One of the wonderful challenges about astronomy is that we have to imagine something so we can go look for it. But nature has this way of being even more creative than we are. So we have always been surprised by what we see in the sky. That's why building a telescope has always been interesting. Every time we build a better one we see something we never imagined was out there that's been going on for centuries. This is the next step in that great series of a bigger, better, more powerful telescope that will surely surprise us in some way that I can't tell you. And welcome to NASA Science Live, an opportunity for you to come behind the scenes and to get to know your space agency.  Visit us on Facebook or Twitter and ask us questions using the hashtag AskNASA, or you can simply leave questions in the comment box wherever you're watching this video. Today we are going to be talking about a telescope that's like a time machine, the James Webb Space Telescope. It's set to launch into space in the year 2021 and to become the world's most powerful space telescope and complex. It will examine the atmospheres of distant planets and orbit other stars. It will help to solve the mysteries of our solar system and the place that we are in the universe. First up, our friend Sophia Roberts is going to take us inside the actual clean room where the telescope is currently being built. She was recently at Northrop Grumman's facility in California and filmed this behind the scene video just for you. It's not often that we get to go inside the clean room with our cameras where such a powerful telescope is being built.  Alright, so I've got my bunny suit on which protects the space telescope from me and any particles that may come off of me. So we are at Northrop Grumman's space park in Redondo Beach and we're going to go see the James Webb Space Telescope. So let's go. Right now we're in a huge clean room and like everyone else, we've all got on bunny suits. And this is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. This telescope was envisioned shortly after Hubble's launch to continue on the next phase of questions about our universe. It's going to look in the infrared spectrum of light and then seek the light of those really early forming galaxies and then try to answer the questions about our universe. And so what we're witnessing right now is the two major halves of the telescope being put together. What's really exciting about what's happening right now is that we are in the final stages of construction. So above us we've got the optical portion of the telescope which has just been integrated with the other bottom half, the sun shield and the spacecraft bus which is just below it. But let's continue on. And coming around this side is the most spectacular view of this whole thing because you can see there are these 18 gold mirrors. They are real gold. And the reason is because gold reflects infrared light the best. Webb is going to try to solve the mysteries of our solar system. It's going to look to worlds around distant stars and then look at the mysterious structures and then try to explain the origins of our universe. And no project like this can be done alone. So Webb is an international program. It's led by NASA with its partners the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Thank you so much for taking us inside the claim room Sophia. I am in awe at just how large and beautiful that telescope really is. Absolutely incredible. So our next stop on this tour of the James Webb Space Telescope brings us back to Northrop Gorman facility where NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine visited the telescope just last week. So let's hear about what we'd like to see the fully assembled observatory in real life. Hey, I'm Thomas Serpulkin, head of science at NASA and I'm here with Administrator Jim Bridenstine. We're in North London Beach with Northrop Gorman in Space Park and right behind us is the James Webb Telescope. How does it feel to be next to this huge telescope? Oh, it's fantastic. You know, the James Webb Space Telescope is the most complicated spacecraft that's ever been built and I know people watching on TV or on the internet can see it behind us right now. But I can also tell you a picture does not do it justice. When you are in the presence of this massive spacecraft, it will change how you perceive how complex and important this particular mission is. What we're looking at here are two separate elements. You've got a spacecraft element and the scientific instrument. And now they have been put together both physically and electrically in a way that was a lot of risk. This is a big day and I want to say thank you to our partners at Northrop Gorman, but also thank you to all of the countries that have been involved in this. We're talking about 14 different nations that have been involved in producing this magnificent telescope that is really going to transform how we see the universe. You know what's so amazing to me as an astrophysicist is really seeing the first galaxies, the first stars that are right out there at the very beginning of many generations of stars that have created our environment. That's the number one objective out of the gate. Imagine being able to see back in time. This isn't just looking deep into space, we're looking back in time. Another element of that will be focused on exoplanets, planets in the outside of the solar system. Yeah, it's amazing. And when we talk about what gets the American public enthused about space exploration or in fact humanity at large, it is the idea that we could find life on worlds that are not our own. It's never been done before. And that's really what we're going to be able to do with the James Webb Space Telescope. We're going to be able to see those atmospheres and make assessments. Is there water vapor in the atmosphere? Is there carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? And so I think that's so exciting about what James Webb is going to help us do. We know from our earth that when life came to be, the entire atmosphere changed. And really seeing those changes in some of these planets that are out there is just going to be such a super discovery. Now you look at this telescope, it's clear to anybody who stands here. This is complicated. There's a lot of people, thousands in fact, to put their heart and soul into this. This is the most complicated spacecraft that has ever been built in human history. These are moving parts that all have to work, which is why mission success is the number one priority. We have to get all of these moving parts working correctly. This spacecraft is going to be a million miles from earth on the other side of the moon as a matter of fact. So what that means is we're not going to have access to it once it's there. We have to make sure that it's right from the beginning. So one of the elements that many people