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So we spent the day at the PSFK conference yesterday. And it kinda sucked. It’s not that the speakers chosen weren’t doing interesting shit. They were. And it’s not that the stuff these speakers chose to talk about wasn’t (mostly) relevant. It was. Kinda.

Part of the problem was the format. PSFK billed it as a conference. And like every conference I’ve ever attended, NO CONFERRING HAPPENED. People are either giving or quietly consuming presentations. There is no conversation. I’d rather be reading a blog. With a blog, at least you can participate in a conversation in the comment threads. And with a blog (or magazine for that matter) you can control the pacing. You can skim, and skip the boring stuff. Not so with conferences. When you’re bored, you have to wait it out.

The other problem is that while the speakers were talking about the cool and interesting shit they’d done, no one actually talked about why what they’d done mattered and, more importantly, what we could actually learn from it. That sucks because most of us came to the conference to learn stuff that will help us.

The very first speaker presented “9 themes for inspiration” (or maybe it was 11—I was already a little wobbly). Aside from most of them being super-ridiculously obvious (e.g., number 3: “look to the past”), there was no talk about how to actually do that. But there was one theme that stood out as a catalyst for inspiration: Frustration. Which is why I’m writing this post.

What seems so dumb is that we had so many cool people in the room, and we were given no way of mining all the good stuff that was in their heads. We weren’t even given a real forum to discuss the speakers’ ideas. I want someone to organize an event that is really about conversation. I want to be sitting at a round table with the attendees, and given a problem to solve or a topic to pursue. I want a creative matchmaker to filter out the idiots and make groups of people that will blow each others minds.

Anyone wanna help us put something like that together?

You can make equal cases for optimism or pessimism. Because, mostly, it comes down to your temperament and whether you’re more disposed to hope or fear. And then you make a semi- conscious decision to live a life under the belief that everything will turn out okay or not. Here’s what Dr. Larry Brilliant, from Google.org, has to say about it:

So I just read two books that are blowing my mind. They are by Margaret Wheatley, a systems theorist and organizational development expert. Her specialty is to learn from super complex natural systems (like the universe, and life), and to suggest how these lessons might be applied in our organizations and in our approaches to living. I’m still processing the stuff, so I won’t try to summarize it here or anything. But seriously, if you like to wonder, pick up one of these books:

Leadership and the New Science

A Simpler Way

And if anyone’s got some more of this kind of material, send it my way, please.

Lucy and Bart like to get conceptual about body stuff. Their work gives me feelings of vague uneasiness. Check this link if you want to feel uneasy too.

So you may have noticed that there’s been much less writing and opinionating on this here inspiration feed than there used to be. There are a lot of reasons for the lull, but they’re not as remarkable as the way we reacted to it. We beat ourselves up for not doing more, started feeling like suckers and losers and impotent dullards.

That was pointless.

Now that the lull has passed, we think we learned something. We realized that we forgot to listen to an old piece of wisdom we trot out every now and again: Everything happens in seasons.

Everything—moods, business, ideas, even happiness—comes in seasons and swells. It all waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows, Jekylls and Hydes. And you can’t force it. You can’t freak out. That just makes things harder. So ride that shit out, and enjoy what the day brings you, even if it’s a little rain. Use the slow seasons to rest, to go easy on yourself. Do a project that’s just for fun, work shorter days, and give more time to your friends and family. Get drunk on a Wednesday afternoon. Fuck it. Really. Everything is just as it should be.

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.

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.”

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 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.

Lately I’ve noticed that I’ve become super sensitive—even a little bitchy—around bad conversation. I mean conversation of all kinds, from branding and advertising to small talk between acquaintances and deep talk between friends. But it isn’t the subject matter that bothers me. It’s the manner in which those conversations happen or don’t happen.

Here’s what I mean:
Once I was sharing a hot tub with two friends, both known for their propensity to talk. It seemed at first like they were talking to each other. But as we spent more time in the water it began to feel to me like they were talking at each other. They weren’t listening to what the other was saying. Or if they were, they weren’t engaging with it. They weren’t responding to it. They were so focused on expressing their own personal point of view that what they were having stopped being a conversation and became a competition for air time. After a while, you could tell they weren’t even talking about the same thing.

