📚 Internal Communication, Apprenticeship, Paris & Cycles, Colour Wheels

Design Spells + a lot more for the curious YOU

Hi and welcome to the post #153.

I had a great weekend - a carnival at my kid’s school, read a book at the kid’s library, did a walking tour of Indiranagar, then visited Blossoms - my favourite bookstore (I did not buy anything this time), followed by visit to Science Museum and Museum of Art & Photography. And to top it, I had some great food and some nice moments of observing hustle and bustle on Church street. I could not have asked for more for a weekend.

The week, however, went by discovering ideas that inspire me more to chase my curiosity. And I got some of those lined up for you in today’s post. Here’s a quick view of the lineup:

And now, onto today's finds…

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📢 Internal Communication

In my last stint, I handled responsibilities for internal communication (as well). I did not have any prior experience or training on this topic (like most other things I handled), so this was an exciting challenge. 

I treated it like the way I thought about customer experience & product communication - with our org values & culture as the core product & our employees as the target audience.

I am glad that I took up that challenge, it raised my interest in the topic. I’m always looking forward to finding new ideas on this topic, now. This last week was a great one to this end. I found two great resources. They come from sources I highly admire, and they did not disappoint. 

Here’s a quick summary from both sources, I highly recommend going over these if you’ve any interest in this topic.

1. 37signals Guide to Internal Communication: Rules of thumb, and general philosophy on internal communication at 37signals (folks behind Basecamp). As Jason Fried says, these aren’t requirements, but they serve to create boundaries and shared practices to draw upon when we do the one thing that affects everything else we do: communicate. A couple of notable ideas from this post:

• You can not not communicate. Not discussing the elephant in the room is communicating. Few things are as important to study, practice, and perfect as clear communication.

• If you have to repeat yourself, you weren’t clear enough the first time. However, if you’re talking about something brand new, you may have to repeat yourself for years before you’re heard. Pick your repeats wisely.

2. Brie Wolfson on Internal Comms: A lot of tactical inputs with actionable details borrowed from her experience. From slack channels & leadership Q&A faqs, there is a lot of useful information here. One key idea worth highlighting:

Make the implicit, explicit. You may think that everyone “gets it” or is on the same page but by making things explicit (which usually means writing things down), you’ll see that you might not be on the same page after all. Good internal comms holds a mirror up to the organization so that everyone can see themselves, and their role in the broader thing, more clearly. 

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📜 Product Pitches

I have read about a lot of templates & best practices around product pitches, BRDs etc. But I did not see any ‘good’ versions of these in practice. When Reforge started sharing some of the original decks and models as Reforge Artifacts, I started checking for references on topics & problems that I could relate to. There is a lot of noise now as they have started to scale the creator / supply side. But, you can find some good references with some patience and a quick scan. 

Here’re two good ones that I found in recent times:

1. Pitch Deck for Instagram Shopping by Sanchan Saxena (Founder, Head of Product for Instagram shopping)

2. Nutrition Assistant PRFAQ at Amazon Alexa by Rupa Chaturvedi (Sr UX Designer, Alexa Shopping @ Amazon)

These documents need to be consumed in full (any summary may not offer much insights), so I am leaving you with just the article link.

PS: you may have to create a free login to access some of the Artifacts.

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🧑‍🍳 Apprenticeship

“Gordon Ramsay's apprenticeship” tells us a story of his time with his mentor Marco Pierre White. It shows a chef Ramsay that we cannot imagine today. This is a story about how he learnt the importance of learning high standards and how to take the reins.

Ramsay talks about how Marco taught him high standards:

Learn high standards: “I stood alongside Marco for two years. Side-by-side for 16 hours a day. It was relentless. I was in that pursuit of perfection and this guy put food on a plate like Picasso. I wanted to get that level of discipline. He wanted you to be pushed to the extreme. He drummed it into you.

[His stance was ] If you're gonna to do it then do it to your best. If you don't want to do it to your best then get the f**k out of here [and] don't waste my time and certainly don't waste yours.

I see these environments all the time time and I say to [younger chefs] ‘stay in that environment and get what you need…and when the sh*t hits the fan, learn to dance in the storm.’ It's a great place to be in because somewhere down the line, there's going to be a storm on your radar and you're going to stand tall in that storm and you're going to get through it.”

There is behind the scenes from how the world of chefs work, and why mentoring/apprenticeship is such a crucial part of this world. As Anthony Bourdain puts it:

[A lot of people have idealized visions of the restaurant industry but] this business is hard…there is no secret recipe. This is a mentoring business. Chefs — one at a time — teach someone. [We invest time and decide if it’s worthwhile to teach a person] everything we know and everything we have learned…over a 20 or 30-year career. All those things that we have learned, often quite painfully and at great personal expense. [We teach] through repetition because that's the way we all learn. Repetition, repetition, repetition.

I would like to know now — or as soon as possible — if you're going to start crying and freaking out…So, if I have to push you a little bit…we're just separating you out from the herd.”

If you have seen “The Bear” you will find some explanations here about the complicated relationship that Carmen & Sydney showcased throughout the series .

And finally, this is a Trung Phan post, so you get lot more gems in one single post. Other stories include Costco vodka, New York Times puzzles and learning from Reed Hastings. 

Just go for it, worth every minute of your attention!

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🗼 Paris: 15-Minute City & Bicycle Friendly

This week, we travel to Paris to know more about how the French capital is evolving with the changing times. There are two key ideas that I discovered so far: 1) “La ville du quatre d’heure” or the 15-minute city and 2) Make the city pedestrian and bicycle friendly.

