Sometimes it takes a small push to get the creative obsessions going. Like the majority of the country, I’ve been appalled at Donald Trump’s presidency. From his administration’s cruel policies to just how awful of a man Trump has shown himself, I have been gritting my teeth for four years, waiting for him to lose his re-election bid. I was profoundly concerned about democracy in the United States and how it was being actively undermined by Trump and his band of far-right Republicans.

When Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, I made a poster and website called “Inside Trump’s Brain.” I knew back then how terrible of a president he would be, but had hoped he’d grow into the office. Boy, was I wrong.

So when Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination, I needed to do all I could to get him elected and make Trump a one-term president.

I donated. I talked to the few I knew who supported Trump. I joined Biden’s texting team. But then my friend Christopher Simmons put out a call to his network for artwork to show support for the Biden & Harris ticket. What began as a one-off for me turned into a series driven by not only the cause, but by a need to just make. I became obsessed with 3D typography and loops. The format on Instagram is about creating bite-sized animations that can catch people’s attention and make them pause their scroll for a few seconds.

Here are the pieces in the order in which they were posted. But do note that the “United We Stand” image came first. It was a collaboration with my very talented sister, Gloria. She provided the paintbrush textures and some color consulting.

I have always liked writing. I don’t fancy myself a professional writer in any way. Still, I like having an outlet (or outlets) for my random musings as I work through understanding the world, be it design, technology, or whatever. While I have published various blogs in the past or written articles and essays on Medium, I want my content hosted on a platform I own and control. So, I’m consolidating everything here on my personal site, which may become a haphazard amalgam of subjects.

This is officially the first post on this site, but I will be bringing in posts from the various past platforms and backdating them to their original publication dates.

I will also use this site to post links to stories and articles I’m reading. It will inevitably be an assortment of design, tech, Apple, and politics.

To borrow from one of my favorite authors, Jack Kerouac: I have nothing to offer except working through my own confusion.

Thank you for the indulgence.

This was originally published as an item in Issue 005 of the designspun email newsletter.

Great art can be born out of great unrest. Anti-government, anti-evil propaganda harnesses the frustration and despair people feel in times of crisis. Mark Fox and Angie Wang (aka Design Is Play) are following up their award-winning “Trump 24K Gold-Plated” poster with a new series of anti-Trump agitprop. The pair have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund three posters, “Trump: Lord of the Lies” and a diptych called “White Lies Matter.”

From their Kickstarter page:

We designed Trump: Lord of the Lies to create a succinct mnemonic for Donald Trump’s corruption. Likewise, the White Lies Matter diptych crystallizes Donald Trump’s history of rhetorical flirtations with white supremacists. And after he is voted out of office, this work will add to the body of evidence that many Americans can still tell the difference between what is true, and what is false.

(Side note: I used Design Is Play’s No Trump symbol in my little anti-Trump agitprop, Inside Trump’s Brain, a single-page website to protest then-candidate Trump.)

Protest art is created all around the world. Hong Kong-based designers last year made many compelling posters. Most take the stance of solidarity in the face of an overbearing and overreaching authority. Hence images that reference the Galactic Empire from Star Wars or homages to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

Raw defiance gives way to a more hopeful aesthetic from Shepard Fairey’s We the People series from three years ago. Slogans such as “Defend Dignity” and “We the Resilient have been here before” adorn striking portraits of people of color. I remember seeing so many of these during the Women’s March in Los Angeles.

In The New Yorker, Nell Painter highlights a couple of anti-racist artists from the 1960s, photographer Howard L. Bingham who took many pictures of the Black Panther Party, and Emory Douglas:

More intriguing to me now is the agitprop artwork of Emory Douglas, the B.P.P. Minister of Culture, which was published in the The Black Panther newspaper and plastered around the Bay Area as posters. Week after week, Douglas’s searing wit visualized the urgency for action, such as this image of children carrying photographs, one that shows police victimizing a child…

This was originally published as an item in Issue 004 of the designspun email newsletter.

When I went to design school in the 1990s, of course, graphic design history was part of the curriculum. I didn’t realize it at the time, but everyone we studied—and therefore worshipped—was a white male. For minorities, representation is so powerful. And as the conversation in our country about race righteously heats up and expands from police brutality to systemic racism, it’s time to look at our own industry and ask ourselves about diversity and representation.

Toronto-based creative director Glenford Laughton compiled a great list of 13 African-American graphic designers we should all know. It includes greats like Georg Olden, who was the first African American to design a postage stamp, and Archie Boston, the designer-provocateur who started and chaired the design program at Cal State Long Beach.

According to the AIGA’s 2019 Design Census, just 3% of designers are black. African Americans make up about 14% of our population. Last year, product designer Wes O’Haire from Dropbox created Blacks Who Design. It’s a directory of black creatives on Twitter, giving them a platform to be seen and found, while simultaneously inspiring young people by showing them successful designers who have their same skin color. Representation is powerful.

Hoping to start a dialogue about changing the design industry, Where are the Black Designers is holding a virtual conversation on June 27, 2020.

Aggie Topkins writes in Eye on Design, “Graphic design, by focusing on its own version of monarchs and dynasties, maintains an outdated approach to history that further entrenches it as a hierarchical society.” In other words, maybe it’s time to teach design students about the societal and social changes happening, rather than the individual geniuses who channeled those influences into some work.

This was originally published as an item in Issue 003 of the designspun email newsletter.

It is no secret that Twitter has enabled and emboldened Donald Trump by not restricting any of his tweets, even if they violated their terms of service. But earlier this week, they put misinformation warnings on two of his tweets about mail-in ballots. This angered the President but also got the ball rolling. Snapchat shortly followed by saying it will no longer promote Trump’s account. Against the backdrop of growing protests against the murder of George Floyd by police, some tech companies finally started to grow a conscience. But will Silicon Valley change? Mary-Hunter McDonnell, corporate activism researcher from the Wharton School of Business says, “Giving money to organizations that are out on the front lines is more helpful, but it’s also to some extent passing the buck. People are tired of that.”

As designers, we have some power over the projects we work on, and the products we create. Mike Monterio wrote in February, “At some point, you will have to explain to your children that you work, or once worked, at Facebook.”

While at Facebook, Lisa Sy designed ways to flag hate speech on the platform—using Trump’s account in the mockups. In 2016. Four years later, Facebook has not implemented such a system and continues to leave up dangerous posts from Trump, including the highly-charged “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” post.

Tobias van Schneider wrote in 2016,

The role as a designer, or even as an engineer has become more influential and powerful than ever. The work we do makes an impact and naturally brings up the discussion around ethics, responsibility and accountability.

Many of us will work on pieces that are seen by hundreds, maybe thousands. A few of us, having larger clients, or working at a tech company, might work on something used by millions, if not billions of people. We hold great responsibility.

We produce work for audiences, users. Humans who are on the other end of that screen, poster, or ad. Mike Monterio again:

You don’t work for the people who sign your checks. You work for the people who use the products of your labor. If I were to put my hope in one thing, it’s that you understand the importance of this. Your job is to look out for the people your work is affecting. That is a responsibility we cannot defer.

We communicate in stories. Storytelling has been around as long as our species has existed. From paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, to radio dramas like “War of the Worlds” that cause city-wide panic, to the fantastical Game of Thrones television series on HBO, stories impart culture, history, information, and ideas. Stories are primal so we are receptive to them, and we remember them.

Today when we think of storytelling, we think of our modern day’s Golden Age of Television or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) movies. Comic-Con in San Diego is the Mecca of pop culture storytelling, and this year brought an estimated 135,000 fans from over 80 countries. Attendees packed over 2,000 panels and screenings and lined up for more than 250 autograph events from their favorite actors, writers, and artists. Fans lined up for hours, often overnight, for a chance to get into the infamous 6,500-seat Hall H where they were able to get a glimpse of their favorite star talking about their latest film or TV project. Many came to the con dressed as their favorite characters, often constructing their own elaborate costumes. That is fandom, otherwise known as brand loyalty.

