It turned out to be one of the more popular things I’ve written. Over time I’ve heard from theaters around the world experimenting with the ideas explored in that post.

Here’s part of an email I got last month:

Hi Chris,

I hope you’re still at this address.

I read your blog post from ‘09 about discovering theatre models that are sustainable and actually move towards viability. We’ve started a theatre in Abuja (Nigeria’s capital) and are looking at innovative approaches to the business of theatre. We ran into some debt and are coming out of the woods. Now, we’re reinventing and also considering a government loan out of a fund that’s recently become available but we want to be as informed and tooled up as we should be. Also, case studies of successful models used elsewhere will be useful for us and encouraging to the banks, as you can imagine.

I wonder what other new and useful insights you’ve had over the years from discussing this — I guess what I’m asking is what models have worked for your friends, which we may stylise for our terrain and replicate?

Neat, right? The wonders of the Internet!

Totally neat. But also, truth be told, a little scary.

Is this thing on?

When real live companies with real live people and real live money are trying things based on something I wrote, I darn well want to feel comfortable that I’m not leading anyone off a cliff.

So, in that spirit,

An Addendum

Or maybe,

A Retrospective?

Anyway,

A Few More Thoughts On Designing A Company

Designing companies is hard.

As my own has grown, we’ve had to pick which new products we’ll tackle, how we hire new people, and how, exactly, we keep the office adequately caffeinated.

But it’s not just those things that go into designing a company. We design our company every single day. The creation of Figure 53 is a continuous act.

The little stuff adds up.

The little stuff is hard to copy.

People study successful companies. They look for what they can replicate.

Replication is hard. Actually, replication is impossible. Replication is copying. Copying doesn’t work.

When people copy the design of our software, I never worry about it. Someone who copies a design doesn’t know the next move. They didn’t get to that place because they figured out how to get there, they got to that place by a shortcut. But the shortcut cuts out all the important stuff.

Are you saying it’s impossible to learn from others?

No.

What I am finally circling around to say is this: I am proud of my original post, but if there is anything I would change, it would be to stress how inconclusive and exploratory those ideas really were, and are.

In retrospect, that post captures the initial moment of product design. A vision for a thing that Might Be, if only we can suss it out with a lot of hard work and corrections to our path.

It represents the point of departure for a unique creative act. The details have not been filled in. All the critical little stuff — the stuff that makes it or breaks it — has not been discovered.

It does not touch on many, many other pieces of the puzzle that will affect the design and implementation of the ideas in play.

And it definitely does not present the only valid option.

Fine, but can it work? Has it worked?

What’s “it”? The problem here is that there is no concrete “it”. There are dozens of possible implementations of those ideas. Some of them might work great. Many of them will fail.

(If you know any great examples of theaters that put memberships at the core of their being, please let me know in the comments, I’d love to learn about them.)

Design Patterns

Design patterns, in software, are architectural strategies that appear across many programs. They represent constructive techniques that appear frequently when dealing with particular kinds of problems.

Design patterns are a good place to start thinking about the high level form of a program. They also serve as a great communication tool; they’re coder shorthand.

But by definition, design patterns don’t dictate specifics, and they don’t determine whether a program will succeed or fail. They can help organize it, they can help clarify it, but they can’t, ultimately, make it good or bad. That’s up to the programmers, whose craft is to create unique software under unique circumstances.

It may be that my ideas from that 2009 post sketch out one design pattern for theater companies. I hope they do. I think they might.

But even if they do, they won’t dictate success. At best they can help organize and clarify. The devil is in the details, and the details are up to you.

Goals: Simplify! Streamline!

New tool: Adobe Illustrator. Haven’t used it before today, and it seemed like making a monogram would be a fun way to learn. Here’s the result:

Hey! It’s my first monogram! And my first time using Illustrator! It could have been a lot worse!

Now, before I sign off and go make dinner, an admission:

My only rule for this site is that the design can only be something I’ve made myself…. but I broke that rule a tiny bit today. If you mouse over the little monogram in the header, you’ll see a question mark from the Symbolicons set designed by my friend Jory. Thanks Jory!

By the way, those Symbolicons are on sale right now. You should probably go buy them.

It reminded me of a story.

A few years ago, my alma mater Carleton College rolled out an extensive redesign of their website.

