We get to the point of a launch, we launch it, we say YAY WE DID IT and then we let it rot. Our content gets old. Our experience doesn’t stay up to date. When we change our values (hopefully for the better), we don’t update anything on the main site because we aren’t sure how or it requires IT or red tape and so we do our own microsite or a half-hearted rebrand or whatever. Because we still need to do the work, and we need to get it out. But our infrastructure hampers us. And then in 2 years we decide, “Well, I guess we need to throw all of this out and start over” and it costs money and time and effort and the emotional labor is just sky high.

And fixing that infrastructure is not exciting work. But it is essential, necessary work.

So, electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris doesn’t mean we’re good now. We aren’t in a position to throw everything out and start over (although that is incredibly tempting!) Racism didn’t end with Barack Obama. Ignorance didn’t start with Donald Trump. But it’s clear that we need to look at what’s crumbling – and there is a lot! – and fix it before we can move forward.

This is the gap analysis portion of our government work. We’re identifying what we need to update, what needs to be retired, and what we need. And then we need to execute on it. If we don’t, we’re going to be doing this same audit in 18 months, wondering why.

What would you do about COVID-19?

Yesterday I had one of my standing informal chats with a coworker; it’s always interesting and great to hear his take on work and life and everything. He asked a very good question of me, one that stuck with me: “Let’s say I grant you magic powers. What would you do about this pandemic?”

In the context of our conversation we were talking about the US (and how we have a federal government that completely abdicated any responsibility whatsoever, holy shit, can you believe that and it’s true), so my responses were in that direction. There were three main ideas I came up with, partially based on fears and perceived fears that are out there.

First, assuming that this magical power also gave me the ability to just do stuff or make stuff, I would test everyone in the U.S. No exceptions. We don’t have enough data; we need more.

Second, universal basic income would happen. The obvious inequities in our society have been made plain by this crisis. We’re at the point where we are about to force people to work at meat plants and give them no legal recourse in the event that they suffer or die from COVID-19. Give people $2,000 a month for at least 6 months. Just give it to them, directly. None of this “you need a Social Security number” bullshit that’s a loophole to save the administration money. Just give it out. Be done with it.

Third, universal healthcare. Knock it all down. The last thing people need to be worried about now is paying for medical bills or care – not just access to care. If there is a time for free healthcare for all, this is certainly it.

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This, of course, doesn’t solve everything and the better answer would have been, “Eradicate the whole virus to start with.” But maybe it should have been, “Travel back in time four years and ensure Donald Trump doesn’t get illegally elected.” Almost too many options, honestly.

Parental Controls in 2020 are still junk

I can’t believe I have to write this, but parental controls like Apple’s Screen Time are still incomplete, ill-informed, and immature solutions that don’t do everything they need to do. I’m going to pick on Screen Time since it’s what I use, and my family is mostly in the Apple ecosystem (my son has an Android phone he uses just for playing around – he is too young to have a phone – but he does use it for little things.)

Bad Assumptions

The core of it, in my estimation, is this. Computing is essential to our lives in 2020 and will be beyond. It’s important to properly educate and support both kids and parents as we navigate this. My son needs a different set of access at age 10 than he will need at age 16, and age 13, and age 21. I am under no expectation nor illusion that a tool like Screen Time should just magically do everything; I’m not abdicating parental responsibility. What I am saying is this.

The internet has gotten incredibly complex in the past 10 years, and none of the tools out there reflect this reality.

Example 1: Apple Music

When I joined Apple Music, part of the rationale was for convenience – it was, at the time, the only music streaming service that integrated with Siri. Later, we upgraded to a family account. My son does love to listen to music, but some of the music he’s heard elsewhere isn’t… great. This happens. This is normal! And so when we discuss a particular song, I may want to choose to block an individual song altogether. I can not. There is no way to do it. Apple Music allows for blocking explicit content, which is a start, but songs can still be about explicit topics even though they’re not using explicit words.

The simple Clean/Explicit block is a start, but Apple – like Spotify – should empower parents and guardians to make their own decisions for their own families. Apple does not. As a result, we have to severely restrict how the kiddo listens to music. It’s not ideal.

Also, the Android version of Apple Music? Doesn’t support Screen Time even if you’re signed in to a managed account. Restrictions must be set locally, on the device. Guh?

Example 2: Safari “Allowed Sites”

Screen Time allows one to set a level of permission for websites. You can choose to block everything and permit individual sites by hand, you can allow everything, or you can use something in the middle that blocks “adult” websites (not defined in the UI) and then block/allow specific ones on top of it. Great.

