Robert Krulwich, of Radiolab fame, is starting a new blog at NPR. So, first, NEW ROBERT KRULWICH BLOG! My enthusiasm is palpable. I just tossed up a handful of confetti.
Second, there’s some really juicy bits in the first entry about the focus of the blog and its content. I’ll just let Krulwich speak. Imagine there are glitchy sound effects through this whole bit:
I like the word “wonder.” … it seems to me that near the heart of wonder is the simple act of noticing. I plan to pause, look, and notice the little wonders that catch my eye. Because there are a lot of people who do this very well, I’m going to follow the better noticers, the great field scientists, the best artists, photographers, journalists and peer over their shoulders to notice what they have noticed.
Biologist (and writer) Bernd Heinrich in his book “A Year In The Maine Woods” points out that because we humans are biggish creatures and so much around us is small and delicate (or shy), because we are busy and very into our lives, our minds, our problems, “most of us are like sleepwalkers here.” We walk through our yards, our streets, our parks, through our days and “we notice so little… We see only bits and pieces, and then only if we look very, very close, or for very, very long.”
Did you notice that? Yep, I just tossed up another handful of confetti.
So, wondering and noticing are tightly woven together. This reminds me of an interview the AIGA ran a couple years ago with Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the benefits of noticing:
It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.
Inputting is hard. Reading Krulwich’s observations and reading the conversation between Portigal and Soltzberg infers that a couple things might be necessary: quiet (or a slower pace), and a willingness to intently focus on the things outside of yourself. Good noticing is selfless.
So how do we build up our noticing skills and spidey senses? Portigal has an idea for that too:
…circulate through an environment and note everything you observe, but using only one sense. First, observe from a distance—say, from on high—so you can’t hear what people are saying. Then sit in the middle of an active zone, but close your eyes. Students have told me how rapidly one sense fills in for the other.
Noticing is tough, yet rewarding work, and it begs to be documented. We’ve more tools than ever to do so. I’ve done some documenting of my own. (And a Flickr set full of things I’ve noticed, and my favorite of all time.) I walk everywhere with a phone camera in my pocket, and I suspect you do too, so documenting visuals is easy. I can type on my phone, so I can capture text or overheard conversations. I can record video if necessary. And then? I can dump it to a Twitter account or a Tumblr blog to catalog everything. And then, if it is good? Maybe if the noticing started to arrange into larger patterns or there got to be a lot of documentation, I could maybe even print up a book of all the things I had noticed. And wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have on the bookshelf? My Year of Noticing and Wondering — 2010.
As a person constantly in a position to produce words or designs or ideas, or whatever it may be, it feels good to give myself permission to kick back and inquisitively absorb things as they come. Part of noticing isn’t seeking, it’s highly reliant on serendipity and unexpected relevancy.
People are always surprised when they realize how many things they are actually experiencing but not really noticing. It’s such a simple activity, but people have told me later on that they felt much more awake after doing it.
Good morning!
Fishing with Strawberries
Back in 1995, Tim O’Reilly was looking for strategic partners for his business. While he was looking, he was told this by Bob Broadwater, an investment banker:
You don’t fish with strawberries. Even if that’s what you like, fish like worms, so that’s what you use.
It’s great to use a very specific bait tailored to your audience and their needs when you’re selling or speaking to a very specific group of people. While Tim agreed, he still had doubts.
At the same time, a small voice within me said with a mixture of dismay, wonder and dawning delight: “But that’s just what we’ve always done: gone fishing with strawberries. We’ve made a business by offering our customers what we ourselves want. And it’s worked!”
On one level, the difference between the two points of view is simply the difference between selling one on one to a very targetted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will match your own “strawberry” profile.
This was 1995, before everyone was obsessed with niches, and almost a full decade before Chris Anderson and WIRED popularized the term “the long tail.” Incredible.
O’Reilly frames this under the guise of selling, but it can be applied to more than that. The idea is this: in the cases where it makes sense, you use the bait you like in hopes it will attract people who care about the same things you do. You project yourself outward and aspire towards some sort of resonance. You define who you are and what you want and try to present it as accurately as possible, and maybe, if you are skilled or lucky (or both), it will result in a bit of creative kinship.
I sincerely believe good things and good people have found me, or I them, because of those strawberries.
But there’s perhaps a deeper level on which this difference is one on which a great deal that is special about this company hinges. We seek to find what is true in ourselves, and use it to resonate with whatever subject we explore, trusting that resonance to lead us to kindred spirits out in the world, and them to us.
But, I’d suggest you’d better use really, really great strawberries. See #2.
via Rob Greco
Anonymous asked: In the last couple months your site has gone from inspiring, to tolerable, to what the deuce. You never talk about it, you just tinker. I can tell you're on a journey. Share with us where you're at.
TL;DR: It’s the words, stupid.
Gosh. I mean, the first time I read this I was livid and wrote up a snarky response filled to the very brim with spite and acid that slayed to bits the presumptuousness and entitled quality of your question. It miffed me that you assumed that just because you liked something less after it changed it was therefore definitively worse than it was before. I mean, seriously, what the hell?