The design was driven not just by the aesthetic taste of talented designers, but also by extensive research.

When you visit the site, something might strike you as odd:

There are no students.

Not on the home page, anyway. Not on the primary “welcome” screen, where they expect everyone to begin.

That’s weird, right? That’s completely different from almost every other school website you’ll visit. If they show photos at all, they are almost always photos of happy, smiling, multi-cultural students, right?

What gives?

Well, Carleton did some careful research, and they discovered:

Prospective students unanimously disliked pictures of people.

Specifically, they found that:

High school students are extremely cynical about people pictures. Typical comments were:

• “Everybody has the same pictures of students studying under a tree.”
• “They look like models.”
• “The people look posed.”
• “This doesn’t tell me anything about the school. It could be anywhere.”

We saw this reaction consistently, whether we were testing first impressions of competing college web sites or testing early versions of our own design concepts. The first thing our prospective students seem to want is a sense of place, and that means campus photos rather than people.

At the time of the redesign, I read a great article about it (which I can’t seem to find online at the moment) describing how they further discovered that students wanted to imagine themselves at Carleton.

You can see in the homepage design they created, everything guides your imagination to placing yourself in the scene. On top of that, they find places to slide in the spirit of the school — a sense of silliness alongside deep curiosity.

So what?

Thinking about this today, I started to wonder:

What if the same forces are at play for theaters?

It seems like every theater on the planet makes websites showcasing actor photos. But do we know that’s what people want to see? Has anyone ever asked them?

What if people would actually rather see the building? What if people really want to imagine themselves in the space? What if they care more about imagining the way the seat feels, than the way the star looks?

What if all those actor photos look the same? (They do!) What if people want to know what’s different about your theater? Could your theater be anywhere? No! Can you tell it from your website? …Probably not, right?

For an art form built so very deeply on a specific place, there sure are a heck of a lot of nearly placeless theater company web sites.

Worth Asking

I don’t claim to know whether the research of a small liberal arts college should be applied to a theater. It would be unwise to assume it does.

But it does seem like an interesting possibility, no? Maybe worth trying to find the answer?

My favorite caption on Carleton’s site might be the bubble that marks the spot where you’d find a “Web team running out of clever caption ideas.” It’s in the library, if you’re curious.

This morning I finally got around to reading last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. Turns out the day I was busy building Seymour was the day this article appeared on my doorstep:

And now, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is starting a dual-degree master’s program in journalism and computer science. [...] One goal of the Columbia program, according to Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs, is to produce journalists who will “take it several steps beyond — to where they’re creating a lot of their own new tools.” That means learning enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation — or enough, at least, to see what technology can do for journalism. Henning Schulzrinne, a computer-science professor at Columbia, says he hopes students will also leave the program with “tools to assist in gathering, processing and presenting news.”

Emphasis mine. Full article here.

Today I improved the layout of SeeMoreB.com when viewed on an iPad. (The photos are larger, and the header is simpler.) I also went ahead and signed Seymour up on Twitter.

Scott requested that I share the code for Seymour. It’s nothing special, but once I have a chance to clean it up and put some kind of open source license on it, I’ll put it on GitHub and let you know.

This summer, in the depths of my obsession, I had a few conversations with Adam Bachman and Jesse Kriss. I posed the observation: “Okay, I really care about this stuff. If I wanted to put some money where my mouth is, could I actually make a constructive contribution?”

After a few cups of coffee, a few paper sketches, and a whole lotta talkin’, one of the fun ideas someone suggested was: Why not just, you know …do it.

Just create a news product. A minimally viable news product, to be sure. Not a proper, full-grown news product. Yet, nonetheless, something with a minimal semblance of reality, built under real life entrepreneurial pressures.

Is that crazy? How might one build a news entity from scratch? What if you had to create the whole thing, from start to finish, in a single weekend?

One couldn’t get too ambitious, certainly. You’d need something extraordinarily simple, with simple demands on your time and money. But it would also need to be, in some sense, real. A thing that someone, somewhere, might actually, you know, dig.

That’s the fun of a minimally viable product, right? It can be useless to almost everyone, and therefore make no money, but if it costs you almost nothing to build, and almost nothing to tend, then, well, if it’s cool to just a tiny number of people, it could be the seed of something bigger and better. Right?

