Communication

Dreams and Design

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that your week is going well and you feel settled in the new year. I’m still trying to remember to write 2016 on memos and papers, but feel like 2016 is already running away from me sometimes. Always so much to do and learn, especially in libraries. Today I wanted to talk a bit about dreams, because it is that time of year, and a bit about design, because libraries should always be talking about design.

First, a couple of things to share: Month in Typography by I Love Typography and All Steps Lead to Somewhere by This is Indexed. Both of these have been on my mind in this new year as we consider design and branding, promotion and outreach, marketing and engagement at my library. Sometimes it is overwhelming when I think about what I can accomplish today or this week (especially when teaching and considering all my other duties). But it is important to remember that we can only accomplish anything by taking the first step, no matter how small, or continuing on with a long-term project.

I’ve been thinking a lot about designing and dreaming in this new year as we are talking about how to do better outreach and publicity for the library, which obviously means we need to design publicity materials. In order to do this properly, we have to have space to dream and to create. Sometimes this seems impossible with all the urgent, and even important, tasks we are called on to do everyday as librarians. However, if we don’t reserve the time for thinking and dreaming, we come up empty when it is time to create posters and flyers and handouts for our events. And herein lies one of the great challenges of librarianship. There is always more to do, so how do we carve out time for these design projects? I don’t think anyone has the perfect, one-size-fits-all answer, but I know that we have to make space for designing if we are going to succeed at my library in promoting and engaging with our community.

For me, the space to dream and design almost always happens in the morning before most of my colleagues arrive at the library. I have to resist the siren song of checking my email and instead use the first hour for whatever design project I’m working on, or paper I need to write, or data I need to analyze. I have to be protective and even stubborn about keeping this space open for my work or it is too easy for it to get lost in the shuffle of all the urgent tasks that need my attention. I’m a morning person, so it works for me. Do what works for you. If you are creative later in the day, use that time. Will  it work every day? Of course not. But if you can line up more days than not for working on your projects, you’ll be amazed what you can do.

And you know, the funny thing about being deliberate about designing my time like that? I still manage to get all the urgent stuff done, too, but feel better at the end of the day because I’ve gotten further along on my important projects, too. Work really does expand to fill time, so design your time so you have as much control as you can.

I hope the new year brings you many opportunities to dream and to design. I hope you turn your dreams into wonderful projects to share with the world. I hope you find great satisfaction, and even joy, in your work this year. I’ll be back with more news and notes soon. Allons-y!

Time at the End of the Year

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! Another week in December gone by. The time does really seem to fly by at this time of year. Everything wrapping up (including packages) and the start of anticipating the new year makes it a great time of year to slow down and prioritize what we want to do next in our lives. This post has some resources to help with time, focus, and getting our stuff done (in life and at work).

Do you feel like time is speeding up as you get older? If so, you’re not alone. Goodness knows I’d like to have enough time to be bored sometimes. Lifehacker has an interesting article on why this phenomenon exists and what we can do to get back into the present moment. Enjoy the article on Why Time Feels Like it’s Flying By.

Part of the reason time seems to be flying by is that most of us, if we admit it, are overscheduled, bad at multitasking, and jump from project to project throughout the day. Because of this, our focus suffers. Being reflective and proactive about how we work helps and so do these Seven Strategies for Regaining Focus in Hectic Workplace. Let’s all agree to have a less hectic workplace in the new year, shall we? That would be grand.

I love the idea of taking the time now to Schedule Catch-up Days in the new year. Having a day or even an afternoon to tackle the to-do list and get through everything that keeps getting put off is a great idea. I’m pulling out my planner now to schedule some in 2016.

I hope you have a lovely day and weekend, dear readers. Hard to believe we are at the end of another year. Let’s make the most of it. Allons-y!

