ambidextrous thoughts

by matt copeland

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Delivering Bad News? Use a Meme

When face-to-face communication isn’t an option, it can be challenging to express your tone. A method that I’ve found to be effective: use a meme. Here’s an example.

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Draw Something - Van Gogh

Video + pics. Almost ran out of ink on this one. I wish DrawSomething would make the videos available to their users. Until then, I decided to capture it myself with AirServer. Hope you enjoy it.

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How to Make a Tardis

When I built this Tardis for halloween, I didn’t have plans or measurements; just a picture and agile methodology. I cut a section, determined what could fit next, cut/attached those pieces and repeated until finished. This discovery process wasn’t easy, but I’m happy with the final product.

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CSS 3D Transforms Demo

This is a css 3d transoforms/animation demo I made some months ago as a teaser for ThoughtWorks Awayday talk.

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Draw It Wrong: Removing Creative Blocks

Creative blocks are sometimes difficult to overcome, when they’re your own. Someone else’s creative blocks can be a bit trickier. Open your teammate’s mind and remove their blocker often requires a work-around.

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Candy Mountain - XD Roundup Sketch Note

Following the 2012 IA-summit, this is a sketch I made on the flight from New Orleans to SFO. It covers my thoughts around what it takes to get ThoughtWorks XD North America Team together for a conference/knowledge share.

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Octobox Lightbox MVP

Octobox is a lightweight lightbox solution for octopress. I wanted a lightbox for my octopress blog so I decided to make a small one myself.

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TW NA Awayday 2012 Buttons

Some buttons I designed for ThoughtWorks North America Awayday 2012. Thanks to the planning team for the creative prompts. I really enjoyed making the graphics. +1 for Illustrator cs6.

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Speed Up With CSS Styleguides

A living styleguide showcases the visual and interactive elements of your application. Companies spend a lot of time and money creating highly detailed brand styleguides. They do this to keeep visual consistency around their brand’s identity. It’s becomming more popular for brands to also have digital styleguides in their websites/apps. The more progressive digital styleguides are not built in photoshop, but in dynamic html, css and javascript.

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Partially Sassy

Organizing partials for your stylesheets can help to: Quickly add and remove elements/features, reduce merge conflicts, reduce ramp-up time, and keep your styles out of the html markup.

Influence Scores Are Like Cocktails

Here’s a chance to relate two of my favorite topics: social media and social beverages.

The validity of social influence is under constant debate. Who is more influential? How does it work? Why isn’t my score higher? Who the hell is Justin Bieber? Social influence is still an experiment. In time, the brave individuals who are blazing the trail will come up with answers to the above. Until then, influence scores are just way to have fun - sort of like cocktails.

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My Startup Story: Pelotonia

Pelotonia has a special place in my heart (as it does for many). During 2009, I was part of a dedicated team, working day-and-night to create the inaugural Pelotonia ride. Fueled by the passion and the support of an entire community, Pelotonia 09 raised $4.5MM for cancer research @thejamesosu.

I can honestly say that being part of Pelotonia was, and still is the greatest thing that I have ever done with my life.

Our Global Data Field [the Internet of Things]

A video expressing some progressive ideas about data analysis and application from IBM: viewing digital-behavior tracking as a benefit by applying what we learn from human habits and urban system to improve quality of life…

Newsfeed10

Jesse Schell delivers a hilariously insightful talk at DICE 2010. Jesse discusses gaming and how creative-companies have used psychological principals to innovate conventional products.