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At BarCampBank I confessed that blogging stresses me out a little bit. There’s always so much going on, so much to say, so many ideas that it can be overwhelming to sit down and tackle any one of them with clarity.

I was feeling this yesterday – I knew I wanted to write a post, but wading through the potential topics was, as they say, like drinking from a fire hose. So I gave up, grabbing a book to distract myself. I’m reading Chip Kidd’s novel “The Cheese Monkeys.” Here’s what I read:

“Always remember: Limits are possibilities. That sounds like Orwell, I know. It’s not – it’s Patton. Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas.

As graphic designers you want the world as your palette. But beware: You can be crippled by too many choices, especially if you don’t know what your goals are.”

One of the most difficult but important challenges in creative work – whether it’s writing, design, media strategy, product innovation, or gardening – is narrowing the focus and creating self-imposed limitations.

In visual design, using a pen and paper before you even think about touching a computer is key. Photoshop has so many bells and whistles, it’s easy to get caught up in the ancillary aesthetics before working out the concept. Make sure your house has a foundation before you hang up curtains.

In our web design process, we limit ourselves and the client by starting each design with a site wireframe (for example: Filene’s initial wireframe). It is unimpressive to look at (a common client reaction is “What’s with all the grey boxes?”), but crucial because it is the underpinning of the entire design. This step forces everyone involved to focus on information architecture and usability before we worry about the pretties.

By the same token…

Social marketers: Think focused, initiated communities over huge vanilla communities.

Podcasters: Develop each episode around a predefined template (ex: intro, topic, break with contact info, topic, exit) to help keep it organized and easy to produce.

Web application designers: Build less. Limit features to only what is necessary.

Gardeners: I dunno. Good luck.

This question recently came up in a conversation about a credit union website. So my simple question, in reply, is this:

What if instead of looking for zany animations, a website that plays rock music, or any other of the latest hippest coolest fads…what if the “wow factor” was that your credit union’s site was accessible and easy to use?

If you’re designing a site, or managing the process, ask yourself why your users are coming to your site. Make that experience as close to perfection as possible. Businesses who pay a mind to solid user-experience – scannable content, attractive design that looks consistent across browsers, simple navigation, copywriting that sounds like a human – these are the Wow Factor.

And here’s another question that tends to come up in tandem with the former: “What do young people want in a web site?” As a young person, I can say this: We are impatient. We want what we want, and we want it now. We do not want to have to wade through all the fluff that you think is “neat” to get to the bottomline.

I hereby rename the traditional “Wow Factor” the “Neat Factor.” Because that’s what happens, users will say “oh that’s neat,” and then go back to wanting your site to just work right, please.

Well, Brent and I have been trying to find time to write a little post-love for Picnik. So, in a busy moving week, we are brute-forcing it.

Picnik is a new, free, Flash-based web app for editing and sharing your photos. It lets you have the simpler features of Photoshop and/or Photoshop Elements, what you might use for a quick crop or color adjust, without having to open that pig of an app. Don’t get me wrong, I use PS to make a living, but it’s a pig and I only open it when I have to. Thanks to Picnik, for little things, I don’t have to. Blamn.

The editing options available are: Auto-fix, Rotate, Crop, Resize, Exposure, Colors, Sharpen and Red-eye. And under a tab called Creative Tools there are a few fun Special Effects available: B&W, Sepia, Boost, Matte, Vignette and Soften. Now, they don’t offer layers, or paint brushes, or vector masks, but most people who buy Photoshop Elements just want to kill some red-eye, crop a bad framing or correct the colors and contrast. Picnik delivers with ease. Besides, there are only about 10% of Photoshop’s stock filters that can be used tastefully anyway. Most folks don’t need them and most family photo-albums will fare better without their creators being made dangerous with too-cheesy filters. ::coughs “Watercolor” into fist::

Now for the sharing.

Picnik is gorgeously, seamlessly integrated with Flickr. Take these few steps with me.

