David Seah - Design, Development, Inspiration, Empowerment

PowerPoint Resume Layout Tips

2008-07-24 14:08:02-05:00

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! :-)

Aligning My Values with My Clothes

2008-06-11 19:44:02-05:00

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.

Splitting up the Blog by Topic?

2008-04-17 02:13:00-05:00

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.

Inadvertent Branding

2008-04-07 03:07:00-05:00

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 :-)

Contemplating Career Directions

2008-03-31 18:03:00-05:00

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.

Quickie Business Card Design 8: Return of Dot Story

2008-02-28 20:42:00-05:00

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!

Print Your Own “Re-Gift Receipts”

2008-01-11 03:42:01-05:00

I don't know if this is common around the world, but after Christmas Day there is a frenzy of returns at retail outlets across the United States, as people trade-in/trade-up their gifts to something they like better. To make exchanges easier, stores issue gift receipts to gift purchasers with the price omitted to maintain some semblance of propriety. Call me sentimental, but when someone gives me a present, I find it difficult to treat it as just another material asset to be cashed in. It just doesn't jibe with what I think of as The Spirit of Giving. Why not leave warm cups of "Drano" out for Santa instead of milk while we're at it, or have a nice reindeer venison stew for Christmas Dinner as we throw rocks at elves? But that's just my moral outrage masking the true issue at hand: sometimes I get terrible presents and I'm not sure what to do with them. The barbarian materialists exchange their presents and are materially happier afterwards. Traditionalists like me get principles stuck in their craw, muttering bitterly as their houses fill with junk they can't just throw away because "they were gifts."

There is another gift-related practice here in the States called the Yankee Swap, associated with office Christmas parties, where you can potentially bring all your unwanted junk and gift it away to some poor sucker. Each person brings a present, and gets one in return. The trick is that each person draws their present based on a number, and they have the option of exchanging whatever they got with whatever someone before them got. It's deliciously balances the Spirit of Giving with the Spirit of Taking Away, just the sort of spirit one needs to survive the modern corporate environment. We are what we are.

While this year I received no bad presents (in fact, they were all awesome), there was an interesting moment at one of these events when someone recognized a "real" gift from a Christmas many years in the past re-gifted to someone else. This created some awkwardness on the part of the re-gifter, though the original gift giver didn't mind at all. This got me to thinking: we already have gift receipts. Why not take it a step further and include a re-gift receipt that establishes once and for all that once you are given a present, it's yours to do with what you want?

Design of the Re-Gift Receipt

To create the Re-Gift Receipt, I used my Stockwell Rubber Stamp Kit (I'll have to write about this sometime later) to create the RE-GIFT RECEIPT: YOUR GUILT-FREE PASS lettering at top. I scanned this in, colored it to resemble the purplish ink on old-style receipts, and laid out some text using an 8-point monospaced font (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono if you are curious...it's one of my favorite console fonts).

Since I wanted to reproduce the length of the typical gift receipt---they are often filled with legal mumbo jumbo---I had to write some filler. I figured it wouldn't hurt to cover some of the basic scenarios that lead to "poor gifting". Here's what it says:

RE-GIFT RECEIPT POLICY

This present has been given to you by your (CIRCLE ONE):

CO-WORKER(S)

CASUAL BUDDY

REALLY BUSY BEST FRIEND

SIGNIFICANT OTHER

OTHER ACQUAINTANCE

If you like it, great! However, in the event that dismay and polite confusion ensued rather than joy, please allow that (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY):

I DON'T REALLY KNOW YOU THAT WELL SO I JUST WINGED IT

IT LOOKED MUCH BETTER ONLINE / IN THE STORE

I'M A CLUELESS GUY/GAL WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT PRESENTS

I GENUINELY THOUGHT YOU LIKED THIS KIND OF STUPID CRAP

I DID ALL MY SHOPPING AT THE SAME STORE THIS IS WHAT THEY HAD

I THOUGHT YOU COULD USE IT FOR HOBBY/WORK BUT WHAT DO I REALLY KNOW ABOUT IT

MOM SAID "IT IS THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS" AND I BELIEVED HERE

In the True Spirit of American Giving, this RE-GIFT RECEIPT entitles you to pass this item guilt-free to a third party, no questions asked.

