shiftfwd

There Are Many Ways to Tell a Story

2013-03-08T06:16:06+00:00

One of the amazing advantages of this time is that almost anyone can tell their story. Something that used to be limited to a privileged few is now accessible to the lucky majority of us. We can now tell our stories face-to-face, through the internet, through print, through tv, through radio, and through mobile devices.

Faced with so many options, the downside is that it can make it hard to choose which method to use to tell a story is best. So, we go for the traditional methods. Or we do what everyone else seems to be doing.

This limits the possibilities of how far and wide our story can reach and how impactful our message is. We need to start thinking outside of the box of what everyone else is doing if we want our stories to stand out.

Doesn’t Everyone Need a Website?

My answer is no. Some businesses do not need a traditional website just as some people do not need to blog. They have other ways to reach their audience that are more effective for them.

When we launched ShiftFWD in November (2012), we purposely kept our client service offerings open because of this. We knew that different businesses needed their stories to be told in different ways, so it didn’t seem practical to have people contact us needing x when what would really be more effective for them would be y.

Since then, we’ve had the privilege of working with a few people doing amazing things. They are sharing their stories through books, ebooks, presentations, and yes, even micro websites too!

How Do You Figure Out What’s the Best Format?

A good story can take shape in so many different ways, so perhaps there is not always a “best” format. However, there are several areas you can look at when you decide which one is best for your story.

Where are your customers?

This is your number one place to look. Are the majority of your customers active on the internet? Where on the internet are they active? It doesn’t make sense to put a lot of resources into a big website or social media campaign if your customers don’t make use of these.

Maybe you have an amazing local business. How can you network and promote locally to meet your ideal customers. Maybe it’s just a matter of picking up the phone!

What technologies do your customers use?

Do your customers use a desktop pc, a laptop, a mobile device, or none of the above? Are they the type who are technology averse? Make sure you know this before you decide the best format for your story.

At this moment, the big thing in website design is the responsive design. This method is usually more costly to implement, so it’s important to make sure it’s really worth the effort. If only 1% of your visitors use any kind of mobile device or small browser screen, the extra cost might be difficult to justify.

Maybe your customers prefer reading on paper rather than digitally. Which would be the best experience for them?

What are your customers looking for?

Is a whole website necessary? Perhaps you just need a microsite with a few details to promote your business. Or perhaps you don’t have the type of business where people buy something from you on the very first visit. This might be a good opportunity to build your brand and share your story.

If you’re telling a particular story for promotional reasons, perhaps an infographic will work well for you. Infographics that are well-done can provide a ton of information at one glance making them a very effective way to promote.

What do you want your story to be?

What your story should be probably aligns closely with your own values. How we act surrounding our own values also affects how we form our expectations about how we’d like to tell our stories.

Here are some questions to think about:

Do you want your story to connect with others?
Should your story be meaningful?
Is communicating a specific message the most important of all?
Does your story need to touch people and help them feel something?

What’s best for the story?

Some stories are 100 times more impactful with the right visuals, the right design, or the right technology.

A good way to push your comfort zone a little is to think of all of the different ways you would tell your story if you were using different mediums:

How would it look if it was just a picture?
What would happen if it was a video?
An animation?
A presentation?
If it was printed?
Or, if it was a digital app?

What would happen if you shared your story multiple ways? Or maybe you can combine different media at once. Would it make sense to combine your eBook with audio and create an app? Or how about placing a presentation on your microsite?

Allow yourself to think of all of the possibilities without limitations. Imagine that you are the director of your own story.

How is your story telling you that it needs to be created? Sometimes, if you let it lead the way without fear or limitations, your story will emerge and begin to take a life of its own. Then you will know.

The Presence of Beauty

2013-02-05T23:49:50+00:00

Koldo and I often talk fondly about times past. He speaks from his childhood experiences and I like to listen to and read interviews with legendary creative people. People like Paul Rand, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Walt Disney, and Charles and Ray Eames. It’s always fascinating to me that many of the problems they dealt with in regards to their work are the same ones we have. Yet, on the other hand, they had many advantages that we don’t.

Certainly they had to fight for creative freedom, just as everyone who does creative work has to do. Seeing from their work, however, they got it and gained the support they needed in order to do their work, sometimes throughout their lifetime.

You might also be surprised to know that one of the big factors that got the U.S. moving forward again after the great depression was Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal program enacted in 1933 that gave artists, designers, illustrators, and other creative professionals federal funding to work on programs that improved the American morale. Programs like the Federal Writer’s Project that created a guide book for every state to promote tourism and the Federal Theater Project that employed artists, musicians, and playwrights in order to promote the public’s appreciation of the arts.

Koldo often tells me about federal programs in Spain when he was younger that would actually pay people to learn an artistic craft or skill. For instance, not only did he get his degree as a light engineer for show business for free (which brought him work as 2nd stage manager for the biggest theater production at it’s time in Madrid), but he was also paid a salary just for being a student. Can you imagine that?

These programs would also pay people to put on cultural events and provide people with cheap music concerts. He used these programs to put on musical events and see a Neil Young concert for about $4 among other things.

