Monk’s Mood
Filed under Input and tagged Ideas on September 30th, 2011
Steve Lacy, undisputed sultan of the soprano sax, played with some of the greatest jazz composers who ever lived. He sat with the likes of Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols and Duke Ellington. His most celebrated contributions to the world of jazz, however, took place under the watchful shades of Mr. Thelonious Monk.
Below are a handful of gems from the scrawled notes in Steve’s notebook under the heading ‘Monk’s Advice (1968)’. The pithy remarks have relevance across all creative work — whether at the keyboard of a Bösendorfer or a Macbook Pro.
1. Just because you’re not a drummer doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.
2. You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
3. Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by… what you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.
4. When you’re swinging, swing some more!
5. (What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!
6. A genius is the one most like himself.
7. Stop playing all that bullshit, play the melody!
8. Always leave them wanting more.
Thanks to Hope for sending this along
Building for Tomorrow
Filed under Input and tagged Ideas on September 26th, 2011
I have long thought that a mark of true craft was the ability of an object to endure — and perhaps even flourish — with the passage of time. Baseball gloves, fine furniture and violins become more distinct and reveal the hidden genius of their construction as they age. Your experience with them is richer for their having been used before. It’s troubling to think that those of us who build objects for the web don’t share in this tradition.
I want this to change and I’m not sure how it can, but this seems like it might be a step in the right direction: Future Friendly.
The Business of Creativity
Filed under Input and tagged Ideas on March 31st, 2011
Three questions before taking on a project:
Can we make money from it?
We’re a going business. We have mortgages to pay. We have tuitions to pay for our kids. We’re not ashamed of making money.
Are we gonna be proud of it when we’re done?
There’s nothing that will break your heart faster than working three months on a project and then, when it’s all done, you’ve sold your soul and compromised and you don’t even want anybody to see it.
Can we learn something new?
That allows us to continue to grow in the skills that we have. It allows us to be better filmmakers and writers and coders and art directors. And it keeps things interesting.
From Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud: Coudal on Signal vs. Noise
Pixel as Mother Tongue
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on March 13th, 2011
The era of transitioning human beings to the screen is over. Now is the time for designers and storytellers to fully embrace the ascendant platforms and invent a vernacular beyond the derivative language of engineers and marketers.
An Elegant Irony
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on December 16th, 2010
The crazy thing about street cred is that as soon as you go to cash it in, you’re stripped of it by the very people who gave it to you. It’s like some sort of scummy casino.
It seems that Banksy is the latest to add his name to the list of well-known street artists that have been harshly criticized for “selling out” by the skateboarding masses. Apparently, while Banksy was busy writing the preface for his coffee table book and story-boarding the recent opener for The Simpsons, the real artists were hanging a gallery show ankle deep in New York City’s collective fecal matter. Tough crowd.
Just goes to show that credibility is hard to earn and all too easy to lose. At the same time, it does provide a sort of cultural system of checks and balances. Brands that manage to earn the wary trust of a counter-cultural crowd — especially one who’s ideology is inherently anti-consumerism — must tread particularly lightly. The oft-cited Patagonia comes to mind as a company that seems to walk the talk. They stand by their guns, even when they’re shooting holes in their own business model. The eco-clothiers have made a habit of cultivating deep loyalties with their core consumer base through efforts like 1% For The Planet and The Footprint Chronicles, through which they candidly admit that they’re part of the problem. That’s some serious street trail cred: Humility before glory.
Organizations that sign up for this voyage into truly authentic branding have got to take the long view. It would be so much quicker to work a gimmick or endorsement and go huge overnight, but as soon as their cover is blown, so is their credibility. Forever. The Milli Vanilli of marketing, so to speak. Menswear mogul Giorgio Armani said,
“I’ve tried to find a new elegance. It’s not easy, because people want to be shocked. They want explosive fashion. But explosions don’t last, they disappear immediately and leave nothing but ashes.”
The same is true in advertising. Companies should strive to be surprising in their openness and exceptional in their consistency. The road to sustained credibility is to respect your customer, accept slower growth and constantly check your product (and your promotion) against what you claim to stand for.
On the other hand, you’ve got to be willing to ignore the inevitable haters. Viva Banksy.
