Seven things a creative team needs to be great

Published by in Media, Technology, Web Design on April 15th, 2012

Whether we’re talking about a 5-person team at a small agency or hundreds of creatives at a company like Apple, there are seven key ingredients that evoke potential for greatness.

Over the past 13 years, I’ve seen the gamut—from a solid group of talented people handcuffed by rampant ego and money-hungry leadership to amazing teams empowered to do work that moves the needle. If you’re team sees continued success, I guarantee you’ll find these 7 ingredients at the heart of your achievements.

1. Talent

The most important element of a great creative team is talent. The trick is to attract the best and most inspired creative thinkers, collaborators, writers, designers and artists. Outside creative, spot-on project management ensures the creative people can focus on what they do best.

2. Passion

If you don’t love what you do and thrive on being better everyday, the work suffers. Passionate people infuse energy into the team. They set trends and strive to do something unique. By nature they are driven to create. Proficient and ambitious, they don’t wait around for things to happen. And they don’t just get it done. They make you say, “wow.” Enthusiasm is catchy and compels a team’s synergy.

3. Trust

When focused on delivering the highest-quality work possible, it makes all the difference to know you’re surrounded by people who will push you and help spring you up when you falter. Let’s be real, even the best and brightest thrive with input. The best creative teams are completely open and brutally honest, eliminating inadequacy immediately and helping each other act on creative energy. Trust is at the heart of collaboration. Teamwork is a necessary ingredient that takes the work to the next level if team members trust their leader and each other.

4. Respect

Respect is earned. Nothing entitles you to it. The best teams don’t tolerate egos, but foster an environment of mutual respect. Respect ties directly to accountability—it says that you value each other’s time and space when you do what you said you would do. Respect also relates to the recognition of each other’s strengths and knowing that what you contribute isn’t more important than someone else’s work. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

5. Power

If company leadership doesn’t put creative first, then the team—no matter how talented, passionate, trusting and respectful—is doomed for demise. Creative people don’t bloom when they’re relegated to order-taking. Great work is led by great ideas and the best results come with creative in the driver’s seat. The team needs to be empowered to make the work the best it can be, as our reputation and credibility are our greatest assets. Creativity is power.

6. Growth

Voltaire said, “judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers.” Curiosity feeds growth. If you’re challenging yourself and learning new things, you won’t get bored. Push yourself and your teammates. If a company has a vested interest in the personal and professional development of the team, the long-term benefits of working relationships really take form. ­­­Growth fuels the talent, the trust, the respect, the power and the leadership. Strength and growth come through continuous effort and struggle.

7. Leadership

Great leadership starts with a big picture view—making secret sauce from the teams’ collective ingredients and curating the right energy. A great leader has a knack for timing—knowing when to push the team and when to let ideas bake. Henry Kissinger said, “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” Steve Jobs demanded excellence and inspired his team to do better work than they thought they could do.

If you’re team is flailing or you feel unsatisfied, try adding a helping of talent, passion, trust, respect, power, leadership and growth. If you find roadblocks, move on to a place that makes the secret sauce or one that’s ready to whip up a fresh batch of awesome.

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Simple javascript show / hide for Oracle UCM

Published by in Development, Technology, Web Design on November 29th, 2011

If you work with the Oracle UCM platform for content management, you understand that it isn’t necessarily the most visually appealing or functional product on the market in its out-of-the-box format. You have to invest a good bit of time and, more importantly, development dollars customizing it to get a compelling front end-interface. Having worked on this platform for a while now, I have discovered some tricks that work well with the standard Oracle UCM implementation. For starters, all in-page javascript works like a champion! This is a great thing for a front end developer if you have limited access to the back end. (In most enterprise-level implementations, this will be the case.) If you are working with large amounts of written content, one of the more useful things you can do is add a show more/less function to the page. I ran across this by accident, having developed a page that was just way too long and needed to be shortened or broken into several smaller and more digestible sections. Our compliance team was adamant about having all of the information on the same page, so there began the search for a single-page solution. As you probably know, you can have different templates with different functionality in Oracle’s UCM product. The jQuery library offers easy implementation of dropdowns, sliders, transitions and more and it works great in Oracle UCM. We have jQuery installed on some of our templates, but it was not available for our compliance template. Uggghhhh!!!!!!

