Artist, graphic designer, & tech consultant in Nelson County, VA
Category:workshops
These are workshops, sessions that LeMasney Consulting led or otherwise participated in to train or otherwise help people to come to a new understanding about a topic we specialize in. Mostly these are hands-on learning opportunities with software, hardware, branding, and fitness.
Maybe you are a long time iOS user and are not sure why everyone is excited about Samsung Android products. Perhaps you are new to mobile computing, and want to know more about the options that Android provides. Maybe you are a long time Android user, and want to get more out of it. In any case, I’d love to see you there tonight.
Here is the presentation that I gave for this talk.
In this quick video (video is now working, sorry for anyone who tried earlier), I give an overview of the reasons why I love Android, and invite viewers to come and see me talk about it at Princeton Public Library on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 7 pm in the Technology Center.
It is becoming more important to know how to create original images, videos, and other visual content. You need transliteracy skills.
20060410 (2) (Photo credit: nikontino)
In the same way that it has traditionally been important to know how to read, write and perform arithmetic as a basic skill set of communication, it has become increasingly important for people to create their own images, video, and other graphics to communicate their particular message effectively. It’s almost as though people only recently realized their visual preferences, maybe as a reaction to the emergence of visually motivated social networks like Pinterest, a place for people to curate, share, and collect images with verbal content becoming secondary.
A more visual web of content requires new skills.
A screenshot of the GIMP 2.2.8 raster graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As we move towards more digital interactions, and enjoy more visual web content from producers as a first introduction to their messages, we can see that they are creating a digital trail for themselves. Other people then find and interpret what they are about through quick visual assessments. If you look at my Pinterest boards, you will quickly get a sense of what I am about, because the cursory glance at a series of images does not carry the threshold of understanding that reading text does. We must slow down and engage our verbal brain to interpret the letterforms, then the words, then the combination of words to make meaning. With images, we need only recognize the items in the image to begin interpretation. We want to be able to leave our own visual trail, one with interesting, insightful, and communicative images, videos, and graphics that tell our story. If you do not know how to edit a photograph, make cuts, titles, and transitions in video and audio, or create a reasonable graphic, you will become more reliant on others to produce, edit, or change content for you. In the same way that you would not have to rely on someone else to create your word processed documents for you, you do not want to rely on someone else for mediating your visual content.
You can learn how to make great images and videos.
There are fantastic free tools and resources to begin to learn how to use these toolkits in the same way that you learned how to use browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems. If you learned by spending time in the applications, the same will likely be true for visual applications. If you learned by reading a book, you may want to try the same for these applications. In order to learn Inkscape, an open source illustration application like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, by book, I strongly suggest The Book of Inkscape, by Dimitry Kosonov. You likely learned word processing and other applications because a need arose for you to become familiar with them to do schoolwork, business, or to communicate with others. A new need has emerged in digital transliteracy: for people to communicate in person, on paper, on-screen, in images, in video, in voice, and in graphics.
You can be your own graphic designer, video producer, or photographer with the skills to support you.
English: An infographic illustrating and comparing the popularity of different geosocial networking services (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
With newly acquired video editing, image manipulation, and other visual media skills, you can begin to tell new stories that move people differently than a page or a voice can, take part in the remixed web, leave your creations waiting to be found and enjoyed, and have a kind of digital presence that engages, sticks with visual learners, and promotes you differently than text can because of the very nature of the media.
I’d like to help you to gain these skills!
Contact me at lemasney@gmail.com or 609-553-9498 to talk about how we can begin to acquire these skills for your organization, service, or product. Let’s do something great together!
Cancellation of Hanover bars through a chroma delay line (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There was a time, not too long ago, when having your own television station was an expensive, unreasonable dream. With the arrival of Google Plus in 2012, there was a lot of comparisons made with Facebook, with the verdict generally being that Google was playing catchup, doing too little too late, and was out of its league. The issue is this: Google is playing the long game. They are adding Plus to your tool set simply by you using any of their other applications. If you have a Gmail account, use Google Calendar, or even just search while logged in with a Google account, Plus is there, waiting for you to use. It is, as the name implies, a sort of umbrella service to add a social layer to other Google services.
