Sung to the tune of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables. (Sorry for the extra verse.)

I dreamed a dream of future clear,
Of boyhood plans and vague ambitions.
This thing that I would call “career,”
With cowboy hats and lunar missions.

But then there came the bills to pay,
And dreams were something one did sleeping.
My goals for life I’d put away
Deep in my brain, for safer keeping.

My harshest critics roll their eyes,
Betraying lowered expectation.
And so it comes as no surprise
That I would join in their negation.

The life that I have been denied,
I see so many others living.
Times I thought I’m satisfied
I can count upon one hand.

But then this woman, near my age,
Without a job, with modest dressing,
She sings a song, and she’s the rage,
The night she shows the world her blessing.

On hearing this, the time has come
To face that I’m my only critic.
I must cheer for my own team
Before I kill
The dream I dreamed.

Lest you haven’t yet seen the video, here’s a link. (They’ve disabled embedding.)

The graphic design market is gaining momentum via social media and blogs. It seems the current way to introduce myself into it is to chime in about spec work online — or as I call it, the logo contest model — as used on sites like CrowdSpring and 99Designs, as opposed to RFQ sites like Elance and Guru. So here goes.

The first thing I’ve decided is not to lose sleep over the existence of such sites, or bother with movements that protest them. They serve a niche, and as a businessman who likes the Golden Rule, I know there are expenses I’ll have for which I’ll wish there was a crowdsourcing portal, so I can compare bids. Like the TV commercial says, “When ______s compete, you win.”

“Yeah,” you might say, “but spec work is wrong.” It depends.  

What’s Your Objective?

If you approach your craft with the goal of keeping busy (designing more, marketing less), then you’ll love CrowdSpring. You will also starve to death. If your goal is to maximize your pay per hour worked, averaging in your necessary business maintenance and marketing time — call it the Golden Ratio — you’ll keep CrowdSpring to a minimum.

Here’s my plan to integrate contest-type sites into my workflow. (I’m posting it in the form of advice for you, but understand, this is based on the flimsiest first- and second-hand experience, but mostly having thought about it for a while, and reading this, and this. It’s what I plan to do.)

Don’t bother with these sites until you get some momentum in more traditional, quote-based work. Once you have, don’t never spend more than a few minutes on these contest sites per day, probably a total of an hour a week.

On the sites, you can search-limit and sort contests by kind of work, time remaining, number of entries, or prize amount. (And yes, I’m purposely using sweepstakes language. Sue me.) If there were a way of sorting the contests in order of suckiest entries, that would be ideal. In lieu of that, sort in order of number of entries, starting with zero.

Open each entry in order, without too much regard for the prize (unless it’s a laughably small amount; use your discretion). Read the brief, and use your favorite brain exercise to see if an idea comes to mind. If after a few minutes nothing does, or you don’t like what does, stop, flush your brain, and go to the next one.

If after reading the brief you get an idea that blows you away (and don’t we all love it when that happens?), commit it to vector immediately, skipping a pencil sketch, if you can. When you’re about 80% happy with it, where at least the basic idea is represented well, ready it for submission. Noodle it at least three more times, improving, honing, and put those into the queue. Don’t forget, these people are expecting to buy this idea as is, and you want that, because any custom work is diluting your Golden Ratio of money per hour. Besides, five or six variations from one contestant tends to intimidate the next visitor, and drives this contest down the next guy’s list sorted by entries. But just to emphasize, your entries all have that same kick-ass basic idea. If they don’t, don’t enter them.

Once you prepare the art and make thumbnails (GIFs or PNGS; see their instructions), only then do you enter them together, using pleasant, persuasive language in the accompanying text. Don’t let minutes go with only one entry; you’re being watched.

Once you enter one contest, or if after an hour of searching nothing strikes you as worthy of entry, leave, and get back to work. If something else pops into your mind later, return, and if there are still no entrants, or the entries are suitably sucky, submit it. If you find yourself daydreaming about the design challenge, trying to solve the puzzle, break that habit before it starts, and get back to work. People holding logo contests aren’t paying you to think. At least not for long periods of time.

Carpet Bomb vs. Sniper Rifle

The objective here, clearly, is not to carpet-bomb the contests with entries, which works better in a quotes-based environment, but rather to target the most likely contests, like a sniper.

