Getting social: Four easy tips

So you want your employees to be your social-media advocates?
It's surprising more companies don't do this, noted Josh Bernoff, co-author of Groundswell and senior VP-idea development at Forrester Research, in an e-mail interview. "Employees speak for the company often at conferences, on sales calls and the like," he said. "Companies need to extend their policies to social media, but the principles are the same."

Whether you have a structured program like Smokey Bones or are just facing the reality that your employees are out there -- and talking about you -- here are a few pointers.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. This is a tip cribbed from Intel's employee social-media guidelines. The company encourages full-timers and contractors to have a social-media presence but urges them to "stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what's going on at Intel and in the world."

BE HUMAN. If a big reason for social communication is to "humanize" a brand, for goodness sakes don't babble on in marketing speak and inside lingo. Encourage employees to speak in first person and be real.



KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY AND ANGST. Everything an employee says could be heard by a customer, including the last one. So remember, being transparent and authentic doesn't mean they have to say everything on their mind. It's the difference between 'It's so hot outside," or "Do you think we should paint?" and "I hated those guys who just ordered lemonade," said Terry Dry, president of Fanscape, a Los Angeles-based digital word-of-mouth marketing agency.

BUILD AN ARMY. Make it part of people's jobs, said Forrester's Mr. Bernoff. "It's great for somebody to have a job as a tweeter. [It's] much better if tweeting, Facebook, blogging, etc. is part of lots of employees' jobs."

-- Emily York and Abbey Klaassen

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137595

photo/ gageyoung.com

Simple Truth

by Robin Grant

If we actually stopped and listened to what consumers were saying instead of just muscling our way into the conversation, we would find that the vast majority of people promote brands to each other based on simple, rational, tangible truths about the product or service. This isn’t surprising, people find big abstract brand ideas almost impossible to articulate and, even if they could, would never admit to their peers that that were the reason they made a purchase.

Now, it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that emotion plays a huge role in individual brand decisions. But this is not the way people talk to each other about brands and if this is what we’re trying to unlock, we have to recognise this.

http://wearesocial.net/

The paradox of the middle of the market

By Seth Godin

The middle of the market is the juicy part, where profit meets scale.

The paradox is that it's almost impossible to make a product or service for this segment, because they want the tried, the true and the boring.

A friend writes a blog and books for this market. They need his writing. He delivers a lot of value. And yet, it's going to take years (if ever) before he reaches them. That's because this market doesn't seek out new ideas, doesn't leave comments on blogs, doesn't spend a lot of time urging others to check out this new thing. He's spending all his focus on this market, and they're not repaying his focus with their attention.

The middle of the market is the home of Sinatra, Diamond, and Streisand. There's an endless list of others that would like to break in, but it rarely happens. The leading edge of the market is a lot smaller, but far easier to cater to, because those folks are looking and listening and talking. The middle will catch up, eventually, but that doesn't mean you have to bet on them.

In my post yesterday, I talked about the temptation to merely pander to the geeks. It's not that difficult to write a blog, for example, that repeatedly shows up on Digg or Reddit. The thing is, this audience is fickle and they don't often convert into paying customers or long-term fans. It's not that difficult to be haute couture, to be fashionable, cutting edge or fickle. What's difficult is figuring out how to make it pay.

I'm not talking about compromising or dumbing down your product. A very hot hot sauce is remarkable. A sort of hot one is boring, and no one, not even the geeks will talk about it. I'm talking about designing products that are simultaneously remarkable and palatable to people in the middle of the market.

The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle. The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It's a difficult balancing act, but it's the only one that works.

Ultimately, you end up disappointing the hard core that first found you, but because of their initial enthusiasm (and more important, because you designed your work for the masses in the first place), your product crosses the chasm and reaches a larger group. The formula starts with a service or product that's purple enough to spread, but not so hyper-fashionable that it merely entertains the insiders.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/the-paradox-of-the-middle-of-the-market.html

Ya Gotta Have (Real) Friends

By TONY WOODLIEF

My 4-year-old son, Isaac, is in his bedroom, putting on a shirt. He talks to himself as he harasses the buttons into their holes. "Everybody loves me," he says. "I love me. I don't know who doesn't love me. Nobody doesn't love me." My little aspiring pop star/cult leader comes to his logical conclusion: "All love me."

