When I joined Smith Micro it was in the role of User Interface Designer, which curiously was to be part of the Marketing Dept. and not part of Engineering. This was down to the Creative Director’s vision that the software the company sells is an outwardly facing extension of the brand, and should be handled as such. By people that know branding. Which engineers do not. Even though it made perfect sense in theory, it was a little odd at first to be designing software in an environment otherwise known for creating direct mail and web sites. As a new department, or more correctly, a new team within the existing Marketing Dept., there were some teething problems but the two of us in UI/UX Design quickly fell into our roles.

Times were good. Exciting. The future looked interesting with lots of new possibilities.

Then things changed, and not for the better. New team members came on board, old team members were gone, and the dynamic of the team changed drastically. Gone were the chaotic, loud and crazy moments. Gone was the sense of collaboration and camaraderie. And gone was the personality of the team.

I’ve always thought a creative team should be greater than the sum of its parts. All individuals should band together and feed off of each other, ultimately sharing and pushing each other forward. And it’s really up to management to foster this kind of environment. By staffing their department, managers and team leaders really need to consider the personality makeup of their team. A good, happy, involved and collaborative creative team is far better as a unit than a few highly skilled, but otherwise dull hermit-like individuals.

I worked as a freelancer at a large advertising agency that had a great number of other freelancers in the interactive department. The Senior Multimedia Developer was an open and sharing Flash-master who knew that bringing his team up to his standards was to the benefit of the team as a whole. He also brought on an associate of his who was far less skilled than every other member of the group, an affable chap named Jonny. Why would someone so skilled as the Senior Developer bring on to his team someone as limited as this? His words, “Jonny is good for morale”.

And it was true. Jonny was one of those guys with a magnetic personality, an endless supply of sayings and witticisms, and and all round nice bloke. The mood of the team was rarely down even during tight deadlines ans high stress. There was always joking around and banter and FUN. I would argue everyone was more productive thanks to the good spirits of everyone there. I doubt all of this can be attributed to Jonny’s good nature, but it certainly was a contributing factor that helped keep everyone loose. A good move by the team leader bringing him on.

So whilst I leave my old team mates behind, I wonder how long they will survive in that dull, corporate environment. They may be behaving (what they believe to be ) ‘professional’ But does professional necessarily need to be mutually exclusive from fun. Or even enjoyable. I don’t think so.

What are your best and worst creative team moments? Leave a comment below.

First, this guy Samuel is really beginning to piss me off. All that soft faux-Irish brogue and tilted head glances. He just seems to endlessly do the same schtick each week. Do something already. We know you have this mean awesome power and your planning something huge, but for heavens sakes lets move the story along and get to the point. All this enticement with golden promises then fake assurances “you can leave whenever you like” to every character that enters Carnyland. Enough already, its making me nauseous. And for once, just to shake it up, could ONE of his prey actually figure him out and not trust the swarthy crook.

Secondly, this character arc of Claire Bennett batting for the other team, if you know what I mean, feels all wrong. Not because I have an aversion to lesbians or I’m offended by homosexuality. It feels wrong because there has never been any indication that Claire might be gay. Ever. She had boyfriends. She like boys. Then along comes her emo goth roomate to hold her hand and all of a sudden Claire is jumping ship. I don’t watch their scenes and think “eeeooooww. Gross” I watch the scenes and thing “that’s not Claire, she wouldn’t do that”. By which point I’ve missed the plot. I’ve been pulled out of the story by terrible writing, which I’m guessing was a lazy means of exposing a softer side of Claire ready for Silar to exploit.

On the other hand, the story arc with Hiro has been great, well thought out and nicely executed. Enough geeky pop-cultural references to keep it amusing without over the top pandering. And Samuel did finally reveal his true mean self with terrifying results. I’m curious to see where he goes from here. I dont expect him to return to his smarmy ways not the gypo is out of the bag.

So I would stop short of accusing Heroes of jumping the shark, but it is definitely in the ocean precariously close to other aquatic life.

Normally I use Apple Aperture to do my photo post-processing, and it is great for almost all basic color-correction and image processing tasks. But for real retouching or more extreme photo color effects, it has to be done in Photoshop. Therefore it made sense to do the primary basic color set up in Camera Raw prior to opening in Photoshop.

I had a lot of fun creating these Flash Cards, and considering I have not had the time to create one this year (or last year for that matter) I thought I’d republish it in it’s lo-res, 2005-web-friendly original pixels. Just for fun.

http://www.influxx.com/media/xmas2005_lo.mov

Anyway, I have my business website for showing my corporate portfolio. And I have this blog for ramblings and research and other related artworks. But what I have not had was a place to host the initial roughs, the raw sketches from which the finished projects are hewn. Or not. Some sketches never lead to anything. And that’s the beautiful thing about keeping a sketchbook. It’s an outlet for me, creatively. And great for building a library of ideas and techniques.

Thus I found myself needing an online sketchpad, a place to host my rough pencil sketches and experiments. Hopefully it will encourage me to sketch often and scan, upload and post them here.