forget is some of the technologies that were developed here actually have already had an impact on our lives. Do you know an example or something that's in your mind? Yeah, so some of the sensors on this particular spacecraft have been used for in fact surgery. Lasik eye surgery, for example, has benefited from the technology developed for the James Webb Space Telescope. So these are spin-offs, these are capabilities that come from NASA's investment into these kind of activities, and they can't be dismissed. We're just about out of time and I want to thank you with many regards here from Rodano Beach from Space Park. Yes, Thomas has been great, congratulations to you and your team on getting this far and I cannot wait to see the end result. Thank you so much. That was a fascinating discussion with Dr. Z and Administrator Bridenstine and an interesting perspective from an astrophysicist and from NASA Administrator. So welcome back to the studio. I'm joined here with the NASA scientist Amber from NASA Goddard and an engineer Keith, who's also here at NASA Goddard, who's going to tell us more about the amazing telescope that's being described as a time machine. But before I dive into the challenging questions, I have a personal question to ask. So Keith, Amber, while the telescope was actually here at Goddard, did you actually have the opportunity to go inside the clean room, just as Sophia did, and actually worked with or work on, touch the actual telescope? Well, no touching, for the most part. So I'm a scientist, I'm an astrophysicist, I'm just a scientist, I'm not an engineer that's actually building the telescope, but I have had a chance to go inside the clean room and it was incredible. I mean, it's so hard to describe how big and how beautiful this telescope is and so I have had a couple of chances to put the bunny suit on and go inside and get up close and it's spectacular. And us engineers aren't allowed to always touch the hardware, so we have highly skilled technicians that do most of that, but I had the chance to go in several times while the telescope was here and as we just said, it is remarkable. As you saw in the video right there, clean rooms are construction sites. There's people everywhere, there's wires and cables, so try not to go in there unless you absolutely have to, but when you do get to go in there, it's absolutely awesome. I'm sure, one that you'll never forget and definitely one for your career journals, for sure. And to share with your kids. And so, we've already had the opportunity to talk a little bit about the actual James Webb telescope and what it will do, but Amber, inquiring minds really want to know what's the actual goal of this mission. Well, it has a lot of goals and the goals are broad and they're big and the telescope is basically designed to be the scientific successor to the amazing Hubble Space Telescope. As awesome as Hubble is, there's a lot of ways that we've sort of pushed it to its limits and so what we're planning to do with Webb is push beyond what we've been able to do, even with the amazing Hubble, and answer some of the biggest questions in astronomy today. We want to look back and see some of the very first stars and galaxies that were born in the early universe. We want to study planets within our own solar system and also planets orbiting other stars outside of our solar system. So we're talking about the entire breadth of the universe from our cosmic backyard of the solar system all the way out to parts of space that we've never seen before. Amazing. So, Keith, let me come over to you as the engineering, on the engineering side, what part of this time machine will support the actual science that Amber just spoke to us about? Sure. So the most unique feature about James Webb is that it's extremely large, with a very large optical main mirror. And the other interesting feature that enables that science is that it's an extremely cold operating telescope. We have to cool this telescope down to what is roughly around 50 Kelvin or about minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit in order for it to operate and detect the wavelengths of light that our scientists are seeking. That wavelengths of light are in the infrared. So it's really trying to detect really tiny heat signatures from these far away objects first born in the universe and in order to do that we have to get it cold. So when it's cold, it does not see the heat from itself. So that's the two big thing. It's large and it's cold. It's large and it's cold. Great. So, you know, I'm always astonished at the science and the engineering of NASA missions. There's nothing like it. So, let's step away from some of my questions and let's take some of the questions that are in queue from hashtag Ask NASA. So, Doug Carey on Twitter asks, what molecules might the James Webb Telescope be able to detect on its journey and how clearly could that indicate life otherwise? That is a great question and of course one of our big questions, not only as scientists but as humans, is their life in the universe. And this telescope, the Webb Telescope, it's definitely our next big step on the journey to try to answer that question. So in terms of the specific molecules that we'll detect in some of the exoplanet atmospheres, we'll be looking for things like water vapor and carbon dioxide and methane. And it's just sort of, it's good luck that those types of elements, those molecules, exist in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum that Keith has mentioned already. And so, we kind of lucked out, you know, infrared is going to help us find these amazing molecules in the exoplanet atmospheres that could possibly signal a planet that's habitable or that is definitely the next step in that journey. Now, in order to do that, in order to really detect a planet that we can say, yes, this planet could have life, we'd have to get really lucky. So we're definitely not saying that we're going to find life with this telescope, but we can definitely say that this telescope will do amazing things in exoplanet science and that it's definitely our next big step on that journey in our search for life in the universe. Great, that's awesome. So let's take one more question from hashtag Ask NASA. John in Mexico on YouTube asks, is the telescope going to be able to view all signs of on site or space, or will it be prohibited by the sun? Actually, the way we configure the telescope with this large sun shield, we put it about a million miles away, as the administrator mentioned, that lets us keep the telescope always pointed to deep space. So over a course of a year, we get the full sky. We can see anywhere, we can point anywhere over the course of a year. And at any given time, I think we can see just about 60% of the sky. So yes, the telescope is not limited, unlike with Hubble, where it's going around the Earth every 90 minutes. James