If your entry is as good as you think it is, the entrant will email you wanting changes. Depending on what they are, this is a good thing. If they’re suggestions on how to better stage the basic idea, or requests to change the typeface or color scheme, you can assume you’ve hooked him. Even if he suggests a rather drastic change, try to see the big picture; it might be as good an approach as yours, or better. Handle the changes the way you would any other client, and submit. Make each transaction a design revision as well as text; don’t just converse with him. Time is money, and he set the price, not you.

This flow of requests for revisions might or might not stop. If they go beyond a certain point (which you set), have prepared a boilerplate statement that goes something like,

I think we both see the merit of my idea, or you wouldn’t be asking for so many revisions. Experience tells me that, when it’s time to apply the logo to various media and surfaces and sizes, changes and variations need to be made anyway. Tell you what: I offer free revisions (you set a limit here) once you become my client, and I can give you my full attention and range of services. Looking forward to working with you on Monday (whatever day the contest ends).

In other words, “Negotiations are over. You love me. So pick me.” (Unlike this post, use only business words, not contest words.)

The day before the drawing, send him a reminder that you’re looking forward to working with him, and attach a revision to your best entry, even if cosmetic.

If you win, make good on your promises, follow through, and get him to know how serious you are about his happiness. There should be a sensation of a switch being thrown. Before, he was an entrant. Now, he’s a client!

If you lose, chalk it up to experience, be glad you limited your lost time this week, put the best pieces into your portfolio, and move on.

Why Bother With Contests At All?

Ultimately, with your Golden Ratio in mind, you’ll use both the contest sites and the quote sites as marketing opportunities. Once you’ve worked with any of these submitters, when they need more design work, you want to loom as large in their mental (or literal) Rolodex as the listing site. Neither you nor he are contractually obligated to ever again use the service that introduced you. You want them to go back to you, and forego the sites — both kinds.

They think they’re shopping for art. But you’re shopping for clients. Until you build that clientele, since you have to make a living, emphasize quoting, and frequent Elance, et al. But don’t rule out contests.

P.S. I look forward to getting a transcript, in whatever form, of the “Is Spec Work Evil?” session yesterday at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin. Please comment here to tell us all where to find it. Thanks.

Currently, the TV networks are getting their face time with Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of the US Airways plane that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River January 15. America can’t get enough of him, and that’s a noble instinct.

I suspect commercial aviation has inherited an important principle from military aviation and astronautics: you train for every contingency so that you remember what to do, and you train the hell out of more likely contingencies so that your reactions are second nature, and are as detached from panic as is humanly possible. This is why it’s impressive to consider the amount of flight time under Sully’s belt up to the ditching, and wonder how average it is: more than 19,000 hours, and a similar amount from the co-pilot, Jeffery B. Skiles, no doubt. In fact, as efficiently and heroically the entire crew acted that day, had it been most any American flight crew in the same situation, you’d likely as not have the same result. (And it would be just as heroic, make no mistake.) The airlines, through competition, a desire to serve, and no small amount of regulatory pressure, have such contingencies down to a science.

So, what will be moment in your next flight when you remember the crew of Flight 1549? Will it be during the drills, when the flight attendants demonstrate the safety equipment in that all-too-rehearsed drone? Maybe during takeoff, maybe landing?

The one time I hope you remember it is when a passenger — maybe even you — momentarily forgets that a flight attendant’s main duty is not your comfort.

It is a concern, to be sure. All manner of market forces drive the crew members toward courtesy and hospitality. But that’s not their number-one job. Their number-one job is one you hope they’ll never have to perform, and to which the crew of Flight 1549 actually got a chance: to save your ass.

The deal is as old as time, when we traveled in ships. Passengers would be taken on, as “supercargo”. In a dynamic drenched in tradition, the captain — and crew, but mostly the captain — would forsake his own safety to ensure that of his human passengers. In exchange, when the captain said “Jump”, the passengers were to ask, “How high?”. It was, and is, a benevolent dictatorship. This is one of the reasons countries that prided themselves in their progress toward personal liberties, such as England, had separate Admiralty Courts: normal principles of the Rights of Man didn’t apply in the hull of a ship. Nor do they apply in an airplane.

America doesn’t have separate admiralty courts. But the deal is the same: the captain’s word, or the word of any of his crew, is law. In return, in the increasingly rare instance it’s necessary, they risk life and limb to save yours. Gladly, at a moment’s notice, without being asked, following rigorous training and simulation.

