I woke up one day recently with this idea in my head for an illustration of the origins of Comic Sans, Microsoft’s often inappropriately misused, popularly hated, comic font. Free to reuse as you wish with attribution. (Origin of Comic Sans by John LeMasney via lemasney.com)
‘Comic Sans MS is a sans-serif casual script typeface designed by Vincent Connare and released in 1994 by Microsoft Corporation. It is a non-connecting script inspired by comic book lettering, intended for use in informal documents and children’s materials.[1] The typeface has been supplied with Microsoft Windows since the introduction of Windows 95, initially as a supplemental font in the Windows Plus Pack and later in Microsoft Comic Chat. Describing it, Microsoft has explained that “this casual but legible face has proved very popular with a wide variety of people.”[2] The typeface’s widespread use, often in situations for which it was not intended, has been the subject of criticism and mockery.[3]’
from “Comic Sans – Wikipedia” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans curated by lemasney creative. Feel free to share.
I have tried to find an especially easy meal to get about 500 calories in a good balance of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. It should accomplish the following:
In a 2 cup bowl, combine granola and peanut butter into a paste, dice and add apple, add raisins and mix.
It is addictive. It’s so delicious that I crave it, and have had it every day since I first made it. The fruit adds a bright sweetness, the raisins add a chewy licorice depth, the granola brings a crunchy texture, and the peanut butter holds everything together. At 8 grams of fat, 10 grams of protein, and 87 grams of carbohydrate, it is very close to my nutritional percentages that I try to get for the day. The sugar is all fructose, and it has no refined sugars. The ingredients are local and organic. I could make the raisins myself, and have a plan to start drying fruit this season. It’s raw food, whole food, good food. 440 calories for the whole bowl.
Apple, granola, peanut butter, and raisins, by John LeMasney via Diary of Calories
Brand is not a Logo by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Often when I first work with a new client, especially in a design consult, I have no idea what or who they are, organizationally speaking. The thing that often surprises me though, is that they don’t either. We might know their industry (e.g. education), their product (e.g. books), and their intent (e.g. sell more books to educational institutions). None of this, however, speaks to brand.
I like to think of brands as flavors. Licorice has a very distinct taste. To some, it is repulsive, while others consider it their favorite flavor. Many foods and flavors are described in this way. Cilantro comes to mind. At any rate, you should have some idea of what your flavor is, so that you can begin to speak to the audience that finds your flavor irresistible.
Very often, organizations think of their logo as the entirety of their branding, not thinking of their logo as just a visual representation of their overall brand. Brand is extended to include so many other elements of your business, as you’ll see below.
The design work for your branding should reflect and not define your brand. If and when you know your brand, making a visual representation of it is so much easier, because we can use fonts, colors, shapes, symbols and other graphic elements that show, underscore, and represent you better.
Five easy questions to find your brand:
What 5 words best represent your organization? If I was to answer this, I would say design, technology, open source, nutrition, and creativity. These are the core ideas that I try to impart about my organization when I post, speak, share, converse, or interact in any way with others about my work.
If I was to ask a customer what 5 words best represented your organization, would they be able to match your 5 words? This is an important question. You can believe that your organization is a certain way, and it may even be true, but if your clients and customers are coming up with a different impression, it forces us to reassess our brand, work, and communication to either match or redefine customer impressions.
In what ways do the sensory elements (sights, sounds, feeling, taste, and smell) of the place where we do our work reinforce our brand? What art is on the walls of your workplace? What color is the rug? Is it clean? Is it a silent place, where people value quiet above music or conversation? Maybe you work electronically, and most people meet you in a neutral space, or only online. In those situations, these questions still apply, because even an email can have a culture to it: spelling, attachments, grammar, frequency, and tone come to the forefront as elements of your brand. Do you offer refreshments? How do the refreshments show your brand? Do you smell nothing? Trash? Baking bread? A meadow? Exhaust?
If your organization was a person, who would it be? How would you describe that person? I’d like to think of my brand as Gandhi. I like to think that my work is kind, empowering, wise, and reserved. Maybe your brand is Jimmy Stewart? Ronald Reagan? Justin Bieber? Tom Hanks? Einstein? When you think about the differences between these people, you are understanding brand.
If working with or using your organization was a meal, what would the courses, flavors, and hosts be like? Are you a fast food drive-thru? Are you a 3 Michelin Star world-class restaurant? Are you a New Jersey Diner? A New York City pizza joint? Do you use herbs from your roof garden in a whole foods feast? Do you deep fry everything? All of these metaphors are potentially valid, and should not be dismissed as a metaphor just because you may be averse to diners, for instance. Diners are casual spaces, with comfortable, easy, affordable food, informal conversations, and free refills of coffee. I’d like to think of my brand as a diner.
Hopefully after answering these questions, you have a better sense of your brand. With that in mind, what do you need to do to match your organization’s culture and sensory elements, visual branding, and service interactions to match your brand?
