providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world
Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
How the psychology of friendship can apply to building a good brand
Hello, class. Tonight's assignment:
- Read this post over at the Happiness Project about Eight psychological terms to help you strengthen your friendships.
AN excerpt:Triadic closure. In a phenomenon called "triadic closure," people tend to befriend the friends of their friends – and this is very satisfying. Friendships thrive on inter-connection, and it's both energizing and comforting to feel that you're building not just friendships, but a social network. I now make much more of an effort to help my friends become friends with each other, and to befriend friends' friends.- Think about how these principles apply to building a good brand relationship with your audience. You do want your brand to be a friend to your audience, don't you?
- Discuss.
Labels: branding, social networking
posted at 10:33 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.29.2008
Um, if you're gonna spend a couple hundred grand on a semi, you probably want some pictures of the details
What's wrong with this web page design?Labels: visual information
posted at 9:42 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Break Free from the tyranny of the clock
Zen Habits has a little post on something I've been practicing ever since I left my last corporate job and started my own firm: Leave the clock behind.
Now, before I get started, let me state that there are times for clocks: Need to be on-time to a client meeting, or (even more importantly) keep a meeting focused and on-track by limiting its duration? Have a court date? Other professional obligation? In those cases, yes, yes, YES, clocks are your friend. They keep us in sync with the rest of the world, keeping the trains running on time, metaphorically.
But this isn't about those cases. It's about the other 90 percent of your life.
In the rest of your life, ideally you don't need a clock. Your body tells you when you are sleepy, when you are ready to awake, when you're hungry, and so on. And your finely-honed sense of professional duty and personal passion for what you do tells you when to get to work (right? right?). So what's the clock for?
Now, yes, yes, YES I know: I am not chained to a cubicle, with a nefarious middle manager lording their supposed superiority over me. I am fortunate to run my own spread, and work with people who are responsible enough not to need much in the way of a clock, either. I'll give you that. But I've got to tell you, there's a lot to be said for waking up when you are no longer sleepy; eating when you are hungry; working when you need money (which, in the face of $4 a gallon gas, is pretty much every minute I'm awake).
My point is that if you live without a clock telling you when to do things, you are letting something else tell you when to do them. Like your body, or your mind, for instance. And I think that's a good thing.
Creatively-speaking, what does this do for you? Or for your clients? Well, if you're not clockwatching, then your are more likely to be actively engaged in your work. You are more likely to be thinking, and not just doing (which is to say: you will be doing your doing better, since you'll be paying more attention to it).
And as your ruler-toting nun teacher (or in my case, sharp-tongued and eagle-eyed philosophy teacher) would say, "if you're paying attention, you're learning." And isn't half, or more than half, of what a designer, marketer, copywriter, or artist does simply listening?
I posted on this topic a couple of years ago, relating that back in the 1600s, the village blacksmith didn't sit at his forge for eight hours, then go home. He worked when there was work that needed doing, or when he was feeling particularly inspired--whether that was at noon or at ten at night. The rest of the time he was, you know, being human. which is to say: having a life.Labels: creativity, performance, work
posted at 8:41 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.28.2008
Twitterized
Yeah, I am doing that thing, now, like everyone else. It seems that six months ago it was all about Facebook. Now it's Twitter. Next thing you know we'll have webcams installed in our necks and will stream it all to our circle of friends and voyeurs.
If you want to follow me, you can catch the twitterstream here. But I swear if you are a fracking robot I will boot you, then reboot you after wiping your nvram, then hunt down your robot children and take an electromagnet to their innards.Labels: branding, social networking, visual information
posted at 9:44 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.27.2008
Jill Freedman: Back in New York and looking for a publisher
Jill Freedman made some incredible images in the 60s, 70s and 80s in New York and Washington, DC. A recent New York Times article gives a brief overview, but you can find a more comprehensive collection on her website. A show of her work is also up right now at the Higher Pictures Gallery in NYC if you're nearby and want to have a look, by the way.
