Michaelbox

While the name “Jon Phillips” may not be instantly rec­og­niz­able to you, if you attempt to keep your thumb on a gen­eral pulse of the web design com­mu­nity, chances are you’ve come across him already, or at least his online mag­a­zine Spyre Studios.

I recall the day that the idea of inter­view­ing him came up. Selene M. Bowlby and I were talk­ing and I went to my twit­ter list to see who I could inter­view next. Jon’s pro­file showed up and to me, approach­ing him felt like aim­ing for the stars. I men­tioned the idea to Selene and she was for it 100%, She sug­gested to men­tion her­self in my intro­duc­tion email since her and Jon had con­versed a lot in the past. Thank­fully, Jon agreed to par­tic­i­pate and here we are, about to get to know Jon Phillips.

(con­tinue reading…)

I do not know exactly when it clicked in my mind or what sparked it all, but as I was sit­ting at my day job, the idea of writ­ing out tweets by hand came to me. I sat there rolling it around in my head and it came to me that peo­ple would be able to write beyond twitter’s 140 char­ac­ter limit with vari­able read­abil­ity depend­ing on clear leg­i­ble writ­ing. With the wide pro­lif­er­a­tion of cell phones con­tain­ing built in cam­eras, as well as many photo ser­vices being tied to twit­ter already, there is an extremely low entry require­ment for hand­writ­ten tweets.

There are likely still many of you ask­ing and won­der­ing why some­one may want to go through all the effort. As I have already stated above, if you have some­thing to say that requires more than 140 char­ac­ters, you can get it all in one tweet. Obvi­ously, cre­at­ing one by hand would require more time and effort than typ­ing it through the site or your favorite twit­ter client, but imag­ine the joy some­one will expe­ri­ence when they get a hand­writ­ten mes­sage directed at them. I know my first @mention, directed at emtay­lor (Twit­ter), made her day.

Writ­ing it out on a piece of paper and then post­ing a pic­ture of it, also pro­vides a broad can­vas that allows for cre­ativ­ity to flour­ish. You can draw lit­tle doo­dles, pro­vide dec­o­ra­tions, or any­thing else you can think of. I KNOW twit­ter is full of cre­ative types and I don’t see why we can’t show that off more.

Just because you write out the actual mes­sage on paper or some other medium, doesn’t mean you can’t use your allot­ted 140 char­ac­ters. Some of them would be used for the image URL, but the rest can be used for more @mentions and #tags.

I know well enough that any idea or trend that grows online is very hard to con­trol, if not impos­si­ble to. That said, I am not set­ting any “method of use” for hand­writ­ten tweets, just explain­ing the ori­gin and some uses that have already come to mind. I don’t know where the idea will go, if any­where, but I would love to see it go somewhere.

Be inven­tive, be cre­ative, make someone’s day, pay it forward…do SOMETHING.

Hand­writ­ten­tweets examples

• @gracesmith (Twit­ter) sent this one to all of her fol­low­ers here
• @domencolja (Twit­ter) did this one as an alter­na­tive to dribb­ble as he lacks an account here
• @designcoyote (Twit­ter) sent this one quot­ing Judy Gar­land here
• @rudedoodle (Twit­ter) asked this good ques­tion here

What about yours?

If you are read­ing this post, then chances are high that you are well aware of my ongo­ing inter­view series “Do You Think You Know…”. If you have man­aged to beat the odds and do not know what I’m talk­ing about, just read some pre­vi­ous posts, the series will stand out and you can get caught up easily.

At this point in time, I have con­ducted six inter­views, and they all have had vary­ing lev­els of pop­u­lar­ity and high lev­els of enjoy­ment for both myself and the per­son we’re get­ting to know. Within this post, I hope to explain and describe the gen­eral process used going into each inter­view, even as it is bound to change and evolve with time and expe­ri­ence. I also hope to clar­ify motives for why I choose to make the effort.

Sadly, I am do not hold an employ­ment posi­tion that uses any of my design and devel­op­ment knowl­edge. Any design or devel­op­ment work has been done dur­ing my free time away from a 40hr/week day job. While I won’t com­ment fur­ther on my day job, I will admit that I do still appre­ci­ate the amount of time avail­able to think and brain­storm, even if it does suf­fer dis­trac­tions. It was dur­ing that free time that the first draft of this post was writ­ten then on yel­low legal paper. This is also when all ques­tions, for the per­son in the hot­seat, are con­ceived. I am able to sit, fig­ure out what I am going to ask, and how I’m going to word them.

I have done what I can to keep the ques­tions pretty open ended but also keep some top­ics reg­u­lar with each inter­view. Ques­tions involv­ing favorite col­ors and fonts, pref­er­ence between pirates and nin­jas and the occa­sional zom­bie or pirate, and a non­sen­si­cal ques­tion involv­ing birds on pow­er­lines, have all been used reg­u­larly. One that I take a lot of pride in and put a lot of focus on is about twit­ter users that the inter­vie­wee rec­om­mends. This focus is because almost all of the peo­ple that we’ve got­ten to know together, I first met on Twit­ter. One of the best parts about this ques­tion is the allowance granted to the inter­vie­wee to high­light some peo­ple impor­tant to them. Lit­tle bits of pro­mo­tion and rec­om­men­da­tion facil­i­tates every­one win­ning and meet­ing new people.

At the end of the brain­storm­ing stage, I have fif­teen ques­tions that I’ve done my best to tai­lor fit the per­son, their per­son­al­ity, and their areas of spe­cialty. The ques­tions are a mix of seri­ous and (hopefully)humorous ques­tions. Before send­ing the ques­tions, I orga­nize them in a man­ner that goes back and forth between seri­ous and humor­ous. I do what I can to acco­mo­date for busy sched­ules by send­ing the ques­tions about two weeks before the day I plan to pub­lish the post. I also send friendly reminders, if nec­es­sary, a cou­ple times dur­ing the two weeks.

Once I receive the answered ques­tions back, I put every­thing into a new word­press post, apply the nec­es­sary styling, add the asso­ci­ated set­tings and meta­data, and sched­ule it for the right date and time. The post going live is what I look for­ward to the most, as it is when myself and the inter­viewed get to have fun pro­mot­ing the inter­view and spread­ing the love. Read­ing the twit­ter replies, retweets, post com­ments, and any­thing else make all the time and effort worth it.

At the end of the day, I get to take pride in that I got to pro­mote some­one I care about, sup­port, and believe in. Mean­while, that per­son gets to be in the spot­light for a day and be the focus of peo­ples’ atten­tion. I hope that it is con­sid­ered a huge honor, with them being in a field where so fre­quently they do the high­light­ing, pri­mar­ily for clients. That is why I put forth the effort.

With all due respect to both past and future inter­views, I con­sider this one to be my most impor­tant. With this inter­view, I am hold­ing up a mir­ror to your pasts. When you look into this mir­ror, you do not see your­self, you see Alex Cook. “What do you mean” you say? Alex is fresh out of Uni­ver­sity, and at the start of her path to her career.

(con­tinue reading…)

It really should come as no sur­prise that I’d have an inter­view with Rachael at some point. If you’ve read over pre­vi­ous entries in the blog, *cough* My Time, So Far, as a Min­ion post *cough*, you know I have a long stand­ing his­tory of work­ing with her on var­i­ous projects. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @caffeinatedelf (Twit­ter) or find her at The Caf­feinated Elf It’s with that won­der­ful rela­tion­ship that I am very happy to present her responses to the fif­teen ques­tions I posed to her. Lets get to them. (con­tinue reading…)