So the next time your pillow is insufficiently fluffy, or there are too many ice cubes in your martini, or you’d like to stand when you’re told (not asked) to sit — or you see anyone else doing so, who’s actions you could help a crew member stop — that’s when you should think of Captain Sullenberger and the brave crew of Flight 1549. And ponder the likelihood that you’ve got as professional a crew pulling for you right then.

Then get some gratitude, sit down, and shut up. Do what you’re told. Convince the other guy to, as well.

As I enter Week 12 of my unemployment (or as I suppose I should prefer to call it, my “underemployment”), I’m grappling with the frustration of Job Hunting 2.0.

Here’s how it works: You find a listing through any of the services — thus far, Monster and Dice (symbolism alone keeping me away from CareerBuilder, owned by Gannett). You respond to it, cut-and-paste the text version of your résumé (already meticulously laid-out as a PDF but not uploadable or attachable), cut-and-paste individual lines from it yet again into their online application form, then hit the submit button.

And that’s the last you see of it. No rejection, no confirmation, not so much as a howdy-doo. Oh, with one exception: there was a job the employer had pulled, which generated a manual reply (yet still appeared on the list; go figure).  

Needless to say, as a deep chill descends on the New York area, even deeper in these northern hustings, requiring dark, drab survival gear just to leave the house, I find I have every reason — no, make that every excuse — to be discouraged.

And with the extra time, I find I’m absorbing more news from the Old Media (which, when I was in college, was the New Media). It seemed every story alerted me of more facets of our economy, many I hadn’t realized could be affected by a downturn, a good many I’d never even heard of. And they are all reeling from the impact. Cascading their failure, like individual relays bringing down the power grid of entire regions.

In the midst of this, I was expected to write cheery and self-glorifying prose, not only in cover letters but in my LinkedIn profile. (One form, I think it was on Monster, asked me for “career highlights”. Particularly nauseating.)

Manhattan

On Thursday, hoping to break the funk, I went to a Social Media Breakfast in New York City (Twitter-tagged SMBNYC3), hosted by Ripple6 (also owned by Gannett), at the Roger Smith Hotel. (Don’t tell me I don’t link!) I had an invigorating conversation with Barbara Bellafiore, and later Danielle Lanyard and Damian Basile. Thus reminded of my place as a social being, and buoyed by the interaction, I got home, sat down at my computer, went to TweetDeck (my Twitter client), and seconds later, I read this post from Grace Piper:

Predictably, justifiably, all eyes and all cameras panned over to this rescue flotilla surrounding a scene from Irwin Allen’s idea box: passengers in shirtsleeves, disembarking on the wing of a downed plane (US Airways Flight 1549), inching over to a tugboat. A scene made that much more perilous by a harsh Manhattan cold, which was still stinging my cheeks, swelling my (dry) toes and hampering my typing fingers.

It was a firecracker of good news, pre-empting the economic dirge. Now television’s finite windows worked for good, crowding out the bad news in favor of the hero story we knew we needed, and they were only too eager to deliver, and keep pumping through three news cyles now, showing smooth sailing till the inauguration of Barack Obama.

I discovered I was buoyed right along by this story (pun very much intended). As I watched, I became aware of the connections to my personal mythology. My subconscious was making hasty switches of neurons, even as I vegged. I realized, with some dismay but not enough to break my smile, that I was letting the Media dictate my mood, by telling me the aggregate situation of forces that don’t and can’t affect individual people, any more than one individual nail can puncture the back of the yogi lying on a bed of them.

Speedy Delivery

That night, my wife told me she’d overheard talk of some openings for letter carriers at the post office in some wealthy zip codes. I knew the trepidation she had in telling me, and I knew how my societal programming — by those faceless others who monopolize the meaning of the word “success” and “career” — requires me to be repulsed by such a prospect.

But in the wee hours of the morning, I realized I would like to be a mailman.

My grandfather was a mailman for a while, as was an uncle. The pay would be good, the work sufficiently back-brain, so as to allow me to think of loftier things. I would be getting exercise, I’d see many other humans every day, and I’d be done by 3, at which point I could blog my brains out for my currently frozen-on-the-slab niche site, DutchNewYork.com. The thought that I could even entertain such a thing had me realizing how ready for anything three months of idleness and boredom and fear and dispair can make you. I was sick of being down.