Webb will be operational almost 24-7. Okay, so continue to send your questions in using hashtag Ask NASA on Twitter or Facebook, and we'll try to get them in. So, okay, let's just continue, and don't excel too quickly, because I have some more of those questions. But Amber, Keith, let's talk a little bit about those 18 iconic gold mirrors that are actually on this telescope. Amber, can you tell us about the science behind those mirrors? And then Keith, I would like for you to tell us a little bit about the engineering behind those mirrors. Sure thing, so the reason the mirrors are gold in the first place is because gold is a good reflector of infrared light. So we've already talked about how Webb will view the universe in the infrared part of the spectrum. And that means it will see light that's just a little bit more red than visible light, than what your eyes can see. And so it turns out that gold reflects that type of light really well. So that's sort of the science behind why the mirror is gold. Great, all right, so Keith? Yeah, so we mentioned earlier that we want this primary mirror, this main mirror to be really large. It also needs to be lightweight because we have to launch it in the space. So if we looked at glass, we looked at other materials, and the best material for this telescope was beryllium. Because beryllium is really good at the operating temperatures that we like. So these mirrors are made out of beryllium. And then when you start looking at how to manufacture a large mirror like this, these 18 segments, each one of the segments, was about the largest segment we can manufacture. So when you take the size and you can take the mirror segment size, that's how you end up with basically 18. Great, and so as you've heard throughout this episode, Webb just completed a huge milestone by having its two halves connected for the very first time. So let's take a closer look at what it was really like. That you've had the opportunity to explore and see an amazing process of joining Webb's two halves together for the very first time. As we've learned today, Webb is an extremely complex telescope, and it is being built to answer some of our biggest questions about the universe. As a result, engineers had to find a way to actually fold up the web so that it could fit inside a rocket for launch. But once it is in space, it will bloom into a full-size observatory. And Keith is currently at our hyper wall, and he's going to explain the beautiful transformation that Webb will undergo once it's in space. Keith, take it away. Thank you, Leslie. Well, I'm really excited to show this short video of exactly how that all happens. So we launch on an Ariane 5 rocket out of the French Guiana Space Port in South America, and it takes us about 25 minutes to get to orbit. And you can see the very first thing we do is we deploy our solar array. This is pretty typical of most spacecraft. We need to get that solar array out in order to start providing power. Up until this point, we've been on battery, so it's very important. So that's the first thing we do is we put that solar array out. And as you can see, we're actually condensing this quite a bit. We're 20 hours into the mission here, and down here you can see the scale and how fast we're moving over that one-day period. So we do a mid-course correction where we actually fire our onboard propulsion system to correct any of the trajectory areas that Ariane may have provided. But they're going to put us right on target. Now you can see the real fun stuff starting right here. We start deploying our sun shield. So we have these five layers of our sun shield. And all those five layers are supported during launch in what we call our pallets. These pallets assemblies actually hold and secure them for launch. And you can see that's the first thing that we put down. Much like a tray table on an airplane, that's how they fold down. You'll see our telescope extending up. We want to get this telescope away from the spacecraft. Because remember, this spacecraft is cold, and our spacecraft is warm, so we want to separate it. After we roll up some covers that protect those five membranes during launch, then we'll actually start deploying out the five layers. Now these five layers are fan-folded up together. And we use something called a telescoping mid-boom, which is a lot like a selfie stick. We extend that out, and it actually drags all that material out. So we do that on each side. And the video is stopped right here because when we talked about those cryogenic temperatures that we want this telescope very cold, this kind of gives you orientation. We have the sun coming in down here, so it's always providing power. This sun shield separates that telescope from that sun. And this five-layer assembly, you can start it back up now. You can see that we tension this up all five layers to create separation between them. And it's this separation that allows all that heat from the sun to escape before it reaches the telescope. We deploy something called an aft flap, which helps us balance solar pressure. And then the last thing we do, once we get that sun shield out, we do start up some electronics. But the big deployment here is our secondary mirror for our telescope that's been stowed up. It sits on a tripod assembly. And we have those 18 mirror segments, but we fold six of them back. It's almost like a drop-leaf table. So we unfold three of those. They fold forward. And then the last thing we do is we fold the other three forward like that. So as you can see, 29 days, I just covered in about three minutes. So I'm very excited to take some questions on anything about James Webb. Back to you, Leslie. Thank you. That's quite a dance that Webb has to perform as it travels 1 million miles from Earth, 30 days full deployment. So thanks for walking us through that, Keith. OK, well, Amber looks like Keith has really piqued the curiosity of our viewers. And we have a lot of questions in queue, so let's take them. All right, so Katie on Facebook asks, how does Webb get to its final destination and how does it stop in a specific spot? OK, so like I mentioned there, we launch on an Ariane 5. And that Ariane 5 puts us on a trajectory straight out about a million miles away. So that's four times the distance of the moon, and it's opposite the sun. So we're on that trajectory about a million miles away. And actually, it's almost like going up a hill. We start out very fast. And as we get further and further from the Earth, we actually start slowing down. And what we want to do is we want to put just enough energy into James Webb as it leaves the Earth so that it stops right at that L2 point, or the million mile away from Earth point. And then we actually don't sit at a point a million miles away, we actually go into an orbit. It's actually an orbit around the sun, but the Earth actually drags us a little bit that keeps that