Now, it’s normal for people to offer up their experience of a given topic—that’s one way of empathizing. And empathy is good. But most often, if you’re talking about yourself, you’re not listening to someone else. Sure, an anecdote about your experience is fun and sometimes useful, but conversation works best when you’re as unselfish as possible. It works best when you share the spotlight, taking turns talking and listening:

Shut up and listen.
Seriously. Shut up. That means more than just quieting your mouth. It means more than simply waiting your turn to talk. It means quieting the noise in your head so that you can really hear what the other person is saying.

Now prove you were listening.
That’s right. Show me you care. Ask genuine questions that send the conversation in new directions. Talk to me about what I’m talking to you about. Otherwise, we’re just making noise.

Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn.
It’s not likely that anyone will listen to you, if you don’t listen to them first. Because when you really pay attention, and you show it, you build trust. You build rapport. You get a reputation for being smart, and thoughtful even, no matter that you’ve said very little. And suddenly people will want to hear what you have to say.

Whether you’re an organization trying to start conversation in a community, or a dude at a party, a good conversation is a hard thing to make. I’m still figuring this out myself, but I’ve got a feeling that if you just listen, if you really respect the attention you’re getting (someone chose to talk to you, of all people!), and if you talk to them about them, you’ll make all kinds of unexpected friends. Which might be what conversation’s all about.

A few days ago I ran into an old acquaintance who also works in the creativity business. He said he’d heard that I’d started a studio. Was that true? I said yes.

Then, he looked me in the face and said, “So, what’s it about? Give me your elevator pitch.”

Now, up until that point I had been genuinely happy to see this person, and this request kinda ruined that a little, because it meant he wanted a neatly packaged sound-byte, one that had been scripted, and used many times before. He didn’t want the story of how I spend my days. He wasn’t interested in conversation.

Another story:
This weekend, I met a girl in a bar (no, not that kind of girl). She asked what I do. And because explaining what I do requires a real, honest-to-goodness conversation with someone who may or may not get it anyway, I shrugged and hemmed and hawed and then said, ” It’s sort of hard to talk about. But basically I run a design studio.”
“What kind of design?”
“Communication.”
Then there was a pause, which I tried to fill by saying, “See? Now we have to have a conversation.”

What happened next surprised me: she looked me in the face, and said, “Yes, let’s.”

Here was a person who was willing to spend time learning about me. She didn’t want the short version that she could immediately fit into the pre-existing file tab in her head and then promptly forget. She wanted the one with all the nuance, with all the interesting bits, the one that she could actually engage with.

See, here’s what I mean: An elevator pitch is meant for people who don’t really care. A conversation is for people willing to invest some time to understand the value of what you do. Who would you rather work with?

So I’ve been wondering about inspiration lately: where to find it, how to use it, and how to maintain it. You could argue that finding it is the easy part—as long as you’re paying attention as you make your way out in the world, there’s a million things that might inspire you.

But do you know when inspiration’s lacking, and you need to fill up? Do you have specific places you look? Do you alternate those places? Are you conscious of the places you find inspiration and the things you’re then inspired to do?

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the MFA Writing students at California College of the Arts. I’d been asked there to talk about how they could use their newly-honed writing skills to make a living in the world. I’d done a similar talk for the entire undergraduate classes a few weeks before, in which we talked about publication technology, about how to be generous rather than proprietary, and about the idea that what they understood as writing, the act of laying words down one after the other, was only a very small part of what writing actually is. Consequently, they’d all bought into the idea that there are only a few things you can do with your writing degree:

You can teach.
Sure, it’s fun and interesting and you get to be around writing and writers all the time. Problem is, this means that your world stays small, because everyone’s practicing the same discipline. There’s not much opportunity for newness. And unless you’re very dedicated and very prolific, you’ll spend more time reading student papers and writing comments, than writing whatever it is you want to write. There’s no job security, you’re getting paid almost nothing, you’re competing with your colleagues—hell, you might as well work at a coffee shop and continue to work on that novel. Oh yes, I tried my luck as a teacher—that didn’t go so well.

