BeautyDialogues

Promoting Yourself

I seem to be on a real video kick lately. :-) Here's one that came though this morning from Berrett Koehler Publishers. They have a fantastic editor for their newsletter, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, who always cracks me up. This video is a great example of his sense of humor used to illustrate a valuable lesson.

The video's about authors and promoting books, but the points are equally valid for anyone making a public offering in learning how (and how not) to promote yourselves:

Responses to What's Possible Now

I've received some great responses on Seesmic from my question about what's possible now that wasn't possible before as a result of this new communications technology, and I thought I'd share a few of them with you. They're all short - most of them around a minute - so enjoy!

The first is from Julie Gieseke from Map The Mind, who brings up several things that have been important to me about using this technology - the power of deepening connections, and the freedom it gives us introverts to be deliberate and thoughtful about our communications:

Next, Otir from New York talks about the way her own access to knowledge has been exponentially increased by the advances in these tools over the last ten years:

These next two are from software developer Clarence Westberg. In the 1st he talks about the incredible expansion of community this new technology brings, and in the 2nd he amends that statement by pointing out who is excluded from this brave new world:

Finally, media inspiration and video adventurer Howard Rheingold talks about the challenges and opportunities he sees opening before us now in using these tools:

A Question for You

I was playing with Seesmic this morning, and realized I could make a little video for you there. So I used it to ask a question ...

Design Deliberations

I was reading something in Chris Brogan's blog the other day on blog design, a solid informative post about basing each design decision on its congruence with your blog's intended use. At last count this piece had drawn 61(!) comments from his readers, many of them appreciative of Brogan's suggestion to use a thinner header to take full advantage of valuable page "real estate".

I  wrote a long comment myself, in part promoting the idea of a more expansive banner, because sometimes an image is as valuable (if not more so) as anything else you could say. This fact may not be immediately apparent in the largely left-brain logic of the marketplace, but it is no less true. Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind gives a wonderful exposition of why right-brain creativity is an increasingly important component in today's world.

One of the great things about a blog is how easy it is to change it, and I tend to be continually tweaking and fine-tuning my "look and feel" and sidebar content. This new banner, for example, is a radical departure from what I've done here in the past.

Even though it intuitively felt right, I must admit at first I was nervous about using black in the beauty dialogue color scheme, since I usually have a more literal focus on light. Then I saw these lines from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue, and knew I was ok:

"We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness ... All creativity awakens at this pivotal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm."

The power of visual language is undeniable, perhaps because it speaks not only to our conscious, logical brain, but also to our unconscious, poetic intuition and imagination. Like Pink, I believe that gaining intuitive fluency is one of the most important skills you can develop, as a designer and as a human being.

But what do you think? What are some of the design decisions you have made and why did you make them? Where does your own balance lie between logic and intuition?

Visual Conversation

The one-dimensional language of text all alone on a page is a thing of the past - more and more our online communications are being enriched by images and audio, and video is everywhere.

I was taking a walk with the fabulous Howard Rheingold (what's a little name-dropping among friends? :-) last week along a wetland stream at the base of Mount Tamalpais, and as always I learned all kinds of wonderful new things from him. Here's one I can tell you about - Seesmic.

Seesmic is the ultimate Web2.0 communications vehicle. Linked into Twitter and YouTube (so far), Seesmic is a video-based conversational forum and social networking site. It was started by a charismatic Frenchman, Loic Le Meur, and people from all over the world have joined him there so the threaded video conversations are happening in several languages. It's still in alpha, but you can sign up for it and Loic will send you an invitation code.

Now that I've already dropped his name, let me talk about Howard for a moment. He is one of the coolest people I know - not just because he's famous (in my world at least) and has written lots of fabulous books, but because he is absolutely genuine, and because he's so curious that he knows an awful lot about everything and is totally willing to share what he knows. He's been doing lots of video himself lately, and recently launched his own video blog. His latest entry is a hilarious attempt to multi-task while making a video.

Annie

What stays with me from Annie Leibovitz' photographic exhibit (and the book it illustrates: A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005) is her decision to integrate her personal and professional photography into a seamless whole. As she says, "it is one life, not two".

Perhaps being married to Susan Sontag and having close personal ties with many famous people has helped blur her line between intimate and public, but I think it is more to do with the level of her gaze, that seems to see pretty much everything with the same measure. There were many stunning portraits among her collection, but the ones that stood out for me were the ones where it seemed her subjects met this gaze head-on. Here are Annie's photographs of Mark Morris, Eudora Welty and Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, to show you what I mean: