Viewing Category: Design
One of the great sins of my personal branding effort has been to let a temporary photograph stand in as my website identity for so long. If you're reading this article through RSS you missed the new header image that has replaced the old collection of scotch bottles. I just didn't see the bottles anymore because I'm too close to the website, but every once in a while someone comments that they just assumed that my website is about drinking. I've resisted changing it until now, because I liked the photo, but I'm finally starting to define my design methodology and the image is incongruous with respect to a respectable practice. It's time to put my childish preferences aside.
The visual history of my website header is documented in my post Inadvertent Branding, but the short version of the story is that the bottles (see below) were a joking commentary on my cavalier attitude about moving my website between servers, live, without doing a whole lot of testing. At the time I was also rather fond of the colors in the image, taken with my previous-previous digital camera (a Canon PowerShot G2). Looking at the image now, I can see the nasty contrast issues. Check it out, preserved below for posterity:
The picture in the new header was taken at Starbucks with the 40D to illustrate a blog post, and was serving as (wait for it) a placeholder in my new website design. The new design, sadly, has not been going anywhere since January, so I decided to just grab the image from it. At least the new photo is somewhat informational in its subject matter. Plus, it has my two favorite pens in it (a Lamy Safari and Al-Star) laying on my favorite notebook (a Cachet Classic Graph). The eventual plan is to shoot a new header image depicting a ton of my favorite bits of gear used in support of my identity and design agency philosophy. But first, I've got to write it. So for now, this header will serve as a transitional brand image. That probably is some kind of no-no, but as I am also in a transition period, I am allowing for poetic license. So there. So much for growing out of my childish preferences.
Another transitional element I've deliberated added is the shift in colors toward the orange-blue palette that my latest business card is using:
The evolution of my business cards has never really matched the evolution of the website, but there's no more excuses now that I'm settling in a "design niche" I think is suited to my peculiar skillset and personality. To help, I'm using some language from the cards ("investigative designer") while retaining some of the keywords that the site has become known for ("productivity"). I also am using the gestalt dot story as a bullet for the design portfolio" button, which is now a little more obvious than before. I'm not sure if I like the bullet, but at least we're starting to get some repetition of elements between the business card and the website, which helps make it seem more like a "brand". It's not great consistency, but then again my so-called brand identity has always been somewhat "ambient" as opposed to "direct". Certain elements like proportions in my design work, color choice, typography, and use of photography have been fairly consistent over the past few years. The explicit use of my name has also been consistent; I demoted the original name of the blog, Better Living through New Media, to a subheader quite some time ago. This probably was a lucky decision, as I've discovered that I really do prefer to engage with people one-on-one, representing me-as-me.
So that's that. I'm giving myself another 10 years to fix the rest of it :-)
It's been a week since I first started trying the new day grid balancer form, and in practice I found that it didn't quite mesh well with my expectations. Partly this may be due to the long weekend and the surprise visit of one of my best friends, which meant that I didn't adhere to the daily schedule I'm striving to put into place. Even when factoring that in, I think I can still say with confidence that there are several aspects I didn't like about the form:
- Filling out the little day balance grid was confusing because my categories didn't quite fit what I was really doing. They are not named quite right, even for me.
- I wasn't quite clear on what kind of things I should list. In hindsight I see I was mixing up several categories of task: things I want to "make time" to do, scheduled meetings, and ongoing projects. The sheet is also a little cramped for writing any more than a few words per item, though perhaps this is a good thing.
- I had a tendency to just want to use the day balance grid to just check things off to try to complete the figure, instead of noting time.
In short, I wasn't very clear myself on how I wanted to use the form, and this might also be due to imprecise expectations. On the other hand, I also knew that the first week run was unlikely to be quite right, which is why I'm doing this review. There were some useful insights:
- There's something kind of fun about the day balance grid that I like. People have commented it reminds them of Tetris® in its shapes, and perhaps that gives rise to the expectation of fun.
- Merely checking off a box does make me aware of the other areas I could be balancing, which I think is a good thing. The current design of the sheet, however, doesn't leverage this very powerfully. Perhaps a single larger diagram is the way to go.
- Having notes on what I did every day to achieve balance is very helpful in remembering what I did.
- My mindset was that of achieving balance through completion, not through doing. This may be because I feel I am bootstrapping a lot of projects to get new work lined up, and I perceive a long sequence of intermediate steps that will take time to complete. In other words, I'm "finish fixated".
That last point regarding completing versus doing is somewhat subtle; I'm thinking that some actions are inherently good because it is about the time spent in the process itself, and other actions are good because they "finish" something that needed finishing. For example, I'm told that fishing is quite relaxing, and that it is not about actually catching a fish and (as I used to presume) getting to eat it. If one is results-focused, then spending lots of time fishing and not catching any fish would be a big waste of time. However, for someone who enjoys the experience of fishing itself, the entire point is to be immersed in the pleasure of the activity itself.