Being loved by everyone sounds wonderful, and perhaps it's possible when one's universe of friends is as small as Isaac's. I once heard him run down the list, naming his brothers, his parents, his friends. This seemed to give him a particular form of pleasure, to say a name and announce that he is loved by that person. What Isaac hasn't learned is that there are gradations of friends, and different kinds of love, and cycles to life. I don't know many adults who can, like Isaac, list without hesitation or doubt the people who genuinely love them.

It's a tempting exercise in narcissism nonetheless, and suitable for our day. Now may be a better time than ever to think about friendship, because we can maintain some semblance of it with more people than ever before. Isaac is far more likeable than I, yet on paper I dominate -- he can go through his entire friend list before his Cheerios get soggy, while I have 298 friends on Facebook alone. But while Isaac can say with confidence that everyone in his little circle loves him, I'm not sure if everyone in my huge circle even likes me. What's worse, I don't know if I care. Two-hundred ninety-eight genuine friendships sounds exhausting.

Friendship seems to be the key, however, to a longer, happier life. Recently The Atlantic published a fascinating story by Joshua Wolf Shenk about Harvard's Grant Study, which in 1937 began following 268 undergraduates through the intimate details of their lives. Some of the men drank themselves to death and others became prosperous and powerful. Some had loving marriages, others made multiple women unhappy. While no formula seems to emerge from these accounts, the study's longtime head, George Vaillant, claims love is the most essential ingredient. David Brooks at the New York Times gives it a more clinical-sounding summation: "Relationships are the key to happiness."
Of course it's not the quantity of relationships that matters, or else Isaac and I would find our outlooks reversed. There's the quality of friendship to be considered, something social network sites neglect. In fact, maybe a high number of relationships indicates shallow friendships. Think about it: We acquire friends through our experiences -- where we live, go to school and work. We have more opportunities to make friends the broader these experiences. But the more far-flung our adventures, the less time we have to grow roots in one place and develop intimate bonds.

That's an appealing theory, but we all know of people who defy it. In "The Girls From Ames," for example, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow offers a heart-lifting account of 11 women who became friends as children in Ames, Iowa, and have remained close even as their lives carry them through marriages, divorces, business success, unemployment, childrearing, illnesses and the deaths of loved ones -- all of it spread across multiple cities. Mr. Zaslow's exploration of research into friendship indicates that women are more likely than men to sustain such intimacy. "Women talk," writes Mr. Zaslow. "Men do things together." With modern communication devices women can do more talking than ever, no matter where they live or how busy their lives become. When male friends move away or start a family, however, the opportunities for doing things together -- the dominant expression of their friendship -- diminish.

Given the research indicating how important friendships are to health (Mr. Zaslow cites one study where women with the most friends lived 22% longer than those with the fewest number), perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that women tend to outlast men. And if Digby Anderson, author of "Losing Friends," is to be believed, we'll need medical improvements to carry a greater burden, because friendship and its social benefits are on the wane, done in partly by a left-wing emphasis on egalitarianism over loyalty, and a right-wing elevation of the nuclear family. Valuable same-sex friendship institutions (Elks clubs and the like) and norms have deteriorated, he argues, especially among men. While men are hard-wired to live out friendship through shared activities, legal and social pressures render them less able to do so.

We needn't rely on the research; we can surmise that friendship is essential to life by the myriad ways we tailor the word friend to our individual wants: work friend, church friend, drinking friend, workout friend, friend with benefits. We are less than we were meant to be, it seems, without friends. Wendell Berry captures this idea: "By ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity." In "Friendship: An Exposé," Joseph Epstein is more blunt: "Friends can be an immense complication, a huge burden, a royal pain in the arse. . . ." Yet, he writes, "without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost."

We assemble relationships because we need them, but many of us -- particularly men -- shrink from intimacy, generating the modern dilemma of dense social networks afflicted with loneliness. Allan Bloom indicates this in "Love and Friendship": "Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time." He decried the word "relationship" as "pallid" and "pseudoscientific," itself an obstacle to genuine intimacy.

My 298 Facebook friends aren't the ones who remember our dead daughter's birthday or leave flowers at her grave. Nor among them is the pastor who baptized each of our children and waged a personal holy war to keep our marriage from crumbling years ago. We have these deeper friendships because we've tried to build a life in one place. They sprang up because the stuff of life happened to this cluster of us living near one another, and much of it was too joyous or heartbreaking not to share with someone. If friendship is the key to happiness, then maybe this is the key to friendship, to be enmeshed -- not just tangentially or voyeuristically, but physically -- in the lives of others. That can be hard to swallow in a culture that prizes individualism, mobility and privacy.

