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pooja-r-bi · 5 years

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APRIL: THIRD WEEK

Hello people! this is Pooja Bishnoi and I’m an AS Level, Media Studies student at Bodhi International School, Jodhpur. Here we have selected film as a media text. Then comes the frequently asked question, why I chose this particular subject? (honestly speaking till last week I myself had no idea why media. Anyway I will try to give a satisfactory answer.) If I say I opted for media because I wanted to know more about how a film is made; how much effort it takes to make movie; I want to make a carrier in film making or I am a movie addict, that would be a huge lie. As a person who is not so sociable, gets awkward easily and embarrassed more frequently who overthinks every single thing, would choose a subject which needs interaction like how human needs oxygen, is a little unimaginable. So finally, my reason for choosing media studies as a subject is that I am fascinated by the things related to art and Film-making is an art. It is art because it dwells on your creative abilities and I thought it be great to study a new subject. It also includes creative writing and blogging, creative writing is not something new to any of us it’s a kind of writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature. Then comes blogging I'll be sharing my experiences, thought's and the knowledge that I've gained in my following blogs beginning with this one.

In the beginning of our very first class we were briefed about our syllabus guides which we’ll be following for these two years. We started with an activity in which we were asked to jot down our favorite movies and series along with their respective director’s name. After the completion of first activity we were shown first five minutes of an Indian feature film, “Lunch Box” and were asked to write its analysis in relation to the camera work, use of colors, what we basically grasp as audiences when we watch just the starting, genre, setting and plot.

In the next class while discussing the same clip analysis activity we were introduced to terms like CODES and CONVENTIONS

So,what I have understood from codes is that they are system of signs, which create meaning. Codes can be divided into two categories - technical and symbolic .

Technical codes are all the ways in which equipment is used to tell the story in a media text, for example the camera work in a film

Symbolic codes show what is beneath the surface of what we see.For example, a character’s action show you how the character is feeling.

Some codes fit both categories - music for example, is both technical and symbolic. As for the conventions they are the generally accepted ways of doing something. There are general conventions in any medium, such as the use of interviewee quotes in a print article, but conventions are also genre specific. Also, we were told about how to understand the explicit and implicit meanings in movie posters and movies through codes which are used to grab the audience’s interest or enhance the glimpse of a film.

According to the color wheel that is given below, adjacently placed colors to each other are the analogues.

Opposite to each other colors on the wheel are called complimentary.

Any three colors placed on equal distance from each other are triadics.

A color and two color next to its compliment on the wheel are split complements.

Grayscale - Intensity of black.

Monochromatic - Shades of a single hue.

(CMYR) Subtracted color mixing- When colors are mixed using paint or through printing process light-dark.

(RGB) Additive color mixing- When colors are created with light for example working on pc’s : Dark and Light.

After that we did a small activity related to movie posters different movie posters were displayed in the class. We were asked to analyze them in terms of codes and conventions. Analyzing a poster refers to the detailed examination of a poster. The hunt for the hidden meanings was really engrossing. By looking at its colors, the character on the poster or observing the printed letters.

HOW TO ANALYZE A POSTER

FIRST GLANCE Looking at the poster, identify

The title What emotions did you feel when you first saw the poster?

SYMBOLISM People Person or the character used What do they symbolize?

Objects Items used What do they symbolize?

Colors colors used What do they symbolize?

THE MESSAGE Are the messages in the poster primarily visual, verbal or both?How?

Who do you think was the intended audience for this poster ?

What do you think the creator hoped that people would do after seeing this poster?

AFTER VIEWING The most effective posters use symbols that are simple, attract your attention and are direct. Is this an effective poster? Why or why not?

The poster we analyzed during our class time was of the movie Annabelle.

That’s it for the week!

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jakekehargillphotographicarts · 7 years

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Project Evaluation (approx. 1000 words)

An important part of the way you develop your own photographic practice throughout the course is the relationship between your research (in all its forms) and your own creative practice. You should have been making regular updates on your blog throughout the semester and using it as a space to think through and develop your ideas. Project evaluation is an opportunity for you to reflect on, and summarize, these updates so that your tutors can have a clear overview of your working process, progress and development during the module.

Use the headings below as a guide and feel free to add to this and include images if you wish.

Project Title: Off The Wall

How did this develop and what was involved in the decision making process?