So there are at least two elements of balance that I should be considering:
- Maintaining a healthy variety of achievements, which lead to balance of multiple prerequisites for security and happiness. This the working assumption behind the design of the current form.
- Remembering to engage in both immersive and results-oriented experiences. This is a distinction that is probably important to note.
So what should this form even do?
And even more important is to decide exactly what this form delivers. I'm not really sure yet. If I look inward to see what it is that's really on my mind, it's that I transform myself into a higher-performing version of myself so I can get my languishing projects done. Just about all these projects are related to either creating new business machinery or creating new ways of interacting with people en masse, which is also beneficial to me. The net result I expect from completion of these projects is more opportunity, both financially and socially.
So why even worry about balance when there's so much to do? The assumption I am testing is whether balance leads to consistent productivity. My gut says that this is part of it, and I keep coming across mentions on other blogs and books that seem to confirm this. Consistent productivity in my case is a matter of maintaining consistent momentum and motivation. I know certain activities inspire and energize me, and I know others drain me. When I am not getting things done AND not constantly exposed people energy pre-mixed with optimism, my motivation wanes.
If I leave this balance issue up to chance, then it's pretty likely that I'll have inconsistent days of productivity. This may actually be an acceptable choice, but I am also feeling that time is short and I need to get my ass in gear. Hence, the creation of a new form to help me track what I'm doing and improve my mindfulness. Improving mindfulness is, perhaps, the main point behind this form.
I'll probably take a second pass at this in the coming week. I'm also very curious about other people's experiences using the form. Feel free to leave a comment, and I'll try to address the feedback as much as possible in the second draft.
My quest for work-life balance continues this week as I continue to ramp up on personal projects while stirring the business development pot. Although I'm not quite sure exactly what I want to balance, I do know that there are general categories that have contributed to my sense of well-being in the past. So, starting from the basic idea that I need four hours of billable work a day, I made a list of the other things that help me feel centered:
- productive work by myself
- productive communication with creative, positive people
- making sure that the crap isn't piling up at home
- putting time into health and the gym
- adequate sleep
There's a purposeful resemblance to something I read about 5 contributors to happiness via my friend Senia, which are:
- sleep
- exercise
- nutrition
- incremental actions
- alone vs. social time balance
The tracker form that's developing in my mind is based around all these principles, and what I'd like to have is some kind of nice weekly form that will both show me at a glance and remind me what the work-life balance should be. I've also been liking the idea of using the asymmetric grids I mentioned last week, so this morning I had a chance to make a first pass at what it might look like over my morning Starbucks.
The basic idea is to have a kind of three-part stack of boxes, with room for overflow. The names and assignments of the categories are preliminary, so I'm open to suggestions on this. Here's what I have so far:
The bottom stack is sleep. For me, I like to get 8 hours, though sometimes I sleep a bit more. Without adequate sleep, the rest of my day is kind of hosed, so that's why I put it on the bottom as a foundation for the rest of the activities.
The center stack are core maintenance. The home category covers stuff like cleaning, dishes, laundry, doing bills, and other responsible things that we should be doing for ourselves. It's on the left, because I think of this as "left-brained" pragmatic thinking. The arrangement is a kind of little box, and there's a couple more boxes available for overflow. The center, which about heart or happiness, are for things that you do that make the day worthwhile. Maybe everything you do makes you happy, but I put the box here anyway to remind me that this is the point, to find a center of joy somewhere in the rest of what you do. On the right side are health type things. This is more about taking care of yourself, and under this I would include feeling and romance. It's that L-shape because it kind of is an encompassing gesture around the heart, and it's more open than the closed-up logical side. Plus, this introduces an asymmetry that helps break up the grid further, providing some eye relief that a straight grid design would not generate. You may notice that this center grid is offset from the top and bottom slightly to, to further create some visual interest.
The top stack is about making stuff. For me, that's creating--the four boxes at the top are the four billable hours I want to seek. The two supporting elements on either side are for conversation, which is the creative dialog that's important to me. It's split in two to accentuate the idea that there are two people in a conversation, plus it creates a kind of neat super robot head shape. The whole stack is reminiscent of a giant Japanese robot comprised of smaller ships, combining in different ways.
Some other subtleties are the provision of extra boxes, because sometimes you'll spend more than the "ideal" number of hours. The stack of boxes is vaguely humanoid in shape, as I mentioned, to make it a little more personable in a way that a pile of boxes are not. There are also actually 26 boxes, because the two in the middle are extra. Maybe these will be bonus boxes when you do something that feels particularly awesome, a kind of bull's eye.
When I get a chance later this week I'll put together the rest of the worksheet, which I'm thinking may resemble a marriage of the Concrete Goals Tracker and the Emergent Task Planner. In the meantime, work beckons!
