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nickjunesource · 5 years ago

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Interview: Max Minghella, Who Plays Nick in The Handmaid’s Tale, is the Enigmatic Brit in LA About to Make His Directorial Debut

(link to article — PAYWALLED — full text below)

Astro is an obscure diner in Silver Lake, Los Angeles’s hipster area. When it comes to trendy nooks in Silver Lake, there are options beyond this, but Astro is one of Max Minghella’s haunts. He’s sipping on a cup of tea in a booth, blending into the background. He wears cord trousers and trainers. The cords are his version of dressing to impress. At 33, the actor and director is taking heed of friends’ advice that he needs to “grow up. I literally don’t have any trousers,” he says, chuckling. “I only had sweatpants until a week ago. My clothing looks like it was made for a 12-year-old. Too many people have said something to me.”

Minghella is dashing — the type of guy who could maybe get away with wearing a uniform of tracksuits and a flannel shirt for decades beyond his youth. He has a refined English accent but with a transatlantic twang. Born in Hampstead, north London, he moved to LA when he was 17, to act, and has lived between the two countries ever since. You may know him from The Social Network (2010) and The Ides of March (2011), but his star has risen recently due to his role as Nick Blaine in The Handmaid’s Tale, currently on its third series. He is also celebrating his directorial debut: Teen Spirit is a Cinderella story, starring Elle Fanning as Violet, a Polish immigrant girl-next-door living in a small British town and seeking to become a pop star. It has been a labour of love for Minghella, and it crept increasingly closer to his heart as the process unfolded. “I wrote the first draft 10 years ago,” he says.

At first, the script was an excuse to indulge Minghella’s guilty pleasures: Swedish pop star Robyn and sports shows and movies such as Friday Night Lights and The Karate Kid. “It was masturbatory,” he laughs. The inspiration came with Robyn’s album Body Talk and its lead anthem, Dancing on My Own. The first scene he wrote was Violet performing the hit song in a TV talent contest akin to The X Factor. “It was also originally a foreign-language film,” he says. “But I thought the combination of subtitles and expensive pop music made it a silly endeavour. The script was a shambles,” he adds. The actor Jamie Bell, Minghella’s best friend, helped to turn it into a real script. “We’re yin and yang,” says Minghella. “Everyone I work with is incredibly hard on me. I’m addicted to that. By the time we got to shooting, every comma had been argued over.”

Minghella is tricky company. He can be curt, offering vague answers, professing to being “very private”, or simply responding with a “sure” or a shrug. It doesn’t surprise me that the story of how he and Bell became friends begins with them as enemies. “We met really young and had a tempestuous initial meeting, where he’d heard that I’d been saying things about him behind his back, which was untrue,” he recalls. “I heard that he was saying things about me, so we were very wary of one another.” Years later, in 2005, Bell emailed Minghella and they went to dinner. “We fell in love instantly. Most of my closest friendships have been spawned in similar …” a pause. “I’m very wary of people,” he says finally.

Growing up, Minghella says he was obnoxious. “I loved school socially and still miss it,” he says. “But I was not an academic student. I did badly and was in a lot of trouble.” He recently bumped into an old history teacher on the Tube. “He said, ‘We just didn’t know what to do with you,’” Minghella laughs. His parents were both hard-working — his mother, Carolyn, came to England from Hong Kong when she was 18 to be a dancer, and his father, Anthony, the writer and Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, had an Italian immigrant father. Minghella’s older sister, Hannah, 40, is the head of TriStar Pictures.

Dropping out of school a year early, Minghella headed to LA with no A-levels, landed some roles, then, guiltily trying to appease his parents, applied to university. He was accepted to only one, Columbia, to study history — he “charmed his way in”.

Anthony died of a haemorrhage in 2008, when he was 54 and Minghella was 23, and he carries with him his dad’s life mantra. “My father would always say, ‘When nine Russians tell you that you’re drunk, you should lie down.’”

Teen Spirit is set — and was filmed — on the Isle of Wight, where Anthony was born and raised. Minghella gets defensive when I ask whether Anthony’s legacy intimidated him as a film-maker. “I don’t grapple with it,” he replies. “A lot of people in my family work in film — my sister runs a studio, my uncle [Dominic Minghella] is a successful producer. The reason for it taking so long is for no good reason except my twenties were very wasteful. I didn’t utilise them in the right way. I’ve made a lot of things I probably should have released in some shape or form, but I’ve always been a private person. The amount of hours I spend acting? Very few. Directing for me was a relief.”

That said, he loves working on The Handmaid’s Tale — and with its lead, Elisabeth Moss. “She’s just a joy,” he says. “A very easy, chill person. I feel privileged.” The show has been universally lauded, winning 11 Emmys and two Golden Globes. Nick is someone of initial suspicion, who winds up being a saviour and love interest to Moss’s June/Offred. Given the current threat against abortion rights in America, I wonder if Minghella is excited to be exploring that on camera. He shakes his head. “None of it was intentional,” he says. He does admit to relief that “it’s on the right side of the conversation”, but he feels “quite antithetical” about using his platform to talk social change. “Activism in film-making is not interesting to me. I don’t like to be told what to think. I like to interpret.”

Teen Spirit’s Violet was inspired by his mother. “She didn’t speak a word of English when she moved to Britain,” he says. “There’s a huge amount of her in Violet. There’s a lot of my sister in Violet.” Initially, Minghella was looking for a Polish actress, but rewrote the part when Fanning expressed interest in being in the film. “I was her biggest fan. And then we sat down, had lunch and [it] became clear that she was probably the only person who could play the part. A lot of her real life is absorbed into the character.” Like what? He squirms. “I don’t know if I want to talk about that. There’s something funny about film sets. The amount of confession that happens … It feels out of turn.”

Reportedly Minghella and Fanning, 21 — 12 years his junior — are in a relationship. They were spotted holding hands last July in Florence and attended this year’s Met Gala together. They gush over each other in interviews, but neither has confirmed a relationship in as many words. To confuse things further, Minghella used to date the actress Kate Mara, who is now married to his best mate, Bell. I ask him whether it was special to work with someone in a creative capacity that he was romantically involved in, referring to Fanning. He laughs. “I don’t wanna answer that question.”

We manage to find some common ground as Brits in LA with a shared nostalgia for the things we miss back home. When he feels homesick, he listens to BBC Radio 1 and he says that nothing makes him happier than a Branston pickle sandwich. He spent some time living in New York in the early 2000s, but wouldn’t move back there. “I love New York, but I don’t know anyone there, so I always end up feeling lonely and strange,” he admits. As our interview finishes, I wonder if Minghella considers himself more British or American, as clearly his connections to both are so strong. “I’m not sure I’d call LA home per se,” he says. “But it is comforting. When I drive by the 7-Eleven on Silver Lake Boulevard from the airport, it’s the one place in the world that feels settled.”

#max minghella #interviews

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twh-news · 8 years ago

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The BFI Radio Times Festival hosted key members of The Night Manager’s cast and crew last month, with Oscar-winning director Susanne Bier, executive producer Simon Cornwell and cast members Alistair Petrie and Tom Hiddleston sharing backstage secrets on this magnificent edge-of-the-seat spy thriller.

There will be some paraphrasing – you try deciphering my notes a month later! And apologies to any of the speakers if I attribute a quote wrongly or misquote.

Radio 4’s Front Row presenter Samira Ahmed was on hand to chivvy the info out of them.

What made you want to do it?

AP: The scale – even though it was the BBC – the settings, the budget to make it happen. Thanks to Tom and Hugh’s involvement, AMC and others got on board. The budget worked without being gratuitous.

SB: I come from low budget film, so I’m used to expanding small into something worth looking at.

SC: The budget was bigger than many films, we were free to do stuff we wouldn’t normally do.

SB: The story is about being drawn into the world of lavishness. You can’t do that without it being rich. Crucial was Roper’s location. That would set the bar for everything else.

TH: The crew make it look more expensive than it was. The interior of the Alps hotel was inside tents! It’s a testament to an impeccable crew.

SC: When we found the Majorca location – originally Greece in the script – we had to rewrite.

AP: The private jet was a cardboard loo roll.

SB: It was a private jet!

AP: There was a guy with a light pretending to be the shining sun. Secrets revealed!

(At this point, Susanne’s reactions made it unclear whether AP was making this up!)

We revisited the clip of Danny’s attempted abduction, closing in on Pine’s eye through the hole in the door. Remembering how the tenseness set in almost immediately, you could almost taste the IMAX audience relive the original moment. The panel discussed how that frantic scene came together.

SB: Whenever you direct a scene you have one single idea. We had this leisurely, relaxed scene completely turned over.

AP: Susanne’s method is to go straight into rehearsal, thrust straight onto set. The crew can get nervous when cameras aren’t turning and you’ve nothing in the can. There are so many elements of the story to fit in but endless rehearsal means everyone knows where they should be. Being in the middle of it is a privilege.

SB: You have an idea, you collect material. You know this particular moment is going to be there. There needs to be real emotion. You don’t see the actors acting, you’re in the emotion. And child actors are just as ambitious as adults.

TH: The casting of Hugh Laurie was genius. His presence, his casting presented a conflict, so affable and likeable (in comparison with evil Roper) he (Roper) is charming, funny, loves his family but is responsible for awful things – all the stuff is paid for by arms.

SC: That scene was a Masterclass in acting and directing. A brilliant piece of construction. It’s in the book but came alive on screen.

AP: The nanny was the director’s daughter, Alice, just 19. I felt like a creepy old man but she put me at my ease: no, we’ll have a dance, no worries.