alignment between the sun and the Earth and James Webb. Wow, that is amazing. So let's take another question. Ryoba on YouTube asks, is the James Webb Space Telescope going to focus on black holes? Oh, yeah. So black holes are one of these amazing mysterious things in the universe. There's a lot about them we don't understand. But we will absolutely be learning lots of new things about black holes with James Webb. So one of the primary science focuses of Webb is to study and learn more about how galaxies change over time. So if you look at galaxies in the very early universe, they look very, very different than the galaxies we see today in the nearby present day universe. And so understanding how that change takes place over time is one of Webb's key goals. And we know that black holes play a major part in how galaxies change over time. Because every giant galaxy that we know of has a huge black hole at the center. But we have no idea how they got that big. And one of Webb's key sort of questions that we want to answer is how do black holes get so big? Wow, fascinating. Go NASA. So we've learned a lot about this telescope that's like a time machine. But I'm really interested to hear about what's going to happen between now and the actual time that it will launch in 2021. So we know that the two halves have been connected. But Keith and Amber, can you actually take a step-by-step timeline? What's going to happen from now until 2021? So as you saw in the video, we just put the two halves together. So we're really excited that we have a full observatory. Both of those halves have been extensively tested. Now that they're together, we're going to spend most of 2020 testing the observatory as a single thing now. So we're really excited about that. So 2020, what we're going to do is we just unfolded and deployment tested everything you saw in the video.  And then early next year, mid next year, we're going to subject it to the environment of the rocket. So the rocket shakes and creates a lot of noise. So that's called an acoustic and a vibration test. So we'll shake the entire observatory. We'll acoustic test it. Then we'll bring it right back into that clean room and do all of our deployments again to make sure that we can deploy successfully again. All along the way, we're doing electrical testing. So we're always making sure the instruments are working, the electronics are working, the spacecraft components are all working. And then late next year, once we complete that, we'll start folding it back up again. We'll pack it up into its shipping container. And sometime late next year, we'll start the process of shipping it to the launch site, as I mentioned it, French Guiana in South America. And we actually do that transport via a ship that will leave Los Angeles and then arrive down there. So that'll be early 2021. Right. So several times you mentioned testing and testing and retesting. And so when we are talking to students about the NASA engineering design process that we feature in NASA's best, we actually talk about how often we have to test the products.  We have to do that over again. So that's really important. But we have some questions still in NASA hashtag, ask NASA. And I would like to jump to just one or two if we have time. Why does the sun shield need five layers? Oh, yeah. So five just turned out to be just the right number. So to put a little bit more information on it, five layers is what allows us, we need about a 500 degree temperature drop over that roughly six foot tall layers. When they're all spread apart, it's about six feet. We need a 500 degree Fahrenheit temperature drop. So that's really what dictated five layers. We looked at putting a six layer that adds complexity and it really didn't buy us much as far as temperature drop. The temperature drop from the warmest layer that faces the sun, it gets more and more difficult to get that temperature colder as you move to the colder layers. So we could have added a six layer. It would have helped a little bit, but it wasn't worth the complexity. But four layers wasn't enough. So these studies were done a long, long time ago. And five just turned out to be the right number. Just happened to be the right number. So to be the right number. Right, so I have a quick question. Well, I have a question that needs a quick answer. So John on YouTube asks, what are the operational temperature ranges? And Keith, I think you mentioned that earlier. So can you just elaborate on that for maybe five, 10 seconds? Our telescope, like I said, we like our telescope to be right around 50 Kelvin. That's minus 360 Fahrenheit. So when you hear on the weather, it's minus 20 in North Dakota. That's nothing. We're at minus 360 Fahrenheit. It's almost hard to imagine. We actually have instruments that run colder in that. So we actually cool all of our instrument detectors to 30 Kelvin. And then we actually have one instrument that actually operates at six Kelvin. So it's very close to absolute zero. Right, and just to imagine that I think I'm cold when it's 32 degrees. All right, so it looks like, oh, that's my cue. It looks like we're here again at the end of another episode of NASA Science Live. Time really does seem to fly when you're having fun. And when you're talking about NASA, I'm probably guilty of being partial. But nonetheless, I want to take this time to thank you for joining us today, sending in your questions. And I especially want to thank our studio guests, Amber and Keith, for taking time to answer your questions. So I just want to, again, point out to you that you can always look for questions and answer on www.nasa.gov. And so in the meantime, until next time, continue to reach beyond the stars that you can see. But there's a lot more to be explored and discovered.


Welcome everybody to our 42 courses speaker series. You are all very welcome and thank you for taking the time in your day to join us. And for those of you who don't know me, I'm Louise Ward of 42 courses. The most excellent platform with courses in creativity, behavioural science, marketing and well-being. And just to let you know how this is going to go, you are all welcome to put your chat in the chat box. Please tell us your names, where you're joining us from, what your interest is in this subject. We're just delighted that you joined us and I am so pleased to have today as my guest speaker, Ryan Wallman. Ryan is a doctor, turned creative copywriter, best-selling author of the marvellous delusions of brandia. We were just chatting about it before you would join us. The chat behind Dr Draper on Twitter, very impressive 22,000 followers there. But by day Ryan is associate creative director and head of copy at Wellmark, a Melbourne based creative agency specialising in health care. Ryan, you're very welcome and thank you so much for joining us. No, thank you. I'm very happy to be here and looking at the names