Book Notes: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

This is the second installment of the book notes series. These aren't book reviews but a place to record some notes and a place to think out loud about what is to be gained from the book.

The Big Idea

Creativity isn't a magic process, there are concrete, repeatable steps that will produce more and better ideas. Catmull, the current president of Pixar and a former computer engineer, takes a systems approach to increasing the quality of the creativity of the people working for him and showcases the way they come to think about their work.

As Brad Bird… likes to say, "The process either makes you or unmakes you."

Katherine Sarafian… tells me she prefers to envision triggering the process over trusting it–observing it to see where it's faltering, then slapping it around a bit to make sure it's awake.

Pink Highlights

At too many companies, the schedule (that is, the need for product) drives the output, not the strength of the ideas at the front end.

The pressure to create–and quickly!–became the order of the day… and its unintended effect is always the same. It lessens quality across the board.

It's been my experience that deadlines are anti-creative. Videos I've produced under deadlines usually come out worse.

Also useful is the notion of 'The Beast', the part of your business that needs charts and numbers that go ever upward.

The Beast cannot be sated. It is one of life's cruel ironies that when it comes to feeding the Beast, success only creates more pressure to hurry up and succeed again. Which is why at too many companies the schedule drives the output, not the strength of the ideas.

When I set up Subbable -- my first attempt at crowdfunding -- it ended up increasing stress in an unexpected way. Subbable billed people automatically every month. I had created for myself a 30-day production deadline when the natural life cycle of my projects is closer to six weeks. While I produced videos like Humans Need Not Apply under that system, the biggest result was guilt and stress every month there was no video. Creativity, Inc is one reason why, when setting up my Patreon page for the eventual merger of the two companies, I made funding be per video. It's early days now, but I think this is an improvement to the process worth the decrease in revenue for months when no videos are made. (Though I can already tell that the trade-off is worrying about videos that are 'too small' to charge for.)

Actionable Items

This section caught my attention:

In December 2009, more than three years before the movie premiered in theaters, a dozen people from Pixar… flew east to visit MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. "Monsters University was to be one of the most prestigious campuses for scaring, so we wanted to visit big-name, old-world, prestigious schools"… They visited dorm rooms, lecture halls, research labs, and frat houses; they hung out on the campus lawns, ate pizza at dives that students frequented and took a lot of pictures and notes–"documenting everything, right down to the details of how pathways integrated into the quads and what the graffiti scratches looked like on the wooden desks." The finished film was loaded with these kinds of details… all of which gave audiences a feeling of reality.
Research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep clichés at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying.

This is something I'd like to try and work into my own processes. My work tends to be extremely insular, if I can work more with experts or visit locations related to the topic of my video, it might introduce some beneficial randomness into the information-gathering process.

Miscellaneous Highlights

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.

Easy isn't the goal. Quality is the goal.

There is a bit of a weird creed passing around business circles about how amazing failure is. This is a good explanation of the process on a more individual level:

The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.

Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

The above matches my (limited) personal experience in working with other people.

… copying what's come before is a guaranteed path to mediocrity, it appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe–to succeed with minimal risk.

Buy The Book:

You can get Creativity, Inc from Amazon or iBooks.

How 'Hello Internet' is Edited

During the editing of the Christmas episode of Hello Internet I recorded the screen for a time-lapse video. This show was unusually long so it ended up being 11 hours compressed down into an hour. For those of you interested in the details, here is how my editing process looks:

Edit 1: The Rough Cut

Two things happen here:

1) Alignment

Brady and I use the dirty-sounding double-ender recording method: he records the audio locally on his end, I do the same on my end and additionally I record the call with both of us.

The first thing that needs to be done is to sync our two local recordings using the recording with both of us. Double-ended recording adds a lot of work but has the benefit of making the audio quality much higher.

2) Cut Boring Nonsense

There are many things that can obviously be cut: technical problems, segments that don't work out or that are just boring.

Because this phase doesn't require visual attention in the same way as other tasks, I can play a game during this phase. Prison Architect has been my go-to at this stage from the beginning.

When complete, this edit gets sent to Brady to listen to for any edit suggestions.

Edit 2: The Precision Cut

(Starts at 17:45)

This is where most of the work happens. This edit is to tighten the podcast as much as possible: I'm listening for any sentence (or word) that can be cut without loss. I don't cut all the 'ummms' because then it wouldn't sound like a real conversation but I do cut as many of the annoying ones as I can.