They moved onto the fire alarm test scene, where Pine breaks into Roper’s office looking for evidence.

SB: This shows why Tom is so brilliant. What he does, he thinks, “Who is Roper? Where would he put stuff?” Not many actors can do things just with their face like Tom.

TH: It’s my favourite scene in the book and a testament to Le Carre. You read it with a propulsive momentum. The internal compulsion within Pine is active even when he’s still. It’s classic suspense, a ticking clock time window. The props were chosen carefully: Churchillian. Boxing. Stalingrad. Roper’s fantasy of powerful statesmen yet rough enough for a boxing ring.

We took a moment to appreciate the glory of Tom Hollander in the restaurant scene where Corky loses it.

TH (jokingly): The manhandling was improvised. He didn’t ask permission. I’m scarred for life.

SC: John le Carre loved the whole experience on set. The scene is in the book but not so bold and exciting.

SB: Tom Hollander went way more extreme than we’d all anticipated.

TH: It was such a pivotal scene and so exciting. The moment of Corky’s demise and Pine’s elevation to the top rank. JLC was magnificent in that scene. Pine settles him quite quickly in the book but JLC refused to be settled – like any great actor, he forced me to achieve more.

SB: I had to direct him to accept the apologies! He was: “What about her? What about him? (being brought their correct food). Well, I think this is very shoddy.”

AP: We’re on the coffee and mints by now on the next table.

Pine v Roper

TH: The whole character was an exploration of the malleability of identity. There is something broken and unique about Pine. All his grief curled up inside. It’s why he’s a night manager, he hides behind darkness. Burr identifies that Pine is able to slide between characters. He had to embrace the side of himself that is quite like Roper. They’re looking in a mirror divided by a moral red line.

AP: My dad was an RAF pilot who came across interesting people. One guy became a good family friend. Great company – but he was a legit arms dealer. There was a disconnect between the job he did and what it led to, and the human being. You start with the human being, before the ‘what do you do?’ They do normal things and you layer in everything else.

We’re reminded how Roper likes to show off his arsenal – and then Pine blowing it all skyward.

SB: You need the scale and the drama of the explosions but it was a metaphor of the shoot out between two men. Roper doesn’t know how powerful Pine is until then.

AP: Looks bloody good on IMAX!

TH: There could only be one attempt at the explosion, everything after that had to be shot very fast while we had the smoke and flames. Hugh is magnificent. He realises he may have lost and loses his cool.

AP: Dr. House, put the gun down! Sometimes, when you’re pressed for time, magical things can happen. Tempers can get frayed. Then it crackles and Hugh grabs the gun, unscripted. An extraordinary thing captured under time pressure. We were blessed with catching lighting in a bottle moments.

SB: In a way, limitations can be advantageous. It forces you to be accurate and push the boundaries.

Twitter got a bit shirty over Pine having sex with the women he rescued after they were tortured – apparently, even Bond doesn’t do that.

SB: That’s not true – Jed is rescued by Olivia Colman. I don’t think they had sex.

TH: He’s in love with Sophie. She awakens his moral duty and he’s motivated partly by guilt.

Any scenes that took you to the brink?

SB: Every day! There’s always an element of not knowing what’ll happen, it’s part of the creative process.

TH: Fight scenes always look violent but have to be very safe. I love shooting action, it’s choreographic, like dance.

How do you feel, watching it now?

SB: It was a heart in mouth process but now I can sit down and enjoy! It was so much fun to do – none of us anticipated the impact . We showed it at the Berlin Film Festival and everyone loved it. So rewarding.

AP: If you’re really lucky as an actor you get something that strikes a chord. I’m genuinely bonded to the people involved. You share something very special. A special little gang. You’ve no idea the emails I’ve been sending with ideas for Series 2.

SB: It’s a privilege. I’m also sending emails. JLC doesn’t respond – I’m joking – I’m really scared of saying anything!

TH: I’m really proud of the team effort. The commitment and detail of every department adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It’s like a 1000 piece jigsaw landed intact. I couldn’t possibly comment on my email correspondence.

Having raised the bar for TV drama, is there a green light for Series 2?

SC: We are working on a story for Series 2. There’s no book and no Le Carre adaptation without a book. We’d love to see it happen. There’s an unspoken contract with each other but we have to come up with something really great.

It’s the greatest export in British cinema! (Audience member)

AP: Aw, shucks!

If you think Hiddleston a bit of a charmer (yes, yes, me too) it has to be noted I did leave the room with a bit of a crush on the very funny Alistair Petrie. You might say he’s now my … Petrie Dish. #sorrynotsorry

#The Night Manager #BFI Radio Times Television Festival #Tom Hiddleston #Alistair Petrie #Susanne Bier #simon cornwell #tnm

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podcastcoach · 6 years ago

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My First Impression of Radio Public

My First Test of Radio Public

You can get your podcast on the Radio Public platform at https://podcasters.radiopublic.com/. Once you’ve been approved at Radio Public, they send a weekly email summary to your email with details about your Paid Listens activity on RadioPublic. Once your podcast earns $25 it will be eligible for payout, and we’ll send an email with information about how to configure the payment step

Earnings are a combination of your Paid Listens (at a rate of $20 per 1000 listens of your episodes in the RadioPublicapp) and for every new listener that hears three episodes of your show in the RadioPublic app, you’ll earn a Loyal Listener bonus of an additional (one-time) $1 - and yes, this bonus layers on top of your Paid Listens rate.

What Is the Criteria For a Listen?

We define a Paid Listen as a listener hearing at least 60% or 30 minutes of an episode, whichever is shorter. For now, only listens in the native RadioPublic mobile apps for iOS and Android count. Multiple listens to a given episode by the same user’s device/account will count as a single listen.

Also, it is important to understand that a download does not necessarily equal a listen. On all podcast apps, including RadioPublic, a given episode's audio file might be downloaded multiple times: the user could have deleted it before listening; a user’s local network error can occur and the file needs to be downloaded again; a podcast hosting provider can have an issue that initiates another download, etc.RadioPublic measures when an episode is actually heard, so you should not always expect a 1:1 download to listen ratio in your hosting provider’s metrics or dashboard.

What to Do If Your Episode Already Has Ads?

Depending on your current approach to ads, you have a few options for providing ad-free episodes to RadioPublic:

Remove the ads from your older episodes in your existing RSS feed by reuploading newly edited audio files to your podcast host.

Create another RSS feed that contains ad-free episodes and provide that feed to RadioPublic.

Contact your ad sales team and podcast hosting company, as they may have the ability to turn off dynamically inserted ads when episodes are requested from RadioPublic.

Where Do The Ads Go?

RadioPublic will place audio ads before and/or after episodes participating in Paid Listens, and the ads will be clearly demarcated with audio and visual cues as distinct from your show, not part of it.

Where's the Catch?

The catch is to get credit for the play it HAS to be in the Radio Public app. You will need 1250 downloads (the amount you need to make $25) to get paid on their app. While they supply a player, it does not count that download as one to be paid for. You get $1 bonus if you get a new person to try the app and listen to three of your episodes.

For me, I'm not sure I can look at my audience and say, "Please go listen on this app where I can better advertise to you."

Patreon Vs Radio Public

Last month on Ask the Podcast Coach I had 3, 852 downloads. If we play in fantasy land and says EVERYBODY heard it on Radio Public, I would make $76. What I do on that show is I do an extra 30 minutes of show with my co-host Jim Collison from www.theaverageguy.tv and put it behind a paywall using Patreon. Last month I'm made $398 (as someone took the option to pay $125/month and receive an hour of one on one coaching) if we removed that (as that slot is not always full that would be $248. (or 3.2 times the amount of money from Radio Public).

Pennies Make Dollars

If you're trying to do podcasting full time, you need multiple streams of income. As with other services I've used that inserted ads paid $1.5 for 1000 listens, Radio Public is a much better solution. But as the average podcaster get around 1500 downloads per episode (source:libsyn.com) I'm not going to retire on the $30 (again that would be if EVERY SINGLE ONE of your listeners was using the Radio Public app)

Improvements Needed

With the short time I tested Radio Public, they need to be able to group podcasts together. I would get to the $25 a month payout fee if all my shows were listed under one account. From what I've seen they are not. So now every show would have to get 1250 downloads (the amount you need to make $25) instead of all of my shows working together. That would make for more payouts, and make it worth my while.

John Bukenas of www.audioeditingsolutions.com on the www.hatetoweight.com show that he tried to import his shows, and the app crashed.

Social Subscribe and Follow Plugin

I had gone to the Internet along with using the branding assets of some apps and went through the joy of resizing them, and then having some with a black background and some with a white background and it looked like this: (see www.schoolofpodcasting.com/627 )

I know Daniel J. Lewis of the Audacity to Podcast. He is a friend of mine and I use his My Podcast Reviews service (which a great) so I decided to check out his Subscribe and Follow plugin and it just makes things so much easier. You can adjust the buttons to match your site. They are all up to date and are using the proper branding. He has everything you'd want to link to covered, and it's super easy to set it up. Check it out at http://schoolofpodcasting.com/socialsubscribeandfollow

$25 a year and $24 sign up for Five Sites

$40.00 / year and a $39.00 sign-up fee for 10 sites

$75.00 / year and a $74.00 sign-up fee for unlimited sites

You can see my new subscribe page at www.schoolofpodcasting.com/subscribe

Pipa Billing Plans Change

My Criteria for Podcast Media Hosting

1. Don't mess with my file. What I upload is what I want people to download. 2. Give me the ability to have an unlimited back catalog (unlimited storage) 3. Don't limit my audience size (unlimited bandwidth) 4. Don't control my feed, and make it easy to leave if I choose to do so. I need to be able to put in an iTunes redirect script. 5. Give me support. 6. Charge me for your service so you can stay in business 7. Give me stats so I can see what's working. It would be nice if they were accurate. 8. Don't own my content, control my links, or block my access to distribution or stats (like Anchor).

