Smaller story arcs can be composed into larger ones, or woven together. Try this: zoom into a small story arc about one or two people. Then zoom out to a larger related story arc. Then zoom back in. This works well when trying to communicate a massive...| gordonbrander.com
Amazon.com has a product development process they call Working Backwards. Rather than starting from an idea or a technology, you start by writing the press release for the product. The target audience is the customer. The press release is circulated...| gordonbrander.com
What is time? Our modern sense of time is homogenous. It divided and measured in| gordonbrander.com
The three act story structure is a framework used in screenwriting and novels. Act 1 — Setup Beginning Inciting incident Second thoughts Climax of act 1 Act 2 — Confrontation Obstacle Obstacle (ascending action) Midpoint (big twist!) Obstacle...| gordonbrander.com
Richard Feynman was a polymath, who did pioneering work in the Manhatten Project, quantum physics, parallel computing, and nanotechnology. One would expect he knows a thing or two about learning. Lucky for us, he boiled his technique down into 4...| gordonbrander.com
When telling a story, structure by plot, not by order of information.| gordonbrander.com
The elements of story: Situation Conflict Climax Resolution This is the traditional story arc, and it has many incarnations: Hero's journey — Joseph Campbell's Monomyth Once there was a — fairytale structure Three-act story structure Lost and found...| gordonbrander.com
In film, a split edit is a cut that changes the audio and visuals at different times. This helps with continuity between cuts. The audio acts as an off-ramp from the previous scene, or an on-ramp to the next. An L Cut overlaps audio from the previous...| gordonbrander.com
How complex systems fail: slowly, then all at once. All complex sytems are full of non-linear feedback loops. In a healthy complex system, these will have balancing feedback loops, holding each other in dynamic equilibrium. Given a small purturbence,...| gordonbrander.com
Smoothing and Downsampling For large enough datasets, Simple Random Sampling is a way to prune datapoints while avoiding systematic bias. In cases where the dataset is small enough, this may cause line visualizations to look different. For...| gordonbrander.com
Second System Syndrome is the curse by which a simple system is doomed to be replaced by an excessively abstract, over-engeered, or bloated successor. You hack together a small simple program to solve a problem. Congratulations! It's wildly...| gordonbrander.com
Edgar Schein's posits three levels of organizational culture: Artifacts and behaviours: any equipment and processes you can point to. Espoused values: stated values and rules of behavior. How the organization presents itself to itself (and others)....| gordonbrander.com
Like genius, except it is imbedded within the scene, and not the individuals that make it up. I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and...| gordonbrander.com
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for...| gordonbrander.com
If you don't have a proper project manager, you could do worse than to fill in the blanks in this punchlist. It's useful to have resources lined up to solve these problems. Strategy, research Who do we think our customer is? What is their...| gordonbrander.com
Smil looks at the Diesel engine and its impact on civilization. Globalization is basically Diesel-powered.| gordonbrander.com
From Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, by Donella Meadows: PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM (in increasing order of effectiveness) Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards). The sizes of buffers and other...| gordonbrander.com
People remember: The emotional peak experience The emotional troughs (low) experience The beginning The end This has implications for everything from service design to storytelling.| gordonbrander.com
Dust moats are a cheap way to add depth and motion to an otherwise static scene.| gordonbrander.com
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud identifies a vocabulary of panel-to-panel transitions used in comics: Moment-to-moment portrays time. Action-to-action portrays key frames in an event. Subject-to-subject take us between different subjects while...| gordonbrander.com
Every design should have at least one moment of surprise. No matter how austere, no matter how formalist, no matter how devoted to function, your design should have a moment of delight. That's how you know it was designed for humans. Polish, polish,...| gordonbrander.com
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. Related: storytelling, story arc.| gordonbrander.com
The Not Rocket Science Rule Of Software Engineering: Automatically maintain a repository of code that always passes all the tests. The Rust language does this with automatic pull request review bots. No code is landed unless it passes tests. Bots do...| gordonbrander.com
This is my bag of tricks — loose notes, design patterns, rules-of-thumb, tools, cheatsheets, gimmicks, leverage points, descriptions of systems, key questions, risks, and unknowns.| gordonbrander.com