A few months ago, I wrote an article about the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound, which ran on SpeakUp and is archived here as part of Writing Design Criticism. My initial assesment of ffffound was super-mega-thumbs-up, but the more I’ve used the site, the more I got kind of bothered by certain fundamental aspects of it. So here’s a devils’-advocate rebuttal to my own article. Indeed.

OK, so: ffffound is to graphic design what Napster was to music. Seriously. Look: I used to blow hundreds of dollars at Other Music and Tower and Satellite and Fat Beats, et al, making my feet sore walking to as many record stores as I could in one fell swoop, all to find that elusive catchy hook or strange beat that I’d overheard someone cooler than me talking about on the train or someshit. But: then came Napster, and its various P2P children and grandchildren, and I didn’t have to leave my seat. Based on the music-snob knowledge I’d already amassed, I could feed the right words into the search engines of the darknet (PDF), and lo: all the music I wanted was just a status bar away.

Now, I go to a record store maybe once a year. Yeah, of course I go to see bands I like whenever I can, and of course I always buy CDs and other merch direct from the table, to assuage the guilt from my gluttony, and to support the music — in that order. I love music with all my heart, and it is that love that keeps this cycle so fantastically well-oiled, throughout all the complex circumlocutions and moralizations that surround the muddled notion of digital copyright infringement.

Similarly (nay, analogously), I used to buy books and read blogs and ferret out design morsels in the library and elsewhere… but now I just look at ffffound. For example: the other day, while I was doing a diagram for a collaborative book my class is putting out on lulu, I skipped through both my personal ffffound archives and those of the ffffound front page, and lasered off about 20 letter-sized images that somehow spoke to what I was doing. Each reflected my idea in some facet of their design — in their type contrasts, maybe, or in their visualization methodology, or in their basic form, or what have you — but they all were from seriously far-flung sources, only temporarily united in the service of my quest only by virtue of their status as ffffound objects.


Figure 1. Some of ffffound’s most popular images.

I pinned them on the wall, sketched a bit, conferred with my colleagues, sketched more, and knocked out the diagram. In the course of all this, I did not pause for a moment and sink into a comfy chair with my well-thumbed edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, nor did I lovingly tease any slowly-oxygenating prints out of my graduated colleagues’ flatfiles, or anything like that. I pretty much stayed in my standard I-am-designing-shit pose, which was: hunched over a computer. Printouts notwithstanding… If I’d had a monitor that was large enough, or if I hadn’t needed to collaborate with my friends in order to do the thing that I was doing, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the lasers (which laserprints — let’s admit it — are totally screentastic in their glossy quick’n’dirtiness).

The point is: ffffound has emerged as a single repository where I can instantly gratify my urge to see new design thingees. I can root through dozens of pieces of other people’s work, with nothing to give me pause, making no payments of any kind, and with no consequence. It was one thing, back in the early days, when the Internet was brand-new… wow! So much design, so much of it from far away, and all right at your fingertips! But you still had to work for it, and engage with your subject matter. To do design research — and I use that term provisionally here — with a computer, you had to balance queries to Corbis with those to Nexis. You had to know when to root through your bookmarks for samples from some weird blog, and when to hit up Flickr or the Prelinger archives, or when to pack it in and buy a fucking stock image of a woman walking along a beach with a sunset.

Or when to stand up from the computer and look in a book. Or when to talk to someone who would know.


Figure 2. Good design. Via ffffound.

Ffffound gives you all that stuff in one place, all conveniently pre-curated by a slaverishly devoted volunteer staff of designers and design fans. You don’t have to have been blessed with one of its coveted invites to subscribe to its main RSS feed, and then there you go: a fountain of fresh design, photography, and art, right there in your feed reader, with new stuff piped in from the zeitgeist minute by minute. Sure, the system hasn’t got any tags or search boxes, yeah, but with a modicum of hunting around, you can find a user whose tastes appeal to your desires, and subscribe to their individual feed. And kablam: their graphic tastes are at your fingertips whenever you like. Ffffound’s look-but-don’t-post invite-only policy promotes a distribution model similar to that which was engendered by Napster and its P2P descendants, in which a small number of taste-making uploaders can distribute a schmorgasboard of content to hordes of downloaders in a vastly asymmetric fashion. But by passing out invitations through the social network of its users, ffffound follows in the footsteps of OiNK (the now-legendary BitTorrnet music hub) in creating a self-reinforcing community standard. Invites only go to those who users think would use ffffound “right”, the nature of which can only be gleaned from observation.

