Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Alex Baldwin
You’ve seen the same boilerplate emails come into your inbox which you immediately archive for being wrong, out-of-date, or simply forgetting the merge tag (F you people that leave $FNAME). When it came to my first time sending out a batch email, it was only to a dozen or so people about booking user research time. However, I had a major sticking point thinking I was sending out a spammy email. Luckily I had met the team behind Streak and knew the power of mail merge to make something a little more individual and helpful. We’re going to continue using my real life example email, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Here’s the actual email template I sent out: Hey there $FNAME, Wanted to reach out about $COMPANY becoming a Hack Design partner. Since 2012, we've helped hundreds of thousands take their first steps in learning design. We're looking to partner with a handful of companies in order to offset server costs and support producing new lessons in 2018. Partnership perks: * Logo placement with link on the home page. * Text link in our footer, 30,000+ page views per month. * Text link in every email, 200,000+ which go out every month. * Free posting on our job board, set to release by the end of the year. As of right now, we have 245,000+ subscribers. It's likely that with new lessons going out next year, you'll see these numbers easily double. Because of that, our sponsorship tier costs $XXX per month. If you're able to commit to sponsoring before October 1st, I will grandfather you in to the super early bird pricing of $YYY per month through the end of 2018. If you have any questions or are ready to sponsor, please hit reply. $POSTSCRIPT Thank you so much, Alex Baldwin My emails aren’t very long, encourage replying as the primary action, and I hope use variables in a tasteful way. Make each email personal You may have noticed the odd $POSTSCRIPT variable in my template. The P.S. at the end of the message is super easy for readers to skip to and it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll be read. That’s the key to the whole thing. Almost every recipient I know personally or have done research on. It would be a huge missed opportunity to not acknowledge that personal connection. For speed purposes, it’s easiest to do this part in Google Sheets. Add another column called Postscript to your Google Sheet. For each recipient write a custom note that will go at the end of your email, i.e. “P.S. It was super nice meeting you at SXSW 2017, still waiting for you to come visit San Francisco.” If you don’t know them personally already, at least make the effort to do your research and make a connection. It’s easy enough to comment on some of their work you admire, I’m talking to you recruiters who never look at my portfolio. Export your Google Sheet to a CSV. Import your CSV into Streak Thankfully since we’ve been working in Google Sheets, we’ll be able to straight import into Streak without any fuss. Install Streak for your browser and open Gmail. Go through the authentication flow for Streak. From the Gmail sidebar, hit Pipelines +New. Pick any of the types, I usually do Business Development and then quickly rename it to my project name. Optionally, invite anyone else to collaborate on this pipeline. On your pipeline page, press the gray more icon. Click Import boxes from Google Sheets. Follow yet another authentication process. Go through the steps to finish your import by mapping your columns to Streak data. They have a lot of options, for those with more data feel free to connect it all up. You’ll see everything from Google Sheets, now nicely organized in your Streak pipeline as a Lead. You can now track as someone goes through your funnel to Closed - Won, it’s the big time sales process for the little guy. Send out that hand-crafted email with Streak After all that prep work, we’re finally ready to put the pieces together. Getting used to the interface and finding the small links or buttons can be quite a chore. Streak is a tool meant for sending much larger batches for sales professionals. We can lay low under the quotas with basic features and get a ton out of it. When I was doing marketing for commercial real estate, we used to use Excel and Microsoft Word to send out massive mailing campaigns. The mail merge feature for Streak works just like it’s offline Microsoft counterpart except with much better tracking and ability to follow up. Put it all together and get ready to hit send Hit Compose in Gmail. Click the link Mail merge. Select your Streak pipeline as the recipients. Write your beautiful email template and use the Customize with Template link at the bottom to sprinkle in customizations. When you’re subject line is perfect and your template customized hit Send, releasing your artisanal emails to their proper recipients. More coming soon Next up we’ll wrap by tracking and following up with our small batch of recipients. This article is part two of a three part series, released weekly. You can read part one here. Subscribe to get access first.