Why Being On-Campus Matters: Or, the Benefits of Drop-ins

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! So here we are, into December already. Can you believe we are in the last month of the calendar year? Neither can I. The days and weeks and months have seemed to fly since the school year started. But here we are. Today, I wanted share a bit about why being on-campus matters to me as a librarian and my one unscheduled day of the week when being on-campus just might matter (almost) most.

This quarter, my only day when I don’t have a meeting, class, or reference desk hours scheduled is on Tuesday. I feel rather grateful for having a day when I’m not automatically scheduled to be somewhere other than my office. If that makes me sound old-fashioned or out-of-touch, I don’t really care. It is nice to have some unscheduled time, especially when I am expected to research and publish in addition to my teaching and service duties. I often use Tuesdays for research: writing and revising article manuscripts, analyzing transcripts for a study, or finishing up grant paperwork. Tuesdays are my unofficial research day, but they’ve also become my unofficial “drop-in to see me” day for students, colleagues, and unexpected visitors.

In one Tuesday, I had an unexpected transfer of materials to the archives from an office that was moving, food drive donations, a history professor stop by to chat, an impromptu check-in about next term’s outstanding scheduling issues (even though I’m technically not scheduling all of our courses this year), and a request from a colleague for help with a misbehaving tutorial software program. To me, this day served as a reminder and an example for why being present on-campus and available, even when I’m not technically in office hours, is so important. As an academic librarian, a library faculty member, I have a lot of flexibility with my time and days, but it is still so important to be around, in the library, to have these serendipitous encounters. Not to mention, being able to have a chat with another professor and help a colleague rescue their tutorial work, totally made my day.

Would I have gotten even more research done had I been holed up in another place no one could find me? Definitely. Would I get annoyed if I got interrupted throughout the whole of my day? Completely. But is it worth a little less productivity to help out? Of course. Plus, it reminds me why I love librarianship. I love being able to help people; I love the conversations and the problem-solving; I love having the library be part of the larger community, on campus and off.

So, my unscheduled day has reminded me why being on-campus and available is so important. It is a reminder to not overschedule myself so I’m available for those drop-in moments and those serendipitous chats (and so I have the headspace to be present and open to these conversations).

So I hope, dear readers, that you have some unscheduled time in your day for these kind of encounters and if you don’t, that you do soon. We are all continually stretched to our limits, I think, but it is good to remember that sometimes it really is being around and present that counts in getting our work done. Allons-y!

 

 

Blog Action Day 2015: Raise Your Voice!

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! So today is Blog Action Day 2015 and this year’s theme is Raise Your Voice! It brings a spotlight on the silencing and abuse that people sometimes face when sharing their views, research, and ideas online. This is an issue that happens especially if you do not fit with the dominant majority (aka not white, cisgendered, heterosexual, and male). So Blog Action Day is a time for us to come together and spotlight this issue and take a stand against it. Today I’m sharing some information and how I think libraries and librarians can, do, and should be advocates and allies against the hatred and silencing that occurs all to frequently online.

Anita Sarkeesian, creator of Feminist Frequency, continually amazes me with her insightful commentary on representations of women in video games and her courage to continue her work through the vitriol and threats that she is subjected to constantly online for speaking out in an arena that a very vocal minority feel should remain a male-only space. If you’ve never heard of Feminist Frequency before, go check out some of her videos and interviews. They are amazing and I’m thankful that she’s continue with her work. She’s making a difference and we should support her against the bullies, trolls, and others who somehow think it is okay to threaten someone online.

Monica Lewinsky gave a powerful and moving TED Talk about her dark days of personal harassment on the early days of the Internet and how she is speaking up now to reclaim her narrative and advocate for safety and compassion online. It is a great speech and reminds us that we need to practice compassion in all aspects of our lives, including online. Harassment and intimidation should not be acceptable to us no matter the medium. It’s up to us to create a better world online and off.