that are joining. I was worried that nobody was going to be here, so you know, good stuff. So, Ryan, I've just introduced you with my background, but maybe for people who don't know you, just tell them a little bit about yourself, your journey into the world of creativity, which is slightly left of centre. So, Ryan, over to you. Yeah, well, you're right, it is left of centre and it's fairly different from most of the people in our industry, I think. So yeah, as you said, I started out life or professional life as a doctor, which seems like it was, you know, a lifetime ago now, but practice medicine for about seven years, which was primarily in psychiatry. And then kind of, you know, for various reasons decided that I wanted to change career. And I'd always loved writing so I sort of looked at how it might possible to bridge that gap and kind of the obvious, the obvious bridge really was to work in health care writing if that was such a thing and at that stage I wasn't really sure what the, you know, what the opportunities were. But I ended up pretty much just Googling medical writing and ended up applying for a job at the company where I now work and started out as a medical, you know, a junior medical writer there, which was 15 years ago. So yeah, which is, you know, a long tenure by pretty much any standards, I think, particularly in our industry. And since then I've kind of evolved from really from quite a technical medical writer to into more of conceptual copywriter really and kind of now create direction. So, so that's really where I sit, but but it's, you know, Wellmark is a relatively small agency where an agency of 15, 16 people at the moment. So I do have to kind of wear multiple hats really and you know I still do, I still do some fairly technical writing from time to time, as well as, you know, as well as the creative side of it. So, yeah, it's we all have to pitch in depending on what's needed. And from that very serious side of your work, there is, of course, the humor that for those of the people joining us don't are not aware the book that I referred to earlier on delusions of brand year. I'm just going to read from the back cover which I mean even the back cover makes me laugh. If you're a fan of books by people like Gary V and Simon Sinek, you should probably stop reading now. I mean, that just absolutely is it puts it in exactly what this book is about I was saying to. I was saying to Ryan just before we joined nearly every page I open on this just absolutely makes me who we laughed at one that I keep permanently bookmarked here turned down the facts about Gen X. I apologize generation human gen H comprises people born between 1900 and 2018. Our research shows they share the common trait of breathing you can tell which way this is going. So I'm going to pick up of articles that you wrote and and tweets, but your, your sense of humor is just spot on Ryan has there always been a comedic course to excite to you. Thank you very much because that's very kind of you and also that's the first time I've seen the book for a little while because I gave away my life probably a couple of months ago. Look it's interesting but yes I think I probably have always defaulted to to sort of more comedic writing and satirical writing and I really sort of found my voice with that I think on Twitter when I joined Twitter whenever that was. Because of you know just the ridiculousness that I that I saw in the marketing industry and and that was my reaction to it and and it was a way I think to, to, you know, to have a go at that without being particularly without being too combative and to come out you know, from a slightly sort of left the old angle so yes I think I probably that is my natural writing style. And I certainly enjoy, you know, and it's a theoretical side of the stuff that I do here. And when we're talking about this sort of obviously the more humorous side of marketing, you know, I think we all see it and some of us might be a little bit hesitant to call it out you know for fear of you know, or what are people going to say about me and what is it that you have in this sort of bravery to just sort of step out and say well I'm just going to say it like it is. I don't know if it's great. I mean I think as I say in some ways by being satirical about it. You know, two years I don't know if it's cliche or yeah it's quite a nice metaphor I think of punching with a velvet glove, because I don't have to sort of take you know approach it head on and criticize people very directly and I think that's probably what appeals to the satirical, you know, that's what appeals to people about the material stuff that I do is that it's expressing things that maybe they can't directly express to their, you know, their bosses or to you know other people in the industry and so on and I feel as though it's probably struck a chord for that reason. Yeah. Okay, well let's talk about the much bigger picture now about creativity about your your industry about copywriting. What do you think of the bit of a big question but what do you think about the state of copywriting in industry today we've been had been threatened as many see it today, nodding your head there you know which way I'm going. You know, we need we need humans to obviously you know draw on a humanity to see this to see humor that's brought into copywriting a lot of people are turning to other systems. Maybe you'd like to chat a little bit about that about copywriting in that in that vein. So obviously, you know, I guess you're alluding to chat GPT and, you know, the other AI things that seem to be threatening us now and you know look I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit worried about it because I think, as much as it's it's limited to to emulate humor and satire and that sort of stuff you know I can imagine that it won't be too long before before it will be much more advanced so yeah look it is a bit of a worry. But by the same token I think I imagine a lot of you know you and a lot of the people here might have seen the article written by me cave where he responded to a reader question about. Or they'd sent in a song in a style of in a style of Nick have written my chat GPT and any any basically taught shreds and kind of on the basis that you know it could never go through human experiences and therefore could never be anything more than sort of a replication machine really. I mean it was fantastic piece I recommend to anyone who hasn't read it. I look I think the state of copyrighting and more more generally, there are, there's lots of great copywriting still around lots of great copywriters, you know, I know a lot of them, I've kind of been fortunate enough to connect with a lot of them. In the last, you know, 10 years or so however these that I've been kind of online. I don't think there's any shortage of talent. I think I think the bigger problem is, is kind of