My original intentions for this project was to create album covers inspired by my own poetry, music taste, and views of the world. This process would have been inspired by music, poetry, art, photography and film. I wanted to do this project because i didn’t want to confine myself to a particular creative process; I wanted to be free and experiment with painting, drawing and text. I thought i could bring a fine art approach to this project and condense down into a graphic design. This way, I can be critical in my work and know how to distribute my images to a particular demographic. The decision making process was very important to me and I always took time to see what worked well and what didn’t. I decided not to include Tom’s photo-shoot in the final piece because the creative just wasn’t working and I believe the photos are not as strong as the others in my selection. There are also some images i didn’t include in the pieces because I thought they would not flow effectively. I changed the album art for Emily’s piece a couple of times. I thought the original did not look like an album cover. I added a water background and placed her image on top. I thought the relationship between the two layers did not work. I felt it needed more texture in order to bond a connection between the two. I thought the images were quite intimate themselves; so it did not need to be overwhelmed by another image. A simple border and text does it well.

Subject

Reflect on the subject matter of your project.

The subject matter for this project was not very personal or making a large statement- which is what I am used to. The purpose of this project was to see how creative I could be in image making when it comes to graphic design. The process was about seeing the potential of images and that photography can be a collaboration- with text, music and technology. I wanted the final piece to be tangible to it’s audience. I’ve called it ‘Off The Wall’ because the pieces themselves can be taken off the shelf and be experienced intimately. It is the best of both worlds. I want my audience to know that physicality and the way we experience art forms is incredibly important. The way we see things on the wall, in our hands, the way we hear things in our earphones or out loud is unimaginably influential.

Visual Research

Reflect on how key photographers / visual artists who are relevant to your project research have impacted upon the development of your project?

Explain how they influenced your approach and what you learned from them.

I first started my research at Tate Modern visiting the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition, which kick-started by project. I really liked one of his processes where he used lighter fluid on a piece of paper and sticking it to a magazine; he would then use an empty pen and draw on the other side. Through this process the image would come out on the paper. I was fascinated with this process and realised that I can create a lot of work through physical manipulation whether, that’d be painting, drawing or collage making. The exhibition was very inspiring.

I then started looking at my favourite album covers, and why I like them so much. I started to study their composition, use of colour and text. From here, I took some images and started to experiment with composition and digital collage. I then looked at photographers Nick Knight and Paola Kudack for my first photo-shoot. I was interested in the concept of body language and posing. I did a self portrait shoot, which prepared me for photographing other people and how they pose for the camera.

I also visited the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Tate, which was also very influential. My favorite parts of the exhibition were the corners of the wall where Tillmans put up several images next to each other. I loved the way he presented his work- It felt very personal and I was able to engage with the images on a new level. It all felt very tactile and it felt like it was presented like how someone would decorate their bedroom. There were also many books on display and was fascinated with the amount of archives he has. Tt had got me thinking in terms of how i want to display my work. This was when I knew I wanted the same tactile feel to my work; That people could pick up the photos and have a much more personal engagement with them. It was at this point where I thought I could call the piece ‘Off The Wall’. I knew that the exhibition space doesn’t need to be ‘professional’ or ‘glamorous’, it can be whatever I want it to be.

I also looked at photography books such as Sentimental Journey 2: Nobuyoshi Araki, Requests And Antisongs: James Richards, and Harry Callahan: The Street. I was fascinated with the creative processes of these works, and the way they were laid out on a page. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make a book, but looking through the pages, I got an idea of how I could present images on a page, and the challenge of how can I make a page interesting. The Edgar Martin’s talk was very important to me. I was in love with his most recent project- Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes, 2016. The relationship between the personal imagery was incredibly emotional and is now the best piece of photography work I have ever seen.

Aims, Objectives, Concept

Discuss your aims and objectives and the main concept for your project and evaluate how successfully these have been resolved.

My main objective with this project was to be free in my creative processes and tackle my issue with photographing people. I think I was quite free in my decision making process when it came to creativity, however I think I could have explored much more process such as painting and scanning. I was afraid of the process not turning out well because the possibilities with this project are endless and sometimes the process don’t work well and this is an issue I have had in the past. I think I have photographed the models well. I definitely have some good photographs, however I wish I knew what more I could have done to tell the person who I was shooting. There is only so much I can do as the photographer- people either understand posing or they don’t.

Production

Reflect on the specific production methods you have been exploring and how these approaches and visual strategies have affected your project development.

Photoshop has been the main production method for me. I would print out photos on paper to see how the look on a page. From this, I would determine which photos are strongest, and which sequence it should go in. I would then retouch the photos and play around with composition and text until I came to a conclusion which I was happy with.

Presentation

How effectively have you communicated your ideas in relation to your identified audience and context?

I think I have communicated them well. I think the title works well with the concept and the work. I wanted to find a middle-ground with the way that the images are presented. In the exhibition I may have a CD player or a computer to play music on, while the person engages with my images.

Evaluation

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your project and what you might do to improve it in the future?

Strengths:

I think I have a good concept with this project and have used technical skill well in my photography. I have communicated with people I do not know, which is a challange for me because I am quite a shy person. This has made me come out of my comfort zone and improve my confidence.