Here’s the Idea

The simplest news site we could think of that might still be worthwhile is something along the lines of Boston.com’s The Big Picture. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it’s compelling.

Maybe Baltimoreans would like to see our own city in pictures like that. The daily pictures of our life in this city — maybe that’s a compelling thing. Maybe I’d like to sit with my iPad in the morning and flick through a page of big, beautiful, Baltimore images. Snapshots of my neighbors. Not some ice sculpture contest in Sweden, but the new graffiti by that amazing street artist who works up and down Greenmount Avenue, or the kids that were hula-hooping at HampdenFest, or the view from the stands at the latest Raven’s game.

Okay, so we have an idea.

Here’s the Implementation

In the spirit of building a “real” thing in a weekend, there had to be a comprehensive plan. It wouldn’t do to say “okay, design an ideal site, then hire some photographers, then….” No! Too much time! Too many resources!

Instead, we’ve got to find some pieces that already exist, and figure out what we can do in one weekend that would bring additional value.

Friday Night

Now, the reason I got on a kick this weekend is because Friday night was the night I stumbled across the new WordPress template by Information Architects.

I had already admired iA. They build news sites. They build really good news sites. And they do it based on principles in which I believe. Go ahead and check out their site. You’ll notice right away that it’s clean and easy to read. What you might not notice right away is that it’s been designed with much more care than first meets the eye. Not sure what I mean? Try resizing the window. You’ll find that this site has been designed five full times, to create the perfect layout for whatever screen size or device you might be using to read it. The same page will magically pop into a new layout as you resize your window. It’s really lovely. It’s really carefully done. And it’s really up for sale.

For, at the present time of writing, a measly 55 buckaroos.

Gentlepersons, we have ignition.

Saturday Morning

What’s a source of photography? I could pay someone, but I need something immediately. Well, there are a lot of photos on the web. Flickr has a bunch. They even have a bunch licensed into the Creative Commons — that lovely place where creative impulses go to live instead of die.

Let’s start with Flickr.

Now we’ve got a site template, and we’ve got a source of photography. Are we done? No. Why? Because the long term cost is still high. I could search Flickr every day, laboriously copying and pasting content from each page into my site. But the time it takes to do that would add up, fast, and the whole point of this is to try an experiment that doesn’t suck me dry while I figure out if it’s got any potential. I want good photos, but I don’t want to spend 30 minutes every morning collecting them.

The Tool

My answer to this problem was to make a tool. I spent Saturday building it, and I call it Seymour. Say hi to Seymour!

What does Seymour do? Well, it automates the curation of images for my site.

When you launch it, it looks like this:

And what is it doing? Well, it’s loading up a search page of all Flickr photos uploaded in the last two weeks that include the word “Baltimore” and are licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons license.

That’s the default starting point. Then, I can start browsing. I can do so by clicking around, or by entering more specific (or less specific) search terms.

Maybe I want to create a collection of photos about the ships down in the harbor. I can enter the search terms up top and refine my search. So far this isn’t anything more fancy than a normal web browser, right?

But the helpful bit comes next: I click on a photo I like, and it looks like this:

Down at the bottom, you’ll find that Seymour has automatically pulled out all the information I need. Title, description, and author information so I can give proper credit to the photographer.

I click on that arrow button there, and Seymour files away this information until I’m ready to publish.

I do this a few more times. Click, browse, click, browse, “Ooo, that one’s cool, let’s use that one”, click, filed, click, filed, done.

Then I click the “Post Them!” button, and friendly old Seymour goes out to my WordPress site, talks to it in the language it understands (XMLRPC), and creates a new post with the photos I liked.

And that’s it! Takes a few seconds.

It didn’t take the entirety of Saturday to make, but I did have to figure out a lot of new Cocoa technology I’ve never used before, so it did become the day’s project. It was a lot of fun just learning new stuff.

Sunday Morning

Well, now that I’m this far, I might as well try to make the site look decent, right? It starts out looking just like the Information Architect’s site, because it IS their site. I don’t want or need to change it much, but it should have its own look.

I’m not a professional web designer, but I can poke around in a site without bringing it to utter ruin, and I did my best to customize this one. Well, the best I could do in a day.

And thus was born

SeeMoreB.com

A place to see large, lovely photos from in and around Baltimore.

Fun! (Well, fun for me at least!)

