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Name: Futura Release Date: 1927 Designer: Paul Renner Classification: Geometric Sans Serif Owned By: The Bauer Type Foundry Claim to Fame: The typeface that put a man on the moon. From the IKEA catalogue to the Olympics to the instrument panel on the Apollo 11 space shuttle. It’s been described as “the world’s most popular typeface” (not bad for 93 years young!). Today we’re talking about Futura. Futura has been used in some of the most iconic ad campaigns (VW’s Lemon ads), movie posters (Gravity), magazines (Vanity Fair in 1929), logos (Crayola), visual identity for TV shows (Sesame Street) and it’s even landed on the moon… more on that in a minute. The name “Futura” invokes hope, quite literally meaning “future” in German. It is based on visual elements of the Bauhaus design style. In 1919, The Bauhaus was established as a school of art, architecture, graphic design and typography by Walter Gropius in Germany. Modernist, simplified forms play an integral role to Bauhaus design. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 by the Nazis but it’s influence had already spread across the ocean into the USA. Interestingly, even though the the Nazi’s closed these doors, they used Futura for some of their propaganda (even though designer Paul Renner was a critic of the Nazi regime). It’s important to note that Renner wasn’t directly associated with Bauhaus, however he believed that modern typefaces should reflect the modern world. Sans serif designs that came before Futura are called “grotesques” - based on sign painting and condensed lettering. They are sans serif fonts that have lots of character, quirks and irregular proportions. Grotesque typefaces consisted of simple letterforms and even stroke weights. They were bold, geometric and typically used as display type. They had a lot more personality and quirkiness than a typeface like Futura, which was designed to look like it was made by a machine. In other words, it’s very functional, has no frills and is modern; Futura was a “conciscous break from the past”. There is little-to-no stroke contrast within each letterform in Futura. Stroke contrast (thick and thin lines) are present in typefaces to make it look more human, as though it were written with a human hand, which was not the intention with Futura. Futura’s anatomy can be described as less is more, basic shapes, geometric, mathematical and precise; all foundations of geometric sans serif typefaces. Futura is made up of geometric shapes (circles, triangles, squares), representing function over form. There are no non-essential or decorative elements. Futura is unique because it works well both in print and digitally, as well as in large and small sizes. It can be used as a display typeface, as well as a text face. It’s versatile and comes in a family of widths, weights and sizes. A few of the key traits that make Futura, Futura are as follows: Low cross bar on lowercase letters like ‘t’ Round circular counters (such as the a - that cut in a bit into the stem to give the illusion of perfect circle) It’s tapered into where the curved lines meet the stems (ex: lowercase n) - it’s an optical illusion - it’s made to look like a machine created it, while at the same time appearing geometrically perfect. This helps contribute to the overall colour and texture of a block of text written in Futura. Remember that consistent texture is an important technical attribute in a typeface and one that becomes apparent when a typeface is applied to a block of text. Squint at a block of text - does it appear uniform throughout, or are there large white gaps and large blobs of colour in different parts of the paragraph? Pointed apex (triangles) + vertex that extends to baseline Terminal is cut off/doesn’t exist (no additional flourishes) Ascenders rise above cap height Monoweight strokes - this is to make it appear as though a machine made it and not a human hand, which would naturally have thick and thin stroke variation throughout each letterform Now let’s get back to Futura’s story. Specifically, let’s get back to Futura on the moon. In a TEDx talk by Douglas Thomas called: How a typeface helped launch Apollo, he explains that when men landed on the moon in 1969, they not only left a flag, but also a plaque that reads “We came in peace for all mankind” set in a very fitting typeface: Futura. After it was designed and released in the late 1920’s, it was used in a variety of capacities before, during and after WWII, including some notable copycats from US designers. When, after the war, the US government was choosing typefaces to use on new maps and projects post-WWII, they chose Futura because they felt as though it wouldn’t be associated with communism. Also, many notable politicians and their campaigns, including Nixon and Kennedy, used this typeface in their marketing materials. To represent who they were to the American people. When NASA was beginning to plan for the Apollo missions to the moon, many many documents (internal and external to NASA), as well as things like the instrument panels on board the shuttle, were set in Futura. In his TEDx talk, Thomas describes it as the typeface being used for an “entire interface”; a system that helped astronauts get to the moon. There were hundreds of different contractors and companies helping Apollo get to the moon and each one using a different typeface would have meant cognitive overload for the astronauts. Futura helped simplify and streamline important information when they needed it most. From instrument panels, to food rations, to tool kits, Futura was found just about everywhere in the moon mission. In regards to the plaque set in Futura left on the moon, Thomas points out that Futura was a perfect choice for a number of reasons, including the fact that it represented what was happening with technology at the time. German technology that was co-opted by Americans had put a man on the moon and a German typeface that had been co-opted by Americans was the visual identity used to mark this historic event. Thank you Mr. Renner, for your important contributions to an incomplete history of type. From the middle ages to the Middle East, from Futura to Freight, thanks for joining us on a journey across the type universe and going where no designer has gone before… next up: we’re going to have a HELVETICA good time. Music: Podington Bear - Squirrel Commotion Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo byAlex onUnsplash

From type tales to type fails, this is the first in a 10-part series of an incomplete history of type. By exploring the history of type one face at a time, we get an intimate look at the people and the stories behind the letterforms. We’ve asked important questions to get to the bottom of each story, such as... Where, out of this world, can Futura be found? How did Helvetica get its name? Who was Mrs. Zapf Chancery? Why, fundamentally, do so many people loathe Papyrus? When did Gotham designer, Jonathan Hoefler, know he’d really made it? What is typographer Nadine Chahine doing that is so needed in the world of type right now? But remember, this is an incomplete history of type; there are too many incredible and influential type designers that have lived and worked in the past 500+ years that it’s impossible to tell the complete history. So we’ll run with the idea that we’re learning the incomplete history of type. Some of the featured type designers may even seem like odd choices; but each has a story to tell. They were influenced by the work that came before them and influenced the work that came after them. Each of these designers have made waves in their own unique ways and disrupted the status quo, helping to shape the look of letterforms found everywhere in our modern world. Stay on the lookout for one character in particular: Mr. Hermann Zapf. Zapf finds himself playing the leading role in one episode featuring a typeface he designed in the 1970’s, and in supporting roles in the 1990’s and into the new millennium. Zapf is someone who influenced an entirely new generation of type designers from across the globe, and indirectly impacted faces that have changed the world’s letterforms. From the middle ages to the Middle East, from Futura to Freight, join us on a journey across the type universe and go where no designer has gone before… welcome to An Incomplete History of Type. First up: let’s look backwards more than 500 years to learn the significance of Gutenberg’s BLACKLETTER. Name: Blackletter (specifically Donatus-Kalender) Release Date: 1455 Designer: Johannes Gutenberg Classification: Blackletter Owned By: n/a Claim to Fame: The world’s first mechanized typeface, used in the world’s first mass-produced book. I’ve had the extreme good fortune of seeing a Gutenberg bible in person and it was awesome. There are fewer than 50 copies left in the world and I saw it at the epicentre of Gutenberg’s world, on the site where the book was produced, in Mainz, Germany. Spectacular! It’s not an exaggeration to say that this book, along with the technologies that made it happen including the blackletter mechanized font used throughout made it possible for us to exist as we are today. Today we’re talking about blackletter. I’m going to start by taking us on a tangent; the odds of winning the lottery is approximately 1 in 14 million. The odds of winning the life lottery is so improbable that it’s incalculable, yet each of our lucky numbers were drawn the day we were born. A few years ago, while reading Neil Pasricha’s bestselling work, #thebookofawesome, I was reminded how totally crazy it is that we’re alive. Your father will produce approximately 525 billion sperm (gross, sorry) in his lifetime. You WERE one of these sperm. For your unique self to have come from 500+ billion sperm, while at the same time having met your mother and combining with one of her 300-400 ovulated eggs is completely unlikely. Pair that with the fact that your mother or father could have procreated with a billion or more people different than one another, and that number becomes astronomical. Take it one step further to understand that you exist on Earth today (not 100 or 1000 years ago) and it’s arguably the BEST time to be alive in the history of the planet. Our descendants have existed in each and every century before us for 200,000 years, but we get to experience today’s world. And for those of us who live in a wonderful place like Canada, our odds of living here are incredibly slim as only 0.5% of the world’s population lives in this country (one in approximately every 200 people on the planet). It’s all pretty incredible. It is ENTIRELY likely that you and I wouldn’t exist if Gutenberg hadn’t created the blackletter typeface, invented the type mould, and commercialized printing when he did. Now, on to Blackletter. Blackletter is the typeface used to print the world’s very first commercially printed book using moveable type: the Gutenberg Bible. Blackletter type was created to mimic handwritten scribes’ work and look like calligraphic text. Technically speaking, “Blackletter” is the overarching classification category; the sub-category is Textura (more on that in a second) and the specific style of blackletter metal type used for the Gutenberg Bible is called Donatus-Kalender (D-K, for short), which was rarely replicated or used in metal type since the days of Gutenberg. Blackletter typefaces are also sometimes called Gothic or Old English typefaces. These typefaces are characterized by dense black texture and very highly decorative capital letters. All of the letterforms contain dramatic stroke contrast within their serifed forms. There are four major categories or families within the Blackletter category: Textura, Rotunda, Schwabacher and Fraktur. It’s important to know that these four categories exist with subtle differences especially apparent in the letter “o”. Let’s have a look at each: Textura - 11th Century; foundational form of Blackletter that occured as there was a boost in literacy across Europe; textura’s calculated uniformity mimicked gothic architecture at the time Rotunda - 12th Century; originated in Italy; considered a ‘sibling’ to Textura in southern Europe; named derived from latin word ‘rotundus’ - building that has a round floor plan (rotunda); more rounded strokes therefore letters tend to be more legible than textura Schwabacher - 15th Century; evolved from textura; similarly round like rotunda but with sharper edges; popular in Germany until Fraktur took over in 16th Century (but interestingly, Schwabacher was still used in conjunction with fraktur, similar to the way we use italic type for emphasis today) Fraktur - 16th Century to improve legibility of type (make characters more legible); Fraktur comes from latin ‘fractus’ or english ‘fracture’ or broken - letterforms are broken apart into independent strokes at different angles and it’s these varying angles that improve fraktur’s legibility; fraktur style was still popular in Germany until the early 