Weaknesses:

I have not experimented with material to its full potential. I don’t have a huge range of processes that I originally intended to do. Many of the photos were shot in a studio and share a very visible similarity. I could have changed it up and worked more in colour and escape the studio.

Improvement: To improve the project I would have fitted in more artists to collaborate with. I needed to have a legitimate conversation with them to talk about their music and what it means to them. This way, the creative process would be much clearer and I would have more of an idea of what to do with the images. Overall I am happy with this project and I am still continuing the photograph artists from this University. I hope to create much more stronger imagery and extended my creative possibilities.

#5IMAG003W #wall page and screen

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makeitwithmike · 7 years

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10 Advanced Strategies for Driving Business Blog Engagement

By Aaron Agius

Your blog is a workhorse. Yes infographics and video are extremely popular at the moment, but a well written and informative blog that is consistently updated will never let you down.

You know the stats:

Websites that include a blog have 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links

Blogging is the main component of the content strategy for at least 45% of marketers

Marketers with a healthy blog element to their strategy are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI

B2B marketers that include blogging receive 67% more leads than their non-blogging peers

And more

As a business blogger, you’re aware of the basic best practices – keep paragraphs short, use descriptive headers and subheaders, break it up, keep it scannable, use bulleted and numbered lists – and you’re able to optimize for SEO (while avoiding the mistakes).

But what about engagement? You don’t just want visitors. You want engaged visitors. That includes reading your stuff, of course, but more importantly you want them to leave comments, share your posts with their social media networks, link back to your site, and return again and again. You want them to be unable to live without your blog.

Diversifying your blog content is one way. No one wants to see the same type of post on the same topic week after week. What would be the point? So mix it up.

Beyond that, there’s a lot you can do to give your business blog an engagement boost. I’m constantly amazed by the positive impact these ten tactics can generate. Try and see for yourself.

1. Understand your audience and what they want

You’ve already identified your target, and hopefully even created a few buyer personas to guide your efforts. But you can do more.

This may not sound like an advanced strategy, but far too many blogs ignore the obvious. You have an industry related to your business, and that’s obviously your umbrella topic. But what specifically is your audience looking for in a blog about your industry? Find out.

Conduct surveys and polls to find the topics that matter. Tools like Qeryz, SurveyMonkey, and Google Forms can help (the last two require leaving your site, while Qeryz functions like a slide box or popup). The best way to find out what they want is to simply ask them.

Or identify their interests using Twitter Analytics. Click on Audience at the top, scroll down, and see the Top Ten interests of your Twitter followers.

That should give you at least a few solid ideas and broad subjects to write about this week.

2. Build better headlines

If your headline doesn’t pull them in, it doesn’t matter how great the actual post is because no one’s reading it. The headline is the promise, the post is the delivery… don’t FAIL them (you’ll lose credibility each time you do). To paraphrase the Godfather, make them a promise they can’t refuse.

Use keywords, power/emotional words, limit it to roughly 55 characters and 6-8 words, and remember that numbered lists, FOMO, questions, and how-to headlines perform very well.

So spend more time on your headlines, and maybe run your ideas through a Headline Analyzer or Emotional Headline Analyzer for recommendations.

3. Track the trends

What’s got people buzzing online? What’s already resonating with readers?

Find out what’s hot with keyword research, a quick visit to Google Trends, and a peek at both Facebook Trending and Twitter Trends on a fairly regular basis. If there’s something trending in your industry, visitors will want to read about it. Harness that.

4. Links, links, links

Your link architecture can lift your engagement in two ways (to say nothing of its SEO benefits).

Your internal structure – linking to other posts on your blog – helps your readers find your (relevant) best stuff.

Your outbound links point them to other valuable articles and resources.

Both develop your reputation as an unselfish blogger ready to help more than pitch. Visitors will respond to that. Guaranteed.

Try including a few similar articles using either Related Posts at the end, or littered throughout the text. They will click.

5. Talk to them

The simplest strategies are often overlooked.

Ask questions, encourage shares and comments, make it easy for them to connect with you.

Comments can be wonderful. They’re a form of social proof, so when readers see them at the end, they’re going to trust and engage with your content more than if they see none.

Remove friction like Captcha and other services meant to stop spam (they don’t), don’t require registration to leave a comment, and maybe even link directly to your comment form in the post. Make it easy, end with a question, and people are more willing than not to respond.

6. Go the extra mile

What are the popular posts in your industry? Find out with a simple online search, or using a tool like BuzzSumo.

Next, identify ways you could build upon those posts and make them better: updated, more visual, current stats, more extensive, interview an influencer or leader, include a video or infographic… it doesn’t matter. You build upon the already-successful post and improve it in some way.

Called the Skyscraper Technique, it can bring in plenty of traffic and engagement.

