Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Often I preach about how amazing Apple's OSX was when it was released (OSX is Apple's operating system, first released back in 2001). Back then I was used to working on a PC based Media 100 844X and boy did I have some headaches. I also like to talk about how Final Cut Pro effectively destroyed Media 100 and took a huge bite out of the Avid post-production market (Final Cut Pro is Apple's $1000 video editing powerhouse). I am traditionally a strong advocate for the company, because they have improved my quality of life.

However, I found the error message below so hilarious that I felt it must be shared with the world. I was working in Final Cut one day when it appeared seemingly for no reason. To this day I wonder, "What happened?"

I enjoy the little TV I watch but the only show I actually stop for is Tosh.0 (http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/toshpt0/index.jhtml) on Comedy Central. Acerbic comedian Daniel Tosh's commentary on Internet buzziness is both brilliant and sophomoric at the same time.

I shared my new favorite show with colleagues. Some had seen the show and loved it. Some not familiar at all. I encouraged them to watch Thursdays at 10 pm.

On Friday I asked, "Did you watch Tosh last night?" A few said, "Yeah, I saw an old episode with Video on Demand. Don't tell me what happened last night." I don't have TiVo or Video on Demand. I would certainly enjoy the convenience. But I also like the experience of waiting for a show. It feels more like a performance.

In my office, current shows like Lost still draw lunchtime discussion. I want that for my show, too! To me it extends the life of the program. Is customized TV one more step away from us talking? What will this do to new scripted TV shows?

I miss Show and Tell. Getting together a roomful of people and learning about things that I wouldn't normally come across in my day-to-day life was a great part of being a kid. So, lets start it up again.

I've got a long backlog of things I'll never formally write about. But some of  'em are interesting and maybe--just maybe--someone else might find them interesting. So here are a few of mine:

• Tobias Wong
  Tobi executes dense concepts with incredible simplicity. These are approachable visually and compelling intellectually.
• Denis Wood
  A Raleigh native, Denis has been making maps of Boylan Heights and the surroundings since 1970. But they're not conventional maps by any means. Think: maps showing how light falls on the ground through the trees. Listen to a podcast on This American Life.
• WNYC's RadioLab
  RadioLab is incredible. I can't remember when I tuned in to a radio broadcast with so much enthusiasm. If you're an NPR listener, it's like This American Life but abstracted up to the level of the human condition. Listen to the "Musical Language" podcast to learn why people violently revolted to Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring.
• Peter Mendulsund Interview on Design:Related
  Great book cover designs, and the dialogue behind how they were made. What's better? Hunt out his portfolio to see the designs that didn't make it past the focus groups. Man, crowdthink can be so bad.
• TED Conferences
  My perennial favorite--and not simply because I don't have a TV that can net a signal. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design; the conferences were the  brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman. For you, skip the $8k entrance fee and watch them online. What do I suggest? Sir Ken Robinson's speech "Do Schools Kill Creativity" is a great appetizer. TED in its 2008 session right now, so subscribe to the vodcasts now and get the videos once they're edited.
• Del.icio.us tagged "Public Data"
  A meme started by John Udell, this is basically an effort to tag freely accessible, public data. Search this and use IBM's ManyEyes to make some spurious yet visually interesting analyses.
• Brooklyn Superhero Supply
  So, yeah, this is a front for Dave Eggers' writing group in NYC. But Dave is a the kind of writer that makes your eyes bug out and your teeth clench when you read his work. So it's cool. And he's got great design sense. BKLYN Superhero re-fronts the site of his writing group with all accoutrements necessary for waging a war against villainy. Need Speed of Light tonic? They got you covered.

 

Now you. What have you seen cool recently?

I have decided to raise a point of order with the English language, based on evidence which has recently come to bear. I would like to formally request the immediate and unconditional abolishment of the word 'podcast.'

I have a mondo affinity for words, don't get me wrong. I can write 'mondo' and 'affinity' next to one another in a sentence, and most of you get my meaning. But sometimes, certain junk words can be gummy enough to stick to our regular-usage muscle. Once Merriam-Webster writes them into law, such words can wreak havoc in contexts worldwide for generations.

Sitting around Innovation Station this morning, I was privy to an internal discussion of a client's expectations, as they pertained to a podcast. After several minutes of furious debate, it became clear that 'podcast' brought absolutely no clarity to the scope of the project. In fact, I contend that attaching that handle muddied the waters.

The term podcast was coined in 2004 with the splash of Apple's iPod. The ensuing cultural revolution of handheld entertainment and communication solidified the 'i-' prefix, and '-pod' as the suffix of the compartmentally-hip. At it's inception, the iPod was an mp3 player, designed for portable audio. The term became synonymous with portable, streamable audio cross-media, and soon the podcast was born, a portmanteau of 'iPod' and 'broadcast.' Used to describe organized audio presented over the Web, the podcast separated itself in that one could subscribe to a podcast feed and have installments pulled down to their device automatically. Well that was all great, but in just a couple of rabbit-speed gestational periods, the iPod gave birth to the video iPod, which gave birth to the iPhone...and now you have rich media for nearly all of the senses at your fingertips. And who hasn't heard of RSS by now? You can practically get your groceries via RSS these days. Bloggers everywhere found themselves stumbling over the clunkiness of describing the New Hotness as video podcasts, or rich media podcasts, or vlogs, or...or...

Merriam-Webster gleans the list of words we use every 10 years or so, adding and striking thousands upon thousands of words based on their popularity or obsolescence. The last major revision came in 2003. So you see, folks...WE STILL HAVE TIME. According to M-W (we're tight like that), they receive thousands of letters every year formally petitioning the addition or deletion of all types of words - but they are quick to add that there is no tangible way to directly sway the jury. I would very much like to meet one of these verbal illuminati and invite them to dinner, but that is beside the point. As frustrating as democracy itself, the only way to truly affect change is to encourage others to support you. So today, I implore you. Walk with me. Help our clients understand the Beast. Help us understand our clients. There just is no podcast anymore. There is only the webcast. There is only the blog. Both are the gryphons of our wired world, and no content is off limits. Just add adjectives to describe the nature of your content, and we will build it to perfection.