Yesterday I'd started doodling boxes on a piece of paper, idly wondering if I could somehow structure the coming days of toil into a set of 24 boxes. This represented, in hindsight, a desire to put some structure on my expectations and somehow guarantee a productive use of time. There's something pleasing about a grid of boxes. It's orderly! It's contained! It makes everything look clean and clear! Of course, it's also a pipe dream to believe that it could actually work, but on the other hand I'm a firm believer that the appearance of order plays a part in creating the motivation to keep going.
designing balance
Today's doodling expands on the theme of breaking up the day into boxes. Underlying the itch to structure the day is something new to my productivity form designing escapades: the desire to build balance into the task management. That presumes that there exists an algorithm for balance in the first place, and admittedly this has always been an area where I've suffered. However, in yesterday's post I decided that starting with four billable hours a day would be a good start; this is both sustainable and realistic in my freelancing experience, especially when considering all the additional non-billable stuff that I have to do.
I'm not going to get this form done today, but a few ideas have popped up:
There are many work-life balance systems in existence, each purporting to break down the formula to happiness into a number of essential categories. I don't happen to use any of them--which maybe explains a lot--but the idea of hour bins is very appealing from a tracking perspective. It's compact, visually countable, and looks orderly. I'd have to build in some way of enforcing the time element for it to be a workable system, though. In some ways this approach resembles the Emergent Task Timer, but the emphasis of that tool is to discover where your time has gone in the face of hectic days. The use of bins, which could be asymmetrically sized, encourages balance. Likewise the Concrete Goals Tracker is similar in that it encourages certain essential activities, but it's not designed to encourage balance. If anything it rewards point grubbing behavior, which doesn't exactly encourage balance.
There are tasks that need to get done every day, which is one of missions fulfilled by the Emergent Task Planner. One minor inconvenience is the need to re-transcribe tasks that didn't get done, so I'm toying with the idea of some kind of overlay system. I actually don't mind re-transcribing tasks because it helps one be mindful of them; the act of writing is an act of mental refocusing, in other words. Still, it might be useful in some way to create sets of tasks and uses them as task lenses on any given day. This was a concept that I'd played with before for an ad agency, but it didn't really go anywhere.
I also like the idea of using asymmetric grids to visually convey the "otherness" of some time blocks. You can see a hint of this idea in the lower left corner of the picture. It reminds me of board games, which suggests a sense of progression from block to block. A reduction of the game board concept to an ideogram-style representation could be interesting, motivational, and highly compact.
This is the first form I'm creating that addresses balance, to my recollection. A larger issue is how all the various Printable CEO forms work with each other; how does this new balance form figure in with that? The short answer is that there is no "system" in the first place; each PCEO form tool is designed to meet a specific need. While there are ways that two or three forms could be used together, there is no unifying design philosophy at work to eliminate tedious data retranscription. This is where software may be the solution.
In the meantime, designing to encourage balance introduces a new concept in the PCEO universe, and I'm curious to see where it goes.
I know I said I was going on hiatus, but I just I got a nice email from a reader today complimenting me on the layout of the blog...thanks Janet! She also asked a question about my old online resume PDF:
In particular your resume's design caught my attention. How did you create a one-page PDF resume that's so organized and detailed? Would you be able to suggest resources or pages on how to design a PDF resume from scratch?
The short answer is that I use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, which are pricey professional page layout and document management software packages.
The longer answer is that I spent some time thinking about how I wanted people to perceive my resume and how people actually read them:
After scanning a few hundred resumes, you start to get snow blindness from all that white. This is where graphic designers have a seeming advantage: A HAH! We can use this opportunity to uniquely express our graphical talents and creative expression! While that does work when you know you're competing against a sea of white paper, it doesn't work so well when everyone else is doing the same thing. The takeaway is a resume should be easy to read, with style in a supporting role.
When resumes are being screened by someone who is unable to evaluate the strengths of a candidate themselves, the resume is being scanned for relevant experience and skills that match the job criteria they've been handed. It's important that these requirements are easy for them to find so your resume makes the cut.
When resumes are being handled directly by the people that you'll be working with, they'll be scanning for signs of rare competence or interesting combinations of skills. They aren't hiring for just skills, though: they're hiring for a team fit. While you still need to address the basic requirements of the job, interjecting that curveball skill might just catch the attention of the person assembling the list of "awesome people we'd like to work with".
Most of the time, my resume isn't being processed by an HR or employee review process, but is provided as a formality, so I don't really follow the standard format. What is important, though, is that people get a sense of what skills and experience I have. The issue I have with the standard resume look is that they often have long page-width sentences (hard to read) and are filled with sentences that sound like Single-handedly managed team productivity of 50 associates through just-in-time distributed beverage ordering coordination and delivery processes. I am yawning "BS" before I even get to the word "handedly", so I cater to my own whims by using shorter descriptions in my lists of credentials. My reasoning goes something like this:
- I put all the experience "color commentary" in the "framing statement" at the top of the page, where it is placed so it is the first thing read on the page, after my name and categorical title. It should be short and to the point, serving as a kind of establishing shot, to use film lingo, for the rest of the resume.
