“Pixel perfect vector nudging. Now say it fast.”

In between managing the team, cycling around her neighborhood and coping up with recent losses (both father and father-in-law), Zana is ready to lead the team to face 2012 with all our awesomeness. Zana is the Project Manager at Stampede.

I could say that 2011 was a crazy fun year for the team. A hefty load of projects landed on our laps – the team worked hard day and night (in between cracking jokes and devising tomfoolery, well of course.). Hence the lack of blog posts. But fret not, we have got a couple of posts lined up for the coming weeks – so stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out this fantastic post on pixel perfect vector nudging for Photoshop – try saying it a couple of times – pixel perfect vector nudging pixel perfect vector nudging – fast!

And does anyone fancy making some ice cream clouds?

Help employees get their bearing back, send them out there again, then get the hell out of the way.

Shaza shares her take on why companies should permit employees to fail. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

Zana wrote a brilliant post earlier today about nurturing creative culture at workplace. Her posts are always very insightful and I want to extend that with how we do things at Stampede.

When we started Stampede some good 5 years ago, Dov and I were still cringing at our share of bad workplace experience. Our goal then was to create a working environment where people not unlike us can do stuffs they really like while actually enjoying each others’ company. My litmus test when I wake up every morning is almost always – “Do I want to go to work today?”

You cannot underestimate the power of working with people you like. If you are an entrepreneur and have the choice, this should be high on your list. Not profit, not product. People.

Which brings me to my next point. So you found a person who is a perfect fit to your company culture. What next?

I think that it is crucial to build a company culture that allows employee to fail and fail fast. Everyone fails. You shouldn’t tiptoe and delay the inevitable. Only by throwing away your reservations and trying things and risking failure, you are able to learn new things. The key point here is moving forward – not to dwell on your failures or repeating the same mistakes. The former is denying yourself of further greatness (and I mean this in every sense of the word) and the latter is just, well, plain lazy. We abhor lazies.

At the speed in which this industry thrives, failing and moving on is a ubiquitous advantage. Never before an outcome of failure can be rectified almost immediately. If it’s beyond repair, be genuine and honest about it. Clients appreciate transparency and only know too well that everyone is fallible to some degree. Get it out of your system, step back and think of another way around it. Nip the negativity in the bud and move the project, and yourself, into positive territory again.

My take – everyone should be permitted to fail. I fail on daily basis, as few dozens half-finished artworks can testify. Dov’s intensity of hacking at his keyboard multiplies when he couldn’t get some code to work. Failure is an acceptable by-product of actually doing something. A good team is built to weather, nay encourage, the education of failures. People will be too scared to try new things if they’re too busy dodging toes.

On the other side of the coin, a company should have a failure-handling mechanism well-oiled and ready. Assure employees that failure is acceptable, help them get their bearing back, send them out there again, then get the hell out of the way.

So fail and fail fast. Then dust yourself off and move on. Rinse and repeat.

“Hire weird people. Interesting.”

Zana is a firm believer in a controlled chaos, a beautiful mess – a situation where everyone is allowed to experiment and fail as long as they get up and learn quickly from it. Zana is the Project Manager at Stampede.

Internet is a fascinating place. It can be where people lurk for prey, scour for a suitor, make new friends, get in touch with people all over the place, or just basically, just to do some plain work – like we at Stampede do. Not having a physical place to work together do not essentially limit our abilities. With all the communication avenues provided over Internet right now, most of the time they make us more productive than the time being concealed inside some office cubes – as long as the culture cultivated is right.

Here are some guidelines by Ben Chestnut, founder of Mailchimp where he grants his employees the permission to be creative:

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).

2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.

3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.

4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.

5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1)

We might not have any written manifesto at Stampede (perhaps we should) but I can confirm that we have done all of these. Especially #3. Yes, that’s right – you should have seen our verbal artistry nearing the end of EST.

(Photo is of Slipknot frontman, Corey Taylor giving a talk to the students at the Oxford Union’s grand hall.)

