From The Blog, Page 2

A bicycle handlebar is not a work of art. Neither does the saddle on which the cyclist sits to pedal. But when Pablo Picasso put these two pieces together, he saw a bull’s head in them. And he created an artistic sculpture.

Something by chance? Perhaps yes. But how often do we do things at random and not realize what’s behind them?

Maybe you are familiar with the case of Art Fry, then a scientist at 3M, the multinational giant that, among a variety of products, is the world leader in high-adhesion adhesives.

Fry and I have something in common: we share the same pleasure of singing in a choir. And when you have a large repertoire of songs, it ends up being common to mark the scores with a piece of paper.

One day, accidentally dropping his sheets with the songs, Fry had his eureka moment: he remembered that a colleague had developed a pressure-sensitive substance, but with poor adhesion. From there, the idea of a bookmark began to germinate.

The scientist’s flash ended up becoming the most famous yellow pad in the world: the Post-it.

Creativity, in short, is something that applies to you too, regardless of your professional field. She is not a gift. It is not exclusive to artists and designers.

It’s just another activity you exercise.

But I confess that I still haven’t found a creative way to sing without being out of tune.

Bill Gates says he reads about 50 books a year, most of which are non-fiction, and help him explain in some way how the world works.

Elon “Mars” Musk, when asked how he learned to build rockets, was synthetic: I read books!

According to Tom Corley, analyzing the role that reading plays in personal success, the rich ones read to educate themselves and self-improvement. The poor ones read mainly to entertain themselves.

But, going back to Bill and Elon, I ask: what do guys like them, multibillionaire tech exponents, have in common?

The fact is that they still rely on one of the oldest instruments of information: printed books. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, when he launched the Kindle was right when he said that “the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it is very difficult to replace it”.

After all, reading books is a sensorial experience: we like to touch and feel the texture of the paper. I sometimes went further and even sniffed the leaves. Nowadays I don’t get to that much, but I still keep the addiction to reading.

Becoming a billionaire is just a matter of time.

Believe it or not, at the beginning of the 90s, in the distant twentieth century, there was no computer with programs to help the designer in the production of some graphic material. In fact, there was no computer. At least not within reach of a mere mortal like me.

The work was done by hand, almost artisanal. That is, the monitor at that time was the paper itself.

When we created a book cover, for example, one of the most annoying things was calculating the width of the spine. Something that was often done on the eye.

For that, you had to know the number of pages, whether the cover would be hard or flexible, take into account the weight of the paper, delve into mathematical formulas, and finally pray that the title and author of the book, which is almost always placed vertically, they were right there, right in the middle of the spine.

If, on the one hand, this could represent an uncreative task, on the other hand, life without a computer forged a more refined look in design professionals.

Today things are much easier. We can leave the math aside. And to make it even easier, there are some graphic sites and print shops that help solve this problem.

Several of them have an online calculator that determines the dimensions of the spine. Just enter the total number of pages, choose the paper type, select the cover dimensions and you’re done. Immediately it indicates the width.

On American sites, measurements are in inches (sometimes Americans like to complicate people’s lives, and that’s why they don’t work with millimeters or centimeters).

Diggypod, gutenberg, printninja and bookbeam, for example, give good help.

Of course, depending on the complexity of your project, the ideal is to check these values directly with the printing company where your book will be printed. Because they all have their production methods and procedures.

But always consider that a book with less than 70 pages is too thin to have a spine.

This reminds me of an amusing chronicle by the late Brazilian writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, where he writes that his grandfather did not take seriously a book that did not stand up on its own: “This is shit.”, said the old man. “These booklets that don’t stand up aren’t books, they’re leaflets”.

The day you get a customer is the day you start losing them.

If you, like me, followed Mad Men, aired some years ago by HBO, you must remember this great phrase by Roger Sterling, one of the partners in the series’ advertising agency.

It’s the truth. As soon as you are lucky enough to gain a business partner, the stage begins in which you build a strategy to offer them your best service or product.

But all it takes is getting a little stagnant in the approach and turning the communication on autopilot for him to realize that you are no longer committed to his success in the way he imagined.

And then begins the moment when he goes to get the food from the neighbor’s bowl.

Because a customer is interested like a cat, not faithful like a dog