What lessons for design and branding can we learn from Comic-Con and its pilgrimage of rabid fans? Storytelling has power, and design is storytelling.

In this article we’ll take the primary elements of storytelling and apply them to design, namely branding, marketing, and product design:

1. Worldbuilding: Where does the story take place?
2. Main characters: Who are the people we’ll care about?
3. The plot: What will happen in the story?​

PANTONE Colors and Worldbuilding

Stories have to exist in a self-contained universe, one that follows its own defined rules. Sometimes that world is familiar, reflecting our reality, and other times the environment is foreign, futuristic, or magical.

In Star Trek, transporter technology allows the teleportation of a person or thing from one place to another.

Internal logic is essential to building a believable world. In other words, it’s about defining the rules and consistently following them. For instance in the Star Trek universe, transporter technology exists—being able to teleport a person or thing from one place to another—but there are rules around its use. It has a limited range, i.e. you can’t beam a person from one end of the galaxy to the other; it cannot be used to or from warp-moving vehicles; and there are certain materials the technology cannot penetrate. And while there are faster-than-light-traveling vehicles in the show and aliens with extra capabilities, humans remain human and don’t have any extraordinary abilities.

I believe that branding, specifically brand identity is the world a brand builds for its customers to live in.

Target’s advertising lives in a world of red, white, and Helvetica.

Target has built a world of red, white, and Helvetica. Its customers know that world and trust it. But if Target decided to suddenly throw in blue, straying from the rules they’ve consistently followed, its customers would scratch their heads.

When creating your own brand, your customers need to see consistency. They need to feel they are in the right place when they interact with your brand. Use brand identity guidelines to document your brand world’s internal logic. Every touchpoint a customer sees should have the same colors, typography, and art direction.

The Hero and the Guide

Our world has been established, so now we need characters to be in our story. All stories have a protagonist, the main character. Many stories pair that character up with a guide or mentor. For our purposes we’ll call them the hero and the guide.

Donald Miller in his book Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, says that the hero is not the brand! Instead, the hero should be the customer, and the brand should be the guide. This makes sense when you stop to think about it: customers seek out new brands to buy from because they have a problem to solve. And by playing the part of the guide, brands have the opportunity to be the mentor, the facilitator.

Captain Marvel has Nick Fury to show her around S.H.I.E.L.D. and Earth in the 1990s.

Luke Skywalker is mentored by Obi-Wan Kenobi who introduces him to the ways of the Force.

In fiction we all want to be the hero, not someone who is the helper to the hero. We want to be Captain Marvel who has Nick Fury to show her around Earth in the 1990s, or Luke Skywalker who is mentored by Obi-Wan Kenobi who introduces him to the ways of the Force. The guides are characters the heroes trust and look up to.

Nike’s ad campaigns celebrate the athlete within each of us.

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign wasn’t about how they had the best computers, but about celebrating geniuses like John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Plotting User Experience Design

All stories have a plot, something that happens. Sometimes those plots are thin, simple, or dense and convoluted. But the best, most popular stories can be distilled to a very simple formula. Miller in his book outlines this structure as follows:

1. A character
2. Has a problem
3. And meets a guide
4. Who gives them a plan
5. And calls them to action
6. They avoid failure
7. And end in a success

StoryBrand Framework by Donald Miller.

Let’s apply it to one of my favorite movies, Star Wars:

1. Luke Skywalker
2. Wants to defeat the evil Galactic Empire
3. Meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, former Jedi Knight
4. Who teaches Luke to trust the Force
5. Luke helps deliver the Death Star plans hidden in R2-D2 to the Rebels
6. Without the plans the Rebels would be obliterated by the starbase
7. With Luke trusting in the Force, he’s able to destroy the Death Star, thus saving the Rebels

StoryBrand framework applied to Star Wars

While Miller’s StoryBrand framework is geared towards marketing and messaging, I believe we can extend it to user experience and product design as well. Remember that the hero is the customer or the user. And our product is the plot through which our hero can solve their problem.

For fun, let’s apply this framework to Dropbox:

1. An information worker
2. Has multiple devices and often can’t access her files when she needs to
3. Meets Dropbox
4. Whose product can sync and store all her files in the cloud
5. Encourages her to sign up and install their product
6. So she can stop forgetting to email herself files to/from work
7. And access her files instantly from any device anywhere, impressing her bosses

For the user to trust Dropbox with her files, Dropbox’s brand identity needs to be consistent from its advertising and marketing, to its landing page and website, and finally to its application. Remember their world needs to stay internally logical by using the same color, fonts, imagery, and even brand voice.

Using Design as Storytelling to Create Fans

In 2008 Marvel began their incredibly ambitious MCU movies with Iron Man. But from that very first movie, they started to build their world. They introduced us to new characters with subsequent films and wielded familiar story beats while bringing something new. Ultimately over the course of 23 interconnected movies, they created millions of fans worldwide who collectively spent more than $22 billion at the box office.

We’ve already mentioned Nike, Apple, Target, and Dropbox, but what about a newer brand that’s doing this right? Slack.

From day one Slack built personality into the design of their product. Their quirky plaid pattern and colors in their hashtag logo made its way to the product, allowing users to customize their own workspaces with themes. Their UX copy is charming, personable. In other words, Slack’s brand from the colors to the fonts to the brand voice is infused from their marketing website all the way into their product. And this attention to design as story has helped drive Slack to over ten million daily active users, and propelled the company’s valuation to $20 billion when they IPO’d.

Design as storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool to build a brand, create a better product, and promote fanaticism. As young startups enter an increasingly crowded marketplace, they need to differentiate through memorable and consistent branding. And they can by incorporating storytelling in their design.

This post was originally published on Medium.

I have longed cringed at how the mainstream media reports on the technology industry to the public. From use of randomly-selected synonyms to just downright misunderstanding of particular technologies, it’s sort of embarrassing to the reporter (usually someone who calls themselves a “technology reporter”) and the publication.

The latest examples come courtesy of The New York Times. I was alerted to this via a piece on BGR by Yoni Heisler titled, “The New York Times’ latest Apple hit piece is embarrassing and downright lazy.” Disclosure: I am a subscriber to The Times because I support their journalism. Their political reporters in particular have done a tremendous service to our country over the last couple of years. I usually trust what The Times writes about politics because I am not an expert in it. But the two pieces mentioned by BGR, about screen-time apps, and the editorial about Apple’s supposed monopoly are downright silly, because I do know a thing or two about technology and Apple.

Privacy, Security, and Violation of Terms

The premise of the article is that Apple has “removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps” over the past year. There are quotes and POVs from app developers and parents, and there are a couple quotes from Apple defending its actions. This is the full quote of what they printed from Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief:

In response to this article, Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in emails to some customers that Apple “acted extremely responsibly in this matter, helping to protect our children from technologies that could be used to violate their privacy and security.”

When the article broke, an Apple customer wrote to Tim Cook who had Schiller respond (emphasis mine):

Unfortunately the New York Times article you reference did not share our complete statement, nor explain the risks to children had Apple not acted on their behalf. Apple has long supported providing apps on the App Store, that work like our ScreenTime feature, to help parents manage their children’s access to technology and we will continue to encourage development of these apps. There are many great apps for parents on the App Store, like “Moment — Balance Screen Time” by Moment Health and “Verizon Smart Family” by Verizon Wireless.

However, over the last year we became aware that some parental management apps were using a technology called Mobile Device Management or “MDM” and installing an MDM Profile as a method to limit and control use of these devices. MDM is a technology that gives one party access to and control over many devices, it was meant to be used by a company on it’s own mobile devices as a management tool, where that company has a right to all of the data and use of the devices. The MDM technology is not intended to enable a developer to have access to and control over consumers’ data and devices, but the apps we removed from the store did just that. No one, except you, should have unrestricted access to manage your child’s device, know their location, track their app use, control their mail accounts, web surfing, camera use, network access, and even remotely erase their devices. Further, security research has shown that there is risk that MDM profiles could be used as a technology for hacker attacks by assisting them in installing apps for malicious purposes on users’ devices.