Pippa Launched in October of 2017. With a goal of making it easy to start a podcast, and making it easy to monetize. They have done some questionable marketing (by scraping email addresses from the iTunes Database and accusing their competition of inflating their numbers). I've tested their service with The History of Six Shooter podcast. Their interface is simple, and they do offer free transcriptions. I tested their transcription service and it was only 70% accurate (so plan on spending a fair amount of time tweaking your transcription).

Originally they adopted the Soundcloud business plan which enables unlimited uploads and unlimited downloads (And lost 100 million dollars). Recently they updated their pricing. They STILL allow you to upload as many files as you want, but they limit the size of your audience (the more expensive the package, the more downloads you are allowed). For this show that gets over 20,000 downloads a month, I would be on the $50 a month plan. I currently use the $20/month plan at Libsyn.com (use the coupon code sopfree for a free month).

As they limit your number of downloads (when other companies like Libsyn.com and Blubrry.com do not) they are just not a good choice in my opinion. I know people who have received thousands of downloads by being mentioned on an influencer's blog. For me, I'd take a pass on http://pippa.io

For more information on media hosting, see www.podcastmediahosting.com

Ready to Plan, Launch or Grow Your Podcast?

I would LOVE to work with you. I have multiple plans (starting at $1 for bonus content, all the way up to a four-figure mentoring plan). I would love to help you with your podcast. See www.schoolofpodcasting.com/workwithme

Check out this episode!

#podcasting #podcast #coaching #new media

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pattersondonaldblk5 · 7 years ago

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Going Offline

A note from the editors: We’re excited to share Chapter 1 of Going Offline by Jeremy Keith, available this month from A Book Apart.

Businesses are built on the web. Without the web, Twitter couldn’t exist. Facebook couldn’t exist. And not just businesses—Wikipedia couldn’t exist. Your favorite blog couldn’t exist without the web. The web doesn’t favor any one kind of use. It’s been deliberately designed to accommodate many and varied activities.

Just as many wonderful things are built upon the web, the web itself is built upon the internet. Though we often use the terms web and internet interchangeably, the World Wide Web is just one application that uses the internet as its plumbing. Email, for instance, is another.

Like the web, the internet was designed to allow all kinds of services to be built on top of it. The internet is a network of networks, all of them agreeing to use the same protocols to shuttle packets of data around. Those packets are transmitted down fiber-optic cables across the ocean floor, bounced around with Wi-Fi or radio signals, or beamed from satellites in freakin’ space.

As long as these networks are working, the web is working. But sometimes networks go bad. Mobile networks have a tendency to get flaky once you’re on a train or in other situations where you’re, y’know, mobile. Wi-Fi networks work fine until you try to use one in a hotel room (their natural enemy).

When the network fails, the web fails. That’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Until now.

Weaving the Web

For as long as I can remember, the World Wide Web has had an inferiority complex. Back in the ’90s, it was outshone by CD-ROMs (ask your parents). They had video, audio, and a richness that the web couldn’t match. But they lacked links—you couldn’t link from something in one CD-ROM to something in another CD-ROM. They faded away. The web grew.

Later, the web technologies of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were found wanting when compared to the whiz-bang beauty of Flash. Again, Flash movies were much richer than regular web pages. But they were also black boxes. The Flash format seemed superior to the open standards of the web, and yet the very openness of those standards made the web an unstoppable force. Flash—under the control of just one company—faded away. The web grew.

These days it’s native apps that make the web look like an underachiever. Like Flash, they’re under the control of individual companies instead of being a shared resource like the web. Like Flash, they demonstrate all sorts of capabilities that the web lacks, such as access to device APIs and, crucially, the ability to work even when there’s no network connection.

The history of the web starts to sound like an endless retelling of the fable of the tortoise and the hare. CD-ROMs, Flash, and native apps outshine the web in the short term, but the web always seems to win the day somehow.

Each of those technologies proved very useful for the expansion of web standards. In a way, Flash was like the R&D department for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Smooth animations, embedded video, and other great features first saw the light of day in Flash. Having shown their usefulness, they later appeared in web standards. The same thing is happening with native apps. Access to device features like the camera and the accelerometer is beginning to show up in web browsers. Most exciting of all, we’re finally getting the ability for a website to continue working even when the network isn’t available.

Service Workers

The technology that makes this bewitching offline sorcery possible is a browser feature called service workers. You might have heard of them. You might have heard that they’re something to do with JavaScript, and technically they are…but conceptually they’re very different from other kinds of scripts.

Usually when you’re writing some JavaScript that’s going to run in a web browser, it’s all related to the document currently being displayed in the browser window. You might want to listen out for events triggered by the user interacting with the document (clicks, swipes, hovers, etc.). You might want to update the contents of the document: add some markup here, remove some text there, manipulate some values somewhere else. The sky’s the limit. And it’s all made possible thanks to the Document Object Model (DOM), a representation of what the browser is rendering. Through the combination of the DOM and JavaScript—DOM scripting, if you will—you can conjure up all sorts of wonderful magic.

Well, a service worker can’t do any of that. It’s still a script, and it’s still written in the same language—JavaScript—but it has no access to the DOM. Without any DOM scripting capabilities, this kind of script might seem useless at first glance. But there’s an advantage to having a script that never needs to interact with the current document. Adding, editing, and deleting parts of the DOM can be hard work for the browser. If you’re not careful, things can get very sluggish very quickly. But if there’s a whole class of script that isn’t allowed access to the DOM, then the browser can happily run that script in parallel to its regular rendering activities, safe in the knowledge that it’s an entirely separate process.

The first kind of script to come with this constraint was called a web worker. In a web worker, you could write some JavaScript to do number-crunching calculations without slowing down whatever else was being displayed in the browser window. Spin up a web worker to generate larger and larger prime numbers, for instance, and it will merrily do so in the background.

A service worker is like a web worker with extra powers. It still can’t access the DOM, but it does have access to the fundamental inner workings of the browser.

Browsers and servers

Let’s take a step back and think about how the World Wide Web works. It’s a beautiful ballet of client and server. The client is usually a web browser—or, to use the parlance of web standards, a user agent: a piece of software that acts on behalf of the user.

The user wants to accomplish a task or find some information. The URL is the key technology that will empower the user in their quest. They will either type a URL into their web browser or follow a link to get there. This is the point at which the web browser—or client—makes a request to a web server. Before the request can reach the server, it must traverse the internet of undersea cables, radio towers, and even the occasional satellite (Fig 1.1).

Fig 1.1: Browsers send URL requests to servers, and servers respond by sending files.

Imagine if you could leave instructions for the web browser that would be executed before the request is even sent. That’s exactly what service workers allow you to do (Fig 1.2).

Fig 1.2: Service workers tell the web browser to do something before they send the request to queue up a URL.

Usually when we write JavaScript, the code is executed after it’s been downloaded from a server. With service workers, we can write a script that’s executed by the browser before anything else happens. We can tell the browser, “If the user asks you to retrieve a URL for this particular website, run this corresponding bit of JavaScript first.” That explains why service workers don’t have access to the Document Object Model; when the service worker is run, there’s no document yet.

Getting your head around service workers

A service worker is like a cookie. Cookies are downloaded from a web server and installed in a browser. You can go to your browser’s preferences and see all the cookies that have been installed by sites you’ve visited. Cookies are very small and very simple little text files. A website can set a cookie, read a cookie, and update a cookie. A service worker script is much more powerful. It contains a set of instructions that the browser will consult before making any requests to the site that originally installed the service worker.

A service worker is like a virus. When you visit a website, a service worker is surreptitiously installed in the background. Afterwards, whenever you make a request to that website, your request will be intercepted by the service worker first. Your computer or phone becomes the home for service workers lurking in wait, ready to perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Don’t panic. A service worker can only handle requests for the site that originally installed that service worker. When you write a service worker, you can only use it to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on your own website.

A service worker is like a toolbox. By itself, a service worker can’t do much. But it allows you to access some very powerful browser features, like the Fetch API, the Cache API, and even notifications. API stands for Application Programming Interface, which sounds very fancy but really just means a tool that you can program however you want. You can write a set of instructions in your service worker to take advantage of these tools. Most of your instructions will be written as “when this happens, reach for this tool.” If, for instance, the network connection fails, you can instruct the service worker to retrieve a backup file using the Cache API.

A service worker is like a duck-billed platypus. The platypus not only lactates, but also lays eggs. It’s the only mammal capable of making its own custard. A service worker can also…Actually, hang on, a service worker is nothing like a duck-billed platypus! Sorry about that. But a service worker is somewhat like a cookie, and somewhat like a virus, and somewhat like a toolbox.

Safety First

Service workers are powerful. Once a service worker has been installed on your machine, it lies in wait, like a patient spider waiting to feel the vibrations of a particular thread.

Imagine if a malicious ne’er-do-well wanted to wreak havoc by impersonating a website in order to install a service worker. They could write instructions in the service worker to prevent the website ever appearing in that browser again. Or they could write instructions to swap out the content displayed under that site’s domain. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that a service worker really belongs to the site it claims to come from. As the specification for service workers puts it, they “create the opportunity for a bad actor to turn a bad day into a bad eternity.”1

To prevent this calamity, service workers require you to adhere to two policies:

Same origin.