I can help you with that part. Email me at lemasney@gmail.com so that we can start that conversation.
I have spent most of my career as an instructional technologist. When I accepted my first job at a university in this role, I was not entirely certain of what instructional technology was, but I was able to answer all the important questions.
In short, Instructional Design is the important work of integrating technology in a teaching and learning environment, and all that goes with that process: research, troubleshooting, experimentation, problem-solving, system administration, programming, design, and being creative. It is, without a doubt, the best job in the world for someone who loves this list of job attributes.
As it turned out, I was perfectly suited for instructional technology, also often called academic technology, educational technology, or instructional technology & design, because I am a versatilist (I know a little bit about a lot of things in my expertise), media producer, technologist, and teacher, and am passionate about these attributes.
From supporting teachers to teaching
In the last few years, I have been fortunate enough to experience the faculty side of this process as a professor in the graduate program I graduated from, the MA in Organizational Leadership at Rider University. I teach students in this program about change management, communication, media creation, media transliteracy, convergence, and effective use of social media. I was recently invited back to teach my third class in the program, and have been working on the syllabus. I like to think of success in course development as making a class that I would be very excited to take. I have done at least that here. I’m sharing the core topics from the course below, and if you have any thoughts about the lineup, feel free to share in the comments!
Weekly topics:
Getting started. Introduction to the class, WordPress account setup, and first posts.
WordPress best practices | WordPress Getting started codex | WordPress demo
Personal and Organizational Branding | Seth Godin lit review | Facebook Demo
Convergence, mobile technologies, and platforms | Google Glass lit review | Google Plus App demo
Creating, gathering, and sharing visuals | 3 tutorials for Inkscape | Inkscape demo
Effective Social Media presence for leaders | case studies for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
Virality, ethics, and balance | Kony 2012 | Basic concepts of headlines/Case study for American Apparel marketing methods
Basic web creation literacy and development | Codecademy assignment | Codecademy assignment review and discussion on practical use of code as literacy
Staying aware of trends, ideas, news, and contacts with social media platforms |social media dashboard lit review | Hootsuite demo
Legal issues for individuals, organizations, and society regarding new media | articles on firings, etc, Organizational Social Media policy | best practices document from Princeton
Creating, gathering, and sharing audio via podcasting and other platforms | Stitcher assignments | Audacity Demo
Communicating, embracing, and navigating change with a comprehensive organizational communication plan | case studies | Google Drive demo
Creating, gathering, and sharing motion visuals | YouTube assignments | editing video
Should I eat this? by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I decided to make this infographic to show my own thought process when it comes to choosing food and as a way of showing this kind of design work in my portfolio. Most of my nutritional philosophy aligns with Michael Pollan, and these ideas are mostly cherry-picked from his writings, research and findings. I decided to choose a fairly complex structure for navigation to represent the fairly complex thought involved in choosing what to eat. The text is highly legible for easy reading, rather than uniqueness or specialty as I wanted the ideas to be easily consumable. The color scheme is one I’d say represents natural, healthy, and fresh. If you like it or find it useful, please share it!
Tonight, March 18th, 2013 at Princeton Public Library at 7:30 pm, I’m giving the second part of a two-part WordPress Camp, in which I show people how to get started with WordPress. There’s a rumor that we will be having a Food Blogging follow-up class in the future, to look at the specifics of using WordPress to publish content about food, but this class is about introducing pages, posts, media, and tags in WordPress. I’m excited about this follow-up class because I’ve talked individually with a lot of the participants from part one, and it’s obvious that they are having lots of success. The session is free, and we’d love to see you. No registration necessary.
Elf in a santa hat by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
She feels in italics (Henry James) CC-BY lemasney
On Tuesday, March 19th, 2013, I’ll be talking to the Special Libraries Association (Princeton-Trenton chapter) about branding in Libraries. In the session, I plan to lead a discussion on what your library says about you, what you say about your library, and how you can migrate your current brand to the brand you prefer.
On Wednesday March 20th, I’ll be talking at 7:30 pm at Princeton Public Library about Google Plus Hangouts! This is an amazing, free tool that is part of Google’s Plus suite of products that allows for videoconferencing between 10 people, public broadcast to many more, archiving to YouTube, screen sharing, lower thirds titles, and more. The session is free, and we’d love to see you. No registration necessary.
I had a lot of great engagements last week, but one that stood out was a job in which I applied what I had learned in making this waveform sketch of me saying the word ‘open’ for a client who wanted the same thing, but of him saying ‘hiphop’.
If you can think of how I can help you to use technology or design to make great things happen, contact me at lemasney@gmail.com, leave a comment below, or like my page on Facebook (see the sidebar!)
Top Branding Resources To Get You Started
The Productive Scholar: Ben Johnston on Mapping in the Humanities
Why You Should Acquire As Many Irrelevant Social Media Followers As Possible
Preparing Writers in a Digital World
These Colleges Are Training Tomorrow’s Social Media Marketing Pros
Embed Google books in your posts using shortcode