1900’s when new, more modern sans-serif typefaces were becoming popular; but Nazi Germany declared these more modern typefaces ‘un-German’ and used it for their propaganda. Fraktur wasn’t popular after that because it was associated with the Nazi party. Back to Gutenberg’s specific rendition of Blackletter. The Textura blackletter typeface used in the Gutenberg Bible was focused on two things: preserving scribal hand-writing traditions that came before mechanized type and space optimization (got to save that cash where possible!). FontFabric describes Gutenberg’s original moveable typeface as recognizable by its “...dramatic thin and thick strokes, some elaborate swirls on the serifs, and the impression of the texture of a woven pattern across the page.” In an interesting nod to Gutenberg’s practical nature, he actually didn’t claim the typeface as it’s own by giving it a specific name (no ‘Gutenberg Bold’ here!). Instead his predecessors, some 500+ years into the future carefully mimicked his mimicking of scribal writing and gave birth to accurate reproductions, such as typefaces called ‘Bibel’, ‘1456 Gutenberg’ and ‘Gutenberg Textura’ to name a few. In regards to the actual process of crafting and sculpting each letter of the typeface, it’s been described as having focused on automation, consistency and recycling. The printing process enabled pages of previously only hand-written books to be printed again and again and again using movable type. Remember that Gutenberg didn’t invent printing, per se, instead he commercialized it. He took the concept of movable type, a converted wine press and figured out a way to create consistency on the printed page (using a type mould). The type mould was his one true invention (breakthrough!) is the hand moulding system for casting type. There is a matrix (mother or indented mould) and patrix/punch (father or outdented mould) poured into to create individual letters. In an excellent documentary called The Machine That Made Us Stephen Fry travels to Germany to try to recreate Gutenberg’s process, including re-creating his technologies. At around the 30-minute mark, there’s an excellent visual of what Gutenberg’s type mould would have looked like. Picture a punch of an individual letter made by hand (this is a master copy). It’s estimated that it could take an experienced punch maker an entire day to carve a punch by hand using a file. If a single page of type needs hundreds or thousands of characters, this is a long, lengthy process. So Gutenberg wanted to figure out how to speed up this process. Enter the type mould. Gutenberg’s type mould was the single new invention in his whole system of printing. It was made of two halves that come together. The matrix (mould) is fitted in the bottom and there’s now a cavity formed - molten metal is poured into the cavity and down into the matrix. The metal solidifies instantly, the type mould is opened and out pops an exact replica of the punch (patrix). THIS is how so many letters could be made again and again and again - quickly and cheaply. You can think of this like drawing a beautiful letter by hand (creating the punch/patrix), but using the type mould instead allows you to copy + paste, copy + paste exact replicas of your letter again and again with minimal effort. Approx 270 characters in his alphabet because of the alternate characters (multiple different e’s, for example); he created multiples of the same letter or letter pairs to create a more uniform look (so it took the better part of a year to just create the punches needed for his Blackletter typeface). Remember that it wasn’t just 270 little pieces of type; Gutenberg had hundreds of pieces of EACH of the 270 pieces, literally thousands of tiny pieces of type organized and arranged into words and sentences that made up each page of printed type. Each could be used in different situations and different line lengths to achieve an overall visual texture that was remarkably consistent throughout its more than 1200 pages. The letterpress technology that Gutenberg used to create his bible is not unlike a children’s “potato-printing” craft projects, where potatoes are cut in half and carved so that shapes (a circle, square or star) extend from the potato, so it can be dipped in paint and stamped onto paper. The image area is raised above the non-image area like a stamp (lead, instead of potato, was the carrier of Gutenberg’s ink). Letterpress printing technology and moveable type wasn’t so different from this; except his “potato carvings” were significantly more intricate, consistent and precise, and letters were assembled beside one another seamlessly to mimic the handwritten work of great scribes. It’s important to note that printing technology that included the mechanized typeface was not invited with open arms; not everyone was a fan of printing, it wasn’t received well. Some saw it as a ‘knock off’ to the original thing - handwritten books. Scribes’ saw their roles in jeopardy (and for good reason!). More than 500 years later in the age of modern computing when most homes have their own printer, scribes were right to fear for their jobs. We live in an age where any adult (or even child!) can typeset a page of text digitally and print it out again and again and again, at speeds much faster and more efficiently than Gutenberg could ever achieve. We’ve come so far. Thank you Mr. Gutenberg, for your important contributions to an incomplete history of type. From the middle ages to the Middle East, from Futura to Freight, thanks for joining us on a journey across the type universe and going where no designer has gone before… next up: let’s travel back to the FUTURA. Music: Podington Bear - Massive Attack Podington Bear - Squirrel Commotion Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo byAlex onUnsplash

While I love podcasting and exploring storytelling in an audio format, my day job is as a lecturer at a university in Toronto, Canada. Last semester I had the pleasure of teaching a course called Interdisciplinary Innovation in the Master of Digital Media Program with long-time friend and colleague, Chris Ambedkar. During one of the experiential activities in the course, I encouraged students to think about a topic, whether personal or professional, in which they could realistically build into a podcast. According to author and podcaster Eric Nuzum, you only need two prerequisites to start a podcast: something to say and a passion for saying it… and I couldn’t agree more. The seed of the Dear Professor podcast was planted during this assignment by Anna Lang and began to sprout when Katelyn and Anna, both students in this class, reached out to me towards the end of the semester to see if I would be interested in supervising a directed studies course in the winter semester all about Dear Professor. Anna has wanted to start a podcast for a long time and now armed with an idea and a potential to receive a course credit for it, now was the perfect time to start. I am not an audio professional and I made it very clear to Anna and Katelyn from the start that I am a pro-am (professional amatuer) podcaster who is figuring this out as I go along. However, they were excited to work with me and I was excited to work with them and also take on a bit of a different mentorship role with students. The reason I’ve asked Anna and Katelyn to come on the podcast today is to fulfill their final deliverable; a reflection of the entire process. Because we have these audio platforms, I thought it would be fun and fitting to ask Katelyn and Anna to share their final thoughts on the semester-long project creating Dear Professor with me here, in an audio format. I promise that this conversation will no way affect their mark for better or for worse; I want this to be a safe, open, candid conversation about their journeys and the highs and lows of creating a podcast from scratch. Happiness is working hard towards something you believe in and after hearing today’s conversation, I think you’ll agree that Anna and Katelyn have worked hard towards creating a podcast they believe in… I think they were pretty happy with the process and with the outcome but I’ll let you hear from them directly. You can find the Dear Professor podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and on Instagram @dear.professors. Music: Podington Bear - Thought Bubbles Dear Professor Intro Freesound: InspectorJ - bell ding Hobotrails - Drum roll Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Last year I read How to Break Up With Your Phone by award-winning writer and science journalist, Catherine Price and it was eye opening... to say the least. We understand that our phones are addictive and that there’s often more productive/sociable/energizing/[fill-in-the-blank] ways to use our time… but we turn to our phones because they’re soothing/easy/distracting/[fill-in-the-blank]. I feel like I’ve had a tenuous relationship with my phone since my first Nokia 3310 almost 20 years ago, but our rocky relationship has been extra dysfunctional in recent years. Addictive algorithm-infused social media is challenging to resist. All-too-easy access to our ever-present phones means that I’m picking it up dozens of times each day, reinforcing the damaging cycle of dysfunction. Dear Phone, we need a break (and it’s not me, it’s you). I’ve broken up with social media on my phone before (which represents a big chunk of my current total screen time), deleting Instagram for a period of time and removing myself from Facebook altogether... but it never sticks and why would it? It’s designed to be addictive. And in perhaps the greatest act of not talking-the-talk, I’m using it right now to conveniently preach my distaste and distrust using the very platform I wish to condem. It’s. Messed. Up. Nevertheless, reading Price’s book a couple of years ago reinforced my need to reevaluate my relationship with my phone. Now I’m not denying that there are some very good reasons to use my phone, such as using email, project management and calendar apps, not to mention actually using it as a phone to call my Mom every once in a while. But I think we can have a healthy, functional relationship with this ever-present object in our lives, and we can have a less healthy, dysfunctional desire to pick it up all day long. One thing (among many) that I’m concerned with is how my phone use is impacting my creative thinking, both in the short term and the long term. This is one of the central themes in this episode and the lens through which I’ve reread Price’s work. This gem of a book is split into 2 sections: Part 1 is called “The Wake Up” (the 5 W’s of breaking up with our phones) and Part 2 is called “The Break Up” (how to break up with our phones). Today’s episode will dive into both. The Wake Up Early in the book, Price wastes no time making a case for why we should care about putting down our phones: “While research on [wireless mobile] devices is in its early stages (unsurprisingly, given that they’ve barely been around for ten years), what is known so far suggests that spending extended time on them has the power to change both the structure and the function of our brains - including our abilities to form new memories, think deeply, focus, and absorb and remember what we read.” Yikes. Smartphones are literally rewiring our brains, changing the ways we think, which undoubtedly has consequences for how we problem-solve, experience creativity and, perhaps most importantly, understand and cope with our own thoughts and emotions, for better or for worse. Price goes on to say: “And the more I read, the more I became convinced that our attachment to our devices is not a trivial issue. It is a real problem - I’d go so far as to say that it’s a societal addiction - and we need to do something about it.” These sobering words are a stark reminder that our phones are changing our brains; literally altering their structure and function, including our ability to form new memories and think deeply. What’s just as concerning AND infuriating is that this is done at our expense... for a hefty profit. “Not only are phone and app companies aware of their products’ neurological effects, but they pack their products with features that will trigger them - with the explicit goal of getting us to spend as much time and attention as possible on our devices.” I suppose I already knew that companies are purchasing our attention, but to have it spelled out in black on white makes me feel like a real sucker. Social media is offered to us for free, after all, so how can tech companies be some of the richest on the planet? Well, we’re not the customer... we are the product. WE are the product. Our focus is being exchanged for cold, hard cash because with the right algorithms, well-targeted products and services are squeezed into users’ feeds (which translates into consumer spending) and thereby advertising dollars become well spent. And what’s most clever on the platforms’ part (and intoxicating to many users) is that we generate our own