Library Pinterest Mashup: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Following
Pinterest (Photo credit: stevegarfield)
John LeMasney of LeMasney Technology and Design Consulting will discuss Pinterest, a visual social bookmarking system that is typically unfairly dismissed as a place for wedding photos and pictures of vegetarian recipes. Pinterest is a way to collect, curate, share and discuss photos of any kind, and this article will discuss 10 ways you can use it to engage patrons and other stakeholders in the visual brand, items, and topics at libraries. You can increase visibility of your programs & assets, and give people new ways to click-through to borrowing.
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!
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.
Do not covet your ideas… by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org
A few colleagues have learned that I always offer my first hour of consulting with a new client for free, and have given me lots of advice:
But what if you only ever get one hour out of them?
You should never give away your skills, it devalues you.
People will take advantage of you.
The reasons that I give my first hour of consulting for free to new clients considers these and many other issues. I’ll discuss them here.
I may only get one hour out of a client, but if that’s the case, I was not likely going to get a lot of business out of them anyway, and they are likely to speak well on my behalf to their friends and colleagues if it goes well. If even one referral comes from any client, it is at least worth an hour of my time.
I have spent many hours volunteering my time doing my consulting, presentation, and training work, and it has come back to me a thousand times over in referrals, new paying work, experience, and good-faith networking. Volunteering also happens to bring me joy and happiness,all by itself. I am focusing more now on paying work these days, but I will never regret the volunteer hours I have put in.
I welcome people to take advantage of me, or try to. I think that if someone sits with me and sees what I have to offer them, I can make an impression that makes them think of me the next time they need graphic design, technology support, a presenter, a media consultation, etc.
Perhaps the most important reason for the first-hour-free clause is that I may not wish to continue to work with someone after hour one, and they may not wish to work with me. Everyone has their philosophies, concepts, experiences, and values, and they may sometimes make for uncomfortable partnerships. I’d rather not have to ask for money from someone who does not wish to work with me, and I’d rather not take money from someone who I’d rather not work with. It’s more important that we be able to amicably walk away, saying “I’m sure you will find success, thanks so much for your time!” with smiles on our face, cheer in our heart, and money safely remaining where it was.
This philosophy also acts as a standing discount on the remainder of our work together, meaning that if I work with someone for two hours, it’s as though they had a 50% off coupon.
So if you are wondering if I can help you, remember that you can find out for free, no strings attached, for the first hour that we work together. I promise.
So in this post, I want to talk a bit about the stresses of modern life, and a possible antidote.
I just lost my job of two years at Princeton University. It was a glorious opportunity, but it was not for me. There were certain skills that particular job required that I did not have. The skills that I do have and thrill in using, including playing with technology, media, consulting, training, graphic design, presenting, and other creative skills were not the ones that caused an issue. There were a lot of necessary skills related to short-term memory, intense and tight focus, methodical and diligent site testing, and political sensibility that I do not, and may not ever own. In the end, it comes down to a misunderstanding on my part about what the job was going to be, and despite that misunderstanding, a need for that job to be done and done well in the way that they wished. Writing styles, working styles, and other stylistic differences also contributed. I wish them very well and continued success, and they did the same to me.
So, what to do now?
One of the things that had happened more often than I would have liked is having to turn down consulting work. An endless schedule of a nine-to-five job often eclipses the flexibility needed to succeed in consulting work. One of the outcomes of this change is that I am very free to pursue consulting work now. If you are interested in following my effort there, please visit https://www.facebook.com/lemasneycreative
Another thing that has become quite clear is that I do not need, nor want all the stuff that I have acquired. In my separation and later divorce, moving from a single home to a studio apartment, two cars to one, alcoholism to sobriety, obesity to fitness, and lots of money to very little, I have learned many things, but chief among them is that more is not better. In fact, to the contrary, losing all of those things has been a struggle in change, but a relief in the gloriously simple result.
I have also gone deeper into my embrace of nutrition via simplification and minimalism. One of my favorite things now is to grab 2 or 3 fresh whole vegetables from the fridge, like potato, tomato, and broccoli, and gathering it together into a delicious, simply prepared, subtle beauty of a meal. I have recently closed off my television service. I have stopped voluntarily going out to eat at restaurants. I have increasingly moved towards a whole-foods and local-seasonal nutritional lifestyle, going so far as to throw out my Splenda tonight, and realize with certain joy that I’ve drunk only a variety of loose leaf teas over the last week or so.
This is leading somewhere. I’m developing a new budget that eradicates my credit debt, maintains my living space, supports my family, maintains my auto insurance, and allows me to eat. Eventually, I’d like to get rid of my car and rely more strongly on walking, biking, and public transit. As a final goal, I’d like to own a very small plot of land (40’x40′?), with a tiny structure (20’x20′) to eat, sleep, meditate, play, think, and work. The world will be my yard.
I will be talking about http://365sketches.org, a daily design project using free software to the Arts, Tech, Community and Culture group at Artworks Trenton on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013. It ran between 2010 and 2013 with a break in the middle for two years worth of daily posts.
In this project, I made a design or image with free (libre) software, most often the open source illustration application called Inkscape. I started it as a personal venture in mastering Inkscape. But through social media, shows, requests, and demonstrations, the project became a community of practice, learning, and communication. In all of the various projects, collaborations, and work that I’ve done, I can clearly say that this one, costing only time and effort and returning my investment a hundred times over, has been the most rewarding by far.
Please come and learn how and why you should get started in developing a 365 project.
The Essential Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions [+ Pre-Sized Templates]
A Crash Course in Inkscape
Top Branding Resources To Get You Started
The Value of Regular Customers – Thoughts From Our Prevailing Experts
The 5 Best Productivity Articles We Read This Year
