You have to admire the sheer chutzpah of the geniuses at Microsoft legal who filed a patent for Edward Tufte’s sparklines.
[via Waxy]
I’m reading Jonathan’s Lethem’s latest novel, Chronic City. The first chapter is a quirky, compelling read, focused on the burgeoning friendship of two very different men in a Manhattan that creeps into every bit of characterization. And while I love a good opening, there’s a ton to admire in the way Lethem broadside of The New Yorker and its audience:
In our talk marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloud bank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes. Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine, the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, no with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself.
Ever since Letters of Note published Mick Jagger’s commission of Andy Warhol for cover art, it’s been getting circulated around for the amusement of those toiling away in the design salt mines.
I’ve received this in email, seen it on Facebook, Dropular and FFFound… it’s the feel good hit of the autumn. As impressive a piece of history as it is, though, the thing that seems to compel everyone is Jagger’s attitude, embedded in just a few phrases. “I leave it in your capable hands,” and “please write back saying how much money you would like,” and most amazingly, “[Al Steckler] will probably look nervous and say ‘Hurry up’ but take little notice.” [ed. note: !!!]
These are the words any creative professional longs to hear from a client: I trust you. Money is no object. Take your time to do it correctly.
I read over at Brand New that Siegel+Gale did an overhaul of Pfizer’s corporate identity. I like it a lot, for some of the same reasons BN did… but did S+G really need to create a messaging element that looks like a hundred tiny little pills?
There are way too many professionals in design fields who believe their work is a matter of life and death, but there are at least a few for whom this distinction is true: bridge designers. This was reinforced yesterday when a trucker died having plunged his truck over the side of the Bay Bridge here in SF.
While there’s plenty of uproar due to the frankly bizarre temporary S-curve that retrofit designers incorporated into the East-bound span, Cal Trans officials are denying it had anything to do with the design:
“We don’t believe the roadway design is the issue,” he said. “There’s just a small percentage of people who choose to ignore the posted speed limit.”
Thankfully, two of the better designers I know, Mike Monteiro and Dan Saffer, quickly put that perspective into context:
Warren Ellis weighs in on his frustration with the current batch of augmented reality applications for smart phones:
Now fuck off and make something that’ll do useful work on a phone in a village, instead of something that’ll get you laid in fucking Hoxton. Make something that has meaning outside a major metropolis.
He has a point. I’m thankful that Ben Fullerton and Jenn Bove were able to talk me out going down the augmented reality angle for a proof of concept I’m working on.
One of the (many) good points they made was that I was over-thinking the solution rather than addressing the core problem. It could just as easily be stated that augmented reality is a lovely whiz-bang solution in certain contexts, but not-so-surprisingly inappropriate where the local terrain doesn’t cast a very deep shadow of data. Anyway, go through to the link; I left the two best punchlines out of the blockquote, and they’re worth the quick read.
Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index
Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content strategy .
Let me know how that works out for you.
I’ve been enjoying Dan Lyons’ media analysis of last Sunday’s NYT hit piece on Microsoft. Today’s post is quality, and even contains a nice little summary of how Microsoft got itself into this position:
But what happened after that? This is what we were wondering. Larry says two things happened. One, the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic. Two, everyone else got faster. Look at Google. They got so big so quickly that there was no way for the Borg to claw them back. Same for all these other Web businesses. Amazon, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter. They came out of nowhere, and what they were doing was free, so the Borg couldn’t just do a crappy knockoff and sell it for less. They were up against free — the Web companies were using their own strategy against them.
Another difference was the customer set. In the old days you were talking about selling to corporate America, and consumers just followed suit — remember the marketing shit about how you want the same stuff at home that you have at the office? Selling to corporates was easy. You have lots of levers you can pull to make them do what you want and pay what you tell them to. We all had a playbook — we just studied what IBM had been doing for decades, and we copied them. (Larry stopped and chuckled a little bit when he said this, and for a moment just stared out the window with this glazed, happy expression on his face.) The Borg’s other customer set were hardware OEMs. Again, easy to coerce, and no messy dealing with end users. Perfect.
But on the Web things changed — now you were selling to consumers, and the Borg had no way to coerce or control consumers the way they could coerce corporate accounts.
This is the Second Verse, resuming broadcast. Good afternoon.
Self-awareness is a valuable commodity in life, and in woefully short supply. I’ve found recently that the one area that I wish I and others were more self-aware was within collaborative design teams. How many times recently have you been told by someone that they felt they were carrying the weight of their team? Or that of all the ideas that moved forward to implementation, they felt that theirs represented the lion’s share?
This ownership dilemma is a natural artifact of team composition. Someone always has to provide direction, while others supply support, production savvy, client management, and the like. And its common for anyone working hard within a collaborative team to feel as though their work is what is driving the team forward. There can, however be another circumstance in which one person’s ideas are shaping the produced work, while others are left to whither. The possibility is that person is a bully.
There’s an old saying in poker, “If you look around the table and can’t spot the sucker, then you are the sucker.” Self-awareness counts for a lot; recognizing the role that you’re playing, consciously or not, is a big part of being able to function effectively in team settings. If you feel that your ideas are the ones moving forward, take a moment to ask yourself the question, “are my ideas trumping everyone else’s because I’m preventing theirs from getting through?” If the honest answer to that question is yes, you just might be a bully.
Bullying takes a lot of forms, but generally asserts itself as a belief that only you know best how to solve the problem/please the client/deliver successfully. Defensiveness, argument, and downright obstinacy in the face of contrary ideas (or ideas that aren’t yours) comes next. The team stops collaborating and simply starts executing on a vision, dictated from on high (you’re the creative lead) or from below (you are a very cunning junior designer).
Think about the best case scenario for having done this: the engagement will go well, your team will be lauded, and you might even get recognized for taking the reins… but you’ll have done irreparable harm to yourself and to the people on your team. More damning, you were collaborating in order to generate the best possible solution – that’s not possible when only one person’s ideas are being considered.
There’s a lot of advice around the construction, management and interaction of collaborative teams – what I’m looking to add to all of that is the importance of reflection on circumstance. If you find the momentum of your team pushing certain ideas forward, take the opportunity to ask why, regardless of whose ideas they are. Ensure that consensus is maintained to guarantee the quality of the solution, and make sure that no one team member is stopping others’ good ideas from being considered.
My name's Ryan Freitas. More about me can be found here.
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