Have Passion and Be Curious
If you were lucky to attend Verge this week, you heard Kristian Andersen speak to passion and curiosity. As professional individuals, we sometimes think that we are confined by what is said on paper, and to achieve more we must have more letters to put after our name or more accomplishments to list out. However, we shouldn’t limit ourselves and allow our resume to be the sole indicator of who we are.

“Curiosity is the one determinant for success; it’s the source of innovation.”

As Kristian put it, “What makes people special is where disparate interests intersect.” By having passion about a problem, a solution, or an idea you are more likely to push yourself everyday to reach your goal. By having a general sense of curiosity you are more likely to explore other opportunities and interests. And coupling your passion with curiosity is where you start to stand apart from the crowd.

Ask Good Questions
At this week’s Linking Indy Women, I had the pleasure of hearing Heather Haas discuss what it means to “ask good questions”. If you’ve found yourself in a situation where you don’t have the expertise or experience to back up your ideas or opinions, she simply explained asking good questions is a great way to establish or validate credibility.

“Ask thought provoking questions that can get people to start thinking differently about how to reach the end goal.”

You may not know everything about the subject matter, but you are in the conversation for a reason and chances are there is value you can bring. First, listen to what is being said, identify the strong and weak elements, and think holistically about the entire situation. Then begin asking thought provoking questions. These questions should get others to think differently about the subject or see it in a way they haven’t before. In helping others see something in a new light you easily build credibility behind your name. Your ideas, viewpoints, and opinions have become valuable to them.

Pull Don’t Push
Asking questions to establish credibility, in turn, can open up an invitation for you to talk about you. Without it, Haas explained, people are less likely to invest in what you have to say. Only after you’ve proven your ability to understand their problem, do you earn the right to talk about you. So rather than jumping in with a “me-first” mentality, listen, ask, and earn your invitation to talk about yourself. It’s simply creating a pull and not a push conversation. Your chance of people investing in what you’re offering is significantly higher once you have established credibility.

No matter where you are in your career path we have all hit that roadblock where we’ve had to prove our abilities and ourselves before we could continue on. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what advice might you have or have been given when building credibility behind your name.

At KA+A we endeavor to make our everyday work our life’s work, by finding roles that require use of our team’s insatiable interests. The work day doesn’t stop at 5pm for us, but that doesn’t mean we’re all trapped behind the desk. Being involved in the community and culture of Indianapolis – whether it’s Verge, IndySpectator, events at the IMA, Pecha Kucha, Triton Brewing Co., or Techpoint – it is just as mission critical, as a brand workshop or building a website. By purposefully cultivating an interdisciplinary lifestyle, we gain a wealth of experience to apply when designing solutions for our clients’ pressing problems.

Following this fashion, I’ve found great direction in the Hemingway approach:

I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.

What Hemingway tapped into, that I find so brilliant, is that he’s not neglecting work; in fact, he admits that it’s always in his subconscious. What he realized though, is that by freeing up his mental faculties to recharge and become inspired, he wards against depleting himself of creative energy, remaining engaged in life and work.

If you’re interested in further guidance for finding your balance, here are a couple of recent resources I’ve found:

• The 99% /a>
• The Sabbath Manifesto

“Don’t steal, don’t deal drugs, and don’t miss your chance to hear all the inside stories of how this singular dark-comedy made it to the big screen.”

As I was scanning through the SXSW panel picker, the above description more than caught my attention. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to listen in on the SUPER panel to get an inside look at how this underdog movie struggled to be made.

Director and Writer James Gunn brilliantly thought up this movie more than 5 years ago, and had to wait for March 2011 for opening night! One of the biggest struggles to bring this movie to the big screen was funding. Janneane shared some great insights to their challenges in her previous blog.

As most of you can understand, when the financial means are lacking, there most likely isn’t a marketing budget. Gunn realized that with a DIY movie, social media was the perfect avenue to spread the word and build excitement around the film. He reached out to those in the trenches alongside him, Rainn Wilson & Ellen Page, to take advantage of their online influence and promote the film themselves!

