Interview: Particletree co-founder and Treehouse Editor Kevin Hale tells us about his Web app development plans, the secret to publishing success, and why everybody just needs a hug. Or a rice cooker. Whichever.The guys at design and development shop Particletree have been making a name for themselves lately.
Last month they released the first issue of Treehouse, a PDF-based design and development magazine that has garnered over 15,000 downloads so far.
Particletree reprints articles first published on their Web site in Treehouse. The magazine covers three topic areas—code, design and business—and includes feedback they receive from their original articles online.
The inaugural issue included an interview with Mint creator Shaun Inman, a book review of DOM Scripting, an article on degradable AJAX, and much more.
The first issue was free. Their second issue debuts Monday, Nov. 7. A subscription to the magazine is $15 for 6 months.
We caught up with Particletree co-founder and Treehouse Editor-in-Chief Kevin Hale on the eve of his magazine's next drop.
So. You live in Florida. What is that, design hell?
Ah, Florida. It's no New York and the storms make it difficult sometimes, but I think we do alright for being a quasi-southern state. A few of the academic institutions here—FSU, Stetson (where I got my degree), and the Ringling School of Art and Design—are releasing some really interesting students onto the scene. Yes, you tend to see a lot more experimental stuff coming out of the Miami and Orlando areas, but we're glad to be making our mark here from Tampa Bay. Plus, it's the Web, so regional design, as I see it, is a sort of defunct concept if you know your stuff.
How about a little background. How'd you and the Particletree crew come together?
Chris and Ryan are brothers and so they met in a hospital somewhere like 20 some odd years ago. Interesting factoid about Chris and Ryan: Their father is a government agent who specializes in something like forensic accounting and so the two of them ended up going to some diplomatic high school in Switzerland—they have snowboarding classes! Chris and Ryan have some very interesting stories about playing intramural basketball with the children of oil tycoons and dictators.
Any way, I was doing some writing and design for a small division at a research university, and that's where I met Chris, who was doing Web application development there. He introduced me to Ryan, who at the time was still a student and writing all the database programming examples for his professor's computer science textbook. For about a year, we talked constantly about how frustrating it was to see our employers fail to keep up with the latest Web development trends and it wasn't until we attended Jason Fried's Doing Big Things with Small Teams at SXSW 2005 that we realized that the three of us could make our own impact on the Web development scene. So that night we bought the domain name and about two months later, in May, we launched the blog.
Where'd you come up with the name Particletree anyway? It's fly.
The Particletree christening was one of those Archimedes in the bath moments, where I just shouted it out during dinner like I was possessed and we all just fell in love with it right away.
What do you hope Treehouse will accomplish that particletree.com doesn't?
Particletree in its current form is a blog, and Treehouse, our Web development magazine, is a spin-off project to help us build presence. What most people don't know is that while the Particletree team is really good at publishing, our hearts are in software development and we're actually building Web applications on the side that we're hoping to release ... eventually. The content and articles on our blog are directly related to researching and solving problems while building our Web apps. So Particletree will probably transform into something different when we finish.
Developing apps on the side? That's very 37 Signals (and very
cool). I know you don't want to show your cards too early here, but
can you give me some hints about what you're working on?
Well, most of the hints can be found in the features we write for
Particletree, but I can say right now that digital goods (PDF/ebooks,
mp3/podcasts, photos, videos, ringtones and software) are hot right
now, but distributing them effectively and securely tends to be a
pain. One of the projects we have in the works involves building on
top of and extending the shopping cart system we've built for selling
digital goods to power Treehouse.
Next Page: The changing nature of online design
How is designing a PDF magazine different from designing for the Web? What's your production cycle like? How do you choose what to pack in there? What's been hardest? Most unexpected?
Not very different. The tools are different, but you can still use links so what you're asking from your contributors is essentially the same. Layouts involving coding samples are a challenge to design, since you want to preserve as much of the structure as possible but everything, in the end, is manageable. Nothing was really unexpected, since I've done a lot of graphic design, and so PDF wasn't an unfamiliar territory for me. The nice thing about creating an online PDF, is that we can make major corrections on the spot and then upload the new version immediately.
As far as the production cycle goes, we have an editorial meeting on the first Tuesday of the month (the day after the issue goes out) and go over slugs for the next two issues. We're always soliciting ideas for articles in addition to taking contributions for two to three months' worth of content at any moment in time. This is important, because our contributors are usually doing fulltime jobs and writing for us in their free time, and sometimes people just can't make the deadlines, and so you have to be prepared. The first three weeks of the month is editorial trafficking, and each person on the team is responsible for handling their own section. We all read over every article and provide comments and suggestions, but contributor contact is, ultimately, limited to one person. Every contributor is responsible for turning in an outline, rough draft and final draft, and this allows us to notice or fix any problems early on when something isn't turned in. Any spare moment during this period is dedicated to application development and research for our own articles.
The actual laying out of the magazine is all done by me and it takes about a solid week at the end of the month. We send off a version to our copy editor, who reads through it like a demon and then it goes through a final check list before getting slapped up on our site.
How successful has Treehouse been so far? Can you give me any
numbers?
The response to the magazine has been fantastic. People seem to be
responding really well to both the content and the design of the
publication and that makes us very happy. The inaugural issue, which
we gave out to everyone for free, has had over 15,000 downloads,
which I think is a good start. We won't really know how successful
this whole thing is going to be until the pay issues comes out (Nov.