AUTHORIZING GIFT GIVER:

RECIPIENT:

by re-gifting this present, you agree that there is no reason to ever mention this again

I think this covers about 80% of all bad-gifting scenarios, and having it in an easy "circle your excuse" format really captures the Spirit of Exchanging Gifts For Better Ones: convenient, cheerfully impersonal, with no hard feelings at all.

After I got this text laid out in Illustrator, I noticed that the overly-crisp quality of the text was at-odds with my scanned rubber-stamp letterings. I applied a 1-pixel gaussian blur over all the text using a raster-based effect. It's cool that you can do this stuff now; back in the old days, I'd have had to convert the whole file to a high-resolution TIFF file and that would have been a pain in the butt. Blurring the text slightly made everything fit together visually. I was pleased that the file size didn't get too large either. At about 250KB for the PDF it's about 100K larger than the non-blurred version, but that's acceptable I think for the visual result. On the minus side, there's a good chance that non-Adobe PDF readers will render the file incorrectly; let me know in the comments if you come across this problem. I'm curious.

Download the Re-Gift Receipt Forms

There's three Re-Gift Receipts per 8.5"x11" sheet. Just trim along the print marks and you'll be ready to start disavowing any intended thoughtfulness to your gift giving. You could also use these forms to legitimately (sigh) let your friends know that you did your best, but there is no obligation to hold on to it...just don't give it BACK. :-)

Download Re-Gift Receipt Printable Form (PDF, 316K)

If you appreciated the dubious value of this download, you might also like my Chain Letter Nullification Certificate, Arm-Mounted Task Nagger, Procrastinator's Clock, and Social Yardstick designs. Enjoy! :-)

Why I Design

2008-01-07 05:14:00-05:00

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed how it's changed its focus from the personal to the productive. In the beginning, when I first started blogging out of a kind of quiet desperation to once and for all figure myself out, the entries were short clippings of my thoughts on whatever happened to catch my eye and interest. As time went on, and I discovered that long-lost friends were starting to stumble upon the webby shores of my site, I grew a little bolder and started writing in more depth about topics that were interesting to me. Blogging for that small audience was the outlet I needed.

At the beginning of 2005, I was starting to just come out of a two-year period of negativity, and was comfortable enough about writing online to make a few rambling journeys into personal introspection. These felt quite daring because they were so out of character with the other posts, which tended to be more detailed, hard-edged and technical. I remember posting about feeling negative, and a couple of my friends actually emailed me to make sure I wasn't about to lose it. While I find those posts to be somewhat embarrassing in retrospect, they are also as honest as I could make them, so I leave them up as signposts of my online journey. And it was through this journey that I really started getting to the bottom of what was important to me so I could create solutions to my problems. This is what lead to the original Printable CEO article, with its bizarre merging of psychology via video game design philosophy. I think one reason people like it, other than its sheer geekiness, is that it was designed to help you care about yourself. Fundamentally, I think of it as a design that is all about caring, inspiring, and empowering individuals.

Lately I've been avoiding writing the long introspective posts, because I've been aware of the growing contingent of productivity enthusiasts who have come here through sites like LifeHacker and Web Worker Daily. These are very popular, tip-focused sites that link to the various forms I've created to address the different inefficiencies I've faced in my freelancing career. Every time one of these sites links to an article here, I see a bump in RSS subscriptions. A few days later, I see a corresponding dip as people realize that I tend to write about other stuff like sandwiches and they unsubscribe. This used to bum me out, but I would tell myself that my writing is not for everyone. It's hard to describe exactly what keeps people here, actually, but I figure the people who stay are the ones I want to talk to in the first place. It's been tougher recently to stick to that line because I'm starting to realize that there is a lot I could do to drive traffic and build a real "web property". I'm starting my 4th year of blogging, and over those years I've learned quite a bit about how to write content and how to maintain a website. I've seen other websites that have started at around the same time I have flourish and explode into full-fledged enterprises, far beyond what I've done here. It was for this reason that I switched from WordPress to Expression Engine, because Expression Engine offers me the ability to start expanding my site facilities without a whole of painful integration work. It will allow me to start compartmentalizing my writing into focused, ad-friendly packets of content. It's a good media strategy.

