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Credits

We Wish You A Merry Christmas – The Bracket Choir (special guest star Emily Newton, the for-real opera singer)

Little Drummer Boy – Rachel Ferguson

Winter Wonderland – Myself

At BarCampBank I confessed that blogging stresses me out a little bit. There’s always so much going on, so much to say, so many ideas that it can be overwhelming to sit down and tackle any one of them with clarity.

I was feeling this yesterday – I knew I wanted to write a post, but wading through the potential topics was, as they say, like drinking from a fire hose. So I gave up, grabbing a book to distract myself. I’m reading Chip Kidd’s novel “The Cheese Monkeys.” Here’s what I read:

“Always remember: Limits are possibilities. That sounds like Orwell, I know. It’s not – it’s Patton. Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas.

As graphic designers you want the world as your palette. But beware: You can be crippled by too many choices, especially if you don’t know what your goals are.”

One of the most difficult but important challenges in creative work – whether it’s writing, design, media strategy, product innovation, or gardening – is narrowing the focus and creating self-imposed limitations.

In visual design, using a pen and paper before you even think about touching a computer is key. Photoshop has so many bells and whistles, it’s easy to get caught up in the ancillary aesthetics before working out the concept. Make sure your house has a foundation before you hang up curtains.

In our web design process, we limit ourselves and the client by starting each design with a site wireframe (for example: Filene’s initial wireframe). It is unimpressive to look at (a common client reaction is “What’s with all the grey boxes?”), but crucial because it is the underpinning of the entire design. This step forces everyone involved to focus on information architecture and usability before we worry about the pretties.

By the same token…

Social marketers: Think focused, initiated communities over huge vanilla communities.

Podcasters: Develop each episode around a predefined template (ex: intro, topic, break with contact info, topic, exit) to help keep it organized and easy to produce.

Web application designers: Build less. Limit features to only what is necessary.

Gardeners: I dunno. Good luck.

Earlier this week, I worked from a Starbucks (my second office) with one of my best friends, Larry Hooper. He’s a musician, and as I designed websites he worked on song lyrics. At some point, his songwriting transitioned into haikus about our Starbucks experience. I thought they were worth sharing. So here you go:

Hey Blue-tooth Talker,
you look like a crazy guy
talking to yourself.

People talking loud
At a table dead center.
Oh so important.

e-mail, myspace, aim
twitter, flickr, MSN
blackberry cell phone

Guy there on brown couch
posing very seductive.
Inappropriate.

Time to leave here now.
Goodbye Starbucks people
and expensive drinks.

Have a happy Labor Day, folks.

Skinnycorp, the brains behind Threadless, has the best business model on the planet.

Last month, Brian Oberkirch wrote about their presentation at CommunityNext:

Here’s a metric I can get behind: this slide clearly tracks the growth of SkinnyCorp over the last 7 years as they moved the needle from sorta awesome to crazy awesome.

He also makes sure to address the ROI-monkeys who only think in decimals and dollar signs:

If you think they were just the feelgood entertaining crazy kids with the tats and the rock and roll, they were probably the only presenters whose businesses are self-funded and doing upwards of $20 million a year in revenue.

Today, ExperienceCurve linked to their CommunityNext presentation on How to Create Online Awesomeness:

Maybe I’m a hippy, but business needs more love. And Awesomeness.

Trey and I just got back from an incredible trip to Seattle. I’ll be posting in-depth about the experience.

In the meantime, I want to share this video from the Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State University. It captures the power of this whole Web 2.0 thing in less than five minutes, and makes my toes tingle.

High five to Doug True for passing it along.