SUPER is a movie made for a specific audience; Gunn, Wilson, and Page understood how to communicate with their online followers and spread the word to the right people. Working as a team they were able to get hundreds of people to stand in line for the SXSW panel & premiere. As I follow their tweets weeks after, the excitement only continues to grow.

When working with a tight budget (or no budget) social media can be a great way to communicate and interact with your audience. I’m sure most of you reading this are well aware of this. This panel only proved once more that social media knows no bounds.

The entire foundation for this movie was supported by the social communications that are readily available at our finger tips!

Last Thursday night, KA+A co-hosted a launch party celebrating TinderBox, a company already enjoying some early success. Guests included the who’s who of Indy’s startup and tech community, investors, clients, families and friends. If you weren’t able to make it out to Broad Ripple to help celebrate, don’t worry. I’ve recapped the entire experience for you right here!

WHO
TinderBox is a technology startup company that developed an extremely useful web-based application, that makes it easy to write, manage, track, and send business proposals electronically. For the past year, TinderBox has quickly been building this concept and already boasts an impressive array of investors, clients, and results.

WHEN
Fresh from Chicago, where TinderBox launched at midVentures Launch, it was time to celebrate their accomplishments. After a few weeks of planning, we brought an event to life filled with conversation, excitement, exclusive t-shirts, and fire dancing. On September 30th, TinderBox opened the doors to an unfinished industrial penthouse suite, blocks away from the Broad Ripple Strip, for one of the most exciting launch parties of the year!

Check out the TinderBox midVentures Launch Video

WHAT
Upon entering the room you’d find yourself quickly connecting with the TinderBox founders: Dustin Sapp, Mike Fitzgerald, Kristian Andersen, and Drew Loftus. In one corner DJ Kyle Hodge set the tone with a perfect mix of deep house jazz-funk and electronica. The room was filled with an abundance of great conversation, fueled by a menu, I can’t compliment enough:

• Sam Adams generously supplied a never ending assortment of their best and seasonal brews accompanied with a wine selection of Purple Cowboy Tenacious Red and Eve Chardonnay
• Fresh-baked soft pretzels and assorted mustards from the local Indy Pretzel, complemented by sausages and salamis

And did someone mention fire dancing? It wouldn’t have been a TinderBox party without the perfect entertainment: a women swinging, twirling, breathing, and dancing with fire. Definitely a conversation starter (and stopper) as we became captivated by her performance.

The crowd was gracious and supportive, welcoming TinderBox into the Indy startup community. TinderBox can’t thank this community of investors and customers enough, for taking time to help celebrate the launch of a new company and for contributing to its future success.

WANT TO SEE IT FOR YOURSELF?
Throughout the night, we were able to capture the evening’s experience, entertainment, and guests on video. We spent the next 24 hours pulling together the highlights of the midVentures Launch and launch party, then shared it with the world through the TinderBox platform. Experience it for yourself!

Tinderbox Launch Party Video

TinderBox Launch Party Live Feed Video

At their basic level, both print and web design are concerned with the clarity and readability of information, communicating a message in the most effective way possible. However, that’s where the similarities end. For instance, the way the information is displayed and consumed by the reader is very different, summarized concisely by Jakob Nielsen:

• Print design is based on letting the eyes walk over the information, selectively looking at information objects and using spatial juxtaposition to make page elements enhance and explain each other.
• Web design functions by letting the hands move the information (by scrolling or clicking); information relationships are expressed temporally as part of an interaction and user movement.

Obviously both print and web design have their strengths and weaknesses. In print you have the luxury of being able to select format/canvas size, as well as paper stock and utilize special printing techniques to create a rich visual experience. You can be creative with layout using photography, typography, color and spatial awareness to lead the reader on the right path through the information on the page. You also have complete control over the final physical product. Everything will look how it was set out during the design process. Print is more intimate. Not only can you see it, but you can touch it and even smell it. It stays with you.

At the opposite end of the spectrum you have web design’s fixed-width (depending on screen resolution), scrolling page. Graphically, there are limitations due to resolution and file size/loading times. There are a limited number of fonts with which to set your text, and you have much less control over how that text will look across different monitors and operating systems. A more uniform approach to layout must also be adopted. With a single click the design can be gone from the screen in an instant.

