In the final installment of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Gary Blessington.

Back in March I signed up for an account on Venmo because people said it was going to be a game changer. I thought I’d give it a go and planned to take a second look when time permitted. I haven’t found the time, but since signing up my only other experience with them has been a weekly email to remind me that:

• I have received no money
• I have sent no money
• I have no friends
• I am not active
• I need to make these emails stop showing up… but who has the time?

I don’t mind that status emails like this get sent out, but in this scenario.. it’s just not valuable. Is it necessary to communicate that nothing has happened?¹ To be fair, Venmo is in beta and is working out the kinks. They are far from the only service that does this, they just happen to be the one that triggered this post (which I will be pointing them to). :-)

There’s a ton of information being sent to people’s inboxes every day. When we decide to communicate with our users, we should be mindful of the value of the information as well as how and when we ask for their attention. Is the email useful? Is it actionable? Or is it just undesired noise?

¹ Context is fundamental here. If you’re a sales manager and your sales team has had zero sales… this might be valuable information.

In part 4 of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Robby Russell.

In part 3 of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Allison Beckwith.

Jump to part 1

Today, in part 2 of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Carlos Rodriguez.

Jump to part 1

We recently got together as a team to work on an art project. The goal for this project was for each of us to paint our own Planet Argon logo. Allison started us off by tracing our logo on five blank canvases with pencil. She then tossed acrylic paint supplies on the floor and said have fun.

Over each of the next five days, we’ll share each of ours.

Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Ryan Gensel

Last year we were happy to sponsor (and participate) in the RubyConf5k. We helped sponsor t-shirts, which meant we’d have our logo included on the back of the shirt.

On the morning of the race, I was looking at the freshly-printed shirts and noticed, “203” above our logo. What did this mean? After a few minutes, I realized that this was our studio’s suite number!

So… the backstory.

On the day that we needed to send over the logo, Allison was out of the studio. I decided to look for a file myself and began rummaging through the Dropbox where our InDesign files are located in search of a B&W graphic with our logo in it. Apparently, the file I found had the number 203 at the top of the image but I completely missed that when opening it up.

Lesson learned? Always have someone else double-check something before it ends up being printed on the back of a t-shirt. :-)