Coalesce NYC

Here's the rub: You won’t get all the things you predict this year and you’ll get a bunch that you don't. Something unexpectedly bad will happen. Something unexpectedly good will, too.

We love this quote from Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century:
“Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading, down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear sighted.”

We navigated some client curve balls and team size challenges somewhat gracefully last year, we will say. But we got emotional. There was definitely bewilderment. But also joy, fear, anticipation, and a lot of uncertainty. What do those feelings have in common? They’re all exciting as hell.

To the inevitable excitement that lies ahead...may you be surrounded by creative and supportive friends through it all.

Dan Gurney shared a great How it Works with us last week on how he built a chatbot that used hundreds of blog post to impersonate his famous painter father, James Gurney.

You can build one, too! Dan has kindly shared the open source repo here: https://github.com/dgurns/jamesgurney-knowledgebase

Want to chat with Dan’s bot (aka his dad 🤖)? Head over to
https://chat.jamesgurney.com/

Thanks to Hot Strike Summer, worker power and class solidarity are back in the spotlight. But how exactly does a new union come to be?

Lindsey Smith, civil rights lawyer and UAW Local 2325 member walked us through the steps in last week's How it Works. Want to negotiate better wages, healthcare, or new remote work policies? Maybe it's time you started recruiting some colleagues.

Want to teach us how something works? Be our next presenter >> [email protected].

Our most recent Creative Factor salon brought together the most stubborn group of people in NYC: The people crazy enough to start new businesses. Featuring Working Not Working's Justin Gignac. Read the recap:

Hard Truths about Entrepreneurship: Urgency is OK. Panicking is not. Our recent salon brought together the most stubborn group of people in NYC: Those crazy enough to start new businesses.

Last week's How it Works from Matt Shadbolt of NBC News Group was a captivating conversation around grief, AI platforms like Hereafter.ai, and what role tech should play in the human grief process. Grief is an inaccessible part of loss. But with grieftech, the person who has died is not the end user.

We are in an AI arms race. Integrating AI tools in products is now part of your “brand innovation” and if you wait too long, you risk being left behind.

While we can’t predict all the intended consequences of the AI boom, we know there is a great responsibility for product owners to be curious and cautious. Needless to say, it was a fascinating conversation.

Want to present at our next How it Works? Drop us a line.

Seventeen years is essentially multiple lifetimes in tech. Coalesce has done everything from laying cat5 cables in offices, to designing educational VR experiences, to building proprietary platforms that process tens of millions of dollars in transactions every year. Just like nature, over time, we evolved.

Our engineering philosophy, however, has stayed the same: Build human-centered products that stand the test of time.

That doesn't mean we haven't learned a lifetime of new skills. See our full list of capes and how we're approaching everything from "no-code" to AI: https://blog.coalesce.nyc/evolution-in-engineering-what-17-years-has-taught-us-about-adaptation-9e3eb5a427a2

We love your gut, but it's not your best bet for decision making when it comes to your product or business.

You need evidence alongside those assumptions. That's where UX Research comes in handy. Especially ours: It's focused, super useful, and faster than you might expect.

Every industry is investing in UXR now. Don't be the last one in line: https://uxresearch.coalesce.nyc/

An iconic phrase, shown in "Street Wise"--a custom font our design team created for the 36 Days of Type Challenge.

"The font needed to live up to [the] intimidation [of New York's institutions]. I always look at the “E” and it's so bold and it feels like that letter is about to fight me, so it works." - Barbara Cadorna

Full interview:
https://www.thecreativefactor.co/articles/36-days-of-type

[EVENT RECAP: Swipe for pics!]

In a sea of sameness, how do you tell human stories that motivate and move people?

This is the query we posed at our most recent Creative Factor Salon this week. Due in part to our new investment with , a publication and studio devoted to stories that shape craft, career, and culture (sign up for their newsletter!), we have been talking A LOT about making things that matter (it is not easy).

Do we still need journalistic reporting in an age of extreme noise and micro attention spans? The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. But it’s often hard to make that point when the folks with the purse strings are beholden to traffic and ROI.