what is kind of accepted really and I don't mean just by clients but just sort of in a broader milieu that mediocre copyrighting is sort of is the more likely to get through I said you know it's the classic of you know design by committee really. That's what's more likely to be accepted by a group of people. And that's probably why I'm slightly concerned about things like chat GPT as well because that's the kind of thing that they can just churn out so. I don't think copywriters are any worse or better than they ever were but but the the kind of the media, you know, the media around us is has changed. So that's my concern. As you say there is hope for the industry and I'm constantly delighted by seeing photos shared by copywriters I admire in LinkedIn where they're just noticing things in the wild as it were you know walking about seeing pieces of copy not necessarily involved even with advertising and I think there is still there is still a great hope for the industry what are the type of, you know when you have young people joining your agency. You know what are the type of things you see as as a difference in terms of you know younger people now addressing copy and obviously somebody like yourself who's been in the industry for a long time. Well, yeah it's an interesting question and it's probably. I don't know that I'm necessarily the best person to ask only because we're such a specialist agency that you know the people who come to first of all the people who come to us tend not to be all that young compared to you know the sort of people that might go into a. A writer you know a copywriter role at a big agency or a consumer agency. So that's the first part but then secondly, the style of writing is necessarily a bit more specialized obviously more specialized than than what it would be. But I think generally probably a more informal style, I would I would say, just as you know as a bit as a general comment and and I think that's that's a good thing. Generally speaking, because that's really that's really my inclination as well. This is for a more informal style rather than you know some of the formal and particularly that sort of stilted writing that you can get with these corporate clients and that kind of thing. Yeah, so I think they do you know the copyrights that we get coming through always bring something a bit different. You know every I mean everyone brings something a bit different from what we're what we used to writing and I think it's really nice to see a different perspective. Particularly for an agency like ours where you know a lot of us have been there for a long time so it's nice to see what other people do. And as I said before talking about creativity and generally it's something we're always talking about in 42 courses is such a wide subject but what do you see as the state of creativity at present in the work that you see we I'm thinking now of can which always comes up as a subject. And then I think there was quite a lot of criticism this year, you know, about the sense of purpose that seemed to dominate. What are your feelings about about that Ryan. Well as you probably have gleaned a little bit from delusions of ground or I am somewhat skeptical about the purpose movement. I think, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of communicating a brand purpose if that's kind of at the core of what a brand stands for and what the business stands for but it's this, you know, it's when it's being slapped on, you know, cynically that that I think most people have a problem with it. And generally speaking, I agree with a lot of what Steve Harrison says about this and I don't know, you know, how much you've seen that what he's written. But he's his book can't sell one cell talks a lot about, you know, the way the purpose is kind of overtaken or overridden. A lot of the commercial purpose that advertising has always served and, and you know to the detriment really of the industry. In fact, we're hoping to what Steve is coming out to Australia in a couple of months so we're hoping to put on a talk with him. So, yes, so it's an issue that's barely close to my heart.   So yes, I'm certainly skeptical about it. To answer your question about can. Yeah, look, I think it's an issue and I've also as you also would have done is probably a book. I'm a bit skeptical about awards as well and not so much awards as the kind of session with you know with awards that that a lot of people, a lot of people in our industry have and what that does to the work. But, you know, it's a necessary ever really and that's just how it is. And Chris has joined us our founder in 42 courses and Chris just asking there, where do you look for your inspiration. Creative inspiration. I assume that means. Well, look, it's probably a cliche answer this but at everywhere really so I try to take inspiration from from what I read and you know I tried to read fairly widely. I do read a fair amount of you know kind of marketing literature or at least I have I've been a bit remiss with that in the past couple years. But also, you know, just fiction more generally and and as you say it's a little as a copyright you can always tune to everything that you read you know you're walking along the street and so you know a sign on a bus or whatever. You just kind of naturally analyze everything. So yeah, look, it's a hard question but sort of everything and I am exposed to really. But yeah, look, I do you know I do make a point of, of trying to, you know, I'll click through the the old award annuals that we've got at work, you know, doing that and doing AD annuals and that kind of stuff. Some of which are quite old now. But yeah, that does come in handy I find, you know, even before we've got a pitch coming up or something so yeah. We're always sharing ideas obviously at work and one thing we say we're not short of his ideas and sometimes that's more of the problem isn't it there's just the wealth of information that's available to you and you know focusing in on on what's important I mean, you obviously have lots of interests. Do you do how do you focus in really and target on on the important things. Not very well. I get very easily distracted by Twitter, you know, whatever else. I suppose when I do have a creative challenge, then I, then I am better at sort of, you know, focusing my creativity and sort of, you know, focusing my attention but yeah other than that, I can't answer that question very well. I can't even focus on that question. I think it's a perennial problem. I was just reading very interesting article this guy was, it's called the second brain. This book he's written and he was going back to, I think they're called chapter books. It's another place to focus your, your, your ideas can be simple things recipes or just quotes from people and it's, I mean that's something that I do is have a notebook on the go I just wonder about your actual, you