Reilly Brennan

Making Un-Perfect Cars

Thu, 02 May 2013 21:41:00 -0700

Last month the author Virginia Postrel wrote a piece for Bloomberg that pulled together various perspectives on why ‘robocars’ are coming sooner than we think and why a lot of that innovation is happening outside of traditional automotive companies. It is a piece with a few very meaty points of view, including my friend Diego Rodriguez (his awesome, fans-only car blog UGG gets a good link too), Brad Templeton and yours truly.

One of the more revealing things happening in the valley right now is how one seemingly common goal (‘cars that drive themselves’) has all manner of different approaches. It’s fascinating and inspiring, but it’s also very ‘autonomous,’ meaning that some cars really can drive themselves but they cannot talk to one another — yet. The optimal view of the future is not one of autonomous cars, but collaborative ones.

All the same, I see manufacturers and technologists pushing forward with an idea of how their robocar project should be introduced. At Revs, which is at its core a multidisciplinary research center, I am lucky to be able to hear conversations about the technology, but also the human factors, the messaging and the infrastructure planning. The kernel that I see common among the best plans is the notion of offering something that might very well be described as ‘un-perfect.’ The word itself is somewhat ungainly and un-perfect, and I think it suits the situation we’re in. That is, it’s probably better to release something un-perfect today and reward your users through ongoing, product-improving releases than delay your release until it’s absolutely 100% dead on perfect.

This is difficult for traditional car companies because it’s just not the typical route. Big car companies have been able to make unbelievably reliable products due to a confluence of large capital investments, massive engineering/QA staffs and this perfection mindset. Designing, building and releasing a new car is usually a 6-year cycle (that’s long!), because you can’t do perfect much shorter than that.

What is the value in releasing something un-perfect? There are certainly disadvantages, but right now we are seeing some new advantages that are only now available due to a dramatic reframing of customer demands and norms we have seen in the last few years months.

The biggest advantage of un-perfect is something I’ll refer to as ‘surprise & delight.’ It’s hard to appreciate how much the world changed on October 12, 2011, but robocars should be thankful because it reframed our idea of surprise & delight. That was the release of Apple’s iOS5, the first time Apple offered OTA (over-the-air) updates to its smartphone (Nokia started offering OTA years before, just at a different scale). It meant a dramatic change in how people think about how products should perform. Think about it: Every few month or so, I get a new iOS update and my phone ‘gets better.’ I don’t pay for this, it just happens. I have been trained through various iOS updates to know that if something is deficient, there’s probably an improvement coming down the line. It is delightful. At Revs, our director Cliff Nass talks about this as a key differentiator for how some are thinking about robocars: if your car can get you from city to country autonomously with 78% accuracy and then next week with 79% accuracy and so on, you think it’s getting better, rather than thinking of it being 21% deficient.

This is a sea change in the kind of relationship we have with consumer products. Once a car manufacturer appreciates this change and uses it to their advantage, they would be in a position to release a ‘robocar’ innovation early and often. That would be a perfect way to build something new.

(Photo via Powerhouse Museum Collection)

Wall plate on a brick wall in Exeter, UK, by an anonymous poet.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:53:12 -0700

Wall plate on a brick wall in Exeter, UK, by an anonymous poet.

This new piece Waterpark by Evan Prosofsky feels like a...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:15:00 -0700

This new piece Waterpark by Evan Prosofsky feels like a long-play short film rather than a shortened long one. It has a patient original score by Alex Zhang Hungtai. Along with the Joe G Globe film from last year, you can really string together some pleasing waterpark work to view.

Art Sale

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:10:49 -0700

Art Sale

Tableau: Saturday Night Dirt Track Racing at Petaluma

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:55:00 -0700

Michael Sturtz and I took our Stanford class to Petaluma Speedway last weekend as a part of our Understanding Superfans course in the d.school (see a blog post about the experience here). The students did a range of intercepting interviews with fans at the track, in the parking lot and in the stands. Petaluma is one of the best little race tracks around. $15 tickets, $4 corn dogs, free fumes and great people. There are rumors that the speedway isn’t long for this world given rampant development in the area, but I hope we can find a way to hold onto it. It is within these short dirt ovals that we find the atomic unit of racing heritage in America.

