THE AUTODIDACT DECK: CARD 94

The Autodidact Deck was introduced and explained in this post.

The Resume Remixed

In what ways are formats, standards and best practices getting in the way of your creative work?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately.

A couple of friends are working on a project that I encouraged them to pursue together. Every few weeks they share what they’ve created so far and I am always surprised. Even if they are executing something I suggested it is always delivered in a way that is completely different from what I imagined. Part of this process has been an ongoing conversation about formats, standards and why are things the way they are. 

This project has led to a lot of questions: at which point did the formats or the media used change the creative process? Did composers write symphonies because that is what the vision was or because that was the expected form the composition should take? CDs (remember those) held approximately 75 minutes of music, but did albums need to be 75 minutes long, or could they contain less music? In the digital age, what form would an album take? Can the album be reinvented? (One could argue that iTunes LP is the album reinvented, but that is exclusive to iTunes, what would the universal new shape of an album be?) Are plays creative works meant to be read or seen in production? Is the theater of the imagination better than an actual theater? What is a theater? What is a book? A magazine? What is a website? An advertisement? Is an open source environment better than a closed system? Is HTML5 better than Flash?

Restrictions can be very helpful to the creative process. Limitations often yield the best creative solutions because of the discipline they enforce. But I worry that over time we’ve conditioned our creative process to fit the things we know to be true making innovation evolutionary rather than truly visionary. Having true visions devoid of formatting restrictions has become something we are not trained to do. 

It is exciting to be at the threshold of so much change in media and technology. This is a perfect opportunity to not only create smart work, but to also take the time to question the forms the work will inhabit. 

As someone that is currently looking for interesting projects and collaborators I am always asked to submit my resume first. The resume becomes the summary of my career as well as a billboard for my personal brand. The resume is the one thing that determines whether the conversation stops or continues, but there is no way that it could present the full picture. And so, all this thinking about formats, and inspired by remix/mash-up culture I decided to do an experiment. 

I created an EP for my resume. I developed the Antonio Ortiz Resume EP 2010, an interactive PDF which includes my original resume and nine remixes and an EP exclusive. I experimented with content and with format to present a more complete picture of my career and how I work. I’ve already thought of additional remixes to create in the future and have asked some friends to be guest remixers and create their versions of my resume while I return the favor. 



Download the EP PDF here. Please take a look, see what you think. Feel free to share with anyone you think would enjoy it or find it interesting. What other remixes would you suggest? Would you remix your resume? Your personal brand? Would you allow others to do so? 

And if you, or anyone you know, would enjoy collaborating with me, please let me know. 

In what ways are formats, standards and best practices getting in the way of your creative work? 

And what are you doing about it?

The New Newsstand Redux - The iPad?

This is a continuation of a post found here.

Yesterday Apple introduced the iPad. After all the build up of anticipation and the managing of expectations via leaks to the press, the product was finally introduced. And in less than 24 hours it has gone through the whole zeitgeist cycle of want-need-hate. Most of us have not even seen or touched the device, yet we have already judged it.

This is a symptom of a 21st Century cultural malady. We are quickly loosing our capacity for wonderment and surprise. If we discover something that we then love, we immediately want to know how it was made, why, how much did it cost, how long did it take to make. Be it art, or technology, or entertainment, even news. We are loosing our ability to appreciate awe-inspiring experiences and in the process rendering them ordinary.

We do this by constantly negotiating with ourselves about how we are to have the experience. If we are expecting the release of a book, a movie, a new product, anything really, we begin an internal dialogue that looks somewhat like this:

Oh, that’s cool. Let me look that up online.

Wow, that’s really cool. Can’t wait for it to come out. 

It is going to be so awesome. 

I’m sure that it is going to be exactly what I want it to be and also will surprise me with unexpected twists.

I don’t know. I heard that it may not be good. 

Here it comes, here it comes, almost there. 

Well, how can it be everything to everyone. 

Maybe they’ll surprise us and it will be better than magic. 

Here it is.

Is that it?

I don’t know. I expected more. 

We can no longer let things be what they are and appreciate them. Everything now has to be created with an aura of awesomeness. Not only are we loosing our capacity for wonderment, we are also loosing our capacity to be fair and effective critics. 