For press releases, advertiser requests, or similar sales campaigns you’re sending a small batch of, usually cold, emails out with a specific ask. Finding potential recipients, writing an email that’s helpful, and tracking the results doesn’t need to take all day or be painful. I’ve watched my fellow product people struggle with the pitfalls of outbound; spend all day trying to find emails, copy and pasting boring boilerplate copy, and then never following up. By stringing together Clearbit Connect, Google Sheets, and Streak, you can knock out these outbound projects super quickly, personalize them, and track progress through a funnel. I’ll walk you through exactly how it works using my most recent campaign, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Researching for the right audience First up, you’re looking for the most likely people to be interested. For a press launch, that may be who frequently cover products in that space. In our example, Hack Design’s sponsor list, I was quickly able to look at who else was sponsoring comparable websites. For me, that meant researching the advertisers on Offscreen, Sidebar, Dribbble, recent design conferences and podcasts. It’s super simple to save your research and move on to finding the right people at those companies. Add companies to your list Start a Google Sheet with the column name Company. Research the companies most relevant to your outbound campaign. Great places to look are Angel List, Product Hunt, job boards (to see who is hiring in a space), Crunchbase, etc. Anywhere that let’s your group and filter through relevant companies. Add the company name to your list. Finding anyone’s email in seconds Now that you have a list of potential companies, let’s find the emails for the best people to talk to there. For my Hack Design list, I was lucky and had about a dozen sponsors from previous years. However, since we haven’t accepted sponsorship in over a year, a lot of my contacts at those companies were out of date. This process made it trivial to find the new people in those roles and be able to reach out. Get the right contacts from Clearbit Connect Add the column names Email and Full Name to your Google Sheet. Install Clearbit Connect if you haven’t already. This is the secret sauce that will allow you to find anyone’s email, for free. Connect does have a limit but for small batches, you shouldn’t have any problems. Disclosure: I’m a small-time investor in Clearbit. In Gmail, hit the Clearbit button in the top nav and then press Find email. Yep, it’s really that easy. You must start with the company and then narrow down by name or title. Copy and paste that into your Google Sheet. More coming soon Next up we’ll write our email and learn how to quickly customize every single one of them. This article is part one of a three part series, released weekly. Subscribe to get access first.
The hanging-punctuation property aims at giving web web designers a finer grained control over typography on the web. The idea behind hanging punctuation is to put some punctuation characters from start (or to a lesser extend at the end) of text elements “outside” of the box in order to preserve the reading flow. blockquote p { hanging-punctuation: first; } Since it only applies to quote marks, you can avoid single purpose classes and trust that your quotes will hang everywhere. Chrome hasn’t yet implemented the hanging-punctuation property, but it works perfectly in Safari. Typeset.js is an HTML pre-processor that adds a lot more functionality and will allow you to get cross browser compatibility.
Live every week like it’s Taco Week. Last year’s articles are now up on Medium.
Full-screen gif mayhem. Worked on this one day last year with CH Albach in order to show it off for a Halloween party. Since the domain is expiring, I’d prefer it live on in the lab. It was truly ahead of it’s time, but now Cochlea and Giphy GJ have surpassed it’s meager feature list. Let me know if you have any feature requests.
More in design
Vigdis Rosenkilde is a Norwegian fine chocolate brand using cacao from the Peruvian Amazon. Its rebranding aimed for greater visual...
Back in 2012 when my first (and only) book was published, a friend reacted by exclaiming, “You wrote a book?!?” and then added, “oh yeah…you don’t have kids.” I was put off by that statement. I played it cool, but my unspoken reaction was, “Since when is having kids or not the difference between one’s ability to write a book?” I was proud of my accomplishment, and his reaction seemed to communicate that anyone could do such a thing if they didn’t have other priorities. Thirteen years and two children later, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to reflect upon that moment. I’ve come to a surprising conclusion: he was kind of right. My first child was perhaps ten minutes old before I began learning that my time would never be spent or managed the same way again. I was in the delivery room holding her while my phone vibrated in my pocket because work emails were coming in. Normally, I’d have responded right away. Not anymore. The constraints of parenthood are real and immediate and it takes some time to get used to the pinch. But they’re also transformative in unexpected ways. These days, my measure of how I spend my time comes down to a single idea: I will not make my children orphans to my ambition. If I prioritize anything over them, I require a very good reason which cannot benefit me alone. Yet this transformation runs deeper than simply having less time day to day. Entering your forties has a profound effect on your perception of your entire lifespan. Suddenly, you find that memories actual decades old are of things you experienced as an adult. The combination of parenthood and midlife can create a powerful perspective shift that makes you more intentional about what truly matters. There are times when I feel that I am able to do less than I did in the past, but what I’ve come to realize is that I am actually doing more of the things that matter to me. A more acute focus on limited time results in using that time much more intentionally. I’m more productive today than I was in 2012, but it’s not because of time, it’s because of choices. The constraints of parenthood haven’t just changed what I choose to do with my time, but what I create as well. Having less time to waste means I levy a more critical judgment of whether something is working or worthwhile