This Ted Williams is amazing. I want to be his friend. Godspeed with the job hunt, my Golden-Voiced future friend!
Update: the video had ~500 views when I posted this; what a difference a day (and some Twitter love from Ryan Seacrest) makes! 4mil+ views and tons of job offers for Ted. I love the internet.
I just logged in to Feedburner for the first time in a year or so.
Oh, hi 900+ new subscribers. I had no idea you were here. We’re going to have fun in 2011. Thank you for reading.
“You know, religious people have such beautiful music and art… and atheists really have nothing… until now.”—Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers from a recent Austin City Limits performance.
At age 28, ten years after dropping out, Franco decided to go back to college…he threw himself back into his education with crazy abandon. He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then proceeded to take 62 credits a quarter, roughly three times the normal limit [while still acting]…He graduated in two years with a degree in English and a GPA over 3.5. He wrote a novel as his honors thesis…[And now] he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once…[commuting between] Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, Morningside Heights, and occasionally North Carolina.
—excerpted from The James Franco Project in New York Magazine
After reading that, Franco has become one interesting character to me. It makes me wonder how much capacity I’m capable of.
I booked a hotel online this past weekend in Charlotte, NC. I did my typical due diligence on reviews, sifted through a few negative ones, and then decided to take a bit of a chance anyway. Lesson learned. You should probably trust (the average of) peer reviews.
When I walked into The Blake Hotel, I got the impression that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. The Blake is frozen in time, seemingly mid-renovation, with the bare minimum of effort, furniture, and fixtures to suspend the facade. The labyrinthian walk from the parking garage, through the attached conference center, and eventually into the hotel is a bizarre journey through the last few decades. And once I got to my room, I imagined I could take a ladder, set it up in any corner, and, if I pulled hard enough, remove the entire pseudo-boutique facade, like peeling off sheets of fresh latex paint.
Which is how most of us approach communications and design. A little gloss here, some fancy words there, and poof, all is well. But if you start from the outside it’s just a facelift. If the bones are rotten (or, in the case of The Blake, woefully outdated) putting on a coat of paint and throwing some modern touches at the problem won’t give you a cohesive, intentional, or finished result. Smart folks will see the cracks and feel the dissonance.
All your attempts at updating your look or your voice have to begin with the internal, or any attempt at a facelift will be wasted effort.
The first time I became aware of guitarist Tosin Abasi was a New York Magazine street fashion video about him wearing women’s shorts and a vintage Schiaparelli hat—not exactly the stuff of metal legend. Then I heard him play…
Lessen your choices and your actions will quicken as well. You will not have to take the time to decide which tool to use because there is only one.
—Patrick Rhone
In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, Makoto Fujimura has put his traditional Japanese Nihonga painting technique to use on the Four Holy Gospels project, making five large scale works and dozens of small dropcaps to illuminate the first four books of the New Testament.
Quote, “We, today, have a language to celebrate waywardness, but we do not have a language, a cultural language, to bring people back home.”—Makoto Fujimura
Set aside 12 minutes to watch this amazing animation/illustration of Sir Ken Robinson discussing changing education paradigms at the RSA.
Projects fail because when we work in teams, we seek deniability. We want instructions, not insight. We want someone else to be happy with our work and someone else to take the blame when things don’t work out.
—Seth Godin
If you delegate and distribute power to the edges of your organization, especially the young fringes, be prepared for fresh, brilliant work—and occasional colossal failures. Even with a talented, savvy team, they’re going to make mistakes when you give them room to roam. They’re not you. They don’t think like you. They’re going to do things you don’t like.
The only way to ensure you always get exactly what you want is to micro-manage every decision, movement, and project. But you’ll eventually end up doing that without a talented, savvy team. They’ll go elsewhere, where they can stretch their legs a bit and get to roaming.
Distribution of power will eventually lead to occasional off-mission decisions. You have to expect (and even embrace) a percentage of missteps from your team. It’s a part of the process of producing great work, but the on-mission ideas/implementations you’ll get in return are worth the trade-off.
Carty Sewill is a San Jose State student and, as he puts it, “dude from California.” I don’t care where he’s from—these portraits of McFly and The Man With No Name are gasp-inducing.