She says elsewhere that she is shopping a compilation of her images around to publishers at the moment; it would be a coup for any house to get it and make it available. Jill: if you need a book designer, well, I'd love to do it. If I were you I'd send it over to Richard Benson and have him make the separations, though ;)
Freedman mentions she is going to resume shooting in NYC, after relocating back there from Florida recently. There's a lot there to shoot, Jill. It may not be quite the same as the late '70s, but it's just as compelling. I know you'll find something interesting to say about the Big City.
image: Busted During Demonstration, 1968, by Jill Freedman.Labels: photography
posted at 9:47 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.26.2008
TO Andy:
I know you're paring down your feeds. Keep us. Really. Anything you want us to write about, in particular? Shine your shoes for you? Make you an omelette?
have a good weekend,
notchcode.Labels: advice
posted at 4:58 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.25.2008
Happy Thought for the Weekend: Getting there is (at least) half the fun
I came across this photo of my dad and his older brother Bob from when they were kids, living in the dusty suburbs of 1950s Albuquerque (that's my dad in the back). It reminded me that the point of anything worth doing isn't the end of the process, but the process itself. I see plenty of photographs taken after the race is over, and the winners look happy. But I know from experience (racing and otherwise) that when you are in the act of Doing, and you are fully invested in it, you have the best, easiest opportunity to be happy.
This is very true in art, too. I could quote from a bunch of different sources that talk about the process being the real art, and the end "thing" being a mere artifact, or shadow, of the art itself, but I'll just digress briefly enough to ask you to read through Edward Weston's notebooks, and you'll get it soon enough.
This applies to the creative and business processes as well as the bigger picture. If I am creating a marketing strategy, or a branding strategy, or working on a web design project, and I really let myself go into the process—I do my best work. And if my client does the same thing, we have no choice but to not only create the best possible outcome for them, but have fun at the same time. I am fortunate to have clients who work this way, and hope all of you out there have success in enjoying the journey as much as I do.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
posted at 10:13 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.24.2008
Can't I just eat my waffle?
Having spent four years in the south, I appreciate a good Waffle House Experience. First, there's the black-on-yellow signage above the establishment, shining through the early morning, stuffy haze like a lighthouse beacon. Then, there's the usually friendly staff, which is a feat in and of itself, considering they are working in, well, a Waffle House. Then, of course, there are the waffles. Need I say more? Ok: I spent two days almost entirely encapsulated inside the McDonough, Georgia Waffle House while my Volkswagen Beetle was having its guts replaced in the garage next door. And the waffles just kept coming.
All of this is by way of introduction to the Very Small Array's lovely collection of maps, which can be found here.Labels: cartography, food, SCAD
posted at 10:54 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Don't robots in Japan and Latin America have anything better to do?
We serve up notchcode.com here in-house, on an aging server whose octogenarian fitness would make Jack LaLanne proud. I noticed today that, yet again, those pesky hackbots are trying to gain FTP access and do who knows what. I spent a little time playing with them, pinging them back with about 300 open terminal windows, etc., but it really wasn't too satisfying. What was satisfying, however, was knowing that there was no way they were ever, ever getting into our little server. Why? Well, for one thing, Apple has some lovely built-in firewall protections, including a stealth mode. Plus our FTP server is specifically augmented to protect against such malfeaseance. Plus, we have a more sophisticated firewall filter running on top of everything else. All with excellent logging, too. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that we cherish our clients' projects as much as we cherish the other facets of our relationships with them. Which is to say: a lot. Plus, I can't stand to even think of giving a robot the satisfaction of beating our little engine that could server...
Labels: hardware
posted at 10:21 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.23.2008
ok, so I am working out right now. even as I blog.
Here's a lovely bit of graphic design interpretation from calorielabs.com. Several states are featured, and I can't decide whether or not I like New Mexico's or South Carolina's flag-as-infographic better. What do you think?
My own interpretation of the Colorado state flag is below:
thanks, Cool Infographics!Labels: graphic design, humor, information graphics, visual information
posted at 9:14 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.22.2008
Google Mashup of the week: Real-time voting results
It's been six weeks since I had my political junkie fix, so I waited eagerly tonight for the Pennsylvania Primary results to come in. Thanks to the folks at google, however, I could review voting stats in real-time, with the results keyed to a map. I've embedded the widget below for you to try out. The county-by-county graphs are handy for comparing various demographics, as well, and (if not for the odd color choices used in the graphs) are a nice addition.
Check it out:Labels: cartography, google, information graphics
posted at 9:24 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.21.2008
Lifestreaming: Aggregating all your social networking crap.