That morning, I was whistling a happy tune from my recent acquisition, a Swing Out Sister album from the 80s. I posted the following five tweets:

• Liberating Realization #1 : A drought in my chosen field does not make me unemployable.
• Liberating Realization #2 : A bad economy means my financial difficulties aren’t due to my incompetence.
• Liberating Realization #3 : When you do the same work for 25 years, maybe taking a break will make you better at it when you return to it.
• Liberating Realization #4 : I used to work for a newspaper. There’s one word to describe my fellow ex-colleagues: diaspora. I’m not alone.
• Liberating Realization #5 : Anything I can do that is in demand — anything — is a potential job.

“Break Out,” indeed!

When a woman miscarries, they sometimes give the mother-to-have-been a funeral for the fetus. Amputees often have ceremonies for their dead limb. Is it possible that I need a parting ceremony for a period of my life? Eight productive years spent languishing? Am I in a grieving period for the prime of my career?

The period in question started in the year 2000, at a company that was just getting the idea to circle the wagons. The eight or nine small-town newspapers in Westchester and Rockland Counties, NY, bought throughout the 20th century by Gannett (of USA Today fame), were now one regional entity: The Journal News. A year later, they hired me for the art unit in their marketing department.

Till then, what I’d been doing for a living, clients would call temping, but we temps always call agency freelancing. It was one such assignment that The Journal News made permanent. I’d hopscotch between Westchester, NY and Fairfield, CT, meeting new people in different shops, seeing and comparing different workflows, and overhearing the button-down communication of scrappy small companies.

Gannett was by far the biggest corporation I had ever worked for. And knowing full well what a hoary tradition a newspaper is necessarily saddled with, I took my cubicle with trepidation, suspecting that I was now a cog in a monstrously vast gearbox.  

Compromises

I had a career of making compromises. So this was nothing new, in that respect.

I majored in Communication Arts, with emphasis on film, ideally go get into animation or special effects. My first job out of college, in 1979, was a dream gig: production assistant in a tiny 3D (pre-computer) animation shop, doing shots for TV commercials. (Bob Franz, if you’re out there, a shout-out to you!) That lasted less than a year, after which I couldn’t find a follow-up job. Desperate, I was hired as a paste-up artist in a local Pennysaver. (I think I actually cried during the interview.) I had always considered print the copout medium, because I knew I had the skills for the job, without even going to school for them. All I lacked to make a career in print was the desire.

Guess what I made my career in anyway.

So, after nearly 20 years of doing something that came easy to me (the switch to computer was pretty effortless), I was at the absolute bottom point: in a newspaper. Any lower and I’d have to build a time machine: we’re talking teletype, or smoke signals, or the Pony Express.

Even in 2000, much of The Journal News still was put together with a phototypesetter, a stat camera, a waxer and Xacto blades. In the lobby, they displayed with pride a huge orange Linotype machine. It had two non-matching plaques; one describing the technology, eventually replaced by phototypesetting in the mid-50s, and one describing how that particular unit had been in operation at one of the bought small-town papers well into 1974. That said it all, to every visitor and every white-collar employee, every day.

Disturbance

Anyway, back to my story.

After a couple of months, I noticed something that I considered quite disturbing. A badly hyphenated word. No big deal, you may say. However:

• In grammar courses I took in college, a mis-hyphenation was graded as a misspelling. I was warned by the professors that out in the real world, it would be treated the same way.
• The product on which it was misspelled was the newspaper, The Journal News, the flagship product in a growing list of support products like magazines, one-shots, and web sites.
• The word was a proper name. The name of the pivotal county that is The Journal News’ market. Westchester.
• Westchester is a compound name (west + chester), which means you’re clearly supposed to hyphenate after the T. They hyphened it after the h. Westch-ester.
• The word Westchester occurred so often on the front page that this bad line break would appear at least once every day.

So, in summary: on the packaging of its flagship product, the most visible page, my new employer—the Fourth Estate, the last refuge of good English, not to mention reputation built on attention to detail—misspelled the name of the home of at least half its customers.

It was an easy fix, I knew. (Forgive the tech-talk.) The software at the time was Quark XPress 4, which I’d been using for years. It had a hyphenation algorithm that grouped “tch”, and a hyphenation dictionary that had too few proper names. The instruction manual suggested adding the word to that dictionary. But every desk of Quark XPress, including the platemaker, had to have the identical dictionary; one exception, and every page’s breaks would suffer. So that’s no good.

