PLMD (pleaseletmedesign) / LIFE

Process at Lift

2013-02-01 12:21:43

Make it simple, Lift is an app to help you track new habits and encourage you to stay motivated to keep your (New Year’s or not) resolutions, day after day.

From this six-year-old habit i am still running, consisting in waking up at 5AM (almost) everyday to this brand new one, created three days ago and getting hard only today (not because I am stressed, only because I really love smoking while drinking beers with friends. And today is the weekend you know…), I’ve always been interested in collecting new habits.

I can’t remember how I ran into this iOS app (except for this tweet) but it seemed pretty obvious for me to test it for the above-mentioned reason.

This is also why, in the early days of our Internet Club — that means last year — we talked about developing such an app, helping people to stay motivated while tracking new habits.

We didn’t do it at the time. We won’t do it because Lift does it really well. We will stay focused on other plans, like Internet Club member Tom Galle’s Maily app, which just won the Seedcamp, reminding us another Belgian success story, or other things we hope to let you know really soon.

After this long and boring introduction, I should mention that other thing that really interests us, personally but also as designers running a small studio, known as The Process.

That's the theme of this post (remember its title). I just wanted you to read a small piece of mail I got when I sent feedback to Lift regarding multiple check-ins a day functionality.

A very simple mail I wrote…

Just a thought.
Did you planned to a kind of alarm on the app for kind of habits like "drink water every hour" and then every hour you have a small sound reminding you to drink water.
But i'm sure you did…
Damien / PLMD (pleaseletmedesign)

… lead to a very complete answer by Erin, the woman behind Lift's Community, with this interesting part regarding their Process.

Hi Damien, that’s a great idea! We've gotten some requests for this kind of reminder - I think when we add the ability to check-in multiple times a day (it's on the roadmap) this type of reminder might be created. Thanks for the feedback.
I want to give you some background on what happens next. You probably want to know how your feedback translates into future versions of Lift, right?

Here’s the answer:

All of the feedback that comes in gets categorized and tallied. That includes your email (again, thank you). Occasionally we get requests that need an immediate solution. If this happens, we drop what we are doing so we can get a change out as soon as we can. This can take anywhere from an hour to eight days depending on where we need to make the change (Apple takes about a week to approve new versions of the app).

Weekly Summaries: I send out a weekly summary of all user feedback, including what’s on Twitter, Facebook, in the app, and in email. Everyone on the team reads this and it keeps us aware of the ideas and feelings from the community. Also, everyone sees at least some of the raw un-summarized feedback. In fact, Matt has a habit of scrolling through support emails each morning to see what’s going on.

Prioritization Moments: We set priorities weekly and focus on specific themes over a few months. We draw from a list of product ideas including feature requests from users.

So, in the case of your feedback, will we do this and when will it be available? Right now we’re just finishing working on the theme of taking what’s already working in the app and making it stronger. The social support experience is getting fleshed out. The data visualizations and streaks are being moved forward and made faster. Email notifications are getting turned into native iPhone push notifications. We targeted these updates to be released around Jan 1st in time for New Years Resolutions, but since we practice continuous releases, you saw each part as soon as it was ready. We're about to go through another prioritization moment and start the process again.

One thing I really like about this company is that while the team is very driven toward our mission of a universal tool for achieving goals, we’re all humble about what’s working (and what’s not). If you’re interested in learning more about our development process, we recommend you check out The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. We’re big fans.

Thanks again for helping us improve Lift by sending us your feedback. We appreciate it. Keep it coming!

Cheers,
Erin at Lift

You can read more about Lift here or you can help them on their Quora question.

So that's it, that's what I wanted to share today.

Hope you liked it and don't forget to follow us on Twitter here, that's important for our ego.

My Facebook account has been disabled.

0000-00-00 00:00:00

It happened today and I don't know how to react.

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

I don't know if I'm pissed or if I'm relieved.

I don't know if I'm ready for this fresh start.

Like a reboot of my digital life.

Of course, as a geeky web guy who spends too much time on social networks, I do hate Facebook as much as I do love it.

Many many times I thought about leaving definitively the network, assuming that Twitter would be enough.

But enough is never enough.