HTTPS only.

The same-origin policy means that a website at example.com can only install a service worker script that lives at example.com. That means you can’t put your service worker script on a different domain. You can use a domain like for hosting your images and other assets, but not your service worker script. That domain wouldn’t match the domain of the site installing the service worker.

The HTTPS-only policy means that https://example.com can install a service worker, but http://example.com can’t. A site running under HTTPS (the S stands for Secure) instead of HTTP is much harder to spoof. Without HTTPS, the communication between a browser and a server could be intercepted and altered. If you’re sitting in a coffee shop with an open Wi-Fi network, there’s no guarantee that anything you’re reading in browser from http://newswebsite.com hasn’t been tampered with. But if you’re reading something from https://newswebsite.com, you can be pretty sure you’re getting what you asked for.

Securing your site

Enabling HTTPS on your site opens up a whole series of secure-only browser features—like the JavaScript APIs for geolocation, payments, notifications, and service workers. Even if you never plan to add a service worker to your site, it’s still a good idea to switch to HTTPS. A secure connection makes it trickier for snoopers to see who’s visiting which websites. Your website might not contain particularly sensitive information, but when someone visits your site, that’s between you and your visitor. Enabling HTTPS won’t stop unethical surveillance by the NSA, but it makes the surveillance slightly more difficult.

There’s one exception. You can use a service worker on a site being served from localhost, a web server on your own computer, not part of the web. That means you can play around with service workers without having to deploy your code to a live site every time you want to test something.

If you’re using a Mac, you can spin up a local server from the command line. Let’s say your website is in a folder called mysite. Drag that folder to the Terminal app, or open up the Terminal app and navigate to that folder using the cd command to change directory. Then type:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

This starts a web server from the mysite folder, served over port 8000. Now you can visit localhost:8000 in a web browser on the same computer, which means you can add a service worker to the website you’ve got inside the mysite folder: http://localhost:8000.

But if you then put the site live at, say, http://mysite.com, the service worker won’t run. You’ll need to serve the site from https://mysite.com instead. To do that, you need a secure certificate for your server.

There was a time when certificates cost money and were difficult to install. Now, thanks to a service called Certbot, certificates are free. But I’m not going to lie: it still feels a bit intimidating to install the certificate. There’s something about logging on to a server and typing commands that makes me simultaneously feel like a l33t hacker, and also like I’m going to break everything. Fortunately, the process of using Certbot is relatively jargon-free (Fig 1.3).

Fig 1.3: The website of EFF’s Certbot.

On the Certbot website, you choose which kind of web server and operating system your site is running on. From there you’ll be guided step-by-step through the commands you need to type in the command line of your web server’s computer, which means you’ll need to have SSH access to that machine. If you’re on shared hosting, that might not be possible. In that case, check to see if your hosting provider offers secure certificates. If not, please pester them to do so, or switch to a hosting provider that can serve your site over HTTPS.

Another option is to stay with your current hosting provider, but use a service like Cloudflare to act as a “front” for your website. These services can serve your website’s files from data centers around the world, making sure that the physical distance between your site’s visitors and your site’s files is nice and short. And while they’re at it, these services can make sure all of those files are served over HTTPS.

Once you’re set up with HTTPS, you’re ready to write a service worker script. It’s time to open up your favorite text editor. You’re about to turbocharge your website!

Footnotes

1. http://bkaprt.com/go/01-01/

https://ift.tt/2H7FueB

#Going Offline

0 notes

jeanshesallenberger · 7 years ago

Text

Going Offline

A note from the editors: We’re excited to share Chapter 1 of Going Offline by Jeremy Keith, available this month from A Book Apart.

When the network fails, the web fails. That’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Until now.

Weaving the Web

Service Workers

A service worker is like a web worker with extra powers. It still can’t access the DOM, but it does have access to the fundamental inner workings of the browser.

Browsers and servers

Fig 1.1: Browsers send URL requests to servers, and servers respond by sending files.

Imagine if you could leave instructions for the web browser that would be executed before the request is even sent. That’s exactly what service workers allow you to do (Fig 1.2).

Fig 1.2: Service workers tell the web browser to do something before they send the request to queue up a URL.

Getting your head around service workers

Safety First

Service workers are powerful. Once a service worker has been installed on your machine, it lies in wait, like a patient spider waiting to feel the vibrations of a particular thread.

To prevent this calamity, service workers require you to adhere to two policies:

Same origin.

HTTPS only.

Securing your site

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Fig 1.3: The website of EFF’s Certbot.

Once you’re set up with HTTPS, you’re ready to write a service worker script. It’s time to open up your favorite text editor. You’re about to turbocharge your website!

Footnotes

1. http://bkaprt.com/go/01-01/

https://ift.tt/2H7FueB

#Going Offline

0 notes

waltercostellone · 7 years ago

Text

Going Offline

A note from the editors: We’re excited to share Chapter 1 of Going Offline by Jeremy Keith, available this month from A Book Apart.

When the network fails, the web fails. That’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Until now.

Weaving the Web

Service Workers

A service worker is like a web worker with extra powers. It still can’t access the DOM, but it does have access to the fundamental inner workings of the browser.

Browsers and servers

Fig 1.1: Browsers send URL requests to servers, and servers respond by sending files.

Imagine if you could leave instructions for the web browser that would be executed before the request is even sent. That’s exactly what service workers allow you to do (Fig 1.2).

Fig 1.2: Service workers tell the web browser to do something before they send the request to queue up a URL.

Getting your head around service workers

Safety First

Service workers are powerful. Once a service worker has been installed on your machine, it lies in wait, like a patient spider waiting to feel the vibrations of a particular thread.

To prevent this calamity, service workers require you to adhere to two policies:

Same origin.

HTTPS only.

Securing your site

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Fig 1.3: The website of EFF’s Certbot.

Once you’re set up with HTTPS, you’re ready to write a service worker script. It’s time to open up your favorite text editor. You’re about to turbocharge your website!

Footnotes

1. http://bkaprt.com/go/01-01/

https://ift.tt/2H7FueB

#Going Offline

0 notes

raystart · 7 years ago

Photo

After the Nightmare Project: Lessons Learned

We’ve all had at least one: a nightmare project that you wish you could walk away from.

Once you’ve abandoned the idea that it’ll end up in your portfolio, you just want to get that final approval, send off the invoice, and never think about it again. We asked a few seasoned design pros to think about it one more time. (Sorry guys.) Why? Because those projects are the ones that teach us the greatest lessons – the ones that lead to revamped creative briefs, new paragraphs in your proposals, and updated clauses in your contracts. Sometimes they even lead to entirely new approaches to shaping your portfolio, sizing up new clients, and deciding when to say “No.”

Avoid “small” changes that create a ripple effect of additional work.

“Elefint was just a few months away from launching a new brand and a website for a nonprofit focused on end-of-life care when the client switched the project management role from a contractor to a newly hired staff member. Unfortunately, a lot of our efforts and insights were lost in the transition, and the client started asking for “small” changes that inevitably created a ripple effect – from logos to the website, animations to print collateral. Each request led to weeks in delays – waiting on feedback, explaining our rationale for the originally approved design, revisiting initial strategy. A project we thought would take 12 months ended up taking more than two years.

Knowing there had to be a more efficient way for us to work, I started experimenting with design sprints for our other nonprofit clients, to eliminate the inefficiencies that come with long feedback loops and broad scopes of work. Design sprints have allowed us to experiment with what’s possible within the context of building out complex digital projects and brands, and to work more iteratively and collaboratively with our clients, with timelines that are both practical and motivating. Working in shorter increments helps our team and clients stay focused, energized, inspired, and, most important, aligned throughout the lifeline of the project. We now integrate our “Design Sprint for Social Good” methods into the design process, and we’ve launched 10 complex digital projects in less than one year. As a small team, that’s a tremendous feat.”

— Gopika Prabhu, Founder + Creative Director, Elefint, San Francisco

Show a healthy skepticism toward new and experimental technology.

“As an interactive designer at the Newseum, I designed touch-screen experiences for museum exhibits that teach visitors about their First Amendment freedoms and how news is made. This was years ago, when smartphones were just taking off, tablets were just entering the retail market, and pinch-to-zoom was a new behavior. On the eve of this digital boom, our in-house multimedia team had a unique opportunity to create a gallery that highlighted digital media and its effects on how we receive and consume news. Our team controlled the content and developed the software, and an external partner promised to provide the hardware: the latest in multiscreen surfaces and projection technology.

We were creating bespoke designs for screens that didn’t yet exist, weren’t available for testing, and wouldn’t be out for months. But our tech partner couldn’t nail down the specs. They often reported changes to the monitors’ and projectors’ aspect ratios and resolutions, rendering our interactives and graphics unusable until we adapted our files. This sounds ridiculous now – because everything is flexible, adaptive, and responsive – but back then, this wasn’t an option.

We had to expect the unexpected. We limped through development and recreated (and recreated and recreated) the files—never knowing if they were right until we finally installed them onto the hardware in the gallery. I learned that with any new and experimental technology – whether it’s hardware, software, a new tool, pattern, or process – it’s okay to feel wary. Use that healthy skepticism to look beyond the current deliverable, to evaluate where the product might show up once it outlives its current platform. Making design into a flexible system expands its utility and its reach, which is especially important across products. Devices, interaction patterns, communication, and tech change faster than our understanding of them. And that’s okay.”

