If you'd like to do something similar, but for your blog (or any website really) -- I wrote an app that produces segmented videos in both Instagram Story / square aspect ratios. It's called StoryScroll => https://neal.rs/app
Tangentially related => I used ffmpeg + puppeteer to build StoryScroll https://neal.rs/app, which turns blog posts into scrolling videos for social media.
I also used to build a desktop app that my team uses to download Alexa Flash Briefing metrics (because there's no API for that)
Puppeteer's full-screen screenshots & DOM manipulation abilities are clutch!!
I built this because i wanted to make my career advice blog https://nealshyam.com/advice more engaging on social and realized, why even both with clicks?
You can't post links on Instagram unless you're verified or have 10,000 followers. And even then, every link is a roadblock.
Frankly, long form content is at disadvantage on social media, because these platforms prioritize video and advertisements. So, I decided to turn my blog posts into videos. No clicks, no distracting sound, no friction. Just a clean, lean-back, and engaging experience.
It has a few limitations - infinite scroll is hard. It might not work well on a super JS heavy site like CNN. But for static site or square space / word press blog, you should be fine.
And yes, I know the icon is dumb. I'll change it :)
Nothing other than anecdata. My audience has reacted positively to StoryScrolls. I've made a some app sales. People have asked me to share the app with them.
IMO, it's a lot easier to like & follow a video that plays without interaction than to like something you have to clickthrough to learn more about.
Ignoring the actual shape/design - they went from 11 colors to 4 (+1 if you consider the text itself). This isn't much of an improvement because printing any swag/tshirts will require a full 4up press (or four spots, depending on how they choose inks) - which is still quite expensive.
The old ChallengePost logo used 4+ colors, which meant every shirt we printed came at a $2-5 premium over a single color.
When we rebranded to Devpost, we came up with a 2 color design (so we could do spot colors), which was an improvement - but I still wish we had gotten down to 1 color.
>11 colors to 4 (+1 if you consider the text itself)
I was confused by this claim in TFA. I see 4 colors of lines in the old logo, plus 4 colors where the lines overlap. 4 + 4 = 8, obviously. Even if we counted text and background (which doesn't seem commonplace when discussing how many colors a logo has) that only brings us to 10. I get why 4 colors is preferable to 8, but I don't know where the number 11 is coming from. Anybody know what I'm missing here?
Why is four colors preferable? I mean yeah in 1980 that means 9 runs through the press, today four at best... and who the fuck cares it's all screens today.
Honestly the old logo is four colors visually, you brain is shortcutting the overlaps because it understands them.
It's not all screens, a logo needs to work irl. The Pentagram post linked elsewhere on this story shows a couple mock-ups of irl advertising and product branding. Want T-shirts to give away at recruiting events? Your T-shirt supplier will charge more for more colors. Fewer colors also generally make a design easier to replicate freehand, and you want amateurs to be able to easily convey your logo. A special case may be made for the old intersections being easily reproducible in some mediums, but consider non-aerosol paints and things get messy.
Aside from physical constraints, I think there is a general argument to be made for simplicity. If something is more complex, there should be a reason for it. Otherwise, toss out the complexity. What is the reason for having more colors? There are other ways to convey overlapping lines, and I would argue that some of them are less complex, though it would be a lengthy argument -- it isn't exactly obvious how the complexity of an additional shape can be measured against the complexity of an additional color, and you can ultimately just subjectively weight one of those factors heavier than other and come up with a different answer. But I think the general case for fewer colors being less complex is pretty sound.
> Fewer colors also generally make a design easier to replicate freehand, and you want amateurs to be able to easily convey your logo.
You don't _ever_ want people to be re-producing your logo (and especially free-handing it!). That is why they pretty much all have a "brand" page to pull assets from: https://brandfolder.com/slack/logos.
You almost always don't want your hired professionals doing freehand reproductions (there are exceptions -- a stated goal of the NASA worm was that it should be easy to freehand on NASA property), but you certainly want amateurs reproducing it in the wild. If your logo is so ubiquitous and simple that children draw it in their school books (think Nike, Pepsi, McDonalds, NASA again, etc.) then that's free advertising. This sort of non-sponsored advertising exists on a continuum, and it's usually beneficial to the signified organization.
SpokenLayer is hiring full-time software engineers in New York City (front-end, full-stack, back-end, dev-ops).
At SpokenLayer, we turn content from online & news publishers into streaming audio on Alexa / Google Home / iTunes using real human voices. We've acheived product market fit and are ready to build processes & products that help our team & business scale.
Our stack is primarily Node & Python, Angular, PostgreSQL, with a lot of AWS infrastructure managed with Terraform. We automate repetetive processes, build tools to shorten customer onboarding time, and help our partners reach bigger audiences.
We're looking for creative engineers who know what they are doing, who want to solve tough problems & build new experiences, and who can prove it.
It's a neat gig. We smile a lot because we actually like what we do. We pay market & have great benefits. We have real clients. We act like adults. We build products that people rely on & pay for. We review our code. We improve and learn from our mistakes.
SpokenLayer works with premier content partners like The Economist, Wired, TechCrunch, and IGN to bring their brands to give them a voice - literally. We ingest written content, add sponsorship messages, turn it all into audio (voiced by real humans) and distribute it via iTunes, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and on the web. We're the largest supplier of voiced content to smart speaker platforms and our clients dig it!
We're looking for engineers that will help us: build better smart speaker skills / work on dashboards & customer onboarding / metrics & reporting / tools to manage our distributed 'cloud studio' of voice artists.
Our core services are currently written in Node.js and Python. Most apps run on AWS. Among the AWS tools and services we use: CloudFront, DynamoDB, ECS, Lambda, RDS, Redshift, SNS, SQS, CloudWatch, and S3.
We'd prefer candidates based in NYC because you'll be working closely with our sales and operations teams (although we may be open to other options for the right candidate).
Oh wow. I feel like I just asked the reverse of this question 3 min after you posted this.
I was a mechE at Caterpillar for 4 years before I decided that my position was a local max in the organization. So I studied, took the GMAT, and applied to b-school. Ended up at NYU and did lots of internships in branding / publishing / marketing and eventually found a route into tech marketing via account management at an ad-tech company that needed someone with solid excel skills & was willing to get on the phone.
Good marketers are eager to talk to people and figure out what their product can/should be doing for others. Then they feed that back to Product. I think Product/Marketing are two sides of the same product development coin.
One way to position yourself as a marketing candidate is as an excellent SME on tech -- you get tech better than your colleagues, so you become invaluable to the team.
I'm actually an engineer who likes to create products but who really sucks at marketing. I never looked at marketeers over the shoulder but now that I am trying to market my own products I realize what a hard and important work is.
I think I did a good job up to the point of finding a real need that people are willing to pay for a solution, but one thing is to get the early traction and a whole other is to actually be able to live from it... the struggle is real :P
Hey yall - I built an Alexa Skill that says your wifi network ssid & password when you invoke it "Alexa, open Home WiFi" - It uses account linking & Login with Amazon, so no need to create new accounts / no email stored in a db somewhere (just your ssid, wifi pass, and a _skill-specific_ (not amazon-specific) user identifier). Love to get your feedback!
Maybe it's a change in functionality? (new tab vs. new window) or perhaps it affects people's behavior (oh, this is another page on this site - so i won't be leaving / going somewhere else with potentially harmful info)
i don't have a concrete use case yet - but it seems like in a world rife with phishing / bad news / SEO blackhats - knowing if a link is external / internal could be useful.
Here's a demo video => https://youtu.be/u1k1JZtDzuU