Geek As Citizen

Geek As Citizen: Hashtag, Crashtag

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I assume that you heard about the #CancelColbert hashtag on Twitter. I’m going to assume you did but the rough summary is:

  1. Colbert did a skit mocking racism in the name of the Washington Redskins.
  2. Part of the joke was retweeted, including his mockery of racism towards Asians.
  3. The joke on its own looked hideously racist (it was removed).
  4. Hashtag activist Suey Park tweeted the #CancelColbert hashtag.
  5. The internet had an intelligent discussion of racism, parody, and society.

I’m joking about #5 of course. I’d say the conversation degenerated, but the conversation never really generated. I watched a lot of the back and forth, which took on the air of a tennis game with grenades instead of balls. Eventually it got bizarre, snipy, weird, and in fine internet debate tradition, people directed racist and sexist comments at Suey Park and others.

As you may have guessed nothing good came out of this that I can find.

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50 Shades Of Resume #10: The Iconic

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 Resume 10

Robert Blankenship’s resume is a colorful affair, yet is also a standard resume. In fact, the more you examine it you realize that he’s actually got a literally iconic resume – it makes strong uses of icons, from the software he knows to even “iconifying” a logo for himself. He’s using them stylistically and as a kind of shorthand – and going with a kind of series of circular designs. That makes it stand out and I was glad to analyze it.

What are the advantages of this style – and the other design elements?

  • The icons are an interesting kind of shorthand. Between what they say, the unified style, and the fact it’s clever it quickly stands out.
  • The use of multiple colors is very appealing. This is a resume where the color doesn’t detract from the content.
  • It’s obviously scannable – and again is one of those one-page resumes I rarely see (oddly it seems artists are good at doing them).
  • This is a colorful resume that is also a good, solid, resume. It does the job.
  • Aside from the icons the columnar divisions for his experience are interesting ways to show a lot of information in a small space.
  • Getting this resume to work, from selecting icons to doing layout, shows real attention to detail.

A few things that may be problematic:

  • As I always say, I’d put skills at the top. This would work really well with this approach.  It also would establish his “style” early.
  • The use of the icons is fast, but it may say a bit too little about his skills. he clearly has more skills, and this may undersell him.
  • There’s a bit too much white space on the left column.
  • The “Find me column” doesn’t actually provide all the contact information. It’d be best with links.
  • The use of rectangular icons seems a bit disruptive to the rounded theme. Not sure that’s an issue as it goes with the rectacnular dividers.

I like the idea of using icons and logos on resumes, and Robert takes that pretty far. This is something to explore in designing interesting resumes.

Steve’s Summary: If I got this resume, I’d appreciate the clear design and effective communication – and the attention to detail. I’d want to know more about his skills.

[“50 Shades of Resume” is an analysis of various interesting resumes to celebrate the launch of the second edition of my book “Fan To Pro” and to give our readers inspiration for their own unique creations.]

– Steven Savage

Geek As Citizen: What We Don’t Know

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Wrong Way Sign

A few weeks ago there was a story bouncing around the internet about a Google employee who had started a petition to replace the US government, basically, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.  This was apparently not done with any form of approval from Mr. Schmidt, and you can read more about the person behind this at Quartz.  If you heard about this, it’ll give you some idea of the person behind the petition, Justine Turney.

To put it politely, I find Ms. Turney’s idea to be ill-thought out and lacking a sense of the larger picture, as well as impolite about Mr. Schmidt’s lack of free time.  It felt like a Deep Geek idea, to reference my previous theories, disconnected from reality.

As I discussed it among the gang, something came to the surface  how many times we run into political theorizing that doesn’t seem to involve an understanding of how the world actually works?  It’s a problem whose distribution may vary among people, political groups, and such, but it’s a problem you find everywhere.

We don’t know what we don’t know.  Which may qualify you if your career is to be “random pundit who yells a lot,” but really doesn’t help solve problems.  It is, in fact quite good for creating them, as anyone who has ever worked on a project that was poorly defined without repercussions knows.  I’m guessing that’s all of us.

Now as much as I’d like to see a lot more people address this lack of knowledge about lack of knowledge, it’s something we geek citizens should also address in ourselves.

In fact, I’d say we need to be extra responsible.

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