Allowing only permitted sites is primitive. It broke when I wanted to allow the kiddo to browse our library’s site for audiobooks to download and listen to on our family Mac: every link led to a different site, and as a consequence, I had to allow each site. This is an example where macOS and Screen Time assume we’re on the web of 2000, not 2020. This is more complex now, and the tool makes dumb assumptions. In the end, I just let him use Chrome for audiobooks – which, by the way, has no restrictions in Screen Time because it’s not Safari! – and obviously monitor what he’s doing.

Is it the job of the OS?

A natural question on this might be, well, should the OS handle this at all? It’s valid. But it’s also an implementation detail. We do have Circle installed on our Netgear Orbi network, and it’s helpful for completely blocking or allowing device access, but its filtering isn’t reliable.

Worse though, as a parent why would I ever need to delve into freaking network settings for this? Again, it’s 2020 – the barrier of entry to the internet is not as high as it was 20 years ago and yet, these tools are straight outta the past.

A better path forward

Here’s the thing. There’s an opportunity here for software and hardware to create a system that supports parents’ goals. My wife and I want my son to be safe and smart online, and we want him to have excellent digital hygiene. None of the tools out there actually support that, which means screen time is always a push-pull. All of these problems are byproducts of: the way the internet has grown and changed into a few major companies control of streaming entertainment, the de-geekifying of computing, and the way our culture has embraced all of this. And what do we have? Ways to block that kinda work, mostly don’t, and don’t support a strategy of good growth for our kids.

Notes on My First Car

Getting my driver’s license was a huge deal. All of that freedom, all of that “I can just leave the house when I want?”-ness of it had pent up inside me for years. I remember distinctly the very first time I drove on my own: I borrowed my mom’s car and drove to the Best Buy in Downers Grove, Illinois, to pick up a special order of R.E.M. Succumbs on VHS. (That tells you a lot about me, right there.) I pleaded with my mom to take that 20+ mile drive and bring my best friend Greg along, and she somehow agreed.

But my first car was something my parents and I found in the local newspaper. An older person was selling a used 2-door 1988 Dodge Shadow. It claimed it was in good condition, and the price was right. I had saved up money for it, but my parents also were willing to chip in a good amount. I remember at that point just thinking, “So long as my dad thinks the car is in good shape, I’m getting that car.” Being able to drive was essential for me, and since my dad had been a mechanic in his teens and 20s, I trusted him fully.

The car got a pretty clean bill of health. The head had a small crack, so I was told not to really take it on the highway nor go over around 60 with it. The interior – red cloth! – was in good condition. The A/C was broken, likely out of refrigerant, so summers would be kind of awful. But it ran, it was cheap, and it was a great first car.

The first thing I purchased for the car was, naturally, a CD player. It had a stock radio – AM/FM only, no cassette even! – and in-car CD players were still relatively new and relatively crappy back then. I spent a day installing a Sony single-DIN, faceplate-removable stereo with my dad. I remember distinctly that when the car went over any bump, the player would skip – and scratch the disc. It was horrible and great.

My first trip in the car? The night after we bought it, I asked my parents if I could drive to Taco Bell. (Teenagers, right?) They reluctantly agreed. I remember the excitement of getting to drive in my car, to get food for myself, to enjoy myself – that independence was incredible. And so I drove the short mile or two to Taco Bell, seeing cars flashing their lights at me, not realizing I was driving without my headlights on at all. (I remember thinking, “Wow, night driving is really hard – it’s impossible to see anything!”)

I also remember the first time I drove my car to high school. Again, I felt amazing. I was coming up on my school’s parking lot, and signaled to make a right turn into the lot. A car from the other direction came up and gave me the wave to go ahead… and I gave him the wave at the same time. We misunderstood each other, and yes, we ended up going at the same time. He took out my front wheel completely. I was scared and worried and so disappointed. As I sat in the back of a police car, talking with them about the accident, I saw other students walk by, see me in the back seat, and laugh. Assholes.

—-

The Shadow died a sad death. Despite the warnings from my parents, I still drove the car on the highway. Once I took it out to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, and noticed a bit of smoke emanating from the hood while I was in a drive-thru. I didn’t think much of it. But when I started driving the car back home, the temperature gauge went all the way to “H” – and the smoke increased. I pulled off to a nearby Wal-Mart and, thankfully, had change to call my parents. They were more than a little annoyed, to say the least, but after I bought some antifreeze, I waited for them to arrive. That half hour was the longest half hour ever. My parents didn’t flip, not fully, but they were quite pissed. My dad looked at the car and sure enough, the entire head had cracked. We caravanned back home, with my Shadow not being able to go over 25.