You See, We’re in the Age of the Practical

There’s a lot of focus on good design, sure, but many people will have you believe that something beautiful serves no purpose if it doesn’t have a practical function. I used to subscribe to this mindset myself until I realized that beauty does have a purpose, a very important one.

Beauty creates meaning. It helps us connect with the universe and whatever other higher powers above there might be. It helps us ask questions. It may not be quantifiable, but it provides an experience. The profound connection that beauty can cause runs deeper than just “feeling” something. It helps us know and understand something inside of us. This can be hard to replicate, to measure results from, and to justify. Hence, it’s easy to discard it as unnecessary as a function of it’s own in the modern world.

The main reason that beauty is undervalued is because it’s subjective, most people agree.

What does that mean exactly though? Perhaps, the bigger problem is that the Western culture has taken us apart from our primitive sense of harmony. It keeps us distracted from simple things, replacing them with an array of cultural and aesthetic codes that are not necessarily in resonance with our natural sense of harmony. So when it comes to recognizing beauty, it takes knowledge and time, both of which take considerable effort to obtain: you must know what it looks like, much the same way you can’t recognize the taste of a fine wine until you’ve sampled many. It’s a matter of not knowing what you don’t know.

There was a time when having culture was still encouraged and a good trait to have. It wasn’t only something to obtain to be superior to others, but instead to have a better understanding of the world and develop a more well-rounded character. How many things in our current world actually teach an average person culture? Let’s not get started on the state of television, unless reality shows can be considered culture.

It’s Difficult to Be an Artist In These Times

These things make it challenging if you’d like to be someone who creates beauty for a living. Many creative people I know feel guilty for wanting create a living this way, as if it was a selfish act. They don’t believe they have a right to make money from something impractical. As if anything that creates a direct connection with the universe and with other living beings could ever be selfish!

The problem isn’t in wanting to create something beautiful for a living: it’s that the present world is hostile to it. Paradoxically, one of the things that makes the world less hostile, is beauty.

But, Times Are Changing

The industrial age as we know it is coming close to it’s end.

In the near future, more of us will have more time to find meaning in our lives. To live better, to make things with our own hands, and to create. We won’t be given these opportunities freely, but we will demand them for ourselves and for others around the world. We will finally have the opportunity to feel what it is to be human. To use our hearts, our minds, and our hands to create exceptional things that bring good.

How can we start changing the tide? Perhaps, when we first give ourselves permission to create more beauty, we can then open ourselves to finding beauty, recognizing it when we see it, and then supporting others to create their own beauty. Where will you start?

Going Back in Order to Move Forward Again

2012-12-05T04:42:24+00:00

Ever since we began working together, one of the main philosophies that Koldo and I commit to is that a willingness to be flexible is one of the main keys to remaining sustainable.

We’ve lived in two countries and three different cities, ran three businesses, and have continuously experimented, learned, and grown together over the past 11 years. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s always been worthwhile because along the way we’ve not only been able to adapt to change, but have also learned more about ourselves in the process.

Times have been changing so quickly over the past 30 years and they just continue doing so at a faster and faster pace than before. During the past few years and past few months in particular it feels like we’re right at the crux of an especially big change, especially toward the beginning of 2013. A reversal of sorts. Going back in order to move forward again.

It’s like a pendulum.

Things swing one way, hit a tipping point, and then they swing the other way. The circumstances are different each time of course, but it always feels disconcerting right at that moment in time when we begin reversing direction.

Did you know that 150 years ago, a time not that long ago in history, most people ran very small businesses? 50% of people were self-employed in 1900, mostly in rural and agricultural work although there were also lawyers, doctors, bookkeepers, and others who worked mostly from their home.

We’re moving in this direction again. In 2008, about three quarters of small businesses in the U.S. had no employees and about 61% of the businesses that are employers had less than 4 employees. That means that over 91% of all businesses in the U.S. were made up of 5 people or less. ¹ And these numbers are from before the big financial crises when even more have been striking out on their own, due to choice or situation.

It’s ironic how something seen as rebellious and risky as starting a business on your own actually places you in the majority of all business owners nationwide.

In the past few years, we’ve also seen how corporations and large advertisers have steadily been losing the control they once had. We’re giving our attention in a different way now because we so desperately want to reconnect again with what it means to be human. Deep inside, we need to collaborate, to share, to communicate, to grow as individuals, and to resonate.

We’re proud of the fact that we started with only our skills and a few computers on hand and have been able to grow and improve each day since. And we’re also thankful that we have the opportunity to work with others who carry the same values we do.

This is a moment where we can no longer make assumptions about how things are or how they will be; only what is true for us and those we care about.

Over the next year, we’ll be talking more about some subjects that we feel are important to discuss in this moment. Some of the topics will be:

Human Communication: Communication will change and take new shapes. We’ll need to explore better ways to connect with one another.
Flexibility: More than ever before we need to be as flexible as bamboo, so we don’t crack in the wind. We must also be open to the possibility that there might be better ways to do things.
Storytelling: We’ll be exploring different ways to tell stories and help others tell theirs beyond the usual timeline format.
Old is New: We can embrace ways to bring old-fashioned values, ideas, craftsmanship, and methods into the present and the future.
Depth: We need to find ways to go deep and wide. Connection is important to us and the last thing we want to do is add noise. We’ll be looking at better ways to achieve this goal.

