the insignificant ramblings of a disturbed graphic designer
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Where have all the citations gone?
A few lifetimes ago I was a marketing and communications specialist for nonprofits, most notably for Bay Area Action and its later incarnation as Acterra.
For a few years I wrote and/or edited weekly email newsletters and action alerts. I started doing this for the Headwaters Forest Project at BAA, then created a weekly EcoCalendar of events all around the Bay Area, and later founded Acterra's first general email newsletter.
During that span of about eight years, I also performed a lot of other communications functions, especially surrounding the Headwaters issue. For a few years my website and email list were the best sources for news on the controversies emanating from the North Coast, and I fielded inquiries from small and big sources alike, everyone from elementary school students to the big media outlets such as Time and CNN.
I spoke at events (the Green Party's state convention comes to mind) and universities (I presented to a Stanford law class once, which was a bit unnerving, but then I reminded myself they were just students), I did radio interviews, I fielded calls and emails and faxes from reporters all over the world, and my email list contained addresses from places as far-flung as Japan and Australia and people from the press, government, and even Hollywood.
Copy this, please
This all happened in a time when the migration of such information to the Internet was much, much less frequent, and a lot harder to do. Nevertheless, lots of people copied my emails and forwarded them along to others. Which is what we wanted. Unlike commercial material, for which one might have copy-protection concerns, we wanted this information spread far and wide. Granted, we didn't want people to re-edit the information, so I simply attached a footer to my email template that stated that permission was thereby granted to forward the email in its entirety, for non-commercial purposes.
And people did it. In droves. They forwarded it on to their friends and family, co-workers, whomever. Some maintained their own large lists of concerned citizens interested in environmental issues, and they sent my emails along to them. Others posted my newsletters and action alerts on their AOL and Geocitieshomepages, on university listservs, and lots of other places.
Here are a few examples, still archived in various niches of the 'net:
Later, as search engines became more adept at crawling and indexing the content of the web (this had all occurred before Google existed), I'd be doing Headwaters research on AltaVista or Yahoo! or Dmoz, and come I'd across some of my old emails and articles scattered across the web.
Fading way
In more recent years I've noticed that Google's algorithm seems to be devaluing these old (nearly ancient in Internet time) posts, probably for fairly legitimate reasons (the HTML of those old web pages would not withstand semantic rigors of modern search technology), so they rarely show up in results, or if they do, they're buried many, many, many results pages deep. It's probably that a lot of those pages are simply gone now too, as people fold their old accounts or Geocities pages get closed down, or whatever.
When I first started noticing this, I must admit that it was a little sad, as it seemed almost as if my contributions were disappearing from the universe. I know this is not strictly true, but in a world where we seem to rely increasingly on Google to provide us with what we want to know (I'm certainly guilty of this reliance), it's disappointing that the content of those older articles is devalued in large part because the method used for archiving them did not use the modern HTML standards.
It's a little like devaluing the best encyclopedia in the (physical) library because its publishers have not yet made it available online. Perhaps the actual content contained in that encyclopedia is of better quality than anything published on the web, but most people would never know it because they'd never see it.
I'm conflicted about this on many levels. Partly because I believe passionately that people should have access to the best quality information (so I want people to go the library, or wherever they need to go for that single best source), but I also want that high-quality information to be much more widely accessible than that. Let's face it, the researcher in Prague seeking information on West Coast salmonids can't easily get the 700-page document off the dusty shelf of the tiny library of the Northcoast Environmental Center in California, can he? But what if it's the single best source, and it's not available online at all?
Technology will catch up
I believe (nearly) all of these documents will be available online someday. It may be a decade or more away, but it will happen.
And I will do my part. I have archived all my data from the Headwaters Forest years, and all my BAA articles and photos, and while they're not really in any usable order right now, I am confident that technology will continue to advance in ways that make the data easier to sort and publish. It's already been happening, with sites like Flickr making it easier to share photos, and tools like blogs and wikis making it easier to publish and collaborate.
