Talk less.

This is a bit of a personal reflection post. As an outgoing extrovert, I wouldn’t be lying if I said more often than not I dominate conversations whether or not I mean to. While this isn’t so bad, it is. The reason is because while I am talking, others aren’t… and should be.

I am reminded of this often as my girlfriend is much less out going, and an introvert. Because of this, I am always reminded (and sometimes trying patience) that I need to talk less and listen more.

It’s something difficult to do but has a fantastic impact. On the business side, I have gotten interviews and established important relationships because of talking less and listening more. On the relationship side, I do a little more to make my girlfriend, and my other friends happy. That makes me happy. So here’s to trying.

Design with Kuler.

I am excited.

A tool I have had bookmarked on my Ma.gnolia for a while now and have been watching over and playing with as much as I was permitted was Adobe’s Kuler. Kuler is a social network for colors.

I love design, but colors in any sort of design has always been a difficult point for me. I will be the first to admit, I am no graphics art major, so finding those colors that compliment each other has always been difficult. Knowing that I want a kind of ‘passive’ or ‘lounge’ mood and finding the appropriate color to portray that was never difficult, but finding colors to create an appropriate scheme around that has always been aggravating. Especially when I’ve just been thinking about a design and want to see what it looks like without much thought in the color yet. I’ve used other tools like the Color Scheme Generator v2, but Kuler is now my favorite.

In comes Kuler. Kuler does a fantastic job of alleviating this pain. Their website is great. You can browse color schemes others have created or create your own through their fantastic tool. You can create your stuff quickly and change it easily. Whatever schemes you create you can tag, save for personal use, or publish for others to comment and rate it.

I am impressed and this will definitely be a tool I continue to use.

Business ideas are like a bus.

I gave a business presentation on a concept I had to the entrepreneurial board here at UNCW earlier this week. After the presentation, which everyone seemed to like (and were explaining the concept to others, which means I at least partially succeeded) there was a reception. I always like receptions, especially if I can give some kind of information before entering into it as it makes it easier to break the ice ;). With that said, there was something that was said by one of the people I had spoken with (Bob Rippy, I believe). It felt like a very suiting entrepreneurial meme that I should try to pass on.

“Ideas are like a bus. There is one every five minutes, you just need to decide which one to get on, and before you get on, you need to figure out how far you want to travel on it.”

 

Some Google Evil and New Text Link Format?

I had read on TechCrunch about Google’s new PPA ads and Text Link Format ads, the latter of which had been hidden in Google’s press release.

I had planned to post about this myself, but there is a great post on Marketing Hipster already. I hope Mr. Silverstein Cord doesn’t mind me linking to him and using his image to reinforce his message in the example I put together of what he’s talking about below.

This new Text Link Format embeds ads into a page’s text as opposed to being in the nicely separated Google ad box. How might this look? Here’s an example for your viewing pleasure.

The trick to making a cool brand.

Found this one over on gapingvoid and thought it was a meme worth echoing for its simplicity and truth.

“If you want to have a cool brand, you have to do cool shit.”

You’re not the one who gets to decide what cool is, either.

For those of you who aren’t aware of Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid, start reading now.

Communities Are Co-Developers Part II.

When I last wrote about this, a friend of mine contacted me and made a an interesting comment. He made a comment about the Co-Developing relationship between developer and community, saying that as opposed to being the “overseers” laying the law and enforcing their wishes on essentially the “living entity” that is a community, a stronger relationship to have would be to let the users merely manage themselves, the developers (or company) acting as simple custodians. Taking it a step further to say that as opposed to it being a co-developing relationship, it’s a parasitic relationship where the community is the host.

Now it is here that I am torn. On the one hand, I want to say that he is wrong, that the relationship isn’t parasitic. Certainly it is a strong relationship, but the ideal relationship, as I see it, is the developers joining with the community as opposed to being the custodian. It is here that custodial services become a mere civil duty, allowing the product or service to take on a life of its own, becoming merely the device, a bridge that connects all those within the community. To me, this is certainly the ideal.

