Working Remotely - The Pros and Cons

I’ve been working at home for the last 3 months after moving from San Jose to Scottsdale. And, let me tell you: I wasn’t really prepared for this.

Years ago, I worked out of my home office for a while. It was fine. I joked around that I was “the Mayor of Bathrobe City.” It was peaceful and I got a lot done during the days. I worked when I felt like it. If I wanted to go out for lunch, I could do it. I just worked a little more at some other point in the day.

Now, on the other hand, I have a schedule. I am at my desk all day. I work as if I were in the office. In fact, I have an open video feed with my old office! The goal is to make it seem as much as possible like I am there with my co-workers… still a part of the team. I don’t want to be faceless and forgotten.

It works really well, for the most part. But, there are things I didn’t realize when I was setting up this dynamic.

First, cabin fever is REAL. When your office is your home, you don’t go anywhere at the end of the day. You leave your desk and you get up and go… to the living room or the kitchen. This is in stark contrast to the hour-long commute home I used to have. And, believe me: when you go from spending eight hours or more out of the house every day to less than 20 minutes, it’s a real adjustment.

I find myself really enjoying trips to Target or the grocery store. I am considering renting some office space at a co-working center just so I can have a change of scenery. But, every time I think of it, I realize that would basically equate to paying someone so I can work. Um, what? No. Not unless I was making waaay more than I am currently.

Second, remote conversations aren’t as good as in-person chats. It’s just a fact. I don’t care how good the video and audio feeds are, the tech just isn’t as good as being there. Body language is totally lost. The subtle gestures and positioning that we all take for granted simply don’t translate. And, ultimately, you’re shackled to one place. If I had a remote controlled robot that I could use to walk around the office, it might help. But, I can’t just drop into my Executive Director’s office anymore. I have to ask to be invited. Like some kind of weird graphic design vampire.

But, in the end, these complaints are really small. The actual experience of working remotely is, in almost every way, amazing.

As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was a big fan of the movie “Aliens.” I remember a scene early on in the film where Ripley is talking with Burke over a video phone. At the time, I thought, that’s the future. Video phones are totally going to happen and it will be awesome.

And, here we are. I had no idea how much better the technology would be in real life. I couldn’t have guessed that I would be using it on a daily basis to work for a San Jose-based company while living in Scottsdale. I can’t wait to see how the features and capabilities improve over the next few years.

But, in the meantime, to preserve my mental health, I think I really need to work from Starbuck’s a couple of days per week.

Awards! Accolades! Pats On The Back! WOOT!

Found out this morning that the two magazines I work on (The Dentists' Mentor and The Cutting Edge) have been chosen as award-winners from the International College of Dentists! This is a great honor for the members of the Editorial Committee at SCCDS, and for me.

In 2015, The Cutting Edge magazine won an award for most improved publication after I dramatically redesigned it. It was great to receive that award because it felt like recognition for my design work in particular. But I really wanted to win the "Newsletter Award" which is given to the newsletter that achieves "an overall quality of graphics, design and content." This year, we did it. And, it's an awesome feeling. We are no longer just the most improved... now we're the best overall!

As icing on the cake, The Dentists' Mentor was chosen for the "Special Citation Award" which is given for "unusual concept, presentation or other distinctive quality." The Dentists' Mentor was conceived by one of our Editorial Committee members, and I am very proud of the design and layout work I did for it. So, it's great to see it get some recognition.

The Editorial Committee oversees the content and policies of SCCDS' publications. My Executive Director and Operations Manager are responsible for content guidance, writing articles and proofreading the publications. I am in charge of writing, editing, design and layout. So, while releasing them is truly a team effort, I feel like the magazines are my babies and I have a personal stake in them.

So, yeah. I'm going to take a few minutes out of my day to feel proud of myself and my team for winning these awards. Hooray for The Cutting Edge and The Dentists' Mentor!

Bootstrap: When A Shortcut Isn't Short

Recently, I've been working on a website for a client.  No big deal, right?

Here's the problem:  I'm not a great coder.  I can design fairly well, but the actual implementation is a weak point of mine.  So, after warning my client that it will be slow-going while I brush up my coding skills, I started to tackle the process of updating my knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Starting, as so many apparently do, with W3Schools, I quickly reached a point where I wanted to go faster than I should.  I was getting impatient.  And, as impatient people often do, I started to look for shortcuts.

Enter Twitter Bootstrap.

Over and over again I read testimonials from website professionals who claimed that Bootstrap only requires a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.  Bootstrap would get rid of the repetitive elements inherent in building a site from scratch.  It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel by providing modular elements like buttons, carousels and a grid-based system that anyone can learn quickly and easily.

All of this is true.

But, I quickly learned as I experimented with the framework that it didn't replace or accelerate my understanding of how to actually build a website.  I still found myself frequently asking "Why didn't that work?" when I previewed my code.  Ultimately, I realized that Bootstrap wasn't saving me time because I didn't fully grasp the fundamentals of website development.

This brings me to my point:  don't take shortcuts when it comes to learning.  Learn everything you can about the topic at hand.  Often, shortcuts are designed for people who already know the limitations, quirks and benefits inherent in whatever it is they're trying to do.  Shortcuts don't help you learn... they actually prevent the learning process by skipping over the mundane, repetitive or fundamental elements in favor of getting to the good stuff.

I've gone back to straight HTML5 and CSS3.  I've been making nice breakthroughs here and there by studying and experimenting all the time.  My client's site is coming along nicely.  And, I'm guessing that I'll probably understand Bootstrap a heck of a lot better by the time I've finished coding a whole site from scratch.

