Best Made Company Axes

Aside from being an awesome product, Best Made Co. is putting on one of the best clinics in marketing and copywriting in recent memory; Selling Axes to city bound business men, stay at home moms, and web designers looking for wall art. They’ve taken a product that’s normally a commodity and elevated it to a work of art through prodigious storytelling.

The most valuable part of their site, though, may be the section on their about page where they discuss their process:

“Color, pattern, and play are the guiding factors in everything we make. Even though it’s “just an axe” it’s a blank canvas with endless possibilities. When the axe is finished we sit down and think of names. The naming process is crucial: it’s where we give the axe the beginning of its story, albeit a very short story (we purposefully do not caption the axes, just give them names) because we know our customers are inventive enough to create the real ongoing story.”

Visit their site…

Overstatement

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

- Mark Twain

Mark Twain in The Lab of Nikola Tesla

Writers On… Writing

Given the freedom they have in accomplishing their daily work, writers are often fascinating studies in wringing out individual creativity. Interesting excerpts from the (terribly titled) How To Write a Great Novel article out this week…

Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.

His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.

Wikipedia: Dan Chaon

When he’s in the middle of a novel, Colum McCann sometimes prints out a chapter or two in large font, staples it together like a book, and takes it to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and pretends he’s reading a book by someone else.

Other times, when he’s re-reading a bit of dialogue or trying to tweak a character’s voice, he’ll reduce the computer font to eight-point Times New Roman. “It forces me to peer at the words and examine why they’re there,” Mr. McCann wrote in an email message.

Changing the way the words look physically gives him more critical distance, he says.

Wikipedia: Column McCann

To write “Lowboy,” which takes place in the New York City subway, Brooklyn-based novelist John Wray rode trains all over the city while pecking out a first draft on his laptop computer. He mainly rode the F, C and B trains, though “there was a time when I was really into the G,” he says. He often sat in a corner near the conductor’s booth with his headphones on. He worked like this, often for six hours a day, for nearly a year.

Granta Best of Young American Novelists: John Wray

Read the Full WSJ Article…

Frank Chimero on Technique and Faking It

“How do you get those uneven edges in your illustrations?”
“I draw them, unevenly.”

“What’s the best way to get this to look like it’s cut out of paper?”
“Cut it out of paper.”

“What typeface are you using? It looks so much like handwriting.”
“That’s my handwriting.”

These are all real questions I’ve been asked by folks. At lectures, in class, over email. It makes me feel like I’m in the business of serving up plain, glaring answers.

“Care to shed some enlightenment, Frank?”
“Hm, I don’t know. How about a big pile of obvious?”

Sorry folks, the most evident way of doing something is typically the way that I do it. No secret labs, no special tools, no computer gee-whizzery…

Read the rest: Faking It
Also great by Frank: Why vs. How

Inconspicuous Consumption

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

- William Morris

Picking an Idea…

Even at the beginning of a project, he already has the end stages in mind. “I never start working on an idea unless I already know how I’m going to spread the word about it. It’s a noisy world, and there’s a lot of awesome people doing a lot of awesome things. No matter how great your idea is, no matter how perfect its execution, if you can’t get noticed, it may as well not exist. This means sometimes changing ideas to make them more spreadable or worth talking about, and sometimes it means not working on ideas I’d really like to work on. Luckily there’s no shortage of great ideas, so being picky is important.“

- Amit Gupta of Photojojo in Behance

The Nuts and Bolts

There’s a huge demand, an appetite, for understanding process in America right now. We have 640,000 paid readers [today over 1 million], and all of them seem to be really keen on why. And that’s a shock to me. I would think that most people wouldn’t care, but they do care. And that makes a good cook.

- Chris Kimball, founder of America’s Test Kitchen

Pay Attention to the Back of Your Mind

There is something that ties all of your ideas together.  A common theme that you keep going back to, something that your new ideas are branches of or new incarnations of.  Remember what that is or work hard determine it if you don’t already know.  That’s what what you should be working on.  Where this baseline overlaps with a way to help people do something, whether it be making money, saving money, or just being cooler or smarter amongst their friends… you have your business.  Run with it and stop jumping around from new idea to new idea.