We hope you’ll continue to join us on our exploration. You can do this by subscribing by RSS to our feed or signing up for our Newsletter.

¹ Employment Size of Firms, 2008 U.S. Census. http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html

TOGETHER: The Birth of ShiftFWD

2012-11-14T14:00:40+00:00

There once was girl and a boy who got together to pursue a dream and left everything behind. They were separated by thousands of miles, a different culture, a different language, and an age difference. Many voices claimed they had no future at all. But, they forgot that when you feel a dream in your core, there’s nothing you can do but follow it. So, not without difficulty and hard work, one day our dream became true.

Yes, Naomi and I met on the Internet. It was 2001. At the time, I was working hard 18 hours a day in Madrid to make it with my first business, Intuitive Music. It was the first international portal dedicated to alternative music on the Internet: a pretty large project! So, I was looking for foreign collaborators and international correspondents to help me out with news and content.

On the other side of the ocean in the U.S., there was Naomi. We got in touch by chance, we talked about common interests, clicked right away, and soon she stepped on stage holding a briefcase loaded with amazing ideas that improved the business. As the days passed, we started knowing each other better; we realized we were soul mates; we fell in love and, just like in any good faerytale, we made the impossible possible and started a new life together in Madrid, Spain, and started a creative agency called Intuitive Designs together.

It’s been 10 years since then.

All of these things could be strung together into a thread of scenes: everlasting chats about our projects while hiking in the Spanish mountains, untold hours locked inside our little studio taking that extra mile to make our work better, waking each other up in the middle of the night bouncing in excitement for a new crazy idea… And finally arriving at Seattle’s airport with 4 suitcases and a pocketful of dreams.

It was September 2008 and we were about to start our USA adventure together right at the kickoff of the economic crisis and political changes. I’ll never forget the day I got my green card: it was the very same day when Obama was elected president of the USA.

Sadly, the last four years the business was far from our initial expectations. We fought so hard to start a new life in this country with the dream of building a beautiful house of cards. But day after day, we hit the same wall… until we gave into the realization that the rules have changed. The American Dream, as it was formerly known, is over.

What’s wrong with our world? We’re living in a time when creativity and beauty are not in demand; it seems that there’s not enough work for so many talented people; acknowledged professionals are required time and again to specialise in a thousand fields just to get badly paid for just one task.

Every day we see most of the money in the hands of those who fear the risk of keeping it rolling.

As a result, culture, art and personal development seem to be suffocating. Except for new tech devices, it feels like there’s really nothing new going on. We needed to dismantle the house of cards and rethink the whole picture from scratch. A strong one that would be in resonance with our internal values.

Last year, it seems that Naomi and I were hitting a turning point with our design agency. We were not happy about the limitations of the business. Time and again, weren’t allowed to put the best of our talent and expertise at the service of the world. There were too many things that we felt the urge to do and we couldn’t find room in the business model to do it.

The last few years we’ve been talking a lot about the lack of humanity, values and warmth on the Internet and modern society in general. It’s sad to be a witnesses of the steady disappearance of a time when small things used to count. But, how could we help make it better?

Do you believe in synchronicities?

It was during our daily walks around our neighborhood that we started finding hair rubber hair bands lying on the floor. There were lots of them, everywhere we’d go. We’ve been walking around these same same streets for a few years and… well, this never happened before, so… What the hell did this rubber band thing mean???

On January 1st 2012 we made our New Year resolutions. Then, we remembered that rubber bands keep things together. While looking for solutions to give the best of ourselves, Naomi and I unintentionally ended up working in different directions. She worked really hard in the fields of UX design and strategy while I was busy with storytelling and illustration projects. We missed working more often with other professionals in the creative fields. We missed the feeling of working as a team so badly! So, we made a keyword for the year: TOGETHER.

ShiftFWD is about putting together many years of experience in different creative-oriented fields to create a very powerful channel that reaches people on a human level.

We may not achieve perfection, but this is what being a creative means: we are the ultimate makers of our world.

This includes Naomi’s experience as a visual designer, UX expert and strategist, my own experience as visual artist and multidisciplinary storyteller, and the partnership with other top professionals such as copywriters, programmers and others. Our mission is to find better ways to cut through the noise and help people connect in a deep way.

Today we’re launching ShiftFWD.

Coincidentally, on the 1st of January, writer Marianne Costa -a woman whose ideas we feel in resonance with- wrote something in her blog that drew our attention: “This year, together”. The next day I woke up with a song looping in my brain. I hadn’t listened to or thought of this song from the 70’s when I was a boy. It’s such a beautiful song!

Naomi and I looked it up on Youtube and there it was: we were driven to tears, listening to this beautiful ballad from the Disco era by Hot Chocolate that goes like this:

When you can’t take any more
when you feel your life is over
put down your tablets and
pick up your pen and
I’ll put you together again.

We are putting the best of ourselves together again.