So, want Microsoft's ever-present life-recording tool, but don't want to wait for it to be invented? Find a lifestreaming tool. I've found one that seems promising: Dipity. It collects a bunch of your social networking data from places like twitter, Facebook, flickr, Picasa, blogger blogs, and pretty much any RSS feed, and places items from those feeds on a timeline. Lots of ways to view them, and it looks like they will be expanding their automated importing options, too. My import went well, although it (for some reason) missed all my blog posts from 2002-05, as well as other posts here and there farther back, which was a bit odd. Maybe it's still importing them (I just started an account literally minutes ago). If you have a chance, check out my timeline. And tell me what you think of the interface.I think it's a good first step for a timeline interface, but it's a bit clunky when you have a ton of info all in one space of time. You can zoom in to the day level of detail, which brings out each event, but it would be nice to see a more intuitive way of viewing the density of events across a wider span of time. You Tufte-ites will know what I mean.Labels: information graphics, interface, visual information
posted at 8:30 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Ask the Design Director of nytimes.com a question
Designers: ever want to know why the New York Times' website looks or operates the way it does? What decisions go into the user interface and information architecture? Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, is answering questions from readers April 21-25. Questions may be sent to askthetimes@nytimes.com. from the Times article about Mr Vinh:As design director, Mr. Vinh leads a group of 11 visual designers, information architects and design technologists in continually improving and extending the user experience at NYTimes.com. Mr. Vinh also writes and lectures extensively about design and technology, and serves on the national board of directors for AIGA, the professional association for design.Labels: design, information graphics, interface, newspapers, web design
posted at 7:10 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.16.2008
Boom Dee Ah Dah
Nice branding ad from the Discovery Channel. Almost makes me forgive them for dropping their sponsorship of one of the best pro cycling teams the US has ever seen.Labels: branding
posted at 8:28 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Watch the outliers: an information graphic
This is one of the twenty-something graphics I created for a book on Participatory Action Research, called (aptly enough) Participatory Action Research for Educational Leadership: Using Data-Driven Decision Making to Improve Schools[this graphic] displays a school, showing both the diversity and clustering of activity within the main influences of the staff and student populations and the few instances where entirely different forces are at work. Leaders at all levels within complex environments such as this illustration continually need to evaluate the questions presented by individuals on the fringe
Speaking from personal experience, I can attest to this. From the time I became a teenager until I graduated from college, I was an outlier within my educational environment. Like a substantial minority of kids, I dressed differently, made different decisions on my educational focus (art! band! philosophy! eek!) and enjoyed being unpredictable enough--at least in the eyes of my peers--that I could fit in with anyone, without really being of any particular group (except for when I was). I never gave educators a headache, but I was an outlier in many ways, and there were enough of us that I am sure we had to be dealt with in a special way--even if it was just to give us a special activity or class to occupy us and keep us out of trouble and enrich us at the same time.
Outliers are more than just social groups. As the book states,Outliers may also indicate the start of important trend. Imagine how strong the academic potential of a school the created a robust [English as a Second Language] department as immigration emerged in the neighborhood rather than waited until the challenge became overwhelming.
So the outlier becomes the hub of "normal" within a few years, and those who weren't paying attention missed the boat.
As to the diagram: I think it does a good job of showing the variety in a typical educational environment, along with the clustering-with-overlapping-and-connecting elements that are present in any catholic environment (bonus points to my readers who know the nonreligious meaning of "catholic", by the way :) In the book it's black and white, but I present it here as displayed in the book's precursor, which was a web-based professional development tool.
If I was developing this solely for the web today, I'd animate it using Flash, to show the change of outliers becoming the norm over time, as well as showing how people within the "norm" move around, how groups wax and wane in popularity and population, and in general showing how dynamic the educational environment really is.Labels: alana, illustration, information graphics, PAR, visual information
posted at 7:47 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.14.2008
Site Launch: CarlSanderSocolow.com photography
I completed a gallery site for Guggenheim Fellow Carl Sander Socolow this morning, and I encourage you to check out his work, entitled Scenes from Civic Life.
His latest project involves documenting the town of Mata Ortiz, in northern Mexico. He writes,This work is a photographic study of the ongoing transformation of a number of heretofore isolated northern Mexican villagers into a community of world-class ceramic artists. This transformation is having a profound historic impact on their lives, the life of their village and on the social, economic and cultural life of the surrounding region. I began this project three-and-a-half years ago with the ambition of depicting the harmonies and paradoxes shaping these artists and their village as both are inexorably compelled, by virtue of an event in the history of art, to confront the modern economic and cultural world and find and take their place within it.
