Image of Hoboken taken by NASA (red line shows where Hoboken is). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Last week, I was fortunate to meet for four hours with a company that wanted to learn how to use PowerPoint 2010 more effectively, make better, more engaging presentations, learn a bit about design tools like Inkscape and the GIMP, and develop a base of design skills. We all learned a lot about color, look, feel, design success, and more. Thanks so much to the company in question, and I love Hoboken‘s view of NYC. I can’t wait to go back.
Here are the presentations I used to walk the group through the issues.
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.
Any of you who know me know very well that I am drinking the Goog-Aid. I believe in the company, give them the benefit of the doubt when they profess that they are not evil, and in general, agree with their business, technology, and work philosophy. Today, I thought I’d share why and how I came to this conclusion.
Their stuff is free (as in free pizza). Google’s products, for the most part, are free. While there are usually optional upgrade costs, such as more storage, they usually offer the fully featured product at no cost to users. Their business model is advertising based, and so the more eyes that look at their products, the more money they get. I can get behind that, especially because it means that I can suggest a Google based solution to a client or colleague and not have to explain why they have to pay a fee. See also my support for Inkscape, GIMP, Open Office, and so on.
Google Code (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Their support of open standards. When I work with others, it often means that I have to decide the best way to deal with them. Do we use the same applications, services, and methods, or do we need to find a bridge between us? With Google, their products often use and support open standards and methods, such as XML, HTML 5, SVG, ATOM, and others, meaning that as long as another product (even proprietary ones) can understand the standard, we are good to go.
Open Source Logo (Photo credit: phradaka)
Their support of open source. In answering the mobile platform question “Why do you love Android so much?” my first answer is always “Because it’s open source.” Many people wonder why I care so much about open source (the source code that is written and compiled into the binary application is distributed along with the application), especially since I’m more of a user than a developer with most application code. The answer is that because developers get access to open sourced code, screen it for flaws, integrate improvements and can shape the code themselves, they act on my behalf. We all benefit from the changes that developers make to open sourced code. With proprietary solutions, those same developers are often cut off from adding their own code, seeing how it works, or checking it for flaws. Google uses open source in many of its projects, and supports its distribution through Google Code.
Music Beta by Google (aka Google Music) (Photo credit: pmsyyz)
They offer portable music, documents, photos, and bookmarks, automatically backed up. I have a music collection of many, many gigabytes. It once was available on only one of my machines. When Google Music launched, it allowed me to upload all of my music to their service for streaming and download to any device that could visit their website, meaning every computer, phone, tablet, and set-top box I owned. They back up my music collection  automatically, and make it available wherever internet access is present, which for me is nearly everywhere, anytime. Oh, and this goes for every photo I take with my phone, every document I write in Drive, and every presentation I’ve given for the last 5 years.
Google Plus logo (Photo credit: Bruce Clay, Inc)
Google Plus, Hangouts, and YouTube. Google launched Plus, a social layer for its services a little while back. The obvious suggestion by critics was that they were trying to oust Facebook as king of social, but they are doing something different. They are making it easy to unify their services, share the products you make with them, and house it all under one roof: Plus. One feature of Plus, in particular, stands out as a disruptor: Hangouts. Hangouts, the ability to have up to ten people collaborate on documents, video chat, and more, has an on-air feature, with which you can do a live broadcast to thousands, archive the broadcast, and share it with people via YouTube. 5 years ago, it took a technologist with system administration skills to do this. Today, you just click the Hangout button on Plus.
They make it especially easy to share and collaborate. Because I use Gmail, and have for a very long time, practically everyone I’ve exchanged email with or gotten a business card from in the last ten years is part of Google Contacts. Anytime I want to share a photo, document, spreadsheet, music, or other item with any of them, Google offers their contact info from my contacts just by starting to type their name. In many cases, I can invite them to collaboratively, virtually meet and work on the item in real-time, with voice, video, and screen actions.
Logo image created by Matt_Stang for the Android Open Source Project and XDA community. Source: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=545151 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Android operating System. I’ll write on this at length in the future, but for now I’ll just say that excluding the Ubuntu mobile operating system, no other phone OS even begins to tempt me.
The Chrome Operating System. I have a Chromebook. In fact, I have two. I bought them each used for $100. They both do only one thing: run the Chrome browser on a thin sheet of Linux. I can tell you from a lot of use that often that is all that you need to get work done.