It's well known that the information is much more fresh and accurate on Twitter — everyone knows that joke: « What's the difference between Facebook and Twitter? ⁽¹⁾ » — and that you also have more direct and immediate response if you're asking for help on the microblogging platform. But.

Without doing so much effort, since 2007, I gathered a valuable amount of contacts, in every domain of my personal or professional life. From Best Friends Forever to "we only met once but had a fucking great time" people, from prospects to clients, from music related contacts to students or interns, Facebook was a great place stay connected with people I might want to chat in a near future.

It's also really funny that this is happening right now, matching this particular period of time in which, in addition of our web design service, we are more and more consulted about social communities, web strategy and online content.

Maybe it's time for me, for us at PLMD or at The Internet Club (remind me to tell you that story about The Internet Club) to think through a new way of spreading content without using the big players. Thinking and studying cases in which smaller communities could also reach an audience, maybe smaller, but with more precision than with the blue thumbs-up button. It sounds a bit like a challenge to me but why not trying this for some times and see what good or bad thing could happen.

Now that I can't post these words on my Facebook account, it will only reach half its "usual" audience (read: the people who I annoy with my multiple posts a day) but maybe it could be a good test to see the real influence of Facebook on the propagation of a story.

(Oh, right, we still have our PLMD (pleaseletmedesign) Facebook page, check it out.)

So, now, please share this post and get this party started.
You could also follow me on Twitter here, that's all I have left.

Note that I'm still wondering why they did that. My posting has never been different these days than it was before. One option could be the "report as a violator" but same here: can't find why. And I'm not sure I'll ever know.

⁽¹⁾ Two weeks.

Written by damien.

Kindle iPad app upgrade.

0000-00-00 00:00:00

Left: old layout. Right: new layout. (Image by Bryan Larrick)

We agree with John Gruber, himself agreeing with Bryan Larrick to say that the Kindle iPad app is more of a downgrade than an upgrade.

Reducing margins doesn't help the reader to focus on the authors words.

It's like standing three feet in front of a brick wall and pretending you’re appreciating the architecture of a building.

Read Bryan Larrick's full article.

A handy tip for the easily distracted.

2012-06-20 00:08:37

I've just seen Miranda July latest movie, The Future, based on a performance she started in 2007, just after her first one, Me and You and Everyone We Know ))<>((, mixing a talking cat, the ability to stop time

"From now on there will only be now."

Quote from her performance "Things We Don't Understand And Are Definitely Not Going To Talk About" at The Kitchen, New York, in 2007.

and some other usual ingredients like love, commitment or a worming t-shirt.

Just after the movie, there was this little video called "A handy tip for the easily distracted" that could perfectly fit a design blog like ours, sometimes dealing with productivity or procrastinating issues. Enjoy.

Source: Nowness.

Checkthis. The Shape of Web to Come.

2012-06-19 22:59:29

Identity by wearebuild.

After three years of hard working and the last six month working harder, our friends Fred and Melvyn, the guys behind Checkthis, have just announced that they raised enough money to move to NY, hire the people they need and continue having fun with what they built ⁽¹⁾.

As far as I can remember (when I was still studying graphic design), every project I have seen from Fred shaped the web with an advance of at least two or three years. So I wasn't surprised when this guy, the same guy behind the first version of Computerlove ⁽²⁾, the design oriented online magazine that started to be social even before Facebook existed, came up with such a simple and obvious idea to make the online world a better place.

We briefly had the chance to work with him on a recent web project for Haus Der Kunst⁽³⁾. The collaboration was very inspiring - for the project itself of course, but also the things we learnt from his expertise. It was not only a matter of "information architecture" or of tweeking some CSS, but of a vision, the one he tailored at the same time he tailored Checkthis, that was emerging everytime we met.

As the very first beta-tester of the product (during one drink at our studio, Fred gave me a special secret code like DAMN007 to enter the beta), I am really happy with what is happening to them right now of course and very proud that they let me give a hand at the beginning of their adventure - even if it was only small pieces of advice. In a near future, I am sure we will continue to collaborate with this company, founded with a true love of what the web should be and most of all a true human-centered way of thinking it.