content. We’re a self-perpetuating money making machine! Ramsay Brown is the founder of a start-up called Dopamine Labs, a company that helps app companies keep you glued to their products. “Brown offered the example of Instagram, which he says has created code that deliberately holds back on showing users new “likes” so that it can deliver a bunch of them in a sudden rush at the most effective moment possible - meaning the moment at which seeing new likes will discourage you from closing the app.” I’m not anti-technology. I’m not anti-consumer. I’m anti-being-taken-advantage-of. But if I know this in my heart of hearts, why can’t I look away from the piano-playing cat? Why can’t I just turn it off?! Our attention is being sold, but even when we know we’re being tricked, we continue to scroll. It’s like watching a magic show where you know it’s all an illusion - sleight-of-hand and misdirection - but sawing a woman in half is still really cool to watch and you’re curious to see how it will all unfold. We stay and we watch and we scroll and we click because we enjoy dopamine. She’s cute. She makes you feel good. And she brings her A-game when you pick up your phone. “If your brain learns that checking your phone usually results in a reward, it won’t take long before your brain releases dopamine any time it’s reminded of your phone. You’ll start to crave it. (Ever notice how seeing someone else check their phone can make you want to check yours?)” It’s a virtual yawn! (And you just felt like checking your phone AND you yawned, didn’t you?!) Our phones are designed to offer novelty and do so consistently. According to writer Clay Shirky, the word ‘novel’ is derived from the printed books of yesteryear; from stories published not long after the commercialization of the printing press when there was huge excess press capacity with little content to publish (you could only print so many bibles, after all). Stories that had never before been written, printed and published to the masses were literally ‘novels’; new and never-before seen. But once novelty wears off, less dopamine is released. So producing constantly novel content is necessary to keep users coming back for more. “...what really gets us hooked isn’t consistency; it’s unpredictability. It’s knowing that something could happen - but not knowing when or if that something will occur… this unpredictability is incorporated into nearly every app on our phones.” The feel-good hormone, dopamine, is the star of The Phone Show. Just the thought that there could be new information headed our way (no matter how frightening or factual it may or may not be) is all that’s required for a warm and fuzzy hit of dopamine. Addictive behaviour is constantly reinforced and built into the algorithms behind our favourite, brightly-coloured squares. But what if what we truly need is a moment of silence? An absence of content; a break, subtraction, removal of noise, a moment of solitude without a barrage of notifications keeping us placated? As Price writes: “If our smartphones excel at one thing, it’s making sure we never, ever have to be alone with ourselves.” I’m someone who prides myself on not often feeling bored. Give me a pencil and piece of paper and I will happily spend hours (literally hours) in blissful contentment. Send me outside and I will find a way to have a good time with only the grass or sand or water around me. In the infamous words of my Granny (and echoed throughout my childhood by my Mother): “Only boring people are bored!” But recently, I’ve noticed my capacity for contentment without stimulation waning. I’m fidgety. I’m uneasy. In these moments of in-between I do what any “normal person” does: I pick up my phone. A few months ago I spent an entire 60 phoneless minutes floating in a sensory-deprivation tank. (Yes, it’s a little out of the ordinary, but hear me out.) The experience took place in a shin-deep pool of warm salt water designed to be the ultimate relaxation experience. I had no stimulation other than a few lights on the ceiling. No shirt, no shoes, no cell service. While the experience wasn’t transcendent or even really pleasurable if I’m honest, it was eye-opening and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to try it. During the float I felt bored more often than I’d like to admit and not having any concept of time (a few seconds felt like a few minutes felt like a few hours), I thought seriously about standing up and ending the experience before the 60 minute mark... more than once. I hadn’t been unstimulated like that in as long as I remember, and it was paired with a loss of control in a way that I found genuinely challenging. Being able to check our phones whenever we want, and receive the hit of dopamine each time we do, is something we take for granted and I saw the effects of losing it first hand. But maybe that’s exactly what I needed. The way I see it, one of the scariest things I stand to lose in the way our phones are changing our brains is creativity. Afterall, “...creativity is often sparked by boredom, which is another mental state that our phones are great at helping us avoid.” Boredom is a good thing. Author, Glennon Doyle, has echoed this sentiment in her book Untamed: “I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming.” In a world where passivity is the new activity and consuming is the new creating, I want more. I expect more. I need more. And while boredom doesn’t always feel good in the moment, we should recognize the important role it plays in creativity, innovation and growth. And for these reasons (and many, many more), I vow to put down my phone. The Break Up In her book, Price lays out a number of excellent thoughts and ideas about how to break up with your phone, as well as a complete 30-day program to help snap out of negative cycles and build new relationships with our phones. I’m going to highlight just a few high-level key ideas, but there are LOTS more outlined in the book so check it out if these are striking a chord. As she makes very clear in her work: “We’re trying to resolve discrepancies between how we say we want to live our lives, and how we are actually living our lives. Sure, there may be some uncomfortable moments along the way, but ultimately, breaking up with your phone should make you feel good… Our goal isn’t abstinence; it’s consciousness.” Price suggests the best place to start is to download a tracking app (iPhones have this feature now built in) to assess important stats about your phone use. How many times do you pick up your phone each day and what apps are you spending the most time using? Furthermore, ask yourself some important questions like: “What do you love about your phone? What don’t you love about your phone? What changes do you notice in yourself - positive or negative - when you spend a lot of time on your phone?” All of this behavioural assessment is setting you up to reimagine what your relationship with your phone could look like and how it can change for the better. Anytime you reach for your phone ask: WHAT FOR? What are you picking up your phone to do? WHY NOW? Why are you picking up your phone at this specific moment? WHAT ELSE? What else besides picking up your phone could you do right now? Turn unconscious habits into conscious decisions. One of the most interesting ideas in this “how section” of this book is around reframing; specifically reframing your FOMO (fear of missing out). Instead of focusing on what you’re missing out on when you’re not on social media, think about what you’re missing out on IRL (in real life!) when you’re spending time on social media. In other words, what are you missing out on in the world right in front of you, in this exact moment? Perhaps you’re missing out on your child gleefully playing (guilty) or the dog begging to be walked (double guilty) or face-to-face time with your significant other (triple guilty). While we may be missing out on the updates of online personas when we’re technologically disconnected, we’re missing out on updating our own lives when we are technologically connected. Disconnect to reconnect. If we’re merely consumers of the world and not creating our own world, whose world are we living in? We can reframe digital FOMO; spend more time actively creating our own lives, versus passively consuming others’ lives. Price also makes a great point about a different type of FOMO that exists online, running rampant on social media especially: “...the jealousy that occurs when you compare your own life to someone else’s social media feed. The irony, of course, is that most people’s feeds do not accurately represent the proportion of their lives they actually spend skiing/surfing/sitting in hot tubs with models. Also many people with enormous social media followings are actually paid to glamorize their lives. If someone’s existence looks too good to be true, it probably is.” Agreed, Catherine. Likewise, here’s some final food for thought: There is no use comparing your behind-the-scenes footage with someone else’s highlight reel. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a highlight reel, but it’s an important distinction from reality that should be consciously noted before opening social media apps. I recently saw an image that summed up the social media experience incredibly well. It was a picture of an apple looking into a mirror. The reflection of the apple in the mirror was shiny, red, perfect. However, on the other side of the apple, the side not visible to the mirror, was a secret; there was a big bite out of it. What a perfect representation of what happens all-to-often as we scroll, compare, judge, scroll, scroll, stop, read, feel guilt, feel pain, feel inadequacy, feel jealousy, scroll, scroll and so on until we get tired or remember the reason we picked up our phones in the first place. We close the app and feel that deep sense of something nagging at us. Something in our gut that we just can’t quite put a finger on, knowing that this is a feeling that often accompanies a scroll sesh, trying to ignore it and move on with our day. Another important part of this section about how to break up with your phone was Price’s prompting to re-discover what you like to do in your offline life. “If you use your phone less, you’re going to end up with more time. Unless you have some sense of how you want to be spending this reclaimed time, you’re likely to feel anxious and possibly a bit depressed - and you’ll be at risk of sliding right back into your old habits.” She suggests asking yourself what you’ve always loved to do, what you’ve always wanted to do if you had more time, as well as who you’d like to spend more time with. Once you’ve asked yourself these questions, make a list of several fun things you could do offline in the very near future. Having a list on-hand helps to diffuse any excuses you may tell yourself. So here we are. We’ve made it. Now comes the hardest (and most important) part of this process: putting down the phone and not picking it back up again for a while. “Just as intermittent fasting has been shown to be good for our physical health, regular short phone fasts - what I call “phasts” - are essential for our emotional and intellectual health. As you well know, being constantly tethered to our phones exhausts our brains; they need regular phone-free time to recover and rejuvenate. And as is also true with other potentially addictive behaviors, it’s important to take a break once in a while just to prove that you can.” It’s worth revisiting one of Price’s quotes I highlighted in an earlier post: “Our goal isn’t abstinence; it’s consciousness.” Setting your sights on unrealistic or impractically long time frames away from your phone isn’t helpful. You don’t have to spend entire days away from your phone to achieve progress. “Whatever you do, remember that the point is not to punish yourself; it’s to make yourself feel good. In other words, don’t ask yourself, ‘When could I force myself to take a break from my phone?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘When would I like to take a break from my phone?’” Price believes that the more little phasts you intentionally take for about 30 minutes at a time during the day, the less you’ll be drawn to unconsciously or habitually reaching for your phone throughout the rest of the day. There’s no one-size-fits all or one-and-done solution to make the most of our relationships with our phones. Truthfully, it seems like a bit of a silly concept to have to ‘break up’ with an inanimate object. But while our phones are just objects, they’re also more than that because there’s so much emotion attached. The people and places where we love, work and play are contained within. Like many relationships in our lives, it’s a work in progress that must be re-evaluated again and again to determine what’s working, what’s not working and how improvements can be made. I’m going to give it a real go. Starting today, I vow to act on Price’s advice and do my best to cultivate my life in lieu of consuming others’ lives. I want to spend my limited time with my young family and my friends in less of a blur, working diligently to slow down time, striving for intentionality when it comes to my attention. And my two-year-old’s recent not-so-subtle tether to my phone and my husbands phone (“I want emojiiiiiiiis” being the first thing she screams when she opens her eyes in the morning and the last thing she yells at night before exhaustion takes over) is an eye-opening reflection of the amount of time and attention our phones are getting in the presence of our children, as well as their telling addictive nature, even in the eyes of a human who can’t yet use a toilet. So I invite you to try it. For 30 minutes try ‘phasting’ as a great step to being more conscious of the attention our phones passively command, and in turn, actively command that attention be paid to our consciousness. So, phone, it’s official. We need a break. Music: Podington Bear - The Speed of Life Freesound: Kim_Kimovna - meow adriann - dopamine harp Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