When the App Store team investigated the use of MDM technology by some developers of apps for managing kids devices and learned the risk they create to user privacy and security, we asked these developers to stop using MDM technology in their apps. Protecting user privacy and security is paramount in the Apple ecosystem and we have important App Store guidelines to not allow apps that could pose a threat to consumers privacy and security. We will continue to provide features, like ScreenTime, designed to help parents manage their children’s access to technology and we will work with developers to offer many great apps on the App Store for these uses, using technologies that are safe and private for us and our children.

Here is a layman’s summary of the above. The parental control apps that Apple kicked off the App Store were using a technology intended for large corporations to control their company-owned devices. This technology gives the corporations purview over, and access to all their devices’ location info, app usage, email accounts, web history, camera usage, and network access, and can remotely wipe their devices. In other words if an end-user installed one of these parental control apps that used MDM technology on their child’s phone, that app developer had access to all that information, and would be able to control and wipe that phone.

The Times and the general media have been lambasting YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for allowing users and other entities to stay on their platforms and abuse their policies. From hate speech (white nationalists, Alex Jones) to huge privacy gaffes (Cambridge Analytica), the media and the public have demanded these companies take responsibility and action, and prevent such episodes from happening again.

And yet, when Apple does take action here—when about a dozen or so companies release so-called parental control apps on the App Store using Apple technology in a way that violates its policies and gives access to thousands of iPhones belonging to kids, The New York Times has a conniption.

Apple does not have an issue that there are apps that compete with its own apps in the App Store (Apple Music vs. Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud; Safari vs. Google Chrome, Opera Mini, Firefox Focus). That’s what a vibrant developer-centric marketplace is: competition. But when an app violates its policies, Apple should be able to act.

Who Owns a Marketplace?

The second piece referenced by the BGR article is an op-ed by The Times’ Editorial Board, “Why Does Apple Control Its Competitors?”

First the op-ed compares Apple to Microsoft. Kind of ironic since Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1990s:

Apple’s management of the App Store is also dangerously reminiscent of the anti-competitive behavior that triggered United States v. Microsoft, a landmark antitrust case that changed the landscape of the tech industry.

Then the piece complains about Apple’s control over the App Store marketplace and its fees:

But Apple’s operating system for mobile devices makes it almost impossible to get an app outside of the App Store that will work on an Apple phone. Ultimately, the company controls what a user can or cannot do on their own iPhone. Apple also takes up to a 30 percent cut of in-app revenue, including revenue from “services” fulfilled in-app — like buying a premium subscription or an ebook. Because all apps go through the App Store, this 30 percent cut is nearly unavoidable.

Apple doesn’t ban apps like Amazon Kindle or Spotify, which compete with Apple Books and Apple Music, respectively. But the 30 percent fee still stings. That’s the reason you currently can’t buy a Kindle ebook through the Kindle mobile app. Spotify, a much smaller company, now pays Apple between 15 and 30 percent of its in-app revenue in order to serve streaming music to its premium subscribers. Spotify recently filed a complaint with European regulators, accusing Apple of anticompetitive practices. In the United States, an antitrust lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court alleges that the 30 percent cut drives up prices for consumers.

Let’s try this analogy. Suppose Apple is a department store. This department store has products lined up on shelves and racks, organized by sections and aisles so customers can find what they’re looking for. This store has endcaps that feature certain promoted products. What The Times is asking is this: Why can’t any company that wants to sell in Apple’s department store just set up shop inside the store and sell direct? And why should Apple make 30% gross profit on selling each item in the store?¹

If Apple allowed any product inside its department store, what if the product is shoddy and doesn’t work? What if there’s a safety issue? What if a seller wants to line the shelves with porno magazines? This tarnishes the reputation of Apple’s store. Customers will start to think Apple doesn’t care about the quality of products it sells, or that the store is now inhospitable for families with children.

(If the department store analogy doesn’t work for you, what about a farmers’ market? The App Store is the market and the developers are the vendors. Organizers of farmers’ markets decide who to allow in to sell, and what they can sell.)

A core of The Times’ monopoly argument seems to be around the fact that the App Store is the only place to get apps that work on an iPhone:

But Apple’s operating system for mobile devices makes it almost impossible to get an app outside of the App Store that will work on an Apple phone. Ultimately, the company controls what a user can or cannot do on their own iPhone.

True. But time and again Apple has argued that its thorough review process is critical to prevent malicious and low quality apps from appearing in its App Store.

And consumers face compatibility or “walled garden” scenarios with lots of things they buy. Printers need specific toner cartridges. Coffeemakers only accept certain shapes of pods. Video game systems can only their own cartridges or discs. In all these examples, including iPhone, consumers can find workarounds. But use at your own risk and don’t go crying to the manufacturer if your product breaks as a result. Fair enough, right?

And finally…

Even if we take Apple at its word that it was only protecting the privacy and security of its users by removing screen-time and parental-control apps, the state of the app marketplace is troubling. Why is a company — with no mechanism for democratic oversight — the primary and most zealous guardian of user privacy and security? Why is one company in charge of vetting what users can or cannot do on their phones, especially when that company also makes apps that compete in a marketplace that it controls?

Short answer is because Apple created the marketplace and controls the rules. eBay is a marketplace and controls its own policies, banning the selling of body parts, government IDs, and Nazi-related artifacts. Airbnb, Uber, and Upwork are all marketplaces with their own policies.² Why is Airbnb — with no mechanism for democratic oversight — the primary and most zealous guardian of what hosts can and cannot do with their listing? Why is Uber — with no mechanism for democratic oversight — the primary and most zealous guardian of how drivers should behave with their passengers? Why is Upwork — with no mechanism for democratic oversight — the primary and most zealous guardian of how workers should interact with clients?

But again, I go back to the two-sidedness of The Times. In one breath it wants Facebook and “Big Tech” to be better at preventing the viral spread of horrific imagery, by removing posts with said imagery, thus having a tighter grasp on its own platform. And in another it wants Apple to loosen up its control of its own marketplace. Comparing the spread of a video of a mass shooting with App Store policies is crass, I know. But they are sending mixed messages to Silicon Valley.

I actually agree with The Times about how Facebook and other social media platforms must somehow use technology to combat humanity’s most wretched behaviors. They do need to figure out a way to reign in the monster they’ve unleashed.

However, I disagree with their view that Apple must relax its tight control over the App Store, because I want a company that has been the most socially responsible in this age of Big Tech to curate over two million apps in the App Store and prevent me from downloading an app that could brick my phone or expose my private data.

The press plays an important role in our society—to hold powerful entities and individuals to account. However, before lobbing any accusations, before sparking any debate, it really should get its facts straight and understand the material first.

[1] Most retailers mark up the products they sell by 50%. Example: They buy a tube of toothpaste for $2 and sell it to you for $4.

[2] By the way, here are the sellers’ fees for each of these marketplaces:

• Airbnb: 20%, https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1857/what-is-the-airbnb-service-fee
• Uber: 25%, https://www.ridester.com/uber-fees/
• Upwork: 20%, https://www.upwork.com/i/how-it-works/freelancer/

We’ve come to this. The K-12 Florida Christian School in Miami is selling bulletproof panels for children to insert into their backpacks. Teachers will show students how to install these ballistic shields. You know, because mass shootings and ’Merica.

We have come to this, when schools need to outfit their students with bulletproof gear just to keep their students safe. This is the endgame for the National Rifle Association of America (aka NRA). It is guns everywhere. Schools, churches, hospitals, courthouses, bars. Everywhere.