In 1933, H.G. Wells wrote The Shape of Things to Come.

In 1997, Refused recorded The Shape of Punk to Come.

In 2012, Checkthis designed The Shape of Web to Come.

Notes.

⁽¹⁾ Robin Wauter, the European Editor of The Next Web and also one of the Checkthis advisors, posted a very complete list of related articles. Go check it if you want to read more about it.
⁽²⁾ Unfortunately, Christophe announced recently that he cannot continue the project alone and Computerlove will close its doors very soon. It's always sad to witness the end of something you have always knew but I am sure it is also the beginning of something new for him.
⁽³⁾ Haus Der Kunst is a global center for contemporary art in Munich, Germany. We collaborate with Base Design on this one: they won the identity and we build the website based on it.

Written by damien and nicely read, corrected and edited by Frederic Bourgeois.

Chaumont 2012. Lecture transcription.

2012-05-28 09:42:48

During the entire festival, Susanna Shannon together with Stefano, a graphic designer currently graduating from CalARTS and his wife Maria, an anthropologist, decided to create "LA LIFE" (that's exactly the name of this blog, that's a sign), a project focused on the release of 1m² of newspaper every day, dealing with what's happening in Chaumont. They decided to live the experience with (quite) the same constrain (again) than a real newspaper: having no time to do stuff, writing during the day, designing at night, printing in the morning and having the issue released at 2PM.

For the issue #3, Susanna wrote almost every word we said during our lecture in this very long transcription with a very personnal touch. We left the text as it was written.

As the text is a bit rough, we thought it was nice to ask Google to provide the english translation. The original was in french and you can find it here.

Pleaseletmedesign = PLMD = Pierre Morgan and Damien, the only person missing is L, which does not exist. But actually yes, it's Constant. With C. We work together for 7 years now and then with Pierre. We went to Erg, Pierre and me, and now I teach at the Erg, said Damien. Pierre is my intern and I am his. We met Morgan because he asked us to make him the badges one day and then he invited us to an exhibition at my monkey, his gallery and then one day 4 years ago he got a job too big for him alone so he asked us to work with him. We will talk about 4 projects.

Les Trinitaires: they contacted me between Christmas and New Year's Day 2 years ago and they needed a new identity for Jan. 2 because they were being absorbed into an EPCC in which he did not know not even if they were not going to lose their names. Morgan said: In half an hour we had a response all around the table: an identity based on a T course that would systematically cut. We translated the violence of the threat to them by a "hole"; They had no budget, they did not anticipate this Opa. We took the cheaper paper, and printing the cheapest and we kept the money for cutting. And one of the tricks to the final product look a little class was to print patterns to give a luxurious look. There was no budget photo and illustration so we stole the pictures on the internet. to take no risks, was used several times. T is the T of the cross, which refers to the place which is located in a former cloister Each quarter the first year it was entitled to a different animal [cat, camel]. The interior is very gross typo. Hyphenation in the text are very radical. The second year, it was I who took the pictures, I have two hours to make, I get a brief mail and shoo. I do not take more than two hours because it does not have a budget. For this, the office espresso machine had passed away so we took sugar and filters, the second was for a residence that I made in Korea, the third, my phone rang while I was shaving when I shaved an area on the T-shaped leg, the fourth I was on vacation in Ile de Re, there is the shaving cream and the last, I cross-dressed people in town on my way home when I arrived dressed with everything I had;

Here is L'Arsenal, says Damien. This is a music room linked to Trinitarians, except that here it is rather classical. They had a rather disparate communication and ornamental, with large golden things, that ran in all directions, so we are told how to bring it to something simple, how do you call something prestigious penniless. So we decided not to use traditional quad, and uses recycled paper cyclus kind that does not have the presence of fine coated paper, no cover for économier paper and shaping coverage. There is no cover, binding is apparent, we replaced the quad, what's yellow, blue, I know more, yes, magenta, in short, they were replaced by colors that are domestic ones that people are used to seeing, domestic colors, this pen are those of four colors, red, green, blue. In a prestigious edition, we would have made mark pages in tissues, we were made bookmarks with colored stickers, so that people can use the book in the most convenient way possible, the dates are set aside to we do not have to open it completely to orient themselves in the program. The footnotes of pages have a handwriting apparently, is to tell people that it is as if one could write to them; It is this idea of ??open-table of this object from very crude very minimum, it was also a marketing campaign to tell them that this was a new beginning, and that we must resume again next year; this brochure could be damaged, and technicians had to work to make themselves a hedge to protect their best work. These famous photos that are not at all in full color, which are only red, blue, green, yellow missing, but it creates an identity and it makes beautiful black. I think we went around to the arsenal, Damien finally said.