Not all my contributions have faded away
Interestingly, search technology has more recently broadened to include the content of printed books too. Google Book Search began scanning the collections of several leading universities in 2004. While Google's tool is still in beta and it comprises mostly academic works, I was mildly surprised to see my name turn up with a few results. I was cited in Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash, by Brian Tokar, and Writing for Real: A Handbook for Writers in Community Service , by Carolyn Ross, Joseph M. Williams, and Ardel Thomas. I'd forgotten that I was also thanked in Inciting Democracy: A Practical Proposal for Creating a Good Society, by my friend Randy Schutt.
Posted by espd at 1:03 PM |
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Sunday, June 22, 2008
The girl effect
“70% of the world's out-of-school children are girls. Girls deserve better. They deserve quality education and the safe environments and support that allow them to get to school on time and stay there through adolescence.” www.girleffect.org
Posted by espd at 4:48 PM |
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Saturday, December 08, 2007
Supporting causes
Updated April 2008: Added ACLU and Save the Redwoods League, which I had forgotten.
Velma and I used to support nonprofits with our blood, sweat, and tears. We first met in a large building full of nonprofits, where we both worked. When you work for an NGO, especially a relatively small, local one, you don't make a lot of money. Sometimes you make very little money (I was making below-poverty-level wages there for a while).
But you don't do it for the money. You do it for the "second paycheck." That's what they sometimes call the feeling you get maybe it's pride, maybe it's joy when you get to do work every day that's all about trying to make the world a better place. It's truly a wonderful and fulfilling way of life, if you can hack it.
These days, Velma probably gets that feeling a lot more often than I do (she works for Save the Redwoods League). I mean, I like my work, and I chose CNET Networks partly because I didn't want to work at an advertising agency or someplace where I'd only be selling more useless crap to more people. But while I believe my work's worthwhile, it's definitely not saving the planet.
Getting paid decent wages, however, does have its up-sides. Velma and I are finally in a position these days to save money for our future, and we're even able to give donations to a bunch of organizations we like. Even if we don't get out to Arastradero Preserve to plant native grasses anymore (our own garden gets most of that weekend love), we were happy to be able to support the work of several groups this year with monetary donations.
If any of these organizations sound worthy to you, please consider a gift.
I did some work for Amnesty International a long time ago, and I also donated to them a long time ago, but a new donation was long overdue. Most people know a little about Amnesty, but did you know how broad their focus really is, and how many worthwhile campaigns they have?
Mario Savio, on the steps of Sproul Hall, said, "There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all." When the law won't fix the problem, Earth First!ers put their bodies on the line to stop the destruction. Some of the Earth First!ers I've met were the bravest, most noble people I've ever known. In the old days I used to donate stamps to North Coast Earth First! but this year I finally decided to subscribe to the Earth First! Journal.
Earthjustice began as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and has provided legal assistance on environmental issues for almost 40 years, representing citizens groups, nonprofits, scientists, and others. "Environmental litigation has been key to preserving threatened natural resources and protecting people's environmental rights. Lawsuits have protected millions of acres of wilderness and hundreds of endangered species. They have helped improve air and water quality and have forced polluting companies to clean up their discharges." Plus I love their slogan: "Because the earth needs a good lawyer."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sort of the equivalent of Earthjustice but for the Internet. EFF uses advocacy and lawsuits to preserve free speech rights in the context of today's digital age. Among its many activities, EFF has participated in lawsuits in support of the college students who published information about the major security flaws in Diebold Election Systems, and against corporate and government infringement of the First Amendment rights of individuals, artists, journalists, bloggers, and others.
The Environmental Protection Information Center has fought for the North Coast in the courts for years. Headwaters Grove probably wouldn't be standing today if it hadn't been for organizations like EPIC.
I've been watching KQED TV since I was a tot and listening since I was in my teens and 20s, and for the past decade or so it's been on almost constantly when I'm at home. I've learned so much from KQED radio that I can confidently say it's made me a better person.
“On the Media” is one of the best shows on radio, if you ask me. The media critics at this show keep a careful eye on world media, and fill in the listeners each week with healthy doses of wit and wisdom. I listen every week, even if I miss the air-time and have to download their podcast later. This year I was happy to contribute directly to WNYC where the show is produced.