Gif'd Up & Functional

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:32:00 -0700

I have started to see a lot more functional / useful gifs lately, a heady upgrade from the usual internet astrofluff you see and experience. Particularly of note is the way that Seems Books does their page layouts, where they feature a big image of the book but then inset on the page is a gif of the book opened and flipped through. It’s shot directly from the point of view of the reader/flipper, so it feels like you’re doing it. Even with a dozen or so frames you can really get the sense of the book’s size, heft, colors and feel. I wish there were more useful gifs like this in product descriptions around the internet and now that I have a mental model of this I might use it for an upcoming project. Below take a stroll through a number of books from Seems:

Comrades: Edward Aten on Rebuilding The Pitch Deck for the Pocket

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:30:00 -0700

New for 2013 and beyond: I’ve started asking friends of mine to weigh in on topics near and dear to their heart on this humble little space. I call this ‘comrades’ and just let them have the mic. In this edition we bring you Edward Aten, the agitator entrepreneur who built Swift.fm and sold it before the paint dried on your ex-girlfriend’s end table remodel. He has spent the last few months building something called CopThis for which I am an advisor. What I found interesting about the launch phase of CopThis is that he chose to reinvent the moribund storytelling format of the powerpoint into some really interesting. It fits in your pocket and, despite the smartphone environment, has but one path. Here he explains how it came about. It makes me want to build one for an upcoming project:

I’m building a company called CopThis and many of my friends, Reilly included, know about it because I’ve been asking for their help. But for all the new investors, employees and clients we have been meeting, I’ve been looking for a way to capture and share the things that make me so excited about this company.

But, you can’t catch passion with Powerpoint. Even the best pitch decks are pretty boring.

Worse, they assume you’re on a computer and not a phone. And phones are changing everything.

Since I’m dedicating my life to building a mobile company, why wouldn’t I tell people about it on their phones? It’s odd to think otherwise today and will seem downright ridiculous in a few years’ time.

So I killed the pitch deck.

I turned off my computer and started over with a clean, four-inch slate.

In thinking about the way you construct a ‘deck’ for this format, I couldn’t just tell people what we are doing, we had to tell them why. I had to share our story — and make it sharable.

Stories are simply unbeatable as a communication device. They capture magic. They have voice (and sometimes mystery). They can also end in a way that leaves the reader want to know more — which is my ultimate goal for us at this stage as we start to tell people more about ourselves.

So we asked ourselves, “Who is telling the best stories on the phone?” The easy answer: Robin Sloan.

Fish, Robin’s app, is impossibly small - only a series of cards you tap through. There is almost no functionality other than tapping the screen to go to the next slide. It allows the writer to focus the reader’s attention on microscopic points that would be missed in other forms.

It is almost impossible to not read every single word, and there’s only one path through the app.

Perfect.

Taking a page from Robin’s format, I then had to write in a way that was dense, aspirational, visual, motivational and worthy of our company. And it needed to break apart into pieces that created a beautiful rhythmic tapping when you read it.

There was no magic here, just the labor of a mediocre writer who’s also a tough critic. I have rewritten this more times than you will know. I am almost happy with it now.

My friend Drew had the idea to add images, but when we included them, they only distracted from the (then poorly written) copy. They stayed because the images he chose were so perfect I couldn’t delete them.

We worked around them for a while and eventually we spaced them out. And then we faded them in and out, like the lights were fading up and down at a concert. We edited and edited until it felt like we found a sweet spot that worked.

Then we shipped it.

We haven’t done any promotion outside of this little thing. Nothing at all. I’ve only sent it to 20 or 30 of my friends but we have already had a lot of positive feedback. It’s doing something better than going viral - people are using their phones to show the app to their friends that manage huge bands and run merch for some of my favorite brands (our primary clients at launch of CopThis). In just a few weeks, without tweeting or promoting it in any way, we’ve had inbound interest from people I would have killed to access with a normal ‘deck.’

We will keep this as our primary tool to learn about us for the first time, and hopefully forever. Maybe even one day it will be our calling card - not just for introductions but for recruiting and connecting as well.

If you want to build one for yourself, let me know and I can give you the details on how we did it. Tweet @aten and I’ll get back to you.

To download the deck/app for iOS click here or for Android click here.

My good friend’s father, Joe, is ill and I went and...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:05:00 -0700

My good friend’s father, Joe, is ill and I went and dropped in on him in the hospital this weekend while Andrea and I were in Detroit. It was good to be in his presence, to hear him speak and to speak candidly about things that people rarely speak candidly about. Andrea and I went down to the hospital gift shop to see if we could get him the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, just a little something to generate some new cell activity, something for the male brain to fire upon. But we were too late, the thing was flat sold out, so I bought him a new Road & Track and told him to think about cars he’d want to buy when he gets out.