48H / 48P. There, Morgan takes is the fine arts of Metz who asked us to stand with editions of artists in their lobby for professional days that were to take place there. And we said no. Instead, it was proposed to make an edition for professional days, we did not want to do as a living publications. The idea was to show the whole process of editing in real time, we got together with students and contributors, and we did not know how it was going to do the first things that one has printer was made 48 numbered pages and paste them on the wall to mark the space. With Nicolas Elaïf Tonton scrapers at the center of the photo and has a suitcase in screen printing. And two Belgian girls who are binders which are called Moleskine [sp?]. When we arrived there was not even a paper, all printed with the laser printeuses administration. In his suitcase, he has a cache to darkroom, to image managers. was recovered while a stock of old French magazines French atmosphere in which the hunter was resérigraphié. Here we see the blankets out to dry after printing; For the content we did not know at all what we would do, and usually in the seminars we produce a transcript of all about symposiumes, then time deans to time we would catch the auditorium a few sentences to make the content and Jochen Gerner, who was one of the speakers came to us drawings. And here we see the work of binding. We had an ad at the end of the first day free to ask trainees to come and help us façonnner publications. And in fact we got full. All sheets of the wall were used from the beginning of the first page for each copy, which could be the coup numbered 1 to 48. It was completed the process of publishing, that is, we made a poster and everything was sold out of the conference in 48 minutes to 4.80 euros. There you can see the seam of girls, and there, the fold a bit unusual that showed the pressure of time, and back of the flap had been just a gray that matched the percentage of time spent converted to gray density.

Ensan / Insane. There continues Morgan is the latest project, a project of signage which is that of the National School of Architecture of Nancy, ENSAN. the director had changed that year when he wanted at all costs to a label while the building did not need, he said: "It's got to be ready in September." It was impossible, so we said no, and we veered from what he had in mind, we said "we will do a workshop for two months twice a week, and we will discuss with students- of the school to see what are the needs identification with them, so they can think about this question for future buildings. We had to invent an office there, then we have in insttallé a corridor and was recovered cartons in the street because it was the day boxes, and was called the BPS. It was a cardboard shack, It was a manifesto, is the stuck on the hut was made of the print to tape school colors, blue stripes, a little tentative identification, the first hut is the Modulor, which is a measure created by Le Corbusier, with a picture of a horse standing on its hind legs taped to the wall. [Morgan must love animals]. Parallel to this intervention, it has set up a blog to accompany the process plmd.mi / insane We made posters jokes: "Cement and Garfunkel "," Grand Funk drunk sick. "Then the students are placed: they made a poster:" I love A3 plans. "And there was a very violent time with professors there, the teachers we have destroyed our hut. We arrived one morning and she was stoned and ashore. professors said, "Uh, but that might well have done it"; But none of them came to talk to us. The director either did not understand why there was so much violence, so he took matters in hand, and with people from the administration, they have rebuilt a new hut. Even the cafeteria has lent chairs, and this is our new office [the photo staff is standing proudly in the new hut]. The principle of the cabin was that we could close the show tonight and above all the work of the day as on the blog ; and students could display them what they thought. We were there as parasites, with this office cardboard. We adopted the principle of interference as a method of investigation of the place, instead of achieving a coldly study. It was like a way to set up a microcosm of society. Through this, we asked a political question: What do you make homeless? Or they are destroyed, or we act jointly. To signage, we knew we would ultériurement to something quite simple, because the students knew where the toilets were, it is a building in which the flow works fine, so I had just something simple for new arrivals and not to the natives. One day when Morgan is ironed a few months after the first stage [of the office cardboard] students had converted the cabin into a sofa and suddenly their morgan wrote "We'll be back" in tape on the wall. At the end, it was like the antisignalétique. It was the question sheet for the building. We put the signs in the corners to the ground, to draw out the details architecture of the building. So we figured if we flêchait too, nobody really would visit the building, if you get lost a little while with some benchmarks, we see better the building; So we said that we are can do only in 2D as graphic designers, so we limited our contribution to the 2D that architects could be converted into 3D because it is their specialty. This kind of layer cake that is the support of this identification is recycling of old documents related to education that takes place in the building and acts as a metaphor for knowledge transfer. The slice is seen here in yellow yarrow is the color of the soil of the place indicated. And there , we see the formation of layer cake shop. By placing the word architecture on top of the facade, they say in passing what they are doing and also what the building: architecture. And the shape of the support of the word matches the parallelepipeds in smashes into the front. For interior signage, markers offices are invisible [white] profiles by affaçant on the white wall, and are visible only on their face face black to white.

