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Quote of the Week:

Ok, Denver Egotist, Just back the beer truck up to our office each Friday afternoon...

...and we'll keep your True Identity a Secret. I won't name any names here, but if you really wanted to be so anonymous, you'd be less worried about scrubbing my comments from your "reveal" article (cute post-april-fools-not-an-april-fools-or-is-it-article, BTW) and more careful about your internet footprints.

By the way, we prefer the Breck's 471 IPA and the Steamworks Brewery's Steamworks lager. While we wait for the beer deliveries, please keep up the fun, interesting, and suckless articles coming!

Labels: beer, creativity, denver egotist, lucha libre

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Buy n Large: another great fake brand

Sometimes the best-branded companies aren't even real.



My favorite fake company is probably Hudsucker Industries, the improbable inventors of the hula-hoop ("you know, for kids!"). After that it would probably be Monsters, Inc., notably for the great pains the production team put into making the Monsters Inc. brand believable (they cited Paul Rand and the vision of a postwar industrial giant, fallen on hard times as the thesis of the brand). But the latest is Buy n Large, the company that put humanity in space and off of the garbage-infested Earth, forever, in the new Pixar film WALL-E. check out their website: it's a lovely dash of Onion-like truthiness, recast for framing the backstory for WALL-E. My favorite article in the Buy n Large PR archives is probably how BnL bought the rights to rebrand north. As in, the direction "north".

So, since the weekend is upon us, go see a movie. And stay away from the NANC-E bot...a nanny robot with pincers like that looks dangerous.


Check the lazyinternet to find more good fake brands, too.

Labels: branding, humor

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6.26.2008

The List, Item Four: Organize (one thing at a time)

Item Four on my dad's esktop list was this:

Organize (one thing at a time).

"Organize" is a pretty loaded word, because it means different things to different people. The dictionary defines it as

"to arrange into a structured whole"; from the latin root "organum", meaning instrument or tool.

Looking at the root is helpful for me, because it breaks down the whole concept of organization into something a little less terrifying. All organization should be is a tool to facilitate getting things done. It shouldn't be something to obsess about, or worry over. It's just like a computer, or a hammer, or a coffeepot. It serves a purpose in your life, and you don't need to dress it up with multiple trips to The Container Store in order to make it work for you (unless, of course, such trips make the experience better for you).

The deeper note that this list item sounds is that dad felt being organized meant doing one thing at a time. Don't multitask. As studies have shown, multitasking actually makes people less productive. Arrange your workspace (physical and mental) to deal with just one thing at a time. For a lot of folks, that means actually having a (relatively) clean space in front of you, where any relevant materials related to the One Thing You Are Working On can reside. And it helps me to shut down e-mail for a while, or at least close the mail application window. Other than that, for me anyhow, I don't need much else. What helps you to be organized to deal with just one thing at a time?

Labels: productivity

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6.25.2008

The List, Item Three: Delegate (But not just the Unpleasant Things)

Once you have minions, it's only natural to want to give them all the scut-work. But if you want loyal minions, well, then you have to treat them well. And that means giving them something other than scut-work to do.

I found (as a minion myself) that the best way to learn is by doing. And the best bosses let you do the things that you wanted to learn. Sure,m you don't always do it right the first time. And sure, it takes more supervision by the boss to make sure it gets done right, at least eventually. But the act of doing, and letting it be done, grows confidence in two directions. The doer gains confidence by successfully learning a task, and the boss gains confidence in the employee. Win-win. But if you are a control freak (designers, I am looking at you!) then it's hard to let go of anything. But it's necessary if you want a team you can rely on.

Of course, by delegating, you have the added benefit of gaining time to work on other tasks (bringing in more business, doing higher-paying tasks for clients, having a three-martini lunch).

So: delegate stuff. And make sure there's some fun, challenging stuff in there. It's one of the best ways to make your design team more successful.

Labels: productivity

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Bike to Work Day

If you forgot to bike to work today, with the rest of us, make up for it by biking in tomorrow. You'll still get credit for it in my book. But only if you wear a tie.



photo by Mark Wolff, Rocky Mountain News

Labels: humor, work

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6.24.2008

The List, Item Two: Say No when You Have To.

This one is hard, especially if you're hungry for opportunities to do every new thing that comes around. Or if you need the cash. Or if you want to keep everyone happy. But Saying "NO" is just as important a task as saying "YES".

