Last Monday, Happy Cog’s Greg Hoy led a SXSW session about company culture. I wasn’t able to attend SXSW this year, but Leslie Camacho wrote up a detailed summary of the session. Of particular interest to me was the discussion about working remotely.
In the movie business when an actor plays the same role over and over, he is considered “typecast.” A word that carries negative connotations and general disdain. The typecast label implies actors only play one role well, emoting the same expressions throughout projects, and presenting the same personality no matter the situation. Generally, being typecast is not something an actor strives for.
“The last thing you need to do is see Jim Avery. He’s two doors down.”
That was the department chair’s way of saying that our meet-and-greet was finished and that I needed to go. She was polite about it, but my stomach was still churning from nerves and stress. Thirty minutes prior to this meeting, I had decided to abandon my long-ago-decided path of pursuing an art degree in favor of a degree in advertising because 1) Advertising was the only department that offered a few graphic design courses and 2) the Art department had just royally pissed me off.
In some circles, the words “waterfall” or “agile” can ignite a spirited discussion about which methodology is better. But is a methodology truly what makes a project successful? I say no. When it comes right down to it, you need to do what works for you, your client, and your project. Learning to adapt the way you work to meet the goals of a project might be tough, but sorting out the details from the start is a formula for success that you and your client can feel good about.
He invoked a sense of dread every Monday and Wednesday from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. At the age of 18, “color theory” wasn’t something I necessarily “got.” Yet the facts were unavoidable. The class was mandatory. All design majors had to take it and endure it. And almost all of us were clueless in the art of discussing design. We were at the mercy of the scariest design professor this side of the Bauhaus, Keith Newhouse.
“Why do you want to offer hosting? Hosting is hard!” We’ve heard quite a bit of that lately from our friends. Hosting is hard, no doubt. And that’s exactly why we want to offer it.
Good day to you, Signals!
Basecamp has greatly enriched our work life. It deftly reduces the incredibly complex noise of a large, busy project with many moving parts into exactly what each of us needs to get our jobs done. It has allowed us to isolate and document critical conversations, and therefore collaborate with our clients and each other more effectively. Smooth integration with e-mail makes it possible to respond at the speed of thought. And the recent integration of accounts makes hopping between the many different Basecamps in the Happy Cog universe a breeze.
Everywhere I’ve worked, there has always been one employee deemed so valuable that other people say, “If she ever leaves, we’re screwed.” Could be the sales gal. Or the IT guy. Or the fearless leader. Someone whose knowledge runs so deep, whose Rolodex is so bursting, or whose leadership is so charismatic that the thought of moving on without them is incomprehensible.
Oh, hello. I didn’t see you there.
My name is Keyboard Man. For the past two years, I’ve been honored and delighted to host Happy Cog’s Cog’aoke Karaoke Competition at the SXSW Interactive conference. Maybe you’ve attended Cog’aoke. Maybe you’ve even performed. If you’re on either of those lists, you have my eternal gratitude and sincere admiration. You are also probably the object of more than a few secret crushes of these people.
Perhaps you’ve stood in line at Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and said,
“What flavor of ice cream do I want today?”
You’ve probably all wished, as I have, that you could have a dozen flavors at once. Thankfully, someone, possibly Messrs. Ben & Jerry, invented that tiny ice cream spoon. Sample just a taste to see if that flavor suits your mood.
Any mint can mask lunch breath, but only Certs has a golden drop of Retsyn. That drop and its golden hue, which no one but a copywriter has ever seen (the actual visual end-product is a trail of green flecks), may have made a powerful differentiator back when Tang was a breakfast drink, but it’s not enough to sway a modern consumer.
The year 2010 was a wild one for the web. It saw the release of the iPad and all of the subsequent great ideas and discussion about flexible design approaches. HTML was cool again (the cinco!). Twitter got a major overhaul and Facebook got between 35 and 268 small facelifts. It was as if millions of bookmarks cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced when rumor had it delicio.us was disappeari.ng. In fact, someone apparently took the web’s pulse and pronounced it DOA!
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