Another solution, one I had tested, involved replacing every instance of the word with the same word and a discretionary hyphen in the right place. You’d only need to do it at one desk, one page at a time, or even before the copy flowed onto the pages. You could even rig an AppleScript to do it automatically at the pivotal station. It was just a matter of either finding or writing the script, and determining where in the workflow to introduce the change to the text.

So I found out who the guy was in the production department, and I wrote him an email. I told him what was wrong with the method in the manual, and my idea for a workaround.

He responded not to me, but to his superior. Who forward it to my superior. The response, rather than being welcoming, was indignance and shock. Who the hell was I to tell someone outside my department how to do his job?

Not only was the involvement of middle management spanning two departments now a game of post office, where the only suggestion to make it back to me was the unworkable one, the workaround one forgotten if I’d never written it. The middle managers were technophobes. But they were good company people.They knew how to keep the walls between the gardens nice and high and thick and impenetrable.

And they knew why, I assume. They never explained it to me.

What gets me is, the middle manager above me was a new hire. She was charged, you’d think, with breaking down the obstructions, of not just raising red tape over our heads but eliminating it, for the good of the product, and of the customer. However, she dispensed the red tape. She was the red tape. It’s like a boxer hiring a sparring partner, someone whose job is to fight you.

I was now faced with some choices as to how to proceed:

1. Go “skunkworks” on these managers, locate this guy via untraceable non-electronic means, commiserate with him, gain his confidence, use a lot of “us vs. them” psychology on him (not falsely, since we were the only two in this kerfuffle who knew the software), and hack out a solution.
2. Use proper channels, which would have involved filtration of memos up and down, likely resulting in nothing.
3. Determine that this is a die-marker indication of a sclerotic corporate culture, and return to freelancing.

To my abiding regret and shame, I did nothing.

I decided that a company with a management (not to mention a readership!) that couldn’t even tell the difference, or care, didn’t deserve to have the problem fixed. The handwriting on the wall was quite clear, even then: newspapers were going down. And while Gannett led the way in stopgap measures (like a huge online presence), and The Journal News was setting benchmarks for the rest of the company (as trumpeted in the decreasingly frequent printed house organ), it was too little, too late.

I know I could have gone commando and saved the day, getting forgiveness rather than permission, but at the end of that day, what I’d be incrementally saving from mediocrity was a newspaper. Hard to rally loyalty for a newspaper in the 21st century.

Days went by, and no fix for the hyphenation error. Weeks. Months. Years. And my bitterness grew.
Finally, one day, the problem was fixed. (That’s how I knew they switched to InDesign.) But by now the rate of descent of the business was noticeable to all, including the stock market. Gannett is now worth one-tenth what it was when I was hired. The things that changed were in other departments; I was stuck in marketing. In the aspects that impacted me, nothing changed. In fact, they got worse.

And yet, I take the blame for it. I was an at-will hire; every Monday morning, they offered another week of work. And every Monday, I consented. Week after week.

For eight years.

Mourning

So now, here I am, having quit this soul-sapping job, as an alleviation of actual physical symptoms. The money I thought I smelled out here is now elusive, the economy in the crapper, so I’m constantly reminded. And I’m even wondering whether this job eroded my skill level, so much of my creative brain lying fallow, unneeded.

And so I grieve for a slice of my existence on this planet I’ll never get back. And wonder what the future holds for the likes of me, acutely aware of my age. 51.

I’ve come to some conclusions:

1. I have worked for my last big corporation. Or if I do work for one, it has to be young, and consider its youth an asset.
2. I’m going to tell the human resources people the above story, and warn them that they’ll have hired a guy who won’t make the same mistake again, who’ll opt for saving the day, who’ll look with the properly jaundiced eye at management’s attempts to throttle self-initiation.
3. I’ll try to find work only for companies in whose success I have some kind of emotional stake, or can find one.

If you’re an employer and are reading this, you’ve been warned. If you take all the above blathering as good news, then we definitely need to talk.

I couldn’t help using the “Finish This Tweet” meme to my own advantage. What I spent the better part of two days not being afraid of — as best I could — was a colonoscopy. Before you ask, it was routine; the occasion was my 50th birthday, put off until after my 51st but not before my health care coverage ended from my cubicle job I quit two weeks ago.

I owed you an explanation today. I’d like to expand the idea of this post to dealing with fear of the unknown, especially of your insides when you get to a certain age, and why it’s worth fighting through. I’d also love to revisit the whole idea of this fun Twitter game, which was wildly successful for me this time, and benefited only a little from an implied imprimatur from Laura Fitton (see previous post).

