Work, in Plain English

Anders Toxboe has put together a beautifully organized thinking place for web designers and user interface designers. Go there to reference screenshots, design patterns and practical articles. Better yet, join the community and upload your personal favorite user interface screenshots.

Very similar to this site is Pattern Tap. I suggest you check out each of them and decide which is your favorite (or join both).

Other good design pattern sites are:
Janko Jovanovic’s Janko at Warp Speed
Peer-written journal, Boxes and Arrows
The venerable Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

And finally, spend some time with (and bookmark) this delightful Smashing Magazine post on mathematics in web design.

A key part of getting yourself inspired is noticing when something is dragging you down.

Reading a creative journal (such as a design annual) can spark ideas, but not always. Sometimes it can be a weighty tome of trendiness, or worse – mediocrity. Bottom line: Hold to what you know inspiration feels like, and keep up the search until you get that feeling.

To paraphrase the provocative (read: can of worms) definitions over at Dictionary.com, to be inspired means to be brought to the state where we can and will bring something into being. (It also means to inhale – to breathe. Is that why a simple walk outdoors can get the proper juices flowing?)

So check in with yourself. If what you’re doing to seek inspiration is not getting you moving (and breathing), do something else.

Very important: I didn’t say resist. If your day presents you with an uninspiring situation, deal with it. Example: I just found out my son’s swim class wasn’t canceled due to rain. Bye-bye $25. I was stuck in Grinch-mode until I remembered to just be ticked off: From there, it took another minute or two to admit it was my own fault for not reading this week’s class email. Again. That made the blame bit an easier bridge to cross, back over to curiosity, a sense of humor… and look! I’m thinking about inspiration again.

Viva la Revolution!

Granted, Twitter is noisy, overwhelming, confusing, and difficult to step into. It’s also incredibly vital, and potentially bottomless. I’m still experiencing regular epiphanies about business, collaboration, art and humanness. Half the fun is that I’m doing it together with others. It’s the biggest team effort I’ve ever seen.

Without further ado, here are the six:

Twitter…

1. …is fast

Twitter communities had spread the US Airways Hudson River story an hour before most of the news channels (Wall Street Journal sent out an alert within 25 minutes—good for them), and smart reporters knew to tap Twitter for sources, finding witnesses and the first photo (shot by a iPhone from a rescue ferry).

Some call it Citizen Journalism. I call it Communication Freedom.

2. …is uncensorable

Something that fast is virtually uncensorable. Unless I am one day caught with my hand in some political cookie jar, I’m going to continue to like it that way. This is a good time to re-watch Johnny Mnemonic (just fast-forward past the goofy Keanu Reeves monologue).

Another perspective: Sure, Big Media is slanted. So are you. Now all our slants have equal voice.

3. …is a “now” medium

There is no “catch up” or “make up” or “keep up”. In the twenty-first century and in Twitter, there is only now. You’ve got to sleep sometime, and you’re going to miss stuff. Read back a little, but as Mack Collier reminded me when I panicked over following 70 Twitterers (to date, he’s following 1,833), “I never try to go back and read missed tweets, there’s just no way to catch up.”

This is a good thing, because it keeps your attention focused forward (this is also probably a good place to recommend TweetDeck again).

4. …is super malleable

Like the rest of the web, Twitter is what you make it. It’s not done being born, and probably (hopefully) never will be.

People ask, “What do you do with Twitter?” Now that I’m a whole month old, I’d day: Start by listening. Complete your profile, then find people you want to listen to, and follow them. What you do next is up to you.

5. …invites new ways of thinking

If you think like you’ve always thought, the benefits of a this untethered tool will be limited. If you try out new perspectives, the benefits will most certainly expand. Find inspiration from your regular sources, try my recommended Five Favorite Follows on Twitter (another five coming soon). I also highly recommend hanging out with a child or teen for a bit.

6. …invites new ways of relating

I’m not really sure what this means yet. I just know I’m listening differently, sharing thoughts differently—sometimes with people I never expected to engage. I’m not a particularly public person, so I’m having to come to terms with the harrowing transparency of this and other social media tools. Still, I love finding people who post inspired, sparkly thoughts, and I love when they expand on one of mine. I guess you could say it’s about learning to participate in an ever-larger conversation.

I’m now a 3-week-old Tweeter, and new enough to be having daily ah-ha’s (and woopses). I’ve followed, then un-followed some good folks whose messages were more than I could process. I’ve obsessed over replies and RTs, downloaded TweetDeck, and installed, uninstalled, and then reinstalled TwitterFox.

I waited this long to sign up because I just knew all this would happen, and feared the rest of my life would come to a standstill. It was only when I watched election day tweets posting live at about three per second that I realized the standstill had happened anyway. A large, lovely, inexorable wave was headed toward and over me, whether I chose to jump on or not.

This is not a “How to Get Started with Twitter” post. Those are here and here, and elsewhere. This post is dedicated to other new Tweeters, though, because there are a few people I recommend following, mostly—but not only—if you are thinking about ways to use Twitter as a business tool.

1. Mack Collier
2. Chris Brogan
Both Mack and Chris would be saying essentially the same thing if this were 1909 or 2109, because their insights are based on a fundamental respect and esteem for other human beings. They do have a vision for the future of social networking (not just online), and they know how to use it. On their blogs (Mack’s main blog is The Viral Garden; Chris’ is plain old Chris Brogan), on Twitter and in person, they discourage people from using social media as another “tactic”, and believe that the really outrageous successes come from listening and making genuine connections. I must add that Mack is way more into sports than I will ever be, but I’m dealing with it.