You might be surprised to know that I don't spend every day reading RSS feeds to suck down the latest productivity and design news. I know that stuff is out there, but I get most of what I know through other people mentioning what's hot in passing. The sites that I do visit are ones that share the stories of someone's life. If there are any tips, they're offered in context to what someone has done and how it affected them. This is what I am drawn to, and recognizing that changes the way I deploy my shiny technical skills. I design because I like stories. And the kind of stories I like best are ones where someone has a dream, meets an obstacle that seems unsurmountable, then finds that greatness in themselves somehow to get past it.

I recently reread Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life?, which is his book about ordinary people who have asked this question and what they did about it. I originally read the book sometime in 2003, before I knew what a blog was and before I knew what was important to me. All I knew was that I wasn't particularly happy or inspired or motivated, though I wanted to feel that way. I wanted a calling, and the book reassured me that I wasn't alone or crazy in desiring this. Then I forgot about the book and went on with my life. 2004 kind of sucked, but 2005 offered possibility. 2006 was pretty good, and 2007 was better still because I've met people who have made a difference in my life, and have given me fresh perspective. What I lacked, though, was a sense of being part of a greater movement. What Should I Do With My Life? (a book about individual calling), along with Why Do I Love These People (a related book about family bonds) has reconnected me with the notion that it's really the people making their lives work that inspire me every day. And so, if what I can do with my life can help them make their stories better and make a good life...that's precisely what I want to do. I just need to make it pay.

I'm not exactly sure why I wrote this, though I suspect it's partly a reaction to my NOT having written a rambling personal post in quite some time, and it's probably also part of my processing of my Po Bronson weekend. I think maybe this is an affirmation of faith, and maybe it's also a beacon. As an experiment I've tried linking this post to the forum that I just installed this weekend for the C# Study Group. If there's anything I've learned, it's the small offerings to connect that lead to surprising opportunities. You just need to keep making the offer, and not have expectations on what comes back. It's both scary and exciting. It doesn't always work out or last, but heck let's see if anything happens. You can register here.

My Desktop Size Reference Wallpaper

2007-09-25 04:03:16-05:00

Occasionally I have to size browser windows quickly to see if a design will really work on smaller computer screens. In times of such need, I use this desktop background:

It's just a 1600x1200 24-bit PNG file that has the standard 4:3 ratio screen sizes on them. I suppose I should also add the widescreen aspect ratios to them too for completeness. My work is never done...sigh. The grid size is 25 pixels; this is good enough to estimate sizes without literring the entire screen with tiny boxes.

Anyway, people sometimes ask me for this file, so I'm putting it here for future generations of new media designers to enjoy. It's a mere 63K too, which pleases my inherent cheapness when it comes to using memory, though technically speaking---oh, never mind...these days memory usage practically doesn't matter anymore.

» Download Desktop PNG File

You will want to right-click and choose "Save Link As" to your desktop. Then do whatever you need to do to set it as your new "desktop background." Make sure you do not use scaling, otherwise the sizes of the boxes will be completely wrong.

Pushing Interactive Exhibit Technology

2007-07-27 22:16:08-05:00

It's not that often that I get to re-relive a childhood fantasy. In this case, it's creating video games, or rather, using the technology to tell some kind of story.

Let me back up first: I worked as a video game developer about ten years ago, in a variety of artist, designer, and developer roles. Working in games was a natural progression, so it seemed, from my childhood fascination with computers. When I was deciding what to study in college, it was a toss-up between English or Computer Engineering; I figured I could always write stories, but I didn't know anything about how computers really worked at the hardware level. That ate at me. Computer circuitry fascinated me, because I couldn’t understand how it worked. So I got sidetracked for 10 years, gradually switching from computers to computer graphics then to interactive media, until I realized that I liked people and rediscovered writing.

Despite my recent focus on design, I’ve still maintained an healthy interest in the hardware and software, because I love the power that technology brings to storytelling. In particular, I like how video games can make you forget you’re just looking at bunch of glowing dots moving around on a flat screen. When a game is done right, you are fully drawn into its world as an active participant. The very best games use tons of presentational tricks to augment the experience so every pixel and every frame pulses with life.

I have a chance to revisit this world now, being in the process of picking up a new project for a large scale interactive for a museum in Illinois. The goal of this particular exhibit, which is targeted at younger children, is to convey the concept of how our choices and actions---and lack thereof---effect changes in the world. We think this can be done by creating a participatory interactive environment where groups of children spontaneously cooperate to create the world together. We’ll know we’ve done our job if children leave with a memory of their actions having made a difference that really mattered to them. This is a project that I can totally get behind, and the company developing the concept, understands the educational and philosophical issues that are important for an exhibit of this nature.