What happens next

To be honest, I’m not really sure. It’s the sort of thing I could actually keep updating for a few months and see what happens. That was, after all, the whole point of creating Seymour. The tool makes it easy. If nothing ever came of it, I’d be down 55 bucks for the template, 10 bucks for the domain name, and a weekend worth of work. Plus, of course, whatever little amount of time I’d spend actually clicking on photos I liked.

Would there be a reason to do that? I don’t honestly know. I certainly like having the site as a sandbox. If I tried to make it more than a sandbox, would it have a path to something more mature? I think it’s possible. If it did develop some kind of audience, a tasteful ad in the right spot might actually generate a dollar or two. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It’d be an interesting experiment either way.

Anyway, like I said, I honestly don’t know what happens next. If nothing else, or perhaps above all else, I’m open to suggestions.

P.S.: Thanks to luckydave for finding the picture of Seymour.

The Story

This morning around 11 AM a man, unhappy about his mother’s spine surgery, shot a doctor.

This incident is still in-progress, about 5 blocks down the road from my house [Edited: Oops, I was confused about where this was happening. Johns Hopkins is at the end of my street, but not their hospital.], and the details may change as the day progresses. But that’s the current story. (The doctor is reported to be expected to pull through.)

Why the Sun in particular is doing a great job, and why this is fascinating in general

In brief:

The Sun’s Crime reporter Justin Fenton appeared very quickly on the scene, providing a trustworthy direct account of what he was seeing.

Justin was able to take several powerful photos of the scene. (That’s down the street from me. [Edited: Nope, it wasn't.] You better believe I am consuming those photos voraciously.)

Justin is sifting through first-hand Tweets from hospital employees on the scene. He is incorporating those accounts into his coverage.

The official account of the @BaltimoreSun is, meanwhile, working through other channels to gather information from the city and police.

The Sun created an impromptu Twitter list of all Twitter accounts they feel are providing helpful coverage of the incident.

Now, here’s where things get especially interesting…

We begin to see multiple official news organizations covering the incident from Twitter. We even see DC-based @TBD publicly request permission to use Justin’s sniper photo, and the Baltimore Sun publicly granting them that permission.

When Justin’s cell phone dies, we see another Sun reporter say she’s bringing him a new one.

We see the official account of the Baltimore Police department releasing updates from their account.

We see a more complete photo gallery appear on the Baltimore Sun website.

We get traces of information from the television outlets, whose reporting is bleeding into Twitter as well.

We continue to get a smattering of first-hand accounts from people on the scene.

We are, in short, watching an unprecedented amalgam of voices, from private citizens to news organizations to official city government, creating an in-the-moment multi-view story, cooperatively and extraordinarily quickly. No single voice must be trusted above all others. Perspectives may be balanced from multiple sources, with varying levels of trust.

What’s more, the voices of the first-hand accounts are fundamentally different from all other forms of reporting. The accounts are not given as an interview to a camera or an on-the-record quote for tomorrow’s front page, they are offered without knowledge of whether the account will actually be “broadcast”. To my reading, the voices of those accounts are more direct, more authentic, and more useful than any printed or recorded interview after the fact.

Hell, even the 140 character limit of Twitter seems (to me) to encourage a plainness and straightforwardness in the accounts that might be lost with a less restrictive medium.

And across it all, I see a tendency toward transparency that I feel I don’t usually see in other reporting formats. That transparency is the basis of trust, or at least the basis for letting me make decisions about where each reported account is coming from.

This isn’t just about the buzzword of “crowdsourcing”, although there is something special about gathering many first-hand accounts in seconds from whereever the news is happening. (I first learned about the recent DC hostage situation from the tweet of a lighting designer who was working across the street.) This is about a fundamentally different story structure, where a professional news organization like the Sun becomes a weighty voice among many voices, serving as a professional reference point, an editorial guide, and a critical source of information in what is nonetheless a collection of disparate voices.

….I see that in the time I’ve taken to write this post, the incident has reached a conclusion. The gunman has killed his mother and committed suicide.

Despite the apparent good news about the doctor (and my personal relief that my wife works at a different hospital), that’s a heavy ending to the story.

Maybe I’ll see this whole series of events with less wonderment in a day or two. But I feel like I just saw a glimmer of something new in the news, and it was remarkable.

I ventured into the drizzle this morning to buy myself a Baltimore Sun.