In a town of 3,000 people, more than 400 potters are now working in what has become recognized as a form of high art, he continues. This has an enormous impact on the economic and social life of Mata Ortiz, and Carl's documentation of it it touching for its humanity, artfulness, and compassion. These are real people in his images, not just stereotypes or one-dimensional characters. They are potters, fathers, mothers, daughters, cowboys, baseball enthusiasts, and more.
His other work from the US and europe are also worth viewing. His scenes of a debutante ball and of Venice are especially compelling.Some notes on the site: we experimented with several navigation methods, including a sliding scroll of thumbnail images on the right side of the window, but eventually settled on an arrangement of squared-off elements of each photo, set in a grid, with links to the full image from each photo element. A Java Script runs the enlargement, which also includes title and date information. This format is hierarchically simple, and will make it easy for Carl to add more images whenever he wants by simply adding a thumbnail image to the grid, and linking it to a full-size image with the included script.
above: Courtship with Dog, Mata Ortiz, Mexico, 2004, © 2004 Carl Sander Socolow. All Rights Reserved.Labels: art, clients, interface, photography, web design
posted at 10:55 AM Leave your comments here: 1 comments
4.11.2008
White Gold: No, it's not cocaine
I just caught this campaign for the California Got Milk? campaign, created by San Francisco's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. It's got a heavy dose of Spinal Tap, but the irony is turned up to, er, 11 (one of the main props in the campaign is a milk-filled guitar). They've hit the internets with a MySpace page, a heavy YouTube presence--even t-shirts for the band (!) and a lot of chatter from the various nonprofit marketing and mainstream blogs.It's a lot of fun to see an idea as silly as this fleshed out as completely as this, and have it work as well as I think it does. The proof will be in the pudding, though--specifically, in pudding made with milk, located in California.So where's the Denver creative crew at, for stuff like this? I mean, we have the creativity, but this is more than that; this actually looked like it was a hell of a lot of fun to do.Labels: agencies, branding, creativity, humor, nonprofits
posted at 10:11 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
New Software Friday: Moody
Need another tool to quantify your iTunes Music Library? Well, I did. ratings are fine, and smart playlists that create playlists out of most-played, least-skipped tracks recorded in the '80s by composers with the name "Peter" in them can only get you so far.
Enter Moody.
Moody uses a 16-square grid of color cubes, representing sad and less intense (blue, in the lower-left corner) all the way up to happy and intense (yellow, in the upper-right corner). Running in "Tag" mode, you simply click on the square that corresponds to how the track you're listening to makes you feel. In "Listen" mode, click on a square and Moody plays the tracks you've assigned to that mood. So: it's a rainy friday, and you feel like listening to shoegazer music and feel melancholy? Click the purplish-gray square (row 3, column 2 for me) and you'll get some slightly intense, slightly sad music. Might not be all Cocteau Twins and Brian Ferry--in fact, most of those are probably too intense for that setting--you'll probably end up with some jazz, some blues, a few Rolling Stones tunes...who knows? And that's the beauty of Moody: a seemingly random (but not really) way of listening ot music that fits your mood exactly, because you are the one telling it what music equates to which mood.From an interface perspective, this is a pretty nice solution, although it's not perfect. Ignoring the little intro screen that explains what the grid coordinates correspond to, I was using the Sad, Slow corner to tag grungy blues tracks...but I suppose as long as you are consistent with your tagging methodology, you could assign any two variables to the grid and have it work well for you.I'd actually prefer an infinite number of points, more like a full spectrum, and perhaps be able to draw a vector on the space--say, from just above sad and slightly intense up through slightly happy and very intense--and then get tracks returned from all the points along the line. This would require a heavier tagging scheme on the backend and in the comments area of each iTunes track (where Moody hides its data) but I think it could be done.
Don't want to tag all of your tracks? Take the lazy-man's way out and click the "Upload/Download Tags" button. Moody will send your tags to their database, and pull down tags for songs in your library that other users have tagged, but you haven't. Mind that now you have other people telling you that Black Sabbath's "Children of the Grave" is less sad that you might think it is, but that's the price you pay for being a slacker.