And perhaps that is why Isaac is so confident in his affections, because the boy isn't self-absorbed enough yet to value individualism as an end. His idea of mobility is to ride his bike without training wheels, and he hasn't -- trust me on this -- the first inkling of what privacy means. He doesn't have a great many friends, this child. But he loves everyone he knows, and I'm pretty sure they love him. Would that we were all so lucky.

Mr. Woodlief's memoir, "Somewhere More Holy," will be published by Zondervan in 2010.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W13

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476939261008701.html

Behance Gives Creatives a New Approach to Business

The Behance Research Team is led by Scott Belsky, founder of Behance LLC in New York City. Scott and the Behance crew have been studying exceptionally productive people and teams working in the creative fields. Behance has been documenting the methods and resources that productive creative professionals use to make ideas happen.

Behance's blog has been humming since January of 2007, and has been busy around the blogosphere. They've been featured on MSNBC, Sirius Radio, and blogs including LifeDev, LifeHacker, CoolHunting, Daily Candy, and many others.

As if doing some exceptional blogging wasn't enough, Behance has also launched a product line that is featured in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art stores.

The Behance team is made up of designers, developers, product designers, and researchers. Scott Belsky, Behance's founder, previously worked in Goldman Sachs' Pine Street team, an initiative for leadership development and organizational improvement. Scott has spent almost five years studying the creative professional community. He graduated Cornell University and holds 50% of an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Here's a fun little fact: The languages spoken natively in the Behance office include Spanish, French, English, and PHP.


http://liferemix.net/blogs/behance

It was a simple proposition: Get a job at Best Buy.

A few months ago at the 4A’s, Tom Carroll challenged planners to get out there and get their hands dirty. Just recently, Scott Stanner from TBWA\Chiat\Day in LA did just that for our Pioneer client.

He became a part-time employee at the infamous American electronic superstore, Best Buy.

He tells us his story:

It was a simple proposition: Get a job at Best Buy.


The objective was to give the Pioneer team insight into the culture surrounding the Brand’s largest sales channel. Scott called it: Project Blue Shirt (because all Best Buy employees must wear blue shirts). Here’s what he focused on:

- How Pioneer was perceived in the retail environment and how their products were sold on the floor
- Ways Pioneer could influence the retail environment
- The lifestyles and behaviors of flat panel shoppers
- The lifestyles and behaviors of Best Buy sales associates
- The typical consumer mindset at purchase

We needed to know more about what really goes on in the retail environment. Conventional account planning would consist
of interviewing Best Buy sales associates, perhaps chatting with consumers as they enter, or conducting focus groups.
All of that can be incredibly tedious and monotonous. So, Scott decided to work in the home theater department at Best Buy
for a month and document the experience. This wasn’t "work in Taco Bell for a day," it was palpable and concrete. Scott
got to witness the sights, sounds and smells of the Best Buy floor over an extended period of time. Here is what Scott said about his experience: “From the first orientation/team meeting I was called in at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday, I knew I was in for a one-of-a-kind experience. After some initial hazing – including being called up in front of the entire store to act out the song 'YMCA' by the Village People – I was able to settle in and get a deep look inside the culture of the employees and the typical consumer moods and anxiety levels as they shopped for a flat panel TV.

"As the job progressed, I injected myself into the employee culture and cultivated relationships with the managers, fellow sales associates, warehouse workers and security guards. The internal culture was well defined and vibrant. Employees buy into the Best Buy brand – a positive atmosphere where employees are friends, you can let your personality hang out, and you’re recognized for your enthusiasm. Individual store pride is almost collegiate in its intensity.

"The impact of Best Buy on American culture is pretty remarkable. From the 40-Year-Old Virgin to the wealth of videos on YouTube, Best Buy represents a unique gathering place that can bring out the best and worst in people. I was exposed to the full gamut: harsh, frustrated and exasperated people as well as genuinely nice, patient shoppers. "But this is only a snippet of the experience. I also suffered a bit of identity loss, an increase in alcohol intake and a permanent aversion to the Village People. But I’d do it again."