I wanted to see the new Sun Magazine. It was restored to life today after a fourteen year hibernation.

I will admit to you some measure of excitement as I strode through an unexpectedly chilly rain.

Is that nerdy? Perhaps that’s nerdy.

But my paper and my breakfast were waiting for me at the store, my coffee and my couch were waiting for me at home, and nothing else worth noting pressed for my attention.

I was, therefore, excited (nerdy or no), and you might even say I was in the perfect mental state for consumption: Eager and ready to fall in love with my purchase.

“User Experience” is just a hip phrase for “how’d it go?”

Well, it went okay.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Just “okay”?

Yeah. Just okay.

Why?

I was afraid you’d ask that.

The problem with trying to explain “why” is that the answer is strung up on so many thorny bits of the modern news-reporting apparatus that to do the answer justice would:

1. Take weeks.
2. Send me quickly onto ground where I can only speculate.
3. Make this post unreadably long.

Therefore, in lieu of trying to be complete, I will try to simply follow

The First Thread of my Experience

The first thing that happened, after I picked the paper out of Eddie’s wireframe newstand, was that the slippery advertising section fell out of the middle of the paper and plopped into a heap upon the floor.

Lying there on the floor, it provides us a convenient place to start.

Advertising

First things first: I am not, at the present time, judging advertising. I am not making conclusions about advertising. I am not arguing for or against the necessity of advertising.

What I am doing, at the present time, is cataloguing the size, shape, and general outward appearance of advertising as it is presented in the Baltimore Sun.

Bring Forth the Scale

By weight, the advertising inserts of the Baltimore sun consume 44% of the thing I bought.

Without the inserts, the paper weighs 14 ounces:

The inserts themselves weigh 11:

Of course, the actual percentage-by-weight of all advertising in the Sun is much, much greater than 44%. If I cut every ad out of every page of the “normal” part of the paper, and add that to the inserts, we’d get something a great deal higher.

But I won’t do that, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

The Main Attraction

Let’s move on to my original enticement, the new Sun Magazine.

Below you’ll find a visual representation of the advertising in the magazine. A red block covers each ad, and the pages are arranged in a rough order of “less ads to more ads”.

Out of 44 surfaces available in the magazine, roughly 53% of them are employed to sell products and services.

Naturally, in the real layout, these ads are not sequestered to the end, but are instead mixed about equally throughout.

Moreover, it is important to note that the ads are not marked clearly in red. Many times they are dressed to look like stories.

So What?

Well, this ever-so-cursory analysis tells us a few things. The design of the advertising, as it currently exists in the Baltimore Sun Magazine, leads to the following facts about the reader’s experience:

1. When I open the magazine, it is better than even odds that my eyes are looking at an ad.
2. If my eyes do land on an ad, there is no quick, guaranteed way to know this has happened.

These facts are a very simple, very incomplete, but very incontrovertible part of the user experience of the Baltimore Sun Magazine, as it exists in paper form.

Back to this Morning

I got home, I filled my coffee cup, I pulled out my sausage-egg-and-cheese-on-a-croissant, and I happily sat down to browse the news.

And the first thing that happened? Someone is making a pitch to me. And then I get pitched again. And again. Ah, is this finally a story? Oh, nope, that’s a pitch that looks like a story.

I am, in short, engaged in a gentle yet very real struggle with the product I have purchased, to make it do the damn thing it’s supposed to do: deliver me the news.

This process leaves me ever-so-slightly frustrated, and my very first impression of this new magazine is flavored by the sense that the Baltimore Sun doesn’t much care whether I read their stories or not, as long as I read their ads.

Which, I am saddened to realize, is probably actually true, for someone over there.

The Hard Thing about Details is that There are So Many of Them, and So Many of Them Matter

There’s a saying in software: “Software is nothing but a collection of details.”

It’s hard to talk about the design of a user experience, because, like software, it is nothing but a collection of details. Some of them may even be quite poor without sacrificing the overall experience of the product — and no one gets them all right.

But similarly, some of the details may be done very, very well, and yet a collection of less important details done poorly conspire to render the whole effort moot.

For example, you may write an absolutely superb article about Baltimore, but if you deliver it in a package with just enough little frictions in just enough places, you push the probability further and further toward the chance that a given person will never read your article at all.