Rating vs. Curating
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on December 2nd, 2010
Today the popular iPad app Flipboard which bills itself as “the world’s first social magazine” released a major update which introduces “the beauty of print, the power of the web.” Heady stuff, to be sure, but as usual— I’m hung up on the m-word. More and more, magazine is being reduced to nothing more than a form factor. It’s pretty fonts and consistent layouts. It’s an empty vessel for — whatever. Don’t get me wrong: I use Flipboard. I love Flipboard. It’s a beautiful aggregator of personally relevant content. It’s brilliant at generating a cohesive package from a variety of channels in ways that are intuitive and enjoyable to consume.
Flipboard is many wonderful things. It is not a magazine.
And the reason, of course, is curation. I know, I know. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger buzzword and it’s easy to disparage the term itself because of its overuse, but the fact remains that it’s the best way to describe what many of the best publishers are doing on the web and on the tablet.
My problem with Flipboard calling itself a magazine stems from the utter lack of curation. Or worse, the notion that curation can be crowd sourced.
Magazine is your friend the gourmet chef. She invites you to a dinner party and your mouth immediately begins to water because you already know the meal will be an immersive, multi-sensory experience. Course after course of surprising, yet ingenious combinations of textures and flavors. Intentionally paired with the perfect wine to complement and draw out the subtleties you would have otherwise missed. A coherent expression flowing from a perceivable point-of-view. It’s edited. Your friend wants feedback to what she’s serving up so her next meal can be even more impressive. She wants you to come back for more.
By comparison, Flipboard is potluck.
The iPad has breathed new life into this whole discussion and opened up a new frontier to publishers — as I’ve mentioned. Some of the brightest folks in the business are thinking and writing about it. Even guys like Khoi Vinh have chimed in. Writing about the web more broadly, Rand Fishkin penned an excellent post on the need for what he calls “benevolent editors” beyond just the algorithm and the crowd. It’s tempting to think of ourselves as little editors making little magazines — wielding our “Like” buttons and retweets. But the truth is that when done well with pacing and insight, a magazine is much more than just a collection of things that have been deemed worthwhile. It takes us on a journey we didn’t even know we wanted to go on. Whether or not our friends care to tag along. There’s Texas and then there’s Texas. The difference?
Curation.
Leave It To Beaver
Filed under Output and tagged Ideas on November 8th, 2010
Summers in college, I worked for a carpenter framing additions, building staircases, and installing trim. I was a cutter. My colleagues would shout down measurements and my job was to grab the correct piece of lumber, measure the desired length, set the appropriate angles and chop. Two-studs-eleven-six-and-thirteen-short-on-a-forty-five coming right up. Unfortunately, seven sounds a lot like eleven and sometimes I’d make a wrong cut. Anyone who’s worked in construction will recall what I heard then. The carpenter’s cry would rattle the ladders, momentarily drowning out generators and nail guns: Measure Twice, Cut Once!
Lots of people apply this same wisdom to the building of websites and I can see why. It’s tempting to think of the web as a known quantity and a website as a fixed vessel. And the construction metaphor is helpful so far as it goes — primarily when talking to neophytes. But a website is the sort of house that needs renovation the day after it’s built and the web is far from known. With the obvious exception of preparing images in Photoshop or Fireworks, the philosophy of Measure Twice, Cut Once has little place in a serious conversation about building for the web. When you’re making a website, whether your business card says IA, UX, Designer or Developer, you are not creating a final iteration. Not even close. You are building — in the best of times — the latest evolution of a space which is engineered to scale and flex in response to the changing needs of it’s owners and users. At worst — it’s the overpriced custom cabinetry that looked great on paper, but turns out to be utterly useless in the kitchen.
Consider the lowly beaver: nature’s busiest builder. Once he finds a tree that’s roughly the right size and shape, quick as he can, it’s felled and into the river. Pretty tough to tell how a particular piece of wood will perform from the safety of dry land, so the beaver gets it into approximate position before he starts trimming and fitting. But the job’s hardly done. Whether he’s working on a dam or a lodge, the thing about rivers is that they never sit still. One week, there’s a flood and the next, a drought. And that beaver just keeps on reading the river and building to suit — shoring up the dam or adding a layer to his lodge for winter. How do you think they earned the reputation for being so busy?
The beaver could spend months at the drawing table perfecting his blueprints, but he knows the river won’t wait. With both mountain streams and site traffic, flow is hard to forecast — the best we can do is be ready to adapt and have the right tools close at hand. We must be not just willing, but eager, to build and build again to meet the changing currents.