- All the following lists of education, experience, skills, and so on then (ideally) support the framing statement. If they don't, then you are sending a mixed message about what it is you do. You may do a LOT MORE in real life, but a company is generally looking you to FIT into a particular kind of box. You might change the actual categories from what I have here to suit the type of business and industry, and if necessary add the necessary years of experience quantifiers.
- While I like to say that people should find out how to stand out rather than just fit in, the resume is one of those cases where you might want to make it easy for potential employers to IMAGINE you as a plug-and-play part in their company. That is what you are trying to sell here: possibility of a good fit, which makes it a no-brainer of a deal to get a phone call.
- When you get to the interview, your personality can then sell the other connections you can foresee. The AREAS OF INTEREST part of my resume provides potential jumping-off points for conversation.
Anyway, this is just what I do for my simple resume. I'm generally targeting the case where my resume is being considered by the creative professional for informational purposes, not competing with others as I've described above. So your mileage may vary considerably!
So, You Don't Have InDesign
In answering Janet's email, I thought about the common problem I face when telling people that I use expensive production graphics software to do my work. The implication is that THEY SHOULD TOO, though it's impractical most of the time due to the need for training and people like to use what they have available. Most of the time this is Microsoft Word or Excel. While I like Word for straight writing and basic formatting of source text, I hate its page layout tools. They are very finicky, and often times one little layout issue will cascade into an unrecoverable mess. Excel just lacks the fundamental typographic control tools, though it is surprisingly flexible.
I avoid using Microsoft FrontPage on general principle, which is that it is the source of ugly web pages that I have had to clean up. Call me small minded, but I don't even want to know what it does because of past ills visited upon me by its twisted autogenerated HTML progeny.
That leaves Microsoft PowerPoint. I occasionally have received photo assets that had been copied and pasted into a Word document or PowerPoint presentation, and this creates a production headache because the original file is down-sampled or destroyed in the process. However, I've also seen several reader-provided PowerPoint and Excel versions of my templates, and these look fine. I then idly wondered if I could use PowerPoint to recreate the layout without looking too ugly, so I gave it a try. I think it actually works. The advantage of PowerPoint over Word is that you can freely place text blocks and format them as you would in Word. You can place graphic imagery. You can also specify in PowerPoint's options to produce output aligned to the resolution of your printer, not the screen. And since PowerPoint is part of the most basic Microsoft Office suite, you probably already have it...so let's rock!
Shown below is PowerPoint 2007 duplicating my resume layout, with the "view grid" and "view rulers" options turned on to make the screenshot look more impressive:
PowerPoint allows you to set the page size of your presentation, so I set it to US Letter. Then I just drew a bunch of text boxes and aligned them in such a way that the white spaces worked together. The grid isn't particularly tight or well-constructed (in other words, it looks a little sloppy) but the overall look is fairly clean. The unit whitespace I used is the height of a line in the body text, because I didn't feel like fiddling with line heights for every paragraph. I adjusted the spaces between the headers to be greater than the blank line that separates paragraphs, and just adjusted other parts of the composition so they tended to line up cleanly where it seemed that should happen.
If I was being more anal, I would have shrunk the space between paragraphs by about 25-30% and tightened everything up proportionally...this would have improved the "scattered" look of the "education" and "experience" areas. However, this effort would have required a lot of paragraph twiddling and hey, I would have used InDesign or Illustrator for this if I were doing it for real. If you are so inclined to this kind of adjustment, though, you would select the paragraph and then right-click to choose "Format Paragraph" to play with the "space after" parameters and linespacing.
There are a couple of tricks that I had to apply to the topmost header that says DAVID SEAH.
First, I tweaked the left margin from 0 inches to a small value to make the left edge of the D in "DAVID SEAH" line up with the type before it. If you align by the text box margins, the D does not optically line up with the left margin of the text below it ("new media designer"). In a real page layout program I would have just nudged it over, but I could not place the text box accurately enough with the mouse due to the way the program "auto-snaps" objects into alignment. Adjusting the internal margin was easier than figuring out how to turn that feature off, which I suspect is not possible.
I opened the text box formatting options to adjust the character spacing (the default value was way too wide) by -2pt. This didn't fix the regrettable amount of space between the D and A letters (a common problem with electronic type on PCs) but it does seem more put together.
I use Acrobat Professional to create my PDF files, but I imagine there are other providers of inexpensive PDF encoders. I'm not familiar with any of them. Readers, any suggestions? [UPDATE: Several suggestions have been posted in the comments, so check them out!]
Download Example Resume Files
If you'd like to play with your own version of this resume, just download the zip file which contains the PowerPoint 2007 source. I've also enclosed a version that should work with PowerPoint 2005 versions and earlier, though I'm not sure if it works. A sample PDF is also included for your reference. Please note that this is not my actual resume, though it is using elements from it.