I found out this week that Nic Harcourt, longtime host of KCRW’s morning show Morning Becomes Eclectic, is moving on to pastures new and will no longer be hosting the show. However, evening show Metropolis host and respected LA DJ Jason Bentley will be taking over the reigns.

I first started listening to MBE and KCRW when I moved to Orange County from London. Back then Chris Douridas was the show host, and I remember the ‘new guy’ taking over after a couple of years. It felt strange not to have Chris do the show every morning, but it did not take long for the ‘new guy’ to become part of the establishment of my morning routine. Hard to believe ten years has flown by since then.

Since Nic took over MBE has grown into an epic show, its hard to find a better show anywhere on the internet. As I think back over the past decade, there are so many great moments, great bands, great performances. As has been the case since I first found KCRW my music library has grown brim full of outstanding music I would otherwise not have been introduced to.

So with sadness I bid farewell to Nic and wish him well. I am so happy to hear Jason is taking over, I have been as big a fan of Metropolis as I have MBE. Great to know our mornings are in such good hands.

When Steve Jobs announced AppleTV at Macworld 2007 I was initially really excited. Finally a chance to watch the gazillions of podcasts on my 61″ Samsung HDTV from the comfort of my couch. I had Front Row already on my Mac, but had never used it because, well, my Mac is in my office and my TV is not. AppleTV promised the ‘lean back’ viewing experience for all the new media I had become partial to. Mainstream TV holds little interest for me outside of a couple of big shows (Lost, Heroes etc) and sporting events. I watch so much more internet content these days but being relegated to the discomfort of my office is a real turn-off, especially having been in that office for many hours already during the work day.

So AppleTV offered the TV experience for web content. Great. Or was it. Unless the content was in the Apple ecosystem there was little chance of getting any other media on the ATV. Quickly this became a point of contention for many who saw the ATV fall short of it’s potential. Seemingly everyone who consumed online media wanted what the ATV offered, and more. There was huge demand. I did not take long for some very smart people to hack their way into the ATV OS and install third party apps to play other media, install bigger hard drives to store all this media, and some nifty SSH tricks for managing the whole lot. Trouble was, for the layman, the technically shy or retarded, this was an extremely geeky process to execute. Nothing I wanted to mess with, and risk bricking an ATV.

Fast forward to Macworld 2008 and AppleTV “Take 2″ was announced. High Def movie rentals were now an option, something I could not even get from AT&T uVerse HDTV package. YouTube content had already been added, and now ATV could download, store and view podcasts without needing a Mac running iTunes. All great additions to an already slick product. But still, we were limited to content from the iTunes Store. Admittedly there is plenty of content in there to keep any video podcast junky happy for many years, but increasingly, the content I was tuning in to was out of the iTunes system. Videoblogs I subscribe to account for a huge percentage of my media viewing. Hulu was now online and serving content not available on iTunes. ATV still fell short of a truly Last Word Killer App.

Another option that is quite popular with online media fans is using a macMini running Miro (formerly Democracy). Miro can subscribe to and play any show with an RSS feed,which is almost every podcast, videoblog and web show on the internet. It’s a great solution. Other than the fact that, like the ATV hacks, is still a bit geeky for everyday use. Basically the macMini uses your HDTV as a monitor, and thusly, interfacing with it is just like interfacing with a computer. This requires a wireless mouse and keyboard to control the Miro (and other) application. I would not be able to convince my wife and kid that this is the way forward to control our viewing experience, and if it this is just for me it’s unlikely to ever happen.

Which brings us, finally, to Boxee. Like Miro, it can subscribe and play any media you might find on the web.¹ But it lives inside the AppleTV, activated by a button added to the ATV user interface. This is created after a quick and (relatively) easy hack. A hack I myself would feel comfortable doing. There is a video on the Boxee blog that walks you through setting it up and it looks completely painless. Boxee pulls in content from Hulu, Last.fm, Flickr and much more which expands the AppleTV capability way beyond the iTunes ecosystem. And it is all controllable from the same remote used to control ATV, no other device to stand between you and your media.

The great thing about TV, regular old mainstream media TV, is it just works. You sit down on the couch, click the remote and content pours out of the screen at you. Changing channels is a simple one click process. New media, web media, online shows, whatever we want to call this next generation of audio-visual magic, it needs to be as simple as TV to take off into the mainstream. It’s fun to be geeky and hack our gadgets, but most people wont accept that. If new media is to thrive, and get beyond the fringe novelty status² then it needs to be one-click simple. Like TV.

From what I can tell, Boxee makes this possibility one step closer to reality. I signed up for the closed beta list. hopefully I will get an invite and be able to test it soon. It might just be the thing that will make me break down and finally get an AppleTV.

1. As far as I can tell from digging around the blog this morning. There is not a whole lot of info I could find as far as the exact mechanism for subscribing to content. so I am assuming a fair bit here. But it sounds like you can input an rss:// address to view content. I hope you can subscribe to it negating the need to enter that address each time.

2. Yeah I know, its not fringe, everyone you know is watching Hulu or Myspace or BoinBoingTV. That’s the way it feels isn’t it. But go ask grandma if she watched a Telly Savalas movie on AMC today or if she saw Dr. Horrible. I’ll bet I know what she says.