STRATSCRAPS v200

200 newsletters and I'll I got was this newsletter.

The idea was to have some object of more permanence in recognition of v200. But it wasn’t coming together in a way that felt right.

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Oh look, someone¹ aggregated all the most important evidence based thinking from top experts on how brands and businesses grow into one place. If you are a strategist – download this and read it once a year.

Only thing that would make this better is if it were a website or google doc with an index and clickable nav links².

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Strategists could never be book cover designers. Every book cover would be like 20 pages long.

(related: itsnicethat feature on book cover design)

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Google is in cahoots with Big Cheese. I knew it.

via the always fun spurious-correlations

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Without further context, which diagram would you say is more accurate?

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I wish there was public data that went with this. They did revive it a few years ago and made a podcast from the things they heard. I have not yet listened.

Additionally, I want more hotline-based creative, but I 1000% understand why we can’t have nice things in this instance.

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from:

https://deathtobullshit.com/

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I would have done better in school if my assignments were more like this set of prompts.

A sample of some of the 40+ prompts:

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A collection of screams:

https://justscream.baby/

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Time for the abrupt interjection of dissent rhetoric and resistance material!

Make your own ICE-Watch kit.

Here is the STL for a wallet whistle you can print if you have a 3D printer.

Then… you can also print a little 8 page booklet on a single sheet of paper like this:

Here is what my prototypes look like:

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Put a whistle and a zine in a ziplock bag, repeat as many times as you can, and leave them around town in coffee shops etc.

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Currently working on a web app that would just let people write in boxes and have the formatting be done automatically. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here is a google slides doc with some good boilerplate copy to get you started. Remember to change it the state specific details!

~

now back to the stuff…

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Weird tech patents is a trip to browse.

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“A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many. Defend yourself from this trap: as soon as you have the photocopy, read it and annotate it immediately. If you are not in a great hurry, do not photocopy something new before you own (that is, before you have read and annotated) the previous set of photocopies. There are many things I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.”

Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis (1977)

… I see myself in this text and I don’t like it.
I also see our industry.

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You can’t do both at the same time.

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If you can’t tell, I went down a data/info viz rabbit hole recently. Starting collecting the purest art form: 2x2s.

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From an article titled “How do you coherently present a lot of content online?” on Itsnicethat, I saw this lil tip that I think applies beyond design:

“Keep the main layout and structure simple and clear. Add little irritating/fun/odd/nonsense/bleeding-edge features to the mix. Voilà.”

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A quote from William Gibson that caused some reflection:

“today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society.”

The quote was written in 1999, but the underlaying premise of information distribution being the categorical factor for society is interesting.

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WEEKLY MONSTER

Something old:

Something New:

1. Gareth O’Connor, founder of Something Different https://www.sdagency.com/

2. hint hint anyone with some time on their hands.