I am by no means trying to elevate the significance of the iPad - much has been said already about the name, in three years all the jokes will be forgotten, maybe less depending on how many early adopters embrace the device. Instead I want to put it in context from the point of view of someone who clearly loves technology. 

I am not an Apple cultist, some of my peers may disagree, on the other hand I’ve worked with Apple products since the late 80s and love them because at every step of my growth I was able to almost seamlessly customize them to allow me to learn more and do more. Consistently and with a minimum of irritation (compared to my experiences with other systems) I’ve been able to use Apple products as tools that adjusted to my needs and then almost got out of the way. 

So here is my take on the iPad. Like almost everyone I know, my initial reaction was decidedly “is that it?” The buzz leading up to the event so hyperbolic that it really was impossible for whatever they were introducing to illicit something more than a “there’s got to be more” response. 

Since then, I’ve watched the keynote, downloaded the SDK and given thought to how I could use this device. 

The clipboard is now obsolete. Any job that used clipboards - for medical charts, inventory, to name a few - for easy access to information can be enhanced greatly by having this device, even more with a custom made application. The idea that as a creative services producer I can do rounds in a creative department with all of my workflow assignments, budgets, timelines, emails, project history, creative notes and briefs, everything easily available, makes me think of how much more I’ll be able to do on any given day. If companies then develop custom made apps to integrate into their current systems this could be a groundbreaking device for running day-to-day operations. I will spend the next few weeks learning how to develop for the device by producing an app that addresses all my work needs. 

By embracing a few behavioral modifications the iPad could also become a productivity tool for creatives. Think of all the things that keep you from your work, your favorite distractions, twitter, facebook, rss feeds, email, all of them. Now, decide that you’ll only engage in those distractions on the iPad and you’ll only do it 3 or so times a day. In turn, your desktop or laptop then become devices used exclusively for work. By physically separating work and play into their own devices you’ll quickly notice all the ways in which the distractions encroach on your creative processes, or worse, all the ways in which we use distractions as procrastination tools. 

The iPad is a 1.0 product that, much like the iPhone, will become even better in its 2.0 incarnation. It has some flaws and some limitations, but what it does it does mostly well and fast. Really fast, thanks to Apple’s own chip.

As for my beloved magazines, it is obvious now that for them to survive they need to stop thinking of themselves as publications and start thinking of themselves as applications. Because the new newsstand is the app store.  

 

The New Newsstand

What was the last magazine article you read? Where did you see it? Why did you read it?

In a few days Apple is expected to introduce a new device, affectionally known as The Tablet until then. Very few know what it will be, what it will do, whether it will be some kind of e-reader. Many publications are hoping, and preparing for, Apple doing with them what it managed to accomplish with music via the iTunes store. This is not about The Tablet, though inspired by it, but instead it is about magazines.

I love magazines. I blame my parents.

On alternating weekends, while growing up in Puerto Rico, my parents would get me and my sister in the car and travel to a different town, half hour away, to visit a small, hole-in-the-wall newsstand. I remember the place being crowded with books and shelves upon shelves of magazines from Spanish speaking countries. It felt foreign, European. I think it was owned by a Spanish family. I am probably romanticizing the memory.

My mother would collect stacks of oversized fashion magazines held for her. My father would pick up obscure books to complement his massive law book library. My sister and I would pick up comic books from South America. We would then visit a cafe and get small bags of deep fried treats, savory and sweet. And while nibbling on churros and drinking coffee we would read.

In that newsstand I discovered magazines. Back then my favorite was Muy Interesante - Very Interesting. Not Interesting but Very Interesting. A Spanish magazine full of fun science. I remember reading articles about how soap is made, about oxygen, about the vastness of the oceans. Every issue a perfectly random collection of information that I devoured with intense curiosity. I remember also looking at all those magazines, from all those different countries and noticing the ads, the designs, the diversity of the Spanish language.

Around the same time my parents introduced me to computers. A Tandy TRS-80, a Commodore 64, a Colecovision, with their big rubbery keyboards, my welcoming hosts luring me into the digital realm. I have vivid memories of my father sneaking me into a BASIC programming class he was taking at night, and me discreetly sitting at a terminal writing and compiling code for the first time, a simple program that printed “Hola” on screen.