Figure 3. Tips for designers who want to be ffffound. Ripped off from this.

Much as psychoacoustically compressed audio files are delivered minus the grounding context of record packaging and liner notes, images on ffffound are ripped from their context and tossed upon the totalizing non-ground that is the sites’ white background. The “quoted from” link that ffffound furnishes is, in many cases, completely useless — bookmarking an image after going directly to its URL simply renders the “quote” link redundant. Furthermore, if such a directly-posted image is from a site with many users (like flickr, say, or facebook) it is impossible to trace the post back to the page in which it was originally situated. The “quoted from” link is also less than compatible with blogs: if I post to ffffound from a blogs’ front page, and the blogger puts up a few new entries, the originating article will move off of the page. To find the source of the image, then, you’d have to root through the blogs’ archive… a task which ranges from eye-rollingly irritating to nigh-impossible, depending on whose site you’re specifically concerned with.


Figure 4. This image is extremely popular on ffffound (as you can see here)… but the user responsible for the flickr page from which it’s taken seems to have copied it, with no attribution, from this guy. Ffffound’s lack of user control and annotation prevents this fact from being noted within ffffound in any way.

And but so: ffffound users could themselves navigate to the right URLs, only posting images when it is respectful (morally, if not legally) to do so. But they don’t. I know I don’t: when I see an image I like on the internet these days, I almost immediately ask, “is it ffffindable??” I have even caught myself thinking this about actual physical objects I see in real life:


Figure 5. Rrrreal llllife ffffound. It was inevitable.

See, what really drives ffffound, though, is love. I love finding and sharing and swapping and trading ffffound images until I’m swimming in them. We all do. It’s sorta like the card game War, and sorta like going to Printed Matter… sorta del.icio.us and sorta HotOrNot (or, more currently, commandshift3). But I am starting to fear that that love may eventually create something nasty. Ffffound already has climbed to the top of many designers’ bookmark lists; the individuals behind some of the more popular design blogs, like SwissMiss and SpeakUp, have presences on ffffound. Such high-profile endorsement legitimizes ffffound as a resource, and allows visitors to gloss over the complex issues of attribution and intellectual property as they ogle ffffound’s visual schmorgasbord. I fear that with each image we post to it, ffffound gets riper for some sort of reckoning in these perilously unresolved arenas.


Figure 6. Escape, from Mandatory Thinking.

We shall see. Will they add more features? Will they take some away? Will the site remain in beta, or will it open its doors to the public? Will an imitator challenge ffffound’s hegemonous hold on “image bookmarking”? Will such an imitator fall first to legal scuffles? Who the fuck knows. I do not. Yeah.

(Anyway. I’m compiling notes for a longer, non-designy entry about me and my big fat life, but in the meantime, there’s always the tumblelogs, in regular and MFA thesis flavors. Indeed. Salud!

ffffound freaks me out like no other site has before.

It’s like stealing singles without proper ID3 tags.

It makes me feel dirty whenever I happen to stroll by, yet I long to be raped by it, again and again.

I think the bigger questions is, if/when they open it to the public, will it become so overridden with total garbage that the “good stuff” will be buried in a sea of unattributed 3-D fantasy photoshop tutorial art? Right now it’s like looking at flickr if only a handpicked group of fantastic photographers were using it, or being on a secret file-sharing network with a bunch of great college radio DJs. The curation is what’s making it great, moreso than the infrastructure, imho.

right. the dirtiness of it has the same texture (as it were) of napster 1.0… from which, despite the filth, I wrung quite a few hard-to-find albums and tracks. which changed my music tastes, which made me support bands I might not’ve heard of had the situation. right. and so on and so forth.

I do recall the ffffinders quite liked your lovely pantone leaf image.

but yeah it’s a mess. I would hazard that the current buzz around ffffound could verrrrry easily spill over into IP-related freakouts.

we shall see. you very well may get your rape, sir!

mr. illnoise: indeed, the closed network reinforces the implicit standards of the little ad-hoc ffffound community. that’s both good and bad: it simultaneously yields a panoply of good design shit, but it also fosters groupthink.

who knows, tho… OiNK was closed, but it was also huge, to the point where there were subfactions within it. everyone agreed on the quality standards, but the system/community was large enough to avoid collapsing into monoculture, somehow.

dunno. these would be good thing to talk about with a digital ethnographer (or somesuch). I’m just a design nerd… but WITH A HEART OF GOLD.

erm!

