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Let's talk about a foreign policy joke....
[The US government funds gender studies in Pakistan to impede the formation military opposition there. It does not in Saudi Arabia because they are allies and don't want to compromise the power structure of their friends. It's not about women.]
[It's hard to effect change without visualizing the whole system. Use tools that help seeing and playing with the dynamics.]
[The three types of feedback loops are re-inforcing, balancing, and chaos. We can effect change in complex systems by creating feedback loops that bring our state to the desired ideal.]
[Create attractors (deepen valleys) that stabilize to positive outcomes. Shorten mountains to make negative outcomes easier to avoid.]
[A block of text creates a certain texture based on the thickness and evenness of letter stroke, the serifs.]
[A font's point size is based on the difference between the tallest ascender (like the tip of a 'b') and the lowest descender (like the tail of a 'p').]
[Body copy tends to look better with a leading / line-height of 120% to 140% of a type's size (1.2em to 1.4em).]
[Similar character widths make for better pairings.]
[Typefaces are built for specific mediums such as print or screen.]
[If you seperate paragraphs with space, a full line break is usually too much, better to have 0.8em.]
[Within Serif fonts: Old style, like Garamond, has a tilted axis, round serifs, modulated strokes; Traditional, like Baskerville, has an upright axis, sharp serifs, heavily modulated strokes, geometrical shapes; Modern, like Bodoni, has an upright axis, thin serifs, extremely modulated strokes, geometric counters; Slab-serif, like Museo Slab, has an upright axis, even thick modulation that matches the size of serifs.]
[Short cones are absent from the fovea, which is the center of our focus and where we can best see detail.]
[Researchers found that exposure to red overloads the brain's rationalizing capacity without you realizing. Participants displayed hesitation and earned lower IQ test scores, but rates their performance the same as the control.]
[Shopping in a Target store involves being assaulted with red in every direction, and there is a joke that you cannot leave without spending $100.]
[When surveying color usage and significance in a particular culture, research the flag, religions, weddings and funerals, holidays, sports.]
[Pointillism exploits our perception of two different colored dots placed next to one another to create the effect of a different overall color.]
[Warm hues and tints pop and appear to be closer. Cool hues and shades recede and appear to be farther away.]
[Tinted purple on black pops in a more jarring way than on blue because there is a relationship between the colors in the former pair.]
[Monochromatic schemes use a single base color with various tints and shades, and tend to be quiet.]
[Analogous schemes use adjacent or alternating adjacent hues, and tend to be harmonious and quiet.]
[Complementary schemes use opposing hues on the wheel and can be more exciting.]
[Split complementary schemes divide one opposing hue into its two adjacent colors, and can be less jarring or more harmonious than complementary schemes.]
[Triadic schemes use three evenly spaced hues.]
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[Colour as we perceive it is a form of electromagnetic radiation between 400-790 teraherts. It's lower than infrared, microwaves, and radio; higher than x-rays and ultraviolet.]
[We don't see pure colours. They are spectrums that our visual system approximates, which results in our experiencing of the dominant color.]
[Colour constancy refers to the phenomenon of perceiving various shades of a colour as the same, despite there being subtle differences between them.]
[Human eyes have millions of photoreceptors called cones that can be divided into three sizes and each is more sensitive to a certain spectra: short (blue/violet), medium (green), and large (red/yellow-green))
[Ganglion cells antagonistically combine signals from the cones, which makes red compete with green, and blue compete with yellow.]
[There is no purple as pure and dominant. Ganglion cells perceive red and blue simultaneously.]
[Women rarely have colour blindness because they have two X chromosomes, which is where the genes for cones are located.]
[A dog may have a hard time finding a red ball in green grass because they are naturally are dichromatic, which means that one of the three cone types is nor present. This is common in mammals other than humans.]
[Some hues have wider perceptible ranges of saturation and lightness: the color space is not uniform.]
[Using a Lab color picker can result in more uniform lightness than HSB.]
[In the additive RGB color system used by screens: red and green combine to make yellow, red and blue to make magenta, and blue and green to make cyan.]
[Whereas RGB is an additive process the mixes towards white, CMYK starts with white and subtracts by reflecting light through pigments.)
[Color management between color profiles relies on Lab representation to produce colors that are ultimately not identical but metamerically the same.]
[If a shape is repeated enough times at a small enough scale, it becomes texture.]