Finally, I wanted to note that I think all librarians can help advocate for and promote values of equity, safety, and compassion online through our work. Librarians already affirm core values of social responsibility and diversity, among others. I see advocating for the safety of all people’s to share their ideas and creations online without fear of death and rape threats, doxing, or other forms of harassment and threat as part of our role as librarians, as people who support everyone in our communities access to information and education, life-long learning and community-building. It is up to us to decide how we want to use our professional standing, our lives, to support and build up instead of tear down others. My hope is that we work together to raise our voices in strength and solidarity to support those who are silenced.

That’s all for today. It makes me saddened that we can’t act better towards each other online, that we are over a decade into the 21st century and we can’t seem to be rid of such vileness and hatred. I want us to have a world that is better than that, for everyone. So that’s why I’m raising my voice with Blog Action Day today. Enough is really enough.

Why Librarian Designers Need to Know about Typography

/ dwakimoto

Hello, dear readers! I hope your week is going well and you had a lovely weekend. I can hardly believe we are almost half-way through July, especially with the especially gloomy morning weather we have here in the Bay Area. But no matter, we must carry on with our work and our blogging. Today I want to talk just a little bit about typography and why I think it is so important for librarians and especially librarian designers to understand.

First, what’s a librarian designer? Good question. I use the phrase to denote librarians who have responsibility for graphic design in their library. I’m talking about a piece of graphic design today, typography, which is very important (and fun) for everyone to understand a bit more about. However, it is especially important for librarians who design graphics for their libraries.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since ALA Annual since I had some really lovely conversations with people during my poster session. I’d been thinking a lot about graphic design in general as I’ve been processing the results of my survey of librarian designers and reviewing what and how they talked about typography in relation to what they’ve designed. I’ve also been reading the book Useful, Usable, Desirable by Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches, which is being used by my library’s UX team to look at the over user experience and design decisions at my library. It’s quite a good book and obviously can’t cover everything, but I know a lot of librarians are using the book, so I thought I’d use this post as a starting point to talk a bit more about typography than could be covered in it.

It is difficult sometimes to know what typeface to use when designing a poster, flyer, web banner, etc., especially if there are no guidelines on type at your library. This situation can be made more difficult if you don’t know the history of typefaces or haven’t given a lot of thought about the original uses of various typefaces, why they were created, and what emotions they evoke. So it can be very tempting, as the above book notes, just to pick Helvetica. It seems like everyone is using Helvetica now. But just because everyone is using it, doesn’t make it right for you.

There seems to be a myth that Helvetica is neutral. No typeface is neutral. Every typeface speaks and conveys emotion. That’s why we have different reactions to different typefaces. That’s why we have a different reaction to Uncial than we often do to Comic Sans than to Centaur. San serifs might look more plain than a serif or display typeface, but don’t mistake that for neutrality.

One of my favorite typography blogs, I Love Typography, had a wonderful article on Helvetica, The Last Word on Helvetica?, that I highly suggest reading. It is a great read and reminds us that choosing a typeface is like choosing a tool. A hammer or a pick ax is not always the right tool for the job and neither is Helvetica.

I’m not disputing that a library should have a branding manual that includes typefaces that are to be used in different situations. I’m disputing that Helvetica, or really any typeface, should be considered a default without considering what it is being used for. The same typeface that is appropriate for a webpage content area is not going to be the same that is most useful for a printed newsletter. Nor is it going to be most useful blown up to four inches tall on a poster. We have to consider the content and the format of each project before settling on a typeface. If we don’t take this care, it shows in our designs and they won’t succeed in communicating in the best possible way that we can.

So why do librarian designers need to know about typography? Because it is important. We are visual creatures and we read so much every day. We communicate visually through text and images and if we don’t have thought as to why we are choosing a certain typeface then we are missing out on the opportunity to make that typeface enhance our message. The point is communication and communicating in the most effective way possible. And we can’t do that if we aren’t consciously choosing the type we use, if we haven’t thought of the applicability of the typeface to the product we are creating. That’s why librarian designers need to understand typography, so we can communicate effectively no matter what we are designing.