When I came across this letter from Keith Haring to Timothy Leary from 1986, it made me think of my old friend Joe. We didn’t see each other often, but when we did we were always sharing stories of recent travels, adventures and accomodations (his decidedly more updraft than mine). I’m thinking about Joe and hoping he’s doing better, maybe flipping the pages on that magazine and thinking about an exhaust pipe as big around as a can of tomato sauce.

Cheeseburger

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:39:00 -0800

A prop from a 1970s McDonald’s commercial on offer, with a foam patty and tomato that break the fourth wall.

Antti Kalhola’s ‘The Start’ is a masterful...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:17:30 -0800

Antti Kalhola’s ‘The Start’ is a masterful edit of F1 emotions. Check out his other work here.

On The Shoulders of a Team Haro Documentary (1989)

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:11:00 -0800

There’s some obvious charm to this 1989 Haro Bikes video, not least of which is that the majority of it was shot from the shoulder on a consumer VHS recorder. The height of all the shots is in that dad-cam 5-6 foot range, the few exceptions being some camera-mounted half-pipe work. We might even assume the camera was held by different shooters, passed around like we used to do with our friends on our old mini-DV cams.

And like any good old dad, the shooter occasionally misses a good amount of the action when the riders fly out of frame, a little too fast for him or her to keep up. Maybe it’s inaccurate to say we are missing the action, it gives us the feeling that the action is faster than the frame. A few examples of some of the out-of-frame beauty:

As opposed to the high-grade film quality of action sports videos today, what you experience here is almost certainly an edited stream of raw captures. This was shot ‘first-take, only-take,’ with likely no reshots completed or attempted. Contrast that with something from today and your appreciation for what’s on hand will be amplified as an athletic endeavor if not an artistic one.

Of course, it’s hard to block the surface-level nostalgia (1980s, BMX, VHS transfer). The video has a heavy mix of corny jokes, dick-wad voiceovers and repetitive blend edits, but if you can get past that (or revel in it), you will find something of material value that hits reasonable high on your feel meter.

Full video below (34 minutes):

Thanks to Joe Case at Tekino for this find.

The Old Men of Deborah Parks

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:15:00 -0800

Among the Documerica series within the U.S. National Archives, I was pleased to find the works of the late Deborah Parks, a photographer living in Rockport, Massachusetts who was married to photographer Winfield Parks until his death in 1977. Among the rosey film shots of life in the northeast, these old gents really made me smile. I keep wondering what she must have said to them to get these reactions.

The Local Cil Delivery Man at Poole’s Rexall Drugstore in Rockport 02/1973

Swedish Painter Now Living in Rockport 02/1973

Worker with the Rockport Public Works Department 02/1973

A Rockport Citizen Bids Good Morning with a Tip of His Hat 02/1973

Coda: I found this nice obituary on Deborah in the Gloucester Times and particularly enjoyed this line: “Being a woman of many talents, she also did landscaping, worked on a turkey farm, spent a summer cooking for an Annisquam family and also found time to take an H&R Block tax course.” Thank you, Deborah.

All photos via U.S. National Archives.

Goodbye Rocky Road

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:32:00 -0800

Comrades: Nick Parish on Learning From A Dinosaur Designer

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:05:00 -0800

New for 2013 and beyond: I’ve started asking friends of mine to weigh in on topics near and dear to their heart on this humble little space. I call this ‘comrades’ and just let them have the mic. In this edition we bring forward Nick Parish, North American editor of Contagious and one of our closest advisors and friends. Nick recently sat in on a Mario Garcia brain dump and took copious notes, some of which really hit home. Here he is:

A newspaper design consultant might be the most interesting job in the world today. There are not only a handful of eager, scared-shitless clients out there trying to climb out of the muck, but each client arrives with their own baggage, their own unique needs and their own idea on how to solve the problem. As it turns out, these clients keep trying new stuff over and over again as the platform evolves.

The one thing that remains as the tip of the spear? Design.

The phrase ‘newspaper designer’ might sound quaint, but the best of them are creating real change, with the remarkable ability to communicate what’s going on and what’s working with incredible lucidity. I’ve just been in the presence of one of the greats, Mario Garcia, seen above.

Last week my company, Contagious, executed the third in a series of collaborative events with Monotype, the legendary type foundry. In each, we’ve looked at different product categories to try and elaborate what their next few years might look like, based on leading-edge stuff happening now.