*Take a photo and download it to your computer *Login to Picnik and grab the photo from your computer *Edit it *Upload it to Flickr from within Picnik with all the usual Flickr options like adding it to a photo set, tagging, title, description *Done

Additionally, you can use Picnik to edit a photo you have already uploaded to Flickr and either create an edited duplicate or replace the old photo. You can also email the edited photos from Picnik to a host of popular photo sharing and printing sites like Wal-Mart, PhotoBucket, Kodak EasyShare to name a few.

Picnik can also access your web cam (if you give it permission) and you can take a shot of yourself, edit it and upload it to Flickr. All right in your browser.

OK, the cover my Trapper Keeper is covered with “Charlie Hearts Picnik 4EVR.” It’s time to show you its handy-work. Here are three shots I edited in Picnik:

Please do enjoy. We are. Please also feel free to download the photos of me to decorate to your office, home, gym locker, that visor thing in your car. At least I’m wearing a shirt.

A recent post shared five tips on how to write better web content. The first: learn to edit.

It’s so tough because school assignments programmed me to ramble. I wrote a ton of papers, and most turned out mediocre due to a minimum length requirement of ten pages (12 pt. Times New Roman, double-spaced, of course).

First drafts would always land a few pages short. I’d squeeze the margins in by a quarter inch, increase the line spacing to 2.25, bump the font size up to 12.25, and cover every paragraph with adjectives. If that didn’t stretch it to having just a line on that tenth page, I’d pad it with more adjectives and take a tenth of an inch where I could.

Years of minimum page requirements taught me to deploy the adjectives at the front-end of the process. Eventually I got so comfortable with verbosity that I still struggle with the habit. Here’s what I do to combat drivel:

• Use a staging area. On posts like this, I start in the scratch pad on my Google Desktop sidebar before moving to a better staging area. When I put together content for a traditional site, I use a wiki for taking inventory, editing and collaborating. When I need collaboration on something short, Writeboards also work nicely. (When Writely allows new registrations again, I’ll add that to my options.)
• Get honest feedback from tough critics. How can I tell if I’m getting honest feedback? If it stings, it’s honest. It helps to work with people who aren’t afraid to tell you when you’re off your game. (Thanks, Matt, Brent, and Mark.)
• Keep it as short as possible concise.
• Identify your weaknesses. It’s through the sting of honest feedback mentioned above that I’ve learned I’m a passive writer, a comma splicer, and a rambler. I watch these reappear, then I do my best to fix them.
• Bookmark and revisit this Lifehack post on fifty tools for better writing.

In 1997 John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen wrote Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web. They concluded that users primarily scan web pages instead of reading them, prefer short text, and “detest anything that seems like marketing fluff or overly hyped language (‘marketese’).”

Ten years later and bad web copy still abounds. Want an example? Let’s look at some content written by a slightly younger and much more verbose me.

It was once the content for the “About Us” section of our site:

We’re not a computer company. We’re a productivity company.

Trabian Technology is a business application development and consulting company whose commitment is to help you revolutionize every aspect of your business operations. Trabian isn‚Äôt a computer company; we’re a productivity company.

Our goal isn’t to convince you to use the latest (or most expensive) technology. Instead, we help you locate the solutions and define the operating procedures that increase your overall efficiency and productivity of your business.

Trabian-powered applications and websites feature breathtaking design, solid architecture, and unexpected affordability, making our solutions ideal for businesses of all sizes. In addition to web design and development, our services include web hosting, custom software development, and consulting.

I doubt you read every word of that; it makes me snore and I wrote it. Good thing we shortened it to:

We help credit unions generate growth and connect with their members by building exceptional websites. Our clients trust us for content management, design, application development, hosting, and great conversation.

Somewhere between writing the crappy version and the current version I figured out how to:

• Edit (Turn 116 words into 29)
• Avoid sales-speak (Describing our work as “breathtaking” was a bad call)
• Pay attention to web usability experts
• Write with personality
• Write (and read) often to keep the skillset sharpened

Writing the two sentence version of “About Us” wasn’t easy. But I’m confident it says more than the eight sentence version ever could.