» Download PPTResumeSample.zip (170K)
» Requires Microsoft PowerPoint
Note: If you are looking for Calibri, the font that I'm using here, it's part of Office 2007. You can download and install the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack to get them; check this article for some tips on other options.
NOTE: There have been some really great reader comments for this article; you should definitely check them out! :-)
The other day I was sitting at one of the outside tables at Starbucks, sipping my hideously-overpriced iced tea lemonade as I mused on the crisis of the hour: my wardrobe. This had never been a problem before, but I had come to realize that clothes communicate quite a lot more than I'd originally thought. Prior to this epiphany, I'd figured that dressing well was largely an exercise in conforming to certain archetypes, thus allowing people to identify you as part of their tribe or not; by dressing to a certain standard, one thus cemented their status in the social hierarchy. I dislike hierarchy in general, and I find dressing to the so-called "standard" to be confusing. This is mostly because my knowledge of "the standard" is based on clothing dogma passed down as tradition. While I could use the intervention of an "expert" to impart a good set of style rules to memorize, this is not an effective learning style for me. I do much better with principles, and the overriding principle here is that I can communicate through the details of my personal grooming, which makes the idea of wearing "grown up clothes" less of an anxiety-ridden chore and more of an interesting design problem.
As some of you may know, I go to Starbucks every morning to meet friends and get my freelance ass out of bed every day on time. And because the particular Starbucks I go to is a friendly one, it's become a test-bed for some of my social experiments. So for the past few days, I've been dressing up to see if it made any difference at all in how people interacted with me.
Instead of wearing my usual cat hair-covered black t-shirt and formless jeans, the clothes I chose were made from nice material, color-coordinated, and actually sized-right because I'd chucked everything that didn't fit me well during the Great Closet Purge of June 9th, 2008. This leaves me with about 3.5 days of clothing before repetition becomes inevitable, which isn't very much but makes for a clean start.
Next, I took care of the personal details such as fingernails, which I have tended to be loose with regarding length and condition. It occurred to me that the personal grooming I was doing was very much like edgework in computer graphics design, which is my term for how well one pays attention to the pixel-level details in how they alter the entire composition. Crisply-placed pixels, as opposed to the usual blops that Photoshop generates when left to its own devices, creates a subtle impression of hand-crafted quality. I wanted no less to apply to my face; I spent more than the usual time scanning for the stray beard hairs that had escaped the hum of my razor, inspected my nasal cavities under a flashlight to seek out and destroy errant nose hairs, and even subtly leveled the edge of my haircut with the razor's heretofore unused beard trimmer attachment.
As a final step, I used the hair wax that my hair stylist, Kim, sold to me 3 years ago. Personally, I never could tell the difference with the wax on or off, so I tend not to use it since my hair is so short anyway. I was enormously surprised when my friend Erin, sitting outside at Starbucks, asked me what I'd been doing with my hair recently. I laughed and admitted that I'd combed it and used some wax; could she really tell the difference? She beamed with pride, and would have patted me on the head if that wouldn't have destroyed the magical effect. I also received a few approving glances from the women barristas, who are used to seeing me in my slobwear, and that is enough to convince me that paying attention to how I look makes a difference. By paying attention to details, I am saying that I am a detail-oriented person and have things together. By selecting clothes based on quality of material, contrast, and cut, I'm also portraying what my standards and my tastes are because I am demonstrating that I'm paying attention, and not leaving my appearance to accident. That's a principle I can get behind 100%.
So I'm totally convinced that paying attention to clothes makes a difference, and I can actually apply the same graphic design skills to the selection of clothing and accessories, manipulating proportion, line, shape, contrast, and color against the backdrop of what everyone else is wearing. It's a very very interesting design challenge. What's next is even more interesting: what do I want to say about myself and how do I say it through clothes?
In the interest of writing shorter posts, I'll leave those questions for next time.
I've been contemplating one of my Groundhog Day Resolutions today: "figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator". I like the idea more and more. I'll still get to make things so what I've learned up to now will not go to waste. However, it means establishing myself in a new niche. I could just jump on in and flounder around for a while, but I have a preexisting commitment to a personally important project. Therefore, it makes sense that I establish the new niche while maintaining my old one.
Serving the Audience
There have been a few new topics that I've been interested in writing about: motivation, relationships, and real-life stories. Motivation probably can fit in with the Productivity writing, as it is one of the assumed prerequisites for wanting to be productive in the first place. I already blog about this topic indirectly under Introspection too. The two new topics, relationships and real-life stories, are a little different because they are not about me or my direct experiences, but are about other people. Much of what I write about now uses myself as the reference point for discussion, because the only person who might get embarrassed is me; no one else is likely to get hurt or feel under the spotlight. I also can safely use my experiences as the basis for drawing whatever conclusions I have, so long as I am clear that this is where they're coming from.