The challenge of designing a successful, sustainable product is finding how to lower that friction without destroying the way you eat.

This is not easy. Of course it’s not easy. Generating income is always a force in opposition to the perfectly smooth user experience. This is the trick of it.

The slippery sloshy slurry of product design is a big ol’ mess, and you won’t get it perfect, and it’s hard.

But Principles Can Help

Somewhere in your gut is a guiding principle. The reason you’re making what you’re making. The change you want to see in the world. All of the power and all of the force of your creativity is tied to this principle. This principle is the fountainhead of your energy and the anchor of your resolution.

The burning clarity of a principle can melt away the slurry. Some of it, at least.

Take reporting. I won’t presume to offer a defining principle for a reporter, but I’d be very comfortable in assuming it generally involves a relationship of trust between the reporter and the reader. When the fortunes of the newspapers began to wane, and the managers began to turn the knobs on the dying business model this way and that, searching for the magical combination that would unlock the new prosperity, it should have been clear that trickery was fundamentally incompatible with the presentation of the news. And yet advertisers are given more and more leeway to trample onto the turf of the reporter — in the case of online news, literally trampling, obscuring, or shoving aside the story. And they are permitted the grossest kind of trickery — creating ads that look like reporting — with only the meekest protestation of a tiny “ADVERTISEMENT” printed in the header to show that the original principle is, by someone’s estimation, still followed.

These kind of choices represent a shift in principle, and it’s poisonous. It doesn’t mean that advertising can’t be part of the solution^[1], but it does represent a sign that the redesign of the news is not in touch with the core principles of the news, and that’s both frustrating and scary.

Principles, and Friends

It’s easy enough to talk about these things from the outside, but it can be terribly hard to see them from the inside. I was humbled to be reminded of this only a few days ago, when my entrepreneurial energies sent me speculating down a perfectly reasonable business path. Reasonable, that is, until my teammates pointed out that, for all its merits, it would necessarily become a huge distraction, and thus poison our existing efforts. It was hard to hear, at first, as critical messages often are.

So clarify your principles, but don’t assume you can follow them alone, either.

In the Meantime

I continue my search for a pleasant way to read the stories of my city. The new Sun Magazine, as a rather watered-down style mag with enough advertising incorporated carelessly enough to make it hard to find the stories, is not a draw, and I don’t expect to walk down to Eddie’s for a paper again soon.

I want to read the news. I care about my city. I feel connected to individual reporters at the Sun, hard-working folks like Julie Scharper, Gus Sentementes, and Justin Fenton. I want to read their stories. I just haven’t found a good way to do it yet. There are enough frictions, in enough places, to push me away from the paper and, heaven forfend, the the website. These products fight me when I try to use them. They get in the way of their own mission: for me to read their stories. Not just because of how they integrate advertising, but with their overall design, format, and delivery mechanism.

Of course, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m extraordinarily picky. On the other hand, it’s the role of a product designer to develop an extraordinary pickiness. Your raw sensitivity to the tiny pin-pricks of the experience is what guides you to file away the splinters. And the splinters, in aggregate, are the thing that bleed your product of greatness.

[1] I used to think advertising was necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe that anymore, in part because of some great counterexamples.

I asked folks on Twitter to define design in one tweet. From sound designers, to graphic and visual designers, to lighting designers, to cinematographers, to set designers, to writers, to developers, here’s what they said:

“Design is reconciling conflicting requirements into a product’s integrated structure and behavior” art vs engineering — @Pen_Bird

Design is telling a story through the shaping of sensation. — @nickkeenan

Design (theatre): Discovering and realizing the physical context of the story. — @Photosphere

The act of thinking, planning, and determining prior to an action, so that future interaction can be expected. — @SunriseDesign

Design is trial and error, mixed with a little luck. The whole process is a lot of “damn, I didn’t get it the first time.” — @lrenhrda

Theatre-Creation of play’s visual &aural environs informed by text & production conceit, rendered thru the art of stagecraft — @batfishlighting

Or to incl concerts: Manipulation of visual presentation of performance for purpose of underlining the impact of the piece. — @batfishlighting

The process of developing efficient, useable, appealing, and appropriate aesthetic choices. — @Jason_Waggoner

Realizing the world of a story, whether realistic or abstract. — @dloehr

Designing is deciding. — @coreylubo

Design is the fusion of creativity and innovation; the systematic art of redefining ideas, rearranging dreams into reality. — @Devcab_Connor

Design: Facilitate Understanding & Relevance. — @TheClayton

Design is pragmatic art. — @ scottmessinger

Finally, here’s my attempt:

1. Walk into the matrix. Bring a sleeping bag. 2. Emerge holding the eigenvectors. 3. Sculpt to taste. 4. Test. 5. Go to 1.