Co-authored by Todd Coats and Will Langley.

We’re honored to be part of PRWeek’s 2007 Book of Lists. They recognized capstrat.com as one of 5 agency sites that awed. PR Week writes, “Many agencies have tried to show its ‘people.’ Capstrat's ingenious panoramic view of the office succeeds where everyone else failed. Every single employee appears to have a bio, declarative proof that it's an agency that cares about all of its employees.”

Well, we believe they’re right. We do care about our employees. We also care about collaboration and innovation. I asked Will Langley, one of Capstrat’s programming ninjas to revisit our collaborative process that led to this unique approach. We decided to write our individual points of view since we approached the problem from two directions (me coming from the conceptual trying to understand the technical, Will from the technical trying to interpret the conceptual). Our mission was the same though—challenge through collaboration.

Todd starts: “Repeal the laws of physics. That’s what I want, Will!” We challenge ourselves to surprise and delight clients at every turn. Visitors to our office always talk about its openness and energy. So I had a crazy idea to create a panoramic view of our office as the stage to show our unpredictable energy and randomness. Strictly speaking, the content could be anything. Since I decided to use the office funkiness as a stage, it was easy to decide that our people and practice areas would be the stars. The challenge was how do they interact? How do we make this useable? How do we keep it interesting for repeat visitors? What is this crazy world we’re making?

I pitched the concept to Will as a place where randomness reigns. We didn’t want to give the impression people were on treadmills as they moved, though. They had to obey (some of) the laws of physics for believability. Otherwise the result would be too designy. It would just be moving pictures, no magic.

Having seen a few sites with Action Scripted parallax, I figured we could do that. When Will’s head didn’t explode I figured we could make it a panoramic illusion, too. Heck, while we’re at it let’s make it animated navigation. Will did a lot of experimenting with the black arts of scripting until we agreed the multiple layers behaved correctly. The design team experimented with backgrounds and people to present them at the right scale. That was harder than we thought. Again, to sell the illusion we wanted one foot in reality and one foot in this anything-can-happen world.

I wonder if Will thought I had a foot in Bonkerworld.

Will says: I did not think Todd was bonkers. A little eccentric? Maybe. Twitchy creative? Certainly. After much arm-waving and wild scribbling, we finally found ourselves on a common plane of understanding. Thus began a period of tense negotiation with the Flash authoring environment to bring Todd’s vision to life. Creating a believable parallax was relatively painless – but as Todd mentioned, randomness was mission critical. I’ve visited so many rich media sites and been wowed by the action—riiiight up to the point where my brain recognized the loop. Once that happens the knee-jerk response is to browse on, having seen all there is to see. By randomly shuffling our arrays of people and objects, we were able to break the “loop.” This created a more engaging experience for visitors to our site and enticed them to hang around and explore.

The panoramic backdrop of our office brilliantly highlighted all the pockets of individual funk and flare that make working at Capstrat such a rewarding experience. We share and evolve ideas and solutions with impunity around here, and the quality of our work shows it. The final panoramic is rich and seamless – you feel as though you could crawl into any corner of it and live the Capstrat experience. When we decided to follow up with a second banner for our Culture page, Todd accepted my offer to create a similar panorama. A print designer before taking up the dark arts of web development, this was thrilling! I was able to push and develop my Photoshop skills to new heights.

Our initial foray into the world of transparent video in Flash, design translation for this project uncovered other unforeseen hurdles. With all of our detailed image assets needing to be transparent, the use of the PNG-24 image format was a necessity. Running Photoshop assets through both After Effects and Flash, and meeting in the middle without color shifts, proved to be a major undertaking. Tears were shed. Hearts were broken. And ultimately, Photoshop actions were created to put us back on our way.

Use of the transparent PNG format presented us with our final major obstacle – file size. This beautiful piece of collaborative effort would be for naught if our baseline user had to wait an eternity for the experience. It’s common knowledge that, as developers, we have only a few seconds to engage our users before we risk losing them. The need to overcome our loading issues led us to rethink our loading and preloading schema. We decided to keep everything compartmentalized, remanding our preloaders to each individual asset. This allowed us to eliminate the use of a clunky and frustratingly slow global preloader. The result of this approach is a [relatively] large file efficiently removing itself from the experience, offering the user tasty morsels to distract from the heavy lifting taking place behind the curtain. The user gets to browse our office panorama almost instantly, with each piece of the parallax puzzle sliding into place seamlessly and quietly around them.

With all of our problems solved, we began the final Q/A process. We noticed right away that we had a little user-experience glitch, resulting in a slight case of “chasing the rabbit”, wherein the user finds themselves unable to keep their mouse on the clickable regions without interference. To eliminate this, we made our randomness conditional, so that each object weighed its randomly-selected starting position against all of its peers. When unacceptable overlap occurs, the position is tossed out and another selected. The process continues until an acceptable condition is reached. While the user is none-the-wiser, this little tidbit is perhaps my most triumphant of the entire project.

This project exemplifies what we’re about at Capstrat. Sure, we all come from different backgrounds and speak different languages. But, whether you say the sky is robin’s egg blue or hexadecimal 6FD3FF, we all agree that innovation is a full contact sport. Our management team understands, encourages and lives the spirit of collaboration. The result is personal and professional growth as well as development on a macro scale. Not to mention note-worthy work that we can all be proud of. Visit the PR Week posting.