— Libby Bawcombe, Senior Visual Product Designer National Public Radio, Washington, D.C.

Clarify what exactly you are there to do.

“I was commissioned by an independent animation and advertising company to produce, or help produce, a very short film. It was supposed to be between two and three minutes long, and I had just three weeks to do it. I opted to be in-house rather than work at my own studio as, I thought it would make communication easier. On this front, I was wrong.

Initially, I had gone in for an interview where I was referred to as the freelance “talent.” (It was a little uncomfortable, and vague, to be referred to that way and not as the visual stylist or creative director or whatever my role was meant to be.) I started the next day, never having discussed the official job title: I was just given a loose concept (make the animation look like a Charley Harper painting) and no script.

I was completely left to my own devices, with small deadlines at the end of each day. I should have taken the initiative and spent the first day figuring out storyboard, style guide, transitions, and color scheme, but I was too stressed and confused to do so. I had no idea that I was in charge of the entire direction of the project. It got a bit better in the weeks ahead as I navigated my way in the dark.

Needless to say, I wasn’t proud of the final outcome, or of my performance as a freelancer. I should have been more vocal about needing clear signposts. In the end, I was credited as the illustrator, although I had ad-libbed the entire direction and narrative. The animation firm was fantastic but I think just as confused as I was about my role. I realize now that I shouldn’t have winged it, but clarified what I was there to do from the get-go. This is something that I now try to do with every new freelance commission.”

— Jon Jones, Illustrator, Port Elizabeth, South Africa

When a brief is conceptual, seek client feedback early on.

“When the offer came in last June, I was all in. It was a commission for a governmental organization – a rather conceptual brief but with a generous budget. That’s a lethal combination, as one doesn’t want to disappoint and one definitely wants to please. What followed was a couple of rather stressful weeks and an ample dose of frustration. Both were completely avoidable in hindsight.

The brief was to create a series of illustrations that clearly described the process of patenting in the science industry. I had to design images for a three-metertall, very narrow banner, which would be displayed at a conference. As I was dealing with American clients, most of my talks and feedback happened over Skype. This was the first part of the nightmare: Skype combined with a temperamental internet connection, conflicting time zones, and muffled accents is a tricky thing to navigate, and can add to unnecessary stress. I’ve learned to stick with emails.

The nightmare got worst. I should have pushed for image revisions at an earlier stage: The client decided to make small changes after I had everything in place and locked down in a very tight layout. That added massively to the workload. I formed a very close relationship and personal attachment to my color choices, too, but when the client at the very last minute decided we should go with murky, corporate colors instead of my usual palette, I said okay even though I didn’t agree. Lesson learned.

Through this experience, I realized that even if it’s a big client, it’s still just a bunch of humans trying to come up with a decent solution to the problem at hand. For the time that you’re working together, you are a member of the team and should act like one.”

— Martina Paukova, Illustrator, Berlin

Creative projects need creative people in the room.

“A sister agency had asked my team to work on a massive experiential project for a meteoric-hot tech and transportation brand in San Francisco. And since my chief creative and I had the requisite sleeve tattoos and hipster facial hair, we were to lead the creative elements of this multimillion-dollar campaign. But on the day of the kickoff meeting, I chose to ignore the first red flag: The client hadn’t invited a single member of their own creative team: just the head of procurement, a couple of mid-level producers, and an account lead with two months on the job.

For the next four hours, not one minute was spent talking about the idea, let alone the intent of the idea. It was all about rate cards, travel plans, and the office politics required to get things done. Of course, this made sense coming from a tech company hell-bent on maximizing valuation. But this laser focus on margin and production timelines meant that the creative had to fit into increasingly oppressive and consequential parameters. Which proved to be a disaster.

Everything we presented was judged on feasibility and budget, not creativity or effectiveness. When we proposed a visual identity system for the campaign, the people in the room didn’t feel qualified or empowered to give direction. As the kickoff date approached, we got farther and farther behind. Ultimately, the campaign was pulled. The work went “in-house,” which is where it always belonged.

Yes, this is a clichéd story of how procurement and creatives don’t mix. But there’s truth in the cliché. If budget decisions require a leader, then creative decisions do, too, If you don’t see another creative when you walk in the room, run in the other direction.”

— Max Lenderman, Founder + CEO, School, Boulder, Colorado

Money matters, but how much?

“Since abandoning computer science to pursue commercial art as a living, I’ve struggled to balance the creativity of my dream job with work that’s comfortable, safe, and lucrative. The biggest frustrations and creative blocks that I crash into are the ones I could have avoided, if I’d just followed my internal compass.

A few years back, a particular style of mine gained attention, and the commissions rolled in, at three or four times the fees I’d accepted a year earlier. I was happy to be getting the work, but something was off. I wanted to be doing work that was more colorful, fun, and whimsical than the things I was being hired for. I thought the money would keep me entertained, but I was wrong. Projects started becoming headaches for me: I’d put things off, I’d get stressed out, and I’d start to think I couldn’t complete the job. My clients were happy, but I was bored, and worried that I had “broken” my creativity and, in turn, my career.

The solution was simple: Put in the time to do what you really want, even if it requires a financial sacrifice. I started consciously turning down work that didn’t excite me, and spent any leftover time focusing on side projects that aligned with my creative goals. Soon, the paying work poured in again, and I noticed that my favorite clients usually discover me through my personal work, which we adapt for their commercial pieces. Now I know I have to constantly fine-tune my work to be sure it’s taking me where I want to go, rather than taking the easy path. Heck, I’ve already decided to throw job security to the wind by being a freelance illustrator – why start wearing a safety belt now?”

— Kirk Wallace, Illustrator, Boston

When outsourcing jobs, be crystal clear about what you’re requesting.

“Some years ago we were hired to design an exhibition. It was located in an old building (not your average white cube,) and we had commissioned a special orange carpet for the floor. It was going to be installed the morning of the show, right before the shelves and sculptures were brought in. We were working on a very tight schedule!

When we arrived on the day of the opening, the carpet had been installed but the carpet installer had already left. What we found was the most sloppy, bubbly orange carpet that we had ever seen. When we called to ask for an explanation, the carpet installer told us that he thought the floor was going to be used for a one-night Queen’s day party instead of an exhibition. (Queen’s day is our national holiday, and orange is the national color.)

The exhibition content was about to arrive, so we had to think and act fast. We freestyled a new design by cutting up the orange floor into small graphic shapes that we combined with the original tiling. We barely made it by the time the shelves and sculptures were brought in, but it looked better.

The carpet installer had had no idea what the floor was actually going to be used for, and we should have briefed them better. In the end, though, we learned to surround ourselves with a network of creatives and suppliers that we really trust.”

— Jaron Korvinus, Cofounder of Studio Spass, Rotterdam

Red flags won’t simply go away.

“Soon after I founded my design studio, a California chocolate company asked me to create a logo for their growing business and storefront. Given my slim portfolio from a previous in-house design position, I was eager to collaborate with a food brand on the West Coast. But my overt optimism made me blind to a few red flags – the client’s small budget and their unwillingness to hand over the creative reins – which ultimately doomed the project.

I pride myself on being able to understand and translate obscure client feedback, but in one of the early reviews, the client asked for the logo to “express more devotion,” words that baffle me to this day. I designed countless concepts and made countless revisions because I was determined to make the client happy. I even asked the client to share examples of other “devoted” logos, which was no help at all. For the first time ever in my design career, I was at a complete loss, utterly defeated. What’s worse, my contract had failed to note a maximum number of revisions or the fact that the deposit was nonrefundable. I gave it my all, lost thousands in unbilled hours, and endured weeks of self-doubt. And my other work suffered for lack of attention. Eventually, we parted ways and the client had a family friend create the logo, so you can imagine the final result.

Fast-forward to today. I still pour my heart and soul into absolutely everything I create, but all of my proposals and lawyer-looked-over contracts help avoid failure or confusion. Now I show clients a few rough concepts early on (rather than perfecting dozens of options) and my contracts clearly note that each project includes two revisions, with additional rounds charged at an hourly rate. With these processes in place, I’m able to demand a fair wage for my talents and time.”

— Kelsy Stromski, Founder + Creative Director, Refinery 43, Massachusetts

Have a strong understanding of the brand’s product story.

“A year after I completed MAX100 (a personal project illustrating the Nike AirMax 1 in 100 different ways), Nike asked me to use a similar approach to create 30 shoes for their Nike Air Reinvented campaign. Nike was a brand I had long admired and a bucket-list client, so I was excited and nervous. But I assumed the work would follow the same loose, stream-of-consciousness approach inspired by whatever mood hit me at the moment.

When I presented my first round of sketches, it became pretty clear that this was a very different animal. As you can imagine, a brand of Nike’s size had a lengthy and complicated approval process, which meant dozens of my ideas were rejected because they didn’t fit into the product’s brand story. In my personal work, I had generated three to five pieces a week, but this time I had completed only two illustrations after nearly a month. At that rate, I’d never complete the project on time.

I recognized that I had to abandon my early expectations and shift my way of thinking to become much more strategic: Each illustration had to tell the story of the product. Nike’s internal team was incredibly helpful in arming me with detailed background information, and the approval process started to accelerate. It was a grueling project, but by the end I could look at each piece and know that the work was better because of the focus on story and the feedback that helped shape the work.

Here’s what I learned: My success as an independent designer is built on a foundation of personal projects, which have created dozens of opportunities for client work. But once you get that opportunity, you have to be prepared to adjust your thinking. Work to maintain what makes you unique in the process, but find out how the client operates and what they respond to, then fold those ingredients into your process. Be prepared to let their direction and feedback make the work better.”

