Today I’ve broken my chatting fast in an interview I did with smartypants editor and content generalist Erin Kissane over at Contents Magazine. The interview is about the nitty gritty of doing content strategy at Facebook—the quirks, challenging bits and how my team operates overall. If you’re curious about how we decide on words like “Like” or just want a glimpse of what it’s like to work at Facebook, you should check it out.

Here’s the whole thing.

While you’re at it, you should check out the rest of Contents, too. You’ll find fantasmic writing by Brain Traffic’s Melissa Rach, the always-classy Mandy Brown and more.

Finally, I owe a big shout out to my team of power people at Facebook. Alicia Dougherty-Wold, Sarah Marx Cancilla, Evany Thomas and Amy Thibodeau: you’re the cats pajamas!

Trying not to go all Tupac-Biggie on this, but it’s great to see NYC and SF growing such exciting design communities.

Huge thanks and congrats to @FictiveCameron and @shiflett to putting on the event.

See you there.

I’ll post a more thoughtful run-down of how it all came together later, but here’s the TL:DR recap.

A fitted shirt

Our old, dark brown design served us well, but it didn’t fully reflect our services, personality or style. It was a lovely old shirt that fit a little too loose, if you will.

To tighten things up, we worked with the super-talented Edrea Lita, who helped us create a new visual identity, including our logo and design direction. (More on this soon—but in short, hire Edrea!)

As for the new web design and build, that’s courtesy of yours truly. And Tiff rethought and rewrote all our content, editing wildly for effect. The result is a cleaner, lighter Things That Are Brown that represents us much better.

A new course

Though our initial strategy was to get great clients and keep them coming back with this site, our move to Facebook has meant that suddenly, we don’t need to book more projects.

To address this shift, we had to yank a lot of our creative work from this design. Painful, but it just wasn’t relevant anymore. The current design has a few rough edges to sand because of all this re-jiggering.

Next steps

I’ll be tweaking the wonkier bits of the site over the next few months. Meanwhile, it’s good to be back and writing again. Tiff and I hope to see you here soon.

To say we’re “excited about the opportunity” wouldn’t do the feeling justice—we’re pumped. Amped.

In the Company of Others

Facebook has some extremely talented people working for them, and more collaboration is something I’ve been craving since I started working as a professional designer. Every time I work in the company of other smart minds, the quality of my work grows immeasurably.

Of course, the decision to leave our companies is bittersweet. We’ve been fortunate to have outstanding clients, many of whom we’ve become close friends with. We’ve also grown tremendously as a result of being entrepreneurs, and take pride in the work we’ve done. It’s been a satisfying ride.

Onwards

We can’t think of a better time to be at Facebook. We’ve been hankering for more professional interaction. And of course, the work we do there will have a far-reaching impact.

So without further adieu, please join us in a celebratory forearm bash (thank you). Also, if you’re going to be at SXSW 2011, come see us—we’ll both be there with Facebook. You can catch Tiff with the Content Strategy team at Confab 2011 in Minneapolis. Or, you could let us know if you’re in the SF bay area, where we’re moving in just a week.

And finally: The Brown Blog has gone dark while we’ve planned our switch to Facebook, but we’ll pick up where we left off after we move. We won’t be taking on any new client work, but we’ll be back blogging about design & content-related topics shortly.

Here’s the short version: buy one. If you’re in the market for a professional laptop, you really shouldn’t look at much else but the new MacBook Air.

Very fast.

It’s a welcome change of pace to work 8 hours straight with Photoshop and Illustrator and not see an angry beachball. Big apps launch in just a second or two, and files snap open when called. More interesting though, is the Air’s pervasive speed. Popping up font menus, new tabs, dialog boxes, scrolling through photos, loading big Word documents—whatever you want, it just happens. It makes the overall experience of using your computer a lot less stressful.

The speed, of course, comes from the built-in SSD harddrive. Others have explained why this is important, so I won’t digress. Really, it doesn’t matter why it’s happening, just know that nearly everything is faster because of it. If you don’t need a new laptop, look into upgrading to an SSD.

Nice to look at.

The Air is a sexy little beast. It’s light enough to make traveling almost completely painless (aside from the recurring feeling you’ve left it behind). The screen has superb color, and the high-resolution panel gives you just enough ‘room’ to work on the road. It also powers the 27″ Cinema Display flawlessly—it’s what I plug into at work. It feels just about as solid as an iPad in terms of build.

It’s all the little details, adding up one by one, that make it a great machine. You can read the spec sheet as many times as you want and not understand what you’re missing. If you need a new laptop, I strongly recommend the MacBook Air 13″ (with the 4GB of RAM upgrade). Shoot me an email if you have any questions.

826spaceholiday.com, a design project we created for 826 Seattle and the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., has launched!

About 826

826 Seattle is a free tutoring center that teaches students writing skills, and Matt & I have been volunteering there for a while. You have to visit the space to really understand how inspiring 826 is, but taking a look at the tutoring, writing workshops and events offered there is a good place to start.

About the Holiday Site

For the holidays we offered up our design & copy services and created a microsite that features best-selling items from 826′s storefront, The Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. (“Space travel is all they do,” by the way.)

You can visit the site to buy holiday gifts like Tycho Brahe coffee sets, an anthology of collected student works, blackhole starter kits and more.

Tell your friends, and happy holidays!