So, needing a quick solution, I began digging around to see what I could find. And there was nothing! What? how could it be that in this day and age there isn’t a readily available solution to my problem on the internet? Bummer. So I started playing around with UCM and some inline javascript. I knew I couldn’t access the header and put the script there, so I tried some inline scripting and it worked straight away. From there, I knew I just had to write the script in the right manner and I should have some jQuery-like functionality right there in UCM. As it turns out, it was a simple solution and it works great.

So, if you need a quick and easy Oracle UCM expandable regions solution, just download the attached zip file and copy and paste the code into the page UCM Content Contributor and edit the text. Simple solutions are sometimes elegant as well.

 

Download Oracle UCM Dropdown here

 

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 review from PopWatch

Published by in Development, Games, Gaming, Media on November 12th, 2011

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s the general aesthetic strategy behind the multiplayer system in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which feels essentially identical to the multiplayer system Modern Warfare 2. Yes, there’s a new coat of paint, and I’m sure that a hardcore CoD nut could point to a million granular improvements. Here’s what I noticed after several hours of gameplay: There’s still a big map in a brokedown city, and a small map with a climbing structure, and a medium-sized map with a bunch of corridors. The available weapons are still incredibly realistic, accurately acronymic, and relentlessly dull. The Killstreak has been redefined into a “Pointstreak,” which allows you to earn rewards by doing more than just killing people. If you’re an expert, the new system adds a Sabermetric-ish depth to the gameplay: Assists are worth something! If you’re an average/mediocre player like me, then the Pointstreak just enhances the sensation that literally everything you do in Call of Duty earns you some kind of reward. It reminds me of playing Little League Baseball: Even if our team never won a single game, we still got a trophy for participation.

Here’s something else that hasn’t changed in Modern Warfare 3‘s multiplayer: It’s still shockingly addictive. I haven’t been a first-person-shooter nut in a long time. (Specifically, not since my freshman year of college, when — in the days before XBox Live — we’d use the dorm ethernet to have 16-player Halo deathmatches. At my height, I think I was the fourth-best player in the dorm.) But I can play Call of Duty for hours. It’s such a pristine, smooth experience, and the constant rewarding — You won a new Callsign! You’ve shot twenty people in the leg with an UMP45! — feeds into a genuine sense of accomplishment: You can feel yourself improving every time you play the game.

You could criticize the CoD franchise for playing it safe. Certainly, the more strategy-oriented Battlefield 3 offers a valuable counter-example of what a military shooter multiplayer could look like: Brainier, more strategic, more team-oriented. But there’s a reason why Battlefield 3 sold pretty well and Modern Warfare 3 set the franchise’s latest record for Biggest First Day Sales in the Recorded History of Pop Culture Things. There’s a pleasant simplicity and straightforwardness to the CoD multiplayer that allows casual and hardcore fans to play in the same sandbox. Coupled with the recent creation of the Call of Duty Elite service, Modern Warfare 3 feels like another step towards the ultimate singularity point, when Call of Duty will stop being a product you buy each year and will start to be a multimedia platform. In a funny way, playing the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer feels a little bit like walking through an Apple Store, or spending a couple hours toodling around Facebook: Comfortable, repetitive, unarguably pleasant.

Here’s the funny thing: Everything I’m saying about the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer system has absolutely nothing to do with the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, which is completely bananagrams insane. It only took me around seven hours to complete the campaign, which sounds ridiculously short — in a Zelda game, “seven hours” is about the point when you finally find the Hookshot and the game seriously gets started. But there is a dizzying array of spectacle packed into those seven hours.

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5 more days to Call of Duty MW3

Published by in Games, Gaming on November 3rd, 2011

No discussion of programming and or design is complete without touching on one of my personal favorite subjects, Call of Duty. Perhaps the most anticipated video game of all time, the latest installment of the Call of Duty franchise is due to be delivered in only 5 more days!!! Needless to say, I, along with about a million other people, am completely stoked and salivating at the chance to play it. The reviews have been stellar, and there are some new features as well.

A little online research tells us that the game will immediately follow the events of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where the Russian Federation continues its invasion of the United States of America, and has also expanded its offensive to Europe, including England, France and Germany. Campaign stages are also planned for Somalia, Sierra Leone, Moscow and Dubai. Gameplay videos from E3 2011 in Los Angeles showed Delta Force soldiers helping Navy Seal Teams force a Russian submarine to surface in the East River and boarding it to destroy the other boats in the harbor. Before this, Delta Force soldiers are on a mission to destroy a radar jamming installation on top of the New York Stock Exchange. On Episode 502 of GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley, footage was shown of SAS soldiers fighting terrorists in the streets of London, eventually chasing them through a subway and killing them. They proceed to a subway station and eventually end up on the streets of London once again. Michael Condrey, Co-Founder of Sledgehammer Games, explained that the SAS are tracking a package belonging to ultra-nationalist Vladimir Makarov and is considered deadly and must be found and captured. Sounds great huh? Well it gets even better!