“Fixing” Technology Meetups in Chicago

I found this while browsing through one of my old attempts at a blog and decided to move it over here since Jelly Chicago is getting really close to the “ideal” that I laid out a while ago….

From Feb 22nd 2008…

Last night I attended TechCocktail here in Chicago, a great event that makes you feel good about some of the exciting things that are sprouting up in this city. However, while it was great to see such enthusiasm and turnout for a technology event here in Chicago, my disappointment with technology based meetups will continue.

As I see it there are several problems with the popular meetups. There is too much noise at these events (and I don’t mean the audible kind).
There are so many people there doing so many different things that it often becomes difficult to have any sort of meaningful or worthwhile interaction with them or to contribute something meaningful or worthwhile to others.

It seems often that the sheer size of the event and, in turn, the different goals each type of person has for the night ends up fighting with the premise and ideals the event had in the first place.

Some people come for the free beer and to have a good time, some come to find people to work with and share ideas, some come to catch up with each other, and some come to demo their latest product or site. Add to that those who come to pitch you (and those that come to hound you and pitch the same crazy idea that they’ve been hounding people with at every tech meetup since the dawn of tech meetups) and you get a pretty awkwardly interacting mass of people.

Hardly a place that generates anything other than excitement for the tech community in the area which is a great thing but doesn’t do a whole lot for the other 361 days of the year when the event is not happening.

So not being one to let things sit, I’ve been doing some thinking about how to fix them and how to create meetups that are functional, productive, and worthwhile. Still less intense and focused on one group of people than a BarCamp or an Unconference but still an improvement upon the large scale meet-and-greets.

So what would make these events productive? I think I’ve narrowed it down to several key factors all related to the idea that the best business relationships emerge from meaningful real-life interactions:

Increased Frequency – Its difficult to form meaningful relationships with people you only meet in passing and speak to briefly a couple times per year.

The ability to be productive – The ability to show someone something or elaborate on an idea is key and its just not optimal to whip out a laptop or brainstorm in a large and crowded space.

Filter out the Noise – While a large group of people may seem optimal for meeting new people its actually quite difficult especially when that large group of people is compressed into a short time. Lets face it, a series of elevator pitches is not a conversation

Less Self Interest – If the idea is to grow community, then sponsors shilling for exposure, people trying to sell you things, and people trying to randomly network are counter productive

More Community Ethos – Like I’ve stressed, you’re there to learn from and interact with others who are doing cool things, not figure out how they’re useful to you or what you can get from them.

Its funny but the best solution I’ve thought about seems to come from the support group model, i.e. they meet frequently, have some form of accountability for like-minded or like-interested people, and they allow for personal interaction and meaningful relationships within medium sized groups.

The solution I had been tossing around is sort of a founders anonymous, a weekly or bi-weekly meeting of people perhaps in a coffehouse backroom (yes I know about OpenCoffee and ChicagoBeta but the sponsors and the pitches there sort of throw me off) or rotating through company conference rooms where people begin to know each other over time based on the cool stuff they’re making and only indirectly on the businesses they’re trying to grow. Realizing this, there is also no incentive for people to show up, I’ll give a hat tip to techcocktail and bring beer into the mix…

It seems like the ideal setting would be a “founders hour”, a biweekly time after work at a local bar where founders could wander in and get to know each other over a relatively quiet drink and with a frequency and intimacy that allows for work to get done and meaningful relationships to be built.

The size of the gathering also helps to act as a filter as theres no room for hucksters and hangers on, if they don’t have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation they’ll eventually just stop coming or people will stop talking to them.

No sponsors, no pretense, no pitching… just cool ideas and the intent of fostering a tech community. I’ll keep thinking but I would like to announce my intention to start something like this here in Chicago and anyone who is interested should drop me a line to brad at unchartedventures with the .com and the @ of course.