# Mark Zuckerberg stationery

# Mike Dempsey

# Urban Improv

# 8-Bit Fashion Show

# Saul Bass

# Innovation

# Jessica Hische

# Somebody make this print stat!

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Don’t wait. Scour and scramble instead to get to your starting point. Then scramble some more. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

From Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech at UC-Berkeley’s Journalism School, via Tim Carmody, who ran around the entire internet giving a million high-fives because of this speech, and to Ed Yong, Tim’s high-five #001.

“Giving someone an uninterrupted four hours time is the best gift you can give anyone at work. It’s better than a computer, it’s better than a new monitor, it’s better than new software, or what people typically use. Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable.”

- Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work
TEDxMidwest Oct 2010
via @knufflebunneh

Come to think of it, there are many better designers out there robbed of their deserving limelight because they are not in it for the fame. In the end, it’s the craft that matters.

Hers is no ordinary design work and I’m still awed, so I’m going to cut my post short here. You can also see Irina’s portfolio on Bēhance. Enjoy.

“…and still making heads turn.”

Shaza Hakim works from her office overlooking the valley of Gunung Raya, where wreathed hornbills swoop down from the mountains in pair and dusky-leaf langurs swing from tree to tree. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

It’s amazing, mind-numbing even. It has been three years and Bird Malaysia is still getting reviews from design galleries and making it into “n-list of Website with Awesome footer/navigation/header/color Design” blog posts. The best part of all, it’s also one of the few recognized designs proudly bearing the word “Malaysia”.

Thank you to the good people at Junglewalla for letting us go nuts with Bird Malaysia!

“Don’t tell all. Keep something back.”

Shaza Hakim’s earliest memory of books was when her dad took her to her first book fair on his hip Scrambler bike. It was a noisy piece of metal but it was yellow and she loved it. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

Where others have gadgets and tutorials to help them get better with design, I have books. The Elements of Style has a permanent place among the few books I have on my desk. In more occasions than I can remember, I have found in it my very own personal guide in design.

Do not explain too much.

It is seldom advisable to tell all. Be sparing, for instance, in the use of adverbs after “he said”, “she replied” and the like: “he said consolingly”; “she replied grumblingly.” Let the conversation itself disclose the speaker’s manner or condition. Dialogue heavily weighted is cluttery and annoying. Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs but load their attributes with explanatory verbs: “he consoled,” “she congratulated”. They do this, apparently in the belief that the word said is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do so by experts in the art of bad writing.
p.109, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

The same goes for design. Don’t tell all. Keep something back. Let the design speaks for itself without the need to anticipate interpretations. And don’t do things because you have been told to do so by the experts in the art of bad design.

Good design does not need a supporting story.

Going through the book, I scribbled my own notes of interesting and important excerpts that I can share with others. Nothing is more important than what I found on Page 395. It reads a transcript of the speech given by Severn Suzuki, then a 12-year-old, who stood in front of the delegations of 1992 Rio de Janeiro’s Earth Summit.

Severn Suzuki is now an environmental activist, speaker, television host and author.

If You Don’t Know How To Fix It, Stop Breaking It!

“Hello, I’m Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. – The Environmental Children’s Organisation.We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference: Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to be not heard.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going extinct every day — vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

1. You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
2. You don’t know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
3. You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
4. And you can’t bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians – but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles – and all of you are somebody’s child.

I’m only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil — borders and governments will never change that.

I’m only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter — we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. And this is what one child told us: “I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection.”

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can’t stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I’m only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:

1. not to fight with others,
2. to work things out,
3. to respect others,
4. to clean up our mess,
5. not to hurt other creatures,
6. to share – not be greedy.

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you’re attending these conferences, who you’re doing this for — we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying “everyting’s going to be alright” , “we’re doing the best we can” and “it’s not the end of the world”.

But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says “You are what you do, not what you say.”

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you.”