15-Minute City focuses on the proximity of workplaces, schools and amenities for all citizens. This is an attempt to revive urban localism. This image explain the idea through a simple visual:

Image credit: 15-Minute City

A city needs to go a long way to make these possible, making more green spaces and reducing dependency on cars are some of the early yet critical steps.

This Slate story covers how “Paris kicked cut the cars.” From how to make more bike lanes, to designing school areas, to challenges that business faces when cars are banned, to how such an initiative may impact the suburbs, to impact on new-age businesses like parking lots & bike deliveries - this piece offers a lot of interwoven ideas around a bike friendly city.

And then there are bits of Parisian history and some beautiful nuggets like this:

It is a humbling experience to try to learn any new skill as an adult. But there is a particular humiliation in learning to ride a bike. Not only because biking is something everyone already assumes you know how to do and the quintessential skill you never forget. But also because you have to do it in public, wobbling and teetering under the curious gaze of other adults who seem to be fully in control of their balance, pace, and place in the world.

So it’s nice that Anne-Lise Millan-Brun, the founder of a bicycle school in Paris, has chosen as a training ground one of the emptiest places in this crowded city. It’s shortly after sunrise on a wintry Saturday morning when her students begin to assemble by the Square Emmanuel Fleury, on the capital’s hilly eastern edge. All are women; most are first- or second-generation immigrants. All had to wait for months to enroll in the Bike School of the 20th arrondissement, which is so oversubscribed that I was allowed to visit only on the condition I not write about it in French. Millan-Brun does not need the publicity. This is in part because she charges just 50 euros for a trimester’s worth of Saturday morning lessons. But it is also because riding a bike has, rather suddenly, come to feel as Parisian as the Métro, and nearly as essential for getting around. To twist a French idiom, vélo, boulot, dodo—bike, work, sleep.

I discovered Vélo, but did not really experience it full when I spent my exchange term in Paris in 2009. Yet, we walked a lot on those Parisian roads and I must say it was fun walking & discovering the beauty of this city during those walks. I wonder how much more fun it will be with all these changes now! 

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🎨 Colour Wheels

We’ve all read about primary (red, yellow, blue) and secondary colours. The colour wheel is part of our imagination of how all colours are formed. And we kind of take it for granted. But is that true? Is this how colour theory works? 

A Brown Bear goes deeper to find out. He covers the ideas from the world of printing, physics and TV screens to tell us a different story around colour wheels. 

Consider his arguments.

Check out your desktop printer and you’ll see something quite different: printer cartridges are CMYK. Three colors of ink which, when combined, produce all others: cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Black is included as a money-saver—black is the cheapest and most common color; it’s cheaper to have a black cartridge than to dump ink from the other three.) No so-called ‘primary colors’ ie Red-Yellow-Blue here.

 If you’re into the design space, you may have become an expert talking in RYG notations. Again, no Red-Yellow-Blue

So three different combinations so far. At a very top:

This one is a little easier to explain—ink and paint are “subtractive” (adding cyan, magenta, and yellow yields black) whereas colored light is “additive” (adding red, green, and blue yields white). Still, we have yet another color wheel in which two (but not all three!) “primaries” match those of the artist’s wheel and none match the printer’s wheel.

And then he turns to science - physics (waves and opposites) and physiology to explain the real reasons. It gets a little technical, but not to the extent that you skip like you did most of those optics chapters in college. 

I loved this piece for two reasons: 1) It touched on an idea that was right in front of my eyes, but never occurred to me. 2) It comes from a very unexpected source. 

Your curiosity can take you places, this is a great example of that.

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🖥️ Apple’s Rounded Corner

I’m filing it as another piece in ‘an idea that’s right in front of me and yet I failed to notice’. 

Arun Venkatesan talks about the secret formula for Apple's rounded corners. He wonders - from Airpod case to Desktop Monitor, it’s Squircles, squircles everywhere. Why rounded corners?

Here’s how he explains it in his beautiful illustrative style:

The rest of the post talks about a quantitative exploration to validate this hypothesis and proves it fairly well.

A designer using data to prove a point - I’m just saying!

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📽️ Title Drops

And while we're on ‘using data to prove a point’ thing, here’s an analysis of title drops in movies.

What are title drops? A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. 

This post is based on a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens. 

It’s an interesting exploration, one that you may not have any need of. But check it out for the love of doing something crazy to satisfy your curiosity. The methodology, the findings - it's bound to give you a smile or two. There are folks who really care about their curiosity and go to crazy length to do something about it.

Bollywood finds a lot of mention in the finding. There is a trend in our movie titles that’s making it possible! What? Check out the post to know more.

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✨ Everything else

1. Design Spells is a library of design details that feel like magic. I loved exploring this one! (via Sidebar)

2. In Sand and Stone, Jon Foreman sculpts hypnotic gradients and organic motifs. An artist can work with any medium to create magic, I must say (via Colossal) 

3. James Cook creates one-of-its-kind typewriter art. I loved the intricate details that he has captured in his work (via Dense Discovery)

4. Daisuke Samejima creates three dimensional art using balls as a canvas by painting entire panoramas in ultra-realistic details. (via Dense Discovery)

That's all for this week, folks! 

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I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If you liked this post, please hit the ❤️ below to help spread the word!  Leave a comment or send a message with your feedback. It’s highly helpful & encouraging. 

Pritesh