3. Todd Henry
Todd doesn’t post more than once or twice a day, but he’s always thinking and writing about something intriguing. His blog, Accidental Creative, as well as his tweets, are so practical, immediately usable and down to earth, I’m delighted he’s in my universe, and happy to share.

4. Guy Kawasaki
When Guy is on a roll, I see as many as 30 posts from him in a single day. I’ve considered un-following, but too many of them are links to stuff I want to know about. Because of this, I’ve given him his very own group on TweetDeck, and have learned to quick-scan it for gotta-reads. For more practical inspiration, check out his blog, How to Change the World.

Side note: You’d think this fella would be too busy to reply when I tweeted him about a $5 bet I made that he did, in fact, know how to make a screenshot with an iPhone. The mensch replied within two minutes.

5. hashtags
Trust me on this one. If you’re new, you probably won’t use it today or next week, but eventually, you will come back around to it. Learn more about hashtags here and here.

Like Etsy for wanna-be product designers, Shapeways is providing 3D dreamers with a fascinating way to produce and sell their concepts online. If you can render it (in the 3D application of your choice, exported to Collada or X3D format), you can probably see it come to life here.

At the moment, the biggest size they can produce is 49x39x20cm. Materials so far are polycarbonate and a variety of acrylic-based photopolymers. The Material Options page has a chart of properties, example photos and downloadable material data sheets.

I copied the process from their About page:

They’ve also got special, customizable projects going, such as this Light Poem—just compose and submit your heartfelt words, and bring them to… oops.

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Learning the Ropes, by RandyJayBraun

Every once in awhile, I come across a photo during research that I can’t use… but can’t turn away from, either. I maintain dozens and dozens of lightboxes on their site, for various projects and clients. One lightbox is titled, “For Me”; This photo, by RandyJayBraun, lives there.

This past week, I have been at both the giving and receiving ends of some very poor communication.

Dishing it out: I asked for backup support with a project, but neglected to mention a specific time the support would be needed. To make matters worse, no one had the mental bandwidth to reply with a clarifying question, so the email wasn’t answered until it was too late.

Being dished: After spending half a week on a project, all preliminaries were junked when the project owner mentioned requirements that should have been in the initial request.

We’re all busy. When we are the source of a request, it’s important that we either do the work of providing all key details, or clearly state what details are needed from the other person. When we’re the recipient of an unclear email, it’s up to us to ask for missing details, and to make sure we get them.

One tool I use is a quick checklist:

If you get the feeling a note (either that you’ve received or are about to send) is unclear, re-read it and jot down the questions that come to mind (they will). If you’re having trouble coming up with questions, give yourself a “who-what-where-when” kick-start: Does the message name all necessary names? Does it explain exactly what’s happening, or what’s needed? Do you need to know more about where or when? (Sure, you learned that years ago, but did you use it in your last memo?) Once you start a list like this, it’s surprisingly easy to know when you’re done.

And once you’ve jotted down those questions…

Are the questions for an email you’re sending? Answer what you can, and ask for help with the others.

Are the questions for an email you’ve received? Reply to the sender with a numbered or bulleted list of questions. Don’t glob the questions into a long paragraph, but break them out into easy-to-answer pieces.

And remember to be patient with yourself and others. We are all busy; Communication is one of those things that will never be perfect, and could always use a little improvement.

This article purposely leaves out the nuances of more complex communications, such as those that seek to inspire change or address organizational issues. If you’re looking beyond the simple project memo, see Ken Milloy’s thoughtfully assembled 11 Laws of Internal Communications.

Otherwise known as the Color Cue®2, I read an ecstatic review for Pantone’s photospectrometer thingy on buy.com. Me, every time I look at it, I want to point it at a Pokemon.

Check out how Adobe Illustrator is using del.icio.us to organize web-wide tips and tutorials! They’ve integrated del.icio.us directly into the CS3 knowhow palette. I haven’t upgraded yet, but I can still go to the web page and pick through the links… or go to http://knowhow.adobe.com, where the demo allows me to play with the actual knowhow panel (first, I’m going to look into how they organized groups of tags under subtitles — very cool).

Of course, in the spirit of social bookmarking, networking, etc., if you’ve found or created any web content you think other Illustrator users would value, just tag it “for:knowhow”. The Adobe team will review it, and then add it to the collection.

Considering del.icio.us as a tool for managing your projects? See my detailed how-to, and a collection of links to other helpful web pages on the subject.

I stumbled on SlideShare this morning, while poking around the blogsphere (thanks to David Armano at Logic + Emotion). My greatest delight is that it allows me to share presentations I’ve created in Apple’s Keynote, rather than having to convert them to PowerPoint, which is like squeezing a porcupine into a nylon stocking.

I’ve already sent ecstatic emails to friends and colleagues, but wanted to further share the wealth by mentioning it here.

… works just like embedding a YouTube video (slide show by brownerfirst).

In the meantime, I’ve found some excellent material for my “competition vs. cooperation” quest, which I’ll post within the week. If you just can’t wait, you can always check del.icio.us/workinplainenglish, which continues to serve as a living collaboration lab.