But you know, I reread what I wrote and I thought about it and I realized I hate snark. So damn much. I think about the creative people I respect the most, the good guys and girls who sweat every detail and make it all sing, the mensch’s mensches, the people I want to be like when I’m older, and I looked at what I wrote and deleted every damn word because I knew I’d regret it. Because I thought, “You know, what if he’s just a nice kid wondering why things are changing around here?” So, I’m going to think that way and make the assumption that I am projecting a magnitude of dickishness onto your question that is ill-founded because it is Monday and my lunch sucked and I didn’t sleep very well last night and got woken up early by the construction next door.
So, to your question. Yep, the site is changing quite a bit. It’s been through a bunch of revisions the past few months, and I think that’s okay. You’re not the first person to notice or mention it. A few weeks ago I had a bunch of incoming visitors from a thread in a forum where someone was trying to remember one of my pages, but couldn’t find it because the look of the page had changed in the few months since they had last seen it. Once they realized that it had changed, they cursed me and poked fun, and said how I didn’t have enough client work to do, and that’s why the site kept on changing. And that, actually, was the furthest thing from the truth. I think I’m busier than most, but it was painfully telling to see people explicitly state out loud their assumption that things only change when there is nothing better to do. Which is wrong. And dangerous. And, well, stupid.
Sometimes you just have to move the furniture around a little bit to make you look at where you live a little differently.
Then, there was the angry email from the guy who scolded me for modifying the page layout after he featured my site in his CSS gallery. I mean, I had no idea how to respond to that, so I just deleted that email and tried my hardest to pretend like that hatebomb never landed in my inbox and hoped that he’d make enough ad revenue to renew his prescriptions or buy himself a nice pair of shoes.
And now, this.
But, for some reason, your question has a hint of sincerity to it, so, I’ll tell you the secret. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think people doubt it. Are you ready? The site changes so frequently because I have no idea what I want, and I am just making things up as I go along. Does that satiate you? Are you satisfied?
There’s a bit of a double-standard here, because people ask for change and seek technologies that allow change to be easy, but, when it actually happens? Ouch. That’s the price of an audience, I suppose, and I’d hate to give anyone whiplash, and sure, change can happen too often, but I think I have a right to change my mind about things as I get more information about what works and what does not, what people like about what I’m doing and what they do not. And, more importantly, what FEELS right to me in my gut, because that’s largely been the decision making process thus far that has seemed to work best. You can’t mumble on about iteration like so many are wont to do now and curse it when it happens. And to not change your mind? To be so staunchly rigid even as you learn new things and the world around you changes? No thanks.
Why do you not like the new design? I feel like I’m doing everything right, am I not? I mean, look at this stuff: I’ve got Helvetica and there is a white background and I’m using a webfont from Typekit and my site is nearly monochromatic save for one tastefully selected color of the bluish-greenish persuasion. I know there is no Photoshop noise filter or gradients or anything of that nature, but I still like it. It is quiet, and, as I get older, I yearn for quiet. I mean, look at the site: it fulfills the obligation of a “minimal” website in 2010, you could almost call it “zen” if that’s your cup of tea (although, no pictures of smooth rocks in the header), and I’ve still kept my logo that is in a black circle that I have had for years now. This is 2010 web design trends manifest!
Sure, this iteration probably isn’t going to make it into any online galleries or be the thing-of-the-day anywhere or find itself on a list on a blog with a number in the title, but that’s okay. Why? Because I’d rather have one person print out a little thing that I wrote and put it away in the drawer of their desk to read again later than be listed on a million blogs for the design of my site. Last week, I got an email from a really nice girl going to school in Ohio for design who said she did just that. And nothing else really mattered that day besides that one email.
But, you know, the thing with the version of my site that you seemed to have preferred? I’ll let you in on a savory little bit about that version. I was having to INVENT content to fill up space. And, gosh, doesn’t that just seem like a freaking awful design? I mean, saying things where there is nothing necessary to say. Scaling complexity up needlessly. I run in to this in my life with the grippy things on my toothbrush, or how the vacuum looks like it has fins like an old Cadillac, and man, it’s so annoying because it is presuming that how it looks is more important than how it works or what it says. And geez, here it was, a big giant thorn in my side, something going against everything I believe right here on my very own website. It had to go. I needed two columns and some type. No 12-column grid structures or Photoshop tomfoolery or anything of that notion. I needed a place for words and the occasional picture, and that’s what it is now. Web 0.5. Not social, not embedded, not streaming, not live, just ideas and words and things to say.
And if you look at it, really look at it, through your squinted eyes, the site is mostly words. Which, granted, I accept is different for a person who is said to make their living as an illustrator. Don’t worry, I get it. Word-fear. Some designers are just terrified of words, especially if there is a swath of a few uninterrupted paragraphs. I’m not even sure if you’ve made it down this far into what I’ve written. But, the words! They make some “visual people” feel dirty, like there is a picture somewhere else on the internet that they are missing. A lovingly cross-processed photo of a nymphish girl with a baby deer and other fauna framed dutifully by a digitally-added dusty, flecked veneer. Or maybe some new song about rainbows. Life gets rough if the pictures used to be in a place that someone liked and when they go back, poof, there are no more pictures. “What the hell?” I understand that.