So what’s the problem? We want to push the envelope, just like we used to do in the game industry. However, the perception out there is that this is "too hard" or "too expensive". People are comfortable with their existing tools. What we want to do, however, is turn that thinking on its ear, and bring some ass-kicking tools into the educational / museum interactive space to raise the bar. Of course, that's easier said than done; I’m trying to figure out the best way of finding the right people and technologies that are intrigued by the possibilities. I’ll be picking up my rusty game development toolbelt again, using what I know to to redefine new workflows so we can wow the crowd, on time and on budget.

A tall order. I'm wrapping my head around it still, and I figured I might as well write a blog post about it and state my case. Read onward!

TYPICAL INTERACTION TECHNOLOGY

I’ve done a few interactives in my time, using programs like Director. Director is what we New Media Designers call an authoring tool. It's sort of like a fancy version of PowerPoint; you don’t need to be a programmer and build everything from absolute scratch, because the tool provides ways to animate things on the screen, play sounds, and respond to mouse clicks and key presses. Director and tools like it allow you to create much more sophisticated behaviors than you can with Powerpoint; you can think of it as the difference between Microsoft Word and a professional Page Layout program like InDesign or Quark XPress.

Director is showing its age, so Flash has started to replace it in several areas. As it turns out, most interactives share a lot of common DNA:

Some set of related ideas is presented through words and moving images
Keyboard and mouse actions cause something to react differently on the screen
The behavior of the interactive depends a lot on what the user does

More "advanced" interactives typically incorporate novel presentational and input elements:

360 degree panoramic movies
Accelerated realtime 3D graphics
High-quality animation
Using computer vision techniques for user input
Controlling external hardware through various extensions

Director can also incorporate elements created with the other major authoring tool, Flash. Flash has the advantage of animation quality and a "better" programming language (Actionscript), but it lacks the extensibility of Director's Xtras to interface with barcode scanners, burn CDs...heck, just about anything you need to do. You can also write your own with the Xtra Software Development Kit (SDK) Flash can do some of these things by using 3rd-party extenders, but it’s not built-in functionality.

The great advantage of using an authoring tool like Director or Flash is that they create programs that will run on practically any computer, either as a desktop program or in a web browser that has the Shockwave or Flash Player plugin installed. This simplifies deployment and installation quite a bit. However, this universality comes at the expense of using the really cool cutting-edge capabilities already built-into your computer:

Instead of hardware-accelerated graphics, a slower general-purpose graphics engine is used.
Instead of multi-channel, low-latency 3D positional audio, simple stereo playback is supported.
Instead of interesting input devices, you're limited to basic keyboard and mouse input

Don’t get me wrong: the general-purpose graphics and audio engines in Flash are very fast and capable, and clever interactive designers are doing astonishingly great stuff with them. However, sometimes you want something that's more specialized. Metaphorically speaking, you can think of the Flash graphics engine as the "computer software equivalent" of a nice 2007 Toyota Camry. It’s fast, powerful, comfortable, and refined: a great daily driver. However, you would never think of driving your Camry through a slurry of rock and mud in a rally race, or doing 500 laps against highly-tuned purpose-built race cars. It would be futile. Your Camry is a perfectly fine general-purpose automobile, but there are times when the level of performance can not be delivered.

THE HOLY GRAIL: 60 FRAMES PER SECOND

The kind of performance I am thinking of, with regards to museum interactives, is to achieve a digital semblance of life. This is a combination of aesthetics and speed: meticulous pixel-level craftsmanship, highly optimized graphics and special effects engines, and super smooth animation.

I know, I know...I said general-purpose graphics engines are pretty darn good already, so can't we just use our existing tools? This is where I have to introduce some personal design philosophy: I can feel my pulse beat faster when engaged by nuanced silky-smooth animation. To me, that’s achieving, at minimum, a rock-solid 30 frames per second (fps) refresh rate; in other words, the screen is redrawn ("refreshed") 30 times every second. Even better is 60 frames per second; the old Atari 2600 console refreshed its crude graphics display at 60 frames per second because the game designers didn’t have a choice; the 1970s-era design dictated this as a major design constraint. If you’ve ever been struck by the eerie smoothness of early video games, the high frame rate is why. 60 frames per second is awesome. 60 frames per second is ALIVE. There is something much more visceral about graphics projected at this speed.

