If you’re in Belfast on Wednesday, 28 August, Mr Murphy – one half of The Standardistas equation – will be running a masterclass on Storytelling and Social Media, as part of August Craft Month.
A half day, afternoon session, subsidised by Craft NI, the masterclass is absolutely free and is open to all to attend, however, places are limited and we’d advise you to snap up a ticket before they all disappear.
If you’re interested in learning about how social media can be used to help tell the story of your business, you’re very welcome to attend. The masterclass will explore:
How craftspeople – indeed any creatives – can embrace social media (tools like Twitter, Facebook and others) to increase audience engagement and, as a result, increase sales. Introducing social strategies used by a range of creative professionals, we’ll investigate the benefit social media can offer the creative sector through adding value, building networks and ultimately driving a sustainable creative business.
This is not a ‘how to’ masterclass on becoming a ‘social media guru’ (or any of the other terms these ‘specialists’ tend to use). It’s a masterclass about the importance of knowing your own story, the art of telling that story in a captivating manner, and finally an overview of the social media landscape, and a guide to some of the tools you might use within that landscape to tell your story.
Places are limited. If you’re interested, you should pick up a ticket now.
]]>You may or may not have heard of the wonderfully named Mr Bingo. An illustrator and animator, living and working in London, he describes himself as having, “a slightly smaller than average,” head and, “girl’s arms,” plus, “the same haircut as his mum.”
As his Twitter bio puts it:
Some say he’s the ‘Master of Pens’. Some call him ‘The Justin Bieber of Drawing’. Some say he fucks about for a living.
Fucking about or not, Mr Bingo – like many a creative – earns his keep through a combination of a witty worldview and delightful draftsmanship. When the two come together the results are striking. One of Mr Bingo’s better know pieces is his series of ‘Hair Portraits’, which includes an instantly recognisable portrait – in hair alone – of Leia, Luke, Han and Chewie from ‘Star Wars’, titled ‘A New Hope’.
The print is available to buy via Nelly Duff, who state:
Mr Bingo didn’t learn a lot at school, but he did discover one valuable thing: he was good at making people laugh. Now a successful illustrator based in East London, he is “drawing stuff” for the likes of The Mighty Boosh, QI, the Guardian, MTV and The New York Times. As well as making pictures, Mr Bingo regularly speaks at events on his favourite topics, such as religion, the internet, dating, animals, art and terrorism.
Imagine Mr Bingo’s shock on discovering his artwork lifted, lock, stock and barrel, imaginatively retitled ‘Hair Cut Star Wars’, and applied to – of all things – tote bags. (Not to mention framed art prints, stretched canvases, T shirts, tank tops and hoodies… in short anything you can apply it to. This truly is ‘design as thin veneer’, applied to base material in an effort to turn it into gold.)
One can only hope that this egregious state of affairs will be speedily remedied by Society6 who represent, “hundreds of thousands of artists from around the world.” One prays they’ll also remove the ‘artist’, appropriately named Thug, behind this creation and another, which looks remarkably like Peter Saville’s iconic work for Joy Division.
]]>Dan Mall, ever on the money, has a little advice on Prequalifying Clients, inspired by a recent Q&A episode of The Businessology Show (which he co-hosts with Jason Blumer).
Amongst the nuggets of wisdom he offers is this, which stood out for us:
If a potential client replies back with one word answers, it’s a big warning sign that they’ll be putting that same kind of minimal effort into a project. We’ll still talk to them, but we approach that kind of client much more cautiously.
Other topics to probe include questions on timelines, scope and compensation. The last point is critical, never skip the million dollar question: “What kind of budget do you have allocated for this project?” (As Mall puts it, hopefully that is – literally – a million dollar question.)
]]>United States Blocks, courtesy of House Industries:
These fifty united timbered tactile territorial tomes feature state specifics graciously presented in a civically civilized color palette. Designed in Delaware, Made in Michigan.
Alliteratively appealing.
]]>Are you addicted to Entrepornography? If you’re suffering from the following symptoms, you probably are:
ODing on GTD? Too many productivity blogs? Constantly reading Paul Graham essays and Seth Godin books? You might be an entrepornography addict.
It’s not too late to seek help. The first step is admitting you have a problem.
]]>Q. What do you get when you cross Base64 SVGs with CSS3 animations and live web text (complete with PNG static fallbacks, included for older browsers)? A. A little something like the new Mixture site.
Team Mixture, working with the fffellas at fffunction, have unveiled a lovely new CMYK site for Mixture, complete with SVG and CSS3 goodness. It’s a real beauty (as is Mixture itself).
Get a feel for the attention to detail that’s been laboured on the new site, by taking a wee look at this Mixture Bolierplates Animation over at Dribbble. Nice.
]]>An HTML5 online presentation tool, Presentate is, as its creators put it, “A new and better way to create, present and share your story.” Presentate works everywhere, as the twin talents behind it - Faruk Ateş and Justin Hileman – explain:
Presentate is online presentation software that works great in almost any resolution, on any desktop computer, tablet or smartphone.
When you share your presentation, you don’t know what browser or device they’ll open it on. With Presentate, you won’t have to worry. See for yourself what happens with the layout and presentation above by opening this page on your phone or tablet (or by resizing your browser).
Interested? Sign up for the beta. It looks very nice indeed.
]]>A handy diagram explaining Impostor Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which sufferers are unable to internalise their accomplishments. As 99U put it:
Impostor Syndrome is feeling like you’re not worthy of whatever success you’ve had. You feel that you’ll be ‘found out’ at any second.
