One of the things I’m thankful for this year…
In a sea of competing voices you’ve chosen to listen to mine.
For those of you in the US, have a nice Thanksgiving! And for everyone, have a nice week 🙂
Featured image paradigm
Featured Image Paradigm > Every article has a picture.
It’s really a simple rule, but you can look at almost any major website on almost any topic (news, sports, fashion, food, science, technology, etc., etc., etc.) and you’ll see it being followed. Even if the image for an article is not showing on the front page, click on the link and you’ll see it.
Social media is built around this concept. To get the full real estate available for your post in Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you need to include a picture. Just like you can’t have a serious social media profile without a profile pic, increasingly, you can’t post a serious article without a featured image.
Featured images make the web visual. They organize content, providing the first view of the material hidden behind each click. More so than headlines, images are our first impression.
Featured images give the web life. They make the front pages of websites different each time you visit.
You don’t have to participate. You can continue to leave visuals off of your priority list. Just don’t complain that nobody is reading your stuff when you fail to follow one of the most basic rules for the contemporary web.
You would forgive me
It was 2 AM and I was sitting upright, head leaned off to the right on the makeshift pillow that usually serves as my jacket. The crying of a small child carried through the dark cabin as my fellow passengers and I attempted to get a little rest on the three hour flight. I felt bad for the parent, the child was just giving voice to what many of us felt, a mix of exhausted and uncomfortable that comes standard with any red eye.
The conference was over. Three days, 35 cartoons, three presentations, countless new connections, and lots of conversation.
If I didn’t have a post up on Tuesday, you would forgive me.
One of the questions I received during my presentation on blogging was about personal motivation. What motivated myself and my fellow presenters to keep blogging?
For me, the answer is pretty simple, it’s just what I do. Over the past couple of years blogging has become central to who I am. In the words of my co-presenter Molly Hamm, it’s become a behavior.
Blogging helps me stay connected with close colleagues all year round. Focusing on an audience’s needs helps me think through the problems that I confront in my everyday work. Each and every week I have the opportunity to make a real connection with more people than I could in even my busiest conference workshop.
While on the plane, and for the two days that followed, I considered not writing a post. But then I thought about all the new followers I gained in the past week and the opportunity that I have today to connect with people who just knew of me as the “cartoon guy” or “the guy who presented with Stephanie Evergreen.”
Thriving in the digital world is about treating the work like a daily jog. Unlike a sprint or marathon, there is no finish line here. No stopping and waiting until next year.
I have quite a few things planned for the upcoming months. If you haven’t seen it up on my home page, you’ll find an outline for a free course on DIY Visual Media Fundamentals.
The course will be delivered over weeks straight to your email covering subjects like data visualization fundamentals, infographics, dashboards and simple visuals. This is the first in a series of events I have planned. And to get in when it launches, the only thing you need to do is sign up to get my weekly email updates.
Comments are always welcome here (and I always find time to respond). Thanks for following! -Chris