In a recent interview on Fresh Air, journalist Mike Spies said:

So what you’ve seen over the last decade is a proliferation of legislation that has been enacted that has allowed people to carry firearms in places that they’ve never been able to carry before. That includes bars, churches, college campuses, day care centers, government buildings. That’s ultimately at the core of their agenda, is to normalize gun carrying in as many places as possible until it just becomes as natural of a thing to see in society as any other accessory that people carry around.

While the NRA wants to normalize guns everywhere via concealed carry laws—and it’s working very well legistlatively at the state level—gun ownership is steadily falling.

Source: Washington Post, 2016

Source: Pew Research Center, 2017

For the 69% of us who don’t wish to arm themselves we must live in fear of gunfights breaking out wherever we are. Remember that 20 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. At least 12 of the people wounded or killed last Sunday in Sunderland, TX were children.

Bulletproof backpacks are a good idea. They solve a problem that’s growing increasingly frequent. A problem that we’ve let a special interest organization create because of its hardline stance against any gun control legislation. A special interest group with only 5 million members (6% of all gun owners, or 1.5% of the U.S. population) who have control of the Republican Party.

From Spies again:

The NRA has become essentially an organ of the Republican Party. It doesn’t do anything for Democrats. It hasn’t for a long time. And the way it spends on election bears that out. It spends essentially all of its money, and quite a lot of money, trying to keep Republicans in power, putting new ones in power.

And how powerful is the NRA? Since 1998 it has spent $203.2 million on political activities. That includes direct contributions to candidates, contributions to political parties and PACs, lobbying, and outside spending. What’s outside spending? “Efforts expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate.” Oh by the way, the NRA spent $30 million on Donald Trump last year.

In addition to money, the NRA can decide who wins and who loses. Here’s Spies talking about how a vindictive NRA lobbyist in Florida dealt with a lawmaker who let one of their sponsored bills die in committee:

After that happened, he was also — or as it happened, he was also in his final term as a lawmaker, and he was hoping to be appointed to, like, a circuit court in Jacksonville and was among the, you know, final three potential candidates for that position. And it seemed like he was actually the favored candidate for Governor Scott, and Marion Hammer, remembering what he did, put together a huge campaign in which many thousands of NRA members sent emails to Governor Scott telling him under no circumstances to appoint Charles McBurney to the circuit court judgeship. And very shortly after that happened, McBurney was not appointed to the circuit court judgeship. Someone else was. And it was directly — I mean, you could say directly because of what he did.

So there you have it. We’ve allowed an organization like the NRA make the United States of America a country where we need to send our children to school with bulletproof backpacks. Well fucking done.

P.S. For children in preschool, you can buy them bulletproof nap mats.

Sex

With coffee in hand, I flipped through Facebook yesterday morning. “Me too” read one post from a female friend I used to work with. Incredibly intelligent, hands-down one of the smartest women — no, people — I’d ever worked with just posted two words. I thought it was a mispost that was supposed to be a reply, a butt-post if you will. Then I saw another, and this time with an explanation. And throughout the day, my feed depressingly filled up with “Me too” posts, illustrating how common sexual harassment and assault of women are.

Of course this movement was spurred on by the bombshell investigative journalism by the New York Times and the New Yorker. Last week they broke open a story that’s eluded the media for so long: Harvey Weinstein and his serial sexual harassment and assault of women in Hollywood.

Why would a man who was successful, married, and the father of five children decide to regularly try to convince young starlets to sleep with him, give him a massage, or just flash their breasts? As I read and listened to women recounting what had happened to them, and how Weinstein actually acted, I realized just how small and backwards of a man he is. He negotiated with them. He sounded desperate. And he sounded guilty and scared immediately after committing any of those acts. Weinstein knew he wasn’t supposed to use his position of power and act like a predator. But he did anyway.

And he is not alone. Fox News Channel’s cofounder Roger Ailes, that channel’s biggest star Bill O’Reilly, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price, and disc jockey David Mueller, were all recently exposed or convicted. And it’s not limited to just the entertainment industry either; see SoFi’s CEO Mike Cagney, Binary Capital’s Justin Caldbeck, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and many others. And of course, let’s not forget our president Donald Trump!

Men have sexually harassed or assaulted women close to me. Stories I’ve been told and my Facebook feed yesterday affirm that. There is a significant portion of men out there who, because they succumbed to their urges, have made women feel ashamed, dirty, and slimy. It’s pervasive, even in our first world country. Even in our liberal state. And even in a progressive city like San Francisco. Penis trumps brain.

Violence

I sat in my car in my driveway, listening to the remaining nine minutes of the podcast. The reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, was recalling the horrific tale of a 20 year-old Rohingya woman named Rajuma who survived an attack on her village by the Myanmar military. She was one of the few survivors. The soldiers had shot, decapitated, and slit the throats of all the men in her village. They took her 18 month-old baby boy she was clutching to and unemotionally threw him into a fire. Then the men pushed Rajuma into a hut and proceeded to gang-rape her. Rajuma woke up to smoke and fire. Her mother dead. Her sisters and brother, all dead. Almost everyone in her village murdered. But she escaped. And eventually joined thousands of other refugees in Bangladesh.

I was heartbroken hearing that story. How could a human being do that to another human being? What could make them so savage that they could do those things to children? To babies? This vicious act was not the isolated act of a psychopathic serial killer. This was systemic, coordinated ethnic cleansing, carried out by groups of soldiers. Since August, the above scene has played out 288 times, with many thousands of Rohingya people killed.

Evolution

Schoolchildren are taught that male animals put on a show when they’re looking for a mate. Peacocks fan out their feathers. Pigeons dance around in a circle. But male mammals go further. Primates like chimpanzees will coerce females to mate with them by charging at them, ripping out their hair, or beating them.

Chimpanzees have also been observed killing other chimps who do not belong in their territory, or in an effort to expand. In fact, Jane Goodall watched one tribe of chimps, called the Kasakela, kill all six of the other tribe’s — the Kahama — adult males over four years.

As modern humans, we are many species away from our genetic ancestors. Proto-humans separated from chimpanzees seven to 10 million years ago. We developed a consciousness and a conscience. And yet our animalistic tendencies still persist. I’m not talking about core biological functions like hunger, or our fight or flight response, but acts that require thought and effort like arranging a “meeting” at the Peninsula Hotel or torching over 200 villages and killing all their inhabitants.

Values

“Hey! Stick to your side!” my daughter yelled from the back of the car. Her little brother is sticking his arm or leg past the mid-point of the row of seats. As he needles her, he’s smiling devilishly.

I’ve lost count the number of times that vignette has played out in my car over the years. Being possessive and territorial is instinctual. Children say “Mine!” all the time. But we teach them to share. We teach them that it’s good and nice to share with their friends. We also teach our children to be empathetic and help those who are less fortunate than us.

These are core human values: sharing and caring.

At least I’d like to think so.

Kayla Chadwick wrote a great piece last week, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” that connected a few dots for me.

Chimpanzees may resort to sexual coercion and murdering rival tribes. But us, modern homo sapiens, should not do that. Yet we do sometimes. Our human society should be about cooperation and shared prosperity. But we don’t always adhere to that either. Instead, just like chimps, it’s each sub-group for itself.

Politics

My core human values are indeed sharing and caring. I am squarely middle-class and believe in sharing my tax dollars to help those who are less fortunate. I care for the plight of the homeless, the immigrants and refugees, Black lives, and the disenfranchised. This is the liberal platform. That all boats rise together.

But on the conservative side, the values are fundamentally different. It’s about the opportunity to prosper or fail by one’s own hand. In other words, it’s every man for himself. The fight over the Affordable Care Act illustrates this. Insurance is, by definition, pooling financial resources to share in the cost. Which, again by definition, means that healthier people’s premiums pay for sicker people’s costs. The Right’s constant drumbeat of repealing and replacing Obamacare is a demand for healthy people to pay less, and sick people to pay more. In other words, not sharing and not caring.