It extends my senses, my memory, and my ability. When I want to know more about a topic that came up in conversation, I Google what others concluded about it. When I want to see all the photos I’ve ever taken of myself, I open Picasa, and look at the photos that Picasa found my face in. When I want to read a book on any topic, I go to Google Play Books or Google Books, or Google Scholar to investigate it. When I sign into Google, I am just a few keystrokes away from learning, knowing, or remembering it all.
Google Self Driving Car (Photo credit: loudtiger)
The Glass project and self-driving cars. Glass is a wearable computing platform that heralds the next big change in computing. Many are already dismissing it as too weird for mainstream use, but if we can get used to Bluetooth headsets, I think that wireframes that look like glasses without the lenses but that give you a heads-up-display on the world with camera, mic, and sound (powered by Android) would be worth the average person’s cultural shift in visual acceptance. And of course, any company that allows a blind person to drive himself to the store is a company that I stand behind.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here for now. If you are interested in how I think you could begin to integrate the Googleverse into your business workflow, please give me a call. I’m at lemasney@gmail.com and 609-553-9498
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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!
I made the image above using a web-based service (pimptheface.com) based on the police sketch artist’s toolkit called identikit. I have an undergraduate degree in the fine arts. I have done many self portraits. None has exactly this look, feel, or tone. None was as easy or quick to make. This looks like a police sketch and carries a lot of interpretive content related to that idea. There is a lot of value in that. Some might say “but it’s not yours” or “it’s cookie cutter”. My response is that for this particular application, that was the point. One should not dismiss services or tools when the result is the right result.
I wanted to talk a bit about my consulting experience on clients and predetermined feelings about originality, ability, and creativity.
Often when I first consult with someone I’ll ask the questions below to get some sense of what they are trying to do. If a client says that they want a web presence that they can update, and they want it up next week, I will invariably respond with WordPress or Drupal as a solution, depending on the number of pages and other factors of complexity that they need to have on the site.
I try not to expect the response “Oh, I don’t want a blog”, but that is usually what I hear. The problem with the response is a bias against blogging: commonality, simplicity, and a lack of creativity and effort. The engine itself is not predetermined to produce uncreative, unoriginal content. When they say, “well, I don’t want it to look like a blog”, I explain that the look and feel of the site is completely customizable and extensible, and that the reason that you see so many blogs that have the same look and feel is because the work of proper theme choice and customization has not been done. I try to explain that creativity, originality, and effort are all possible with these solutions, and that the words, images, video and other media that you produce and share are what will tell your viewers. A lot of my work in web development starts with convincing clients about the potential success of the solution. I have also often suggested Facebook, Google Plus, or Tumblr as the entirety of one’s web presence. It’s the content, and the audience’s reception to that content, not the platform, that determines success. I offer the following questions to help you to start to think about what the purpose of your design is.
What are you trying to do? In other words, are you trying to get the word out? Are you trying to learn something new? Are you trying to get more customers? Are you trying to reinforce brand? Are you trying to change your audience? Those questions, more so than what do you want to use to do it, are the important ones, and will lead us to a solution that meets those needs. Do we need to beat a new path or reinvent the wheel to do that?
What is your best result? What does success look like? If you are trying to get more customers, how many more do you want? If you are trying to sell more plates of food, how many more will it take for you to see value for effort? If we have a goal, we can work towards that goal, track it, and know when we’ve accomplished it. Now, what is the best way to go about that?
What are you an expert at, and how do you carry out your success there? If you are a successful multiple restaurateur, what gets people to come in? Is it the food? The ambiance? The site? The service? All of the above? In what ways will that help us to decide the directions we take with your project? If we treat your design project the same way that we treat a new dish or new restaurant, you will have a better sense of the choices you should make to make success there too. The solution we choose in graphic design or technology choice should please you as a successful new dish would.
What is it that makes your service, product, or organization unique? If you are doing something in your work that is also done by 20 others, why would they choose you over someone else? If I’m already at Wal-Mart, or CVS, and they do the same thing you do, and I have to go through the register here, what about your service is going to make someone say “I’d prefer to do this at Joe’s”? Answering this question tells us what we need to emphasize in our project, but if you don’t have a good answer for this, you might want to look at another business.
What is your brand? As always, we want to know what it is that you are trying to underline about what you do. We want to have alignment between what you believe about your organization and what your customers and potential customers believe about you. What design choices, technology choices, and marketing choices do we make to do that?
Interested in these questions? The answers are even better! I’m at lemasney@gmail.com
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