Tiny Gigantic

Over at the brilliant Signal vs. Noise, there’s an interesting post on some rather unknown but super insightful communications theory. Here it is, verbatim:

Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws.

* If communication can fail, it will.
* If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
* There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
* The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

And I particularly like his observation that anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

Read more about Osmo and his theories on communication here.

Seriously, this video is the dope! From three legged leg, of course. Check the video here.

So we were asked to design the name, logo, interior, website, and experience for a new restaurant here in San Francisco’s Mission District. Super fucking fun.

It’s called Beretta, and they serve up gourmet pizzas and fancy-ass cocktails you won’t find anywhere else, except for maybe a Hemingway novel. We’re psyched they’re blowing up.

Oh yeah, and they’re open late too. If yer in SF, go give ‘em some love.

And just in case yer new around here: Jim Coudal runs the brilliant and playful Chicago design studio known as Coudal Partners.

via boingboing.

This is fuckin smart. I’d love to see it implemented.

And I can’t help but take this idea even further: what if we combined location-aware technology like RFID or GPS with a networked database of images so that the figures in red were drawn to look like the driver’s loved ones? Yikes!

via notcot.

On the very very slight chance you don’t already know about the torture—I mean, “interrogation”—technique called waterboarding. Launched by Amnesty International. Created by a firm called Drugstore. Wow.

Ok, so we just learned something that might help young freelancers and the people who hire them:

Design students are used to thinking of their assignments as homework. Homework is something you do on your own. And asking for the teacher’s help is not really the way the game is played—it’s seen as a sign of weakness. Beyond that, success is measured differently, and failure is sort of acceptable, even welcome as part of the process. If a student does a crappy job, the teacher awards the student a crappy grade, and that’s how things are supposed to work. Everyone walks away feeling like things turned out the way they should have.

Unfortunately, young designers often keep that mentality for a long time, even after they’ve left the classroom.

Here’s what I wish I would have said to the young freelancer we just hired:

“This isn’t homework. This isn’t a test. By giving you this assignment, I am entrusting you to manage two of my precious resources—time and money. I need you to be responsible about that. If you find that you are stumbling, that you are spending my time and money and nothing is happening, I need you to alert me, so that I can help. If you are able to see your weaknesses and ask for help, everything will be fine and I will respect you and most likely reward you. I am not interested in giving you an F for crappy work. If you show up at deadline with nothing useful, I’m fucked. And giving you a scolding is not going to help me.

The difference is that design teachers don’t really care if you get an F. But if you fail at a work assignment, it hurts my business.”

Check out the awesomeness of this old Atari game packaging. Note the amazing copy too. There’s a whole bunch more here.

Check out what happens when ferrofluid (iron particles suspended in liquid) is put in a magnetic field (like an MRI). Make sure you watch the second half!!!

What do those shapes look like to you?

This is the “preliminary traverse map of the primary landing site.” Er, I mean, this is the path Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took on their very first walk on the moon, overlaid on a soccer field. If you wanna see which path Buzz walked vs which path Neil took, all the details can be found on NASA’s website. Pretty cool, eh?

Found at the super awesome Strange Maps.

Recently, we blogged our dismay at discovering that design students today don’t really know what design means today. That blog post generated a lot of conversation around what “communication design” means, and this made us realize that a definitive definition might be useful.

So let’s break it down:

Communication = creation of shared meaning.

Design = a structured way of using creativity to accomplish a strategic result.

So:

Communication design is the practice of creating strategic meaning. And that meaning can be shared through words, images, and experiences.

When the goal is to get a new idea adopted, or to change people’s behavior, or to get people emotionally invested, there’s a whole bunch of shit involved in getting it right. You’ve got to think about the content of your communication, the styling of it, and the method of delivery. In other words, you want to make sure you’ve really thought about what you need to say, how best to say it, and what medium will be most effective. This is what communication designers do.

We’ve talked before about design as a process for solving problems, not an end product. ideasonideas‘s got another good way to talk about it.

Here’s a little sample:

This kind of design forces us to see ourselves as intermediaries, who facilitate defined outcomes. To do this, we consider and weigh business, marketing, communications (and other) challenges, and work to resolve them through design. The end-result doesn’t have to look good, even though it might, but it absolutely must work.

Right?

So Nokia’s pushing their new N-Gage software with this pretty cool, musta-taken-forever-to-make, stop-action movie/game. You’ll like that it’s pong (one of the first computer games I ever played, only with people as the game pieces. You may not like that it’s a lot of work for very little payoff.

Still, free content is a great way to build reputation and get people to like you. It’s just that the intro movie to this thing is way cooler than the game itself. Of course, that could be because it’s pong, which is fun only when you’re really really stoned.

The good people at the Small Planet Institute—who helped us spread the word about replate—have launched a new website to help reduce climate change by offering help and info about how we can easily change our food, shopping, and eating habits. Go check it out.