You’ve arrived at the future of digital publishing! Welcome! In between taking our self-driving hover cars to soccer practice and comforting our emotional artificially intelligent house robots after a particularly hard day, what will the future of digital publishing look like? There are lots of possibilities (and lots of predictions) as to what the future of digital publishing could look like. If you haven’t yet seen IDEO’s The Future of the Book (the link is available in the show notes at talkpaperscissors.info), please check it out now. Run, don’t walk - it’s incredible! It details three concepts for what the future of the book could look like, including ‘Coupland’ (which allows users to connect within their professional networks to find new books and build shared libraries alongside their colleagues), ‘Nelson’ (in which readers have access to multiple viewpoints and and commentary within a digital book’s interface, reinforcing the central role of books as the carriers of knowledge), and ‘Alice’ (facilitating nonlinear and participatory narratives, turning traditional storytelling upside down with technologies like geolocation to unlock pieces of the story, allowing readers to enter a whole new world). The one that intrigues me the most is Alice. Building on IDEO’s initial concept, I think that enabling creative collaboration among online communities to reimagine works of literary fiction (especially works that are freely available for use in the public domain like the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) could re-invigorate the stories and find new audiences the world over. Furthermore, how cool would it be for readers to participate in non-traditional collaboration with a long-deceased author by adding sub-layers and new context to their stories, remixing and having a hand in our new world of participatory culture? Retelling a story with new media, helping to create new narratives (and crowdsourcing new narratives) and then communicating them from the perspectives of the characters through digital media channels commonly reserved only for friends and family (ex: texting, social media) could be an unparalleled experience in storytelling through digital means. One possible way I see it executed is to have the text exist on a website where the reader opts-in at the beginning of the experience with their phone number and social media handles. As they read through the story there are prompts throughout where they can hear from different characters via their devices. Imagine stepping into the digital world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz where, as you’re reading the story, the Cowardly Lion is sending you frazzled text messages about his need to find you ASAP. The Scarecrow is sending you the latest Bernie Sanders’ meme and the Tin Man’s joints are too locked-up to text until you geolocate to the nearest mechanic’s shop to re-lubricate his limbs before he can use his phone. Even Toto’s in on the action - he’s got his own Instagram following of nearly 1M. This could help deepen connections between the characters and the readers, as well as between online fan fiction communities and the authors' works. While my interpretation of the technical roll-out of a website is a little, how do you say... ‘basic’, this idea could be interwoven into current e-reading platforms and authors could even write their stories with these additional sublayers and interactions in mind. It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure book combined with fan fiction told through digital media and devices to deepen readers’ connections to the story, authors and their reading communities. While versions of this have been tried (Seed Story and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal both come to mind), publishers have yet to go all in on this multi-layered, intertwined, collective storytelling experience. Perhaps it’s telling that IDEO’s The Future of the Book is now 11 years in the past. Feeling incredibly progressive and promising in 2010, no publisher has really run with any of these ideas. Perhaps the return on investment is too suspect or the sheer magnitude of transforming a static story into a multi-layered, multi-faceted narrative adventure isn’t yet worth the effort or seen as necessary in order to compete. Whatever the case, I think there are still so many brave new worlds in digital publishing that haven’t been explored yet in any way, shape or form. While it’s fun to dream up possibilities of where the future of storytelling through digital publishing may lead, let’s come back down to reality. I’ve asked Jason Lisi, Chair of the School of Graphic Communications Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada to join me in today’s episode. He’s a technical whiz in the world of the graphic arts, specifically as it relates to PDF standards. Jason is an active member of the Ghent Workgroup whose work revolves around PDF and the standards that build on the PDF format. He is also a subject matter expert for the Organization of International Standardization (ISO) that develops and maintains the PDF and PDF/X standards. We all know (and love!) PDFs as a user-friendly, powerful file format for everyday personal and professional use. PDFs can be published, printed, shared, used for collaboration, authenticated and more, which makes them a powerhouse of a universal file format. They allow users to quite literally “get on the same page” and PDFs play a huge role in the digital publishing landscape so I’ve asked Jason to come here today to help us more thoroughly understand where the PDF is headed. Key takeaways from my conversation with Jason: A PDF is like any other file format, however it’s strengths lie in the fact that it’s an open standard, consists of vector and raster objects, platform agnostic and based on the page description language PostScript When we speak about PDF in general terms, we are actually referring to PDF as specified in the ISO 32000 standard PDF/X restricts the feature set of PDF to include only those features that are acceptable for print production, eliminating uncertainty and better predicting the successful output of PDF files for professional in print and publishing PDF/UA (Universal Access) means that those requiring the use of assistive devices will have unobstructed access to the contents of that PDF file and for the most part are WCAG 2.0 compliant PDF/VT (Variable and Transactional) was designed specifically for variable data printing and is ideal for graphic rich black and white or colour files that recognizes repeated elements and only requires them to be RIPped once (R.O.O.M. - RIP once, output many) PDFs have evolved to meet the growing demands of industry and Jason predicts that PDF will need to continue to evolve to meet the needs of society moving forward You would never expect an EPUB file that’s reflowable and great for mobile to act like a PDF file, so why would we expect a PDF file to behave like an EPUB file? If PDFs were dynamic and adaptive, they no longer would have the characteristic of reliable and consistent appearance. PDF is a tool - even the best screwdriver in the world won’t saw through wood because that’s not what it’s designed to do Jason sees no reason why AI would not play a role in the future of publishing (D.O.O.M. principle – design once, output many) If the PDF were human, it would be a hip 20 something in terms of its relative age and stage If there is any file format that could enjoy eternal life, it would be PDF Music: Podington Bear - Electric Car Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

We have now arrived at digital publishing’s present. Glad to have you here! While it’s impossible to explore every single thing that’s currently going on in the multifaceted, far-reaching world of digital publishing, we’re going to have a look at four hot topics that you should understand if you want to be in the know in this industry. From DRM to capabilities of InDesign CC to self publishing and publishing in a pandemic, let’s have a look at where digital publishing is today. Hot Topic #1: Digital Rights Management (DRM) Digital rights management (DRM) is kind of exactly what it sounds like. It’s a way for publishers to systematically approach and manage copyright protection of their digital media works. If you’ve ever purchased an e-book you have experienced DRM. As you may have experienced, you cannot simply share or distribute an ebook in the same way that you can share a physical book. That’s because ebooks rights are managed in a way that restricts unauthorized distribution of the work. Another way to think about it is that a digital media file protected by DRM is “wrapped” to prevent it from being shared or copied. The restrictions are applied by the retailer/distributor. If you’ve ever borrowed an ebook from the library, the DRM applied to loaned ebooks works in a way that restricts viewing to a specific time frame. So you’re able to view the book for a set time (ex: 3 weeks) and after that time limit is up, the book disappears from your virtual bookshelf. (No late fees to see here, thank you very much!) So in the same way that libraries purchase a specific number of copies of a physical book for their locations, they also purchase licences to loan out specific numbers of digital copies of ebooks that comply with the DRM. The concept of DRM can be controversial: If I buy a hardcopy book, I can share it so why can’t I share a digital book that I’ve purchased? Well, here’s a way you can think about it. Not just anybody has access to a high-resolution scanner, a printing press and professional binding equipment that would be needed to reproduce a printed book, however the ease and speed of distribution of digital content means that without DRM it would be really easy for someone to buy something once and share it with all of their friends, the world over. This spirit of gifting and abundance sounds lovely, however think of it from the publisher’s perspective; it would quickly destroy the publishing industry as we know it. So DRM imposes restrictions embedded within the digital media that make it difficult, if not impossible, to share freely. But before DRM, digital content must be created to have any rights to manage. Take it away, trend #2... Hot Topic #2: Software for Digital Publishing The Adobe Creative Suite, and specifically InDesign, is the de facto standard in layout and publishing. InDesign Creative Cloud (CC) makes it easy to design a publication once and then re-purpose it for multiple mediums; both printed and digital. Interactive PDFs with hyperlinks, embedded video and audio, as well as form fields and buttons can be created with just a few clicks. Furthermore, InDesign CC also allows you to create SWF (‘swiff’) presentation files, which is a type of animation file that allows users to realistically turn the pages of digital documents to provide greater realism and enhanced sensory appeal. It also allows you to animate text and images within the digitally published document. Finally, InDesign CC allows you to create and export epub ebooks, either as a fixed layout or as a reflowable layout. In a fixed layout epub, the layout of each page won’t change in the ebook reader and it’s primarily used for documents with lots of images that the author does not want reflowed in undesirable ways. Conversely, reflowable epub documents allow text to freely reflow from page-to-page as it’s resized by the reader, primarily for text-heavy long documents. These small epub files work wonderfully on mobile devices and they can be used to sell your work in online bookstores, such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or Kobo Writing Life. This is a perfect segue to our next trend... Hot Topic #3: Self Publishing Self publishing is a huge and exciting trend that’s gaining traction and challenging the traditional publishing market. In the days of yesteryear, if you wanted to publish