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 However, since we haven’t accepted sponsorship in over a year, a lot of my contacts at those companies were out of date.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.

While in Korea, I used Shazam to record all the songs played in coffee shops. Here’s a mix I put together of all the discovered tracks.

Jonathan Corum, New York Times See Practice until your eyes can see it See what others have done See what’s possible Look at more than you can use Think Find a clear thought and get it on paper Sketching is visual problem solving Sketches are not commitments What are you trying to do? Set the pattern, then show the variations Ugly is fine Sketch with data Sketch in the browser Find something your brain recognizes Remember that aha! moment Communicate that understanding Design Good design is clear thinking made visible. - Edward Tufte Design for someone else Don’t be your own audience If you’re talking to yourself, you’re not communicating Remember what it’s like not to understand If I could have gone back in time, what would help me get to understanding. Explain overview + relevant detail In order to get anything out of this [research paper], it’s going to be a translation project. Show change Don’t collect trivia There’s a reason that I’m collecting that and then presenting it. Collections should add up to something Visualization ≠ counting Find and show meaningful patterns Avoid the language of infographics Avoid the facade of communication. Don’t introduce false patterns Is this pattern a true pattern or an artifact of how I arranged the data? Visualization ≠ explanation Don’t count diapers! Be skeptical of vanity data Compared to what? Produce When your idea hits the real world. Embrace limitations Point and annotate Put the text where it’s relevant. Combine art + label Anticipate confusion It doesn’t say here’s some lines, now you figure it out. Help the reader through Keep honing your ideas We are not designers! - Matthew Ericson Ruthlessly apply common sense Brute force works but tools can help Understand every step in the process Understand what you can control: accuracy, clarity, legibility, empathy, and simplicity What might emerge? Understanding, elegance, and beauty. What if I am tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful? - Andre Lim See & think = understand Design & product = explain Understand then explain Respect the reader Bret Victor, worrydream Links to examples Static displays Dynamic displays Dynamic data Dynamic Displays Summary and detail graphics - Two levels of questions for different readers. In the example it’s “what are the main contributing pollutants to global warming”, with the follow up being “what are the causes of each pollutant”. Slice and filter - Every decision is put within context. Where you see information, you can interact to filter by that aspect. Narrative context - While going through the data, you’re going through a story. These real world events are tied to the chart. Emotion - Switching between datasets that can tell a story from different perspectives. Don’t let readers sleepwalk through the graphic. When you have the interactive medium you can design a learning curve, similar to game design. Starting a reader off with a basic task and then after awhile let actions grow in complexity. Dynamic Data Black box explanations - you don’t care about what’s going on under the hood, you just want the output. Elements you can adjust and see the consequences of those adjustments. Open box explanations - what’s under the hood is exactly what you care about. Explaining how an algorithm works. Nouns are data objects, verbs are the transitions. Series of interactive graphics explaining each step of the process. Making a graphic is not about putting a large spreadsheet in the middle of the page with the data. It’s much more so like show and tell. Each cell telling a piece of the story, much like a comic strip. Representations for systems design - Show comparisons between original and intended change. Show the state of the individual steps in a system. Come up with a design language and then show the steps through the system. Ladder of Abstraction The graphics we make for displays must be better than their paper counterparts. By showing an animation, you take away the control that interaction allows. Animations are the pie charts of interactive graphics. First, give readers control over time. Let them move at their own pace and answer their own questions as they arise. Second, give control over each of the parameters while abstracting time. When you control a parameter, you need to be able to see the result. Be able to see the entire behavior over time. Third, give control back by letting the reader control time and variable by marrying them together. See also — Steven Wittens, Amit Patel Mike Bostock, New York Times If one of the best designers of all time doesn’t know if what he makes is good, how can anyone else expect to? Good design is as little design as possible. - Dieter Rams Fitt’s law, it’s easier to click on targets that are closer and bigger. Two phases: create and edit. Get fresh eyes frequently; invite criticism. New York Times Preview tool, displays all of the ongoing work. Can switch between each branch and interact with works in progress. Takes a snapshot of each commit on each branch. Prototypes should emphasize speed over polish. Transition from exploring to refining near deadline. Delete code as you go. Be ruthless. Make your process reproducible. Try bad ideas deliberately. Don’t be afraid to fail. Let’s make a bubble map. pbpaste allows terminal to access system clipboard. Edward Tufte, Author The Thinking Eye Code is now design and design is code. What was observed by us in the third place is the nature or matter of the Milky Way itself, which, with the aid of the spyglass, may be observed so well that all the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty, and we are liberated from wordy arguments. - Galileo Galilei Organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations - Melvin E. Conway Seek verbs and actions. See now, words later. A sense of the relevant. Seek forever knowledge with a taste for excellence. Understanding the difference between evidence and inference. Only two industries refer to customers as users; software and the drug industry. Silence sharpens and deepens seeing. Most of social science studies are false. Social science is harder than rocket science. It does not have the fundamental truths of nature’s laws. Image quilts. Distribution of excellence is extremely logarithmic. A hard look at the practice and results of conventional asymptotic theory easily leads one to three points: We ought not to expect it to be widely useful (since it refers to the ultimate oversimplification). Rather often it has been useful (surprise!) We have developed no basis for telling when it is likely to help and when it is not….. 123 - John W. Tukey Standards of graphical excellence: Google Maps and Swiss Mountain maps. Future is maps moving in time. How do you know that? How does what I see come to be seen by me? Real science has it easy because they have forever laws. Begin with a question, a problem, then measure. You can have your own point of view, but not your own facts. - Daniel Patrick Moynihan