7. Promote and repromote

Most of us already share our new posts on our social media accounts. It’s Marketing 101.

Simplify that with an automation service like dlvr.it (“Share Better”).

But don’t stop there. Sharing just once is not enough. Consider:

Facebook posts hit 75% of their impressions within 2.5 hours, and 75% of engagement within five hours

A tweet’s lifespan is between 18-24 minutes according to most research

The vast majority of your audience will NOT see that share if you do it just once. Set up a reposting schedule for each blog post – twice on the first day, once daily for a few days, the next week, the next month, and then periodically after that at a minimum – to get your content in front of as many new eyes as possible.

8. A plugin for All seasons

There are nearly 48,000 plugins available for WordPress. You don’t want to go overboard, but a few well chosen ones can increase the usability and UX of your blog just enough to bump engagement to the next level.

A few good ones to try out:

Inline Tweet Sharer, Quote Tweet, Click to Tweet, or TweetDis allow readers to easily share your most alarming, striking, or thought-provoking statement or statistic with one-click.

Reading Time provides an estimated reading time at the top so visitors know beforehand how long it will take them.

Atomic Writer analyzes audience engagement with your content to provide recommendations on how to write better posts for them.

9. Build a community

We all love being part of a group. Provide that feeling on your blog, and your readers will be happy to hang around longer and engage more.

Offer groups, discussion boards, and online portals. Let your readers reach out and connect with you and other users.

BuddyPress, for example, allows readers to create profiles, private message other users, create and interact in user groups, and more. And there are currently over 700 WordPress plugins available to customize the platform into whatever you need.

10. Give a little to get a lot

Try a giveaway. Create a contest or draw with upgraded content, discounts, coupons, or other prizes (your latest ebook, your favourite book by an industry leader, a free sample, free attendance at your next webinar, or whatever).

Giveaways are a great tactic to encourage engagement because visitors have to comment, share, or sign up in order to enter. And everyone loves free stuff.

Pay with a Tweet (despite the name, the service works with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ in addition to Twitter) requires readers to share a pre-made note and link to get access to something special.

KingSumo Giveaways makes creating a giveaway dead simple, and visitors earn additional entries for themselves with each new entry that signs up via their URL, so it promotes frenzied sharing (everyone wants to increase their odds). The plugin has worked amazingly well in generating interest, engagement, and email subscriptions.

Wrap

Your business blog is an extension of your business. You should only ever post the very best that you can create, because anything less will reflect poorly on you and your brand.

Share cheap, irrelevant, unimaginative junk, and that’s what readers will think of you. If you take only one thing away from this post, take this: quality above quantity at all times.

But you know that.

These ten tactics – in addition to that golden rule – will increase engagement. It’s a given. Get involved with your readers. Give them what they really want, and a place to connect with each other. Gift them your best stuff for free.

Engagement comes to those who earn it.

Have we missed anything? What strategies have you implemented to boost audience engagement on your blog? What tips have failed you?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below:

Guest Author: Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, including Salesforce, Coca-Cola, Target and others, to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, his blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+and LinkedIn.

The post 10 Advanced Strategies for Driving Business Blog Engagement appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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craigbrownphd-blog-blog · 6 years

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Technologies Set to Revolutionize Marketing Analytics in 2018