The fact is, I’m still a little out of it from the anaesthesia. (Not so much that I couldn’t spell anaesthesia!)

Nighty-night.

A photo after the break…

Highlights from my insides. I tinted them blue to keep from grossing you out.

Last week, I witnessed a fun and touching piece of performance art. Its impact didn’t hit me at the time, and it might have had I participated in it more. But since that day, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. I had the satisfaction of watching a magic trick which, even though I have a vague idea of the preplanning behind the scene—or especially because I do—I have an even bigger appreciation of its execution.

Early in the morning of Friday, October 17, Laura Fitton, a power-user on Twitter going by the name of Pistachio, read the following short bio of another user, whose name is probably Ben K. Weller:

I write songs, record them and sing them for people. I love music and Bass fishing. Most of all I love my wife Liz and my son Dorian.

This inspired Laura to post the following “tweet”:

@benkweller’s Twitter bio inspired this morning’s “Finish This Tweet” (#FTT) “Most of all I love ______”

Some things you should know before we proceed, if you’re new to Twitter:

• “#FTT” is a Twitter code Laura also made up on the spot. It starts with a hashmark (#), making it a hashtag, which makes searching more tightly focused. When you put a hashtag code into search.twitter.com, you get only those tweets with the code. (She clarified herself a little in some other tweets.)
• Laura follows many people via Twitter. But that Friday demonstrated how many people follow her—listening, going to sites she recommends, looking up people she may be conversing with who we ourselves may not yet be following. Yes, I’m among them.

As the morning progressed, I saw some retweets of Laura’s invitation. (A definition here: when I read a tweet from Laura, I’m aware of people who follow me who may not follow her; if I retweet her message, the readerships of two members are made aware: hers and mine. Yes, there’s some overlap, but folks understand. Worthwhile messages get retweeted over and over, to an ever wider audience. This one was, as I could see from my stream of messages. Retweeters make sure they label them as such.)

Then, an update from Laura herself, as she reveled in the responses:

Your #ftt answers are lovely. anyone may watch them come in right here: http://tinyurl.com/5ky49e

That “tinyURL” (compressed to better fit into the 140-character limit of Twitter) brought you (probably not any more; try this) to a page showing all the people who answered Laura’s question.

Scores of people. about 90 in all, counting many retweets and Laura’s reminders, over that day and most of the next.

Such a range of people, from all walks of life. And the responses ranged from self-promoting and businesslike to unashamedly altruistic, from snarky to deeply moving. Each singing a verse of a worldwide song.

• hearing my boys giggle
• a cool and sunny day
• proper Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut
• a hot shower
• splurging when shopping
• serenity
• Fridays
• sleep
• intellect, sense and geniuses
• laughing so hard I snort
• turtles
• sharing information with other professionals in my business
• my kitties, who still crack me up every day
• my luck in living at this time in history
• friends who tell me my links are broken
• iGoogle, TGIF, Red Sox, Plumber, Obama
• bacon cheeseburgers
• my support team
• my grandma
• sunshine in the fall
• organ donors
• believing in people and watching them do things they themselves didn’t think possible
• Krispy Kreme donuts
• puppies and cupcakes

By far the most popular answer was family—spouse, kids, parents. Variations thereof.

As I paged through the responses, I realized that they, and potentially hundreds of others, were seeing the same variety. The snarky responders were reading the moving responses. The altruistic were reading the businesslike responses. Each got an idea of their position in the cosmos that is Laura’s “followship” (my word; feel free to steal). And all the participants had a link to their bios, their stream of updates—their little corner of the world, which anyone was free to visit, get to know, maybe start to follow themselves. There’s no way to measure how much of that was spurred by this one notion.

There are precedents for these memes, which flare up over a few days, satisfy a popular urge, then die off. Still, Laura had another shoe to drop.

Then, later that day, we were treated to the answer from the questioner herself:

Most of all, I love… (reunion with my babies!!!) #ftt http://seesmic.com/videos/4…

(That above code definitely won’t take you there; try this.) Connected to the other side was a treat: not another 140 characters. But a video. Recorded on a service called Seesmic. With her laptop out in an adjoining hallway, we see Laura taking a seat, waiting for a few seconds. Then three figures enter the picture, two of them children.

Her children.

They run up to her, she scoops them up, there are hugs and kisses, and talk about the absence.