a book, one of the only ways you could do it was by having a publisher buy the rights to your work and publish it on your behalf. While this model has worked well for hundreds of years, the Internet has ushered in the age of democratized published works and has created the conditions within which the traditional publishing model is less important today. Notice I used the term less important and not not important, as traditional publishing still absolutely has its place in this world as a means to provide high-quality professionally-vetted fact checked content and as a way to provide readers with some level of assurance of the quality of the writing and quality of content overall. However, by removing the publishing middle person and gatekeepers to information, this opens up a whole new world of niche content that would never have been financially viable at any other time in history. Typically for a publishing project to be worth doing (in financial terms), it must be anticipated or predicted to cover the costs of the expertise put into it (from the author through to the editors, layout artists, printers, and many, many more involved along the way) and turn a profit. But with the decentralized model of self publishing, there are huge opportunities for anyone to publish work about anything (and at any quality level). Do you want to create a book all about the art of butter sculptures? How about a beautiful coffee table-style digital book all about celebrating Christmas in July...specifically in Winnipeg? Why not? It doesn’t matter anymore if there is a very (sometimes very, very) small niche audience who wants to read your content. The costs associated with publishing the work are little to none, above and beyond the time the author spends writing and editing. As one of my favourite thought leaders, Seth Godin, explores in his book We Are All Weird: The Myth of Mass and The End of Compliance, we can celebrate choice and embrace the power of the Internet to allow us all to be heard, no matter how wacky our interests may be. “A new era of weirdness is upon us” and I am here for it. This weirdness takes the form of sometimes very specific interests and the internet allows us to connect with “our people” from anywhere on the planet, in ways that could never have been possible only a decade or two ago. One of my absolute favourite stories of self publishing was told in a TEDx event by author of The Martian, Andy Weir. His hilarious, informative and self-deprecating coming-of-age-as-a-novelist story is entitled Ending The Old Boy Network: The New World of Publishing. In a story that lasts just over 15 minutes, Weir describes wanting to be a novelist as a child, but choosing a more practical and stable major: computer programming. When he was laid off in 1999 and given a healthy severance package, he decided that this was his time to give professional publishing a go. So he wrote a novel. He tried to get a literary agent. He tried to break into the publishing industry. Three years went by and he decided that enough time had passed trying to live out his dream but it just didn’t work out so he could move on knowing that he’d tried. Weir went back to the world of computer programming and as a hobby, he continued to write and did so on his website. He posted lots of different work, really whatever he felt like writing about that day and his small community of readers would give him feedback. The Martian was one of the works he was writing as a serial, chapter-by-chapter, and it took him three years from 2009 to 2012 to complete it. His readers loved The Martian but didn’t like reading it on his website so they asked him to make an ebook version of it. He made an ebook and posted it on his website. His readers yet again provided him with some feedback that they love that there’s an ebook version but they would really love it if it was located in an ebook store where they could more easily download it. He self-published to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. He wanted to offer it to his readers for free, as he had always done with the story on his website, however Amazon doesn’t allow free ebooks. So, he set the price at $0.99, the absolute lowest possible price you’re allowed to charge for an ebook. One thing led to another and sales started to snowball. The book was passed around from friend to friend and landed in the hands of a literary agent. He read it, loved it and called Weir to help him work out the printed book deal. Around the same time, 20th Century Fox called and wanted to purchase the film rights. Both deals were finalized within four days of each other. So while Weir had spent three focused years trying to make his publishing dream a reality through traditional means, he had inadvertently backed up into it when he least expected it, in the most delightful and endearing story possible. (Is someone writing this stuff down? Someone needs to write a book about this!) Weir’s closing thoughts in the talk were this: the publishing industry has been difficult to break into for hundreds of years. Only in the last 15 years has the wide-spread use of the Internet and self-publishing platforms allowed authors to write and share their work without anyone’s permission. In other words, write your book and don’t wait for anyone to tell you otherwise. But self publishing isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop a work of fiction or nonfiction and then write, rewrite, edit, rewrite again and so on until the work is ready for publication. In a guest lecture to my book publishing students in 2018, former Director of Kobo Writing Life, Christine Munroe, explained that the self publishing market is a very long tail. If you picture a graph where the y (vertical) axis represents popularity (units or dollar value sold) and the x (horizontal) axis represents the all-time sales rank of a published book based on a ranking like you can find on Amazon, the best selling and therefore most profitable books in the self publishing world are relatively few and the vast majority of books exist in the far-reaching long tail. In other words, there are a few books on top who make millions doing it and there are many, many more who make some, very little or virtually no money. Taking into consideration all extremes, the mean revenue for a self-published book is… (drum roll please…) about $350. Total. Forever. However, self-publishing also doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing scenario. There are ‘hybrid’ publishing options for authors, where, for example, a trade publisher buys the rights to a book in one country and the author self publishes that same book in every other country. There are no hard rules; just creative solutions to get the right content into the hands of the right readers. If, after hearing all of this, you’re still interested in self publishing, Munroe offers up ‘The 3 P’s of Self Publishing Success’: Practice - rule of 3 (you need 3 books to build a readership) Patience - overnight success takes time Persistence - write your NEXT great book; keep trying new things Whether you choose to try your luck with a traditional publishing route and have the support of professionals massaging and marketing your work OR try your luck with self publishing, which removes the red tape but there’s little-to-no professional support or any way to cut through the digital noise, both avenues require ‘trying your luck’. Yes, there’s skill involved, but as an author you have to have a willingness to accept that you might be creating something that only a handful of people will ever read. But, on the flip side, it can work out; just ask Mr. Weir or Ms. Rowling. But it’s one thing to try your hand at publishing under normal, everyday circumstances and constraints, but what about trying to publish today. As in, right now. As Charles Dickens’ aptly states in the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Coming in hot, here’s the final trend... Hot Topic #4: Publishing In a Pandemic As Ross so eloquently put it in a classic episode of Friends (which also turned out to be the unofficial word of the year in 2020): PIVOT! PIVOT! And this is exactly what many publishers have had to do this year, some to thrive and some to simply survive. In an enlightening podcast episode entitled Publishing in a Pandemic Special from the Media Voices podcast recorded in April 2020, the three person team discusses what it means to be a publisher in a pandemic. They cited an interesting case study chronicled by the Nieman lab of what it means to be a publisher with a paywall during the pandemic. The Atlantic decided that it was more important to publish important, and potentially life saving, information about the coronavirus for free and lift the paywall on this content than it was to keep it behind paywalls. While a case can be made that publishers still have bills to pay and essentials such as food and shelter aren’t free so why should information about the virus in articles typically encased within paywalls, however I think a better argument can be made about the moral responsibility of big-name publishers to provide this valuable, factual information in an age where fake news runs rampant and a huge percentage of the American population doesn’t trust traditional media outlets (according to The State of Digital Publishing, in 2020 a mere 41% of Americans trust mass media outlets). For their free COVID content, The Atlantic was rewarded indirectly by seeing a huge surge in the number of digital subscriptions. Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg sent an email to his staff that read: “We have never, in the 163-year history of this magazine, had an audience like we had in March: 87 million unique visitors to our site, and more than 168 million pageviews. The number of unique visitors is astonishing — more than double the previous one-month record. But the most notable statistic, the one with possibly the greatest salience for The Atlantic’s future, is this: Your work has brought in more than 36,000 new subscribers over the past four weeks, even as we have lifted paywall restrictions on our coronavirus coverage.” Bringing on 36,000 subscribers to any digital publication is impressive, never mind in 4 weeks… during a pandemic. Goldberg attributes the success to a number of factors, including the redesign of the magazine (starting in December 2019), paywall architecture and what he calls “high-touch copy editing and fact checking” within the publications digital content. The Media Voices podcast hosts, Chris, Peter and Esther, made a number of excellent points in their coverage, including the fact that it’s obvious, now more than ever before, that publishers need diverse monetization strategies and can’t rely only on subscriptions or only on hosting events or only on advertising revenue. They must determine many revenue streams so that there are fail safes in place when a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime health pandemic shakes up the entire world and the publishing realm within it. Let’s look at an ebook statistic for a minute. In an article from The Guardian from November 2020 entitled Pandemic drives ebook and audiobook sales by UK publishers to all-time high, author Mark Sweney details that the ebook industry has suffered six straight years of a decline in sales, the industry peaking in the UK in 2014. In 2020, UK publishers saw ebook sales hit an all-time high, up 17%. While the UK saw print sales decline by 17% in 2020, the rise in ebook sales doesn’t make up for the loss because the print sales account for approximately 80% of the overall publishing market. So a gain of 17% in a small percentage of the market doesn’t make up for the losses in a large percentage of the market. It’s no surprise that 2020 was a tumultuous year for the publishing industry. It will be incredibly interesting to see the ways in which an industry that is hundreds of years old, continues to reinvent itself in 2021 and beyond. And I suppose that moves us nicely along to our third and final episode looking to digital publishing’s future. Music: Podington Bear - This Little Piggy Drum Roll - HoBoTrails Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, whose past, present and future spirits arrive on Christmas Eve to show him a side of himself he can’t see from within, I too will be taking you on a journey, although it will likely prove less prolific and transformative than Scrooge’s experience. Nevertheless, over the next three episodes of Talk Paper Scissors, I will be your guide through the past, present and future of digital publishing. There’s lots to learn about digital publishing of yesteryear, including the technologies that made it mainstream. That’s what this episode is all about, where I will cover the first 40 years or so of the history of digital publishing from 1971 to about 2010. The second episode will capture the snapshot of the last 10 years, from 2011 to 2021. Digital publishing of today represents a variety of formats on platforms