A night before the main event, we were part of an evening event, focusing on publication design and I found the discussion really revelatory. Even though we look at a lot of different industries for a lot of different clients, we’re in a similar predicament to many businesses: we often have a hard time applying the lessons we pass along to ourselves. The tariff we take on great ideas is very low.

But I quickly found myself taking a ton of notes as the keynote presenter, Mario Garcia, laid out his experience. I’m a little embarrassed to admit here that I’d never heard of Mario before, but he’s been very intimately involved with publishing design for years, having had a hand in almost 500 papers’ look. He redesigned The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Die Zeit and The Charlotte Observer among many others.

When I shared some of my notes with Reilly, as publications and design are to our chats as wine is to The View, he asked me to put them into coherent shape to share as a Comrades post.

So, here we go, lessons learned from Mario, take one. Stick around to the end and I’ll give you something valuable for free.

Think in the quartet

There are a different kinds of screens. Mobile and desktop are the “lean forward,” and tablet and print are the “lean back.” A tablet experience, for example, is more like a book, or a documentary film. Mario would bet on the smartphone to be the Ultimate Warrior among these, the one that’ll eventually pummel them into submission, but only when people get used to reading longer stuff on it.

Communicate the full quartet

It’s important that any communication of your publishing brand includes showing all these things together, ie a mag next to a tablet next to a phone next to the site. That makes people’s intuitive relationship with media seem like a shared aspiration with your publication. As readers, “we travel through these platforms unconsciously,” but as publishers we retain artifacts from the earlier ones in how we present and publish on them. Mario’s example was a throwback from “radio days” which saw early TV weatherman reading the weather from behind the desk rather than standing up and demonstrating where the clouds were with their whole bodies. I took a look afterwards, and it was five years before the BBC switched from a static image with a narrator reading the weather offscreen to George Cowling himself appearing on the screen, motioning around hand-drawn weather maps.

The fifth member, that which will make the quintet, is radio, and Mario pointed out Monocle’s radio show as an example. The fact that many of our devices have audio as a native function will do more to drive its use.

Type Branding

The big connector here is typography, according to Mario. It’s the first visual connection between the person and the publisher, and it’s essential it is unified thematically across ALL platforms and representations of brand. Mario cited examples like 360, from the Netherlands, which uses Fedra across platforms.

Stop-lossing Print

Mario’s words: “In print the last thing you want to do is remind people the information is old.” The way you stay away from this, he says, is to use headlines that look to the future, and are active and promising, and employ capsule and summary items to remind people of things they may already know that’s relevant to a specific discussion area.

I asked him later how the aesthetic of the web fed back into print design, and vice versa. His biggest point of excitement was a reinvention of white space. There’s a lot more of it, and a greater potential to use that in both types of canvas to “guide the fringes,” mostly informed by web design. Additionally, Mario was fired up about full-width images, and was insistent they make an appearance in web work. Lastly, where to look for inspiration in publication design? Scandinavia. They’re over five years ahead, he says, marrying platforms visually very effectively. One example — not mentioned by Mario specifically — is Politiken. Note the hand-drawn front-page when they announced their redesign.

For me, this was really eye-opening, as I thought a lot about how we’re translating our design, which is really good in print, to other platforms, where it isn’t as sharp.

I’d like to pass along some of that inspiration to you, too, so I’ve sequestered five copies of our Brand Perfect Adventures in Publishing Report. You can register and download it here, or give me a shout at nick@contagiousmagazine.com and I’ll put a printed copy in the mail for you.

(Photos above via Wikimedia, Telegraph, Typotheque and SND.)

Tableau: Sears Point Swap

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:38:02 -0800

I tore up 101 on Saturday morning with my pals Randy and Ray to check out the first swap meet at Sonoma Raceway, aka Sears Point. We didn’t quite know what to expect, but what we found was exactly the sort of rag-tag bunch of greatness that you hope for at one of these. After the fact I had a little regret I didn’t buy that dirtbike for $400 or the set of turbo-mag wheels, just to have. I hope they do one of these again.