We’re witnessing what I can only assume is some formal visit, or revisit. A bit of her reality, made even more touching if you’ve been able to assemble her unofficial biography from little 140-character glimpses, easily missed admissions of vulnerability, as the weeks and seasons unfold.

And just like that, we’re swept in. The fifth person in the room is us. And all five of us are beaming.

Laura has spent a few minutes, dispersed through the morning, telling us a story. In one sense, it covers the moments of a visitation transition, culminating in the video, played out with a cast of three or four. In another sense, just as real, it’s a drama that unfolded over two days, involving a cast of hundreds and hundreds: the original responders, plus subsequent connections, as people saw each other across a crowded search result page. Like a story told or sung by someone standing by a fire, surrounded by a ring of listeners, all of whom are visible across the circle to exchange a smile, or a shrug, or a finger-down-the-throat barf gesture.

The story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. she had the end in mind all along, and the wifi all checked, even as she told us about the bio that gave her the idea. We were the middle. The part of the story that introduced us to each other may not have ended yet. And this is just the first “FTT” day. Laura would never claim ownership to it. Who’s next?

As far as the social media or business or networking implications of Twitter, I’m still a student, though because of my circumstances of late, I’m learning fast. What I think I know when I see it, is art. I’m not privy to the lightning bolts she and the rest of the Twitter pantheon are hurling far above my head. But I can tell you that Laura is a successful and talented multimedia artist. And if it turns out that the marvel of the happening is lost in my telling, well then, you just had to be there. Join Twitter, follow Pistachio, and watch your updates.

And follow me too. I could use the followship!

Nothing would give me a bigger kick than for this to become an authoritative and highly Dugg pillar-post, telling one and all once and for all how to design a killer logo. I’ll be happy enough to cull together the things I’ve learned in 25 years of the pursuit, for you to compare with your own experience or recall should you ever get to similar crossroads in your craft.

I’m assembling this as I depart a job where I was not at liberty to use all these rules as often as they applied. And now, as a freelance designer, I am. I have this folder of a few dozen logo designs, called “my way”. When I’d get frustrated over a logo I thought was designed badly but had to use for my job, I’d take a shot at it myself after hours. I’ll show them in future posts on this blog, which will slowly morph into a design blog, I guess.

The above logos were for my former company’s credit card auto-renew subscription program. They went with the first one, but after a while decided (wisely) not to bother with a logo at all.

Let’s begin. 

1. A logo is an important message. Style always takes a back seat to clarity. (#13 explores what I mean by clarity.)
2. A logo is an entry into an arena of competition for attention. Anything goes, including the breaking of any design rule, if there’s a reason. (In fact, if it doesn’t break at least one rule, it’s probably wimpy.)
3. A logo is a symbol. The best logos have elements that actually symbolize an aspect of their subject. Every element should serve a function.
4. A logo is a brain tickle. The fewer visual tricks, the better. One is best. if you can think of more than one, use them in additional suggestions (see #7).
5. A logo designer is a consultant for that part of business that involves visual identity. Learn business and marketing. You’re advising a business owner to spend a hell of a lot more on design than he ever intended; you’d best justify yourself.
6. A logo is not a lottery ticket. Do not enter logo contests. Your service is as a consultant (see #5). If you “win”, do you consult before or after the drawing? Don’t rob your client of your expertise. And buy your own damn iPod.
7. A logo is a choice, made by your client. Never deliver less than three distinct and equally viable approaches to the design problem. If none of those work, do three more, and three more, without complaint. Charge a flat fee for the whole process, with the assumption that you’ll be back to the drawing board. Charge enough.
8. A logo, like any creative work, is a balance between your originality and synthesis of other people’s originality. (So are their logos.) Looking at other logos and borrowing their style isn’t cheating (although outright lifting of their work is, of course). Don’t be surprised if you look at a logo you like and get an idea that bears no resemblance to the logo you saw.
9. A logo is (sometimes, among other things) a work of typography, and typography is an outgrowth of calligraphy. Learn calligraphy, to get a better understanding of why letterforms look the way they do. And bone up on your ability to identify typefaces. Call them out during TV and movie credits. (If you don’t drive your friend or significant other nuts, you’re doing it wrong.)
10. A logo is a work of fashion. Don’t leap to current trends, but don’t fight a design’s tendency in that direction. There’s nothing wrong with a timeless look — nor with a bleeding-edge look, providing you make the client aware of the expected shelf life. Keep in mind, some of yesterday’s trendy looks are today’s timeless looks.
11. A logo is a technical specification. Anticipate all the technology that will be used to put your logo onto things. Don’t think that your client’s list of such applications is final. He doesn’t know. You do. Make variations that retain the design elements, yet are more easily reproduced in different media, or take advantage of a medium’s higher capabilities. (In other words, it’s not just dumbing down.) Package the result with clear instructions, so anyone else can guide technicians just as you would.
12. A logo is an appeal to a target audience. Be aware of who they are, what their expectations are, and whether you meet them, exceed them, or screw with them — whatever works.
13. A logo is a mental challenge. It should deliver 105% of the viewer’s level of understanding: just enough to get him to make the cognitive leap to where you are (thus furnishing him with a sense of accomplishment), but not so much that he misses the point (and feels inadequate and out of the loop). Undershooting the viewer’s level of understanding for the sake of obviousness will feel like pandering, and will come back to bite you in the ass. And yes, in my experience, speaking at exactly his level (100%) will feel like pandering. This 105% factor is how I explain what we commonly call “cleverness.” (Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?) A client may give you grief over this point. If he persists, drop him as a client. It’s just not worth it.
14. A logo starts its life as a doodle. Use pencil and paper (or Photoshop and Wacom tablet), not the software you use to execute the final logo. Limitations often create interesting results, but not at first.
15. A logo is a flag, a pennant, a talisman. An ordinary logo just identifies; a great one rallies. Use passion, instill meaning, elicit emotion. Channel your client’s intention; be his hands. He may be a huge corporation. Don’t you be. The stakeholders must care about the logo. But the logo has to care about the mission.