Saying "no" when you have to allows you to get the stuff that's already on your plate done. No nagging distraction of the bright shiny new thing/problem/issue/project to distract you; if you're like me, saying yes to new things in the middle of an ongoing slog of a project is a wonderfully sly form of procrastination: how could you be shirking work when you just committed to a whole additional project, you know? But all you've really done is add something to The Pile, as we call it here. And The Pile is not something we like to keep around for very long, because all it does is bring us down. Because if it's in The Pile, it's not getting done. Which has the added non-benefit of really pissing off whomever asked you to do it in the first place.

So: say no when you have to, and you'll keep yourself--and your clients and your fellow workers happier.

Labels: productivity

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6.23.2008

VIrtual Water: today's nice infographic

The Virtual Water Project has designed a nice poster showing the amount of water it takes to grow certain consumables. AN excerpt from the site:

The main intention of this poster is to show how much freshwater is used to produce selected products - hoping for people to rethink their consumption patterns. The visualization of nation’s footprints tries to draw the big picture and sensitize for local problems in differnt parts of the world.
The poster is rather a rough summary of the virtual water issue, than a step-by-step instructions to lower your personal water footprint.

While it isn't a guide on how to lower your water footprint, it does make you aware of how much raw energy (in this case in the form of water) is needed to make, say, the hamburger you had for lunch.

Raise a glass of H2O to the Strange Attractor for pointing us to this.

Labels: information graphics

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6.20.2008

Weegee: Still one of the best photojournalists ever.

The NY Times is running a nice overview of Weegee's life and career online right now. If you are jaded about the main stream media, it's like a nice little palette cleanser--from the 1940s.

Labels: photography

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The List, Item One: Do the Unpleasant Stuff First

These posts aren't specifically design-related, but they do speak to a working methodology that I have learned a lot from: my dad's. He had a list in his office that served as a set of guidelines for how to get things done quickly, efficiently, and well. I have no idea if he came up with it himself, or if he got it from somewhere else (although I suspect it might be a mix of the two), but having tried out The List on my own, it certainly has helped. So I wanted to share it with you.

The first thing on the list: Do the unpleasant stuff first.

There are several advantages of tackling the things that really make you cringe right off the bat. The best thing about it is that you get it done, it's out of the way, and you can now focus on things that you are more excited about. And a lot of times, if you do that Unpleasant Thing, you find that it wasn't so bad, after all. In most cases, what's the worst that could happen? Someone getting mad at you? Be disappointed in you? I'm not discounting these things as being bad--because in some contexts, they really can sting--but as they say in the old world, "you've still got your health, right?"

What this rule does for me is it forces me to look at my list of Stuff To Do and find that one thing that I would otherwise weave my way around until there was nothing else on that list to do....and then I'd probably make a new list with a bunch of other stuff on it in order to keep avoiding doing That Thing.

The problem is, That Thing would still be there. And it's not going away. The worst case scenario is that it's actually getting worse, just like an untreated wound festers without proper attention. So you need to get up out of your comfy chair and deal with it. Ideally, you'll get the most unwanted item off your plate, and lighten your work- and psychic loads. And even in the worst of all worlds--hey, at least you won't have it hanging off your shoulder like the proverbial albatross. Forever.

Labels: performance, productivity, ROI, work

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6.19.2008

Animator vs. Animation

Ever thought your Flash animation was actually working against you? Like it knew you were under deadline, and was trying to make you late? Well, now there's proof.

Tip o' the Wacom Stylus to Heather GM for the twitter about it.

Labels: flash, hgm, humor

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6.17.2008

Been gone for a bit...

But I am back in Denver, now.

I went up to Oregon with my wife and our youngest (still only 5 months old) to visit friends and family, and do a little work as well. Here's what you missed while I was gone:

Fried Chocolate Pie: Almost as good as the amazing pulled pork, shrimp, beef brisket, greens, coleslaw, and mashed potatoes at the Russel St. BBQ, on (where else?) Russell Street in Portland. Even better with some LSD from down the street.

The Shed Shot: espresso, whipped cream, and chocolate syrup. Available at (where else?) The Tin Shed Cafe, on NE Alberta in Portland

Spontaneous Goldsworthyesque environmental sculpture: made down near Eugene.

Best of all: we got to celebrate my sister in-law's tenth anniversary in PDX, and fellow SCAD grad and web design/traveler HGM and taijim's 20th anniversary down in EUG. And HGM insists we will all be blogging about more made up food very soon.

Labels: oregon, portland, travel

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6.09.2008

Great PSA for Cyclist Awareness from the UK

Check it out:



tap o' the brakes to the folks riding a bike from Alaska to Chilé.

Labels: advertising, cycling, PSA, TV

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6.05.2008

Photography in Public Places? Yep, Still legal.