Chaumont 2012. Day 2. The lecture.

2012-05-27 22:58:01

The first phase of our intervention was a lecture in front of a whole bunch of people including students from all the workshops⁽¹⁾. For three reasons we decided to focus our talk on four specific design projects that started with strong constrains:

We decided to define the brief of the workshop only a few hours before starting it, around a cup of coffee at the hotel. Not because we're lazy people but because we believe that sometimes, having a constrain of time makes you focus on what's essential.
The students themselves had two big constrains. In one hand, the physical one was forced by the limited size of the post office standard box. On the other hand, they were in a "fuzzy mess" with a weird and bloody unprecise brief: they had to figure out what we meant by "Summarize the Festival, put it on a 38x19x25cm box and send it to another Chaumont in the world". We incited them to refuse the brief and re-invent it if something was wrong. Being able to say "NO", as we said during the talk, and adjust the brief to make it doable is sometimes an important part of the design process. Unfortunately (for the pedagogy) but fortunately (for the work to be done), there was no refuse and they actually understood what to do quite quickly.
The last reason was more political, related to the events in Canada and the students out there being unable to demonstrate against [the rise of education fees]. The government voted a law to forbid them to walk in groups made of more than 50 people. The kind of law a government could adopt in case of, for example, a war. So, instead of being violent and burn down the city, they invented a way to continue their walk and their protest, dealing with this big constrain, finding loop-holes by staying within the law:

We like to think design as a process to find the most intelligent and reflexive answer to a problem. That's exactly what these canadians students did, and, in a way, they designed a brand new way to demonstrate.

Read the transcription of the lecture here

⁽¹⁾ The other workshops and the animators:

Editorial and periodical design with Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé
About Ann and Paul Rand’s book with Prill Vieceli Cremers and Piero Bling.
What if…? with Pinar&Viola and Moniker.
Showmont with James Goggin.
Introduction to a cinema and design real story with Sa_M_ael.
Type design with The Entente / Colophon.
Webcraft with Raphaël Bastide.
Dreadful city, “Whatever… all that is hypocrisy, blurred face” with Thomas Mailaender and Erwan Fichou.

Chaumont 2012. Day 1. Introduction.

2012-05-26 00:00:00

Every time Pierre and I are going to Nancy, we pass by a belgian village named Chaumont-Gistoux. The same name than the famous International Poster and Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont in France.

It had been a while that we were thinking of doing a spin off of this festival in Belgium but we never really had the time, the braveness or the opportunity to start this long creating process for such a big event.

A few months ago we went to Nancy to attend the Lettre-Type exhibition at My Monkey – the gallery of our partner Morgan. There, we met Étienne Hervy, the director of the French festival. After joking around the idiotic idea of creating another Chaumont Festival in Belgium, he actually took it seriously and we all ended up settling on the idea of doing a workshop around the (more generic) theme: The Chaumont(s) Festival.

So, long story short, that’s why we’re now in Chaumont (France) for the week working with 12 students from France, Switzerland, Germany or Finland to create a micro-event and send the “official” Chaumont Festival to some other Chaumont we located in the world. In a box.

A bachelorette party took place at the hotel restaurant. A nice one.