How do you define design?

I dig that.

Anyway, here’s the page for our conversation:

The competitive advantage of hiring artists, A conversation with Chris Ashworth

Despite the specificity of the title, we hit a bunch of topics in that hour of chatting. Listen in and hear me:

• railing against sick days
• pleading with businesses to question the rules of their workplace
• ranting about pricing your work
• wondering whether your art can be better instead of cheaper
• hollering “F permission”

and

• making my case for how Star Trek, positronic brains, human evolution and racism all relate to hiring.

I’m only really here to share one tip. Kinda like a stock tip, I guess. It’s a tip I am increasingly convinced should be seriously considered by a variety of business owners in America.

The tip is this:

Hire artists.

No, wait, hold on. It’s not that simple. Actually, it sort of IS that simple, but not in the way you’re thinking. You need to understand what I’m proposing here, and to understand what I’m proposing, you need to understand the following story.

The Story

In March 2010, I was in trouble. A year previously, I had released the second version of my product, QLab 2. As a product, it succeeded. It brought new customers. Many new customers. Too many new customers.

In 2008, I sent about 600 QLab support emails.

In 2009, I conservatively estimate that I sent 6000. (But that’s really low-balling it.)

There were days I’d wake up in the morning, start answering emails at 6 am, write responses until 6 pm, take a break for dinner, answer a few more that night, and go to bed with more email in the inbox than when I’d started.

Serious problem. Seriously AWESOME problem, but, you know, still a problem. I needed help.

Now, I already had some help. Meet Sean:

Hi Sean! Sean’s an awesome dude. He was a friend from college. He is an OS X developer too. The summer before, Sean and I had joined our two companies together. Aside from helping with the code, he had already become an invaluable help in answering all those emails in the months leading up to March 2010.

But it wasn’t enough. I needed another person. The time had finally come to, you know, hire someone. Not just join forces with a friend, but flat-out, does-this-mean-I’m-an-adult-now? hire someone.

Meet Luckydave

Hi Luckydave! Luckydave, in case you hadn’t noticed, goes by the name “luckydave”. In March 2010, Luckydave had already been a QLab user for years. He is a working video designer in New York. A really good one. But more than just a user, Luckydave had been a champion. And by “champion” I mean he sold our product harder than we did. Luckydave wrote posts to the QLab mailing lists that rivaled ours in their detail and helpfulness. Luckydave acted like it was his personal mission to convert the world’s theaters to QLab. Luckydave was known to announce that he’d “drunk the QLab koolaid”. Luckydave knew details about how video codecs work “in the field” in ways that we simply did not know. Because we were not in the field.

Luckydave was, in short, awesome. And I, it will not surprise you one bit to know, wanted him on our team.

What I Did

I offered Luckydave a job.

Surprise!

Well, yeah, big deal. But here’s the twist:

I offered Luckydave a job based on the needs of his life as an artist.

First, I told him we wanted him on the team. Then, I told him we would create the job based on what would work for both of us. We talked it out, and we constructed a position specifically for him, with these properties:

• He can sign up to “work support” in units as small as a single day, or as large as a full month.
• He only needs to tell me one day in advance if he’s working the next day.
• He can work the hours that fit his schedule for that day.
• When he is not working for Figure 53, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Including go make art. For a week. Or a month. Or whatever the gig requires.

We created this framework together, and then I asked LD what it would take to make this structure worth his time. He replied, “When I have been the least worried about money, I have been making X dollars a month.”

I could afford X dollars a month. I said yes.

I wrote down the above terms, put them at the end of the legal-speak from the lawyers, we signed it, and it was done.

This all happened at the end of March 2010.

What Happened Next

When someone writes to support@figure53.com, our help desk software tracks how long it takes us to respond. Now, one thing you need to appreciate is that we have customers all over the world. We get questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no such thing as “standard business hours” for us. Art doesn’t take a vacation. If someone writes me a question at 10 PM, and I wake up at 7 AM to answer it, that person has waited over 500 minutes to get that answer. When your customers are in Australia and you’re in Maryland, that’s a real wait.