Healthcare costs for the sick can be extraordinary. A year’s course of treatment for a typical breast cancer patient is over $140,000. So if she were in a high-risk only insurance pool, her premiums would be incredibly high — upwards of $18,000 — compared to a healthier person her same age. Would a person making minimum wage or on disability ever be able to afford such insurance?

Republicans conveniently forget that Americans already share in a lot of costs that may not apply to us individually: mass transit on the other side of the country, the Library of Congress, the military, disaster relief from hurricanes. Adding healthcare — something that affects each of us — seems obvious to me.

We’re just not there yet

Perhaps we’ve been fooled by liberal idealism. We’ve been overly optimistic in our assessment of our own evolution as a species. Despite millions of years of continued brain growth and refining our societies, humans are still pulled by our primal instincts of sexual aggression, territorialism, and tribalism.

I want to believe that we can do better. I want to believe that someday, there will be peace and prosperity on Earth for 100% of us. That someday, men will no longer be pigs, and we won’t squabble and kill over a plot of land. The only way we can achieve that is by pulling the other way and moving forward. By believing and acting better, together.

P.S. This essay was not written from a point of moral superiority. The opposite is in fact true. I acknowledge that we are all imperfect, including myself. But that we can—and should—improve in our own lifetimes, and in the generations to come.

Sen. John McCain standing up for regular order by voting down an Obamacare repeal.

What we are witnessing, friends, is the beginning of the end of American democracy. With senators and representatives who used to believe in “regular order” — as Senator John McCain would say — retiring, we are electing ideologues.

I’m a liberal and believe in liberal ideals (gun control, universal healthcare, social safety net, helping the disenfranchised, etc.). However, if we continue to send to Congress, ideologues who will not compromise with the other side, we all lose. Whether we like it or not, America is made up of hundreds of millions of individuals with different experiences and values than you or me. Therefore we all won’t always agree. Which is why compromise is so incredibly important.

To believe that we must pass universal healthcare in this Congress is to believe in a fallacy. To hold out for it, is dangerous. To believe and hold out the ACA will be repealed and replaced is just as dangerous. Because then, as we are now seeing, we will have done nothing and millions of people will suffer.

At home, at the office, at school, don’t we all learn to compromise? Don’t we teach our children that they’re supposed to compromise? Why can’t we ask our representatives in Congress to do the same?

Our own echo chambers are making it harder and harder for all of us to believe in compromise and moderation. We want outrage and intractability to be the new normal. Why? Our media diets are shite. Facebook and Twitter are like ice cream and chocolate, and MSNBC and FOX News are like french fries and onion rings. We all get caught up in the mob mentality of these outlets, and we turn around and ask our representatives in government to do the same.

We forget to listen, to compromise.

And therefore, we lose American democracy.

Did you know that March 31 was World Backup Day? Yeah I didn’t either. But for shits and giggles, I decided to finish writing this post which I had started late last year. Hope you enjoy…

Anyone who works with any type of data files should have a comprehensive backup plan. Which pretty much means everyone who uses a computer. As a designer who’s been working professionally for over 20 years, having a good solution that works is incredibly important. Over the years I cobbled together something that works for me, but I wanted to codify it and share it, in case it might work for you.

The Crash

I’m a data packrat. Since my early days with my 512K Mac, I’ve tried to save everything that I’ve produced. Therefore there’s a big plastic bin filled with 400KB and 800KB floppies, DAT backup tapes, SyQuest cartridges, Zip disks, Jaz disks, CD-Rs, and SCSI hard drives, containing many years of work. Eventually, I’d like to extract all those files onto a modern medium, like say, the cloud, but that’ll have to wait until I have much more time on my hands.

Anyway, as a designer, I accumulate a lot of work files. At some point in the mid-aughts, I had a massive hard disk failure on my main work drive, which contained portfolio pieces from three or four jobs. Five-to-seven years of archived work disappeared with a screech. I sent the poor silver LaCie Big Disk (all 2GB worth!) to a data recovery company and crossed my fingers. A couple of weeks and $2,000 later, all they were able to recover was about 60% of the data, in loose, unorganized files, some even with generic names like “Photoshop Document 01.psd.” Because a lot of my work from that time were Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress files with placed assets, it was all pretty much useless. Sigh.

Since then I vowed to always back up my work onto a redundant medium. Enter RAID.

Redundancy

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It’s a technology that acknowledges that failure is inevitable and therefore builds in redundancy. There are a number of RAID levels which you can read about here. The gist is, for almost any RAID level except 0, if one of the hard disks fail, the data will still be protected. The first device I purchased was a 1TB Buffalo Terastation Networked Attached Storage (NAS) to which I manually copied all my music, photos, and whatever archived work I had left.

It worked fine for a couple of years until my storage needs started to grow exponentially (I just had a child and therefore wanted to take digital pictures of everything she did!). But I realized that upgrading the storage on the Terastation wasn’t exactly easy. While theoretically it was RAID 5 and pulling out a hard disk and replacing it with a bigger one should have been fine (then repeat for each of the four disks), I just wasn’t confident. The tools they had at the time made it look like a chore. So the next move was to a Drobo.

Drobo’s proprietary RAID system seems like a dream because I could expand it whenever I wanted to! It also involved me getting a Mac mini and connecting the Drobo to it, since they didn’t have a NAS option at the time. Also around this time I discovered CrashPlan. So now I could use CrashPlan to continuously back up to the cloud and to my Mac mini plus Drobo server. Additionally, I had CrashPlan running on the Mac mini and it backed up the entire Drobo to CrashPlan’s datacenter as well.

The Mac mini plus Drobo combo served me well enough for a few years. But I did have a couple of complaints. First of all, the Drobo model wasn’t exactly quiet. With the Mac mini in the living room and part of the entertainment system, the device was just a bit loud. Secondly, the Mac mini was mostly idle as I didn’t really use it much to view media on my TV. Yes, I could have solved the first issue by moving the Mac mini out of the living room since it wasn’t really necessary for it to be there. But I didn’t.

Because I’ve had to move around a bit in the last few years, the mini and Drobo went into storage. Recently I finally settled down and started to think about setting up the Mac mini + Drobo server again. But I also knew that it had been in storage for over four years. My hunch was that it would be dicey, so I decided to upgrade to a new NAS.

In the years since buying the Drobo, NAS technology really accelerated. Modern NAS servers seem to have come down to two brands: Synology and QNAP. After much research, I purchased the Synology DS916+, a four-bay NAS, and I outfitted it with four 3TB drives, formatted the unit as RAID 10, for a total of 5.5TB of storage. Synology’s DSM operating system software is pretty cool in that you can install numerous apps and use it as a mini server. Although it’s really not recommended that you use a NAS server for anything robust, as their processors are usually underpowered. I chose to format the volume as RAID 10 for both redundancy and speed. Although in hindsight, I would probably use Synology’s SHR format next time to eke out a little more space.

Once set up, I dug the Drobo out of storage and plugged it in. It didn’t sound too great at all—after all those platters hadn’t spun in over four years. But it stayed alive long enough for me to retrieve all the data and copy it onto the Synology. Years of work, photos, and music data was safe again.

Comprehensive Backup Plan

Enough backstory, here’s the plan. The best backup plan is the kind that you don’t think about because it’s automatic and constant. To have to manually think to back up your files is an immediate fail. Because you won’t remember.

For me, the goals of my backup plan are:

• Access to 100% of my data from anywhere
• At least two redundant copies of 100% of my data
• Automatic and always running
• Security

To reach those goals, the solution really calls for a two-pronged approach: local and cloud. Local is handled by the Synology NAS plus CrashPlan. And cloud is handled by a combination of CrashPlan and Dropbox.