While obviously this short post isn’t going to get into the history and intricacies of typography, I hope it has convinced you that type is important and shouldn’t be an afterthought. We look at type everyday; it is ubiquitous and important. As librarian designers, it is our duty to understand at least a little bit about typefaces in order to ensure our library can communicate effectively through all our designs. Besides, geeking out over typefaces is fun and we all need some fun in our work.

That’s all I have for now. If you want to learn more about typography, there are any number of wonderful resources available. Obviously the above mentioned I Love Typography blog is a great resource. Right now I’m reading Just My Type, which is wonderful. I loved The Typographic Desk Reference and hope the 2nd edition comes out soon. Thinking with Type is another great reference.

I hope you have a wonderful week. I’ll be back with more thoughts and news next time. Allons-y!

Organization and Creativity as Partners

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your week has been lovely and you have some fun planned for the weekend. Before we get to the weekend, however, I wanted to take a few minutes to share some ideas about organization and creativity that I’ve been thinking about this week. I have numerous projects going on at the moment so I’ve been thinking a lot about how to be organized to get everything done, but I’ve also been thinking a lot about how to partner organization with creativity and how that works in my life and work.

So I didn’t want to talk about creative organization. I think there are enough blogs out there writing about that. Instead I just wanted to share a few observations about how organization and creativity, at least for me, are partners instead of head-butting opposites. I know that there are people out there who believe that creativity has to be messy and I’d agree. But having a messy creativity process, like getting paint on the floor or ink on your wrists from all the edits on your manuscript are not the same as being unorganized. Sure, creativity is messy, just look at my kitchen table when I’m writing or my work desk when I’m creating a new tutorial or video for my classes. It’s a super-big mess, maybe one that I’ll share sometime with pictures. It’s messy, but it isn’t unorganized.

Being organized for me is a way of saving time and headspace so I can devote more energy to being creative. If my stuff is organized (and I have less of it to organize), then I don’t waste precious minutes or hours searching for what I need, be it some more fountain pen ink, my audio recorder, or a stack of notes for a video script. I’m a firm believer in putting things away, in the same place, every time. It not only keeps it organized, but then I don’t have to try to remember where I last saw something. I know where it is.

This, in turn, allows me to free up space in my head to organize thoughts and projects. Do you ever have days when it feels like the index cards or files in your brain are all hodge-podge on the floor? That each thought you have scurries away before you can link it to the next? I feel like that sometimes, but notice that I feel that way a lot less if I’ve been diligent about organizing my stuff, my time, and my projects. Then I actually have the room in my head to make connections I’d otherwise miss in the noise and I’m calm enough to get something new done. And, I like that.

One of the projects I’m currently working on is a poster session for ALA Annual. I’ll be there on Sunday, June 28th, from 2:30 to 4:00 pm in the Exhibit Hall. You can see details about the poster session here. I’d love it if you’d stop by. We can talk graphic design and libraries. It will be fun or at least hopefully not awkward. I’ll be posting more about poster design as I continue to work on them in the coming weeks.

I hope you have a wonderful spring weekend. I’ll be back soon. Allons-y!

Creativity and One Design Tip

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you’ve had a lovely week and are looking forward to a lovely weekend. Also, Happy National Library Week! We’ve had a week of events here at the library, which has made for a fun (and busy) week. I enjoyed designing posters and flyers for our events so I wanted to talk a bit about creativity today as well as start talking about design. Since one of my new research areas is looking at graphic design and libraries, I wanted to start sharing some of that on this blog. So let’s get into it.

First, I had to share this article from Lifehacker on How You’re Sabotaging Your Creativity Every Day. Go ahead and read it; I’ll wait for you here. I really like this article. It is a good reminder that we shouldn’t feel like we need to copy someone else’s schedule to be more creative. It is about what works best for us. And, if you need one, the article gives you the excuse to keep working on side projects, which I think is great. I would also add that we have to give up the myth that we just wait around for the muse to strike to be creative or that we have to keep a totally rigid schedule to be creative. I think it is great to have a schedule and figure out your best times to work. It helps to be consistent and work consistently as you are more likely to train your brain to know when you are “being creative.” But, on the flip side, not all of us can always keep a consistent schedule for our creative work. I’ll give you an example.