Keep that in mind, and then take a look at this graph of our time-to-first-response for the past 9 months:

There are at least two things here worth noting.

Number one: Since joining us at the end of March, Luckydave has helped us pull down our overall response times significantly.

Number two: Those little green bars for the last few months? Those show that our median time-to-first-response since adding Luckydave to the team has been around 20 minutes.

20 minutes. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day.

NOTE TO SKIMMERS: HERE IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL

So far the story has been pretty good. I found a wonderful teammate. We made a job for him. It measurably helped the company. Life is good.

But I’m hiding one stunning fact from you, and it is this:

Barely a few weeks into Luckydave’s new job with Figure 53, he got a call.

A call from a temp agency. The temp agency he used in the past, to fill his free time between gigs.

Because, you know, that’s what working artists usually have to do. It’s hard to make a complete living in the arts.

And yet people do it. People like Luckydave, who are passionate about what they make, they do it. They temp if they must, but they do it. Because that is the drive of these people. They care. They care very, very much.

And so they temp. And so Luckydave temped. And Luckydave temped for a financial agency in New York. And he learned to operate financial…software of some kind. I’ve never fully understood what. But something tricky to use. Something important to fancy financy-type people.

And Luckydave, it turns out, is really fucking good at this financial software.

Not just a little good. Best-in-the-world good. He is fast. He is efficient. He is really. Fucking. Good.

Which? Is not actually so surprising! Luckydave is the kind of guy that uses QLab like a musical instrument. I couldn’t keep up with him if I tried. He makes things in QLab I didn’t even know were possible. AND I WROTE IT.

So the temp agency calls to say, weeks after Luckydave accepted my offer, that by golly, the financial company would like to hire him to drive THEIR software. Full-time.

With a starting salary of 80,000 dollars a year.

Kapow.

Ka.

Pow.

Now it is not my business to share what Figure 53 is paying Luckdyave, but I will tell you this: it is not 80,000 dollars a year. Not, I am afraid to say, even close. I wish it were. But we are not fancy financy-type people, and we don’t have that kind of cash at the moment.

So by all rights, that graph up there? That graph up there should have started going back up in May.

But I note to you that it did not.

I note to you that Luckydave thought over that offer for a few minutes, and then?

He said no.

I want you to let that soak in for a second. I’ll wait.

{he waits}

Pretty crazy, huh.

Well, pretty crazy if you just focus on the money. But for many (all?) of the best people in the world, money stops mattering once you have enough to not worry about it.

Is 80,000 dollars enough for Luckydave to give up his life as an artist? Turns out, no. Turns out, robbing him of his life’s passion costs more than that. Turns out, I can’t afford to pay him nearly so much, but I can support him as a creative human being who doesn’t fit in a 9-to-5 structure. Turns out, what I get for that support is one of the most dedicated, cheerful, creative, committed, hard-working teammates I could possibly ask for. Turns out, his battery is charged by being him more than it is by counting dollars.

So here’s the thing, here is my tip, and here is what I want the business owners of America to think about very hard:

Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this. Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being. If they’re a performing artist, I will show you someone who breathes teamwork. I will show you someone who eats healthy critiques for breakfast and grows an inch that day because of it. I will show you a communicator, and a thinker.

I will show you someone you want to hire.

And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.

All you have to do, in short, is create jobs built for artists. The result? Instant competitive advantage.

I think this is a big deal.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get to the point here, but I didn’t know how to do it any more compactly and get the depth of this point across.

I think this is a really big deal. I think the failure to employ artists is an inefficiency in the system. I think it doesn’t need to be this way. I think there’s no reason we can’t collectively set up the same kind of win-win situations that Figure 53 found with Luckydave. I think we should do it.

I’m going to continue working to build my little company. With luck, and work, and grace from the unknown, we’re going to keep making things, and grow enough to make things we couldn’t make before. It won’t be about getting big, but it will be about getting big enough, and every person will count. I don’t have a ton of money to make this happen. But I have enough money, and I have the good sense to give people things more valuable than money.

My tip to you is that you, too, have things more valuable than money. All you have to do is be smart enough and willing enough to give them.