So, we invited our favorite creators, writers, editors, and makers to the Coalesce HQ in Chinatown to debate the well, slightly controversial role content plays in today’s brand landscape. What did we learn?

1. Great taste never spoils.
2. Passion drives everything.
3. The fundamental skills haven’t changed, but the generation of creators sure has.
4. This AI crossroads looks eerily familiar (we’ve survived a lot of sea change).
5. Maybe we need a TikTok for services (finance, healthcare, design).
6. Why can’t you get discount tickets to The Lion King on Broadway?

Full recap link in bio.

We consider our design team one of the best in the galaxy, and hey, looks like we’re not the only ones! Congrats to our type and animator-extraordinaire Barbara Cadorna .zip on being shortlisted for the 2023 Young Ones Awards, a global creative competition that highlights the world’s most impressive student work. Her projects (Processed, Thrive, Mütter Museum, and SVA Yearbook) were shortlisted in the Branding/Communication, Typography, and Publishing categories, respectively. Want to talk logos, fonts, brand experience, or storytelling with our design team? Find us at [email protected].

Last night we hosted a hand-selected crowd of content creators, editors, architects, storytellers, at our Creative Factor Salon. This event we lovingly labeled "Content is Dead! Long live storytelling!" What did we talk about? Well...how to tell consequential stories in a sea of sameness, why the Chat GPT threat is pretty empty, when and how people will pay for good storytelling, why you should build things for your super fans, the tumultuous road we've traveled the last 15 years in publishing, how to define your narrative DNA, and why Broadway's the Lion King never has discount tickets (wtf!?). As we partner with The Creative Factor to launch their studio offering (a storytelling service for brands and businesses), we are drawn to people and companies who are taking risks with content. If that's you, don't be a stranger >> [email protected].

Great memories, great works, and great stories come from working with, well, other humans. Read Tucker’s new post (link in bio) on why we are investing in HUMAN words in an age of AI.

How it Works: Swiss Design in Brazil was another awesome tutorial in our ongoing series at Coalesce (where a member of our team teaches the rest of us, well, how something works) - taught by our very talented designer, Barbara Cadorna.

Some key takeaways:

-Swiss Design or International Typographic Style was popularized in the 1950s but its technical rules were already in practice as early as the 1920s. You are probably pretty familiar with this style. You see it every day.

-The core principles of Swiss Design are: Asymmetric layouts, grid-based design, use of sans-serif fonts (Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk), text aligned flush left/ragged right, use of photography, rather than illustration

-The widely-accepted origins mention Bauhaus, Constructivism, and Suprematism movements, but the less-widely accepted inspirations go way back to the body painting of the Asurini people of Brazil, and the architecture of the Kotoko people in Africa

-As we know: The winners write the history books. And origins are hard to pinpoint. Our truths (especially in design) are not universal. As we continue to evolve and grow how we give attribution to creators, we have to question the stories we are taught.

Full post: https://blog.coalesce.nyc/how-it-works-swiss-design-in-brazil-5604057fe3ad

Want to attend our next virtual How it Works? Shoot us a note and we'll put you on the list.

This year at our TOY (Top of Year) we killed Coalesce. (Translation: We asked each partner to write an obituary for our company's untimely death 25 years in the future.)

The goal? To see if our long-term visions were aligned. The outcome? Confirmation that we're headed in the right direction (and some pretty long-shot predictions on client work eg. Delta's Moon Base?!)

We didn't invent the exercise (you can find it in Marty Neumeier's book, Zag), but we certainly endorse it. Maybe you should kill your company, too?

Full obituary: https://blog.coalesce.nyc/why-we-killed-off-our-company-at-this-years-toy-fb65a3a243e4

(To be clear, we are still alive and well, and maybe healthier than we've ever been.)

New crew addition to the manifest for the next moon mission. Too bad Artemis 3 is still two years away. 🐦(Made with Dall-e using “close-up monochromatic studio photographic portrait of a pigeon, wearing a space helmet, dramatic back lighting 1963 photo from Time Magazine”).