But it had to go. You know why? Because I was drawing and reading these articles that accompany the little pictures I make for the inside of magazines, and you know what? I started having ideas. Tiny, dangerous, little ideas that happen when there is no music playing, when I’d be laying down on the sofa with my eyes in the crook of my elbow to block out the light, listening to the ceiling fan spinning, waiting for an idea to spring up for an editorial illustration. You cuss and sweat and toss and turn and swear to God. Why did this all come so easily last week and nothing is happening today when all you want to do is to go out with your friends but instead you’re thinking about emerging markets and their relationship to 50-somethings stock portfolios?
And, damn, just like that, this little dangerous worm crawls in your head and you think of something that you can not draw a picture of. “What if limitations are the fuel for creativity?” Or “Have we gotten too acclimated to fake representations of real things?” Or “If there’s no money involved, does everything run on enthusiasm?” Or “Why can’t I have dinner without seeing a cell phone?” Or, God forbid, the most dangerous thought that man has ever thought, the one that has tortured us since Aristotle, “What is the good life?”
And so I started writing because the pictures I was drawing weren’t good enough for these ideas of my own. I couldn’t do them justice. They were not brief ideas. They were complex and needed to be framed properly and they needed to use the right language (if you believe that drawing and visuals and graphics and English are all languages like I believe they are). And that’s where it started, that’s when things started changing, that’s when the site started morphing. And slowly, and surely, I started speaking at different places and sharing these dangerous little ideas that I had and people seemed to like them or at least think they were interesting or novel. I don’t necessarily think that they enjoyed them more than the pictures that I made, but, they did add a new, important depth to what I was doing and new, different people that didn’t really know very much about the world of pictures started to enjoy what I was talking about as well. Scientists. Tech people. Programmers. One classical composer. And that felt good. It felt right. It was substance, and more than just a picture to accompany a little puff piece on grill-outs for the summer issue of some lifestyle rag. (Not that there’s anything wrong grilling, lifestyle rags, or summer.)
The site is different now. It used to have to hold pictures. Now, it has to hold ideas, and that, decidedly, must look different. I’m still trying to grok what that means, but with each change I feel like I’m getting a little closer. You know how clothes start to feel better as you grow into them? That.
So, this “journey” that you speak of… I don’t feel obliged to share the specific details of that with everyone because I would like to keep a small insular speck of privacy for myself, but, I will tell you about some of the high notes. I have been doing this “design thing” on and off for 10 years now. And it is just now, just in this moment, just in this past little bit that I took a step back and said “Wait, what?”
I looked around at what I made and what other people were making and I got sick to my stomach because it was all so damn slick and I felt like I could trust so little of it. I was suspicious of the things that I was not suspicious of before, and believed that things were fake before I believed that they were real, and that made me feel something awful in the pit of my gut. I wondered if a little, important, bright part of me had left or had gotten buried under something I didn’t want.
I’m not out of it yet. I am having fun working on things, but I am much more particular about what I agree to do because, fortunately, I am lucky enough to be in a situation where I have the liberties to say no to things. And you know what? The things that I have agreed to do have been so much more rewarding now. But, I still struggle with the absolute usefulness of what I’m doing in the larger context of things, and I’m not sure if there is logical ending point to that. It’s like asking someone “When are you finished being skeptical?” and I don’t know if that ever ends unless you can control every single little bit of everything you produce, which, fortunately and unfortunately, is not the reality when you are working with or for someone else.
But things are changing. I’m afforded the liberty to choose, and because I have that opportunity, I feel obligated to be very thoughtful about which opportunities I take. I’m not sure how long you’ve been doing this, but as careers go, things very rarely have clear edges and hard cuts between the stages of them. We perceive this, because often we stop one job and then start another and then, wham, all of a sudden everything is different. But, it is usually not that way. There is a gray area between the stages. It is a cross-fade that takes time. It is a situation where your malcontent grows in one place and then, finally, after months you decide to go do something else. Or, your interest in this other place grows and it takes months to muster up the courage to go ahead and leap into fully embracing that new thing.
I think I am of the latter case. It takes a bit of courage to spend 5 years building something, then just turn it all on its head. I’m slowly prepping to do something different, but I’m far enough away that it is still a bit hazy. But, that’s okay. This is new and exciting and invigorating, but things are incubating because good things do not usually happen all at once.
So, I will leave it at that. Thanks for your question, and I’ll go ahead and assume that you’re a nice guy who had a good question that was worded poorly, because really, writing this helped me a little bit, and I hope that it can help you maybe understand just a little bit why the background color of my website is now gray. Maybe it’s a metaphor. Or I could just like gray.
Note: This question was originally submitted by someone under their own username. That’s the reason I decided to respond. That being said, I’ve removed the user’s handle, so this doesn’t seem like me scolding them as an individual. Thanks for reading.