Bruce Schneier's posts are some of the most thought-out essays providing an antidote to the official Sky Is Falling message that the TSA puts out there regarding national security. Today he talks about why the current infatuation with harrassing, assaulting, and imprisoning photgoraphers making images of public buildings in public places is not productive:

...[If] terrorists did photograph their targets, the math doesn't make sense. Billions of photographs are taken by honest people every year, 50 billion by amateurs alone in the US And the national monuments you imagine terrorists taking photographs of are the same ones tourists like to take pictures of. If you see someone taking one of those photographs, the odds are infinitesimal that he's a terrorist.

Read the whole post here.

Labels: photography, tsa

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I know advertisers want to capture eyeballs, but _really_.

I'm going to talk like a cranky old man for a minute.

As someone who designs Flash ads for clients all the time, I know there is a lot of pressure on advertisers to get people in the door, past just the passive viewing (or ignoring) of an online ad. Many strategies have been tried throughout the years. Pop-up windows have almost completely gone away, as users install pop-up blockers (or just disable them, as you can in FIrefox and Safari). And then there are the annoying, spasmodic animations within ads (remember the dancing baby? And the latest odd hula-hooplike gyrating man or woman jiggling with glee at getting a low home mortgage rate?) And then there is the occasional ad that plays sound without your permission (although most publishers' ad guidelines forbid this).

Perhaps the most interesting one seen recently is the two-space integrated ad, pioneered by Apple on the New York Times website: it featured a banner above the main editorial content, with a double-wide skyscraper banner to the right of the editorial content...and the animations reacted to each other, effectively integrating the structure of the whole page into part of the layout for the ad.

The important feature of this ad is that it didn't interfere with editorial content. Nothing was obscured, and the sound had to be manually turned on.

So you can imagine my surprise (or disappointment, rather) when I saw this ad for Radio Shack on the Times' site:



See the packet of electronics breaking out of the banner? Well, I was too slow on the Command-Shift-4 to capture the full magnitude of the intrusion, but jsut prior to that, it had actually obscured the little chart below it and to the left, as well as the sidebar info to the right. It was hard to miss, true, and it did make me remember Radio Shack. But not exactly in a good way. More in the "I hate your annoying flash ads, Radio Shack" sort of way.

Now, the TImes' advertising board had to approve this ad, too, so the blame doesn't lie just with the advertiser. I've seen this technique used at the Rocky Mountain News as well, but on their site the ad covered nearly the entire top half of the viewable content. Not cool.

If I want an immersive dialogue with an advertiser, tease me within the boundaries of the ad space. If it's compelling enough, I'll Click To Play anytime. Otherwise, respect the reason why people are viewing the page in the first place: for the content.

Now get off of my lawn!

Labels: advertising, flash, interface

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Where the Democratic Candidates got their votes: some variations on the NY Times graphic

Amanda Cox and Farhana Hossain at the New York Times put together a graphic showing where in the US Obama and Clinton got their votes during the grueling, historic five month primary season this year. It's (as always) a nice visual explanation (click on any of the images to enlarge them):


While this is an accurate representation of the votes each candidate got, I noticed that it reflected some more general trends, in terms of geography. Obama did well in a wide swath from Philadelphia, down the east coast, and then well into Texas, for example. Clinton had support through the New England/Allegheny/Appalachia/South-Central portion of the midwest, and on down into rural Texas.

In terms of looking at this in a more general geographic sense, the precise circles of vote tallies made these broader areas of influence more segmented. So, in a spare ten minutes I made a couple of variations on Cox and Hossain's map that (while admittedly far less accurate) show the more general voting geography:

This one takes the green and blue colors the Times has used throughout the campaign to display Obama and Clinton votes and gives them a higher degree of color contrast by placing them in red and blue. Already I think the broader geographic trends are more visible. But I wanted to smear the data a little more, so I did just that: a little gaussian blur, followed by some increase in contrast, then a filling of the selected areas with a flat color (note that my half-assed casual attempt results in some obvious inaccuracies in which candidate got votes in some of the smaller datasets....now that I've mentioned it, feel free not to pick at me for it):


Now, this is a very general graphic, compared with the original. In many ways it is inaccurate. But it also helps to give a general picture of the topography of the race. I think there is some value in this, and I am sure that with the precinct-by-precinct data available to both the politicos and the journalists that create visual representations of a campaign a more accurate and at the same time more general picture of such campaign results (or polls or projections) could be generated. I'd love to see them, alongside the more traditional visual information graphics that we have become accustomed to seeing at the Times.

Labels: information graphics, politics, visual information

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Planning the shed--er, the office.