7 is when the first one is released). We're relatively new on the
scene and I think people want to see if we keep up with the quality
and if we're committed to being around for awhile—both of which are
part of the plan. We know there's definitely a need for this kind of
publication in the community and so we're glad to be the ones
producing it.
So since you've been pubbing Treehouse, what have you noticed about design on the Web? There's certainly been a tremendous focus on CSS and standards-based design over the last few years, in large part due to publications like Zeldman's ALA. Brad Howell's CSS Reboot just dropped, and I think you guys were a part of that. Is all this CSS a good thing? Does it overshadow other aspects of design we should be worrying about?
Hmmm... my background is fine arts-based and so my perspective on the Web is a bit different from most in the industry. I initially was interested in the Web as a medium for my art work. CSS was just a tool to help me express my ideas better, yes it separated my design information from my structural information—but I was most interested in the fact that it was easier for me to layer 57 pictures of the Queen's head on top of each other (I was weird in college).
While doing Particletree, I've become a lot more immersed in the professional Web development community and design. There seems to be moving away from a focus on aesthetics and the technology to create that eye candy and towards a scale based on functionality and user experience. This makes complete sense since companies want the Web sites they pay professionals to create to do something for them—make them gobs of money. But it's important to recognize that the professional Web development community is just one circle. They're a highly influential circle, but one circle nonetheless. There's a good number of secretaries and hobbyists out there who have no idea about CSS and standards, and I'm going to bet they generate a lot more sites than we do.
As far as CSS and Web standards are concerned: Yeah, some people get a little nutty about this stuff and get lost in the details, but I think the community is starting to move away from whether things validate or not and towards a more holistic approach to design that asks, does this site generate a successful user interaction? I honestly believe that standardized sites make the Web a better place. Do I think using tables for layout makes you not only a bad designer, but a bad person? No, no I don't. In fact, one of my favorite Web sites ever is www.chrisglass.com, and his site uses tables for layout, obtrusive javascript, the works, but I would kill to have a site like his. The most important thing you can do as a Web developer is to always be aware of the goals of your company and to see how the medium you develop for will serve those goals. The technology you use should always be the second thing you consider.
Next Page: What's up with design and Web 2.0?
As a designer, what's your take on all this Web 2.0 ballyhoo? Suddenly, DHTML is popular again. New interface tricks and paradigms are popping up, but that also leads to new design challenges (single page or multi-page AJAX app? Flash or AJAX, or both?) What are the implications for online design?
Ballyhoo? I take it you're not a fan of the hype? Well, I think it's good to see the development community reinvigorated by the prospect that something new can be done on the Web. While I am a bit intrigued by all the semantic discussions going on, I think it's important to do your best to make sure that there's more doing than talking if you want to get involved. The implications, I think, are that online design is becoming too complex for one person to handle alone, and so there's a new emphasis on team-based development and design. Gone are the days where you can have just one person do all the design and scripting for a Web site. We experience this shift everyday at Particletree. When we create Web sites, we're in constant communication with each other so that our separate layers of development are integrated smoothly and effectively. Web developers, if they want to be successful, need to become interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary.
Yeah, seems a lot of Web designers, like Shaun Inman,
Jason Fried, Adaptive Path, you guys, etc. are moving into app
development. Combine that trend with the recent launch of so many
mini-Web 2.0-apps, and it looks like this has been the year of the
"small application, nicely done." In this context, where do you see
the Web going? Will we use more and more small apps for multiple
tasks, or will we see an increase in meta services and larger
companies like Google and Yahoo eating everything up?
Uh, yes? The big boys definitely pay attention and in part rely on
the innovation created by new small teams, but there's definitely
going to be way more of these small apps built than they can acquire, and so I think we'll always see both around, which I think is a good
thing. The two major problems, in my opinion, that need to be solved
to make the "Web as a platform" idea work involve solving issues
surrounding reliability and Identity 2.0. Dick Hardt does a wonderful
presentation explaining Identity 2.0 problems so I'll just refer you
to the video. As far as reliability goes, a lot of mashups are built by generous hackers that
tend to be great at creating software, but have very little resources
to pay for the infrastructure to support their services. That's an
unreliable system to build other services on top of, and it sort of
makes me uncomfortable that the only option for global scalability on
the Internet is through acquisition. Web 2.0 has a lot of hype around
it, but it's really a movement powered by hackers and it would be
nice if they had some better alternatives for serving reliable
services more cheaply.
Other sites/teams you think are doing great work these days? Who
inspires you?
37signals got us out of our seats, and so props definitely go out to
them for showing us the possibility. The guys over at Netvibes.com are doing some wicked JavaScript stuff on their Web site. Every week,
they're checking items off of their to-do list, and it's just an
awesome thing to watch. Odeo, Measure Map and Yahoo's new Beta Maps
are all en fuego. They do a great job of integrating Flash interfaces
into their services seamlessly, which is how I always thought Flash
should have been used (sparingly and appropriately). I admire
tremendously the work Dean Allen and his crews do over at TextDrive
and Textpattern. They're amazing people who truly love and believe in
the work that they do, and it makes them one of the most respected
groups in the industry. If we could work with half their integrity
and intelligence, I'd be a happy man.
Anything else I haven't asked you that you're dying to talk about?
I think it's important to acknowledge the power of hugs. Everyone
needs a hug. Also, rice cookers are awesome.
Web Design 