In Campaign Mode the player assumes the role of various characters during the single-player campaign, changing perspectives throughout the progression of the story. Each level is a mission that features a series of objectives that are displayed on the heads up display, which marks the direction and distance towards and from such objectives. Damage to the player is shown by blood shown on the screen. The player’s health regenerates as time passes. Tasks vary in their requirements, having the player arrive at a particular checkpoint, eliminate enemies in a specified location, stand their ground to defend an objective, or plant explosive charges on an enemy installation. The player will be accompanied by troops who cannot be issued orders.

Further reading has also revealed that Modern Warfare 3 will feature a new Survival Mode. Survival Mode features one to two players fighting endless waves of enemies with each wave getting more difficult. Despite being much compared to the World at War Nazi Zombies mode, enemies do not spawn at fixed locations like the zombies do, but instead, at tactical positions based on the current location of the player. The mode will be available on all multiplayer maps in the game and in the mode, players can earn “cash” for items such as weapons, upgrades and ammo. Spec Ops will also be returning from Modern Warfare 2 and will feature up to 48 stars, unlike Modern Warfare 2, which featured 69 stars.

Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games have confirmed that they revamped the entire killstreak reward system. They have stated that while Treyarch had slightly improved the system, it was not enough to make the system feel perfect. Killstreaks are now known as pointstreaks, and kills are no longer the only way to increase the player’s pointstreak. Completing objectives such as planting the bomb in “Search and Destroy” or capturing a flag in “Capture The Flag” will award points towards the player’s pointstreak. Pointstreaks rewards are organized into three different “strike packages” called Assault, Support, and Specialist. The Assault strike package works the same as the killstreak reward system in Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, offering rewards like the predator drone and helicopters. The Support strike package offers support-style rewards such as UAVs and SAM Turrets. Rewards from the support strike package do not reset when the player dies, but accumulate over the course of a match. The Specialist strike package rewards players with perks of their choosing after every second consecutive kill. After eight kills, they will receive every perk in the game, but will reset back to none upon death. Players are allowed to choose which pointstreak rewards they want to use when they gain it during the match, rather than choosing them between rounds.

Along with revamping the entire killstreak reward system, Modern Warfare 3 will also have a completely revamped ranking and unlocks system, and will not use a currency system for unlocks.The player’s primary weapon will level up alongside the player, and unlock a number of “Proficiency” perks such as Kick (reduced recoil while aiming down the player’s sight) and Focus (stay focused under fire). Only one Proficiency can be put on each weapon. Another new addition is the ability to equip Hybrid Scopes on a weapon, such as a Red Dot Sight and ACOG Sight on a single weapon, and the player can switch between the scopes. Modern Warfare 3 will introduce a “Prestige Shop” which will unlock only after the player has selected the option to prestige for the first time. The “Prestige Shop” will allow prestige players to use tokens they gain from using the prestige option to buy exclusive features such as double XP and a extra custom class.

Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games have also revealed that they are attempting to balance perks that make players rely less on skill, by removing certain perks that give players a major advantage over others who do not possess the same perk. “Quick-scoping” has returned, while diving to prone or “dolphin diving” has been removed due to balancing issues.The teams have also revealed that to fix bugs and glitches, they will utilize Treyarch’s hot fix system. Modern Warfare 3 will feature a local and online split-screen option.

Several new game modes have also been added. “Kill Confirmed” requires players to collect floating dog tags from the corpse of a downed enemy before the kill can be registered. However, the opposing team can pick up the dog tag as well to deny the other team of a kill. In “Team Defender”, both teams must try to cap a flag dropped by the first person who gets killed when the match starts, and hold it to accumulate points. Private matches also now include pre-made game modes including “Infection” (where the infected kills enemies to recruit them to their team), “Drop Zone” (where the player must hold a drop zone for points and care packages), “Team Juggernaut” (each team plays alongside an AI Juggernaut character), “Gun Game” (be the first to get one kill with every gun in the game) and “One in the Chamber” (in which players are only allowed one pistol with one bullet and three lives where they can only get more bullets by killing other players). Along with this, players are allowed to create their own game modes with customized settings such as number of players and time limit.

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