You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2011.
Chances are as a business owner — especially a service-oriented business — you have something to offer beyond your core service that people want, maybe even need. But you’re not giving or selling that information or wisdom.
Think about your typical day and all the actions you take, the opinions you have, the advice you give, the troubles you troubleshoot. We all have blinds spots when it comes to what comes naturally. We don’t realize there is value in that pool of deep knowledge or interest we’ve spent years cultivating. We don’t think that sharing or selling that advice or information is a possibility. You might be thinking, “It’s just how I do my job.” Or, “Who would want to know that?” Read the rest of this entry »
If I’m looking for any kind of service, I don’t normally use Craigslist. (Though I am looking for an expandable Danish modern dining room table.) I prefer to ask colleagues or friends for referrals. It beats a shot in the dark. And referrals are a great way to share some love within your tribe.
But after asking around for WordPress developer referrals to add to my list, I was curious to look on Craigslist. Not surprisingly, many of the listings include the word affordable.
What’s wrong with affordable? After all, aren’t we always looking for a bargain? Read the rest of this entry »
The word brand and its counterparts, the mind-boggling (and snooty-sounding) array of words like brand architecture, brand extension, vertical branding, diagonal branding (okay, I made that last one up) are enough to make you not want to bother.
This leads small business people to think branding is only for the Martha Stewarts and Budweisers of the world. But as overused as the word brand is, it’s the only word we have to describe the totality of what a company represents to the outside world. Read the rest of this entry »
Oatmeal, while healthy, is also an off-white blob composed of distinct particles loosely hanging together by a gelatinous substance.
Sounds wonderful, right?
Now picture a real meal, a dinner plate with a juicy seared steak surrounded by roasted potatoes, sautéed greens and wild mushroom compote.
They’re all in it together but the steak is the meal’s leader. The steak wouldn’t be as effective without its supporting cast. A one-person-led project can work, but it can also lack the pizzazz and ideas that a group of people bring to the table, each with their own perspective and expertise. (Assuming the team was selected to create a balanced and broad understanding of the subject at hand.)
But the problem with teams is that many are unfocused and lack a real decisionmaker — someone who can keep the project alive with decisiveness.
How does indecision kill your efforts? Read the rest of this entry »
Way back when, in the days of t-squares, triangles, waxing machines and lots of bloody X-acto cuts, I met my first Mac. The year was 1987. I was a design student at the University of Maryland.
I had a paid internship in the university’s publications department where I spent the next six years. And this is where I met the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, the Mac Plus was the third in its line and cost a whopping $2499. It had a 9-inch monochrome display and a resolution of only 512×342 pixels. Typography was still fairly crude but far better than what the PCs in the school’s lab could do.
In our design program, there was one lab with a few PCs and crude paint software. And yet, to draw a squiggle on the screen felt like magic. Not many students took interest in these computers. Our projects required clean typography. One way to do that was to trace by hand and paint with gouache. Yes, we actually hand-painted our type, mainly headlines, but if you were insane enough, small type as well. I was insane and also poor.
Students who were bankrolled by parents could afford INTs — a type of transfer like a custom Letraset. We gouache types felt superior in our willingness to hand-craft our type, but really we were just jealous. And yet, even though this was painfully slow, we knew we were developing an intimacy with letterforms, drawing and spacing them just so — a skill that comes in handy even now because out-of-the-box type often requires some manipulation.
I digress, but it’s important to put this into context. For one thing, phones were still largely connected to walls (younger readers take note). There was no free music on the internet. There was no internet, at least for common folk.
I had never seen a Mac and I’m not sure I had heard of one.
I don’t recall why but I understood that this computer was cool. Probably because our boss would allow only certain of us to touch it. It sat unused much of the time because A) is was very small and hard to do a newsletter layout with it, and B) we weren’t yet able to output camera-ready layouts. We still hand-specified our manuscripts, sent them to a typesetter and used cave-man like tools to put a layout together.
There was also no such thing as halftones on the computer. In fact, it would take a few versions of the Mac before we stopped making halftones in a dark room (oh, the drudgery) to mash up with our computer-created layouts. Back then, we knew we were a little slow to adopt all the technology. Our new boss was resistant to the computer and discouraged us from using it fully, much to our annoyance.
Steve Jobs’ story of how typography came to the Mac is well-known. But for those who don’t know, he had taken a random calligraphy class at Reed College because he had seen beautifully done posters around campus. He spent hours learning about letter and word spacing, thinking he was just killing time and having a creative outlet.
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
—Steve Jobs
Steve also said he wanted to put a “ding in the universe.”He certainly did that. And he also put a ding in people’s hearts.
(Image Credit: Blakespot / Flickr)