They are not following Facebook, and are in fact doing something quite different from what Facebook is, even though a lot of the features seem the same. You can make connections in both systems, add photos and videos, create groups of common interest, and have conversations. However, one set of features in particular sets Plus apart: Hangouts.
Google Hangouts are free. You need to install a plugin or app in Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, or Android to take part, but aside from that there is no threshold to entry. Hangouts are a metaphor for being available for a chat, sort of like standing by the fence waiting for a neighbor or sitting on the porch waiting to chat spontaneously with passersby.
You can be more direct than that though, choosing specifically to invite people to chat with you, up to and including everyone on the system (public). The interactive chat holds up to 10 people, and people can drop in and out. You can chat by video or audio, and you can also share your screen with the screen sharing plugin. You can use addons to create titles and use other features. What is perhaps most interesting is that you can choose to put the hangout ‘on air’, meaning that you can broadcast and archive the hangout to the world via your YouTube channel.
Other systems have done and continue to do this, but not usually for free, and not usually with such a widely adopted system as Google Plus. I have used Google Plus hangouts on air to build a related series of video broadcasts with others about the juxtaposition of technology and design, art, customer service, and nutrition. I call the collection Neckbeard Networks, and you can find it, along with all of my other videos on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/lemasney
Tonight, Wednesday, March 20th, 2013, I’m talking to an audience at Princeton Public Library about this topic, and at 7 pm, I hope to see you there.
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Carnegie library interior, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 2004 by Rick Dikeman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tonight, I’m getting the chance to talk to librarians about a topic that I think is incredibly important to discuss, but do not get the opportunity nearly enough: organizational branding.
You might be tempted to think that I’m just talking about visual branding, like the library’s logo, but I’m not. In fact, visual branding can only be truly successful in my opinion after you have done the more difficult work of discovering what you are, what you are trying to represent, and stakeholder perception. The aim of organizational branding efforts is to make these three ideas merge:
We are presenting a brand of some kind now (active or passive, intended or unintended) that we hope creates a positive, accurate perception by our stakeholders.
We have stakeholders that perceive our brand in some way, and we must discover what that perception is, even if it is not positive or correct.
We can do actions, enforce policies, and check stakeholder perceptions to align our brand with our intended perceptions, the very intent of branding.
We are doing these things to underline and reinforce what we are, and our patrons and other stakeholders understand and agree.
Brand assessment
The first part is to find out how you wish to be perceived. In other words, your brand is your function, your vision, your mission, your actions, your culture, and your perception. Do you know what these things are for your organization? What is your function? If you are a public library, is your function simply to get books and other media into the hands of patrons? Or is it to extend the education, abilities, and preparedness of humans getting ready to face the world? There is a chasm between these two ideas. What is the vision of your organization? How does your organization see the world? For example, the world might be dystopian, a cold and barren place in which everyone is watched and tracked, or the world might be an experiential delight, in which every interaction in the world is an opportunity for growth, learning, and extension. Perhaps most interestingly, what is the culture of your organization? What are the sensory cues that your space, language, and actions represent? What kind of art do you have on the walls? What color is on the walls? What scents greet you when you walk in? What kind of programming are you offering? What resources are available to patrons? How do staff react to interruptions? What frustrates your patrons? What do those things say about who you are, versus who you are trying to be? You can find out what you want your brand to be, and what it is now, and close that gap.
Stakeholder research
After you have discovered what it is that you are trying to be, it’s important to discover how you are being perceived. If your mission, vision, and culture are either not being perceived or interpreted in the ways that you expect, then the rest of your efforts will be that much more difficult. Through observation, interview, survey and other research methods, you can get a clear idea of how your efforts are being interpreted by staff, administrators, children patrons, adult patrons, and so on. You can find out how you are being perceived, and how you would prefer to be perceived, and close that gap.
Rebranding effort
Finally, you have to assess the gap between your efforts, your branding goals, and the perception of your brand. Once you have a clear idea of how you want to be perceived, and how you are being perceived, you can make changes in visuals, culture, policy, and action that underline, reinforce, and support that brand until your research shows that your intended brand is matching your perceived brand.
If you are interested in getting help for your organization to assess, interpret, and construct the brand that you want for your library or other organization, I would love to sit down with you to have that discussion. I’m lemasney@gmail.com.
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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!)
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