— Matt Stevens, Designer + Illustrator, Charlotte

Just because something worked for one brand doesn’t mean it will work for the next.

“I’m currently rebranding a local flower shop for a client with enviable taste. Our kickoff meeting went great, but I soon realized that I hadn’t asked the right questions. The owner said she loved a clean, abstract logo I’d created for a local coffee shop, but I eventually realized she liked the brand and feel of the coffee shop itself more than the minimal mark.

I shared mood boards, and then the first round of logos (with far too many options), and the response was kind but somewhat tepid. A month later, the client finally shared specific feedback, and I revised the logos she liked best, although she wasn’t thrilled with any of them. Another month went by before she told me, “We need to start over – here’s an example of what we really like.” The sample made perfect sense, but it felt derivative and cliché; I was dejected and took it personally.

After I thought about the process for a long time, my frustration slowly turned into empathy. It was my fault. I didn’t get to know their brand: The logos I’d shown were cold and impersonal – the exact opposite of a flower shop. I’d been lazy and arrogant, thinking, “I’ll just do what I did for the coffee shop, and they’ll hoist me on their shoulders in a victory parade.”

So here’s what I’ve learned: Do your research up front, understand who the client is, and communicate expectations clearly. And when you inevitably get frustrated, try to put yourself in your client’s shoes. That empathy can lead to something unexpected.”

— Matt Lehman, Designer + Illustrator, Nashville

Creative briefs demand details, details, details.

“Years ago, my previous agency landed a web project for an East Coast client that runs a popular cycling event. We’d pitched them on designing their logo as well, but they chose to go with a local agency. So I started the project a little bummed about the lost opportunity.

A few weeks in, the client asked for daily email updates on top of our weekly phone calls. Requests for features that were outside our scope quickly turned into demands and requirements. Unfortunately, our proposal lacked concrete details regarding features, functionality, and timelines, so it’s not surprising that the client’s expectations went way beyond our own. Eventually, the client got angry, asked for their deposit back, and said they wouldn’t be using the site, even though it was close to completion. I had to talk to my boss about it (not fun) as well as their lawyer (even worse).

The first thing I learned? Don’t take on projects you’re not interested in. Once we’d missed the chance to do the work we specialize in (branding and identities), we should have passed; taking on creative work that doesn’t excite you rarely leads to a great client relationship or stellar results. Second, I promised myself I would make every proposal as clear as possible. Sometimes I feel like a hack, writing ultra-specific agreements that suggest I don’t trust our clients. But that’s not the case. A crystal-clear scope of work allows for open and honest conversations with clients – a project where no one yells, cries, or gets sued in the end.”

— Michael Benjamin, Creative Director, Anthem Branding, Boulder, Colorado

Don’t shortchange your design approach in the interest of time.

“A few months after I moved West to take a new position at a small studio in Boulder, Colorado, we lost a crucial account. We quickly realized that we needed a new identity and website to separate ourselves from previous leadership challenges and to reveal our new business model. To get it done quickly, we abandoned our typical design approach and skipped some key steps. I was tasked with the design deliverables, but I never had an opportunity to think holistically about the experience or collaborate with the internal team, since the leadership wanted to keep the brand reveal a secret. Instead, I went straight to the computer and wasted a lot of time, suffering in silence. Who was our audience? What was our message? What experience were we hoping to design? And where was everyone else?!

I took a step back, restarted the process, and insisted that two of the agency leads – a married couple – invest some time in the discovery and user experience. There were arguments every step of the way, secret talks about the direction, and clear disagreements about the new business model. In the end, the design came out okay, but the process highlighted misalignments on the leadership team, including the married couple themselves. Shortly after the design went live, the couple divorced and the studio went out of business. I wasn’t sure if I’d torn my new family apart or if the project was just another symptom of a difficult relationship.

The experience reminded me that the discovery and strategy process is essential prior to diving into any design deliverable, no matter how personal or painful it may. It ensures that we’re identifying pain points, solving the right problems, and capturing the full story that will lead to a more compelling design and, in the end, more customers.”

— Sumiko Carter, Creative Director, Gorilla Logic, Boulder, Colorado

Chuck the calendar and embrace the stress.

“I’m a very chaotic guy. I procrastinate. I don’t ever check my calendar. Every deadline that seems a long way off quickly and suddenly becomes a very short deadline. I‘ve tried over and over again to organize myself but it’s never been very productive. One particular commission was especially frantic. It was a lettering piece, for which I had to draw 19 letters out of landscapes, people, machines, cities, cars, and other doodles. I completely forgot that I had to do it and then suddenly realized my oversight the night before the delivery date, when I got a reminder email from my agent. I had it in my calendar, but I never looked at my calendar.

I was busy with two shows in Düsseldorf, Germany, at the time and I had a few other commercial commissions on the go, so I stayed up all night sketching and drawing to make the deadline. Luckily, in the end, the client was incredibly happy with the results. And so was I.

What I came to realize – through this experience and many others like it – is that I need stress to be motivated and succeed. The things that I’m most proud are the things I drew on the day of a deadline. So you could say, in a way, that all my illustrations are nightmare projects. I need the nightmare: It’s my vital source of energy.”

— Jonathan Calugi, Illustrator, Pistoia, Italy

The client is the client, not the designer.

“Every project has its own level of complexity and comes with different challenges, though the nightmare project will always be the one where the client tells us exactly what to do. It’s always detrimental if the client doesn’t give us creative license and doesn’t trust us to do our job.

Our error with these scenarios has been to give up and follow along with the client’s opinion and direction. Over time, we’ve learned to be more convincing and not to allow the client to be the designer. In the end, we want to create graphic design that makes an impact, but if the client is the creative director, then it’s hard to make something incredible. It’s also, of course, very important to keep clients happy and satisfied, so in these situations it’s often a tough balancing act.

To deal with these nightmare projects, we try to be honest. Sometimes it’s about showing multiple options and saying, “We could have done this, but here’s what you asked for,” making it clear which idea we prefer. In the end, it’s the nightmares that encourage us to grow.”

— Marissa Gutierrez, Graphic Designer, Anagrama, Mexico City

#startups #text #startup #advice #busieness #howto #news #tech #love

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ds4design · 8 years ago

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Good News for Messy People: How Disorder Can Contribute to Success

In the corporate environment we are encouraged to be efficient and have our work in order. But what if being a little messy made you a better employee? That’s the idea in the new book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, by Tim Harford, a senior columnist at the Financial Times. “There is always a gap between how things look very nice and neat and tidy on the spreadsheet … but seem very different when at ground level,” says Harford, who is also a host of a BBC Radio 4 show called More Or Less. “What may look messy in theory may actually work very well in practice.” Harford offered his unconventional views on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you get questioning looks from people as to why they would want to have mess in their lives?

Tim Harford: I have found that highly successful people who are at the top of their profession, and are tremendously productive and great professionals, carry a lot of guilt about mess [in their lives]. They’ve told me that my book has made them feel better. So that’s obviously my role in life, to unburden people from their guilt. But [I wonder why] so many successful people don’t draw the conclusion that they are doing fine, and therefore the mess doesn’t matter. Instead they convince themselves that if only they could tidy up they’d be more effective.

Knowledge@Wharton: But because of how busy we are and more and more people are working two jobs to get by, it feels like that there has to be a little bit of mess in our lives.

Harford: Tidying up takes time. If you’re going to decide how messy or how tidy you should be, that’s one of the costs of tidiness. It costs time and energy to get things straight. One may be both literally messy, i.e. emails and papers everywhere, and metaphorically messy like in dealing with complicated people, obstacles or randomness. We tend to underrate how much good that can be doing us. It can be spurring creativity. Or it could just be simply and practically a perfectly functional way to get things done.

“Studies of office environments often find that while things look well organized and neat, you may have a tremendous amount of paperwork all hidden away.”

For people who keep things incredibly tidy, if it works, that’s great. But studies of office environments often find that while things look well organized and neat, you may have a tremendous amount of paperwork all hidden away. You don’t really know where it is. You don’t really know what it is that you should be doing. You’re carrying around a lot of anxiety in the back of your head, but at least your desk looks clean.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where did the idea to write about this come from?

Harford: I was originally interested in the idea of interdisciplinary work, funnily enough. I was asking myself, why is it that we tidy ourselves away into silos? The accounts department won’t talk to the marketing department. The anthropologists won’t talk to the economists and the economists won’t talk to the physicists. The New Yorkers won’t talk to the Angelinos who won’t talk to Princetonians. What is it about all this? That was the starting point.

But then I branched out into different forms of mess. Randomness in David Bowie’s recording studio. Improvisations in the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Messy environments for children. And of course the straightforward mess of having an overflowing inbox or an untidy desk.

Knowledge@Wharton: As you lay out in the book, there are so many elements of what we need to be successful, like creativity, that have some level of disorder around them.

Harford: Yes. One of the great moments for me in writing the book was interviewing the composer and producer Brian Eno, who worked with the late David Bowie, U2 and Coldplay, and many great musicians. He deliberately disrupts musicians in their working environment. When they’re in the recording studio working on their new album, he’ll mess things up. For example, on the random draw of a card, he will tell the best guitarist in the world to play the drums and the best drummer in the world to get off the drums and to play the guitar. He will mess around with people like that. It’s a deliberate strategy.

Eno says two things. One is when you’re being pushed out of your comfort zone like that, you’re paying attention. So we may like things to be very routine and exact, very familiar, and exactly the way we’ve always done them, and that may feel very comfortable. But we get bored and so we get lazy and so we lose our creativity. So when he stresses people out by throwing these messier elements in, he gets their attention and that gets their creativity.