Anybody who’s tracked the analytics market would know how new technologies keep on pushing the bar, and changing the analytics ecosystem in unimaginable ways. These tech revolutions are disrupting markets, making old analytics tools absolutely obsolete, marking the influx of enhanced analytics technologies, and making the benefits accessible as well as affordable for SMBs and enterprises. Whether you’re a data scientist, a tech strategist or consultant, or a CIO – you need to remain well aware of technologies that are reshaping the analytics market, and will continue to do so throughout 2018. Here’s a helpful guide. Analytics Technologies Driving The Impact of Visualization Sight is a prominent sense in humans; we remember things that we see much better than those we hear about. Visualization, hence is already a focus area for tech giants operating in the big data analytics and business intelligence space. When the data in question is huge, it’s through visualizations that data scientists and busy executives can identify trends and patterns, pose pointed questions, and take data backed decisions. In an environment where enterprise users have to deal with multi-dimensional data, analytics tools that can offer the benefit of intuitive visualizations can help end users extract meticulous insights from the mountains of data. Tableau and QilkView, for instance, are leaders in the space, and are ramping up their products’ visualization capabilities. Analytics and Machine Learning – A Match Made in Heaven Like everything else, machine learning is changing big data analytics for the better. Use of data analytics for applications such as product recommendations, custom segmentation, churn prevention, and fraud detection can be supercharged by bringing together analytics and machine learning. Enterprises can, for instance, use a content audience intelligence tool to leverage the power of your analytics platform, enhance it with machine learning to filter out the most valuable leads, and follow up with them to drive sales. SAP Brand Impact helps you understand the impact of your advertising and promotions. SAP Leonardo helps developers integrate with Google TensorFlow for creating advanced analytics algorithms. SAP Predictive Service helps internal stakeholders quickly find accurate answers to their questions, using analytics and machine learning. Data Monetization initiatives Whereas the role of Chief Data Officers in enterprises was largely seen as a defensive role, with max focus on ensuring data privacy, and regulatory compliances, things are now changing. The availability of inexpensive cloud storage as well as the plummeting cost of physical storage mean that organizations are confidently creating and archiving more data. IDC, in fact, predicts that by 2025, there will be 180 zettabytes of global data (it was 10 zettabytes in 2015). Data officers, hence, will need to step up and think of innovative methods of monetizing data. Raw data as well as value added components will bought and sold in online marketplaces sooner than you think. Naturally, analytics platforms and technologies are aware of this, and hence will bring in functionalities that help enterprises achieve data monetization goals quicker. Predictive Analytics – A Potential Disrupter Enterprise application service innovators are working on advanced predictive analytics technologies. Now’s the opportunity for businesses to reimagine their business processes by using predictive data analytics to optimize resource allocation and utilization across processes. The collective improvements in margins that predictive analytics powered process improvements can bring about for an enterprise are exciting. Whether it’s uncovering trends from your big data, harnessing the data from Internet of Things, and connecting with existing ERP endpoints – tools like SAP’s Predictive Analytics can get it done for your business. SAP HANA integrated predictive analytics brings the perfect blend of deep data analytics capabilities with futuristic speed of data processing. The world of data analytics continues to evolve; 2018 is all set to be a landmark year, as multiple technology trends seek to converge upon analytics to change it for the better. http://bit.ly/2nkUwSm #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

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nice2meatu · 6 years

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Looking Back: Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf 2017

If you were to ask me what it is like to attend a Beyond Tellerrand event, my initial answer might be:“Welcoming and inspiring!” followed by a very long monologue about why I think it is one of the best conferences in the whole Web Industry. That monologue would most likely contain words like “the atmosphere”, “such diversity” and “bloody brilliant organization by Marc”.

After going to BTConf 2016 in Düsseldorf I was very eager to go again this year. It was the best experience out of all the conferences I attended so far, which, of course, set some high expectations for the 2017 edition. I was looking forward to meeting friends, new people and those I've only known via Twitter or through their blogs. Hugs to you wonderful human beings!

The speaker line-up looked promising to say the least, as well as the events around the conference itself. Arriving on Sunday afternoon, I made it to the hotel, dropped my bags and headed off to Sipgate, where the Conference warm-up took place.

Warming Up – Chillin’ ‘n’ Grillin’ at Sipgate

Free drinks, free food (vegan, vegetarian, grilled goodies like pulled pork, chicken and beef) sponsored by Sipgate, and free talks. We were sitting in front of the office chatting until 10PM. If you were especially curious what it‘s like to work for Sipgate, you could even join a short tour around the office.

The first nicety I want to mention here, which is just one of many tiny details that together make this conference so worthwhile: you could get your badges at the warm-up venue, reducing the time to wait at the conference venue the next morning.

Day One

Wake up. Realize you‘re in a hotel. Realize that it‘s time for BTConf to take off! Shower, breakfast, off to the venue it is then.

Day One – The Exhibition

Arriving at the Capitol Theater right on time and meeting my friends Jan and Mario, we joined the rest of the crowd and entered the venue. The foyer, which Marc calls “The Exhibition”, and rightly so, was packed with people. You might find stands by sponsors, or one corner being taken by the Microsoft Edge team, where all talks could be watched on a TV screen. Eva-Lotta Lamm, who made sketchnotes of each and every talk, had a standing table where you could buy posters she made (she would draw a little something on each poster on request – what a feat), and next to one of the two bars stood a table with books on it.

This table, a new part of the Exhibition suggested by Frederic Hemberger, was the “Book Exchange”. You could bring old books you don‘t need any more and put them on the table for others to take. For free. Also for free: there was a whole table filled with candy sponsored by Mozilla.

All of this surrounding the counter in the center where volunteers hustled their asses off in order to answer questions, give everyone their badges, goody bags and any information they needed. While I‘m at it: big shouts to the volunteer crew, whom I partially got to know, and “Oh Boy” they were doing quite a job there and doing it very, very well.

Cheers to my friends at etherTec Systems, who took care of the conference Wi-Fi! Considering the amount of data going through the connection they had set up.

Day One – The Auditorium

On entering the auditorium you were greeted with music played by Tobi Lessnow. Tobi is a musician, who is producing live during the event, and, just as last year, he was HOT. Dancing behind his decks, headbanging, booty-shaking – he really hooks you up. Last year a sideshow act next to the stage, this year he was on the stage doing his thing.

