From John Kricfalusi’s blog (aka John K, creator of Ren & Stimpy):

Some people might wonder what the point is in copying the drawings of others. I’ll tell you. It’s so you can apply what you learned from the copies to your own drawings. It’s not just so you can be good at copying.

I was obsessed Ren & Stimpy back in the early/mid 1990’s when I was in high school. When class projects came up, no matter the subject – physiology, English, chemistry, math – I would create big comic books narrated by Ren & Stimpy. Art and drawing were my entry point into topics I would otherwise be too bored to learn about.
At first it might sound as if I was taking the easy road by creating comic books in all my classes, and while it did come naturally to me, it was still a lot of work.
Before I started a sketchbook, I would first draft up the story I wanted to tell in my comic book. From there I would determine which character I wanted to say what, and what expression/pose they would be making when they delivered those lines.
I transferred these characters in the comic books was by first recording all the episodes and then playing them back on my VCR (yes, I said VCR) and pausing it at the moment Ren or Stimpy made a unique, hilarious expression so that I could draw the image in my sketchbook. If you’ve ever watched the show, you know these moments happened every other second.
(My father would yell at me when he caught me doing this because he said it ruined the tape heads on the VCR. He’s and an engineer and that’s a story for another time.)

Moving Beyond Copying

Back to John K’s quote. Copying is crucial to learning. Whether you’re copying someone’s cartoon characters, CSS files, poster design, acting or music you eventually reach a point of departure. I believe it was Picasso who said that that point of departure, that screw-up in what you copied – that is your voice.
Since my goal was never to become a cartoonist, i never moved beyond copying Ren & Stimpy off of the television, but copying has played a big part in my work as a designer. Whether it’s been code, or style or methodology the first step for any artist or designer is copying.
Once you’ve full absorbed and become one with the subject it’s a natural progression to alter it and make it your own.

Great cover story at the NYT on Powerpoint:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. …“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

Reminds me of a great essay by Edward Tufte I bought a few years back on the topic of how shitty Powerpoint is:

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
UPDATE: Tufte on the topic of his Powerpoint essay (Wired.com, Sept 2003)

from Wikipedia:

It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.

Financial bootstrapping is a term used to cover different methods for avoiding using the financial resources of external investors. Bootstrapping can be defined as “a collection of methods used to minimize the amount of outside debt and equity financing needed from banks and investors”[10]. The use of private credit card debt is the most known form of bootstrapping, but a wide variety of methods are available for entrepreneurs. While bootstrapping involves a risk for the founders, the absence of any other stakeholder gives the founders more freedom to develop the company. Many successful companies including Dell Computers were founded this way.

(via)

This is so, so, so important to understanding human behavior, especially how financial disasters happen (via 37Signals):

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

2. You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.

3. I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!

4. I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.

Most of the time I forget that I’m 32 years old and not a kid anymore when I’m living my life spending time with my wife, working and going out with friends. If feels like it I was just learning HTML at Webmonkey.com with Dreamweaver 3 and reading the thick manual for Flash 4 (back when they made print manuals for software).
When I’m teaching my web design course at FIT on Thursdays, that feeling goes right away. I’m the old dude, they’re the kids and it doesn’t bother me in the least.
I’m actually fascinated by their opinions and view of the world. We adults all tend to make assumptions and generalizations about kids – what they care and don’t care about. What they know and what they’re ignorant about. Nothing clarifies those assumptions like firsthand discussions in class with them.
Sometimes I’m surprised by the answers I get.
For instance, their thoughts on the future of (print) media and the iPad. I heard a few students talking about it so I jumped in and asked them what they thought about it. I instigate these discussions because their concentration is on traditional print design and advertising and if you haven’t noticed, there’s some serious shit happening in these industries.
I don’t feel it’s enough to merely teach the curriculum I’ve been given. These students need to be prepared for what lies ahead.
I found out some of them were scared about the future of print media, magazines and books. I expected them to be excited about this new device and the potential it has to redefine how we create and consume media. Some (not all) of their opinions were surprisingly old school and traditional. Some were afraid print was going to die, that there wouldn’t be any more magazines. Things were ending and they didn’t know what to expect.
I told them fear should be the last feeling in their heads. It’s an exciting time to be a designer and they’re going to be defining (if they rise to the challenge) how we experience media in this new format. I also explained that print wasn’t going to die, but we are going think much harder on what we want to have printed.
I’ve referenced it numerous times before and will continue to. The key to success in designing and creating media is being agile:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change

—Charles Darwin
My students are not obligated to design content for the iPad, but if I can teach them to be agile in their careers, then they’ll be great.

