My business partner went on vacation and learned to jump off the dock and
swim around like the merry old thing he is. I am so happy to be posting to this blog after a week and a half of trying to
learn Adobe GoLive so that one day I can build a "real" website. The life and death struggle with GoLive is just beginning
with some help from Deke McClelland who is teaching me Indesign, which in turn is helping me with GoLive. But coming back
to my ever so simple little verizon site is an idiot's pleasure at this point.
Recently I found an amazing array of saved things while going through my files. One was a list of questions to ask yourself
before you begin a publication.
1. Why am I doing this?
2. Why would this matter to anyone who reads it?
3. What do we want you to do as a result of reading this?
4. Why would anyone be even slightly interested in reading this?
5. Is it visually pleasing?
6. Is it funny?
I would be interested in helping people develop publications that are not boring and filled with debilitating facts and
information about dull stuff that is only of interest to themselves. A publication is like a good conversation and should
have liveliness and feel somewhat personal in tone and look.
I am also thinking about talking to lots of people about how they think about a thing. There's a workshop out there ready
to be developed called something like:"How to think about a thing." A long time ago Harvey Lipsky and Clark Brinkerhoff tried
to figure out how someone from an aborignal culture, given a brush and a can of Ajax, would go about cleaning a toilet. Someone
came up with: First, they'd do a dance". This reminds me of Ed Norton on the Honeymooners waving his arms and hands about
wildly in preparation for doing a thing. Ralph would watch this for a while, steaming about how long Norton was taking to
say, open a stuck window. But I think, that this is exactly how you do a hard thing. First, you do a dance.
So I will go back to doing the lessons in the GoLive book tonight, first, having done a dance. Talk to you all soon.