Any conversation over The Internet is going to have some points where the participants talk over each other. Another advantage of double-ended recording is it allows me during this edit to pull apart those sections for easier listening.

Edit 3: the Final Cut

(Starts at 39:00)

This edit is for three things:

1) Add in the sponsor reads and jingles

If I'm on top of things I've recorded my ads and gotten any of Brady's ads between cut 2 and cut 3. This is the time to figure out where they go best and to add in the theme and jingles.

2) Create the show notes.

On the final listen through I add in links to the things we have discussed in the video. While in theory I could do this in edit 1, I'd rather wait until all the cuts have been made.

(You do know about the show notes, right? You can easily look at / click on them because you're using a podcast app like you should right?)

3) Listen for errors.

I've learned from experience it's easy to make pretty embarrassing errors in edit 2, so this listen through is to catch them. While I listen to the first cut at 2x and the second cut at 1.5x this final cut is at normal or almost-normal speed because there are sometimes little audio glitches that are difficult to notice at the faster speeds.

Why Bother?

Why take all this time editing the show if it's just a casual, two-dudes-talking show? Well, let's be honest: many two dudes talking shows are death to listen to. Many people who start podcasting assume that sounding casual also means that the process of creation is casual. But it's often the reverse: a casual sound requires a lot more effort to make it bearable to actually listen to. While there are some podcast naturals who can just roll the tape and let it fly, that's not me. Luckily that can be fixed with work.

Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

When Amazon announced the Kindle Voyage, it filled me with hope. Lighter?  Yes please.  Higher resolution?  Why not?  Magnesium case?  Sounds great.  Page-turning buttons?  Huzzah!  Amazon cares about Kindle again!  Instant pre-order.

But when the Kindle Voyage arrived, hope turned to despair.  Not just for the future of Kindle, but for the future of Amazon itself. 

What Readers Want

A promotional image for the Voyage reads: “passionately crafted for readers”. 

Imagine a restaurant that advertised its meals as: “passionately crafted for foodies” but a visit reveals sticky tables, dirty plates and a smoking chef. 

This is the Restaurant de Kindle and I’ve been eating there for years. Hoping – against all evidence to the contrary – that the sign represents the food. 

But actions, repeated over years, speak louder than words.  Everything Amazon does shows they don’t care about the details and pleasures of the reading experience.  There is no evidence to believe they will. 

Typesetting

I’ve already written much and spoken much about typography on the Kindle.  Please allow me to continue for just a little bit longer on this final Kindle review.

Kindle, from its inception uses ‘full justification’: changing the width of the spaces between words to force every line to span the screen.  This doesn’t give you more words on the page, just the same words spread unevenly across every line.  The effect makes ugly ‘rivers’ of space on the page and, for some readers, has the effect of speeding up and slowing down the narrator in your head.

The effect is bad enough on the physical kindle but is magnified on narrower screens, such as on the Kindle app.  Add in Amazon’s inability to understand em dashes and the result is comically, insultingly bad for a product with the sole purpose of displaying text. 

There are two options to improve readability: either break the words with hyphens at their syllables (as paper books and open source typesetting programs do) or simply don’t spread the words out (left justification) as is the case with this review. 

Amazon Kindle gives you neither option to fix the justification.  Search The Internet and you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of people asking, begging for Amazon to change this.  Users go to great lengths to manually left justify their books which turns each Amazon ebook purchase into a multi-step-DRM-cracking trial of customer loyalty. 

“Passionately crafted for readers.”

Let’s take a brief look at something that would be deserving of the above label.  Instapaper not only does justification right, but also includes dyslexie among its font choices to make reading easier for dyslexics.

That’s the kind of thing a product does when it cares about its users. Oh, and by the way, when Instapaper introduced dyslexie it was a one-man product not a billion dollar company. 

Is such a font available on Kindle?  No.  Is there any reason to hope it might be?  Since Amazon hasnt updated anything about their typography since 2009 I wouldn’t hold my breath.

It’s not about Dyslexie in particular, it’s about Amazon saying they love readers yet failing to make even the most simple, low-hanging-fruit changes to improve the reading experience. 

Fixing text justification isn’t asking a restaurant to find a new chef, it’s asking for clean tables. Yet Restaurant de Kindle does it not. 