Job titles are important. Very important. But this doesn’t mean they should dictate everything. Job titles should be warranted. They should be earned.
This doesn’t mean, for instance, that an art director can’t let a junior design act as lead designer on a project. In fact, it means quite the opposite. The only way you can grow in your field is to take on more challenging projects than your title dictates.
In the career trajectory of an interactive designer there’s a substantial amount of time you can operate in a ‘silo’ and create designs that you and you alone are responsible for. I have known many visual designers, senior visual designers and art directors who have worked within a team of developers and Human Experience designer where they are the only visual designers on the project – no one junior assisting them and no one senior to them, guiding the direction of the final design.
The art director level in the career of a visual designer represents the point at which it’s no longer about your design chops alone that make you great at your level – how fast and precise you are in Photoshop, or how beautiful you can animate a scene. If we take a quick jump into the etymology of these positions, we notice that the change comes when ‘designer‘ is replaced with ‘director‘. As an art director, you’re no longer designing on the project, you’re directing the design efforts of others (ideally). As a creative director you’re directing the conceptual and strategic efforts of others.
Getting to a director level is also about how well you present your ideas and designs to your internal team and your client. It’s about how you work with and mentor junior designers. It’s also about how you delegate responsibilities. It’s about management.
Despite these characteristics, you’d be surprised how many people consider themselves art directors. This doesn’t mean the people I’ve known who have been art directors couldn’t perform the non-visual tasks I mentioned above or that they’re not worthy of the title. It just means they’ve never had the opportunity to (disclosure – I’m guilty of this ‘silo’ work lifestyle too).
We have to be very careful when we assign titles to people within the companies we work for. I don’t give a shit if you’ve worked for a company for 20 years. If you’re not qualified to be a manager or a director or a senior vice president, then you shouldn’t be one. End of story. What salary compensation you give someone is another story. That is something between your management and you, and doesn’t get added your email signature next to your email address and job title.
When people who are given titles they never live up to, it might give that person an ego boost, but it demoralizes others in the company who look to them for vision, direction and strength and never receive it.
Giving the wrong job titles to the wrong people effectively makes job titles meaningless, and inevitably confuses everyone, making them question their own worth in the company.

Regarding Palm’s recent revenue forcast (via NYTimes):

The company shipped a total of 960,000 smartphones during the third quarter ended February 26, but sell-through — which reflects how many devices actually end up in consumers’ hands — totaled 408,000 units, lagging the 600,000 units or more many analysts expected.

I understand that the point to consider with this news is the decreasing sales trend not the total number of units sold, but it’s still sad to think that a company that moved over 400,000 units is doing badly.
As much of a Apple enthusiast as I am, I really want to see Palm succeed with their Pre and WebOS. They need to break off from their shitty mobile provider, Sprint.

A good way to tell if you understand your own business plan, product or service is whether you can describe it in the length of time an average elevator ride takes, aka the ‘elevator pitch’. Sometimes that’s all the time you’ll get to pitch it to the person making or breaking your future.
The smart people over at Knowledge Games have a great exercise to help you achieve that level of clarity and simplicity:

Often this is the hardest thing to do in developing a new idea. An elevator pitch should be short and compelling description of the problem you’re solving, who you solve it for, and one key benefit that distinguishes it from its competitors. It must be unique, believable and important. The better and bigger the idea, the harder the pitch is to write.

A great example of a company who understands this is The Future Well.
What is The Future Well and what do they do?
They provide a much needed service with an admirable focus, and they can tell you:

We identify either creative or disruptive business opportunities within the health space and design beautiful solutions that positively impact health and happiness.

And:

Sometimes we identify the opportunity and find the right partners to execute it and sometimes we build it ourselves. Other times, we help guide clients so the product/service is simple, elegant, and wrapped up with a business strategy that leverages their core competencies.

via Modern Mechanix

Continuing my thoughts from last month on the Unified Mobile Platform.
I’ve been thinking about standards and standardization, theory vs practice, and relevance.
Ok, first off, let’s think what would happen if we took the premise of the Unified Mobile Platform (if you want to know what a world of ‘unification’ looks like, check out that beautiful site) and moved it to another industry, say – automobiles.
Suppose all the car makers in the United States banded together ‘for the common good’ in order to create a standard car-type and engine-type. An ‘open ecosystem’ in which all car makers could create cars that whose parts would be compatible with all the other car makers’ parts.
Yeah. It sounds great but it’s bullshit.
It’s bullshit not only because it would never work, but it’s also extremely boring and flies in the face of how innovation, art and expression happen.
Sure, a world full of ‘Ferrari-types’ sounds great, right? Everyone is driving different ‘flavors’ of Ferarris. That’s the ideal scenario, but if this were to really become a reality, and if we know anything about US car makers, we’d most likely be stuck with a country full of Ford Escorts.
Do I really have to say this? Variety is the spice of life. (UGH)
The truth is, even if we lived in a world of Ferraris some people would still be unsatisfied. That’s why we have Lamborghinis and Audis and Porsches and Bugattis and Toyotas and Volkswagens and Jeeps and Chevys and Fords and the dozens of other makes.
Even when we do have alliances and open standards, things don’t always hold together like people envision. Case in point – WebKit. WebKit is the ‘engine’ that power MobileSafari on the iPhone as well as the browsers for Google’s Android OS and Palm’s WebOS.
Actually, here’s a list of browsers that use WebKit. If you notice from that link, the only browser that passes the Acid3 test 100 percent is MobileSafari. So even when you have adoption of open standards, things still diverge and become customized. That’s how humans work. Think about our workspaces. We surround ourselves with plants and lights and figures and pictures and books. At least those of use who are creative do that.
Depending on your point of view, open systems can fall victim to fragmentation, as some say is the case with Google Android …
OR
Open systems can mutate and evolve into different ‘flavors‘, as is the case with the open source operating system, Linux.
The only way to ensure a system neither fragments nor mutates is to have it controlled by one company. Case in point: Apple’s iPhone OS as well as their proprietary DRM technology formerly used on music and currently still in use on their video content. Like it or hate it, Apple has succeeded in creating a completely consistent and stable operating system with iPhone OS because they control (and don’t license) the technology as well as the hardware.
What we’re seeing with the Unified Mobile Platform isn’t a initiative done out of good will and progress, but one done out of fear.

Bloomberg has teamed up with MLB.com to create Bloomberg Sports Fantasy Tools.