Maybe it’s the pouch.

Should Dutch New York be a launchpad for podcasts, or a rich blog with embedded media? Are they mutually exclusive?

Next week, I will be going to PodCamp Philly for the two days. Unlike PodCamp NYC, I will come armed with an actual project, DutchNewYork.com (see previous post), for which I have a fairly overarching question. I suppose it would be good to get my quality-if-not-quantity readership on the case as well.

The plan would be to provide the most reliability through the blog, which would serve as the backbone property, delivering a post at least once a day, maybe with regular weekday features, such as Links Wednesday. I feel adept in all Internet media that can be embedded in a WordPress blog, and hope to use them all. The subject matter will dictate the choice of medium. If I’m concentrating on an artisan with examples of her work, it gets a Flickr slideshow. If it’s an event with much activity and people doing stuff, nothing but a short video will do. A meaty interview with a guy in a necktie sitting in an office calls for an audio recording, and a little play-control widget embedded in the post. Whatever makes sense between two blog paragraphs that bolsters a point being made right then and there, that’s what dictates the embedded media. I think.

The thing is, after a number of such recordings — say, five interviews — there will be the argument that I should post them and syndicate them into a podcast. Or even that I should plan on doing that from the start.

There are some good arguments in favor. There will be those who discover the podcast first, maybe never get to the blog or use it for show notes, and care not to go beyond that. Producing with them in mind is good for overall audience count, which will be valuable come monetizing time. (Sorry I used that word.)  To postpone this is to leave money on the table.

To me, there are even stronger arguments against the idea. A podcast is, for good or ill, an unwritten commitment to consistency, usually one episode every week or two. This means that my attentions to punctuality are split three ways: the blog, an audio podcast and a video podcast. What if one week there are two things that happen that would be best on audio, but neither are suitable for video? To satisfy the subscription demand, I’ll put onto video something that doesn’t belong there. (This is assuming I can find the time!) Also, each snippet will now have to be packaged like a free-standing show, not only with an opening and closing, but with cross-network pimping. While I subscribe to and like Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation podcast, the first ten minutes are wasted on me, because he’s going on about every other Web stronghold for which he wants to up the odometer. I don’t want to do that. I would rather drive traffic expressly to the blog, where they’ll discover at their own pace the connections to all the other places and media I’ll have up, but mostly get enthralled by the content.

What would you do in my case? Can audio and video start out as just enhancements and illustrations on the blog and later convert to podcasts? Should they ever? Should the podcasts be established right out of the box? Remember, this is a nights-and-weekends project at first. I have a staff of one (me), and no money to pay anyone else.

What are your thoughts?

P.S.: I made sure to get the .com, .net and .org of the domain DutchNewYork. Which I bought from GoDaddy for about $24. Does that make me the Peter Minuit of the blogosphere?