Tiny Gigantic

At Language in Common, we don’t usually work an 8-hour day. I mean, sometimes we’re in the office for eight hours. But we don’t force our process around an arbitrary schedule. Because as most of you know, you can’t actually, truly, I mean really, be creative for eight straight hours. It’s important to have as much time as possible in which to harness whatever creativity makes its way into your day, but riding it all day long, each day? No way.

So we break up our day into two workable chunks. There’s a morning session and an afternoon session. And those go as long as they go.

Problem is, since we’re small, and mine and axel’s roles are completely blurred (basically, we share a brain) we spend a bunch of time in meetings. And meetings fuck up the whole two-creative-sessions-a-day thing.

Paul Graham’s got a kick-ass article about how much meetings suck right here. He makes a great distinction between the schedule of someone who makes things and the schedule of someone who manages things. Axel and I are both. Which is yet another reason why meetings muck us up so good. Here’s a taste:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

We don’t have a solid solution to this really, other than to do our best to avoid meetings that seem useless (read: 90% of them) and try to be extra clear with our clients and collaborators about the dangers of reckless meeting setting. Anyone got any good ways to solve this?

So apparently I’m way behind when it comes to internet memes. This piece (which is actually quite brilliant) is part of a meme called rickrolling, in which users share clips related to the ever awesome 80′s one-hit wonder, Rick Astley. Amazing.

Yup, Wired editor, Chris Anderson (who wrote the Long Tail) has a new book out. It’s called Free. What’s awesome about it is this review by Malcolm Gladwell.

A few days ago I had a conversation with a client about the state of his communications. I was arguing for a certain visual language: a little glossier, a little colder, a little more overtly monied. By that I mean that I was arguing for a design that actually looked designed. I know this flies in opposition to the current fashion of invisible design, but it seemed like the market we were playing in required a little slickness. The client makes high-end luxury stuff, stuff that I felt needed a designed presence.

But when I told him (again) that we should rethink the graphic presentation of his site, he kinda went off. “You’re wrong!” he said. “You’re standards are just too high!” Now, that may be true. I care a whole lot about what things look like. But then he went on to illustrate how the site has been functioning quite well to generate leads for his business. It was all true. His logic was sound. He was, in fact, getting tons of interest from this ugly-ass site.

Which begs this scary question: if design is meant to incite action, does it really matter if it’s pretty?

I want this. And I want a jetpack too. But mostly I want to know if the Autonobile, by design studio Mike and Maaike, is actually make-able, if it can be made to be safe and affordable. And if they can send me one as payment for posting it on this here inspiration feed.

Found here.