Back and Forth

Three launch week and a pingpong table

Does your work day open with someone walking into the office saying, “coffee’s ready”? Well, ours does. Then there’s the tapping pingpong ball in the other room. Back and forth.

And there’s a golden retriever named Cam here today, walking from desk to desk, leaning up against us, smiling, and waiting for us to rub his head. Now he’s laying on the concrete floor, a square of sun framing his head.

This week has been one of those “push” weeks I heard about on my first day. The Bitcoin Foundation has been the first project I’ve actually gotten my hands into, writing and editing content for an idea that can, and most likely will, change trade forever. We are launching the site soon. Isn’t that kind of crazy though? We’ve spent entire days writing words and inserting them into lines of code that becomes the face of a foundation that is the face of an idea started a world away from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
It makes me think more. I throw away so many ideas because they don’t fit inside of what’s been done, so how could it ever become anything, right?
The week has been a lesson in aesthetics and promotion and delivery.

I’m listening to the public relations director from the foundation, concerned with things that don’t usually cross my mind. Like how difficult it can be to direct event emails and organize them all. We can fix that. Is it easy for the website viewer to connect with the foundation? How long does it take? Then I realize how short my attention span is. I leave websites all the time because I can’t find what I’m there for and I get tired.

It’s bigger than attention span, though. In the incubation stage of creativity I become heavy, too heavy sometimes, with the idea itself, and I forget that it’s only the beginning. Our content director, Ross Hagan told me that it’s not efficient to try and craft a perfect example of what you think a client will want the first time. It will never be. Leave room for revision, just know that the spirit, the essence, the idea is there. And then, it’s all about delivery. Content and ideas fail when the delivery is wrong.
The beautiful thing, though: we aren’t alone. Every day I understand more about why agencies like Whiteboard are important.
Recently, I was on the website for a brewery that makes one of my favorite stout beers, and the site was not great. It looks like a Myspace profile from 2003. I thought about not buying the beer anymore. That’s where we are. Aesthetics and delivery are the keys to making an idea, a good idea, work. And we need collaboration for that. It’s wonderful to be on teams that are welcomed into that collaboration room. An often locked door that decides the size of an impact.

I still haven’t played any pingpong. I suck at it anyway. We’ve launched two full sites and a demo site this week. Coffee’s ready.