While not the most creative work I do, I would argue that writing up research articles takes a measure of creativity. You have to synthesize literature, you have to be creative in spotting where you can make a contribution, and you have to ultimately write up your findings in a way that will get accepted for publication if you want to share out your results in the peer-reviewed literature. Being in a position where publication is expected, I do this quite often and it is definitely a creative and at times exhausting process. When I first started in my position, I could only write in the mornings and only if I had long, uninterrupted stretches of time. When I first started, I also had fewer commitments on campus which made this possible. Shutting the door actually worked and I could get work done. But now, almost 7 years on, I rarely am able to take a day away from campus (or even a half day) to dedicate to writing. It’s kinda sad, but at the same time, I’m much better now at using 15, 20 minute breaks in my day to write and revise articles. My last article, which I’m currently revising, was written completely in small time pockets at work. So while I’m a huge fan of scheduling writing/drawing/creating time, I think it is also important to maintain flexibility to still be creative (and productive) when scheduling problems throw a kink in our best laid plans. Life happens, but we can still create.

On that note, I just wanted to share one design tip today. If you are interested in graphic design and are a librarian, look for inspiration and experience outside of the library field. Don’t confine yourself to literature, webinars, courses, etc. that are written only within our field. One of the best, fondational books I just read for graphic design was Best Practices for Graphic Designers: Grids and Page Layouts. It is an excellent introduction to using grids to organize your designs and the importance of planning before creating designs. I highly recommend it.

I hope you have a lovely weekend planned full of everything that makes you happy. I’ll be back next week with more news and notes. Allons-y!

Designing and Being Brave

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your week has gone well and you have a wonderful weekend planned. I can hardly believe we’ll be in April next week. The time really does pass quickly, even if the spring days are getting longer here in the Bay Area. Today I just want to share a few links and thoughts about designing and being brave. I’ve been doing a lot of graphic design work this week so these two topics are on the forefront of my mind.

We’re getting ready for a week of National Library Week events at my library and I volunteered to take the lead on designing flyers, posters, and handouts for our events, so I’ve been doing a lot of graphic design work this week. And I love it, but it does take a significant amount of time, which I don’t mind because designing is one of the most fun tasks, outside of teaching and research, that I get to do. But it does mean that I have to be brave because when the posters go up and the handouts get given away, my designs are out there for potential criticism, which can be scary, even if you’re not designing something for some major campaign.

So I re-read this Lifehacker post on How to be braver in your everyday life and wanted to share it because I’m thinking a lot about being braver in everyday life, especially when it comes to sharing out my work and designs. Creating is super-fun, but sharing those creations can be a fear-producing thing because then it is in the public and not everyone will always like what you do. But I figure if I can handle the barbs (and sometimes incredibly unprofessional comments) from anonymous peer reviewers of my research, I can handle criticism of my designs. So that’s my baby way of being a bit braver and sharing out a bit more. I have to give a shout-out to Online Northwest because my presentation on graphic design there went over well, which has given me a lot more confidence to be brave about volunteering for design work and suggesting things at work.

I love hearing from artists about their work processes and what they love about what they do, so I obviously loved James White in this short video, How professional designers create their posters. I love how enthusiastic graphic designer, James White, is about his work and it looks awesome. If only all our library posters could look so cool and have such thought put into their designs.

One great way to make awesome posters or other designs for the library, or really for anything, is to start with a great photograph. So I had to share this lovely video on nine tips for photography composition, which uses amazing photographs by Steve McCurry to illustrate the tips. Watch and learn, or if it is all review for you, just admire the beautiful photographs.