ALSO: the writer(s?) for the Things magazine blog has this to say about image blogs. The main pages’ title reads “print is not dead, it’s merely sleeping”. I don’t think she/he/they/it like it either. Yo.

I seem to remember a more caustic synthesis of the phenomenon on that site; maybe they posted/deleted and I snagged the RSS…? I guess no one will ever, ever know. But erm. Yes!

I am an addict! I’m use ffffound! daily and here are some of my thoughts:

1. The copyright/attribution comments are on point. It is problematic. Only a few times have I been very interested in some material and not been able to source out the original author/designer. In my opinion the speed that ffffound! gives me new stimuli far outweighs my concerns about attribution.

2. ffffound! is fantastic for blog content searching.. I’ve made several posts based off ffffound discoveries. Not only that, but I was able to dig up some old images from out of the way texts (i.e. the Codex Seraphinianus) and share that work with people who may not have seen it otherwise.

3. Your “tips for designers that want to be ffffound!” is exactly on point. There are certainly trends in what material circulates within that system. I don’t need to see any more hands at the edge of an image frame holding up a poster. Really now!

Digg has had issues where the “politics of inclusion” have directed how people write stories, and scheme to vote them up. There is no “server crash” jackpot with fffound though.. I pity any designer for making material with that site in mind, but if your stuff works there why not capitalize on the friendly environment.

I only have a few iimages from my archives on ffffound! So I’m perhaps my opinions about attribution is a little more liberal than others who have lots of uncredited material in circulation. I haven’t talked to anyone who doesn’t love that extra little boost of buzz & linkage though.

This is great! I’m happy somebody in the know is taking this service to task.. keep the thoughts coming ffffish!

hahaha, thank you sir… and in your case, yes, it is always fantastic to see people use a tool such as this as you have (vis a vis, say, the recent spam-tsunami of tits on ffffound, which as you may recall triggered the posting of a spate of amusing replies in image form). But yeah that’s great work you have, indeed.

and yeah, while I think the “inclusion politics” issue is less likely (but not wholly unlikely) to influence peoples’ actual design decisions, such a dynamic definately holds sway over what gets posted, as you pointed out… which feeds back into the attribution issue a bit.

And also: I have to say that I personally have come to terms with the hands-on-the-poster thing (see?)… For a while, I ranted against it as a cliche. But for print work, the hands trick is a simple and easy way to show how the scale of the printed object relates back to the humans perceiving the object in question. As with most of the irritatingly clip-arty CAD-symbol human figures many architects fall back on, in many cases it’s an essential (if often cheesy) device.

I’m all for more varied methods, tho — new shit, that’s how you do shit, indeed.

Actually.. you slid a dagger right between my ribs on the clip-art CAD figures point. I’ve waffled on them over the years.. I’m currently back to pretending it is the early 90s and that photoshop’s motion blur is a new invention instead of populating virtual space with the GSD approved Back outlines of hypothetical people.

Tangent: I think the “holding up the poster” thing.. is just about showing that indeed yes, print actually exists in the world! I suppose it doubles as a means to show off a snazzy wristwatch or rings. ;)

Maybe I should prepare some of my own meta-ffffound commentary. Regardless, you’ve got some doozeys in this piece! :)

mhhh…

i know people surfin ffffound regularly and often more than once a day.

you can see it in their work - they all take parts of what they have seen at ffffound and remix it with their own ideas. the problem is that they all just produce eyecandy - nice stuff, but with no real concept in mind! a nice mixture of up-to-date stuff like data visualization, diagrams, and weird typography… it just rocks - at there is nothing more about it…

but i know they can do much better!
go to a fuckin bookstore and buy a good book, take a walk outside in the woods or downtown watching people…

you have to choose your sources, where you derive your inspirations from!

you have to do your OWN thing!

otherwise you will only re-do all the stuff that was already done by others and that is repeated over and over again…

its your choice…

Ffffound is fun, but just making things look cool is not what makes good design. It’s important to understand why the look of something is meaningful to the subject being presented. I don’t think ffffound helps young designers understand that.

