A Keynote video we made for Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School.
1. On goals and purpose
Over the last few years we’ve found that in some cases, a Keynote-authored video is what you might call the “good enough” solution. Full animation can be complicated, expensive and time-consuming. Don’t get me wrong — we love it, it’s beautiful, but it’s not always needed. Keynote lets you create and edit presentations, make things move, is ridiculously easy to learn and exports to Quicktime, including easy exports for iPhone. That’s the “good enough” part — but of course technology isn’t all you need. You better have a good story and visuals too.
Once again XPLANE | Dachis Group has teamed up with Dr. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University to create a thought-provoking video. The brand-new “Iowa, Did You Know?” kicked off the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday morning. This DYK video contrasts the world’s exponential growth in technology and learning with Iowa’s struggles to best prepare K-12 students for this new future.
Intended as a forceful wake-up call for Iowa educators, the video stresses the importance of an educational approach that moves away from “low-level mental work” and towards stronger development in critical thinking and problem solving.
This is a guest post by Jeff Manuel, Assistant Professor of History at SIUE.
As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.
We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.
XPLANE | Dachis Group and The Economist teamed up to create the “World in Figures” application for iPhone. Based on The Economist’s popular book, Pocket World in Figures, the application provides a unique, visual way to discover and display global data so that it’s compelling, understandable and easy to use. Here’s a quick video overview of the project.
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.
I’ve been thinking about how to describe the mission of Dachis Group. While first blush is to describe the use of social media technologies, there is a much loftier mission based on the the cultural sea change we are experiencing. Considering the sweeping changes in our social, economic, environmental and technological forces, it’s clear to everyone that the relationship between organizations, customers and employees is changing. It is not a matter of “if” companies will operate differently, but when and how.
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.
For those of us who have enjoyed Lloyd Dangle’s disaffected “Troubletown” strip over the years, the next step in his career is rather interesting — and reflective of the growing popularity of visual recording.
Oops, looks like I gave away the ending… also, some slightly NSFW alt-weeklyish writing appears at the beginning of this Pacific Northwest Inlander article.
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…
This 3-minute overview animation is being used to drive adoption and usage of IHG’s Green Engage program, which helps individual hotels analyze their energy usage and devise action plans to reduce their environmental impact. Check it out on our YouTube channel.
XPLANE | Dachis Group drives breakthrough results with Business Design Thinking. Our approach includes a set of comprehensive business architecture solutions that combine research, collaborative consulting, design thinking, social media technology and incredibly effective visual communications.
It’s what makes us different. And better. The world’s biggest brands have found success with XPLANE. Are you ready for results too? Contact us.
Founded in 1993 by Dave Gray, XPLANE has evolved from an information design company into a global communications and business transformation consultancy. As part of the Dachis Group XPLANE drives results for the world’s leading corporations through the sophisticated process of Business Design Thinking.
XPLANE founder Dave Gray, along with XPLANER James Macanufo and our friend Sunni Brown, have written a playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers. It's called Gamestorming and it's filled with useful, fun knowledge games — games designed to help you get more innovative, creative results in your work. More info at gogamestorm.com.
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.
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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.
Azure poster
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.
XPLANE founder Dave Gray, along with XPLANER James Macanufo and our friend Sunni Brown, have written 