Worse and Worse

Even when Amazon makes changes, you often wish they didn’t. 

Here is the first Kindle I owned:

A perfect device?  No, but it was pretty great (typographical issues aside).  It felt weightless and had satisfying buttons on the sides to turn pages.

Then Amazon introduced the Kindle Paperwhite. 

I was more optimistic about the paperwhite in my review but I found myself using it less and less over time.  The touch screen made accidental page-turns more frequent and white light is the worst for reading in bed.  It’s proven to keep you awake.  A design team that cared would have made the light warmer. 

Amazon also couldn’t manufacture screens that lit evenly.  I exchanged mine many times before giving up settling on a screen that was good enough but also made every page slightly more irritating to read.

These irritations, combined with the increased weight, contributed to less and less frequent use of the paperwhite. 

‘Button’

Rather than bring back the page-turn button for Kindle Voyage, Amazon birthed a Frankenstein's monster: This pressure sensitive white strip on the Kindle Voyage’s bezel.

This pressure sensitive ‘button’ is so bad, such an obvious worst-of-both-worlds construction its existence makes me doubt everything about the product team at Amazon.

To replicate the experience of the Kindle Voyage ‘button’ find an immovable surface in your house: a marble kitchen countertop will do. Place your thumb upon the surface, then press down – deforming your thumb. 

Not pleasant, is it?

imagine repeating that gesture thousands and thousands of times over dozens and dozens of books for every turn of the page.

This is no button, it’s a repetitive strain injury machine. And a committee of humans (presumably including Bezos) somewhere in Amazon saw it, approved it, and shipped it.

Such judgement cannot be trusted. 

If you want to avoid the RSI-‘button’ the Voyage does also have a touch-screen option like the Paperwhite.  But this too has been made worse. 

The touch screen, previously recessed, is now on the same level with the bezel which makes accidental pages turns more frequent.  This flatness doesn’t make reading books any better – given the way the rest of the device is set up it makes it worse. 

At Kindle design headquarters there should be a whiteboard with ‘Does this feature make reading better?’ at the top.  Instead Amazon is trying to make the Kindle into an iPad-like tablet rather than making a speciality device “passionately crafted for readers”.  The result feels like it fell out of an alternative universe where Palm survived into the tablet age.

Switching Costs

A recent two-week trip to America was intended to be a kindle testing ground but since Amazon does everything outside the US weeks or months late, my Kindle Voyage didn’t make it in time so I decided to try something else:

I used Apple’s iBooks for my reading on the trip. IBooks may not be the industry leader, but their product shows evidence of caring about the reading experience: 

• There are multiple options for handling text justification.
• You can tap both margins to advance the page. (Unlike Amazon who thinks readers always hold their books in the same hand. Have they ever seen people read books?)
• There is an acceptable (though not great) dark mode.
• Collections of books sync in an understandable manner.
• You can make highlights in a book sample before you buy it.

Speaking of highlights: Amazon has no graceful option to update books. Updating a book, in Amazon’s world, is the digital equivalent of handing you a new book, then burning your old one.  Hope you didn’t have any notes or highlights in there. 

IBooks, meanwhile, can update books while keeping your notes and highlights intact.  ::gasp::

You Can’t Convince Someone to Love You

Reading books is a large part of how I make a living. My decision to switch away from Amazon’s ebooks doesn’t come lightly.

I have a huge sunk cost in terms of my existing library of books in Amazon.  The future costs will be large as well.  I buy, and still plan to buy, my audiobooks from Audible – which often lets you get the Amazon version for a dollar extra.  Now, many of the audiobooks I buy for work will have to be double purchased.

To be pushed over a switching-costs wall so high is serious business. This long-coming decision is helped by Amazon’s other blunders: Their Firephone is so terrible they literally can’t give it away and the existence of the Amazon Echo strains all reason. 

(Seriously, I dare you to sit through the Echo Ad without skipping. While you watch that train wreck unfold before your eyes, keep in mind that somewhere at Amazon is a team of humans, led by Bezos, who approved it.)

These bizarre products, combined with making the kindle line worse two generations in a row, and a neglected software system for half a decade makes Amazon feel unstable.  Mentally. 

I had been planning to launch a big, public campaign about Kindle typography to try and get Amazon to change her ways.  But I came to the conclusion: why bother?

A restaurant won’t get better no matter how much you care if the owners don’t.