Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

  • Why 90% is not enough

    Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing. And then if it doesn’t work out, you know there’s nothing else you can do

    –New York Times interview with Thrillist’s Ben Lerer

  • Quick takes: Apple vs. Samsung

    Round up of interesting opinions on last Friday’s decisive victory (see this comprehensive count-by-count summary in the Wall Street Journal) for Apple in the patent wars:

    Unsurprisingly, Apple’s Tim Cook circulated a memo proclaiming that “Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.” Samsung is working on appeals while messaging that this is a loss for the average consumer, and took a 6.9% beating in the market, the largest drop since October 2008.

    Graphic: Infomous-generated cloud of Apple Samsung topics in the news 08.26.2012

  • Is that social account legit?

    The GSA announced the launch of an official registry of government social media accounts.  Their goals were to help users understand which accounts are legitimate in an era of phishing; offer a series of APIs for agencies to pull data back out of these burgeoning social accounts; and make the registry itself available to agencies, reducing duplication and error.

    We launched a modest version of this directory idea at Harvard back in 2011 — a manually created directory of “official” social accounts at Harvard. Tweets had already been cleverly aggregated by David Malan and his CS50 crew, but there’s the problem of account creep and authentication. Is someone producing a HarvardTweet as a current faculty member or student? What happens when students graduate? When staff leave? How loose or tight should the definition of a HarvardTweet be?

    Social media policies at most institutions address egregious misuse of accounts — sharing confidential information or harassment — but the question of affiliation is murkier, especially in an academic institution with 375,000 alumni worldwide. Perhaps the best approach is to divide into “endorsed” (departments, schools) versus “affiliated” (alumni, past and present staff) — and create useful APIs for both.

  • Closing statement in the trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot

    It is the entire state system of the Russian Federation which is on trial and which, unfortunately for itself, thoroughly enjoys quoting its cruelty towards human beings, its indifference to their honour and dignity, the very worst that has happened in Russian history to date.

    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s closing statement in the trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot

  • Down and out (of access) in Paris and London

    Was lucky enough to get a little time away this summer — never enough — and sneak off to  London and Paris. Managed to avoid the Jubilee and the Olympics for the former, and all the Parisians (and, regrettably, their best boulangeries) for the latter.

    It was eye-opening to me how much more digital and mobile London felt. Everything from finding location-aware Tube maps to evaluating museum passes to seeing what’s on around town at a glance on an iPad was easy and optimized for information on the go. Paris felt almost like the opposite — nothing seemed to render well for mobile and sites were organized more bureaucratically than with the user in mind.

    End result: easier to find and buy via mobile in London. Wired cities may begin to see investment in digital as more than streamlining infrastructure and engaging citizenry in governance, but as a key to unlocking tourism dollars via mobile commerce.

  • Personas for a 21st century media environment

    Conjure me up a guy who talks science winningly, who shows you that everything is transparent, and does it in a self-help-y spirit,” [Gitlin] said. “In our age, a guy who looks cute and wonky is better positioned to get away with this than others.

    Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, said in an interview that not only had Mr. Lehrer carved out a career in the popular niche of brain science, but he had created a persona that is perfectly suited to a 21st-century media environment. (The New York Times)

  • Weekend reading: Just My Type & my fascination with fonts

    Ignore the chick lit title — Just My Type is a wonderfully informative and gossipy exploration of fonts (thanks, Cesar). If you’re eager to learn why Garamond left an indelible mark on 16th century Paris, how Caslon cut the finest ampersand, or which master of the sans serif had a taste for ceaseless sexual experimentation, give it a go.

    I started my career in textbook publishing at Houghton Mifflin, a company which back in the late eighties had a management approach oddly similar to Dunder Mifflin today. What it did have in its favor was passionate editors, mostly highly educated women who cared not only about the pedagogical value of the content but also about the painstaking review of page proofs. The editors led endless page reviews to ensure the accuracy of the fonts, point sizes, and line leading — and the absence of widows and orphans. For better or worse, I had a knack for spotting a stray serif, and gained a love for fonts just before an embarrassment of them appeared on all our dropdown menus.

    Fast forward to Harvard in 2010, and to leading an effort to bring consistency to the University’s infamously decentralized visual identity. For the Harvard wordmark, the team settled on a modified version of Anziano Pro — striking a balance between Roman tradition and modern sensibility. It’s gratifying to see use of the wordmark spread as new digital properties are developed. Its success is partly driven by the desire for increased consistency, given the stark juxtapositions created by digital communications, and partly the recognition that fonts can reflect and amplify the nature of a message. It only takes one glimpse of Comic Sans on the side of an ambulance to understand the importance the right font.

  • Is technology ruining language?

    Many a linguistic commentator would have us (misleadingly) believe that technology is ruining language. Every mangled text message and misspelled Facebook status update, they cry, is a dagger through the heart of proper usage. But such grousing ignores increasingly symbiotic ties between linguistics and technology: Some of the most exciting developments in the use and exploration of language have been occurring this year on the front lines of technology.

    Voicing Concerns, The Economist

  • Great expectations (and how to live up to them)

    Greg Hoy has written a thoughtful piece over at A List Apart about client and vendor expectations. Like Greg, I’ve sat on both sides of the table as those expectations are defined through discovery phases, written requirements, and more multi-colored sticky exercises than I’d care to admit to.

    I think Greg’s onto something when he talks about the importance of being vague at the initial contract phase — of listing all the tools in your arsenal, but not committing specifically to which ones will be used. It’s just too soon. Too often agencies have an inflexible one-size-fits-all methodology that the team frogmarches through. But we all know that clients (and their enterprise constraints) vary, as do specific project needs. Far better to take the counter-intuitive approach: “Instead of prematurely committing to a course of action that may or may not be appropriate for the project, we identify all of the possible artifacts we could produce in each phase. Then we commit to zero of them.”

    Of course, this vague an approach only works if you have the same end result in mind — and that understanding has to be mutual and comprehensive before any SOW is drafted, let alone signed. The project has to have a client-led but ultimately shared understanding of the overarching business goals, and how the end product will satisfy, empower, and ideally delight the end user. The shared vision needs to be crystal clear, but the deliverables to get there can and should be re-visited as you go.

    Photo credit: haagenjerrys

  • Risks of new ICANN gTLDs

    [W]hat if the name was created by an open source community, without the financial resources to mount a challenge? I have some standing there, because I played a role in establishing blogs. How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog?

    Dave Winer quoted in Giga Om on the risks inherent to corporate use of generic words in new ICANN gTLDs