If we were able to have 60fps games in the 1970s, we should be doing pretty well today, right? Well, not quite. Modern computers are tens of thousands of times more powerful than those early video games, but the technical necessity for 60fps animation has long past. Back then, the screen needed to be updated that quickly because if you didn’t draw fast enough, the screen would literally flicker and look terrible. Since computer memory was very expensive, the graphics were created "just in time" for the television electron beam to draw them. Other early game systems used what are called vector displays, which control the screen's electron gun directly. Today, just about all computers use a framebuffer, which is sort of like a "drawing slate" inside the computer, compromised of a whole bunch of pixels. There are often two framebuffers: one is shown by the computer monitor, redrawn from 60 to 120 frames per second. The other is used for new graphics, say the next frame of your animation. When the computer is done drawing the new frame, it tells the monitor to "switch framebuffer", thus showing the newly-completed slate. Because switching framebuffers is practically instantaneous, the screen appears to change immediately. The framerate of the animation is determined by how fast the computer can keep drawing and flipping those framebuffers; if the computer takes a long time to draw each new frame, the result is a slower stream of images. The result: a lower framerate.

In practical terms, you can still maintain the illusion of smooth motion with as little as 12 frames per second. In hand-drawn animation terms, this would be like watching an old Bugs Bunny cartoon; at 12 frames per second on a 24 frame-per-second film reel (the standard for film projection), you are drawing an entirely new image on every other frame (this is called animating on twos). Japanese animation tends to be animated with fewer frames, perhaps on 3s or 4s (corresponding to 8 and 6 frames per second). If you’ve noticed that Japanese TV animation looks a lot choppier than "American" animation from Disney or some other studio, this is probably what you're seeing.

Other than frame rate, the other main contributor to animation smoothness is consistency of the frame rate. It's far better to have a consistent 10fps than 30fps half the time and 15fps the other half. Many new interactive designers don’t understand how the graphics engine works, and sometimes create situations where frame rate variations cause "jerkiness" and "hitching". They just heap graphic after graphic on the overloaded graphics engine, like Dad loading 1000 pounds of cinderblocks in the back of his Camry, then wondering why the car’s making that weird noise and it’s driving so slow. Every graphic element has its own cost, and the savvy interactive designer knows how to account for every overdrawn pixel to maximize available computing power.

HITTING 60

Humor me and presume that 60fps is the holy grail of framerates. There are only three ways you can do this:

Draw fewer objects -- the fewer graphics you draw, the faster each frame is drawn. However, you lose visual richness.
Be clever about HOW you draw -- You might only update a few things at a time, or update different parts of the screen at different framerates; you just need a few things moving at 60fps to start to benefit. You can avoid "overdrawing". You can pre-render some graphics sequences to avoid real-time compositing. The disadvantage: the optimization techniques start to get in the way of implementing new ideas.
Get a faster graphics engine -- Oh, yeah :-)

So let's look at the graphics engine choices we have!

PEERING INTO THE TECHNICAL ABYSS

Compared to 10 years ago, there are a lot more game development tools available, both commercial and open source. They fall into three general categories:

Tools that expose the raw underlying power of the hardware to programmers. For example, DirectX.
Tools that provide a mature implementation of a useful game element. Simulating physics and gravity, for example.
Tools that provide the framework for a typical type of game. For example, there are game toolkits that are targeted toward First Person Shooters, so developers can focus more on creating the customized game experience, as opposed to first building one from scratch.

There's a lot of tools out there. Unfortunately, they require that you are a game programmer! This, of course, is is the domain of intense individuals who have learned to deconstruct their very existence into constructs of optimized code to recreate entire worlds in their own image. It’s pretty heady stuff. I can’t do it myself, but I’ve had occasion to peer into the abyss.

That said, there’s not really any reason we can’t apply some of that technology to our interactive work. We just need to know that the tools are not quite as forgiving as Photoshop, and that there is new workflow to learn.

BUT ISN'T THIS WAY TOO EXPENSIVE?