Check out the Rather Difficult Font Game. I know that some of you anal designers out there will a) not rest until you’ve gotten everyone of these correct, or b) get everyone of these correct on the very first try and then make fun of those who didn’t.

Seriously, I’ve got no idea what this is.

So a few weeks ago, we participated in the CCA Career Expo. They gave us a booth alongside a shitload of other local creative shops and set the students loose on us. I never went to any of the job fairs when I was in school, but I assume that they’re kinda like this: students or recent grads come by, show their stuff, and talk to you about what you do and how they might fit into it, and you spend all day repeating your story. That’s where it got sticky.

Because saying “we’re a Communication Design studio” mostly returned blank, slack-jawed looks. So we spent the whole day reframing and re-articulating what communication design actually is and what it’s good for. We talked about design thinking and communication strategy, but most of the students didn’t know what those were either. The day brought up two big questions:

What is communication design?

And why the fuck do students at design schools know nothing about design thinking?

Anyone?

So Al Gore commissioned a new logo for his non-profit advocacy group, the Alliance for Climate Protection. You have to applaud the fact that he donated his Nobel prize money and then some to the cause. But mostly, I’m inclined to believe that it’s really fucking hard for a simple logo to spur people to action, without a ton of context (I can’t think of any other than the recycling icon and the peace symbol.)

Still, I’ll reserve judgment for now because I’d like to know what you think about this. So, whaddaya think?

Oh joy! You have to write a resume and cover letter. You have to package yourself up for people you’ve never met, and if you don’t get it right, you get to move out of your apartment and sleep on your fat cousin’s couch. And when you apply for your next apartment, if you ever manage to scavenge enough bottles and cans for a deposit, you’ll have to write a cover letter and resume for that shit too.

Sucka.

Well, we take pity on you. Here’s some tips:

Keep it short.
Let’s think super clear here: resumes are ONE-PAGE documents. Anything longer is a CV and CVs are for when you’re applying for tenure (which you’re probably not if you’re reading this here post). I bring this up not because I’m being a nitpicker but because no one likes to read resumes (or, for that matter, CVs), and everyone’s super busy, and hiring is not the funnest process anyway, so it’s not a good idea to send long-ass resumes that waste people’s time. This goes for cover letters too.

Keep your pants on.
Cover letters and resumes are not about getting the job. They are about getting an interview. If you try to build an exhaustive and conclusive case for why you are perfect for the job, you will (a) bore the reader, (b) be building a case based only on your mere guesses about what they’re looking for, and (c) leave the reader with no questions, and no need to invite you in to ask them.

Remember: when people read resumes, they are making 3 piles. Interview, Maybe, and No Interview. Remember also that resume readers want to move through the resumes asafp.

Your goal is to quickly say just enough to get put in the Interview pile. That’s it. You can get naked for them once they’ve invited you up for a drink.

Show your best bits.
Your resume will communicate the following types of background info:
-Institutions (your schools and employers)
-Titles (your degrees and job titles)
-Job/Degree Descriptions
-Dates
-Locations

Take a minute to think about what aspects of your background are most likely to make someone invite you in for a conversation. Perhaps you went to a fancy school, or worked at a company with a good reputation. Or maybe your job titles sound a lot like the job you’re applying for. Or maybe your job descriptions are especially relevant. Figure out what is the sexiest thing on your resume and then make sure that’s the first thing a person sees when they look at the page.

In other words, you should lay your resume out in such a way that the bigger, bolder, most eye catching stuff is the stuff most likely to get you an interview.

Keep your job descriptions real.
“Effectively coordinated the placement and inversion of gourmet beef patties on extensive grill surface.”

No one falls for this kind of crap. If you flipped burgers, you flipped burgers. But perhaps the interesting part of that job was that you did it with a smile, or that you did it while you were working a second job. That’s the real shit. And it’s worth something to employers.

Beyond that, the secret to writing your old job descriptions is to focus on the verbs and the concrete data. Try to use the same verbs that are mentioned in the description of the job you are applying for. Define your prior challenges and successes in objective terms; so instead of saying you coordinated a large team, say you coordinated a team of 8. Instead of saying you successfully completed an important budgeting project, explain that you completed a budget project spanning four departments, and that you completed it on time, and that it saved your company 3% in overhead the following year.

Your cover letter should be coy.
It’s a good thing you can’t fit your whole story in your one-page resume. This leaves you with something to talk about in your cover letter. Again, you want to keep this mother short, but you want to hit these cones:

-I am applying for X job, which I found posted on X.
-The important thing to notice about my resume is X.
-However, there’s a lot more to know about me that you can’t find on my resume. For example I have some wild stories about the time I put my X in a X.
-Sincerely, X

By hinting at a fun conversation about information you have yet to reveal, you create a reason to be invited in for a conversation. Simple.