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This is my blog about creating a startup LED flashlight business. I'm a designer, fabricator, and strategist and I'm passionate about making ideas real. I believe that products are about people, that they should be built to last, deliver real value, and that we need to do a better job than we have in the recent past.

Most of my career has been contract or freelance work and I've crafted products and strategies for both big international companies and startups. I also used to work in the "industry" fabricating special effects for film and TV, along with the occasional hot rod. Bottom line, I love making things.

I'm starting this blog so you can follow along, from day one, and see what it's like to start a business, or fail in the process. Only time will tell, but I hope you find this interesting enough to stay tuned, comment, link, like, tweet, and (most importantly) participate in turning this idea into something tangible and valuable.

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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Help me with an instruction sheet!

Hi folks, so one thing I've been messing around with is an instruction sheet. One of those dozen little things that takes some cents out of my pocket but I think it will be both helpful and a nice touch. I'm having it printed, double sided, on post card stock. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Clarity, content, typos, whatever. I'd like to get some printed up sooner than later so please take a sec and comment!


6 comments:

  1. My one comment is that you elide the somewhat unintuitive behavior of the NANJC 105C regarding mode switching. Your statement that the light "remembers" the current setting after it's been illuminated for 2+seconds is technically correct. The unintuitive part is that if you press and release the button for less than 2 seconds then it "remembers" to jump to the next ramping level regardless of if you wait 5 seconds or 5 weeks to press the button again. I'm not sure how to phrase this so as not to confuse people but it seems worth at least mentioning since the behavior is probably at odds with most people's experience with multi-level flashlights. Most controllers ramp to the next level after the light has been off for less than two seconds and is re-illuminated.

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    1. Hey Andrew, Thanks for taking the time to comment! I'll give that some thought. I don't think I actually own a light with the "power off" memory setting. Could you suggest one that I can try out?

      One of the main problems is lack of space on the sheet. Despite my desire for covering all the bases, I might have to stick with using that space to describe what "is" there as opposed to what "isn't" though.

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  2. This is a nice touch, and I like it! As much as I like your tone which is very 'natural' as opposed to the formalities we're used to, however might I suggest that you 'justify' the text so that they align nicely, making it look more professional - like your products.

    Just my thoughts.

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    1. Hey Rez, that's a good point. Anyone else want to give a thumbs up (or down) to justified paragraphs?

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  3. Actually, ragged right justification is pretty much standard for most all but typeset books and some magazines. It's easier to read because the word spacing remains consistent from word to word and line to line. Right justification requires fudging spacing to make all the line lengths equal. I'd stick with the current layout.

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    1. Yep, I'm afraid I (personally) can't stand excessive gaps in full justified text :) Although...looking at the justified text on this blog it doesn't look to bad. I actually tried it on the instruction sheet and it came out pretty gap-filled unfortunately.

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