to pursue much earlier in the process than I did before. In the past – if I’m dreadfully honest — I took pride in being the guy who started early and stayed late. Today, I take pride in producing the best thing I can. The less time that takes, the better. But parenthood has also reminded me of the pleasures and benefits of creativity purely as a means of thinking aloud, learning, exploring, and play. There’s a beautiful tension in this evolution - becoming both more critically discerning and more playfully exploratory at the same time. My children have inadvertently become my teachers, reconnecting me with the foundational joy of making without judgment or expectation. This integration of play and discernment has enriched my professional work. My creative output is far more diverse than it was before. The playful exploration I engage in with my children has opened new pathways in my professional thinking, allowing me to approach design problems from fresh perspectives. I’ve found that the best creative work feels effortless to viewers when the creation process itself was enjoyable. This enjoyment manifests for creators as what psychologists call a “flow state” - that immersive experience where time seems to vanish and work feels natural and intuitive. The more I embrace playful exploration with ideas, techniques, and tools, the more easily I can access this flow state in my professional work. My friend’s comment, while perhaps a bit lacking in tact, touched on a reality about the economics of attention and time. The book I wrote wasn’t just the product of writing skills - it was also the product of having the temporal and mental space to create it. (I’m not sure I’ll have that again, and if I do, I’m not sure a book is what I’ll choose to use it for.) What I didn’t understand then was that parenthood wouldn’t end my creative life, but transform it into something richer, more focused, and ultimately more meaningful. The constraints haven’t diminished my creativity but refined it.
The Silicon Valley office design integrates the landscape, culture, and user group’s needs, blending colors and architectural elements to mimic...
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
On the Ambient Entertainment Industrial Complex “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal’s observation from the 17th century feels less like historical philosophy and more like a diagnosis of our current condition. The discomfort with idleness that Pascal identified has evolved from a human tendency into a technological ecosystem designed to ensure we never experience it. Philosophers and thinkers throughout history worried about both the individual and societal costs of idleness. Left to our own devices — or rather, without devices — we might succumb to vice or destructive thoughts. Or worse, from society’s perspective, too many idle people might destabilize the social order. Kierkegaard specifically feared that many would become trapped in what he called the “aesthetic sphere” of existence — a life oriented around the pursuit of novel experiences and constant stimulation rather than ethical commitment and purpose. He couldn’t have imagined how prophetic this concern would become. What’s changed isn’t human nature but the infrastructure of distraction available to us. Entertainment was once bounded — a novel read by candlelight, a play attended on Saturday evening, a television program watched when it aired. It occupied specific times and spaces. It was an event. Today, entertainment is no longer an event but a condition. It’s ambient, pervasive, constant. The bright rectangle in our pocket ensures that no moment need be empty of stimulus. Waiting in line, sitting on the train, even using the bathroom — all are opportunities for consumption rather than reflection or simply being. More subtly, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary information has collapsed. News, social media feeds, workplace communication tools — all blend information we might need with content designed primarily to capture and hold our attention. The result is a sense that all of this constant consumption isn’t entertainment at all, but somehow necessary. Perhaps most concerning is what happens as this self-referential entertainment ecosystem evolves. The relationship between entertainment and experience has always had a push-pull kind of tension; experience has been entertainment’s primary source material, but, great entertainment is, itself, an experience that becomes just as affective background as anything else. But what happens when the balance is tipped? When experience and entertainment are so inseparable that the source material doubles back on itself in a recursion of ever dwindling meaning? The system turns inward, growing more detached from lived reality with each iteration. I think we are already living in that imbalance. The attention economy is, according to the classic law of supply and demand, bankrupt — with an oversupply of signal produced for a willful miscalculation of demand. No one has the time or interest to take in all that is available. No one should want to. And yet the most common experience today is an oppressive and relentless FOMO you might call Sisyphean if his boulder accumulated more boulders with every trip up and down the hill. We’re so saturated in signal that we cannot help but think continually about the content we have not consumed as if it is an obligatory list of chores we must complete. And that ambient preoccupation with the next or other thing eats away at whatever active focus we put toward anything. It’s easy to cite as evidence the normalization of watching TV while side-eying Slack on an open laptop while scrolling some endless news feed on a phone — because this is awful and all of us would have thought so just a few years ago — but the worst part about it is the fact that while gazing at three or more screens, we are also fragmenting our minds to oblivion across the infinite cloud of information we know is out there, clamoring for attention. Pascal feared what happened in the empty room. We might now reasonably fear what happens when the room is never empty — when every potential moment of idleness or reflection is filled with content designed to hold our gaze just a little longer. The philosophical question of our time is not how to fix the attention economy, but how to end it altogether. We simply don’t have to live like this.