At the front of the stage stood an old TV screen showing a live C64 demo coded by Björn Odendahl, who also created the shirt design of the 2016 edition.

Take a Seat – It's About to go Down

Music off, lights out, show on. The opening titles by Sebastian Lange are something to watch and right after there is Marc Thiele entering the stage. Smiling, greeting everyone and introducing the first speaker of the day: Christian Heilmann.

A short note on the pace at Beyond Tellerrand: talks are seperated by 15 or 30 minute breaks and there‘s a lunch-break for 2 hours. Before and after each talk, Marc takes the stage for a few words on what's next, who‘s next, or what to watch out for in the foyer.

Breaking Out of the Tetris Mindset

Although being heavily jet-lagged coming in from Seattle the day before the conference, Christian opened it with a wonderful talk. He told us how all the different building blocks of the web combined to make it what it is: a diverse medium built by diverse people. A medium which, after more than 20 years of ongoing development, still has fundamental problems. And yet, both ends of the spectrum of developers working with and on the web contribute to make things better.

“If Tetris has taught me anything, it’s that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear”

In the end it all comes down to a single phrase written into the W3C HTML Design Principles specification:

“In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.”

See the transcript of his talk on his own blog or at the end of the wrap up post for this edition of BTConf (all videos, transcripts available can be found there, so I'll spare you of posting links to each talk or speaker from now on).

Cultivating Community

After this great opener, Sharon Steed entered the stage in order to talk about how we communicate. On one hand, how we, as people in general or as a community (be it inside a company or as web developers or designers or social-media peer-group) communicate; and on the other hand, how this communication can be improved, how it can be used to make us better contributers on our teams.

“The foundation of all great communities is empathy!”

Sharon, an empathy consultant, has a speech impediment: she stutters. The points she drove home were how and why empathy is such an important subject, how good communication makes a community inclusive and what it means to be a positive communicator. All very important points and I hope that everyone in the audience listened closely.

Design Systems

As I‘ve seen Jina giving this kind of talk twice already, it wasn‘t particularly exciting for me personally, but I heard a lot of “Uuuhs” and “Aaaahs” during the session. Jina worked for some of the largest companies in the industry, such as Apple or GitHub, and sure is knowledgeable when it comes to this subject.

First, she took a look back at how Design Systems have existed for a long time already. She told us how pattern libraries, style guides and toolkits evolve and become more and more a deliverable when working on the web.

Pointing out where challenges lie and showing how to work around those were the main takeaways for me. I've already found out the hard way how maintenance can become quite a challenge when a design becomes a grown-up system living next to the website it should mirror.

Comedy and Microservices

Phil Hawksworth. Well, Phil. I really like him. I met him for the first time two years ago while sitting on a beer-bike in Freiburg after the Smashing Conference. (The ride we had that time will luckily never be told in public.) After finding out he will present at BTConf I sent him a note via Twitter.

Phil talked about Microservices and how web developers can use tested working solutions to existing problems to reduce the workload it would take to build all by themselves.

Feeling this syndrome of “not in-house” myself from time to time, this talk really helped me understand when it makes sense to diverge from the standard track and go for prebuilt solutions. The best example I can think of (and Phil also mentioned it in his presentation) is IFTTT.

“There is great power in avoiding responsibility.”

“If This, Then That” is a conglomerate of microservices, where one can create recipes or use existing ones. A recipe can look like:“If I post something on my blog, send a message on Twitter, post something on Facebook and forward the whole thing to Medium.” Since I last looked around there, it sure got more capable than that.

He also talked about static site generators and how they are the perfect example where Microservices help out in making a static site more dynamic.

One of the main points that stuck with me was:

“Complexity can be a barrier while simplicity can be an enabler.”

Keeping it simple and avoiding complexity, can make your, and the life of your co-workers, that much easier.

Hacking the Visual Norm

Data Visualization is really not my cup of tea. I always imagined it to be about endless meetings, where people show pie-charts and bars get thrown around and how on the x-axis there's humor and on the y-axis there‘s the time the meeting will take – and we all know what the graph on that chart will look like.

And here‘s Nadieh Bremer showing how Data Visualization with d3.js is something unimaginably creative and awe-inspiring. You really should go to Visual Cinnamon, Nadieh‘s homepage, and see for yourself as I‘m completely unable to explain the concepts she presented in my own words.

From my perspective, she turned one of the driest subjects every company has to deal with into art.

Peace, Hellfire and Outer Space

Talking about art, meet Seb Lester (creator of typefaces, artist, calligrapher), showing the audience how the typefaces he created have been (mis)used around the world – and beyond.