I hope these videos and articles have pushed you, maybe, just a bit, into thinking about how you can be a little bit braver in your life and/or your library. Maybe they’ve inspired you, just a bit, to take a second look at a sign in your library or a flyer or a handout and think about how you might be able to improve it, just a bit. Or maybe you’re inspired to go out and capture some moments from you weekend. In any case, I hope you have a fantastic weekend and I’ll be back soon with more news and notes. Allons-y!

Type and Design

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you’ve had a lovely week and are managing to stay healthy. The cold and flu are going around our library so I’m hoping you’ve been spared. Today I want to share some articles and such about type and design–two of my favorite topics.

I love typography; that’s no secret. But what I really love is good typography and unexpected, but amazing uses of typography. I love books on typography and I’m one of those people who can definitely spend hours looking for the perfect font to use in a project. I’m also one of those readers who is driven bonkers when a book doesn’t include a note about which font was used in setting the type, but that is really neither here nor there.

What is important is that for those times when we don’t want to take hours looking at fonts or deciding how to set type, there are handy cheatsheets and guidelines. I quite like this infographic on the design rules for text. Learning these tips will set you well on your way to artfully combining fonts and communicating well textually on everything from business cards to posters.

Type, when used well, can trigger emotions and moods in the viewer and help you engage library users, so it is important for librarians to understand at least the basics of typography. Plus, it is just a lot of fun and you can amaze people when you talk about kerning and leading and whether you are a fan of slab serifs or not. (Well, maybe not amaze people, but you will be able to talk coherently with designers and know what to consider the next time you design with text.)

While typing on a computer may be a quicker way to write a note (and almost essentially for designing graphics for the library), there is nothing better than receiving a handwritten note. I think everyone should always have with them a pen they like for writing and for encouraging more writing throughout the day. I love this post from The Well-Appointed Desk on the Top 5 Pens under $5. This is a great, fairly inexpensive way to branch out and write with something other than the last free pen that you got from a vendor. 🙂

I had to share probably the best resume design I’ve ever seen: top-secret resume. Getting a resume that was that thoughtfully designed would be a huge improvement over many that I’ve seen. Plus, super-fun.

Finally, because it is almost the weekend and I think weekends should involve sweet things, I wanted to share Joy the Baker’s recipe for extra nutty dark chocolate fudge brownies. They look so scrumptious that I might have to bake them this weekend.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend full of things that make you smile. I’ll be back soon with some more news and notes. Allons-y!

Graphic Design and Librarians: ONW Recap and Some Links

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you had a lovely week and have a great weekend planned. Today I want to share a quick recap of my experience last week at the fabulous Online Northwest Conference and some links to some tools and articles related to my talk subject: graphic design.

I have a fond spot in my hear for Online Northwest. It was the first conference where I had a proposal accepted after I became a librarian and I think it is a great one day conference. After attending that first conference, I hadn’t been back in years due to budget issues for professional development, etc. So I was excited to make it back this year to speak on a topic near and dear to my heart: graphic design in libraries. I was thrilled that so many people came to my talk and I got some great feedback. If you’d like to see my slides they are here and my resource list is here. I apologize if the slides don’t make a lot of sense. I practice my talks a lot before giving them, but never write out an entire script.

I’m working on some research and other talks on graphic design currently, so expect to see some more information here soon. In other graphic design news, I wanted to share this interesting article on 8 cities that have their own distinctive fonts. I’m quite a fan of Berkeley’s Rennie Mackintosh font.

If you are into design, you’ll probably enjoy viewing the slideshow on 36 visual content creation tools especially if you are looking for a new tool to play with in your next design.

Also, Lifehacker’s post on what creative professionals do that separate them from the amateurs is well worth a read. There are good ideas here even if your job isn’t designated as “creative” or it isn’t your entire job.

I hope you have fun designing some new things for your library or redesigning some old. I’d love to see your designs, so drop me a line in the comments below. Until next time, I hope you have a lovely weekend full of things that delight and inspire you. I’ll be back soon. Allons-y!