Anthony Garritano

Mums the Word

So…you thought I was going to tell you a secret. Actually, that’s British for mom, so you’re wrong. I was reminded again today that no matter how old you get, your mom always has relevant advice for you. As frustrating as it can be to bridge that generational divide at times, my mom has proven over and over and over again that she’s at least wiser than me, and usually smarter too. Also, she still makes better toast than I do. For those of you paying attention she’s three for three.

Hiatus

It’s been a while. I’ve moved since I last posted. Twice, actually. In fact, the whole year has been one wild adventure. The past three months have been particularly hard. I’ve loved every bit of it though. At some point I’m going to do one ridiculously elongated post about it. For the moment though, I’ve finally rebuilt this blog after it exploded (picking up bits of server-fried-blog is not enjoyable I’ll have you know). Expect deep insights…or random bits of amusing writing after one too many cups of coffee after midnight. Either way, the train is moving once again!

Tweeting Lecture Notes

So here comes a rant. For us Twitter users, I think everyone follows somebody who tweets little snippets from conferences or events they go to. For me it’s usually when the An Event Apart conference rolls around once year in Boston. For the most part it’s not too bad, I’ve received some insight from the quotes of Jeffery Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cederholm, and the like. The problem is when people tweet without giving any context, and worsen it by the fact that they are posting 10 or 20 of these random meaningless snippets in a row. It’s quite agitating to say the least.

This applies not to just conferences or events but lectures as well. I read a blog post by famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson a bit ago where he describes a talk he was giving to some students at Harvard. The students’ professor asked them to tweet out the notes they took of the talk. In his blog post he goes to explain why tweeting out lecture notes was a good thing.

Mr. Wilson’s main arguments boil down to the following:

1. Writing things down makes them easier to recall
2. Sharing them on Twitter saves them publicly
3. You might have a separate Twitter account for just such a thing

I agree with item number one whole heartedly, but 140 characters to take notes? Maybe this is practice in taking shorter notes, but I don’t want to have to consciously focus on a character limit. If I exceed that limit by one character I now have to stop paying attention to the lecture and decide what it is I can truncate legibly. This isn’t something I find very practical with Twitter.

Item number two is true, but only temporarily. Twitter’s whole platform is based on the answer to the question, “What am I doing now?” It’s widely known that Twitter doesn’t maintain tweets over 14 days old. Services such as backupmytweets have been built for people that feel they need to archive these interactions, but tweets through it aren’t publicly available so there goes the idea of sharing with peers.

Item number three is the only one that really makes sense. This is something I would probably do. With the use of hash tags, no one necessarily has to be following this other account either, you can simply do a search of the tag and you’ll see anything anyone has posted using it. That said, I’m not sure how many people are actually going to go to the trouble of creating a separate Twitter account just for note taking.

All in all, I don’t feel that social media platforms should be used for note taking.

TIL - Today I Learned…

Today I learned how to duplicate layers in Photoshop. No, no, no, not make a copy of the layer in the same document, I’m talking about sending a copy to a different document.

One of my greatest pet peeves about Photoshop was how agitating it was to transfer elements between documents. No longer!

Simply right click on a layer, and choose duplicate layer:

Then decide which document you want it to go to. You can create a new document on the fly if you want too!

Communication - It ain’t about You

The other night I treated myself to a cupcake from the local bakery. I worked real hard that day so I figured I was worthy of a little sugar intake. I feel like I should first tell you I’m an indecisive person. I am the guy that spends 7.385 minutes deciding between two different flavors of the same cereal type (Oatmeal Squares!!). And now I am confronted with about 13 different flavors of cupcakes. Oh. Boy.

The lady behind that big glass display asked if today was my first time in the store. I told her it was my second. I then requested a recommendation. She asked, “What are you in the mood for?” I replied, “I want something sweet, but not overly sweet.”

She stopped me in my tracks. After a little more conversation she told me that ‘sweet is not a flavor, it is an ingredient.’ That took me by surprise. I’d never thought about it that way before. That was actually quite profound. However, my next thought was, “Then how do I describe to you what I want?”

This is important, because She had taken the only means I had to convey to her what it was I wanted. Even worse, she didn’t give me anything to replace it with. She left me unable to express my desires, completely debilitated. Not something you want to do to someone about to give you their hard earned money.

This was the second time in a 24 hour period that I’ve encountered someone failing to understand that communication isn’t about flaunting your knowledge or trying to get the customer to use your lingo. Communication is about explaining what you have using vernacular that the customer already understands. People don’t know what you know. That’s why you’re the expert. The only way for me to communicate what I want in a cupcake is in relative sweetness. Perhaps I should be more educated on baked goods, but I’m not.

Instead of being reprimanded, I should have been given a new vocabulary without taking away the old. Instead of telling me I should not use the word ‘sweet’, she should have used different words to express what it was I was feeling, and then quietly not use the word ‘sweet’ in any of her sentences. I’m sure they have a name for this process. I like to call it communication.

Bringing it full circle, this mistake happens too often in design. Just the other day I was working on a project for a client with a product containing various pricing plans. We used generic titles that were easily understood, like ‘Basic’, ‘Standard’, and ‘Premium’. Underneath each of these was tagline for the product, and just for kicks let’s say they were ‘Makes life bearable’, ‘Makes life easy’, ‘Makes life Paradise’. This client told me he wanted to get rid of Basic, Standard, and Premium and just use the taglines. His premise was that he wanted to be unique. He would have been unique, but at the cost of the customer not understanding what they’re looking at, potentially hurting the ultimate goal: to have the customer signup for a product.

Communication is not about you. It starts with you, but its success is measured by how well the receiving person understands.

Frank Chimero

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything. Been busy, I guess. Anywho, I wanted to point out a designer that I really respect. Meet Frank Chimero. I like him because he’s a deep thinker. I recommend checking out his FAQ and Profile pages. Even if you’re not a designer, there’s so much to be learned. This guy quotes Socrates for crying out loud.

Also, I recommend watching his talk from Build Conf entitled “The Shape of Design”. Again, designer and non-designer alike, he’s full of wisdom and knowledge.