Thank you, Scott, for sharing this story.
All too often we get stuck in our own world, never finding time to discover anyone else’s – most importantly, our audience's.

http://www.tbwa.com/content/pdf_store/7/TBWA__Thursday_by_JMD_1969_344.pdf

Information is Currency

New Wealth
May 14th, 2009 by mikekarnj

According to Wikipedia, “wealth is an abundance of valuable material possessions or resources. ‘Wealth’ refers to some accumulation of resources, whether abundant or not. ‘Richness’ refers to an abundance of such resources. A wealthy (or rich) individual, community, or nation thus has more resources than a poor one. Richness can also refer to at least basic needs being met with abundance widely shared.”

So, in the old economy, wealth was determined by how much money you have, your family name, your school, etc. Most of the things you’ve seen in high society or the upper class. The problem with this definition of wealth is that it’s purely destructive. When a person is motivated by the pursuit of profit, he or she will start making decisions outside the normal realm of morals and ethics.

If you’ve seen the film, The Corporation, they reveal that “a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.” Symptoms include the “callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.” Pretty scary huh? Enron, Worldcom, sweatshops, and Madoff are great examples of this psychopath behavior and the consequences that result from it.



What I’ve noticed is this notion and concept of “new wealth.” Within our generation, it doesn’t matter how much money you make or how “wealthy” you are through monetary means. With the collapse of the financial system (from psychopathic investment bankers) to the numerous corporations filing for bankruptcy, we’ve seen what “business and wealth” will cause individuals to do.

The currency around “new wealth” revolves around your creativity, innovation, cross-displinary networks, and what you’ve actually done to make this world a better place. These are the people that are “rich” in my books. Not the investment bankers on wall street leveraging more buyouts with inflated money that doesn’t actually exist to make an extra buck.

As we move into this conceptual age, the new currency should revolve around creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and not on making billions at the expense of others. I’m just glad that the majority of investment bankers have finally moved out of Manhattan because the “wealthy” creative folks are finally moving back in.

—–
Michael is the Co-Founder of All Day Buffet. You can follow his updates by following him on Twitter.

http://www.alldaybuffet.org/2009/05/14/new-wealth/#more-2258

How might we design a participatory system?

Those who have stuck with me all week, know that I believe that participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society. Whether it is in the fundamentals of how we think about wealth or the economy, how we parse the minutiae of individual transactions, or how we evolve our most important social systems such as health care, I believe that the interconnectedness of our information society makes this shift inevitable and highly desirable.

The question that I inevitably ask as a designer is how we design these kinds of participatory systems?

The first and most obvious response to this question is that it really is all about we, not I. In other words, corporations and their designers cannot presume to conceive of, design and engineer complete systems and role them out to the enthusiastic applause of the masses. The best examples of current participatory systems included a significant amount of “user” participation in the design process itself. Whether it is Facebook or Apple, the richness and variety of their offerings are created by untold developers, not employed by the host brand, who have created solutions never imagined by the original architects of the platform.

But there are other design principles that must be considered here. First, and foremost, these systems need to be human-centered. Nobody will participate in a system that does not serve his or her needs, and hence those involved in design, whether inside or outside conventional organizations, must master the skills of human centered design thinking.

Additionally, these systems should be fractal. By this I mean they must work at both the small and large scale. Industrial production and consumerism relied on mass scale to operate. Millions of products were made at a low cost and distributed to millions of consumers; in those systems, individuals and small organizations typically could not compete with large-scale industrial corporations. Participative systems must be as relevant to a market of one as to a market of millions. Digital technology offers the flexibility to operate at very different scales. Any participatory offering must make effective use of the Internet.

As I discussed earlier in my post, :”Why We Need Economic Dashboards“, we have to design interactions that are profitable for all participants. And that profit must be measurable on one or more of the dimensions of the participation economy, even if they have associated costs on other dimensions. This way every interaction becomes a productive investment, not an act of consumption. This means we must design in the information feedback loops that make measurement of the various forms of participatory value easy. Robert Wright proposed a related idea in his book Non-Zero. My interpretation of his thesis is that good participatory systems will not rely on zero-sum trading of finite resources but will instead allow everyone to make a profit.

Earlier, I also mentioned information transparency. Figuring out how to make information transparent, and understandable, will unlock unanticipated forms of value and help create the “multiplier effects” recently explained by President Obama in his defense of the bank bailout.

It’s likely that the best ideas that emerge from our networks will not be those decreed from on high by senior executives or government officials. Hence we also need to design processes that allow us to spot new patterns, encourage the evolution of new ideas, and help new ideas scale to the point where they have impact. This is a different approach to innovation and management than the one we have been reliant upon for the last hundred years. It will take some getting used to. Gary Hamel has lots to say about this in his book The Future of Management.