Leadership Tips From A Parking Lot Conversation

Last night, I spent about half an hour talking to one of our organization's leaders in the parking lot at my office.  We had just finished attending a committee meeting that I felt was very successful.  As it frequently happens at my organization, the committee chairman was unable to conduct the meeting, so it fell to me as the "staff liaison" to keep things flowing and get as much work done as possible.

This leader I was speaking with (who shall remain nameless) took it upon himself to give me some advice for leading meetings, and leadership in general.  I told him that I was simply an employee... a staff liaison.  He countered by telling me that I was in a leadership position whether I liked it or not.  The choice before me was to either lead effectively or lead poorly.

Here are the tips he gave me:

• Less "I" and more "we".
• Engage silent or passive participants directly to inspire them.  Call on them by name and ask them what they think.
• Allow people to take credit for your work.  The success of the work is what's important, not the credit for doing it.
• It's hard to lead without followers.  Inspire those you work with to take ownership and improve the quality of their contributions.
• Making people feel important will make them perform important work.

Is this advice you would follow?  Let me know what you think about these tips!

Cherry Tree tattoo mockup

The idea was fairly nebulous.

"I want a cherry tree floating in the middle of my back with branches that extend to my shoulder.  And TONS of cherry blossoms.  Pink with maroon centers.  Tons of them."

After a bit more discussion to flesh out the idea and caution the client about the difficulty of tattooing TONS of blossoms, I sketched the tree.

From there, I decided it would be beneficial to move into Illustrator and convert it into a vector graphic.  This would allow me to quickly change colors and elements, resize, and create a final mockup.

For the blossoms, I created a custom symbol set and sprayed along the contours of the branches.

I'm not happy with the water... I'm going to go back in and mess with it some more in the future.  The client seems very happy, though.. that's what counts!

Does Responsive Design Have To Be So Boring?

So, I've been tinkering with responsive web design for the last 10 days.

It's not that difficult to pick up the concepts.  In fact, HTML5 and CSS3 seem to be much easier and more semantic than past iterations ever were.  Not that HTML was all that difficult to begin with.  Throw in the Bootstrap framework and suddenly I'm feeling pretty accomplished!

Unfortunately, I'm noticing that all of the responsive and flat designs out there seem to look very similar to one another.  It doesn't appear to be the fault of the tools.  It seems like there's something else going on.  I'm still an amateur at all of this responsive stuff, but am I the only one who's noticing the cookie cutter look?

It seems like designers are shying away from using images as design elements.  Boxes don't have textured borders or gradients.  Decorative image elements are few and far between.  Images seem to stand alone... big, fat images that span the entire screen, or slideshows that highlight portfolio items.

Even logos on these websites are often text only.  Selectable text provided by Google Fonts or Typekit... these aren't really logos in my opinion.

The better designed sites are the ones that use images to break free of the grid, or gracefully transcend it.  Grid design is obviously beneficial to web development, but it doesn't have to be so obvious.  Putting an image in a box doesn't mean that image has to look like a box.  We can still make overlay images the same color as our backgrounds to create irregular or diagonal shapes, wave elements or textured borders.  We can even allow those elements to scale so that they're responsive.

I'm going to try to create web designs that think outside the box.  I'd like to respect the grid but not be restrained by it.  Responsive design doesn't have to be boring.

SCCDS Annual Event Program

A while back, I proposed an Annual Event program for the Santa Clara County Dental Society.  This was one of three brochures I worked on for SCCDS over a short period of time.

I was very happy with the design... it's really simple, clean and flat. The color coded categories make it really easy to locate whatever event that members may be interested in.  The font is simple and tidy.  The colors are attractive and subdued.

In general, I'm happy with the result.

Design
The design fell into place pretty easily.

I chose the colors based on the colors in the SCCDS logo.  I decided to mute the colors to avoid a cartoony, saturated look.   The striping was based on the event calendar I include in each month's "Cutting Edge" magazine.  I think it makes the event listings easier to read.  The font is an old favorite of mine: Gotham.  It's readability and simplicity made it my first choice.

The toughest part of the design were the icons.  Some of those were easy (CPR, Continuing Education) but, some of them were really tough (Montly Meetings, Practice Management).  In the end, I'm not sure if they are all successful, but time constraints prevented me from investing too many minutes on them.

SCCDS members are already using these and I've received a lot of appreciative feedback.

Work faster, harder, better.

Today, I had to complete the May magazine for SCCDS while putting together an email blast and designing a revised event promotion.  Of course, I wouldn't have had to revise that promotion at all if I hadn't asked a key question:

"Why are we doing this?"

It's a simple question but it's one that I think gets asked too infrequently in business.  Let me give some backstory.

For years, SCCDS has welcomed new members with a "pizza party" and with a seperate "wine and cheese night."  These events have been suffering declining attendance in recent years.  Promotions for the events have always used the titles "New Member Pizza Luncheon" and "New Member Wine and Cheese Night."  I was asked to add promos for the events to the latest issue of the magazine.

It occurred to me that the events may not be drawing attendance because perhaps the target audience isn't interested in pizza parties or wine and cheese nights.  So, I asked our Executive Director "Why are we doing this?"

Everyone paused to consider.

I continued "Is the food the focus of the event? Or is it the services we can provide our new members?"

The answer was obvious, of course. But, the question afforded us the opportunity to reconsider the messaging and purpose of a long-standing event.  In the end, we decided to change the event titles to "New Member Welcome Events".  The promotions are now focused on explaining to new members what SCCDS can do for them and what they'll get by attending the events.  No mention of pizza, wine or cheese.

How many business and personal practices can you improve by asking "Why are we doing this?"