Pachamama Alliance works with the Achuar, an indigenous group living in the Amazon basin of Ecuador, to develop a sustainability and economic plan that will protect and manage the two million acres of their tropical rainforest territory.
Planned Parenthood is a vital resource in a country that's incredibly backward about sexuality and where most people are hopelessly un- and misinformed about health and reproductive issues. They provide health and sexuality info to teens, women, and men, contraception, HIV/STD tests, pregnancy tests, and much more. We are proud to support the work of Planned Parenthood.
Velma may work there, but that doesn't stop us from giving them money. Save the Redwoods League was founded 90 years ago to acquire and protect what's left of the redwoods. You probably think there are a lot of redwoods left. If it hadn't been for SRL's work over the last 90 years, there wouldn't be any. Most of the redwoods in state and federal parks were originally bought by SRL and transferred to public ownership.
“This American Life” is the other show I can never miss. A few years ago I learned that Chris Ware had done an animation for a live performance of “This American Life,” and I'd seen a snippet of it online. It was awesome. This year I learned that it's actually available as a DVD/book as a premium for donating to the Chicago station that produces “This American Life” (see the “Lost Buildings DVD” description).
Velma's been interested in this little local org for a while, and she's considering volunteering with them. Urban Sprouts works with San Francisco school gardens "to help youth actively engage in school, eat better and exercise more, and connect with the environment and each other."
Wikipedia is truly one of the world's greatest resources, and truly one of the world's greatest ideas. I use it almost every day, and even though the slogan is "free knowledge for everyone," this year I decided we should pay for the privilege with a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Posted by espd at 5:31 AM |
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Design firms and ad agencies that work with environmental groups
I have a reputation for working with environmental nonprofits, so I still frequently get requests to do graphic design for green groups or companies. Usually I'm too busy and I just can't do it. Sometimes they ask for referrals.
So I finally compiled this list of other designers and firms that have worked with environmental groups. I'm including a few advertising and PR firms too, since green groups can almost always use some expertise in their publicity campaigns, plus those firms usually have designers on staff too, or work with freelancers.
I can't vouch for all of these. Some of them I've only heard of through the grapevine, but some of them I've met and really been impressed by.
LIST UPDATED 11-28-07: Innosanto from Design Action turned me on to a few more companies that specialize in design for social change, and I found a few others on a site called renourish.
a5 Group Inc. size: boutique location: Chicago IL, St. Louis MO, and Grand Rapids MI clients include:Green By Design, Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, Environmental Protection Agency
Alto size: boutique location: Aotearoa, New Zealand clients include: The Sustainability Trust, Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority
Another Limited Rebellion size: boutique location: Richmond, VA clients include: Vegan Action, Richmond Green Party, Center for an Urban Future
Eric Benson size: boutique location: Champaign, IL clients include: Whole Foods, MADD, Toyota
Big Think Studios size: boutique location: San Francisco, CA clients include: Bluewater Network, San Francisco Food Bank, United Nations World Environment Day, Center for Biological Diversity
Celery Design Collective size: boutique location: Berkeley, CA clients include: Elephant Pharmacy, The Natural Step, Alameda County Green Building
The Change size: boutique location: Chapel Hill, NC clients include: Fair Trade Resource Network, Higher Grounds, Sierra Club
Conscious Creative size: boutique location: Berkeley, CA clients include:In Defense of Animals, VegNews magazine, San Francisco Dept. of the Environment, Marin Environmental Film Festival
CSDesign size: boutique location:Melbourne, AUS, and London, UK clients include:Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenbuild Expo, The Fair Trade Company
Design Action Collective size: boutique location: Oakland, CA clients include: United States Social Forum, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Craigslist Foundation, Rainforest Action Network
Design for Social Impact size: boutique location:Philadelphia, PA clients include:Environmental Fund for Pennsylvania, The Nature Conservancy, Recycling Action, ForestEthics
Designarchy size: boutique location: San Francisco Bay Area clients include: Compassionate Cooks, Terrain magazine, American Cancer Society