It's free, with donations appreciated, and they even have a beta online player version, too.Labels: interface, music, software
posted at 5:02 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.09.2008
Good Times
I did this sort of thing everyday, once upon a time. Now, with my practice focused more on branding, design and interactive experience, it's a treat to get into the photo studio when I can.This shoot was a day-long affair for a client of mine. They are a small skunk-works operation made up of obsessed lighting engineers. They have a new product coming to market, and asked us to create a product booklet, brand, and shoot the images for the piece as well. They are a fun crew to work with, because they are so passionate about their work, and are obsessive in their attention to detail. At the same time, they are very open to collaboration, new ideas, and new perspectives. This is a great combination: obsessive and open.In any case, I spent a day with Kevin from the group, and two sets of freshly-minted fixtures, down at Camren in their large studio. We shot digitally, and reviewed our shots in realtime, making it easy for a film-boy like me to make decisions on tweaking lighting positions, intensities, and so on. Needless to say it's also a bonus to have a lighting engineer on hand to look over your shoulder as you figure out how your strobes are going to refract through the product's diffuser, say. All-told, we had about ten set-ups, and shot about 200 exposures that I kept. All this for about seven final images for the booklet and their website.I had a great day; great enough that it makes me want to do more work like this. So: you need some photography? I might know a guy.P.S. Once we get the booklet out, I'll post some of the shots from the shoot. -aLabels: clients, creativity, photography
posted at 9:35 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.08.2008
Measuring the Return on Investment for Fundraising Websites
A while ago I prepared a white paper titled "Measuring Return on Investment for Fundraising Website Development" for a client of mine in the non-profit sector. I think it's important enough to share with everyone, so I've posted it here [PDF].
It covers the basics on how to measure online fundraising goals, what to expect in terms of conversion rates, what sorts of metrics are important, and more. It serves as an introduction and overview, and I'd love to talk at length to anyone who reads it and is hungry for more information.Labels: fundraising, nonprofits, ROI
posted at 1:56 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.07.2008
...and if I code all four by then, I get a cookie!
I am web interface boy this week, with three web site projects all hitting the user interface design phase at the same time. What kind of project manager let that happen? Oh, right; that would be me. In any case, it's all good: doing a lot of the same sort of work can improve the quality of work done on all of the projects I'm working on...you get in a groove, and just keep refining and making things better. I told myself when I rolled out of bed this morning that if I got all three interfaces done by Wednesday I'd treat myself to an afternoon by myself at the art museum, or maybe the Museum of Contemporary Art.
I also have another site which had the final bits of content land in-house last week, and am hoping to get that completed and live. It's a great little site, and I can't wait to share it with you guys. Stay tuned.Labels: art, interface, web design
posted at 7:21 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.01.2008
Information equals power: Zimbabwe
Mapping the election conditions in Zimbabwe is Sokwanele. Their post from March 11th has been built upon and added to and contains on-the-ground reports of voter coercion, vote buying, political abductions, voter unrest, and other symptoms of a very tense situation surrounding the elections in Zimbabwe. It's today's best use of GoogleMaps, and a nice bit of information delivery.I think it's obvious what this sort of information can do for people who want to make a difference. The more detailed your level of information is, the better you can right wrongs, address challenges, and make informed policy decisions.Two things that would make it better: less-detailed iconography and hyperlinks to the specific events that are detailed in the map. (via boingboing.net)Labels: cartography, google, information graphics
posted at 11:00 PM Leave your comments here: 1 comments
How you know you went to an art school
...when the top posted items in your school's Facebook network are all in Japanese and probably are links to some sort of nifty anime or motion graphics YouTube reel....
posted at 10:14 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
What Makes a Great Designer?
Adrian Hanft over at Be a Design Group has a nice post on the Five Uncommon Attributes of Good Designers this morning. It rings true not just for the designer in me, but the brand communicator, the photographer, and the marketing consultant as well. Hanft concludes thusly:At the end of the day, designing a logo is relatively easy. Being a good person is the real challenge. I believe that it isn't enough for a good designer to just do good work. A good designer must also be a good person. What are some virtues that you believe help make a better designer?
Read the whole post. It's worth the time.Labels: advice, creativity, design, graphic design
posted at 8:36 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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