[Use direction and organize elements into explicit and implicit lines to guide the eye from one section to the other.]
[Use contrast not only to differentiate elements: frame and give focus to light elements by surrounding them with darkness.]
[There will be a biotech bubble, it's inherently impossible to understand. Do some homework on a few companies and buy them, sell during the bubble.]
[You don't make profit, you make value.]
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[Goals go away once they are achieved. Work continuously instead of stops. Just do, try, create, absorb yourself in process. Treat each step as a continuous line from the first thing you ever did.]
[Moving towards 100% of our attention in the digital world implies zero-sum economics for software businesses.]
[Competition is more likely to be with Internet-first businesses than pre-Internet incumbents.]
Let's talk about speaking Trump and the biggest republican joke....
[Even if you have your winning strategy, don't throw it at them: lead them to put the pieces together themselves.The truth is realized, not told.]
[Don't make it about 'Trump' or 'Republicans' (but correctly remind who was in power of they blame it on the Democrats. Focus on 'government' because the goal is to turn them against authoritarians, not into progressives.]
Let's talk about Trump's base, messaging, and incrementalism....
[Progressives are by nature big picture thinkers. Conservatives care about he here and now. In order to reach them, everything needs to be framed in terms as a big picture issue and a kitchen table issue.]
[Democrats are terrible at messaging. Even though they agree with most low-income conservatives on many issues, they fail to communicate by insisting on a foreign language that doesn't resonate with the target.]
Let's talk about speaking the language of Trump....
[When trying to convince someone of something, consider what rhetoric they use on you.]
[Racism comes from fear (of the unknown), fear comes from ignorance.]
[Trump was successful because he spoke to their fears.]
[Education and context, not fear, create progressives.]
[Maybe can agree on anti-authoritarianism.]
How Courtland Allen Built Indie Hackers, with Ben and David from Acquired
[Instead of solving an unsolved problem, attach yourself to problems that are already solved and reduce cost. This way you the client already knows what the problem is and is willing to spend, without needing you to educate them. Just propose your solution to win.]
[Selling to someone who's job is to spend a budget is way easier than to those who don't have money.]
[Anytime money changes hands, think of yourself as a business, even if you're an employee. A resume is like an ad, sending your profile to prospects is like marketing, interviews are like sales (selling yourself).]
[An acquisition in a special contract unique to you, so don't worry about precedents and what employee contract might look like - the sky's the limit. You may not get it but feel free to ask for what you want.]
Jeff Atwood on Growing Discourse to $120,000/mo
[Sell to businesses if you can because they generally have money. Individuals tend to look for low-cost shortcuts. Sell to those who don't flinch at $200/month.]
The customer mission might be something subconscious or never put into words: a musician doesn't want to learn songs, they want to play like Chris Potter.
Mighty Network's Gina Bianchini on How to Create a Community Worth Subscribing to
[Think about bringing together not just your customers but all the people who could be your customers.]
[One of the top reasons for subscription fatigue / churn is subscribers feeling bad about themselves for not being able to keep up with an overload of content and get enough value for money even if it's all high-quality. A community can be less intimidating.]
[Most people want to make better decisions about the things that are important to them.]
[Antiquated definitions of community like 'learning together and support each other' mean nothing to people now. Most valuable communities bring together a very specific profile of members in order to master something together. This replaces content with progress and journey.]
[Your customer doesn't want to spend time talking about your widget. They want to talk about what is important to them in mastery of their own identity.]
[Your customer isn't buying your stuff because they want to buy your stuff but rather because it is in service of achieving a goal. The more you align with the goal, the more likely the customer will stay.]
[lt's a mistake to focus more on the product than on customer mission.]
[The 'myth of more' can delude us into thinking that all reach is equal ('if I just get more visitors or eyeballs"), but a reach on Facebook is not the same as a reach on your private network.]
[Expecting people to show up and figure out how to get value is like a holding a workshop with no facilitator. Getting them in is not enough. Put some light structure in place to guide people.]
[Onboarding (the first few seconds, minutes, days) needs to be choreographed meticulously – it is not merely adjusting the product parameters.]
[Have a weekly event that gives newcomers a chance to get a feel for how it works.]
[Hold give/ask days with a new profile every week so that customers feel they helped someone and also got some useful insights for themselves.]
[People need to understand quickly how they will get value.]