Local

For Macs, Apple has a built-in backup solution called Time Machine. You can switch it on and point it to an external hard drive, or to a network-mounted drive, like a NAS. But it’s for local backups only. And since I was already using CrashPlan to back up to the cloud, I can also use CrashPlan to back up to my Synology NAS. It’s automatic and always running in the background. If I need to restore anything—like I accidentally deleted a file—I can do so via the copy on my NAS, which would be a lot faster than from the cloud if it were a huge file.

With CrashPlan backing up to my NAS, I always have two local copies of every file.

Cloud

A key part of my workflow is Dropbox. All my project files are placed into Dropbox for realtime cloud backup and sync. And while I’m always really good at saving versions and iterations, there’s also the peace of mind that I can revert via Dropbox if I needed to. And best of all, I can always access work on my iPhone while on the go, in case a client needed a file and I was nowhere near my computer. Which I’ve used at least a few dozen times. I can’t recommend enough to use Dropbox in your daily workflow.

Now Dropbox is great, but there are limitations. Their upgraded individual plan is only 1TB, so it’s not great for my archival purposes. My music and photos alone take up over 600GB.

I’ve mentioned CrashPlan a couple of times already in this piece, but let me dive a little deeper. I install CrashPlan onto every computer I own—my MacBook Pro, my PC, and my wife’s MacBook. I have it back up my user folder which contains all my data files, including everything that’s synced with Dropbox. CrashPlan will also keep versions of files. And all my backup data is encrypted so no nefarious entity can go digging through my data.

Adding Dropbox and CrashPlan, I now have two copies of the same file in the cloud. This means for any given file, there are four copies: two local and two in the cloud.

Now the only piece of the solution that isn’t being backed up is the NAS. Back up the backup? Yes! Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy! I back up the Synology NAS to the cloud as well since it contains archives of project files, photos, and music. I do not back up the CrashPlan and Dropbox data that’s on the NAS. But for everything else, I use Synology’s built-in Cloud Sync app to sync with Amazon Cloud Drive. This awesome service from Amazon gives you unlimited storage for one flat yearly price. Well worth it.1

Security

With revelations from Edward Snowden about how the NSA and other spy agencies had developed tools to snoop on Americans, I—and the rest of the web—have been much more aware of security. That’s why for all of the cloud services I mentioned, I’ve enabled both encryption of my data as well as two-factor authentication where available.

Missing Link

I like my plan and it works well. But it is missing something. Namely all the pictures and videos I take with my iPhone are only getting backed up in one place—Apple’s iCloud. Yes, the media is also on my MacBook Pro which is backed up to the NAS, but it’s fleeting and gets deleted automatically when I’m running low on space and macOS decides to optimize my storage. I wish there were a direct way to sync all my photos to my Synology NAS as well. But in my research so far, it doesn’t seem possible. Will need to revisit this one in the future.

Conclusion

The origin of my backup fanaticism is tragic, but as certain as death and taxes are, so is data loss. Hard drives crash, laptops get stolen. It will happen. While my backup plan might seem overkill for your needs, feel free to tweak and modify as necessary. At the very least get a cloud backup solution like CrashPlan2 so that your data is protected at least once. Fit Dropbox3 into your workflow if you generate any amount of files. And then add a NAS when you can.

Having a comprehensive backup plan that’s automatic, that you actually use, will ensure that you can recover quickly and easily when one day you hear a big screech from your hard drive.

Notes:

1 There is a way to install CrashPlan on the Synology NAS as well. I tried this for a couple of months, but ultimately gave up on it. It’s not an officially-supported platform for CrashPlan and took up a huge amount of resources from the low-powered processor in the NAS. Using Cloud Sync to back up to Amazon Cloud Drive was the best solution I could figure. However, it is only a copy of the current state of the NAS, and not a true backup with versions.

2 There are other great cloud backup solutions besides CrashPlan. For features and pricing, CrashPlan continues to be the best fit for my needs. Check out this excellent roundup of backup services from The Wirecutter for other options.

3 Dropbox was the first to the market with a cloud sync solution that just worked. I’ve tried Google Drive, Box, OnDrive, and others, but Dropbox works best for me. Feel free to explore the other sync solutions.

I was working from home on Friday and happened to have the TV turned on to CNN. Therefore I watched the defeat of the House Republican’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) in real time. But I wouldn’t have if I were tuned to Fox News Channel instead. A conservative friend of mine was watching Fox News Channel that day, and was moved by its assertion that the “mainstream media” was not covering the Maryland rape case sufficiently. Our two different experiences actually illustrated this great article from the New York Times called “One Nation, Under Fox: 18 Hours With a Network That Shapes America.” It’s an excellent reminder about media bias — right or left.

After reading the article this weekend, I came to this conclusion: There are roughly 325 million people in the United States. More than ever in my life I’ve come to understand that there are then 325 million different experiences. Each of our life experiences is different. There is no way that any media outlet can cover all those stories. But those same media outlets can impose their own worldviews onto their audiences. Those individuals in the audience will either have their own worldview reinforced, or go elsewhere for that reinforcement.

My conservative friend posted a video from Fox News on Facebook. It’s a clip of Bill O’Reilly doing his own media critique about the amount of coverage this story got, comparing Fox News’ amount to that of the mainstream media networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. According to the NY Times article, this same media critique was leveled by at least three other Fox News shows, “Fox and Friends,” “The Five,” and “America’s Newsroom.”

First of all, Fox News Channel is mainstream media, whether they’ll admit that or not. They are the most-watched news network in America. Mumford & Sons, an “alternative” music darling made $40 million last year according to Forbes. That’s almost as much as Katy Perry ($41 million). I’d argue that they’re mainstream now, no longer alternative. Likewise, in January 2017, Fox News Channel had 14 of the top 15 programs in cable news in total viewers. Therefore I’d say that the outlet is indeed “mainstream news.”

So Fox News hit this point all day long: Why isn’t mainstream news covering this horrific rape of a 14 year-old girl by two boys, one of whom is undocumented? Rapes do actually get covered. Steubenville High School (50 media links in the footnotes), Stanford (134 media links in the footnotes), Richmond High School (39 media links in the footnotes). Over 90,000 rapes were reported to the police in 2015. Unfortunately not all of them were covered in the news. If they were, we’d be learning about 246 new rape stories everyday on TV. But of course Fox wanted to give more credence to this one case by an undocumented immigrant because it fits into the conservative narrative they’re spinning — America is in danger, and the danger is being perpetrated by outsiders who are coming into this country legally or illegally. And never mind that in past coverage of high profile rape cases, Fox News actually tends to downplay the role of the assailants and will even go as far as blaming the victims. Example, Fox’s Stacey Dash said that “alcohol doesn’t get you drunk, you get yourself drunk.” Fifteen more specific examples can be found here.

Why did Fox News focus on the Maryland rape story and the London terrorist attack while almost all other outlets focused mainly on the impending vote and then pulling of the AHCA? The amount of coverage a particular story gets at any particular outlet is determined by its editors and publishers. I think we all know that media is inherently biased by those views because someone has to make the decision to dispatch reporters to cover story A or story B and then give airtime or print space to said story. Roger Ailes, who is the founder and former CEO of Fox News until July 2016 when he stepped down over allegations of sexual harassment, was formerly a Republican Party media consultant. John Moody, Executive Editor and Executive VP of Fox News, issues daily memos to the news department with instructions on exactly how to cover news stories, as well as the themes of the day. A former Fox News producer has said, “The roots of Fox News Channel’s day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered.” So the agenda for the day? Cover the healthcare bill vote if it’s looking good. But run with rape and terror if it isn’t. Almost all other media outlets decided that the AHCA vote was the most important to America that day.

The amount of coverage a story gets communicates its importance. It was important to Fox News to continue their portrayal that undocumented immigrants are bad — reinforcing the right-wing worldview, but more importantly Trump’s worldview — and it was important for many other outlets to continue their criticism of Trump’s presidency (some of it more harshly than others). You could argue that it’s the job of the media to support our president and government, or you can argue that it’s their job to keep government officials honest, and the American people informed. I would agree with the latter. And so would our Founding Fathers:

The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs.