Repairing the car would cost more than the car was worth, as you can imagine. After a short while, I traded it in – somehow – for a 95 Dodge Neon, which would become the first car I truly loved.

—-

I write this now, recalling stuff that happened over 25 years ago, without a car that I call my own. My wife and I still have a car, but due to the coronavirus it’s just not being used much. We sold my car just before all of the lockdowns, and are waiting to see what happens next.

Notes from Repainting My Kitchen Cabinets

When we bought our house a few years ago, there were a number of style decisions made by the prior owners that we did not agree with. Almost all of them were cosmetic in nature: the entire first floor was painted in a pastel yellow with giant golden curtains; the master bedroom was neon green with beige carpets and a pale yellow popcorn ceiling; and the kitchen was oppressively, relentlessly brown. The “gourmet kitchen!” described in the listing was an exaggeration – the cabinets were original to the 1980 house, the flooring was old and tired, and things like the dishwasher and stove were on their last legs.

I replaced the dishwasher shortly after we moved in, and we got a new oven last year, but the big project we had in our heads that I finally got around to tackling over the 2019 holiday break was repainting the damn kitchen cabinets. Here’s the obligatory Pinteresty before-and-after.

Project Outline

Keeping this relatively cheap was important. I did investigate a few options including replacing all of the doors and drawers with new ones, but that was cost-prohibitive for us (thousands of dollars). Plus, the cabinets were non-standard sizes because some… liberties… were taken. For example, one of the hanging cabinet boxes (in the far corner of the wall above) is a full 36” wide, but half of it is covered by another cabinet – so they hung another one-door cabinet next to that, and we have two doors that open to the left. Just little weird quirks like that, as with any house.

New hardware was a must. The hinges were something we ultimately did not replace – hinges are more expensive than you’d think. So other than a few hinges I chose to replace manually due to pure annoyance (at a cost of $6.50), we instead spray painted all of the worn brass color hinges with a metallic silver.

Similarly, we looked at many paint options. I wanted to minimize the amount of work and get the best looking results. I considered things like milk paint and the Rust-Oleum “all in one” box kits, but given the size of what I was tackling neither was quite a fit (nor cost-effective). On top of that, after looking at the doors themselves it was pretty clear I needed to do a full sanding, priming, and painting – skipping anything wasn’t an option. I went with Sherwin-Williams paint despite the cost over something like Behr (at Home Depot) because a) it’s not Home Depot and b) it has been good for my prior projects.

Lastly, small touches. Brown being the main theme meant that all of the outlets in the kitchen were brown with brown faceplates. I replaced all that ugly shit with simple white switches and outlets, and upgraded a couple to USB-A and USB-C ports too. All of the drawers had single round pull knobs – I took the time to change those out to actual handles versus that cheap crap. And there was a really questionable quarter round at the top of the cabinets, abutting the soffit – that came down and (as of this writing) will be replaced with something simple and clean.

I had planned on painting the toe kicks (which are a chocolate brown) but chose to just leave them because no one sees them.

All told, we had 27 doors and 13 drawers (nothing like odd numbers!) Start to finish, this took about 6 solid days spread over a week and a half due to the holidays. Our total cost was about $475, with half of that going to paint and primer followed by hardware (hardware is more expensive than you think.)

Lessons Learned

Instead of a Pinteresty step-by-step DIY post I wanted to share a number of things I learned in this process, which was only my second house project of this scale. (Prior was replacing wood paneling with drywall in a house we lived in years ago, but I had two friends really do about 90% of the work on that, so that doesn’t quite count.) For reference, I’m mildly handy – repainting and simple electrical is easy, as is simple plumbing, but things like a full on room revamp are out of scope for me.

Lesson 1: Will require more effort than you think, and will go over budget.

Don’t be fooled by endless blog posts that say this is a weekend project. It is not. Unless you’ve got, say, 6 cabinets total, this is a very long weekend or a week-long thing. In addition, buffer in overage for cost.

Lesson 2: Proper prep is a great idea, but I’m still concerned about the results.

Ultimately, not skipping steps was necessary. Fully sanding and then priming and then painting was something I simply needed to do. On nearly all surfaces I ended up having one or two coats of primer, and two coats of paint. The only thing I let through with one coat of paint was the windowsill – which was also in brown – because it was the very last thing I did and I frankly didn’t care at that point. It looked good enough.

The concern about the results is this: occasionally while working on painting, I found it trivially easy for me to nick through the paint and primer to see the original brown wood underneath. That suggests I didn’t prep the doors as well as I could have.