You can scrape by in obscurity hoping for the big break.
Sheeeit. It’s a romantic notion, no doubt. But there’s not that many people out there who have the balls or the talent to pull it off. This is not to say that if you believe you can do it, that you shouldn’t. I’m only saying that it’s hard as fuck. At least it was for me.

You can get into publishing.
Which means you’re not gonna be writing that much. Unless writing rejection letters is your thing, you’ll be spending time reading and copyediting—not a bad way to spend the day no doubt, but it isn’t writing, not even the way the graduate students understand it, and certainly not the way it should be understood.

These three directions—teacher, starving artist, editor—are the only ready-made avenues available to someone with a writing degree. The thing is, they’re not the only ways to go. Not by a long shot. There’s a whole universe of careers you can create for yourself if you try. It’s just much harder to actually figure out what it is you want to do with your time, than it is to choose from a list of options. It’s hard because it takes courage and confidence and imagination. It’s hard because no one can know you like you know yourself and so no one can do it for you.

Here’s why I’m writing this:

During the conversation, one of the students said: “so I’ll have this degree soon. Then what do I do?” This was the question of the day, the reason I’d been asked to come speak. The weird part was that when I responded by asking her what it was she actually wanted to do, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “yeah.” And that was the end of it. As if the question, as trite as it sounds, were too big to even go about trying to answer. It’s a big fucker, no doubt. But it’s also the way to greatness.

Finding your path has very little to do with your resume, and everything to do with knowing yourself a little better every day.

So lately we’ve been thinking about attention: how to get it, how to keep it, and how to respect it. Here’s the first bit of thinking about ways to go about getting it:

1. Stand out.
This is the most common way to get attention, probably because it’s easiest. It doesn’t take much: if everyone is wearing a red dress, you wear a blue one. Or if everyone is talking at a certain volume, you shout louder. While we think this kind of attention-getting is often really off-putting (”Ooh, look at ME!”) there is some value in it: it will get you noticed. Problem is, you’ll most likely be forgotten as soon as someone shows up wearing a purple dress and screaming louder than you. Which means you’ll have to put on a polka dot dress, hike it up past your ass cheeks, and sing through a megaphone. And still, you can be sure that someone will out-do you again before too long. Which leads me to note another concern: we now live in a super noisy world, and most people have had to become numb in order to deal with it. It’s probably best not to get caught up in this vicious cycle.

2. Be everywhere.
This is tactic is simple, but expensive. Eliminate all the competition for attention by occupying all the territory: take over all the ad space in the subway station, buy up all the Superbowl spots, or monopolize an entire magazine. Often this approach can be impossible for people to ignore, which makes it both effective and dangerous. It’ll get you 100% of their attention, and if you piss them off, 100% of their anger.

3. Be in the right place at the right time.
This one is most challenging, but perhaps also the most rewarding. The idea is to figure out what it is your audience wants to see in any given moment, and then give it to them. The idea is to tune into your audience so well that you’ll know where their attention will naturally fall. This way, you won’t actually need to call them over, or compete for their attention, or ask them to change their behavior in order to hear what you have to say. But it’s not enough just to be in someone’s line of sight. You have to meet their attention in a way that makes their day better. Seems obvious, but it’s really fucking hard to get right. You’ve either got to be a psychic or do a shitload of research. And then you’ve gotta be disciplined (and empathetic) enough not to use that research to create an all-out sales message. Because if they can sense the sell (and people are fucking smart, so you can bet they will), the love is lost.

Most of us ‘creative types’ think we’re better than everyone else. Hell, we think we’re better than each other.

We’re always rejecting conventional wisdom and getting away with it. We flaunt it because we think it proves that we’re more creative than anyone else. And lucky for us, the world is full of suckers in suits who believe us. That’s how we pay the bills.

We’ve been doing this for so long that we started to believe that different is always better, even when it isn’t.