There's a voice in my head that is telling me that when I start to write about other people, I need to keep this content separate from what you're reading right now here in the main site and feed. There are several assumptions that I'm making:
Assumption 1: People are subscribed because of the productivity and process investigation, and skim through the occasional article on whatever crazy thing is on my mind.
Assumption 2: Adding content outside of this is somehow not desirable, because it further clouds the nature of the content on the website.
These assumptions have constrained my writing in the past several months, as I've struggled both with my own identity as a creator and freelancer. I also know that I get a lot of traffic from productivity-oriented websites. More recently, however, I've come to the conclusion that I should just write about whatever happens to be on my mind, just like the old days, and just try to entertain and inform as I indulge my whims. The reason behind this conclusion is pretty simple: writing something is better than writing nothing. But even that statement requires contextualization; my value system tends to emphasize the production of anything interesting over the production of the right things. And from a marketing and branding perspective, writing about a multitude of topics just clouds "my online identity", which is bad when it comes to helping consumers make the decision whether they are interested in reading or not. Ideally, my writing would convey a clear message with an identified need, focus, dream, and vision of the future. Therefore, it makes some sense to metaphorically create a new product line for stories and reporting, a spin-off if you will, to neatly contain my journalistic intentions. This keeps the main niche "safe" by not muddling with it, allowing the new niche to develop its own following while drawing on the existing associations of the parent brand.
Serving Myself
The other approach is to not worry about "packaging content for the efficient consumption by market segments" and just assume one thing: continuity trumps categorization. That continuity is me, my voice, and my perspective. This presumes--and I feel kind of embarrassed to even suggest this--that the reason people are here is because they just like reading about what's on my mind, and that is enough. If that's the case, I could write about anything I want, so long as I maintain the continuity in whatever way makes sense. For me, I think that comes down to the core beliefs that I have: sharing inspiration where I find it, documenting what I've learned, and being supportive of anyone who is trying to make a go of it. I really don't write about productivity at all: I write about people who happen to be trying to be productive. What's interesting to me is the motivation behind the productive urge, which is one reason why I want to start collecting more stories. Creating the tools that allow people to be more productive, myself included, is really an exercise in creating our own life stories.
However, not all stories have any relevance to anything. For example, today I heard a good one while hanging out at Starbucks, where someone was complaining about how she hates it when someone doesn't leave the towel in the bathroom after taking a shower. I nodded in agreement, but then I realized that there was an variation in domestic household operations at work here: some families share one towel. You're clean coming out of the shower after all. This was news to me, as my family has always had separate towels for each individual in the house. We took an impromptu poll, and apparently the "One Household, One Towel" rule was not uncommon in the very small set that we were able to sample. The very idea of a single-towel bathroom seems incredible to me, as I personally like my towel to be my own. My sister would probably agree, because she goes to great lengths to ensure her own towel is fluffy and maximally dry; she would become very upset if someone else used it "by accident". But I digress...the point I'm trying to make is that this little side trip into communal toweling has nothing to do with what I topically write about. It's just interesting to me. The "gracious host" in me imagines people who are patiently waiting for that software update to the Emergent Task Timer Online going out of their gourd every time they read a detailed article about how sharing towels is OK, but sharing facecloths is not (FYI: I am just taking a stand here on that issue). If he's got the time to write about stupid towels, he certainly could be updating something USEFUL instead...
Taking a Poll
So I'm torn. I'm leaning toward NOT worrying about branding as the motivating force for a redesign, but nevertheless creating a separate content blog (accessible through this site, of course) for story collecting, random encounters, road food, and visits to new places. Some existing categories would also move, such as the Encounters category. If anyone has any strong opinions or insights into what the best approach would be, I'm all ears. The issues boil down to this:
- Will moving non-productivity, non-design, and non-business content out of the main blog create a more optimal experience for both readers and myself?
- Is "managing my personal brand" really so important that it dictates how I organize the content on this site?
- Is it more important to write for myself or write for the audience?
- What is the more worthy goal: creating a focused blog experience which can serve as a content platform for more commercial activities, or just creating what's on my mind? This issue is really which is more important to me: success/commercialization (freedom) or writing for the sake of creating "good" content (recognition). Both are important, so maybe I am actually looking for a means to do both.
I get asked about once a month about the whiskey and scotch image banner that is featured at the top of this web page. Concerned Christians have asked me about it in email, making sure that I am not embarking on a doomed spiral of binge drinking. The best thing that I've gotten out of it was a very nice bottle of Scotch from a German fellow (thanks again, Alan!) who happened to be visiting New England. I got asked about it again today, by a friend who I hadn't spoken to in quite a few years, so I think it's time to tell the story. You can think of it as a cautionary tale about what happens when you don't think about your brand before laying pixels out on the World Wide Web. On the other hand, I don't think it could have happened any other way, and it's certainly fun to look back at the evolution of my online identity.