If you find yourself relating to this – and you’d be surprised how many do – you might like to hop on over to Cyclone Life and read Crushing the Impostor Syndrome. It not only offers valuable advice on crushing the syndrome, but equally – and interestingly - highlights a few others who are sufferers too, including Meryl Streep, Tina Fey and Maya Angelou.
]]>Jonnie Hallman (one of the many designers working in Studiomates) has put together The Perfect GIF Workflow Using Dropbox and Alfred. As he puts it:
Like many internet dwellers, I prefer to use GIFs as a form of response rather than words. Why say you’re angry when you can show it.
On Twitter, I’m quick to respond with a GIF, which catches most people off guard — they wonder how I found an appropriate GIF so fast. Some assume I already have the URL copied to my clipboard, and this is partly true, but how did it get there?
The answer is this carefully considered workflow using Dropbox and Alfred to designed to optimise Hallman’s TTGIF (Time To GIF). Nice.
]]>Yesterday, Edward Snowden’s reported email service of choice, Lavabit, shuttered abruptly. Barely a day later, Silent Circle – “a provider of secure communications services,” founded by Phil Zimmermann – has followed suit, closing down its Silent Mail service. As the company puts it:
Silent Mail has similar security guarantees to other secure email systems, and with full disclosure, we thought it would be valuable. However, we have reconsidered this position. Today, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system. We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.
As Glenn Fleishmann put it:
When Phil Zimmermann folds, it’s a bad bad sign for freedom.
So it goes.
]]>With a new semester right around the corner, the fine folks at Take Control are running a 50% Off Sale until 15 August. With everything half price, this is the perfect opportunity to expand your ebook library and, as they put it, “Polish your Mac and iOS skills, and start working more efficiently.”
As died-in-the wool BBEdit and LaunchBar users, we can highly recommend Take Control of BBEdit and Take Control of LaunchBar, respectively. They’re both full of useful advice and, even if you’re a seasoned user, they’re guaranteed to pay for themselves in productivity savings as your proficiency in each increases.
Of course those are just the tip of a very large iceberg, which includes a wide range of topics, including books covering: CrashPlan Cackups, Dropbox, iCloud, TextExpander, and a whole host of others.
Take Control’s books are free of DRM and available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle) formats, so you can read them wherever, whenever, and on whatever device you like.
We strongly recommend you take a look.
]]>Lavabit, the email service Edward Snowden reportedly used, has shuttered abruptly. Ladar Levison, its owner and operator, writes:
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.
It’s a sorry state of affairs indeed when one has to shut a business they’ve run for a decade and isn’t even in a position to talk about it. As Levison puts it, as things currently stand, he cannot even share his experiences over the last six weeks, despite making repeated requests to do so.
In a sobering conclusion, Levison sates:
Without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Repeatedly.
]]>If you missed our tweet yesterday, the folks at Adobe are rolling out file and font sync for Creative Cloud members. Simply sign up at the Early Access page to be added to the waiting list and notified the moment you’re in.
The desktop font syncing aspect looks particularly nice, allowing you to browse the Typekit library and use a selection of these fonts on your desktop. By enabling you to sync fonts from Typekit to your desktop with a single click, the feature allows you to use Tyepkit fonts in applications like Photoshop (and, apparently, all your desktop applications, not just those created by Adobe), so you can benefit from font consistency, right across the board.
Take ninety seconds out to watch the sneak preview by the Typekit folks. We’re sure you’ll agree, it looks like a lovely feature.
]]>On 1 July, 2013, Michael Birch, the original founder of Bebo, bought Bebo back for $1M (he’d sold it to AOL for $850M in 2008, so not a bad deal). Today, Birch announced his plan to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh with a brand new, less ‘cocky’ Bebo.
Birch’s video announcement – where he announces, “It’s time to come clean.” – is a fantastic example of what a little self-deprecating humour can do to reinvigorate a brand that’s been driven into the ground by big business.
Focusing on the site’s ‘whiteboard’ – “a creative canvas for unlimited self-expression” – Birch celebrates Bebo’s users’ penchant for creating, as he puts it:
The single biggest repository of illustrated cock and balls ever recorded.
It will be interesting to see how Birch reinvents Bebo in an era of Facebook and Twitter dominance. Regardless of what he does or doesn’t achieve, you should spend ninety seconds to watch his entertaining video announcement.
Bebo, it would seem, is growing up.
]]>The quest for absolute zero might, just, have been reached in the search for beautiful, minimalist and versatile templating markup languages. Darius Kazemi – “I build weird internet stuff.” (His words, not ours.) – has lifted the veil on Gaunt, “The most aesthetically minimalist markup language ever.”
As Kazemi puts it, “The core idea of Gaunt is that it maximizes the beauty of your markup,” clearly demonstrated in the following example of Gaunt markup:
A mix of tabs and spaces – each tab representing a binary 0 and each space representing a binary 1 – Gaunt’s markup is nothing if not elegant. (The above markup renders, “Hello world!” – What else did you expect?) The beauty of this approach is clear, you only have to remember two characters to use it and, its simplicity is unparalleled.
As Kazemi puts it:
Reading a Gauntfile is like looking at a Suprematist composition by Malevich, or listening to John Cage’s 4’33”. Its beauty is transcendent.
It’s hard to disagree with this assessment, and we’ve no doubt that Malevich and Cage would be equally enamoured by Gaunt’s elegant approach. Truly great work.
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