An old Disney Autopia car on offer, of somewhat questionable lineage:

Great old turbo-mags

Piles of manuals for cars I don’t really like, a few I do

The British guy was superb

Some guy got suckered into buying this whole box of cans

This is what you want to see at a swap meet: the price and the golden word: “works”

Moke has some lovable qualities and some extra garbage in back

I bet you don’t have a box that says Early 90s Indy Shocks

Great old logo, Draplin would go nuts on this

A legendary Weismann locker from an old Can-Am car

Acres of springs, indeterminate lineage

Had to talk Randy out of buying this, he was wooed by the AM-ness

Light bar with siren, $75

Good resting spot

These look deliciously used and deflated

Jeepster with DIP sign

I just want to put this on my desk

Best camo limo of the day

Italian cars often do start

A great old Scout on offer

Love Steve’s handwriting

In December, my colleagues and I made public the news that the...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:04:00 -0800

In December, my colleagues and I made public the news that the Road & Track collection would come to Stanford for 10,000 years of stewardship. Today we released a short mini-documentary about the some of the thinking behind the accession and a view toward the future.

Pizza Party norms

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:10:00 -0800

Gene Davis sideways

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:20:00 -0800

Since learning about the artist Gene Davis a few years ago I have loved his work and even more so his singular focus on doing everything in vertical stripes. There’s something both derailed and in control about artists in general, but especially those who keep to one form. I like that Davis is using tape in this little clip below; he is at least 30 years ahead of the HGTV how-to video you have about how to paint your walls.

Despite my love for the work, I kind of always wished they were horizontal instead of vertical. Within the Brennan house we do a lot of sketching and it’s almost always in horizontal stripes, so what if we just turned them? I hope Gene wouldn’t mind.

All photos via the Smithsonian.

2013 Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona Couch Kit

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:48:00 -0800

Another long-distance race, another great opportunity to let technology act as our war room for maximum enjoyment and shirtsleeve analysis. This is another installment in my couch kit series, highlighting the best in terms of web streams, feeds, useful info and anything else I think is worth mentioning while keeping the race going twice around the clock.

(Note this page updates frequently throughout the week / weekend)

Start time: Saturday, January 26, 3:30PM Eastern standard time

TV coverage explained: Speed (TV): 3:30PM - 11PM, then SpeedTV.com until 9AM, then Speed (TV) until 3:30 checkered flag. All times Eastern.

Live video streams:

Speed.com web stream (11PM Sat - 9AM Sun)
Speed broadcast feed in very high-def on Justin.tv
French Motors TV — Motors TV but with French commentators. There’s a 30-second ad that plays but then you’ll see it.
MotorsTV — but beware of popups and make sure you wait 30 sec for the cover-over ad to disappear.

Team streams: Mazda USA, Turner motorsports, Magnus Racing

Radio feed: Radio Le Mans, MRN (timing and scoring on top, radio feed with controls at bottom), SiriusXM Channel 90 (aka the NASCAR channel) if you have a subscription.

Phone / mobile apps

Radio Le Mans on iPhone: Download F-stream (free) from iTunes and then add this URL in as a new Favorite (go to Edit, then add a new station).
Radio Le Mans on Windows Phone: Requires Windows 7 or later. Thanks Brian Roche for the tip!
Grand-Am app for iPhone and Android

Timing and scoring: Grand-Am site, mobile-enabled

Other useful stuff:

Entry list
Race notes and another version of race notes from DSC
Spotter’s Guide via Jalopnik. Sadly Andy Blackmore isn’t doing one of his great guides this time!
A great preview by the boys at DailySportsCar includes a DP preview and a GT/GTX preview
Cool Porsche-only Daytona site. Tweets, historical stuff, very neat.
Twitter searches: #rolex24, #daytona24, Metacool racers list

2012 info, just to keep in mind:

Winner’s average speed: 126.300 mph

Winner’s total laps: 761 (1 short of the all-time record set in ‘92)

Winner’s best lap: 1:41.473

Winners: Allmendinger, Wilson, Negri, Pew (Michael Shank Ford-powered Riley)

(Photo above: one of the TRG Porsches from test days, photo via Grand Am)

The Coffee Cup That Broke Free of Context

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:05:14 -0800

What’s remarkable about this coffee cup with a lid? Not much on its own, but when the nice Southwest flight attendant served it to me last week, I marveled at it like a rare gemstone. It was quite a special experience — my first coffee with a lid on an airplane. I wondered what took them so long.

Then again, I wondered why I never thought about lids on airplane coffee / tea before. I suppose it’s just that zombie-like state we get in when we suffer through an experience over and over again, growing a mental scab. It’s as if whenever I got on an airplane I forgot lids even existed!

The opposite of the zombie state is taking an active role in making these problems less of a problem. Some people do this on their own using everyday objects, just simple little ways to make things less annoying; one of my favorite books on this topic is called “Thoughtless Acts” by IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri; there is also an interesting open Flickr group. I really like this coaster / warmer that takes advantage of the notoriously warm Apple power units.