Oodles of Doodles

The last thing you want to do, if you’re a designer in a business environment who wants to be taken seriously, is spend your time in meetings doodling like an idle schoolboy. Rather, you should be an active and attentive participant in the conversation, someone whose mind is present and alert, and not lost in the meanderings of the scribbles in the margins of your notebook paper.

And yet, we’re designers, and we can’t help ourselves, right? Or, at least, I can’t. It’s like my drawing hand has a brain of its own, and it feels compelled to entertain itself when left to its own devices with a notebook, a pen and any idle moment. It’s a bad habit that I try to be discreet about, but I can’t deny that it’s a distraction I quite enjoy, too.

Continue Reading …

+

Training Keynote Thinkers

KeynoteIt’s no surprise that I spend less and less time these days executing design ideas in the customary graphic design applications like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Instead, I’m spending more and more time doing work about design, whether it’s on this weblog, in Microsoft Word or even just in a plain old email client. That’s management, I guess.

One of the programs I turn to with increasing frequency is Keynote, the presentation software half of Apple’s iWork ’06 suite (sometimes known as the company’s Microsoft Office-killer in waiting). Before joining The New York Times, I’d frequently use Keynote for sales and design presentations to clients. Now I use it all the time for internal presentations to our design group and to management, and of course I’m using it more and more for lectures and talks I’m doing in the outside world, too.

At first, I thought Keynote was little more than a glorified and beautified competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint. In time, though, I’ve come to realize it’s not just a better presentation-making tool for visual designers, but it’s something of an essential thinking tool for us too.

Continue Reading …

+