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!
Figure 1. 
Figure 2. 
Figure 3. Me being all like “WHAT THE FUCK??”
Figure 4. Bethany Johns being all like “WHAT THE FUCK??”, Sesame Street style.