I met with my wonderful architect Liz Biondi today to flesh out our plans for my backyard work oasis, where I plan on moving the Notchcode offices as soon as timer, construction labor, and money permits. After our first meeting where Liz had asked a lot of great questions about what I wanted in a workspace/relaxing space (because any creative process requires a certain amount of room to breathe, so to speak), Liz drew up a plan that I really liked.

The only problem was that we'd have to pull in another water tap, a sewer tap, and potentially a gas line...three items that are budget-busters. So today we looked at a smaller space (although it's still around 400 square feet...not exactly a tiny space) that nixed the bathroom and hard-plumbed coffee bar (but we're still gonna have fine coffee beverages there, because otherwise I would be unable to function in any meaningful capacity).

Some highlights (besides the coffee bar, of course): good north light, passive (and possibly active) solar, all the server/printer/storage enclosed and out of the way, guest accommodations, room for 2-3 worker bees, and a space set aside for the enormous Argus light table I plan on prying out of the hands of one of my printers, since they aren't doing as much stripping as they used to.

Plans will be posted here as they become available. I want to share my experience with the rest of the design and home-working universe and get feedback from you all to make this the best creative space it can be!

Labels: architecture, productivity, work

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It's like a highly erudite game of Tetris

I know, I am an admitted fanboy of the nytimes.com information graphics staff, but with flash-enabled interactive data like this, who wouldn't be?

Labels: information graphics, visual information

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6.04.2008

Creative Inspiration for the Week: The Malagan Fish Figure at the DAM

I was out with my girls this week at the Denver Art Museum, and they directed me towards the Malagan Fish Figure in the Oceanic Collection. Wonderful patterns, and a great color palette:


Notes from the piece's page online:

This sculpture was made by an unknown artist on the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, for use in an indigenous Malagan ceremony. The entire surface is covered with brilliantly colored geometric designs that serve to unify the three parts of the composition: the central fish and the two male human figures attached to its side and snout. The fish is carved from a single piece of wood; open projections form its mouth and dorsal fins.

As a bonus, there are three wonderful Motherwell paintings just around the corner. Go check out the third floor of the Hamilton Building, if you are in the neighborhood, for some creative revitalization.

Labels: art, creativity

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6.03.2008

This week's Playlist

if you're looking for some new (to you) music, have a peek at some of what we're listening to this week:

Waiting in Vain (Remix) Bob Marley
Wildwood Flower Bill Frisell
Aganju (Latin Project Remix) Bebel Gilberto
All Together Now The Beatles
All You Need Is Love The Beatles
Always Returning Brian Eno
Driving Sideways Aimee Mann
Halfway To Dawn Billy Strayhorn
Change My Ways (Part 2) Galactic
Casey Jones Grateful Dead
Jeep on 35 John Scofield
Police & Thieves Junior Murvin
Rock Lobster The B-52's

No really new new songs here, but a few are making their way into regular rotation for the first time in a while. John Scofield has been rather absent until now, and Brian Eno has been keeping us in the zone while we conceptualize.

Labels: music

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6.02.2008

Those NASA folks love their Firefox

...or at least those who designed and approved the "Mars Phoenix" branding do. Have a look:

Here's the latest Firefox logo:


...and the Mars Phoenix logo:



Perhaps it's all open source up there in space?

Labels: branding

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Even Ira Glass Sucked before he got good.

Sometimes it's the people who know a good thing when they see it that know they aren't a good thing, themselves. At least not yet.

Ira Glass, of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life, is quite arguably one of our best storytellers currently broadcasting. He puts together compelling stories of every facet of our country's experience, told through the deceptively normal tales of the people around us. Stories that are compelling enough to keep nearly two million people coming back to hear more every week. And, apparently, he took a really long time to get good at it. Over eight years, in fact. And while he was sucking it up on NPR, where he worked before doing This American Life, he knew his writing and performances weren't as good as he wanted them to be. Now, this level of self-awareness isn't necessarily unique--in fact, Glass posits that all creative people, the ones who really are impassioned to make something unique to share with the world, these are the people who are the most aware of what a good piece of art is; and they are also (even sometimes they don't admit it to themselves) the most self-critical. As they work through the beginnings of their careers as creatives, they know they aren't good enough. At least not yet.

In this short video, Glass gives all creatives a locker room pep talk, telling us that it might seem like the game is over, but really it's not even halftime, and that we have to keep our heads in the game and persevere. And if we do? We'll come out on top. Or at least, a lot farther than we thought we could.

tip o' the Rapidograph to the Denver Egotist and Kottke for the link.

Labels: creativity, work

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