both new and established. And while we can never know about digital publishing of tomorrow until it becomes the present, there are exciting new opportunities for connection that we will explore, including the ways in which this hyper-connectedness may directly and indirectly impact the world of digital publishing. The final episode will cover trends and what might happen in 2022 and beyond. A logical starting point before we look behind us, observe where we’re at right now and squint to see the future, is to simply define the term “digital publishing”. Let’s start there. “Digital” refers to the digitization, or computerization, of content. Whether viewing content on a screen or listening to digitally stored music or a podcast in our ears, we live in a very digital world. Digital mediums and formats are useful for many reasons, such as their ability to be replicated an infinite number of times, shared instantly and globally and be remixed into something new. With the advent and commercialization of the Internet came new avenues to distribute content to newfound audiences. This segues nicely into “publishing”, for which the dictionary definition states: “the occupation, business, or activity of preparing and issuing books, journals, and other material for sale”. However today’s digital landscape has broadened the scope of this definition in a way that the publishing industry even 20 years ago is unlikely to have predicted. We are all now publishers. When we create content and put it out for the world to see, whether in the form of photographs or video or writing or music or any combination thereof, we are publishers. The Internet has democratized the publishing process and if you want to get something out into the world, you no longer have to receive permission and approval and cut through red tape to do so, you can just publish it for the world to see. And if the Internet were a flame that ignited the self-publishing revolution then social media is the gasoline, the accelerant, poured onto the flames that caused them to shoot up into the air for all to see. Social media added fuel to the fire and facilitated new ways to share content with friends, family and like-minded individuals across a variety of platforms with precise algorithms getting content to people who will be most interested in seeing it. An audience can be found for nearly every imaginable subject; every unique niche topic and area of interest has a home on the Internet, unrestricted in mass, not bound by any physical size constraints. This has created a new phenomenon whereby appealing to the masses has been eclipsed by appealing to individuals, which one of my favourite creativity thought leaders, Seth Godin, explains in his wonderfully quirky little book ‘We Are All Weird”. But I digress. I’m getting ahead of myself. When we put “digital” and “publishing” together, we come to a definition that could encompass everything from PDFs and eBooks to apps and games and social media. For purposes of this 3-part podcast mini-series, we’re sticking to digital publishing in the more traditional publishing sense. Documents and books that live in digital format, weather locally on individual computers and/or shared on interconnected platforms. That said, the potential role that social media could play in the future of the book can’t be denied. I’ll be veering into the mainstream media lane when we take the exit ramp into the future of digital publishing. Let’s do this. Put on your slippers and overcoat, and let’s head out into the cold night air as I introduce you to digital publishing’s past. We’ve arrived in the 1970’s. 1971 to be exact. In his wildest dreams Gutenberg couldn’t have imagined the long-lasting impact of his efforts or the trajectory of his converted wine press. What started as a way to print bibles efficiently and profitably has transformed our entire world, enabling all of the communications technologies leading to today, as well as all other wonders of modern life. It’s fitting then that the widely recognized birth of digital publishing started in 1971 (predating the modern Internet), with the launch of Project Gutenberg by Michael Hart. Project Gutenberg is an online library of free digital books; their mission “to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks”. It started at the University of Illinois with Hart hand-typing ‘The Declaration of Independence’, as he tried to navigate how he would add value to the world and repay the immense amount of computer time he’d been gifted by the university (equivalent to $100,000,000). In a 1992 article by Hart, entitled The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg, he states: “The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.” Hart believed from the beginning of his Project Gutenberg journey that the “...greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries”. The entire premise upon which Project Gutenberg was founded was that anything that could be entered into a computer meant that it could be replicated an indefinite number of times. He used the term “Replicator Technology” and conceivably, anyone and everyone in the world (even outside of this world!) could have a copy of a document that lives inside of a computer. “Electronic Texts” (Etexts) are made available by Project Gutenberg so that works are in the simplest format and accessible to the greatest number of people. Project Gutenberg is all about free access of valuable works to the greatest number of people. I recently searched for this first entry on the Project Gutenberg site and, sure enough, there it was; the very first entry with a release date of December 1, 1971, filed away on the Internet in an appropriately modest and historical URL that sums it up wonderfully: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1. That was 50 years ago. Project Gutenberg now boasts 60,000 free eBooks in both ePub and Kindle formats. 1980’s here we come. The year is 1982 and the first CD-ROM (Compact Disc with Read Only Memory) just became commercially available. This changed the way people were able to share digital information. CD-ROM’s obviously had important uses in the music and video industry (a vintage Aqua CD still lives happily in my car), but publishers also found a way to make use of the technology. Publishers like National Geographic magazine sold and distributed CD-ROMs of their issues. This allowed for digital copies to be made available and viewed on screen at a time when the Internet wasn’t widely available for home use yet. Furthermore, digital rights management (or DRM, something we’ll be exploring in the next podcast episode) could be controlled by the publisher when distributed in CD-ROM format. Additionally, CD-ROMs could hold so much text information that an entire’s encyclopedia’s worth of text could be contained on a single CD-ROM. The entire 21-volume, 65 lb., 9,000,000 word Grolier’s encyclopedia could fit onto a single compact disc. This was mind blowing at the time. To give you a little perspective, a CD-ROM in the 1980’s could hold about 700 MB of data. A fairly standard and cheaply available 16 GB USB stick contains 23x the data storage of a single CD-ROM. After the CD-ROM came some exciting and groundbreaking technological advances in the world of digital publishing... Here’s looking at you, 1990’s. Welcome to 1992! The Toronto Blue Jays baseball team won the World Series championship, Home Alone 2: Lost In New York premiered in theatres and the PDF was born. It was a BIG year. A PDF (or Portable Document Format) is a cross-platform compatible, now staple of the modern digital publishing world. Appearing the same on any device or operating system makes information exchange seamless and elevates the PDF to modern marvel. They are easy to make, send and receive. The year prior in 1991, the co-founder of Adobe, Dr. John Warnock, began ‘The Camelot Project’ with the aim of anyone being able to capture documents from any application and send it electronically anywhere and print them on any machine. By 1992, the format became a reality when the PDF was created. PDF is now an open standard, overseen by the International Standards Organization (ISO). PDF’s can contain all sorts of information: text, images, links, buttons, form fields, audio, video and even business logic. PDF files are also the defacto standard for the printing industry. Which means, whether a publication is intended for digital publication, traditional publication or both, PDF files will play an integral role in the publishing process. There are many different PDF Standards, all with different purposes. Some of the most common in the publishing world include: PDF/X (for print and creative professionals because high resolution images, fonts and colour profiles are embedded within), PDF/UA (designed to aid in accessibility and readability for those who use screen readers - the UA stands for ‘Universal Access’) and PDF/VT (also for print professionals, but specifically for those who use PDFs to customize information, such as information in bank statements or marketing material - the VT stands for variable and transactional), among others. We’re going to hear more about PDFs and what the future holds for this universal standard in digital publishing in a later episode. Let’s jump ahead two years to 1994 when the first online diary (later coined ‘Blog’) is written. Then-student, Justin Hall, is credited with creating the first blog, Links.net (a URL still in existence and added to regularly!). He used this platform to publish his writing and provide links to content. His first entry in January 1994 read: Welcome to my first attempt at Hypertext Howdy, this is twenty-first century computing... (Is it worth our patience?) I'm publishing this, and I guess you're readin' this, in part to figure that out, huh? High Stylin' on the Wurld Wyde Webb This is a Hypertext server using MacHTTP v1.2.3 running on a Powerbook 180 w/ 8 RAM and a 120 HD. It is currently being broadcast from the depths of Willets, a dorm nestled in the shrubbery here at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennisylvania. I’m getting a little ahead of myself timeline wise, but I want to share with you a particularly interesting example of success in the blogosphere. Julie Powell was a modern New York woman working in a job she hated, trying to navigate life and reignite her passion for life. In trying to figure this out, Julie decided to embark on a journey of cooking every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking; a lofty goal for someone who “had never eaten an egg before she tackled Oeufs a la Fondue de Fromage”. She decided to call her experiment The Julie/Julia Project and chronicle her adventure on a blog, beginning in 2002. Julie’s blog grew a large following and it was featured in an article in The New York Times which really put it on the map. Publishing company, Little, Brown and Company offered Julie an opportunity to develop a book about her experience. The resulting book, published in 2005, was called Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 542 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. That’s a pretty big deal for a little blog. An even bigger deal was when the film rights were purchased on the story was adapted into a feature film starring Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl (Freaking!) Streep as Julia Child. The film was released in 2009. What a ride! (As an aside, who would you play you in a film about your life? Me? Tina Fey, please.) While the real Julia Child wasn’t a fan of Julie’s blog saying “I don’t think she’s a serious cook”, Julie was awarded an honorary diploma from Le Cordon Bleu, which is the same cooking school that Julia Child graduated from in 1951. What a blog-tastic story! In the next episode of this podcast, looking at digital publishing’s present, we’ll hear about another blog turned movie blockbuster success. With that little skip ahead behind us, let’s now officially head Into the new millennium! The Year is 2000. The world’s banking systems didn’t set themselves back 100 years and Will Smith may have released the greatest song of our time (in my humble opinion). Google, founded only two years earlier, had a very ambitious goal: they aimed to digitize the world’s books. In an absolutely incredible 2017 article by The Atlantic, entitled Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them. Author James Somers details the long-held dream of a “universal library”; one-click access to a collection of nearly every book that has ever been published that’s out of print available for free at terminals in every local library the world over. That was the dream. It wasn’t the capabilities of the technology - hardware or software - that stopped this dream from becoming a reality, instead it was the judicial system (and scholars, archivists and librarians standing opposite Google in the courtroom) that saw the modern-day library of Alexandria go up in virtual flames. “Project Ocean” (Google’s effort to scan every book in the world) began in 2002 when Google co-founder, Larry Page, sat down with a 300-page book and a metronome to figure out how long it would take to scan a book. It took 40 minutes. And at that rate, scanning the 7 million volumes just contained within the University of Michigan’s collection would take… about a thousand years. Page told the university that they could do it in six years. With this lofty challenge ahead of them, semi trucks filled with books showed up at Google scanning centres every day of the week. It took just over a decade, but Google outpaced Page’s ambitious previous goal, having scanned almost 25 million books in just over 10 years time, costing the company approximately $400 million dollars. How did they do it? The article describes one Google scanning site, a converted office building on Google’s Mountain View campus as custom-made scanning/photographing stations arranged in rows, each with a human operator and each station could digitize 1,000 pages per hour. Each station contained four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book and technology that would compensate for the curvature of the book. Pages were turned by hand and the cameras would fire when the operator manually pressed a foot pedal. Software employed de-warping algorithms to adjust pages after they were scanned, speeding up the scanning process. 