Lunar Module 3D mockup, Place markers & images evident

Google realeased google Earth 5 this week and is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing by releasing deyail maps of the moon. CNET UK’s Crave blog has more details and a few pics. Pretty educational way to blow through your afternoon break

Lunar Module Image (Street View)

Once you’ve downloaded the update, choose view->explore->moon

I took some screenshots of the sea of tranquility info and “street view.” So far no Wallmart or Applebees, but plenty of other stuff littered around. I’ll leave the Star Wars jokes to the able minds of Slashdot. You are welcome.

Cheers

-C

Filed under: Design, Technology by Chad Self
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Who are you, anyway?

I learned this from an old ad man: Chances are your employees can’t correctly tell you what their job is today, so you need to tell ‘em right now so as they know it. Put it on a sign on the wall or hang it from the ceiling.

You’d think it would be real easy to say what your job is. For your employees it is generally anything but straight-forward. Everybody has to be all things to all people. If you get emails you have to be a good writer, voice mail a good responder, cell phone a good text-er for crying out loud. I know of one large B2B company who mandated that all employees create their own Facebook and Twitter sites in order to “better understand and communicate with tomorrow’s customers”. Good grief. No wonder businesses struggle to turn a dime.

And to add to the problem, we got too arcane along the way. We tend to over-think our functional roles and worry about missing something important in their engraved (and public) description. God forbid we leave room for a critic to probe a gap (real or imagined).

Stop the madness! If you can’t say who you are in two sentences or less you don’t know who you are. Period. Make the adjustment or get out of way of those who have a clear sense of purpose in your organization.

Get your mission statement off the wall, and re-write it. Keep it clean and simple: “My job is to produce [product or service here] that pleases the customer and makes the company money.” Hang it from the ceiling, wide and short. Make an oversized version of it and hang it on the wall. Then get everybody together and get them to repeat it back to you. Those that can repeat it accurately and without hesitation should get a reward.

I defy you to come up with a more accurate mission statement that your employees can recall and that will satisfactorily guide their behavior.

In my own company our mission is simple: Please the client with great marketing work; be profitable. The employees know that profitability hinges upon happy clients, regular time sheets, efficient production and professional-grade thought. Great content, of course. New techniques, research, value-added items, delivery on dead-line, good client communication, budget-tracking are all part of the package. But I don’t need to weigh the mission statement down with all those details.

“Keep your eye on the ball” is a reminder that the even the most seasoned professional needs. The simpler the reminder, the easier to remind.

What’s your mission statement? Post your comments to this entry or email it to me. I want to hear how your simple focus has improved your business.

Filed under: Business At Its Best by Zack Self
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Seems I’m running behind in my blog-reads. I missed this statement of support for .webfont on Typekit’s blog last week. That’s what I get for playing with a post as a draft for long enough that it becomes dated at posting.

• Typekit’s release
• A .webfont primer (from astheria.com—who by the way agrees with me on the issue of paying twice, and did so nearly two months before I even knew about the issue. See the article here)

Cheers

-C

Filed under: Design, Technology by Chad Self
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Slate.com had an interesting article about how the folks at Typekit are working to fix the legal issues with the @font-face rule in CSS. The article by Farhad Manjoo explains the issues and concerns of the foundries -vs- the desires of webdesigners. It’s a well written and thoughtful treatise. Go read it. I’ll wait.

If you are running a up-to-the-minute browser (like Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4) you can see the possibilities of the @font-face rule at this posting on the Craig Mod blog.

Before "@font-face"

After "@font-face"

If you are worried that the web will become ruined by the same people who post in brightly-colored, bold, all-caps on e-bay and who can’t understand why no one else uses the “blink” tag, I have a question for you: Where have you been? It’s already ruined. Your question is beside the point…by about 20 yards, and downhill, across the slope, against the grain. If you are not the sort of person who asks that question—and feel slighted by the dismissive tone I just took with you—please allow me to apologize. You clearly are a person of wide and considered experience.

The problem (and if you’ve read Farhad’s post I apologize for restating the problem) is that the nice people who make and sell all the cool fonts (and even the horrible ones) are a bit freaked out that browsers can automagically download their fonts when said fonts are posted to a server and called by the @font-face rule. Typekit’s solution is fairly intelligent and not without precedent. They are set to allow people to subscribe to their service and thus be able to download the fonts. Those who don’t subscribe, or those who stop paying will see the page stripped of it’s coolness (depending on how you view Comic Sans Bold).

Here’s the rub: We’ve already solved this problem. The designers buy the fonts. They use them for the client who pays the designer. The users (or viewers) pay nothing. To them, the design is free—until they pay for the product and provide cash to perpetuate the cycle.

Surely there is a way to keep it as it is. Designers love the font guys. They are the brushes and paint for our work. We clearly don’t want them to be victimized by font piracy. But then they aren’t currently getting paid for all the fonts I use in PDFs. That’s because Adobe reached an agreement and found a way to keep the fonts in cache. They can’t be reused by the viewer for his own designs. I’ll bet that there are some smart people at Mozilla, and Google, and Microsoft, and Opera etc who could come up with a standardized way to do the same thing. I’d vote for that.

I’m sure the guys at Typekit could be part of that solution. I’d vote for that too.

I just want us all to get along…and we can’t do that if I can’t use at least a few of the 20Billion fonts I have installed. (only 20 of them are versions of Comic Sans)

Filed under: Design, Technology by Chad Self
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I think those words, ringing from probably the most poignant movie in the last 20 years well describe the feeling most have as we (hopefully) bottom out in this economic downturn. Around the globe, economies have tried killing themselves so many different ways, and every day we wake up to find out it’s still Groundhog Day.

That’s right. I said it. Groundhog Day.

We are in a tragicomedy.

If it weren’t for the obvious suffering of so many people,  (many of whom I know personally) you could be forgiven for thinking that the only way out is to let the groundhog drive—off a cliff.

OK Larry, on me in 5, 4...

Meanwhile, “Don’t drive angry” and “Side of your eye, side of your eye” seem like the best advice.

Filed under: Design, Technology by Chad Self
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