Today we are happy to publish a new Dachis Group XPLANATiON about Social Business.
What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.
Click to download the PDF.
So far this series has been unoriginal and had a few bad ideas, but today’s installment can be especially crippling: self doubt. It usually goes something like this: “I can concept this, but I can’t execute it. I don’t have the requisite skills to pay the forthcoming bills.”
The fear of undertaking a project beyond your abilities is enough to stop you in your tracks while concepting. And it’s especially frustrating because the idea you have may be great. It may be inspired. You can see it, right there, clear as day in your head. But getting it out in the real world? That isn’t your forté. And that’s a bummer.
By Brooke IllaHuston and Teija Springman
At XPLANE | Dachis Group we have some of those fun perks you often hear about at great workplaces — wine every Friday, free M&Ms, a pool table, and a duck pond to name a few. But we think the reason our workplace is so great runs a little deeper than that. For us, building a great workplace is a big commitment, and it’s all about building trust, pride, and camaraderie. We wanted to share a few of our practices with the hope that it might inspire you to think about how you could build a better workplace — wherever you work.
Our beloved X.
Cold sweats. Anxiety. A blank canvas. Sudden creative paralysis.
You have stumbled into a zone in which we’ve all found ourselves: Coming up with a design concept for your new project.
I’m here to talk you through some of the common roadblocks you may encounter when generating concepts. Previously, we discussed unoriginality. Today, let’s dig into bad ideas. Or at least what to do when you have them.
I should probably begin by explaining why we call it “Top Jeff” in the first place. Myself, fellow St. Louis designer Susanne and XPLANE Project Manager Lisa were discussing the strange phenomenon of Jeffs that orbit the XPLANE | Dachis Group world (we counted around eight or nine). It was determined a reality show should be created that would collect all of these Jeffs together and pit them against one another to find out who would be Top Jeff!
Cut to Spirit Week at XPLANE, a week where we do fun, silly things to raise money for local charities. We needed a name for our Top Chef-style quickfire competition and Top Jeff felt right. Instead of Jeff vs. Jeff it became XPLANEr vs. XPLANEr. Events were devised which tested an XPLANE employee’s most basic skills: Scheduling, live sketching, rendering and more! The St. Louis staff was split into two teams and we gathered in our main conference room. What followed was an hour of teeth-clenching trepidation and gut-wrenching tension! The defeated were downtrodden. The victors, proud. Here follows an account of the events that took place that fateful April day in St. Louis…
At XPLANE|STL’s public Visual Thinking School on April 7 we thought the time had come for a little character building. Specifically, cartoon characters and how just a few pen strokes can convey emotion and tell a story. We were inspired by Ivan Brunetti’s YouTube trailer for his new book “Cartooning,” below, and decided to do a few related drawing exercises.
WARM-UP
Everyone took dry erase marker in hand as I read through the following sequence, one line at a time. Remember — no one knew what was coming next.
What can I say, I like dark humor.
For the main exercise we took Brunetti’s video exercise linked above and changed it slightly. We had 14 people so we paired up into seven groups to create a few Wordless Stories.
PART 1 (30 minutes)
PART 2 (20 minutes)
One of the characters.
A full panel. Click to view larger.
Rapid creation (and beer — VTS runs 4-6 p.m.) always leads to very lively and unexpected results. Visit our VTS Flickr Set to see more examples.
FINALE
After going round the room and reviewing each other’s work, we sat back and enjoyed Matthias Hoegg’s beautiful animated short, “Thursday.” We marveled at how much story and emotion he was able to create without using a single word.
Speaking of music…
Although I always say I very much need music to do creative work, it’s scary how many times I catch myself, headphones on, cranking away… even though the music stopped playing an hour ago.
That’s because for the most part I am an album purist — I like to listen to every song in the order the band chose. But sometimes I really need to crank on a project — so I put one amazing song on repeat and get into the zone. Here’s what have turned out to be my top get-things-done tracks (each of these show hundreds of listen in my iTunes):
Doors + file cabinets = Desks! XPLANE circa early 2000s.
When I was combing through dusty hard drives and ancient project folders the other week looking for that old Robonaut XPLANATiON, I found an old text file (saved in BBEdit!) called “Core values: Things we believe in.”
It came from conversations and emails with Dave Gray, XPLANE’s founder. It was shared with all employees, even back when we were just five or six people working on desks made of doors and file cabinets. I’m pretty sure it dates to 1999…
Read more
I bet you thought we forgot all about Valentine’s Day.
We didn’t.
A love letter to Designers from XPLANE on Vimeo.
Dear future XPLANE Designer,
We may not have met yet, but I suspect you’ll receive this letter as if it’s a call from a wayward kindred spirit. See, we’ve got this magic chemistry that’s precious and rare. In short, I’m looking for you. More directly, the world needs you.
First, let me tell you that XPLANE is unlike anywhere you’ve worked before. We give respect to Design by using it as a proper noun. We’re neither an advertising agency nor a marketing group — we’re a consultative Design studio wherein Designers employ the arts of listening, strategizing, creating and presenting on a daily basis.
Now that I have your attention, please allow me a few moments to tell you why you’re so very special.
You awaken, suddenly, from a particularly distracting bout of daydreaming to find yourself staring at a blank piece of paper, screen, lump of clay, whatever your particular medium — and you’re struck with an undeniable feeling of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and shame.
We’ve all been there.
The struggle for that first idea, the breakthrough concept, is often a hard-fought battle. It’s an uphill slog through uncertainty and self-doubt. There’s a hesitance to put pen to paper for fear that your initial ideas won’t work out. A worry that a friend or colleague may walk by, glance at your work and quietly judge your (in)abilities, forever changing the tenor of your relationship.
Okay, maybe it’s not so bad as all that, but lack of ideas is a common occurrence in any field involving creativity. And this isn’t going to be a list of ways to find inspiration. Enough of those exist in the world, and you don’t need my help finding them. I’m more interested in what’s getting in our way once we’ve been inspired. What stops us from putting those ideas down on paper?
In this, and subsequent posts, I present to you some common roadblocks that we might be looking at the wrong way. Maybe they’re not roadblocks at all, if we give them a chance. Let’s explore further, shall we?
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
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