NASA chose his typeface Neo Sans for one of its projects; the 2010 Vancouver Olympics for all their branding; and then he finds it used on a menu in an Indian snack bar.

Yet, while everyone and their mother used his letters, noone knew the person behind them. Seb showed us a picture of his desk at home, followed by a short video of him doing a calligraphy. This video (fancy a compilation?), among others, propelled him first into the world of social-media and later on international TV.

I love fonts and typesetting, although I‘m not very good at it. I tried some calligraphy but failed miserably – to be honest, I‘m hardly able to recreate my signature since my last name changed after getting married! Meh. However, I almost shed a tear over how beautiful his calligraphies are.

Some found the talk to be cheesy, or thought it to be mostly about himself, marketing his own brand. I found it inspring and also very interesting, as you got to see a different angle on your own work. You may create the most beautiful of fonts, which will be used in space and during the Olympics – and then it‘s the menu of that snack bar around the corner.

The Final Talk of Day One

Award-winning illustrator Yoku Shimizu, who created the design for the BTConf T-Shirts for this year, took the stage and brought a witty and inspirational presentation with her. As she learned speaking English in New York, she also brought a lot of four-letter words with her, which, mind you, did not have a negative impact on the quality of her speaking.

Yet, no matter how well she spoke, the slides were what really mattered to me here. Wonderful illustrations, so unique and yet still identifiable as hers. True pieces of art for each and every image.

I really laughed when she stated (this is not a quote but how I kept it in mind):

“I once did a cover of a Batman Comic. audience cheering and clapping I know, I know. Thanks. It‘s not my favorite type of work, looking back, but it‘s always great for street credibility when teaching young students how illustration works.”

A client project from her early work as an illustrator showed us how creating illustrations for a newspaper, on demand, the night before the paper goes into print, can be a challenge of epic proportions. As Yuko pointed out, it was either working night shifts and taking in whatever feedback was thrown at her from clients, or you‘re out of business because the will tell everyone in their network about how you failed to meet their requests. Talking about demanding clients is something not everyone does on stage from what I know.

Hotel? What Hotel?

Right after the conference, we went to eat and decided, as Jan and Mario hadn‘t been there before, to head to the old city centre of Düsseldorf.

“The longest bar in the world” consists of over 300 bars, restaurants, discotheques, breweries and pubs all on a spot of half a square kilometer. If you can name the drink, you can get it. While nothing for the faint-hearted, it sure is a sight you‘ll remember.

We didn‘t take it to the end of the night, though, as we knew we‘d have to get up in the morning for day two of BTConf.

Day 2

Wake up. Realize you‘re still in the same hotel. Realize that it‘s time for the second day of BTConf to take off! Shower, breakfast, off to the venue it is again.

Blow Away Them Hangovers

While my peers and I decided to take it easy on the first night, a few other attendees (and speakers?!) didn‘t look all too flashy or awake on the morning of day two.

But five minutes into Espen Brunborg's talk, everyone was on the edge of their seats. This has to be the funniest, freshest and most interesting talk I‘ve seen in a long, long time. From how Espen presented, to what he talked about and what the key take-aways were, this talk had it all.

I even caught him referencing “Planet of the Apes” which reminded me of someone else occassionally doing so. Twitter Banter. Love it.

Apart from all the laughs and jokes, the presentation drove home the point which Christian Heilmann had made clear on day one: it‘s not how you got the one holy truth or how others “just don't get it”. It is about how both ends of the spectrum are right in what they do and how, together, joining forces, great things could be made.

I witnessed Jeremy Keith not saying “progressive enhancement” in a talk

Along came Jeremy. He replaced Ellen de Vries, who couldn‘t make it, and I must say it‘s not too shabby a replacement to have Jeremy Keith present as a surprise. Jeremy ran the Indie Web Camp together with Joschi Kuphal on the weekend before the conference and originally planned to only attend the conference.

Well, so much for best-laid plans: there he is on stage talking about how we developers can evaluate technology. How well does it work? How well does it fail? Both important questions to ask before setting out to use a brand-new tool or technology. How well does it suit my needs? How well does it serve the user?

He came to quote Postel‘s law (or the robustness principle) which is a general guideline when it comes to designing software:

“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others“

Being the great storyteller that he is, it was a joy to listen and learn from Jeremy‘s seemingly endless fountain of knowledge. Although he did not say “progressive enhancement” in his talk, he talked about the idea behind it, saying that evaluating technology by looking at its robustness and how it serves the user first should be the way to go.

Performance and Accessibility

The talk I looked forward to the most followed up now: Patty Toland of the Filament Group talking about Performance. The Filament Group, who won the Agency of the year award at the 2015 Net Awards; which created loadCSS, a script I incorporate in all websites I build since I got a hold of it; which shows and tells everyone how performance should be a first class citizen when it comes to evaluating technology for building sites and apps for the web.