Here’s what I mean:
When it was time to hire our first staff, we were so focused on being different, and provocative, and, yeah, unconventional, that we ignored the wisdom of the time-tested hiring process. We didn’t ask for resumes because we don’t think they really help you know a person. We didn’t ask for portfolios because we weren’t interested in hiring someone to do work they’d done before. And we didn’t check references because we were lazy.

And so we wound up hiring (and firing) a sociopath who went berserk in the studio, tried to recruit our friends for revenge, and stalked us for a week and a half.

So yeah, maybe that wasn’t so smart.

Next time, we’ll give the suits a little more credit.

I’ve got various friends who run various successful graphic design studios. They all went to design school, seriously know their shit, and have been practicing graphic design for years. When we met years ago, I was doing copywriting, naming, and brand strategy stuff. So when a recent article referred to Language in Common as a “design studio,” I received no end of razzing: “Since when are you a designer? Since when do you run a design studio?”

To be fair, these friends have devoted large chunks of their lives to the practice of Design, and have no doubt earned their status as masters of the craft. And I believe I’d never have come to design if I hadn’t met some of them early in my creative career.

Still, I’ve never identified as a Designer, so my friends’ playful poking doesn’t bother me that much. But what does bother me is the misunderstanding inherent in their fun-making: that design is limited only to graphic communications. I know, I know: here you’ll remind me that designers are pure problem solvers, and that design is a process rather than a product—absolutely, and we’ve heard it yawped form the rooftops of the graphic Design community for a quite a few years now. Problem is, many of those who are yawping it—while deep and effective creative thinkers—are mistaking mastery of the tools of graphic design for the process of designing. And while they continue to use that mastery to solve problems, and continue to be top notch graphic designers, many refuse to allow that design can be used to solve problems other than graphic—that the practice of design itself is an entity separate from the creation of a visual product, and that the measure of design success is very rarely only aesthetic. If design is really to be an inclusive community, we’d better start inviting all the creative people in.

So, at the risk of being redundant, and late to the game, I’d like to offer a broader definition of design. One that lets problem solvers be problem solvers no matter the medium they work in.

Design is not the making of posters and logos and brochures and websites. It’s not title sequences and motion graphics. It’s a way of doing which can be defined as making things that solve problems.

Here’s how it goes:

-You figure out what the problem is
-You figure out other ways to frame the problem
-You come up with a shitload of ideas
-You test a few of them out
-You decide what solves the problem and what doesn’t
-You refine it and make something dope

And with this process any problem can be engaged as a design problem, and any tool or resource can be used in the process. Sure, the tools and eventual outcome are different, but whether an essay or story, a painting or poster, a space or a structure, the process is exactly the same: Sometimes you begin knowing what you want to say, other times you figure that out by doing. Then you think about rhythm and composition, light and shadow, hierarchies, shapes and sizes. And you hope that the thing you’re making has multiple useful ways of being understood.

Often that thing isn’t graphic, or even pretty, and sometimes it has nothing to do with communication. But it’s still design.

As you know, we’re, like, nanomoments from finishing our book for written on the city. And today, our friend Richard Oliver of Purposive Drift sent us a timely note, sharing his experiences in the final sessions of finishing his book Understanding Hypermedia 2.0 for print.

Enjoy:

Just thought I’d share an experience with you. My last published book, “Understanding Hypermedia 2.0″ was a bit of a nightmare. My co-author, Bob Cotton fell ill at a crucial point in the process. I was having conversations with Malcolm Garrett, the designer, at 4.00 in the morning, where we were swearing we would never do an illustrated book again. I was doing lots of processes that should have been sequential like writing main text, captions, choosing illustrations, and so on, in parallel. We had what was beginning to look like an impossible deadline. And so on. I guess you get the picture.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I was having a final meeting with our editor where there were a few tiny bits to tidy up before the book was sent off to the printers. Everything we needed to deal with could have been done in about ten minutes. After half an hour I realised that I was dragging the meeting on because I was reluctant to let go of our baby and let it go out into the world - very weird.

In the end, despite all the pain, I think it is my favourite of all our books.

Thanks, Richard. Wish us luck!

Um, watch this.