Aaron Weyenberg wrote an excellent article asking Is Realistic UI Design Realistic? He cites some great examples of the glut of skeuomorphic design cues making their way into UI design recently, especially on the iOS platform. (Dribbble’s popular shots are often icons or illustrated elements straddling that real/fake line as well.) Aaron does a great job of discussing tradeoffs, inconsistencies, and shortcomings of the skeuomorphic route.
Designers abuse history when they use it as a shortcut, a way of giving instant legitimacy to their work…historical reference and outright copying have been cheap and dependable substitutes for a lack of ideas.
—Tibor Kalman, Good History/Bad History
Salt Lake City-based designer Geof Crowl posted this shot to Dribbble with the simple question, “What state do you live in?” Five days later, there are 300+ rebounds (Dribbble’s version of a follow-up response) from designers stateside and abroad, including my nod to my homestate. I’m a sucker for good typography and variations on a theme.
Here are a few of my favorites so far:
clockwise from top left: Utah by Geof Crowl, Oregon by Frank Chimero, Pennsylvania by Preston Brigham, Texas by Phil Coffman, Texas by Trent Walton, Washington D.C. by Brent Jackson, Connecticut by Brian Cook, New York by Tyler Thompson, Colorado by Luke Lisi, Minnesota by Bryan Knauber
At the banquet of creativity, no one breaks the bread for you.
—Frank Chimero, via Twitter
Dotcomrade Grant Blakeman (you should be reading his blog) recently gave this excellent, short, illustratively-inventive talk at a regional TED event in Boulder.
I threw this out to Instagram on Twitter last week:
@instagramapp popularity only breeds popularity. I want more discovery. Show me diamonds in the rough, not in the store.
—@blankenship
They responded:
@blankenship Can you add your ideas for how we can make photos/users more discoverable here http://getsatisfaction.com/instagram thanks!
—@instagramapp
I appreciate how engaged Instagram has been with users and their willingness to listen to ideas from the community. But something feels off to me about a small company funded with half a million dollars in VC money crowdsourcing improvements to their product.
I’ll be the first to admit I have little understanding of the obligations Instagram (or any funded company) has to their investors, or how they’re having to spend that cash to scale the app. But where I’m from $500k is a lot of money, no matter how you slice it. Money changes things, at least subconsciously. If Instagram was a team of two bootstrapping a great app and pushing out changes in their spare time, I’d think differently about giving them ideas on how their product could be better. But they’re not, and so I perceive them differently (whether I’m wrong in that line of thinking or not).
I’m trying to figure out if this is some kind of bias against VC-funded companies (too much reading 37signals anti-VC rants maybe?), a perception of crowdsourcing being similar to spec work, or if I’m just in a snarky mood that ends with, “you have $500k of someone else’s money, why should I do your work for you?” The first is likely my ignorance showing, the second is wholly understandable, but the third is just plain nasty.
One of the things I love about the web and the people creating good things for it is the desire to share ideas and knowledge in an open-handed fashion. I hate scarcity mentality, I don’t want to operate from it or let it creep into my subconscious and affect the way I interact with others. I know building great things typically takes money—and the more people along for the ride, the more money it takes to scale it. But Silicon Valley designer shortages aside, I wonder if tapping the user community for ideas is the best way to move forward?
My assumption is that hungry intelligent people who talk wealthy intelligent people into giving them half a million dollars will have razor-sharp focus and vision for their product. I assume they are busy in the depths of the proverbial laboratory making that vision happen. I assume they’re balancing user feedback with their own goals and gut to write the roadmap for their product. I assume they have clarity and are fearless in ignoring the voices that compromise it, even if those voices are from their own user base.
So am I assuming too much? Or generalizing too much and looking for patterns where they don’t exist? Am I just reading too much into a tweet from a classy company who wants to improve a product they’re proud of? Does money change things? Or does money just change things for me? I obviously have more questions now than I did when I started writing this post. I’m getting used to that.
I’ve been toying with social photo (photo social?) app Instagram for a few days now, along with the other reported 100,000+ users it scooped up in its first week. Instagram has the requisite film-like filters, easy social-sharing, simple UI (though not without its share of kinks), and built-in community from your contacts list.
If you’ve got an iPhone, sign-up and start sharing. There are some incredible users on there already. My username is blankenship if you want to follow along with my photos.
Apt artistic/design commentary from the immensely talented Jessica Hische.