Patty didn‘t disappoint. Although it was a pretty fast-paced talk with slides changing in seconds, I was able to follow it quite nicely as I knew some of the facts being presented from reading the Filament blog and Scott Jehl's book Responsible Responsive Web Design, published by A Book Apart (book recommendation: check). Luckily, one can access all slides via the wrap-up article I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Showing how bad performance can impact the life of many users, how bad performance is an accessibility concern, how page weight can cost people a lot of money which they may not have – all of this while backing it up with statistics, case-studies and more. Lovely.

One thing that stuck in my brain is the fact that 3G takes up close to 40% of the network speeds accessing the web on a daily basis. 2G is just as common when taking in global statistics, and around 20% of people in North America own only a smartphone or some other kind of mobile device – no desktop or laptop or broadband internet in sight. Think about this the next time someone states:“Yeah but we all got fiber, now. Why should I care?”

I hope more people care about the low-end of devices and networks, now that they‘ve seen Patty on stage.

Tell a Story with JavaScript

Sarah Drasner, who I had the pleasure to meet once before, told the audience how animating SVG with JavaScript can be part of the user-journey, and how it can make an interface not only usable but also enlightening.

Her presentation contained some nice animations she had created. To see how gradually revealing information can make it more digestable was an eye-opener.

Being on the bleeding edge when it comes to JavaScript, she also talked about her experiences with React and Vue, two competing frameworks being used by many developers around the globe. As I‘ve only dipped my toe into the waters of developing with Vue, it's been great to see her talking about it.

Luckily, after the conference was over, I sat across her at the dinner table and we had the chance to briefly but excitedly talk about how we both love Vue. This resulted in Jeremy stating:“You talk about this as if you have found Christ.” Well, not so much, but it is pretty awesome.

Are Machines Creative?

Quasimondo, also known under his real name Mario Klingemann, works in the field of deep learning and machine-learning, a universe completely foreign to me. I know what people in this section of the industry do, but how leaves me with a group of questionmarks hovering over my head.

So it was impressing to see what Mario had to show. He asked the question of whether a machine can be creative and answered it with another one:

“Can humans be creative?”

Showing the capabilities of his machines by endlessly zooming into pieces they‘ve created themselves or how a computer tried to recreate human faces (talking about five-year-olds portrait painting here) sure was an experience.

I couldn't figure what to make out of this talk: mind-blown. Little did I know what computers are already capable of. A lot of us must have heard the news that a computer beat a human-being at chess, Go, Space Invaders or whatever but a computer rendering art or recreating it? I felt that‘s a totally different thing.

And one thing only a few among the attendees realized: Mario‘s slides all had computer generated art as a background. You couldn‘t tell until the second half of his talk – it looked just like an old oil painting with a few cracks here and there in the paint. Stunning.

All Good Things Come to an End

So, the final talk had to come and it came with something very special to me (and possibly to a lot of people in the audience). “I‘m a fan of David Bowie!” is something millions around the world can say and here I am saying it too. Not the first time, but still.

On stage stood Jonathan Barnbrook, who worked with David Bowie for the last fifteen years and through four LPs released to the public. With wit and insight, and without taking himself and his work too seriously, Jonathan said that it‘s important to not take too much pride in your workings.

You might work for one of the most stellar figures in popular culture and do your best, and still someone might not “get it”.

Showing the artwork for the LPs and other pieces he created (working for Adbusters, for example) made clear how great design is not cramped with a lot of things to make a point. “Good design is as little design as possible.” is one of the ten principles of design by Dieter Rams, and here you got someone who clearly understood what this meant.

Somehow not everyone sees or feels the same, and when Jonathan presented the artwork for “Blackstar”, David Bowie's final LP, social media fired back:

“This Jonathan Barnbrook must be the laziest designer in the world!”

and

“I bet he charged millions for this crappy black star on a white background. This is ridiculous!”

were only two of some comments he showed in his slides.

The End

The 2017 edition of the Beyond Tellerrand event in Düsseldorf was just as good as the one the year before. Thank you so much to Marc Thiele, who never grows tired of sweating the many details I cannot mention here because it would blow this already lengthy blogpost completely out of proportion. If I needed to describe Marc with a single word it would be “caring”. Thanks again for caring and taking the time to talk to anyone having questions before, during and after the conference. While it might be his job to do so, you can see that he does it with excellence and with a passion. If it wasn‘t for that passion, I suppose the conference would be just another event, just another option among many.

Closing this post I will say one thing: I‘ll keep returning for as long as there‘s a BTConf, that‘s for sure. With so much value for money and such a familiar and inviting atmosphere, how could I not?

#btconf #beyondtellerrand #web development #web design

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jvzooproductsclub · 6 years

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