Where web design comes into its own (and this has by far been the biggest challenge for me) is with its interactivity and user engagement. The typical extent of a reader’s interactivity with a printed piece is the turn of a page, unlike a web site where scrolling and clicking on multiple links lead the user on a non-linear path through the information. Interactive Flash presentations, audio and video can be used in place of text effectively summarize an otherwise lengthy read.

Of course, while the visual aspect of web design interactivity is very important, it is the ease of navigation through, and structure of information that creates a more fulfilling experience for the user. It’s all very well having a clear style defined for a link rollover, but if it isn’t clear where that link leads, or if the requested information isn’t clearly defined on the target page, then it is all for nothing. User experience design goes much, much deeper than that though, and is a science (or an art) in itself. I still have a lot of learning to do in that respect.

I’ll never unlearn the knowledge of print design I’ve gained in the last 11 years. My ultimate goal is to gain an equal amount of knowledge in web and User Experience design. While print design is my number one passion (alongside corporate identity and typeface design), I’m slowly warming to the possibilities of design off the printed page. Whether I’ll be as versed in it as with print, only time will tell.

Needless to say, when Kristian Andersen + Associate’s extended their summer internship position to me, I was thrilled. The prospect of having a job at all was magical (my hometown had the biggest year-over-year unemployment increase in the nation), but the prospect of having a job that resonated with my personality was sublime.

Last fall, I was fortunate to hear Zappos.com’s CEO, Tony Hsieh, lecture on the importance of measuring a company culture as we search for employment. He stressed to the hundreds of college students in attendance that any good company has a set of values, and if those values aren’t harmonious with our own, we probably shouldn’t bother. Not only will we be unhappy, but we will be doing that company a disservice if we aren’t wholly committed.

I based my impending internship hunt around this notion, and if I couldn’t visualize myself starting and managing a company like the prospective employer, I didn’t invest my efforts any further. Sure, with the aforementioned job market crash, turning down any opportunity for employment is risky, but the hunt for the ideal culture paid off immensely, and now I truly look forward to coming to work every day. I’m surrounded by a collection of talented, positive, forward-thinking individuals–and that’s exactly what I wanted.

Further reading: Hsieh puts his money where his mouth is with the quit-now bonus.

Training, Inc. was founded in 1981 with the purpose of providing career training for those living in poverty in Marion County. Their 12 week training program equips clients with the life-skills, situational training and the
confidence they need to succeed. These men and women develop the marketable skills they need to support themselves and their families, and ultimately give back to the community that gave to them. Equipped for success, Training, Inc. graduates get jobs, retain them, and make more money than other similar career training programs. 91% of Training, Inc. graduates are placed in jobs after completing the program. Just one year later, 83% are still employed. These high results contribute to a high ROI. For every dollar spent on training, $2.96, nearly triple, is returned to the community in taxes paid to government, dollars returned to the economy, and savings of annual welfare and food stamps.

But with a track record this good, and unemployment figures on the rise – resources like Training, Inc can quickly run out of bandwidth to serve all those knocking for opportunity. 6 News even reported on the swell in tonight’s 11 o’clock news. I had the privilege of joining Training, Inc.’s board this January, which is why I’m here right now eager to generate awareness and support for this best kept secret in Indy. If you’re interested in learning how you can become invested in Training, Inc., we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to contact me at janneane@kaplusa.com or visit our website.

Tomorrow the team from Kristian Andersen + Associates saddles up and heads to Austin, TX for a few days of pixels, podcasts, angry academics, lonely gamers, geeky tech-moguls, mexican food for breakfast, and Shiner. Stay tuned for daily dispatches from the front lines.

This year the staff at Kristian Andersen + Associates traveled from Indianapolis to New York City for our annual Holiday party . It was a whirl-wind 48 hour trip for the KA+A team (excepting Clay and Erin – who decided to prolong their holiday). We started with a little consumer marketing research (aka shopping) and finished with dinner at Nobu. We were blessed with a perfect NYC Christmas experience, including copious amounts of snow, sleet, and the tangy scent of urine on the subway.