Meet the Curator...

According to Dictionary.com to Curate is to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation.

Lately, this word curate keeps coming up for me both in terms of what I see as my role as a visual practitioner and my overall philosophy on social media. Let me explain, 

As I've been mulling over business taglines, messaging and such, one line that keeps sticking with me involves the word curate. Why? As a graphic recorder one has to listen intently to a conversation and try to sift through it for the important "nuggets" and then find a way to translate that information into a visual presentation. Thus as a museum curator would sift through information and then develop a display that conveys meaning and value, so to does a graphic recorder. 

Now onto my social media philosophy. If you've ever read ANY article on how to use Twitter for business (which it is clear that many people haven't). Social Media 101 says, DO NOT use Twitter or other social sites for that matter only to toot your own horn. Unless your line of business is reality TV or some other form of entertainment, people really don't follow you to find out about the minutia of your day (sorry if I'm the first one to break it to you). People DO follow you because you should be adding value to their lives, you know something that they don't, you share the same interests, you are a thought leader or carry some type of social capital in a given field.

We come across soooo much information that it's quite impossible to filter it all. So we look for curators who we can relate to in some way that  essentially say hey, there were 100 million articles published in the time it took you to log into Twitter, but here are the one's that you might find interesting. However, since information does come a mile a minute by the time you log into your Twitter or FB feed an article/slidedeck/video/etc. that you might have found amazing is buried somewhere on your Timeline that will never see the light of day. 

Sooo I say all that to say that in order for these awesome things not to get lost in the sauce, I'd like to on a somewhat regular basis (perhaps weekly), compile a list of some of the things I've come across on the web (perhaps 5), that I think would be of interest to my followers. 

While most of these things will likely be in the realm of visual communication, I'll also probably include things related to creativity/innovation/design thinking; small business and entrepreneurship, and instructional design/e-learning. So if you're interested go ahead and subscribe via RSS so you don't miss out!

So to kick this off, I'll share some pretty awesome things I've come across recently on the web:

1) Hot off the Presses (we'll ok e-books don't use presses but I couldn't resist) is Jeannel King's e-book What You Draw Is Good Enough is available for FREE 

2) ImageThink has put together a great slide presentation on how to get the most out of your graphics

Got Visuals? How to Use Graphic Recording to Make Your Event Unforgettable from ImageThink

3) Great TED talk by Todd Henry...seriously where can I get my "Die Empty" T-shirt
 

4) Who doesn't love a good infographic, Here's one to point you to social media success (it's what us instructional designers would call a job aid) be prepared to scroll... 
via: Manage Social Media the Easy Way in 2013 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Wow, you stuck around and made it all the way down here. I hope you enjoyed, and you'll be visiting again soon.