Infographics have exploded over the past few years. It’s a great way to visually and simply explain sometimes complex data to a general audience. My own personal brand of infographics is more on the data visualization side, and thankfully coincides with TrueCar, my employer. I believe that data should be presented in a beautiful and sophisticated way. It should be easy to grok and doesn’t have to be cutesy.

When the latest epic infographic™ project landed on my desk, I started where I always start—I looked at the data. What inspired me was seeing this color-scaled chart of the smartest day of the year to buy. Just by looking at the color I quickly understood the patterns: end of the month, December is the best month, and January 1 is the best day.

From there I looked for inspiration on cool calendar designs. The notion of color scaling was present in a few examples, and I also really appreciated the circular format in some. Years are cycles, plus a circle is an inherent shape in cars (tires, steering wheel, speedometer, knobs). My search led me to this lovely piece by Martin Oberhaeuser. With much respect to his design, I used it as a jumping-off point to transform the above table from Excel into something hopefully more elegant.

Using TrueCar’s color palette of a couple of blues, I made a color scale—lighter being better, and orange being the best—and inserted the actual percentage value within each cell.

For the chart to show the best month to buy, I combined a calendar and a column graph. And it validates the long-held belief that December is the best month of the year to buy a new car.

The most helpful data I thought we had was the one about the smartest month to buy a particular kind of car. While December remains the best overall month, if you’re looking to buy a subcompact, you should buy in June. Since I had a circular table already I decided to leave this one pretty straightforward.

Last, but not least, is the best day of the week to buy a car. There’s really only seven data points here so presenting the data simply seemed the way to go.

I actually designed the infographic as one long piece first, and then broke it into smaller graphics for social media sharing. As a whole piece I think it works really well. There’s a story that weaves it all together. I hope you enjoy it!

At TrueCar, data is our lifeblood and visualizing that data in a compelling way is important. Finding that compelling way takes time. We’ve produced a number of infographics recently. Some have been more involved than others, but all as a way to find our voice in telling a story through data.

The Assignment

This project was initiated because Fiat is going to spin off Ferrari as a separate company. They’ve owned the brand for over 40 years. So we wondered how long other exotic makes have been owned? The CorpComm team—my internal client—was thinking a simple chart showing the years of ownership. It could have probably been designed easily and in a few hours. But I saw potential in telling a richer story and producing a cooler artifact while still getting the point across. I didn’t quite know what form the final graphic would take. It warranted some research, inspiration, and exploration.

Research

While the team did provide me with some data, I decided to look into the histories of all these makes. Just to get a feel for the material. I ended up spending a full day in the bowels of Wikipedia and other exotic car enthusiast sites tracking down each time a brand changed hands or changed names. What I found was a sometimes—in the case of many of the British brands—fascinating spaghetti of bankruptcies, auctions, nationalizations, and spin-offs. This added much more depth to the pure numbers that I was given, and a timeline form started to wander into my head.

Inspiration

I recalled seeing an infographic about the history of automobile companies a few years ago. It’s called “The Genealogy of Automobile Companies” and was expertly designed by Larry Gormley. He presents the information about the explosion of auto startups in the early 20th century and how over time it all starts to consolidate. It’s a classic.

My dataset is different because it’s only about foreign exotic makes, but it tells a similar story of consolidation. Additionally the story is also about the changing of owners. I didn’t want to repeat the same form and really needed to show the information in a style consistent with TrueCar’s high-tech brand.

I’ve always admired the infographics from the New York Times. Their graphics team has done a tremendous job of using a variety of techniques to bring life to the data. They have no visual style per se, yet their signature is clarity.

I also flipped through the massive tome called Information Graphics by Sandra Rendgen. While ultimately I didn’t find the perfect form in the book for my data, it certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities.

Exploration

I began to explore different formats. I knew my dataset and knew that my goal was to show the winding paths that each of these car makes took to get where they are today. Like abandoned orphans bouncing from foster home to foster home, many of these brands’ lineages tell stories of rich men, fast cars, and terribly stupid financial decisions. What form could tell that story?

When I thought more about the data, it occurred to me that this was really about ancestry—about who begot whom. So I looked into examples of family trees and genealogy fans.

Solution

The data and the resulting infographic didn’t turn out to be a very screen-friendly. Instead it is a data-intensive multi-layered intricate 24″ x 36″ printed poster meant to be looked at up close.

Time is indicated by the radial lines, from 1906—when Rolls-Royce started—through 2014. Each slice of the semi-circle indicates a brand. The outside starting color is their brand color with a watermark of their original logo. Each change in color within each slice indicates change of ownership or name. As you can see with Maserati and Ferrari, Bentley and Rolls-Royce, and Land Rover and Jaguar, sometimes owners are shared. Ultimately—with the sole exception of Aston Martin—all marques lead to larger corporate parents like Volkswagen AG today who own a multitude of these makes under one entity.

In the end, I don’t think the final solution would have come about had I not gone through the process and spent time getting immersed in the data, looking for design inspiration, and exploring the possibilities. It’s the industry-tested universal design process. But spending a full day getting lost in the history of all these car makes helped me synthesize the data into something bigger. And then spending time to look at hundreds of other infographics helped me break out of any preconceived design notions. The first thought is often wrong and lazy. Finally in sketching, I was able to land on something compelling.

Having spent the last seven years of my career as a creative director, my job is usually more about ensuring my designers are set up to do their best work. Therefore it’s a rare opportunity to design something from start to finish and to obsess over the little details so completely.

I must also mention that having an open-minded client helped a lot too. The CorpComm team at TrueCar gave me a starting point and a long leash.

It was a fun ride and I’m proud of the result.

Download the high-res PNG (4096x2740 3.3MB)

Download the PDF

A Short Note about Craft

The final infographic was worked on over a number of weeks. After finishing the initial design—which was a focused weeklong marathon—I spent a lot of time tweaking the colors for screen and for print. I also had to completely flatten my Adobe Illustrator file to get rid of anti-aliasing artifacts. I originally built the file with a series of masks—one for each slice or marque. But the adjacency of the colors and paths wreaked havoc on the anti-aliasing algorithm and it just looked bad. I knew it would be fine printed, but it also needed to look good on-screen.

From an advertising standpoint, I believe Apple has been on fire recently. (Disclaimer: I have been an Apple fanboy since 1985 and used to work there many years ago.) Beginning with the “What will your verse be?” iPad ad that debuted in mid-January, they’ve continued with the “You’re more powerful than you think” iPhone 5S that began airing recently.

When I first saw “Your Verse” on TV it stopped me in my tracks. Using audio of Robin Williams speaking to his class in Dead Poets Society, it features footage of people using the iPad around the world for making music, photography, tracking tornadoes, playing professional hockey, and more. The haunting melody combined with the breathtaking images and Robin Williams’ voice really struck a chord with me. It evoked a deep sense of wonder and faith in humanity. These were real people doing extraordinary things with this product. In the mere three years that iPad has been available* it has created a whole new category of devices and enabled millions of people to do ordinary and extraordinary things.

Here’s the text from the speech:

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering. These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman: “O me, O life of the question of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these? O me, O life.” Answer: That you are here. That life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. …That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” What will your verse be?

It ends with a challenge, raising the question for the viewer, “How will you make your dent in the universe?”

And just this week, Apple debuted a similar people-do-awesome-things-with-Apple-products video called “Powerful.” It features people using the iPhone to make music, perform art, video their kids, and more. It’s set against a youthful cover of the Pixies’ “Gigantic.” The film is an anthem much like the iPad ad that preceded it, and about how Apple products have empowered millions of people to do some pretty cool things.