50 full-time software engineers were assigned to the task, creating OCR (optical character recognition) software that turned raw images into text, creating the de-warping, colour-correction and contrast-adjustment instructions, as well as detect illustrations and diagrams, page numbers and turn footnotes into real citations. In a perfect marriage of established and new-fangled digital publishing technology, in August 2010, Google released a blog post that announced that there were 129,864,880 books in the world… and the company was going to scan them all. Holy smokes. But it all went up in smoke when, as James Somers explains: “What happened was complicated but how it started was simple: Google did that thing where you ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and forgiveness was not forthcoming. Upon hearing that Google was taking millions of books out of libraries, scanning them, and returning them as if nothing had happened, authors and publishers filed suit against the company, alleging, as the authors put it simply in their initial complaint, “massive copyright infringement.”” The result is a long, complicated series of lawsuits and statutory damages for “willful infringement” of a copyright that could run as high as $150,000 for each work infringed upon (tens of millions of books times $150,000… carry the one…) they were looking at trillions of dollars in potential liability… yikes. It was a complicated and important series of lawsuits for everyone affected by copyright. I encourage you to check out the article for yourself. It’s a long one, but an amazing account of one of the most significant moments in the history of digital publishing and the enforcement of copyright law. At the end of the article, the author, James Somers, says this: “I asked someone who used to have that job, what would it take to make the books viewable in full to everybody? I wanted to know how hard it would have been to unlock them. What’s standing between us and a digital public library of 25 million volumes? You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.” Incredible. While there was LOTS going on with digital publishing in the early 2000’s, there are two more notable events I’ll mention before we round out our look at digital publishing’s past. The next took place in 2007, when the EPUB 2.0 format (that enabled a unifying standard for publishing ebooks) was established. EPUB is a standardized, open source file format managed by the IDPF (international Digital Publishing Forum) and it is what you see when you open up most eBooks on a variety of devices. Without getting too technical, before EPUB 2.0 there was the original OEB 1.0 (Open EBook) specification that was developed in 1999. This consisted of a single HTML file an OPF (open package format) file contained within a folder. The advent of EPUB is so important because before this standard, some publishers had to make six different versions of every title: OEB, Microsoft LIT, Palm, Sony, Mobipocket and PDF. Additionally, timing played a role. Just a few months before the EPUB 2.0 standard, Apple released the first iPhone and just a few months after, Amazon released the Kindle. Here were two major players hedging their bets in the online world of digital books. There have been a variety of updates to EPUB since then, some more useful and desired than others. This includes the EPUB 3 standard released 10 years ago in 2011 based on HTML5 with audio and video capability. EPUB files can be read on different types of electronic devices such as e-book readers, tablets and phones. There are reflowable EPUB documents that allow text to be enlarged or reduced in size, as well as for the typeface and background colour to be changed). This is ideal for long text documents in the trade book publishing market. There are also fixed-layout EPUB documents that allow readers to zoom in and out of a page, but the text doesn’t reflow. This is typically used for publications like children’s books and cookbooks whose image and illustration-heavy design elements can’t easily be broken across pages. My Final Thoughts on Digital Publishing’s Past There is A LOT to cover in the world of digital publishing’s past and it’s nearly impossible to cover each and every detail and important moment and technology, many of which intersect, build on one another and collide in the first 40 years of digital publishing. But in a world where it feels like digital is taking over the world in many domains, can print and digital happily coexist in the publishing realm? In a blog post I wrote in February 2014 entitled Print & Digital Publishing: Long Lost Lovers (a digitally published piece about digital publishing!), here’s what my seven years ago self had to say about the world of print publishing meeting the world of digital publishing. Many publishing theorists say that print is a dying medium. Ebooks and digital publishing technologies are the way of the future and the future’s here now (so watch your back, print!). I have a different take on traditional versus digital publishing, which is to say that they are meant to be together. In my scope of work, I teach students traditional publishing means, including printing technology and preparing files for printed output. As a graduate student, I opt for the ePub version of course textbooks whenever I have a choice and I spend the majority of my time expressing my views in pixels, not on paper. Furthermore, I love nothing more than the tactility of fine paper and the authentic smell of an old book that ties the present to the past; but I equally love dynamic search capabilities, hyperlinking and the ability to choose my typeface available with a digital book, tying the present to the future. You may call me a walking contradiction, but I believe that there are times when printed mediums work better and there are times when digital platforms simply work better. This long lost love affair between print and digital publishing extends much further than their nostalgia and functionality. I don’t think they simply want each other, so much as they sometimes need each other too. To round out the idea that traditional printed publishing and modern digital publishing are, indeed, meant to be together (in the same way that the two protagonists in a Nicholas Sparks book are meant to be together), here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote for Graphic Arts Magazine in November 2011 about the new frontiers of digital archiving and preserving important printed matter, entitled Print Through the Ages. Entire new disciplines of study have been established from the convergence of literature, printing and digitization: Digital Humanists. In an age where the disciplines of technology and humanity have come face to face, Digital Humanists are creating new possibilities for archiving printed matter and enabling accessibility to more people than ever before. I had the pleasure of listening to Cara Leitch and Julie Meloni discuss “The Future of the History of the Book” at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Cara is a Researcher who works in UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), a facility in which data-harvesting, textual content analysis and document encoding takes place. Cara’s focus is on digitizing 19th Century texts and social networking. Julie has also worked in the ETCL with a focus on Information Management. They are both book lovers and consider themselves “Digital Humanists”. Through their work, they rediscover the meaning of texts by using technology, comparing with other texts and annotating. Through using OCR software, as well as crowdsourcing, Digital Humanists preserve texts of the past for future generations to enjoy. It is important to understand how printed documents and books of the past will be preserved for future generations. Environmental conditions, such as temperature, relative humidity and light all play a role in the deterioration of paper and printed matter. Digitizing is the answer for increasing longevity, accessibility, and broader use of a given document. Print advocates and old book lovers the world over have always faced the challenge of preserving books but now have a viable resource to preserve information long into the foreseeable future. Even our national memory institution, Library and Archives Canada, understands the importance of the momentous shift in archiving processes and keeping up with technology to stay relevant. Digitization of old printed matter has created new jobs and research opportunities, as Digital Humanists use technology to learn about printed documents in whole new ways. So a strong case could be made that traditional and digital publishing both have their places in this world and work pretty well together, if I do say so myself. That’s what makes them the perfect couple; a modern day Notebook. The past is behind us. So now tuck yourself back into bed and you will soon learn all about digital publishing’s present. Music and Sound Effects: Podington Bear - The Gall 1970’s - DDmyzik 1980’s - Beetlemuse 1990’s - monkeyman535 Happy New Year - stomachache 2000’s - blaerg Podington Bear - Kitty in the Window Podington Bear - Smooth Actor Podington Bear - The Gall Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

I have a little New Year’s Day tradition. Every New Year’s Day for the last four or five years I’ve done some goal setting and I don’t think that’s new or novel for anybody. What I started to do was not just set goals, but visually layout what I hope the year ahead will look like. Some may call this vision boarding and there are other names for it as well, but I try not to get hung up on specifics. I think about how I want to feel in the coming year, more so than trying to define specific goals. I think look for images that align with these feelings. I try to align the actual subject matter of the image, but also the colours used and things like the viewpoint or perspective of the photo. I try not to think over-think it or get too technical about it, but aim for the photos to feel right. I’ve also started adding some words or short phrases that describe the way I hope my upcoming year will unfold. For example, in 2020 my word was PLAY. Have I done as much playing in 2020 as I would’ve hoped? If I’m speaking honestly, probably not. There were a lot of curveballs thrown at the world in 2020 but I’m still glad I intentionally thought about this word at the beginning of the year. Using that word helped me focus on what was most important for me this past year, which was looking after my two little girls and play is obviously a big part of that. So consciously and subconsciously I think that establishing play as my word helped me make important decisions and prioritize what I took on and what I said no to. This type of exercise is especially well-suited to visual thinkers like myself. I encourage you to try it today if you’re listening to this on January 1, or anytime you need a bit of a refresh or refocusing as to what the priorities should be in your life. For example, this would be a really great exercise to do at the beginning of each season or maybe at the beginning of September, which is the start of the academic year for lots of people and to me it feels like a second new year. So happy goal setting if that’s what you’re into and you may want to choose a couple of photos (or even just a single photo) that helps clarify less what you want to do in the coming year and how you want to feel. And if you’re wondering what word I’ve selected for 2021, it’s ENERGY. Not so much that I’m looking for more energy within myself (I mean I’d love that, who wouldn’t?!); instead I want to tap into subtle sips of energy that come my way. I’m the kind of person who dives into a project headfirst and I don’t come up for air until it’s over. At which point I look for the next project pool to dive into, get lost underwater for a time, and while I enjoy being down there I know it can be a lot for those around me. I know that I sometimes miss out on the energy from those around me, which goes a long way to making life worth living. For example, there are times when I’ve had my head shoved in a book or in my laptop when my girls are playing gleefully in front of me (the word PLAY is still, very much, at the forefront too). But what I want to spend more time doing is engaging and re-energizing in these moments of play and joy for their sake as well as mine. I think a big reason that 2020 was so challenging for a lot of people was there were a lot of distractions (albeit important distractions) that put people in a position where they were turning away from the energy of the humans around them, or in many cases they are simply weren’t as many humans around us whose energy we could feed off of. I felt this a lot in my teaching. Moving to a completely online “Zoom University” format meant that I didn’t have the same experience feeling the energy that I used to feel with students present. And whether that was positive high energy or even stressful or tired low energy, it was something. For me, that in-person presence is something I really miss and I think it has a lot to do with the give-and-take of human energy. So I have chosen to make ENERGY my word of 2021, hoping to tap into whatever sips of energy I can, as well as sharing my own energy as much as possible. I think it will make all the difference. Here’s to an energetic 2021! MUSIC Podington Bear - Dragonslayer Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash Purple Hand: Canva