The other thing Eno says is, simply, if you’re forced to try something new, you may finish somewhere new. The unfamiliar simply forces you to find new solutions. That’s true in the recording studio. But it’s true in everyday examples as well.

Knowledge@Wharton: You also say that being messy at times will make you a little more resilient.

Harford: Yes. This is an old idea going back at least to Jane Jacobs, the great scholar of how cities work. [She made that] observation in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a wonderful, life-changing book published in 1961. She said, “Look, if you’re an urban planner and you’re trying to get things nice and tidy on a map, you will tend to zone things in a straightforward way so the industry goes in one place and the residential stuff goes in another place and the retail goes in a third place. That makes perfect sense from the point of view of the map. But when you’re at street level, that very tidy and well organized system is boring and it’s fragile and it’s not creative. So the streets will be completely deserted at one time of a day and then they’ll be absolutely packed at another time of day because everybody is in the same industry or everyone’s doing the same thing. They won’t learn from each other.

“But when you have this messier, more diverse, more jumbled-together streetscape, old and new buildings, residential and industrial and retail and you mix them all together, you get a lot more evenness in the way the street works. You get people on the street at all times of day, which means it’s always interesting and it always feels safe. It doesn’t make any sense on the map, but it’s a much more, better functioning city.”

It’s worth taking that idea and then thinking about, for example, a government planning a new policy or a chief executive thinking about how to run a business. There is always a gap between how things look very nice and neat and tidy on the spreadsheet, on the PowerPoint presentation, but they’re going to seem very different when you get to ground level. What may look messy in theory may actually work very well in practice.

“What may look messy in theory may actually work very well in practice.”

Knowledge@Wharton: You also bring up Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. How did that fit into this?

Harford: Some people will be aware that that speech comes in two halves. Remember the context. He’s under tremendous scrutiny. The civil rights legislation is going through Congress. There were debates within the civil rights movement. The TV cameras of the world are focused on him. There were 250,000 people looking at him in the march in Washington, D.C. And he was under time constraints.

The first half of that speech is very carefully scripted. He stayed up all night preparing it. It’s poetic, but it’s not that good. Then halfway through the speech he realizes it’s not that good. He realizes it’s not quite fitting the occasion. It’s not speaking to the people who are actually there. It’s not moving people. He steps away from his script and he takes a biblical flourish and he gets a smattering of applause. People respond to that. Then he doesn’t know where to go after that.

The people behind him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial know he’s away from script. They’ve got the script; they know he’s not delivering from the script. Behind him the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson who has seen him preach in churches across the country and who’s seen him often talk about this dream that he has just yells out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” So he begins to improvise the second half of his speech based on this story that he’d been telling people in the churches, based on this sermon-like style, the preacher style. And he tells them about the dream. Of course that is the half of the speech that we all remember. I discuss it in some depth in the book.

In other speeches of Martin Luther King, he switched from a very carefully prepared speaker who was very competent, very effective, but not brilliant. When he began to improvise, under sheer pressure of time because he couldn’t do anything else, suddenly his speeches broke out of their previous constraints and started to touch people. Of course they contain their imperfections, because any improvised speech will contain imperfections. But it has that vitality and energy.

Maybe when we’re talking to each other, we’re tempted to stick to routines because they feel safe. But sometimes you need to step away from the routine and connect with people in a more honest and maybe a little bit more risky way.

It is the same thing when we’re dealing with companies. Very often we feel like we’re dealing with people who are reading from a script, and if we feel that we’re touching something authentic, although it’s risky, it could be very effective.

Of course Donald Trump is no Martin Luther King, but one of the reasons why he’s an effective campaigner is because he would improvise and people felt that he was speaking in an authentic way, no matter what fact checkers might have said about him and said, “Well, we checked him. This stuff isn’t true.” It felt true because the people who were listening to him felt that he was speaking in an unguarded and improvised way. It’s very powerful whether you’re Donald Trump or whether you’re Reverend Martin Luther King. Improvisation is risky, but a very powerful way to communicate.

“Experimenters said, ‘you can’t have the potted plant or your poster there’ — employees hated the experimenter, they hated the space. They hated the company. They hated everything. Their autonomy had been threatened.”

Knowledge@Wharton: One of the other people you bring up is General Rommel of the German Army in World War II, and that he would just go off of orders on his own tangent in terms of fighting the war. That was one of the things that made him a very tough opponent for various other militaries from around the world.

Harford: [Rommel] was arguably Hitler’s favorite general. The people he kept beating were the British. He was such an amazing and dynamic figure and such an effective general. He believed that war was full of fleeting opportunities. So it was a very messy process. You just had to grab those opportunities. You couldn’t necessarily prepare. You could try, but if you stuck too closely to your plan you would miss all of these opportunities that you had to seize.

The other thing that he believed in was to act quickly. Even if your side wasn’t properly prepared, even if the logistics weren’t quite right, even if your men were tired and you didn’t have enough food, you had to think the other side has got it just as bad.

Again and again, whether on a very small scale with just 10 or 20 infantrymen or with vast tank engagements, Rommel would make a bold move that if you had been on his side, or if you had been with his Army, you would have said, “This is crazy. The people are not prepared. It’s chaos. It’s a total mess.” They were in a mess. But then if you’d gone to the other side — the French or to British — you would have realized it’s a mess on this side too and it’s becoming more of a mess because Rommel is using disorder as a competitive weapon — very effective.

I drew some parallels with Donald Trump and also with Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Bezos was very clear in the early days of Amazon that he’s going to make a strategic move. He seemed to think, “We’re not ready, our warehouses aren’t ready, our systems aren’t ready, but you know what, Barnes & Noble aren’t ready either, and if we move quickly we’ll do okay. If we slow down and get everything nice and tidy and perfect, Barnes & Noble will crush us or Toys ‘R’ Us will crush us or Wal-Mart will crush us.” He was very conscious about that and he’s been proved right.

Knowledge@Wharton: How much of this ends up being an individual philosophy that people will take? And how much of this can be something that a corporation can weave into its operations?

Harford: If a company accepts these messy principles, to some extent that is almost a laissez-faire decision. The company is saying, “Look, we are not going to try to micromanage you. We’re not going to try to organize every minute of your day or tell you how to run your calendar, or tell you how to organize your desk. We’re going to let you, the employee, take control of those decisions.”

One piece of research that changed my views on many things while I was writing the book was done by two psychologists, Craig Knight and S. Alexander Haslam, where they examined the effects of ‘clean desk’ policies. They got people to sit in various office spaces that they’d designed and do tasks like sort some e-mails, do some paperwork, or other regular office tasks. What Knight and Haslam found was, first of all, that people didn’t seem to like a super minimalist office. If it was bare and there were no distractions, people weren’t super comfortable.

A much more powerful finding was that whether the office was full of soft furnishing and potted plants, or whether it was minimalist or not wasn’t the issue. The issue was: did people have control over their spaces. If you’re a neat person, could you make it neat? If you were a messy person, could you make it messy? Or would somebody else come along and change everything for you?

They found that when people had control over their spaces they got loads done. They were happy. Comfortable. Productive. But when the experimenters came in and rearranged the space and said, “Oh, I’m afraid, you can’t have the potted plant there. You can’t put your poster there,” and they would change things, people got very resentful and it was multi-dimensional resentment. They hated the experimenter. They hated the task. They hated the space. They hated the company. They hated everything. It was just because their autonomy had been threatened.

Haslam and Knight have done this work in old people’s homes and in nursing homes as well, and they believe that if you give residents in nursing homes more control over how the nursing home looks, you might get a much messier space because these are very old people. Some of them have dementia. They’re not professional designers. But if they have control over the space, their mental health improves and their happiness improves.

“Improvisation is risky, but a very powerful way to communicate.”

There is a story about Steve Jobs and his interior design ideas at Pixar in the book which I found interesting to discover. It is a famous story about Steve Jobs who was the majority shareholder at Pixar and who had a lot of influence over the Pixar headquarters coming up with this idea that the whole company was going to share a pair of bathrooms. There was going to be one big pair of bathrooms in the middle of the space because that’s serendipity. They’re all going to come together and they’ll all mix together. Of course, serendipity is very important in a creative company. But then it was pointed out to him by a consortium of pregnant women that, “Look, we need to go pretty often. Maybe we need to go two or three times an hour. If we don’t have a bathroom close to us we’ll spend our whole time walking to and from the lobby.”

At first Jobs was very resistant to this. He had this big idea. He didn’t want these pregnant women to spoil it. Steve Jobs has this reputation for being a control freak’s control freak. But he said, “No, okay, you’re right. I’ll find another way to foster serendipity.” The Pixar headquarters now has plenty of bathrooms. It’s an environment where the design is beautiful, but if you go to the offices it’s full of this chaotic riot of different ideas because everybody’s desk is designed like a Disney castle or a Hawaiian paradise or a volcano or something. It’s chaotic, it’s messy, but it’s a very creative space that respects the autonomy of the people who work there, which is the most important thing. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look like a magazine issue, what matters is if the people who have to work there every day feel that they’ve got control.

Knowledge@Wharton: How much have you learned from writing this book?

Harford: Writing the book made me realize that there’s a time and a place for everything. Some projects are intrinsically disorganized and create mess as you’re working on them. In other projects you can be tidy. If you’re cooking food it’s going to be messy while you’re doing it, and then it can be tidy when you finish. But that is not so with many work projects, like writing a book. It took me five years to write this book and I was doing other things as well. That’s a bit like cooking a meal that lasts five years. Of course it’s going to be messy most of the time.