Digital Hive Ecological Design size: boutique location: San Francisco Bay Area clients include: Institute for Environmental Entrepreneurship, WholeSoy & Co., Canal Alliance, Greener World Media
ecoLingo size: boutique location: Phoenix, AZ clients include: Phoenix Department of Health and Sustainability, Earth Accents, Valley Forward EarthFest
John Emerson size: boutique location: New York, NY clients include: Amnesty International, National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, Human Rights Watch
Fenton Communications size: large location: New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. clients include:Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Marine Conservation
Fibu Design size: boutique location: San Francisco, CA clients include: National Conversation on Climate Action, PG&E ClimateSmart, Media Fund, Help America Vote Act
Firebelly Design size: boutique location: Chicago, IL clients include: Sustainable Chicago, Awakening Organics, Midwest Wind Energy
Free Range Studios / Free Range Graphics size: boutique location: Washington, D.C. clients include: Amnesty International, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy
Green Team size: boutique location: New York, NY and Tasmania, AUS clients include: Environmental Defense, World Resources Institute, National Geographic Society
Mark Bult Design How could I not include myself? size: boutique location: San Francisco, CA clients include: Amnesty International, Anne Frank Center, Bay Area Earth Day, Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition
Metropolitan Group size: boutique location: Portland, OR clients include: Charles Darwin Foundation, National Park Foundation, The Wetlands Conservancy
Open size: boutique location: New York, NY clients include: EarthAction Network, Not In Our Name, Good magazine, The Nation
Palatal Collective size: boutique location: Kansas City, MO clients include: Pharos Project, Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Girl Scouts of Mid-America Council
Public Media Center size: large location: San Francisco, CA clients include: Earth Island Institute, Greenpeace, Foundation for Deep Ecology, Oceanic Society
Rizco Design & Communications size: boutique location: Manasquan, NJ clients include: Corbis, Huntington's Disease Society of America
Roughstock Studios size: boutique location: San Francisco, CA clients include: East West Herbs USA, Mission Arts Foundation, Search For Common Ground
Studio 7 Designs size: boutique location: Victoria, BC clients include:PESCO Environmental Solutions, Juniper Tree, UN Golden Chapter
Tumis size: boutique location: Oakland, CA clients include: Natural Heritage Institute, Strategic Action for a Just Economy, Urban Strategies Council
Underground Advertising size: boutique location: San Francisco, CA clients include: Environmental Defense, Union of Concerned Scientists, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Greenbelt Alliance
Vivace Design size: boutique location: Montreal, Quebec clients include:Tori Amos, Liberal Party of Canada (Quebec)
Willoughby Design Group size: boutique location: Kansas City, MO clients include:Hallmark, Kansas City Zoo, Women's Political Caucus, Sheridan's
Donate to Wikimedia Foundation Okay, the close-up on the eyes and the creepy hand-wringing is weird, but the rest of this video is good. I'm going to talk with Velma about adding the Wikimedia Foundation to our giving list. And if you've ever used Wikipedia for anything at all, you might consider a donation too. wikimediafoundation.org
Also Also is a really cool design company with a really cool site. Jason will probably like this one. I think he should redesign his site something like this — using Flash to tell an amusing story that's also the site's navigation itself. www.also-online.com
Julia Rothman Julia is a partner in Also (mentioned above) and does all their illustrations. She also does really cool pattern and surface design independently of Also. And if that wasn't enough alsos, she also runs this great blog called Book By Its Cover covering artful books about comics, design, etc. (below). www.juliarothman.com
Several web-based companies have sprung up in the past five or six years to provide small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals with better tools for managing large email lists and collecting statistics on how well one's email marketing efforts are working (or not working, as the case may be).
I have a long history of managing large email lists, having done so for a number of nonprofits in the past 12 years. I used to manage a sizable list for the Graphic Artists Guild, and a couple of pretty large ones (several thousand email addresses) for Headwaters Forest preservationists and for Bay Area Action.
Back then, you had to do all the list management with your email program (I used Eudora, which was pretty good for this sort of thing), or often a server-side program called a Listserv, and there was practically no way to measure success other than counting your "Message delivery failed" bounce message.