Rapid prototyping and “learning by making” is already an accepted strategy for effective innovation. For participatory systems, this is even more important because the complexity of the interactions cannot possibly be anticipated by even the smartest of plans. The reality is that these prototypes cannot live in the lab; they have to be let out into the wild. So, we need to start getting comfortable with letting others participate in our innovation activities. Of course this means that many of our accepted notions of IP and trade secrets go out of the window. This is very scary for the lawyers.

Over the coming months I am hoping to build a clearer and more precise set of design principles for participatory systems and I would welcome your ideas for new principles. I’d also appreciate your thoughts on whether this thesis makes any sense at all!

originally posted at Fast Company.
http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=301/#content

Businesses Need to be Social

Digital Agencies: Drag your clients into the Social Media age

May 12, 2009 by neilpotter


I read a great article by Social Media Consultant, Joanne Jacobs, the other afternoon on Selling Social Media. It really got me thinking about the significance of not only educating, but forcing our clients into building their digital marketing strategy around the web 2.0 phenomenon that is changing the way we are communicating.

Social media is not just a group of new technologies. It’s not just a Facebook fan page or sticking some social networking bookmarks at the end of a blog post. It’s a completely new way of thinking… and it’s our job to make sure our clients ‘get it’? – No one said this was going to be easy.

Taking Twitter as an example – you’d be forgiven for thinking that is just a new way of shouting messages to the customer base like an RSS news feed. It’s not. It’s a robust tool to listen, engage and connect on a personal level with the ‘real’ people who are buying your product or service. It’s all about conversation. But getting your client to really understand this is an art form in itself.

Adopting a social media strategy is a huge learning curve. It takes time and patience to get it right and will provide even the most open-minded PR manager a migraine. But ignoring it and hoping it goes away just isn’t going to happen. We need to drag our clients into the social media age – but more than that, we need them to embrace it with both arms open – not just dip their toes in the water.

We’re here to aid our clients in the creation of conversation through social media, digest everything and provide them with statistics to show them exactly what’s going on out there.

Hardcore social media heads are getting worried about monetising social media and weakening its power. They’re insisting it’s not a ‘sellable product’ – but in Joanne’s words – “Try staying in business for the next five years without it.”

Every type of digital agency needs to take note as social media changes the digital landscape – Design & Build agencies at the flexibility and customisation options of new platforms, Media agencies at new ways of advertising and so on. The quicker we are in convincing our clients that Social media is here to stay, the better.

http://digitalagencyblog.wordpress.com/

Web Design is 95% Typography

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Information design is typography
Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.
With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of an information designer. It is the information designer’s task “to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him”.

Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information design”. So to speak, information designers nowadays do the job that typographers did 30 years ago:

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.
Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance. Organizing blocks of text and combining them with pictures, isn’t that what graphic designers, usability specialists, information architects do? So why is it such a neglected topic?

Too few fonts? Resolution too low?
The main—usually whiny—argument against typographical discipline online is that there are only few fonts available. The second argument is that the screen resolution is too low, which makes it hard to read pixelated or anti-aliased fonts in the first place.

The argument that we do not have enough fonts at our disposition is as good as irrelevant: During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work:

The typographer shouldn’t care too much what kind of fonts he has at his disposal. Actually the choice of fonts shouldn’t be his major concern. He should use what is available at the time and use it the best he can.

Choosing a typeface is not typography
The second argument is not much better. In the beginning of printing the quality of printed letters was way worse than what we see on the screen nowadays. More importantly, if handled professionally, screen fonts are pretty well readable.

Information design is not about the use of good typefaces, it is about the use of good typography. Which is a huge difference. Anyone can use typefaces, some can choose good typefaces, but only few master typography.

Treat text as a user interface
Yes, it is annoying how different browsers and platforms render fonts, and yes, the resolution issue makes it hard to stay focused for more than five minutes. But, well, it is part of a web designer’s job to make sure that texts are easy and nice to read on all major browsers and platforms. Correct leading, word and letter spacing, active white space, and dosed use of color help readability. But that’s not quite it. A great web designer knows how to work with text not just as content, he treats “text as a user interface”. Have a look at Khoi Vinh’s website, and you’ll probably understand what that means:

Slightly more famous examples of unornamental websites that treat text as interface are: google, ebay, craigslist, youtube, flickr, Digg, reddit, delicious. Being a hard to dispute necessity, treating text as a user interface is the only parameter for success. Successful websites manage to create a simple interface AND a strong identity at the same time. But that’s another subject.