In all of the reading that I’ve done and positive psychology and the science of happiness, as well as the anecdotal memoirs of those who have transformed from a low point in their lives to a high point, the most powerful and useful thing that stuck with me is it happiness is all about working hard toward something you believe in. But work doesn’t always happen without challenges. If you’re anything like me, some days you are in the zone. Things are working smoothly, you’ve got ideas coming from every which way, and things are getting done. But as with the ebbs and flows of anything in life you probably have some days where you just. feel. stuck. Nothing is quite going right, you have writer's block, and you just don’t feel motivated to do anything. It’s two steps forward and three steps back. I liken the latter scenario, the hard days, to a cloudy gray sky. The air is stale, there’s no wind of change blowing, it just feels stuck. I think of those really awesome days kind of like a warm spring rain. So it’s not necessarily that the sun is shining all the time but it’s warm and the birds are chirping and all of a sudden a warm rain starts to fall. It’s raining ideas all over and sometimes if you’re lucky, lightning may even strike. Speaking from my own experience, creativity comes in spurts. Sometimes all I can do is sit and wait for the next good idea, priming my brain by reading and listening and walking and taking in all the information I can become inspired. And then when the inspiration comes it’s like a crazy downpour - where I turn my umbrella upside down and try to catch as many ideas as I can. Sometimes I can write 2000 or 3000 solid words in a day. Other times I literally can’t get two or three words on paper. What that means is that I know my creativity comes this way and I don’t freak out when it’s not there. I can rest assured knowing that my next idea will come. I just have to be patient and therefore I give myself lots of time and work to my own internal deadlines ahead of actual external deadlines. None of us will feel happy or be their most creative all the time. But I think this is an important part of the process. Without the lows we wouldn’t know what the highs feel like. So my recommendation to have more days of spring rain than stale air? Try not to worry about those cloudy stale days and listen to what your body is telling you. If you need to take a break, you need to take a break. But make the most of those warm exciting summer storm days, squeezing as much fun frivolity and function as you can. Embrace the ebbs and flows of productivity, creativity and innovation. I realize it’s easier said than done, however please know that as I write this I have a screaming toddler who is mad for a reason I cannot figure out, I have a preschooler refusing to do anything at the park and just wanting to go home, and an active dog pulling at my hip leash wanting to sniff everything in sight. I have not accomplished anything near what I would have liked to accomplish by this time today, but getting frustrated or angry isn’t going to solve any problems; it will definitely make things worse. So I am deciding today that today is less of a march forward and more of a cha-cha: two steps forward, two steps back and one to the side. Let’s see I will see where that takes us. It’s a lot more fun than getting frustrated. MUSIC Podington Bear - Clouds, Rain, Sun Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash Purple Balloons: Canva

You’ve got a laundry list of things to do (including the laundry!) and you have no idea where to start. Might I suggest trying a simple, little technique: If something takes less than 3 minutes to do, do it. Don’t postpone it. Set a timer for 10 minutes and get these pesky little things done. Even better, let me help you with this. When you clicked on this podcast episode you thought it was going to be 11 minutes. It’s only 1 minute. I’m going to stop talking and put on a few lovely little tunes from Podington Bear. 10-minutes worth, in fact. So here’s 10 minutes of found time for you to check a couple of 3 minute or less tasks off your list. Enjoy! MUSIC Podington Bear - The Speed of Life Podington Bear - Steppin’ In Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash Waves: Canva

I recently read a story with my daughters called Claymates. It was awesome. It was about two blobs of clay: one grey and one brown who are shaped into a wolf and an owl, but once the sculptor leaves the room the real fun ensues. They turn themselves into all types of different characters and have fun with the materials around them. But the most delightful part of the whole book was on the very last page where the sculptor and artist who created the book had a chance to say a few words. She mentioned that when she creates new characters she tries not to get hung up on making them perfect or worrying too much about the details. Instead, she keeps a piece of paper on her desk that reads: emotion, movement, connection. Three little words, a huge difference. I was so struck when reading this simple passage by the artist that I felt the need to sit with that feeling a little bit longer. I thought about how true those three words sum up the desired process and outcome for just about anything in our lives. What I mean to say is that emotion (expressing it and receiving it), movement (experiencing it as part of the human experience) and connection (to one another, to the world and to ourselves). I don’t know about you but keeping these three simple little words that are seemingly so distinct and removed from one another combine to create perfect harmony as a trio are three little words that I want to keep in my back pocket from now on. When I’m creating content or when I’m teaching or when I am making dinner for my family, I want to keep those three words in mind for a happy healthy experience. My final thoughts are twofold: Inspiration can come from the most unlikely places and often in the moments you least expect. And that’s what makes inspiration such a mythical, mystical, magical thing. I encourage and invite you to think about these 3 little words: emotion, movement, connection in your next project; whether personal or professional, formal or informal. Think about those three little words and how you can integrate them for a more powerful experience for everyone involved. Grab a post-it note and scribble down three little words. It might make all the difference. MUSIC Podington Bear: Sunset Stroll into the Wood Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash Purple Arm: Canva

The rules are fake. What mainstream society has conditioned us to believe as the ‘right way’ to live life is simply not true. Settling down with a partner, buying a house, having a linear career where you climb the ladder, spitting out 2.5 children, and retiring on a boat looking out at the sunset it’s not the only way to live. For some people that is absolutely the idea of success and what a wonderful life looks like, however for the other 99.99% of the world that plan it’s going to look a little or a lot different. And So be it. How on Earth could life be a one-size-fits-all experience? Fear of missing out (affectionately referred to as FOMO) in something greater or being envious of friends or those who follow on social media is not overly helpful to your journey and to your happiness. I found the Buddhist concept of ‘mudita’ to be very helpful in this regard. Mudita roughly translates to feeling a genuine sense of happiness for others well-being and successes in life. In the process of living your own best life, you can acknowledge others successes and see what others are doing in the world in their own right and you can be genuinely happy for them knowing if that’s the path that they’re on even if your path looks a little or a lot different than theirs. There are so many different ways to be happy and to have a “successful” life. As one of my favourite people on Instagram, Annie of @thrlaminimalist likes to say: “the rules are fake”. Instead, there are just decisions we make. But what the best way to approach big, important decisions? Follow your passions. Period. I often have students ask me for my advice when it comes to major projects and career decisions. My answer to each of them, no matter how different their situations, is often the same. Follow your gut. Follow your passions. Go in the direction of something that interests you. But what about chasing fame and fortune? In most cases, that only comes after, and as a result of, hard work and fulfilment. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing and you do great work, people will recognize this and it’s unlikely you’ll be without an opportunity for long. I also think there are a lot of similarities between close personal relationships and relationships that people have with their work. Let me explain. Do I think that everybody has one true love, one soulmate out there in the world for them. Absolutely not. The statistical odds of finding that person are insane never mind the fact that there’s nothing in that logic that says that two people are perfect for one another. You may be my true love but am I yours? I think the same logic can be applied to the world of work. Does everyone have one perfect discipline or one perfect job out there for them. One true calling. No, I don’t think that’s a thing either. If I were to make different decisions 10 or 15 years ago I would be in a very different place than I am right now, for better or for worse, I’ll never know. The educational and career decisions I made as a teenager and in my early 20s has ultimately led me to where I am today. Could I have just as easily gotten into the world of interior design or theatre and dance as many suspected I would come out of high school instead of the world of design and printing? Sure, absolutely! And I think that the decisions I continue to make, and perhaps most importantly the decisions I make about my attitude towards the projects I’m working on and the enthusiasm I put into those projects, helps dictate the success of the outcomes. I’ve been told that I’m good at seizing the opportunity in front of me. I tend to dive into the deep end and swim around searching for all that I can down there on the projects that I’m currently working on. Many of these have led to additional projects that have led to additional opportunities that have connected me with people who have led me to where I am today. The moral of the story is this: focus on the next best thing for you, whatever that might be. There is no way of know where you’ll end up in 5, 10 or 15 years (and where would the fun be in that if you DID know?), so focus on what’s interesting in front of you and dive in with gusto. People will take notice. And that could lead to the next cool thing, that leads to the next fascinating project, that leads to the next delightful role to the fulfilling, successful, happy life. And the best part is, you will have done it on your own terms. The rules are fake. MUSIC Podington Bear: Fantasy and Denouncement Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash Ice Cream Clouds: Canva