The First Blog Design
I started with Movable Type in September 2004, but switched almost immediately to WordPress 1.1. However, I hated WordPress' default typography, so I ported the Movable Type template over. I only added a simple graphical header:
In October or so, I was processing a particularly yummy-looking picture of some Chinese-style pork belly stew, and added this banner below the header for fun:
I decided I liked the combination of image and text, and even though it didn't make any sense at all I decided to just keep it. I was still trying to figure out what the site would be about, so over the next few months I added a few more banners just to liven the place up. Eventually 13 banners were created, and they would be set depending on the day using a simple algorithm. Here's what it looked like:
And here are the 12 other banners:
The Website Refresh
In January 2006, I was thinking about adding advertising to some pages of the website, but the old fixed-width design hadn't taken this into account. I basically needed to widen the layout a bit. You read about the design decisions I was facing in 2 Days and 28 Pixels Later, the original post that documents the redesign. This is when the infamous whiskey picture first made its debut.
At the time, I thought that the picture would be temporary, and it was used on context to the way I was doing my site update. Feeling particularly lazy, I didn't set up a proper staging server to test the new deployment on. Instead, I just backed up my databases, crossed my fingers, and did live updates on the running server. This is extremely bad practice in a production environment, but at the time I was getting only 250 pageviews a day, so I figured no one would notice anyway in the middle of the night. However, I knew it was still a bad idea so I decided to use this picture of the scotch bottles, which were left over from an attempt by my dear cousin Ben to introduce me to the finer things in life. I had mentioned to him that I didn't know anything about hard liquor, and so we went to the New Hampshire State Liquor Store and bought a selection of "introductory" scotches and whiskeys. I tasted each one of them, and didn't like any of them that much. I actually don't drink at all, except for the occasional beer when I'm having a good pizza.
The bottles, however, photographed quite beautifully.
The composition was such that it would work well with a Post-It Note I photoshop'd into the picture that read: Danger! Live Update in Progress! XXXOOO - Dave. The joke here was that I was doing something irresponsible on server, which is on the same level as mixing alcohol with work:
I figured that I would put the "real" banner in place after I was sure that the design worked, by adapting the banners from the old site. As it turns out, though, none of the images were suitable for the new aspect ratio of the header; I'd inadvertently designed myself into a corner. I would have to reshoot all my banner pictures! I never did get around to it. And then a couple design ranking websites actually liked the design and booze theme, and then I just plain forgot about the whole thing. When I decided to move to Expression Engine, I deliberately did not attempt a redesign because I had a whole new templating system to learn and 1200 entries to convert. Now that I'm a little more comfortable with how EE works, I am thinking about a redesign again to fix the terrible navigation on the site...a lot of stuff is buried and inaccessible because the WordPress categories did not translate cleanly over. Sigh.
The Brand As it Stands
I keep saying "brand", when I really mean "identity". Right now, the look of the website is somewhat entrenched. I like the irreverent imagery, too. It's a kind of visual non-sequitor because it has no bearing on anything I write about on the site. And that's kind of fun. I could invent a thematic rationale after-the-fact like the quality, variety, and international origin of fine spirits reflect the best of life's offerings for the discerning palate or some such nonsense, but you and I would know that I was deliberately spouting crap :-) However, there IS a grain of truth in that statement: I do aspire to experience more, and there is something rather nice about the variety of pleasures that I have yet to sample. And I must admit, I have developed a taste for certain peaty Scotches; the Lagavulin 16 year single malt is what I like, but I use ice and only drink 1/8th of a finger at a time. I am basically just smelling the stuff, letting the complex bouquet of aged wood mixed with the hint of smoke waft through my upper nasal passages. I am not sure that this counts as actual drinking.
So that's the story! Moving forward, I may retain elements of the bottles, booze, interesting colors and maybe ill-advised combinations of objects as a visual theme, but I'm sure that a branding consultant would tell me I'm doing terrible things to my message. I might care more if I knew exactly what that message was; I'm still figuring it out...
Until then, bottoms up :-)
I had a long coffee meeting with Fred Schechter yesterday, an industrial designer based in northern California that I've been talking to on-and-off for the past couple of years. Industrial Design is one of those majors I wish I'd known about when I was applying to college; not knowing any better, I had gone into Electrical Engineering. Fred himself had originally started in Mechanical Engineering, but thanks to a chance conversation with a friend ("they have a MAJOR for making cool stuff???") he made an early exit and jumped to the world of product design. Anyway, we've been chatting about our mutual interest in making and selling our own products, and Fred's perspective on it from the industrial design / manufacturing side has been invaluable in fleshing out my next steps. He's an enthusiastic guy too, so if you're looking for someone to talk to about early-stage concept and prototyping for manufacturing, it's worth dropping him an email. Anyway, the conversation has helped solidify some thoughts on my personal career direction, so I thought I'd share them.