UPDATE: As it raised so many eyebrows, hands and questions I decided to write a follow up to this article.

Where to start: Resources

On the Web
Web typography In order to “allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web”, he has “structured his website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS”.
Five simple steps to better typography The kind of typography he is talking about “is not your typical ‘What font should I use’ typography.” A good read for those who believe websites are usable when leaving font size and line spacing to default while letting the text width expand to wherever.
Khoi Vinh Co-founder of behaviordesign. Currently design director at NYTimes.com. Extremely talented man.
Rod Graves Communication designer. Sublime work: “Typography is a definite focus for me. Typographic grids and hierarchies usually form the foundation of the visual languages I develop.”
A List Apart Communicating via typefaces. Fonts and layout. Designing for readers. Legibility. Typefaces, graphic design. Problems of typography on the web. Controlling web typography: size, font, color. CSS methods, browser problems, user problems, and workarounds. Make sure you read this article as well.
Association Typographique Internationale ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) is the premier worldwide organisation dedicated to type and typography. Founded in 1957, ATypI provides the structure for communication, information and action amongst the international type community.
Thinking with Type The on-line companion to the book Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
Typetester Compare screen type
Typophile Typophile is a member and sponsor-supported community. Since 2000 Typophile has been guided by open collaboration and the idea that we’re all always learning. We they serve 3+ million pages monthly.
Typohile Wiki A user-created encyclopedia of all things type and design-related. Users create and edit Wiki entries with the aim of becoming a collaborative, useful, balanced and relevant resource.
The Next Big Thing in Online Type Bill Gates wants computer users, well, Microsoft users, to have a more enjoyable on-screen reading experience — so much so that he made improving reading on the screen one of his top five priorities.
Books
Emil Ruder, Typographie Emil Ruder’s Typography is the timeless textbook from which generations of typographer and graphic designers have learned their fundamentals. Ruder, one of the great twentieth-century typographers was a pioneer who abandoned the conventional rules of his discipline and replaced them with new rules that satisfied the requirements of his new typography.
Kimberly Elam, Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type Although grid systems are the foundation for almost all typographic design, they are often associated with rigid, formulaic solutions. However, the belief that all great design is nonetheless based on grid systems (even if only subverted ones) suggests that few designers truly understand the complexities and potential riches of grid composition.
Muller-Brockman, Grid Systems: A visual communication manual for graphic designers, typographers and three dimensional designers. From a professional for professionals, here is the definitive word on using grid systems in graphic design. Though Muller-Brockman first presented hi interpretation of grid in 1961, this text is still useful today for anyone working in the latest computer-assisted design.

http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period/

New organizations and leadership through Participatory Design

I define consciousness in a very profound way as our ability to exercise a reflective awareness for ourselves in our own contexts. Generally spoken, I see two major approaches to consciousness in organizations today: they are either based on roles, hierarchies, authoritative direction, and linear planning (e.g. many companies, public authorities and political institutions) or by values, equality, and joint decision making (e.g. many civil society institutions, social and ecological enterprises and small company networks). Both approaches meet certain economic, social and ecological requirements and both have their crucial drawbacks. I consider both of them insufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This is why my work focuses on the development of a third approach which is based on participatory design and collaborative co-creation with the aim to foster individual and collective potential in order to create emergent solutions.

I have worked with participatory design processes over the last 9 years in landscape architecture, businesses, civil society and ecological organizations. At the core of participatory design lies the understanding that sustainable solutions have to be found on the basis of context, environment and process and not on the basis of predetermined goals. They are based in local practice and shaped by the interconnectedness with given social, ecological and economical frameworks rather than single ideas rolled out globally. It is also acknowledged that participatory design incorporates the designers in the design: while we change the world around us, we change ourselves as well. Personal, local and global change are interlinked. Participatory design thus becomes a co-creative and generative process which is alive in itself. It creates emergence, produces contextual awareness, new ideas, collective intelligence and often unexpected solutions.

The idea that change is a transitional phase between two stable states is ridiculed by everyday experiences in our globalized world. Constant change is the actual state of our living world. We should seek to comprehend, incorporate and develop that which makes life worth living through change, not against it. One way of doing this is by participatory design. Participatory design will change the way we think about leadership and organizational structures and is based on certain attitudes and methodological approaches which in part we already know and in part we still have to develop. The results of participatory design are not set products or structures but living processes in themselves and therefore represent sustainable change.