(As an aside, I think “Powerful” is better executed than “Your Verse.” My issue with the first ad is that it had too many cuts in it. And the voiceover did not lend itself to a 30-second or even 60-second ad. Only the 90-second version works. Whereas all the cuts of “Powerful” are just as effective. And additionally interesting, my sources have told me that “Your Verse” was done internally at Apple. I would suspect that “Powerful” was also executed in-house.

As a second aside, this is one of the rarer moments when Apple’s campaigns are integrated, with a strong digital presence. See for yourself: Your Verse, Powerful.)

So what’s the takeaway?

These ads are not meant to convince the non-believers to buy Apple products. Instead, they’re both calls-to-arms for the Apple faithful. It’s their CRM strategy if you will. These ads are meant to inspire “the rest of us” and reinforce that we made the right choice in terms of the iOS platform and devices. These epic films depict a world made better by Apple products which makes us feel good. With Samsung and other Android devices eroding at Apple’s historic lead, this is exactly what they need.

These ads are reminiscent of Apple’s classic comeback “Think Different” campaign. Here is the text of the commercial that launched it:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

As documented in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Apple needed to make a statement that they were still a viable company able to make world-changing products. Isaacson writes, “It was designed to celebrate not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the computers.” And he goes on to say that this ad wasn’t only directed at the general public, but also to Apple employees who had forgotten what Apple stood for.

And I believe rallying the base is exactly what Apple is doing again.

• iPad was announced January 27, 2010, at MacWorld in San Francisco and began shipping April 3, 2010.

The Apple Mac turned 30 years old today. I got my first Mac in 1985 actually after weeks if not months of convincing my father to spend his hard-earned money on it. Every weekend and after many school days, I’d take the bus over to Computerland on Van Ness in San Francisco and just play with the Mac on display for hours at a time.

Embarrassingly this is one of my first MacPaint paintings. Bear in mind that I was 12 years old at the time.

Yesterday Apple announced its third-generation iPad, simply named “iPad.” Buried in MG Siegler’s excellent take on the press event is this statement:

What’s more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it’s a joke to think it will take a full five years.

In the post-PC world, tablets are becoming the new normal more and more. In just the two years since the iPad was first introduced, we’ve seen it pervasive on airplanes to entertain children, many executives in Silicon Valley walking around with them instead of lugging laptops, and even the President of the United States receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad instead of a sheet of paper.

How We Really Use Tablets

Rosetta—the agency for which I work—released a study last month around how we consumers use tablets. Consumption and entertainment are still the primary uses of tablets today, but here are some interesting points to note:

• 33% of tablet users (who owned one 12+ months) prefer to read/check email on their tablets
• 38% of them prefer tablets to read e-books, magazines or newspapers
• 34% of them use their tablets at work
• 45% on the go

In other words we’re witnessing the trend of users either adding to their repertoire of connected devices or in some cases shifting away from traditional PCs to tablets. As MG Siegler said in the quote above, tablets are poised to become the primary computing device at home.

But I would argue that place is a misleading distinction. Yes, PCs will likely still be a primary computing device at the office, but maybe it’s the wrong way to put it.

Work/Life, Life/Work

PCs today are not stationary. Almost every workplace I’ve come across in recent years outfits its workforce with laptops. Those laptops are often taken home so that work can be done at home. And here’s the thing: as much as we’d like to draw a hard line between work and home, it’s too fuzzy. It’s too gray.

Workers check their personal emails and Facebook while at work, on their work machines. They IM their friends or watch funny cat videos on YouTube in the office. Conversely they check their work email on their personal smartphones and catch up with industry-related reading before bed.

The workforce of today achieves work/life balance by seamlessly blending the two to get things done. Wherever they are.

Responsive Web Design

Out of this notion of users being connected constantly and wanting access to information all the time, wherever they are, the responsive web design movement was born. Essentially it’s a set of techniques to enable a single codebase to deliver multiple layouts for different screen sizes. The redesign of BostonGlobe.com has become the poster child for this modern and forward-looking approach to designing for the web. It’s about letting users access content from whatever devices they have, wherever they are. And with this approach, content creators are also saving money on operating expenditures because they only have one site to maintain, not two or three. No longer should you need to write a different headline for mobile.

The Impending Future Is Here

With all this data staring at them in the face, it amazes me that when it comes to digital marketing, many corporations still have the traditional view of developing for mobile. They are still stuck on starting with the desktop experience and then dumbing it down for smartphones and tablets. The old way of thinking made sense at the time (three, four years ago?): users on the go have different needs, and the screen real estate is too small to do anything significant.

However, as we’ve become used to having the Internet in our pocket and as we’ve found a place for the tablet to live in our lives, that four year-old thinking is sadly out of touch with the impending future.

432 million users use Facebook on a mobile device every month. Facebook partially attributes the 76% increase from 2010 to the release of its iPad app. With Apple selling more iPads in Q4 2011 than PCs sold by any PC manufacturer, and with annual tablet sales projected to be at over 45 million by 2016, tablets are here to stay and will become more and more prevalent.

Additionally 472 million smartphones were sold in 2011, 46% of the U.S. adult population have smartphones, and 69% of smartphone owners use it for business. Last, but not least: 81% of smartphone users browse the Internet. The mobile web and the notion of content anywhere cannot be ignored.

The workforce of tomorrow will read their work emails on their smartphones and tablets. They will do research and consume work-related content on those devices. And they will go beyond consumption and produce work on those devices.

As designers and marketers, to ignore this is ignoring the inevitable.

I have been a Mac user since 1985, when I was in the seventh grade. For months I lusted after the Mac on display at Computerland on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. I’d go there after school just to play with MacPaint. It simply captured my imagination. Finally, after many weeks of begging, I got my dad to buy me a 512K Mac. Thus began my love affair with Apple.

Imagine how lucky I felt when I actually began working on the brand and on Pixar in 2001-2002. It was such a privilege to be so close to the magic and to Steve Jobs himself.

The Steve Jobs I knew was human. Not a god. Not someone who could distort reality. Just a man.

But he was sharp and always focused with his opinions and observations. He demanded perfection. Always.

I was a lowly pixel pusher when I worked directly with him. In addition to Pixar.com, I also designed some pitch slides for him. His feedback was always direct and always right. Yes it was surreal to have him call me on the phone and for me to load slides on his Mac.

Near the end of my tenure at Pixar, I wanted to do more. I was hoping to build a little design department there. But Steve didn’t think I was ready, and he told me so—directly. Even though I was crushed at the time, it was probably one of the best pushes I ever got to do better, to stay hungry, and to stay foolish.

Thank you, Steve. You changed me—and more importantly, the world—for the better.

With everyone sharing their sweet Steve moments, I have to share mine.

I was working at Apple in the motion graphics group within the Graphic Design department. I was assigned to work on the intro animation for the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther setup assistant. We went through the normal design process with our stakeholders (people in charge of “MacBuddy”) and got to an animation that was essentially swarms of dots that formed each of the different translations of “Welcome” on the screen. And then we showed this nearly-final animation to someone higher at the top—forgive me, I’ve forgotten who this was—and he killed it because the dots looked too much like sperm. OK, they kinda did. (Think about swirling points of light but with motion trails. We tried increasing the motion blur, but it was no use.)

It was back to the drawing board and I presented more ideas. Eventually, Steve got involved and started looking at the animations. Each week my boss would show Steve a new revision of it, and each time we got a little closer. Then on Round 14, the week my boss was on vacation, I had to go present it to Steve Jobs.

He was eager to see this new revision. No pleasantries. No introductions (actually he knew me from Pixar). Just got right down to business. But he did say this to me, “Wow. We spend more time on MacBuddy than Microsoft does on all of its UI.” And then he chuckled.

The presentation was quick and he only had a couple of pretty minor notes. I think I had one more revision and it was finally done.

What my time at Apple and working with Steve taught me was this: Keep going until it’s right. Don’t settle.

Thank you, Steve.