Other than the technical complexity, there's the perception that game development is very expensive. And yes, it is. Modern commercial game development budgets regularly exceed a million dollars, and require dozens of specialists---these are the experienced programmers, artists, animators, and producers that you’re unlikely to find on the street. The high cost of game development is sometimes cited as a reason why this would never work for something like a museum interactive, which can have much more modest budgets. However, a great deal of the development cost is from creating content for hours lavish gameplay. That’s expensive to produce, and why a lot of artwork creation is going overseas. A second expense is all the play balancing, refinement, and testing to make sure the game is a commercial success. A museum interactive, by comparison, needs enough content to fulfill maybe 5-10 minutes of interaction, is "successful" if it integrates with a larger supporting educational experience, and doesn't cause a maintenance problem. With the lower content requirements and less brutal fitness metrics, cost can be contained within a reasonable (that is, doable) scope. Theoretically, anyway :-)

There's a second advantage: we're designing for a specific computer. Developing for the mass market requires a defensive programming mentality to ensure that the code runs on every supported machine. There are thousands of small-but-deadly variations between video cards, motherboard bugs, installed software, and operating system variations. This is where using Flash Player shines: the hard engineering work to make sure the player works on all computers has already been done by Macromedia's engineers, so it will run pretty much the same on all supported computing platforms. If we were developing a product for use by individuals, this would be very important. However, for a museum interactive, we get to specify the hardware ourselves and control what's installed on it. Our interactive will run on a machine of our designated speed, with a particular video card, and our own code libraries. This is absolutely controllable, if you know what you’re doing.

THE WORKFLOW CHALLENGE

What is a challenge is acquiring the know-how to work with game development technologies. There is no click-and-play application that you can use to create an awesome cutting-edge game experience, though I’ve been very intrigued by Unity as a potential solution.

The great advantage that visual authoring tools like Flash and Director has over "traditional" game development is:

The common workflow -- Flash is in broad use, and there's a lot of books and tutorials available. It is less the case for game development tools, though it's actually getting a lot better because this is a popular subject.
The refined user interface for integrating artwork and code -- You can do just about everything you need with Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator and a decent sound editor like Sound Forge. Not so with game engines…you’ll be learning how to model and rig elaborately-textured 3D models and export them as esoteric file formats that you’ve never heard of, using utilities that work maybe 80% of the time. You’ll have to learn all the messy details of how the graphics engine really works and bend it to your will. Otherwise nothing will work at all, and you'll be wondering why.

Game development is kind of like building a race car that you're learning to drive at the same time. When it works , it’s fast and exhilarating. When it doesn’t work, nothing works at all. However, you’re building a specialized machine that will do things that just aren’t possible with general-purpose authoring tools.

THE HOLY GRAIL

This post seems to have become an introduction to interactive technologies, so I should bring it home and explain why all this is important to me.

60 Frames Per Second. Beautiful, compelling, living motion. If you want to attract kids, you need to make something pretty compelling. Some of this you can just do with bright colors (kids are suckers for that), but holding their interest requires animation talent and enough graphics horsepower to move a lot of objects on the screen.
Advanced Graphics. I’m a big fan of Flash, and I also know how to code up a rock-solid Director app for a kiosk application. Video game technologies, however, are a quantum leap in visualization capability...if I can get them to work right. I’m tired of seeing ratty 2D graphics, amateurishly hacked out of a low-quality JPEG file, lurching across the screen at 7 frames per second in a freakish parody of "fun". I believe that things can be much better. It's time to push harder on this.
Parity of Experience with Other Media. Kids can tell the difference between a gimpy 12 fps Flash animation and a professionally-produced game running on their PlayStation 3. They can rent 20 million dollars worth of production for 3 bucks at the local Blockbuster. As small interactive producers, we can’t possibly compete with those massive budgets and teams, but we can apply some of the same techniques with less money. We have an advantage in having a controlled space in the museum, and thus we can employ environmental graphics and attraction design techniques to our advantage.
Magic. It really doesn’t matter what kind of tools you’re using; what counts is your ability to wield your presentation techniques with graceful surety. This is showmanship. However, there is something to be said for having that awesome explosion effect, that bone-crushing sound system, and novel visual ideas that have never been seen before. This kind of spectacle often requires some investment in serious hardware and software.

For the next few months, I’ll be looking at ways of trying to achieve this higher level of interaction. I’ve started to look at open source game engines and some commercial products, re-immersing myself into technologies that I haven’t looked at in a long time. If there are people out there with the interest and the skills, I’d like to hear from you to see how we might combine forces and do some cross-education. Leave a comment!

NOTE: The views expressed in this post are mine, not necessarily that of the company I'm working with! :-)