The question to which I am torn, however, is can this really be achieved? As long as the developers are just that- caretakers of the bridge or core connecting part of the community that’s not theirs, but the communities, can they really be 100% a part of the community? Does that small fraction of “power” or “involvement” tip the scale enough to taint them? Are developers simply forever damned from being a true part of the community, always forced, as long as they are developers, to some degree be a parasite, thriving off of the host that is the community?

Communities Are Co-Developers

I was taking a look at Raph Koster’s presentation on game design at GDC this year and

came across two slides that read the following:

“Fail fast and fail often.

Users must be treated as Co-Developers.

Google discards 80% of its features.
They often prototype and deploy within 2 weeks.”

 

“Release early, release often.

Flickr issues releases as quickly as every half hour.”

 

I agree with these two things whole heartedly. The game players are becoming more involved in the games, and as they become more involved they needed to be treated more as co-developers. With that, the best kind of feedback to get is real feedback. Issue a few instances of your new design, whether it be a weapon, spell, level, etc. and see what the players say about it. I see little point in wasting tons of time hypothesizing about something that you could give to a community to test and get real feedback on. Then you’d know the result because you have real data. But I also see little point because I agree with the above statements.

Overall it looks like it was a great presentation. I am sad I didn’t get a chance to make it to GDC this year :(

People Keep Score

 

Fairly often something will occur relationally between people (sometimes people I know, sometimes people I don’t know) that gives me a nice little reminding insight about the relationships people have with each other, and how that also works in their relationship with businesses.

I recently over heard (whether I’ve wanted to or not, really) a number of arguments between random people. The arguments may have been about different things, but there was one thing that was consistent in all of them.

People kept score. When their boyfriend said that harmful thing, she remembered. When his girlfriend secretly brought him lunch, he remembered.

In any relationship, whether it is with a friend or your company, when people become invested in something they have a reason to keep score. This means every company needs to do their best to right their wrongs and to go above and beyond. Every company has a track record. Don’t be lazy and let an upset customer stay that way. You wouldn’t let a friend stay that way. If people are keeping score, so should you. Take the time to check and make sure the score is what you want it to be.

Creative With Boredom

Boredom is a fantastic thing. I think there aught to be something special said about it. Don’t confuse boredom with relaxation, though, no. Boredom is something much more spectacular than relaxation, much different. I am not exactly sure how to describe it, but I think boredom is something like the mental anxiety of the potential of too much of nothing to do, or too much relaxation… and those special bored moments are choice. They’re the times of creative bliss.

What’s the point of all that? I had spring break this past week and unlike my friends who are from around here- I am not. This means that most everyone I know, including my girlfriend, are gone leaving me with, for the most part, no one around. Now, I did some socializing over spring break, but for the most part I did very little… which let the boredom creep in. Let me tell you, it was magnificent.

I haven’t been bored in a while. When I get bored, my mind gets hyper-creative, over working, over thinking, over dreaming, over everything as it stresses to come up with something to occupy the too much time it has. Because of this, I had quite a few strokes of creativity and also had the time to practice my artwork (which needs practicing). It was awesome. The boredom allowed for some great insights on game design (something I am sure the Fractured Universe team is secretly crying about), artwork (something I am sure anyone who sees will be crying about), and a great many other things.

I think I may look to add an hour of boredom to my week to help ensure the creativity is flowing, or for some “power creative” moments. People take power naps. Why not do power boredom?

The Design Process

I saw this over at Signal vs. Noise. It’s a paragraph written by a professional, successful designer. The paragraph is the writing of his musings on what would happen if he told the truth about how he designs.

“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?” by Michael Bierut.

A great paragraph and I thought it would be interesting for others to consider when comparing it to their creative/design process. I know it was interesting for me to consider.