Noise to Signal

Renegotiation

rob — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:41:46 +0000

It happened to a friend not long ago: she showed up at the event where she had been hired to speak and met the organizer – who was wearing that patented sheepish grin that says “Now, don’t be mad, and above all please let me leave this room alive.” It turned out that my friend’s cheque wasn’t ready, that there were still a few hoops for it to jump through, but honest, it’ll be there soon! Five, six weeks, tops. Three months at the outside.

I’ve been lucky so far: I’ve been treated very well whenever I’ve spoken. Others haven’t been so lucky – and it isn’t always some last-minute hitch with money.

Sometimes it’s the empty room that you were told would be packed with cheering throngs. (“I don’t understand it – we posted about your speech on Craigslist. Once. Two months ago.”) Or an LCD projector that requires a dongle made in North Korean during the 1990s to Kim Jong-Il’s personal specifications. (“There must be even more pins!“) Or a little switch-up: “I know we asked you to talk about The Vision to Win, buuuuut… the last three speakers all spoke on that. So would you mind talking about advances in power density for molten salt batteries in electric vehicles instead?”

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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The Oops Files: forethought

rob — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:55:31 +0000

And Oops Files number three.

I’ve never quite understood why some people insist on considering the consequences of their actions. It totally spoils the surprise.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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The Oops Files: attachments

rob — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:51:18 +0000

Number two in our oops files: forgetting to send the attachment. The only thing worse is when you then send a nagging note saying why haven’t you read that document I sent you?

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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The Oops Files: cc

rob — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:55:52 +0000

Having screwed up in a minor but still awkward way in an email exchange with a friend earlier today, I sent them a little self-deprecating image that I hoped

a) they would find funny, and
b) would prevent them from hating me, and prevent me from dying alone and unloved. (Huh. Apparently Zemanta is now mining my subconscious.)

Then, after making a realistic appraisal of my chances of ever having a gaffe again, and Skitch still being open, I made a few more – just in case.

And I now give them to you, because I don’t want you to die alone and unloved, either. (Updated: I’ve moved them into separate posts for the sake of, well, for the children.)

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Also, I think you just voided your warranty.

rob — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:45:01 +0000

You may have noticed that Pinterest has taken on new prominence here at Noise to Signal Global Headquarters in the past few weeks. There’s a good functional reason for that, as a quick look at the number of people who’ve been pinning my more recent cartoons can show you.

And there’s also a certain giddiness I feel when I see visual communication moving so firmly to the fore. I think – hope – we’re on the verge of a new age of visualization, where more and more of us are able to use everything from doodles to sophisticated rendering to explain, argue, persuade, imagine and entertain.

Sure, it’s being preceded by a wave of flotsam – not the least of which is the flood of mediocre-to-awful infographics that turn out to be neither. (I actually saw one today that has no graphics. It’s a table, filled with words. But it’s in bright text on a dark background, and there are many blocks of color, so it must be an infographic – and therefore a PNG file. It’s hard to imagine a more gratuitous screw-you to the visually impaired… not to mention to search engines everywhere.)

But I have every hope we’re soon going to see a new wave – tools large and small, shared expertise and an explosion of ideas and applications for images. Pinterest is just the pin-pointy tip of a very visual iceberg.

And here’s my particular chunk of ice and snow.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Bright + shiny = We need a strategy!

rob — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:08:34 +0000

If you’ve been hauled into your boss’s office and handed a business magazine with some new social network splashed across the front page – “Flegmar: The hottest thing since GorbMeSilly!” – and told, “We need a Flegmar strategy right now!”…

…then this cartoon’s for you.

And so is this blog post about life at Weneda Communications.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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How nonprofits can protect digital rights (and themselves) post-SOPA: cartoon-blogging at #12ntc

rob — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 08:26:47 +0000

One more session from NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference – this one featuring the EFF’s Rainey Reitman, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark and NTEN’s Holly Ross.

This one works a lot better as a bigger graphic. So if you’d like, here it is.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Awards luncheon: Cartoon-blogging at #12ntc

rob — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 05:36:08 +0000

Oh, sure, NTEN does a great job of recognizing technological innovation, community-building and superlative achievement (huge props to Farra Trompeter, this year’s NTEN Award honoree).

Yet there are so many more kinds of genuine excellence we could be celebrating, and these cartoons represent my modest suggestions for a few new categories.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Affection of displays

rob — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:37:54 +0000

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

The outrage a few weeks ago over the Etch A Sketch scandal (what to call it? “Shake-and-gate”?) was bad news for Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. But it was good news for one of my favorite toys of all time: Etch A Sketch is apparently having a big resurgence.

Which brings back some pretty fond memories. A lot of kids like me spent hours, hours leaning over their Etch A Sketches, twisting knobs with painstaking care, slowly creating images that would then vanish with a quick invert-and-shake. It was a lesson in impermanence and the virtue of nonattachment… and, at a less spiritual level, the ability to move your hands in one location to draw in another.

Thanks to those hours of Etch A Sketching, when the time came to operate a mouse for the first time, my brain wasn’t completely thrown. I not only recognized the separate location of movement and visual feedback, but welcomed it. And for a kid who’d managed to verrrrry carefully create the U.S.S. Enterprise with two knobs and a free Saturday afternoon, those first windowed interfaces held no terrors.

There may be some synchronicity at work in the timing of Etch A Sketch’s sudden surge in renown. It speaks to the 2-D image’s newfound status, whether it’s found in the explosive growth of Pinterest, the popularity of infographics, the increased emphasis on data visualization, the White House whiteboard (and Edward Tufte’s role as a White House advisor), or the growing prominence of visual practitioners like Dan Roam and Sunni Brown.

Communicating visually crosses boundaries of language and literacy; it conveys ideas quickly and memorably; and it creates social objects for resharing, pinning and posting. Of course, it’s also open to spectacular abuse; a little fiddling with colors, shapes or proportions, and you can create a highly persuasive but deeply misleading image.

All of this suggests to me that we might want to revisit our schools’ curricula. We place a lot of emphasis – rightly – on reading and writing skills, on how to construct a sentence and organize an outline and structure an essay. Visual communication doesn’t get nearly the same attention, which means we aren’t teaching kids (or adults) how to communicate effectively with images. And we definitely aren’t giving them the critical skills to know when an image is lying to them.

Visual communication is rapidly becoming crucial for anyone who wants to explain, persuade or inform… and that’s an awful lot of us. And we should be encouraging kids to develop the skills involved.

And until curricula make that leap, sitting down with them over an Etch A Sketch may not be a bad first step.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Dr. Changelove – making tech change happen in your organization: Cartoon-blogging at #12ntc

rob — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:49:54 +0000

Another cartoon-blog from the Nonprofit Technology Conference. (Thanks again to NTEN for having me, and Rally for flying me in! Catch the work Kate Rutter and I did at the conference here.)

This one’s from Dr. Changelove, or: How My Org Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Technology. It was one of the strongest panels I’ve seen in a while, featuring Rose de Fremery, Dahna Goldstein and Marc Baizman (who went out of his way to make me feel like a rock star, and then delivered a terrific Ignite talk on improvisation).

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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