In the olden days (a year or two ago) when you wanted to raise funds for your cause — especially in education — you’d hold a party. You’d charge parents to get in. You’d wine and dine them. You’d have a live auction. People would get tipsy enough to open their wallets. And you’d have some money to help run your programs.
Turns out, you can do almost all of that online!Read More
Winning awards isn’t the reason we do what we do. We like happy clients even more than happy peers. But it still feels good when you get one.
Especially the Gold.
Congrats to designer Amy Crossan, photographer James Armas, and writer Emily Hutta for their work on the 2020 Legistics calendar. What a team!
(Click an image if you want to read the text. Which you totally do.)
One of my heroes is Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, the project management system we have used for over a decade.
Like us, he and his company have been working almost entirely remotely for years, and he’s written a book about it call “REMOTE: Office Not Required” that is full of experience and wisdom.
Jason and his partner David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH to the tech world) believe in a no-bullshit simplicity and a high level of personal accountability that has driven all their decisions since the beginning. They are self-funded, smart, opinionated, articulate and successful.
And they have just published an e-book on how they do it. It’s called “Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters“.
If you want to see how the sausage is made — the beautifully simple, no-frills sausage that is Ruby on Rails and Basecamp — you’ll enjoy this.
One of my heroes is Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, the project management system we have used for over a decade.
Like us, he and his company have been working almost entirely remotely for years, and he’s written a book about it call “REMOTE: Office Not Required” that is full of experience and wisdom.
Jason and his partner David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH to the tech world) believe in a no-bullshit simplicity and a high level of personal accountability that has driven all their decisions since the beginning. They are self-funded, smart, opinionated, articulate and successful.
And they have just published an e-book on how they do it. It’s called “Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters“.
If you want to see how the sausage is made — the beautifully simple, no-frills sausage that is Ruby on Rails and Basecamp — you’ll enjoy this.
Leon Battista Alberti is a name you might not know. He promoted a revolutionary idea — that “a man can do all things if he will.” He felt people should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.
And he lived the idea himself. An accomplished 15th century architect, painter, classicist, poet, scientist, and mathematician, as well as a skilled horseman, he was the original Renaissance Man.
Renaissance thinkers created art, music, architecture, poetry and literature. Understood physics and metaphysics. Spoke several languages. Studied philosophy. And could hold their own in conversations across a wide range of topics.
As they created, invented and executed, they found that each of their areas of experience affected others. Leonardo Da Vinci’s study of science deeply influenced his painting. Michelangelo Buonarotti approached architecture as a form of sculpture.
”Hyphenates” have always been influential
Naturally, the idea didn’t stop (or even start) with the Renaissance. And it certainly wasn’t limited to men.
Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th century theologian, writer, poet, composer, artist, medical researcher, botanist, linguist and an abbess.
Émilie, Marquise du Châtelet, was a natural philosopher — the early term for scientist — a mathematician, a physicist and a writer in 18th Century France. She translated Newton into French (with commentary), and wrote a treatise on physics.
Robert Hooke was an architect, mathematician, artist, surveyor and a natural philosopher.
Thomas Jefferson was an archaeologist, designer, inventor, naturalist, highly effective writer and a politician.
Winston Churchill was a historian and a novelist and a prime minister and a painter.
Today, in our era of specialization, there are plenty of advocates for crafting a broader education and pursuing multiple interests. There’s a reason so many people thrive with a liberal arts background. And a reason why serial career-switchers can have enormous impact on our culture. Because often the most interesting ideas come from cross-pollination.
Sometimes, we need generalists. Not just specialists.
In his new book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” David Epstein explains that specialists become “brittle”. They see familiar patterns quickly, but they are rarely the Big-C Creators.
Those Creators are amalgamating broader experience. They see patterns too. But a different kind. They see the relationships within the variety of the wide net they cast. And they can find those similarities more quickly and more effectively than the specialists.
As founder of the brand marketing design firm FreeAssociates, I’ve seen this in action. When I’ve hired designers, these differences become evident — not just in their problem-solving ability but in the kinds of problems people can solve creatively.
The narrowly focused person can efficiently bang out a technically complex project, so long as it’s in the realm of their training. But the designer with a more diverse background and broader experience moves comfortably from one world to another, and finds the useful, rich and valuable relationships inherent in each new situation.
They’re unintimidated by unfamiliar challenges. In fact, that’s where they thrive.
A Renaissance of the open mind
In our complex, interconnected world, wide-ranging experience is valuable. It enables a creative person to see things from multiple perspectives, to come at the problem from different angles. The idea that “we’ve always done it this way” gets challenged. The fresh approach gets traction. The outsider’s point of view gets incorporated. And, often, the final solution is better than the “industry experts“ would have come up with.
That’s why there’s a resurgence of interest in wider exposure, broader education and more open-minded thinking to complement the narrow-but-deeper specialists who bring particular expertise, but often have trouble seeing the larger picture.
Perhaps it’s time to focus on the forest instead of just one tree. Let’s spend less of our energy on a particular branch of Populus tremuloides and more on considering the whole beautiful landscape.
It’s always rewarding to see our work at work, raising money for a good cause. The Santa Monica Education Foundation has announced the results of its 2019 Wine Auction, their mouth-watering spring event, now in its fourth year.
Featuring tasty offerings by some of the areas top chefs, and award-winning wines from all over California, the event sold out weeks ahead of schedule. And it generated a record-breaking 1/3 of a million dollars over the course of about 4 hours.
Yes, our graphics have been part of its success. But most of it comes from the hard work of a dedicated and joyful staff, and proud volunteers who know they’re helping create a great education for thousands of kids.
Each year, we create a promotional calendar for Legistics, who provide international practice support services to large, multi-office law firms. The object is to make these publications interesting enough that customers will enjoy keeping them on their desks (and keeping Legistics top of mind) even though most people use digital solutions for their day-to-day scheduling.
For 2019, we focused on “The Face of Justice: Pioneering Women Jurists” and commissioned six talented artists to create portraits of these international legal visionaries. The results are beautiful, intriguing and emotionally resonant. (Click an image to see them larger.)
Congratulations to our lead designer Anat Rodan, and to the illustrators — Agata Nowicka, Andrea Ventura, Florian Nicolle, Pep Montserrat, Sonia Pullido and Żaneta Antosik — for creating such a powerful piece.
That’s how much money we helped raise for scholarships at the seventh annual COPi Cup Invitational Tournament at Pebble Beach. ($223,785 to be perfectly accurate.)
The fundraiser was conceived by our philanthropic client Philip Frengs, the CEO of Legistics, Inc. (That’s Phil in the salmon-colored pants, driving one straight toward the green, just like he does with his charities.)
Named after his firm’s forerunner the COPi Companies, the COPi Cup is a 2-day event celebrating “Camaraderie, Competition and Charity”. It was created to fund scholarships for underserved kids who are often the first members of their families to attend college.
This financial assistance is provided by the SCGA Junior Golf Foundation, but eligibility is not about competitive performance or athletic scholarships. Instead, through their involvement with SCGA Junior, these high schoolers become eligible for aid based on their leadership skills, their academic achievement, their committed participation and their mentorship to younger golfers.
FreeAssociates handles the marketing and information materials, the physical event setup — signs, banners, audio-visuals, etc. — and helps coordinate the actual event. It’s exciting to be so deeply involved in creating the participants’ experience, especially for such a worthy cause.
And spending time in stunning Pebble Beach is pretty nice, too!