Mr. Smith: hahaha, I was not trying to kill you there. But yeah, illustrating scale in all these contexts is one of those necessities that is, for some reason, hard to pull off elegantly.

But yeah, if you feel like going for the jugular (as it were) with your CAD people, you should have a look at PartIV’s “real life” symbols, which are free to download:

http://www.partiv.com/2007/03/08/real-life-dwgs

… indeed. Also, your comment about poster-hands having to do with verifying the existence of an actual print is most certainly true. And yeah, now I am beginning to think that “how to show people printed matter” is a topic worthy of independant investigation, n’est ce pas? Yeah!

Mr. McGinnis: true, but that is a problem all of the field’s freshmen will likely have at one point. Meaningless, content-free style tricks are like the marijuana of graphic design, in that lots of people try the stuff at some point as they grow up, but only a small percentage of those that try become problematically habitual in their use of same.

Wow, I am just FULL of metaphors today. Blech!

so it seems like the main issue here is that little regard is given to the source material. that there’s no longer any room/time for rumination on the artist’s body of work. or even really on the artist at all. or the project that it relates to.

and i agree. but i don’t think this is a problem confined to fffound.

like most users now, i really only consult about a dozen main sources a day, and rely on those “authorities” to guide my travels around the web. it’s a narrowing approach, but really the only way it can be navigable. the result of that practice is that the linker will always be more privileged than the linkee.

i think we’ll see that trend continue and intensify in ‘08, across all interests.

Ms. Rasley: that’s an important clarification. But while the problem is by no means confined to ffffound, I would contend that it is far more an issue there, specifically due to the sites’ budding status as a central source for imagery.

I mean, you can’t swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting ten tumblelogs that don’t give a fuck about attribution. Sometimes such wayward uploaders are merely careless; sometimes (as I would hazard is the case with my aforementioned CMM example on flickr) they are trying to rock on someone else’s dime, as it were.

But you as a viewer can disregard, or filter out, those examples more easily. Ffffound’s lack of user control (and therefore user voice, a point I beat to death in the first article) makes the site speak with one voice, if you will.

IT’S A BLOODY MESS… is it not? Perhaps there will be a reckoning, perhaps not. Perhaps people — specifically designers — will react by making their images more or less ffffindable (that is to say, compatible with ffffound’s rather narrow parameters for what can be posted), depending on the skew of the situation.

But yeah the consolidation of moral “authority” will definately continue. I’m fucking curious, certainly, about where it all goes. Indeed!

It’s a commendable job, this reposting in (somewhat) opposition to your original enthusiastic thoughts. At that time I gently called into question the utility of the service but have found myself more or less coming to the conclusion that it’s more innocuous than it is frustrating. I go to the site when I see an inbound link and it’s an enjoyable 10 minute meander.

Attribution is a *thing* though. I actually wrote to them a while ago (unanswered) suggesting that they would be doing everyone more of a service if they excluded .jpg links and encouraged members to be more specific about the origins (at that time I hadn’t read Migurski’s article so I wasn’t aware of the user’s bookmarklet ‘machinery’ automatism) - but in any event, you have admirably covered all of this in detail here.

*idea for new blog* 2 column page: debating format ‘for’ and ‘against’ both authored by myself, on the same topic.

Mr. Peacay: I’ve been away on break, and now I’m sick, so I will reply to yr comments in due time, when I am not expectorating prodigiously, thanks!

In the interim, I would note that a similar complaint has been logged by the person(s) behind the inscrutable Monoscope.

Indeed. Also, happy new year, you guys!

Mr. Fish.. thanks for the realist-DWG’s. I’m all over them!

Mr. Smith: you’re quite welcome. Use them in good health, indeed.

Another general note: just, like, to complicate the whole attribution thing further, it would seem that some enterprising individual has started ffffound.tumblr.com, which is a wholesale republication of the entire ffffound.com RSS feed. It preserves the “quoted from” links, of course… but just today I saw a bunch of random-image reposts on peoples’ tumblr accounts that cited this site. This shit don’t stop, evidently… indeeeeeeed.

Ah, so ffffffffffffound is invitation only? Ah ha. That’s why they’ve never responded to my repeated email requests for a membership.

Huummmm, wish that were just a tad more explicit on the site.

As far as I can see this is never made clear one way or the other. Just a line through the Register link that brings up the notice but no way to become invited.

Seems odd and, as you say, creates a self-referencing loop.