What Do I Do?
I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that I do, because it doesn't neatly fit into a simple category. Or rather, I don't want it to, which makes telling people what I do difficult. And if I can't tell people what I do, it's hard for them to imagine a way to work together. This is essentially a kind of marketing / branding problem, but from my personal perspective it is an aspect of my ongoing search for identity and how I relate to others; this is the million dollar question. It is what really drives my design process too. I suppose if I billed myself as a marketing or branding person, I would have to say that I'm NOT an operational or strategic manager (which is what a lot of people seem to do). What I like to do occurs before strategy so it can inform strategic planning, but it is not strategy in itself. What the heck is that called? I don't know, therefore I can't explain it.
For most of us getting started in the job market, we've learned to define ourselves through skills and years of experience (this includes education, which becomes less relevant as years of experience accrue). For "creatives", we add a portfolio that showcase the physical work we've materially contributed to. If your job does not produce artifacts like this, then you use position and job title as the lowest common denominator for placing yourself in context to the field with which you've identified; this implies you have relevant knowledge and experience. All of these "markers" of "job identity" work if you fit in the pre-existing system. I could fit into this system (I've tried several roles to date), but they have not fully satisfied me. For the past few years, I've been trying to figure out my niche, so I could adequately define something NEW that fit me well. I haven't thought much beyond that, but that's OK: I've learned to appreciate that chance encounters are pretty much the mechanism through which the Universe makes my life interesting.
In the conversation about making books, Fred helped me figure out a few attributes about my writing methodology from a more detailed perspective. Here's what I think I do from a blogging perspective:
- I am obsessive about documenting process meticulously and accurately. I hate bad docs, having been exposed to plenty of them.
- I scaffold my documentation with personal experience and context. I can safely use myself as an example without stepping on other people's toes.
- I am inclusive of my readers as friends as I document and relate these experiences. I don't like feeling like an outsider, so I try to be as inclusive as I can so long as it feels good.
- I always try to create original expression and new content, rather than just report on what others are doing. It's a personal value.
- I summarize and distill working principles as succinctly as I can, because that's what I find easiest to remember
- I maintain personal continuity in my writing, because I happen to find that kind of thing interesting.
From this, I could see how I could induce general principles of interest from my specific interests. For the past few years, I've been aware that I tend to write about these specific areas:
- Design
- Development
- Productivity
- Personal Empowerment
- Inspiration
- Sharing Personal Experiences
Repackaging these into general principles, I come up with this:
- Design Thinking and Concepts
- How People Work (from a process psychology perspective)
- Building Stuff
- Chasing Dreams and Making Them Real
- Creating Practical Process Guides with Useful Insights
It is interesting to note that my specific interests were inward facing: they are my activities and interests. The general principles, however, are outward facing: they include other people's interests and activities. For example, I'm very interested in what other people are doing with their dreams, and I'm happiest when I'm a part of that process of making them real. With the general principles, I now have the critical balance of perspective that I was missing.
And, finally I can see how I could spin this into a general consultancy specializing in making sense out of things. The skills I have---that is, the specific experience I have with design and development tools, new media development, interactive design, etc---are just tools used to express the general principles.
Yes, South by Southwest Interactive 2008 is about to spring again in Austin, Texas, and I am again way behind on my preparation. However, I did finally decide to get business cards printed up beforehand, using Hotcards.com on the suggestion of the Twitterverse. I really liked the Hotcards website experience and the copywriting, so I am taking a chance on them, though it is pricier than some of the other business card services I've seen at $60/1000 plus shipping. Still, I have a penchant of putting my dollars where the user experience catches my eye.
Since this is the first time I've ever had the opportunity to print double-sided cards, I tried to put something together quickly. After a couple of hours of trying to put some Printable CEO-style graphics on the back, I remembered the old dot story concept on my really early cards. I never liked the way that design had worked, as it felt "all over the place" to me. With the extra room to play with, though, the dot story became viable.
Unfortunately, I thought of the "Structure / Story" tag pair after I had submitted the job to press; the cards I get will say "Structure / Design". This sort of works still, but it isn't as relevant to the story-based approach I take to design work. And, the alliteration sounds way better to my ear.
The front of the card is still the same general design I had from the previous round, though I have changed the text to reflect my incremental movement out of interactive and toward general design:
david seah - providing insight + ideation via information graphics and investigative design services
The text is broken with short lines, coor, and selected bold on keywords. It reads clunkily off the tongue, but it convey something. Not the greatest piece of marketing copy in terms of fluidity, but they may work better as conversational keyword starters. I'm not entirely happy with it:
Making these kinds of decisions can drive me nuts, as I'm prone to have long "should have / could have" internal conversations with myself. At some point, you just got to see how people react. Perhaps for my first double-sided card I should have used a cheaper service. Oh well!
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