In the early 90s, after college, and with me now living in New Jersey, the passion for technology and magazines grew. I dove into the deep end of the web before most people knew what it was. I created a website to promote the Rutgers Arts Center, completely text-based, an experiment really. I had an email account as early as 1987, one of the perks of studying computer science. In 91 or 92, I am not sure which year, I received a holiday gift (a mousepad, a coffee mug) from Amazon.com with a letter telling me that I was one of their Top 50 customers in New Jersey.

And I subscribed to everything.

I had subscriptions for Premiere, The New Yorker, American Theater, Theater Crafts International, GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Interview and on and on. I can’t even remember everything I was subscribed to. I slept little and read a lot. I had books and magazines with me at all times using train delays and other inconveniences of travel as opportunities to catch up on reading. To me magazines were the perfect tool for exploration. By getting magazines I was allowing myself to be within reach of a multitude of ideas, opinions, visuals. I would clip and save articles and layouts I liked. I would get excited when I checked my mail and there would be stacks of magazines waiting for me.

Then the rest of the world embraced the web. Slowly I migrated from reading magazines to reading online with the added advantage that most everything was easily available and free. I still subscribe to a few magazines, Wired, Esquire, Communication Arts, because I like them as physical things - the thickness and richness of the paper, their fantastic layouts and spreads — as much as I like them as distribution mechanisms for information. On the other hand, the list of RSS feeds, twitter lists, and other online content I read surpasses what I read on any printed page.

Now we are exposed to as much random information as we want at all times. Feeds and streams of information like a fast moving river we can look at, dip a toe in or swim in as we wish. Then we write about our experiences in the river, our words contributing to the streams that make the river bigger. The problem with this transition is of course that we become the editors of the information we consume and therefore limit the amount of new information that enters our lives. For the most part we only read things we are interested in. Additionally, with that much information constantly available to us, a keen ability to discern, very quickly, what content we will engage with and what will be dismissed is needed. 

There is great value to having an editorial voice, aesthetic and vision. A group of eclectic individuals curating ideas, putting together issues that include things familiar and completely new. That is the power of the magazine. The advantage that people that still seek magazines acquire.

But today, in 2010, what is a magazine?

There are sites online that have editorial voices as strong as any printed magazine. Even magazines that exist exclusively online, though they don’t call themselves magazines. There are individuals that single-handlely curate information in a way that rivals any established magazine. Printed magazines have begun to embrace the norms of the web in their formats with Esquire going as far as sometimes underlining in blue, like hyperlinks, phrases and words that have footnotes. What we are witnessing is the mashup of both worlds: rich content with a specific voice, supported by advertising, presented in a format that readers would embrace and pay for whether online or printed.

Online magazines are looking to grow and printed magazines have to change their business model or perish. Last year we saw the atrophy and death of many magazines, from the obscure to the Gourmet and I.D. Perhaps magazines should evolve to be printed only a few times each year as a supplement to the web, the reverse of the current model, with exclusive print-only content.

As a consumer of magazines and books, as a reader, something interesting has happened to me as a side effect of this evolution. When I am reading something that is actually printed I find myself completely aware of how much longer I have to read before I finish. It is not a short attention span or lack of concentration, I can still comfortably read for hours. It is a constant, almost unconscious calibration of the time spent with any given written piece. On the other hand, anything that I read on a screen lacks this distraction. I can read on screen, scrolling and scrolling, completely loosing track of time.

Which brings us back to technology. Next week Apple will, once again, put on The Greatest Show On Tech. Some kind of tablet will most likely be introduced. It will probably handle magazine content like this:

With Apple’s acquisition of Lala and the rumored expansion of iTunes to the web, soon your library of movies, music and most likely books and magazines will be in the cloud. The newsstand, now an ethereal concept, available to you everywhere. Apple will probably surprise us again and the device will not only be a tool for content consumption, but also innovate ways to create content of our own. I will probably get one and read more because of it.

This is all informed guessing, about Apple and the future of magazines, and for those of us that enjoy technology and reading, very exciting. One thing is certain, magazines in digital form guarantee no more loose subscription cards and no more perfume strips.

The Autodidact Deck: Card 61

 The Autodidact Deck was introduced and explained in this post.