There are studies that I discuss in the book of people who keep very tidy desks, whereas people who pile things up — they’re called the “filers” versus the “pilers” — find that the pilers are completely on top of their paperwork and often have much better ratio of knowing where things are. They throw stuff away regularly. They use their archives. The people who create elaborate filing systems very often don’t know where things are. They have huge piles of paperwork they should have thrown away but they haven’t thrown away because they put it into a filing cabinet immediately after they got it. It’s not necessarily a functional way to organize a desk. It looks tidy, but it’s not necessarily for everybody. Not for me.

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podcastcoach · 7 years ago

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Marketing Your Podcast - How Long Does it Take?

Understand Before Being Understood

About a month ago I left a comment on the Spreaker Live show, and this comment resulted in a response from the host that in a conversation he had with me was "Disproportional." So after we both hissed at each I set up a time when we could talk about this and see how we pushed each other's buttons. We did and it was a great interview. The bad news is my SD Card ran out of room, and my backup (mp3 skype recorder) didn't get it either. I could call Alex back on, but at this point, so much water is under the bridge, I thought I would just paraphrase what really happened.

In my comment, there were times when I used ALL CAPS to make a point.

Alex is used to dealing with comments from YouTube which are much crueler, and personal that the average podcast comment

This was the first time he had been challenged on the podcast side of this content (vs the YouTube side) and it caught him off guard.

He apologized for calling me a schmuck, and I explained that when he made a joke about me not having any listeners (because I don't use Spreaker), and that I wasn't up front with people about the fact that I work for Libsyn, and we chatted about that. I explained how I wasn't trying to push his buttons, and then we did something that most people miss out on.

We had some cool conversation about topics we have in common. For example, Chris Cornell had just died. Neither one of use quite gets while World Trade Center Tower Number 7 went down.

In the end, I look forward to meeting Alex at Podcast Movement. If I had not taken a second to step back, and wonder if there was something I DID to create such a reaction (instead of just condemning the other person) then I would've lost out on an opportunity to learn something (be careful using caps in comments), and Alex wouldn't have been able to see his reaction. Lastly, I think we both gained a new friend. So instead of being so set on proving somebody wrong, instead maybe ask, "Why did you say that?" or "What were you feeling when you said that?" and try to understand before being understood (Which is a lesson I learned from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

Seriously, How Do I Grow My Audience?

Devlin Wilder posted in a Facebook Group, "Please, for the love of all that's good and pure, someone please help me WITH REAL INFO on how I get the numbers. I don't want to hear I need to have my show out for years or I need to get to 200 episodes or what not. And I've had no luck with Fiverr. I need to know the real deal"

This is like saying, "I want to know about making a baby, but I don't want to hear about ovaries, sperm, or having to wait 9 months."

THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS

In her book Beyond Powerful Radio Radio Consultant Vallerie Geller states, "in my experience, with few exceptions it takes about three years to build a talk station." She points out that the original Star Trek Series was canceled after three seasons and it was re-runs where the audience found the show. Jerry Seinfeld has framed a memo stating that his show has a poor supporting cast, and most people who saw the test pilot would not watch it again.

Gary Vaynrchuck says nobody watched his show for the first 19 months

Rand Fishkin tells about his wife, Geraldine, and her travel blog, Everywhereist. For two years she never broke 100 visitors a day (she does a blog). Five years later she gets 1000,000 visitors a month. Source

Success comes from feedback, and the ability to look at yourself and ask "Can I Improve This?"

Growing up I had a basketball hoop in my backyard. Every time I shot a basket and it bounced off the rim and back at me.... that was feedback. I watched Kareem Abdul Jabar and his sky hooks shot. It was unblockable. I practiced my skyhook over and over and over. Eventually, I could shoot it with my eyes shut. That took time.

If you want to quit your job in six weeks, I would recommend that you not even start podcasting. This is like someone wanting to lose 40 pounds in six weeks. You soon learn that six weeks is not that long, and 40 pound is not that small.

The Answer is There is No Answer

There are so many factors that play into this

Are you working full time? What market are you in and how crowded is it? How unique are you? Your Web Design

It's Not Who You Know, It's Who Knows You

Podcast Movement is coming up in August, and DC Podfest is coming up in November. I will be at Podcast Movement, and I plan on being in DC Podfest. Do these cost lots of money? Just the travel alone can be expensive based on your budget. That is the key, what is your budget? If you don't have the budget, don't be stupid, don't go. I'm saving money as we speak for Social Media marketing world. I have to plan. I have to put money in my budget. If you have a family with a spouse and kids, don't be stupid.

Is It Worth Going to An Event?

I have a podcast group for people in Northeast Ohio. I rarely get more than five people in attendance. One of those people (Matt from theauthorinsideyou.com) helped get me on a local TV show.

I met Gary Leland, Paul Colligan, and Rob Walch at one of the fire New Media Expos. Rob was the person I called when I found myself out of a job and looking to work in the podcasting industry (I now work for Libsyn).

I met Ken Blanchard at an event and I haven't stopped laughing yet.

I met Jared Easley and Dan Franks at the New Media Show. Later they would start Podcast Movement and I've been blessed to say I've spoken at every single one in one capacity or another.

I met Eri kK Johnson and came up with the idea of adding him to the Podcast Review show at an event.

I met Mike Russel of Music Radio Creative at the New Media Show

I met Glenn The Geek At Podcast Movement. Glen got me involved with Chris Krimitsos and I was able to speak at Podfest.us That lead to me helping with the Messengers Podcast about their documentary. That lead to me being the closing keynote at podfest.us this year. One person, one contact.

Last year I met a whole bunch of people at DC Podfest including Matthew from Podtopod.com.

Most of those I paid for (events post-2016 I typically can expense out).

When I was a musician, I once drove four hours after getting off work at 8 PM to drive to Cincinnati and hangout with a bunch of indie musicians for three hours before turning around and driving home (I was probably 20). One of the relationships I start at that meeting was a guy who went to another event and learned about podcasting.

Whooshkaa Free Media Hosting

For those who are new to me reviewing media hosting, I have some criteria.

Whooshkaa is doing something that has been tried by audiometric.io and before them podango.com. This is where you give free hosting so you can see advertising on the podcast. Do Whooshkaa meet my criteria? No, but there is an asterisk.

They mess with your file (as they put code into the mp3 file to alert when to play an advertisement), so they keep most of your ID3 tags, but they ditch you image (so if someone downloads your show to their computer and plays it, the dreaded gray music note of death appears on a windows machine). They also change your file name. They don't change your file format, but by nature, they HAVE to change your file to stay in business.

Their support was quick and very helpful. Their stats are very similar to what everyone else provides (number of downloads, geographic, operating system, the technology used, etc). They do offer how long someone has listened. Unless they have cracked a new code, this is typically a wasted stat. The only way they can get that information is if you are using their player. To this, I point out that over 80% of podcasts are listened to on a mobile device (so this stat is kind of a "Corinthian leather" feature, sounds good, but in the end not that accurate).

They have a built in "Clammr" feature, called highlights. Clammr.com is the first service that allows you to make snippets of a show and share it on social media. With Clammr you can share a snippet of the show and when they click on the snippet they are taken to a place where they can listen to the rest of the episode. You can see how many people listened to your "Highlight." For me, I thought the design could be adjusted to make it go from easy to SUPER EASY to hear the rest of the podcast.

They do have a weird "Sign up for our newsletter" when you send people to an episode on Whooshkaa. The problem is that for the Whooshkaa email list (not yours).

Getting Paid

As the code in the mp3 file has the word "Triton" I'm guessing that they are using Triton for their advertisements. This means that podcasters can probably expect 1 to 2 cents per download. So if I had my Weekly Web Tools on their platform I might make $12 for the month (at 1200 downloads a month). That is if you are lucky enough to have advertising.

When I enquired about their CPA, they responded, "We don't have any information on the CPA for ads. We generally only work with our larger podcasters/media companies for ad injection." When I wanted to know how many downloads you need to get a sponsor, a support person lets me know, "Generally more than 10k per month before we approach a podcaster for ads. Some of our current partners monetising include News Corp, Fox Sports, Sky News, Bauer and a few large Australian Sporting organizations.

When I pointed out to them that others had tried this model, they responded, "We support the podcast ecosystem with free hosting, while making ad revenue from the top 5%. At the end of the day, the cost of hosting a podcast with small downloads is negligible. We hope that some of the smaller podcasters turn out to be the next Ira Glass or Alex Blumberg :)

It's super easy to pick a spot where you want your advertising to be placed. By default, they want to add three advertisers (I chose one). I believe you will be contacted when you reach certain milestones for advertising as there is nothing in the dashboard (that I can find, and nothing in their help section) about getting paid (i.e paypal, direct deposit).

Conclusion

Call me weird, but building your podcast on a host that doesn't charge is risky business (again, podango, audiometric.io) but if you're in a boat and have zero budget (they do redirect feeds if you want to leave) then I would recommend Whooshkaa over another free service Pinecast if you're looking for a free service with all the trimmings. If you asked me which one will be in business in five years between Pinecast and Whooshkaa, I would put my money on Pinecast as their free service motivates you to upgrade to their paid service. With Whooshkaa they are hoping that people with 10,000 downloads per episode take their advertising, and don't leave for another host. I notice in their terms of service it states, "If you are a Commercial User/Channel Partner, this may be altered by any specific agreements we hold with you."

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