Do you keep templates for
improving your next project?
I build organizations,
teams, destinations on the internet, and publications, and for each
project, I have one or several Benefits of
Hindsight Templates. With a nod to Professor
Keith, I wanta
know now what I
shoulda known then...
I was talking with
Jack about a professional editor’s response to my
exact typography standards, when he said, “Well you use them
several times a year, of course you know them better than someone
just feeling their way.” Those standards have been developing since
1989, when the other Robin Williams published The
Mac Is Not A Typewriter. Before that I
had been setting standards by eye on the Vydek and then Trash 80.
Didn’t do any good to set standards on .dos, because every printer
was different.
The other night when I was
talking with a magazine editor, who asked for my opinion of her work.
I had some specific improvements, and was giving her a string of
numbers for changing her typography in both Word and open source
software. She stopped me, saying, “Is there open source software I
could use for setting my publications?”
Well now, that’s another
template. And that template came from my Pagemaker Ninja status,
where I learned, “You become a ninja when the sun comes and you
hadn’t intended it to.”
The other Pagemaker story
was when they ported it to Windows, one of my clients ran out and
bought copies for their code wranglers, since they had been been
giving me their data, I would go home at night and come back with
their finished product.
We tried their Windows
version, and it sat there like a lump and blinked at us..
Finally, I got frustrated
and started suggesting Mac keyboard commands to the operators. The
file started to take shape, but it was hard work.
Eventually, we shipped,
and one of the programmers brightly said, “Well that’s the
difference between Windows and Mac. Mac has keyboard commands.”
Aargh! Something like that.
My Doctor Of Proposals is
smart, but that CD with his previous creative solutions makes him a
force of nature. He’s like Ray
Kurzweil’s Singularity, the combining of man and machine.
It’s not the words or
data, it’s how they were used, the creative
solution, that gets us to the next level.
It’s not the length of the wand, but the magic of the magician.
So many people don’t
keep their lessons, so they are doomed to repeat them, usually losing
details and quality.
The beauty of templates is
that all those details that were so brilliant at the time don’t get
away. That let’s me spend my time on the new details.
What do you save to take
forward?
Moments
of Truth – New Strategies for Today’s Customer Driven Economy