In my work for various organizations, networks and businesses promoting social and ecological change, I see the main obstacle to our aspirations not in the fields of resources or information, though these too need careful consideration. I see the main obstacle in the design of our organizational structures and in the way we act individually and collectively within them. Our own consciousness lies at the core of developing new habits, attitudes, methods, processes, actions and organizational designs.

So how do we turn into organizations which employ the third approach?

1. We have to create diverse face-to-face opportunities to experience and reflect upon local participatory design processes so that individual and collective consciousness towards these processes can develop. This can be done through programs in education, business and civil society. For those programs to succeed it will be important that methodologies can be devised in accordance with the respective local context and that results are judged on the basis of the process rather than on initial goals or requirements.

2. We have to encourage self-empowerment, exploration of individual and collective potential and truthful, conscious leadership, the willingness to thoroughly engage with the topics at hand so that personal processes become intertwined with the design process and the willingness to see crises and challenges as opportunities to transcend old agendas and behavioral patterns. This is fostered by participatory design process which are lead by professional and experienced facilitators.

3. We have to exchange personal and local experiences at a global level, so as not to copy solutions into alien contexts but to understand the patterns of change, creation and the emergence of collective intelligence globally. This can be achieved with the aid of new collaboration technologies which are already under development and testing.

Through these measures we will dive into a global participatory design process which will lead to a succession towards new organizational structures and a new understanding of leadership as a service to our collective potential and consciousness.

http://spacecollective.org/jascharohr
http://sacredmtn.com

How Omega Code Used the Internet

Music Biz In This New Aeon


Maybe some of you in the design sphere already know about a project I've been developing for the last few months. Omega Code had a little buzz over the internet as we promoted a poster contest and the fact that we invited a few well known designers and artists around the world to create a series of posters that we're going to distribute for free. There is also the book we are going to release through IdN later this year.

The feedback over all has been very positive and exciting, getting us known all over the world in a matter of days. That can be good and bad at the same time. All will depend on how people will receive our music. Anyway, the crucial point of this post is not about the music itself, but the music business now days.

We managed to make ourselves visible. We managed to create a great visual appeal. We did our best to create great music. We spent lots of money that we didn't have to make lots of things possible. Yet, we can't do everything by ourselves. Our main objective is to give the most we can for free, because, I personally think that is the deal now. Buying CD is pointless, even paying for downloads is quite dumb (if you don't receive lots of extra stuff in return).

Probably Trent Reznor, NIN mastermind, is doing everything right so far as distribution and doing new things, better than what Radiohead did, but there is a huge difference in there. Trent Reznor already had enough money to pay everything by himself. He could even take the risk of not selling anything. The other point is that NIN was already well known and had a large fan base all over the world, so eventually the minimum sales would be covered.

Here is my struggle. How can I deliver something in a high quality, not having that kind of money and getting the risk of failing big time? There are a few bands that got known over the internet without resources, but hey, their music didn't need that much effort on the production either. Is just easy music. Is that all we can get from 'internet artists'? I hope not.

Recently, I saw a post on the Ghostly twitter, about Kickstarter, a place where you can raise funds for your projects, just counting on the goodwill of internet strangers, and apparently it works, although is just available for US citizens, not suitable for Brazilians. Maybe that is a way of getting a support to release good content. Would that work out? Don't know, sounds risky.

We'll keep doing our best to deliver a great work and trying to be the most creative and avant-garde as possible. Maybe will take longer with our own legs, but we will get there.

I am just sharing what is going on with the project and see what the creative minds over Space Collective would say about it. Probably everyone here is involved with this new way of doing/selling/buying/enjoying music and have their own ideas on the subject.

http://spacecollective.org/Combustion

How Designers Think

In a recent post, I wrote about the four essential members of a design team. Each designer is an analytical thinker, a contextual thinker, or (most likely) some combination of both. How do designers use these ways of thinking to create products? This post breaks down the way designers think and the two essential approaches to creating good products.

Analytical thinking focuses on the product, asking key questions like, what are the components of the product or experience? How can we design them to make a better whole? Activities like product teardowns, lifecycle analyses, and in-category audits look at existing products and their components. Contextual thinking, on the other hand, looks around the product, searching for insight through the users, the environment, and everything surrounding the product itself. Contextual thinking aims to answer the question, How can we benefit users and their environment in the design of this product? Ethnographic research leads the charge in uncovering contextual insights, but there are other tools (like Victor Lombardi’s Question The Brief) that can be used to effectively develop ideas far beyond what currently exists.