Things have come a long way since then. Now we have online services that take a lot of the headaches out of managing your data, and which provide a lot of extra functionality and usually offer a lot of info on best practices for creating and sending email marketing.
Some advantages of these services:
Far less administrative time required by your staff or volunteers.
Email examples and templates are provided, or you can often upload your own.
How-to articles offer insights into best practices for content and design.
Automated list management removes duplicate emails, invalid addresses, and more.
Robust statistics track your success: open rates, clicks, and more.
You have to pay for these services, but it's generally very reasonable compared to the savings your likely to realize in saved time and headaches.
If you're in the market for this sort of thing, here are three you may want to look into:
Posted by espd at 8:14 AM |
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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Eritrea
All the news coverage of the G8 meeting (on NPR and the BBC at least, since you won't hear anything about it on the US media) has meant that I've heard an unusual amount lately about African nations that one doesn't normally hear covered that much even on NPR and the Beeb. Within two hours today I heard two pieces on two different shows about Eritrea.
You've probably never heard of Eritrea. Neither had I in 1993 when I met a tall, lanky Eritrean named Teclu Tesfazghi. At that time, almost no one had heard of Eritrea, because it was the world's newest nation, after having just won independence after 30 years of war with Ethiopia.
Tec asked me to donate my design services to help fundraise for the International Committee for the Eritrean Blind (ICEB). Three decades of war had devastated the small North African country's population. Nearly everyone had been touched by the war; tens of thousands had lost limbs, eyes, and so on.
The ICEB was establishing itself in the U.S. through expatriots living and working here. Tec was doing some contract work with the City of Palo Alto, where I had worked until very recently, and he was volunteering to raise money for the ICEB.
I designed and wrote content for a calendar that was to be sold by local volunteers to raise funds to send back to Eritrea, in order to create skills-building programs that would allow the blind to go back to work.
We had almost no photos or other graphical assets for the project, and it's not as if you could go to a stock agency for photos of Eritrea, so I had to be very creative. I also had to do a lot of research on this country, in order to create some interesting text for the calendar. This was a bit of a challenge, since the country was brand new and encyclopedias still had it listed as a province of Ethiopia, if it was mentioned at all. This was, I might add, before the time that the Web made such research a lot easier.
In the years since the project I've followed the small nation's progress with interest, whenever I came across and information on it. While Eritrea's future was very bright in the mid-1990s, war with Ethiopia flared up again and the democratically elected head of Eritrea shifted towards dramatically totalitarian policies.
In one of the NPR pieces I heard today, I learned some new things about Eritrea I had never known, but which shouldn't surprise me. For example, I didn't know that the U.S. had poured money and weapons into the country for years and had maintained a strategic listening post there for use during Cold War spying on the U.S.S.R. and other nations. Terry Gross interviewed author Michela Wrong, whose new book, I Didn't Do It For You, is a history of Eritrea. I should very much like to read this book. I have strategically and un-subtly added it to my Amazon Wish List in case you would like to purchase for me as a belated birthday gift ;)
There are precious few books about Eritrea, but another one I enjoyed quite a bit was To Asmara by Thomas Keneally, who is most well known for having written Schindler's List (the book which the movie was based on). To Asmara is a novelized version Keneally's own travels in the land during the last years of the revolution that set Eritrea free from Ethiopia, and it was a very good book indeed.
For a few years I wrote and/or edited weekly email newsletters and action alerts. I started doing this for the Headwaters Forest Project at BAA, then created a weekly EcoCalendar of events all around the Bay Area, and later founded Acterra's first general email newsletter.
Interestingly, search technology has more recently broadened to include the content of printed books too. Google Book Search began scanning the collections of several leading universities in 2004. While Google's tool is still in beta and it comprises mostly academic works, I was mildly surprised to see my name turn up with a few results. I was cited in Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash, by Brian Tokar, and Writing for Real: A Handbook for Writers in Community Service , by Carolyn Ross, Joseph M. Williams, and Ardel Thomas. I'd forgotten that I was also thanked in Inciting Democracy: A Practical Proposal for Creating a Good Society, by my friend Randy Schutt.
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Kansinee
Karl
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
MJ
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Yu-Po