Stop and Smell the Sawdust

Four easy steps to designing and building your own social media site.

If you’re a creative professional and you ever find that the ephemeral advertising/marketing/graphic design world that the fruits of your labor live and (usually pretty quickly) die in is needing a little out-of-office boost this project might be right up your alley.

Step 1: rescue castoff old headboard from your father’s woodpile.
Step 2: deconstruct (discovering six beautiful oak boards and maple bedposts under the awful, thick, poop-brown stain – notice that the backs of the oak boards, unfinished, and with pronounced saw marks, are actually way nicer than the “finished” side – then while looking at your pile of wood start to imagine
Step 3: recruit a cardboard box to help hold up your deconstructed pieces and using the pictures in your head start moving the wood around (having a few clamps to hold stuff together will be an asset)
Step 4: add poplar accents in tribute to the woodpile, tweak idea, cut wood to finished sizes, assemble, paint and stain.

You’ll find that limited tools and even less experience in woodworking needn’t hold you back. Lessons learned from your career – about things like contrast, scale and proportion – will prove to be beneficial. And in the end, you’ll have a mobile social media device that could even outlive Instagram, Twitter, Facebook et al. If used correctly it will be a site where you can combine pretty much all social media – keep in touch with your friends – talk about the news – share your likes – network – and you’ll even straighten your neck, smell smells and touch something other than a flat piece of glass – with no limits on words or characters or data.

Taking time to stop and smell the roses did me a world of good.

(I acknowledge the irony in the fact that I’ve had to resort to using social media to make a cheeky statement about social media.) (What effect will using the word poop in this story have on our search engine optimization?)