Of course, product development teams need to use both analytical and contextual thinking to create great products and experiences. They often do so in a differentiated manner, with activities that emphasize one or the other. But how can you ensure that a diverse team with a range of thinkers is engaged on a project?

Integrated thinking combines analytical and contextual thinking for powerful results. Often, teams need to create tools for generating concepts that utilize a broad team’s entire skill set. If a team is a diverse group of analytical and contextual thinkers, the integrated approach helps them collaborate early on in the process. Imagine designers, engineers, researchers, strategists, and project managers working together in an immersion session.

One example of integrated thinking is Forced Association (originally introduced to me by UC’s Dale Murray). Thinking analytically, participants break down and list ideas for each of a product’s attributes, like form, color, materials, manufacturing process, etc. Then switching to a contextual mindset, random mixtures of these attributes force participants to consider the new context that these “recipes” would live in. An activity like this is diverse enough to engage the entire team, giving each team member an opportunity to use their individual strengths. The best teams know how to deploy analytical and contextual thinking individually and when to integrate them, dynamically identifying opportunities to combine their thinking for powerful results.

What experiences have you had that combine the strengths of analytical and contextual thinkers to achieve success?

http://www.michaelroller.com/

Polytopia, how does it operate?

I've been thinking a lot about this polytopia without offering any of the thoughts, so here, for whatever they're worth, are some of them.

Mind work in the old world:

Scenario One:
Each mind walks into a room on two legs, they chose a seat and take out a pad and a pencil. Everytime someone offers an idea it's written down on a white board, meanwhile everyone takes copious notes to themselves. As has been effectively demonstrated in 2+2=5, some people are intimidated by the social implications of a bad or "wrong" ideas, and keep their ideas in their skulls, disconnected from the larger brain pool.

Polytopian mind work:

Scenario Two:
People log in to Polytopia. Everything they say is captured and shows up in a shared data space where an connections are made between all things that have been and will be said. The sum total of their mental work is enhanced by an algorithm that brings together relevant information. The hot spots of thought activity will be evident and visualized in 3D space.

Scenario Three:
You're walking down the road while simultaneously logged into Polytopia and your "second self" pulls all available information about everything in the space into a pool and starts searching for related kernels of thought or opportunities that may lay in wait in other people's minds. The guy in the striped shirt happens to be struggling with the same thing as you, how will we continue to build this Polytopia? You invite him into a mind transmission whereby all immediate thoughts are pooled linked and visualized.

Scenario Four:
You're looking for love. Wait, what kind of love do we look for in the future anyway? What does non-physical love look like? Will we live in a non-monogomous state of constant mind sex? wohoo!

So how does Polytopia enhance our experience of the world?

It potentially bypasses the biological interferances still in operation from a different evolutionary era.

And in so doing, elevates the sharing of intelligence.
It gives the mind space priority, even in physical space.
Or perhaps it just serves to more effectively bring what you are looking for into plain view, like amazon recommendations for every aspect of life.

http://spacecollective.org/meganmay

Behind the Work: CaT Opening Animation

Go behind the scenes and read about how Mekanism merged old and new for the CaT opener.

PUBLISHED: MAY 28, 2009

We asked Mekanism if they'd create a show opener for CaT and its team, led by Emmett Feldman, motion graphics division head and creative director, came through in a major way. 

The piece, shot on a consumer-level DSLR, combines stop-motion and a generative application to create a futuristic block village, building layers of shapes amid ethereal sound design before sprouting leaves and revealing the CaT logo. We spoke with Feldman and Mekanism EP Jason Harris to hear how they created the striking piece. 

We asked Mekanism if they'd create a show opener for CaT and its team, led by Emmett Feldman, motion graphics division head and creative director, came through in a major way.

 

Full Credits

Client: CaT: Creativity and Technology 
Production/VFX Company: Mekanism 
Creative Director/Motion Graphics Artist: Emmett Feldman 
Graphics/Animation Programmer: Gabriel Dunne 
Sound Design: Jeremiah Moore 
Graphic Assistant: Matt Carvalho 
Executive Producer: Jason Harris 
Producer: Elizabeth Morse 

 

How Twitter will Change the Way We Live.

by Robin Gant

wearesocial.net - June 7, 2009 

Time magazine's cover story on Twitter 

"There is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it."