Similarly, for the drawers – which are pretty cheap – I only painted the faces, and left everything else in the original light brown. If I did this again, I would paint the entire front and back of the face. Not a huge deal to me.

The painting of the hinges worked pretty well, but their usage (they’re hinges!) means that some paint may go away over time. They’re still way better than the ugly brass.

Lastly: I would be way more aggressive with tracking down paint drips. There were some that made it through to the final product and while I notice them, most people won’t. (I’d say I did a B/B- job on handling the doors’ many bevels.)

Lesson 3: Drying takes forever.

I set up my garage as the working/staging area for all of this, and that was great. But drying took easily double the time I would have estimated.

Lesson 4: I need a yardstick and/or high-quality ruler.

I didn’t have one. I had a level with imprecise measurements and an old tape measure that was floppy. For the cabinet drawers I ended up using my trusty Field Notes notebook’s built-in ruler to get things precise.

Lesson 5: Label and number everything.

Before starting I numbered all cabinets. Hardware went into bags that were labeled appropriately. Outside of one minor mix-up at the very end when I was hanging doors, this was necessary.

I then posted these on my garage wall and it was totally helpful and necessary.

Lesson 6: Drill holes for new hardware prior to sanding/prep.

As mentioned, the prior owners had single pull knobs on every drawer. I figured, “Oh, I’ll measure and drill holes for handles after everything is painted.” Nope! Bad idea. I did that once and then realized it was completely backwards. Drill new holes (and fill old ones) first – then do everything else. Speaking of which….

Lesson 7: Assume the prior owners did nothing right.

There I was, installing the final handle on the final drawer – one we used a lot. I held up the drawer for a final look and… huh. The handle wasn’t centered. Like, obviously not centered. The reason? The single pull – the one we lived with for 3 years – was also not centered! I was floored when I first caught this and measured it. Things were quite a bit off. I ended up refilling the holes and remounting the handle. (Hilariously, on the way to this post I caught another that had been the same way – but this drawer is already “done” and in the kitchen. It’s a touch-up project now because it’ll annoy me.)

Lesson 8: Have good equipment.

I did all of this work with a Purdy angled brush – all of it. I bought a couple of small foam rollers but those, frankly, sucked for this job. Also, plastic drop clothes suck for drying things – paint detaches from the plastic and sticks to the item. I chased after dozens of little paint specs and spots after things were “done”.

In Conclusion

All told, the end result is dramatic and completely worth it. Our kitchen looks fresh and so, so much brighter – it’s truly amazing.

On Reviews

Recently, Apple pulled customer reviews from their online store. To me it isn't a huge deal. The internet is full of opinions on things, particularly Apple’s products, and it’s fairly simple to be able to find other reviews. (The trustworthiness of those reviews is a whole other can of worms.)

But Boing Boing spun it completely disingenuously with the headline, "Apple doesn’t want to hear what you think about their stuff anymore.” The argument there is:

1. Apple pulled reviews.

2. Thus, Apple doesn't want to be transparent with people.

3. This is probably somehow a free speech thing or something.

But it’s trash, because here’s the thing: reviews in a lot of places – including hashtag-ads on social media – are bought and paid for. Companies provide products, people write about them and toss in a tiny disclaimer in a review, and there you go. While I stated it’s easier to find other reviews on the internet, good luck finding a bunch that aren’t spammy as hell. It’s a mess. In any event, every company moderates their on-site reviews; it’s just a cost of doing business, and it’s foolish to think that Apple is providing some kind of free forum. Apple is a company, not a charitable organization.

Apple’s move is only hostile or opaque if you believe that reviews are the only way people can share an opinion or experience with their stuff.

iOS 13: every interaction is heavy

It’s funny, but I’ve been feeling a tiny sense of dread in more of my interactions with my iPhone lately. Upon reflecting on it it boils down to this: every little interaction now has more weight on it.

The best example is contextual menus - evoked with a long press or a press and hold, taking the place of the old 3D touch. The long and short of it is that Apple has driven to consistency with a similar “share sheet” across the OS… but each share sheet takes up more than the height of the screen, is fully customizable, and has a lot of options that make zero sense in context. Like: would I ever want to add a song from Apple Music to Deliveries, the app that tracks UPS/FedEx deliveries for me? Of course not. But I can, because that option is available system-wide.

This makes every interaction I have with Apple Music now carry extra weight. I need to actively search for what’s relevant, and I’m presented with a list of options that simply don’t apply. It’s, in a word, crummy.