know techniques, your practical techniques that you use in the agency when you're working on projects like this. Yeah, well, yeah, that's an interesting question and it's, it's pretty pretty form. I think I think I personally am not a big fan of, of big brainstorms. I think I work best when it's sort of either literally sitting down with that, you know, pen and paper, because I send to be able to be more creative when when it's pen and paper rather than sitting at a computer. And, and kind of working through ideas myself and then sitting down with usually it's, you know, a designer or someone from the studio and bouncing ideas off each other and that seems to work well it sort of had the kind of a classic copyright or art director partnership really, yeah, we'll, we'll sort of bounce ideas off each other and, and often what I try to do, and this is something that was inspired by a guy called Mark Duffy who I think his Twitter handle is copywriter, who's even more kind of caustic than I am. He made the point that, you know, that he's written a blog about this that saying that the best ideas, or the best advertising tends to have an unexpected visual, which I, which is a fairly big statement because I don't think that's entirely true. So many of the examples that he gave were excellent and it really sort of made me, I think, kind of prioritised visual thinking over thinking about the words first, and I think as a copyrighted that really helps because just because it makes you makes you think about the combination of, you know, of visuals and and copy together. The other person found that was very helpful. And by the same token, you know, my, our executive creative director who's got a design background says, you know, he often thinks about the words first and then sort of, you know, how the visuals will work in with that so I think that there's a sort of a complementarity there with the way that we work so, you know, a lot of the people that I've worked at Wellmark have been, we've been working together for a decade, some of us. And so we sort of worked out a bit of a shorthand I think in the in the way that we work together so it's quite it's probably a bit hard to describe the creative process but that's sort of how it works. And the other thing is that, you know, I'm like a lot of other creative people or people in creative industry, I should say, and I find that ideas come to me kind of in the, you know, in the liminal spaces and when I'm not actually thinking about what the problem is and, you know, in the shower or the classic, it was that when my kids were very young, I would sort of have the best ideas when I was lying awake at 2am because, you know, I've just been up to feed them or whatever and sort of that I think the stillness of the night somehow brought out brought out ideas and some of the stuff in my book was, you know, it was all sort of it came to me in the middle of the night. Yeah, I don't know that I'd necessarily recommend that. So many interesting points then I mean we as as we know visual is, you know, a much stronger stimulation to to the brain and and there again as you're saying you can't know when your ideas are going to come to you and some of the best advice is just to stop what you're doing and go for a walk. I often join a meeting in the morning and I'll be saying to Chris. I had this idea in the morning this morning I don't really know what I what I mean but I feel it's going this way and as you say the ideas just seem to come to you at those times and you can step away from the work that you're focusing on. And the shower thoughts, I mean, I mean that's happened, you know, I've had that as well so yeah, there's something about it and the subconscious just starts working on it so yeah. Absolutely well we've had some great questions in from the people who joined us and again thanks so much for joining us for this talk I can see a question there from Claire, Claire Johnson thanks for joining Claire. I'll read out the question with your background in health care you possibly have a decent amount of clout with health care clients. How do you advise non medical copywriters to cut through the risk averse attitude many providers have. Just in question. Yeah. I mean that's a very relevant and difficult question. And I think I remember writing about this sometime ago about the difficulty of dealing with. You know, scientific approvers and medical approvers when you when you're working in a creative role, because they definitely approach things from a very different lens. And yes look clear you are right it's. It does help to have a health care background is it you sort of come to it from a positional authority to some extent I suppose. But it doesn't necessarily make it any easier for me to you know to get sort of ideas through that I think. You know the best way of communicating something even if it doesn't sort of stick to the regulations as they see them. Geez. I think probably one of the problems with with well with with our with our jobs in general but probably particularly in health care is that. You know you have to kind of justify creative decisions but to people who really just aren't used to judging creative outputs. And it's and it is really difficult you know you sometimes you have to. I have found anyway to use some of the work of people like you know by and sharp. Because they really you know they have brought kind of science I guess to the forefront of marketing and and if you can sort of quote that kind of work and the scientific basis of for example creative effectiveness then that I think can resonate with you know with people who are naturally or come from a scientific background. So yeah I have these that we've used that approach sometimes. That's very interesting I worked in medical market research for a good number of years and as you say the specialist adverts that the medical professionals in particular are exposed to are certainly a league on to their own and. I tested in a slightly different way in terms of a message that's conveyed and you know they're they're certainly looking for a very particular particular slant on it so it does interest me. Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting that there has actually been a real shift in health care advertising and probably in the last five or five years maybe even a little bit longer. Where there's there's been a real kind of explosion of creativity and I think the health care advertising industry is very healthy for one and better word. And a lot more interesting that people shifting from the consumer side, you know, big names in the industry that are moving into health care and I think there really has been a recognition of the role of creativity. In health care and pharmaceuticals and yet but as you say I mean it used to be very, very formulaic and and kind of generic. But yeah it's not really the case anymore so it's been really nice to see. That's really interesting so I'm going to go to the questions again. There's a question here from Melissa. Melissa Gray Ward for joining us. What Melissa asks what are the critical skills for copywriters who want to move towards a CD CD roles and she says in her experience. Most a CD CD she's worked with have come from design art direction first, and former copywriters are less represented. So thanks Melissa that's an interesting question. Yes, Melissa that is an interesting question and I share your pain. No, as you know, it used to be the case that that most creative, you know, I mean we're talking sort of half a half a century ago probably but most creative directors at that stage came from a copywriting background and that really has shifted. Moved up through the agency. Yeah, it's really changed and you know, all of a lot of the creative direction roles that you see, you know, job ads or a lot of the creative director that I know have come from a design background and that seems to be the norm now. Advice. I suppose maybe sort of talking back to what I was saying earlier which is trying to sort of think as much as possible as you know, you know, you know visual way and and try and put visual ideas first when you when you're when you're thinking about your creative process, because I'm just finding that it, you know, first of all, it goes down well with designers. But assuming that you don't actually go and try and do the design yourself because that that doesn't go down so well. Yeah, I think it just it makes your ideas so much stronger and I think probably sort of demonstrates your ability to think you know, you know, holistic creative way rather than rather than just thinking about a good headline or you know, you know, cracking line, which is very tempting to do. But yeah, I don't know what I can recommend about the systemic issue because it does really seem to be that there's a there's an emphasis on designing creative direction roles and and look, I don't know, the pendulum might swing back who knows, I guess we'll see. That's still very helpful. Thank you. I mean a question we're often asked from people when we have guests on is just the perennial books that you've enjoyed or have inspired you and and people within the industry you've already mentioned Steve Harrison who we're a great friend, great great fan of. So the people who inspire you or the books that you think are particularly useful in the copywriting industry or advertising. Yeah, yeah. Well, probably the first the first sort of really kind of revolutionary book in terms of, you know, my introduction to copywriting would have was drag birds. What's it called? I don't remember none of the letters that sell or something. Anyway, it's direct marketable. It's a classic and he's updated it to include sort of, you know, digital marketing as well. And I know Drayton quite well. So he's been a huge influence. So I used to, you know, back 20 years ago, probably when I was living in London, I used to read Rory's column in the spectator. And that was kind of, you know, well before I got into the industry, but he's been a massive influence as well. So I would highly recommend his book, which I'm sure you know, the top of the list for me a recommendation. Yeah, I mean, just amazing. Yeah. And then advertising more generally, well obviously, you know, and all those classics, I think you can't really go wrong with those. But other people in the industry, certainly copyrighted Vicky Ross, who a lot of your, your viewers will probably know as well. She's a bit of a kind of force of nature in the copyrighting community and very well connected. Has fantastic advice about copyrighting. She's, you know, started started a copyrighting community on Twitter, although I don't know how active that is anymore from the state of Twitter. Yeah, they'd probably be then they're a good start. Very, very inspiring list will put a list of those up afterwards for any of you so don't worry if you're not scribbling down furiously. Yeah, and Chris has just reminded us that Rory has a new book coming out but as you say the alchemy book is really inspiring isn't it I really would. I always recommend that to people it was my first sort of introduction to all of the concepts of behavioral science which have become so involved in. Yes, go ahead. Just reminded me that Richard shot and who wrote the choice factory has just, I think has just released a new book as well. Speaking of behavioral science so I'm sure that it will be fantastic because choice factory is great to. Yeah, good recommendation I can't remember the name of the new book you're right it's coming out at the coming out at the end of March. So yeah, yeah I can't remember that as you say it's another great writer in the behavioral science field I mean is that an area that you feel for yourself as contributed to sort of diversification of thought. Yeah, it is. And I sort of. It's one of those things that you know, as soon as I read the choice factory I was kind of looking for behavioral science angles into every kind of job that we had. And I think it's sort of a little bit since you know since then. But absolutely yeah and social proof and cocktail party effect and that kind of stuff and then we would, you know, genuinely use that in campaigns that we've done. And I think it's really added just a different dimension to a lot of advertising and you know Rory is just so, so insightful and less filled with the way that he thinks that it makes it all seem so obvious but yeah it's not necessarily. And as you say, the techniques that are explained through behavioral science another author we're a fan of is Patrick Fagan, who explains psychology behind marketing and as you say a lot of it as we know it's not that it's new to us sometimes it's just that you're going to label, but it certainly opens your eyes to different approaches to these and that's interesting you say that. Once you read Richard straight away. I suppose it's recency by thought or whatever but I think it probably gets back to I think it was Claire's question about, you know, how you deal with scientific people and healthcare approvers and so on and I think and I do recall using some of the stuff in Richard Scotland's book as justification for what we're doing.  Yeah, and as you referred to earlier the work that Byron Sharp's done that we all admire so much you you feel that his work lends credence when you're talking to clients. Yeah, it's a lot easier to justify it on the basis of that kind of stuff and yeah it's actually surprised I was I was quite surprised. You know, I mean it must have been several years after how brands grow came out. I was talking about it in presentations to clients and now you know some of them quite a lot of them had never heard of it which which are quite surprising but but yeah I suppose, you know until you've been exposed to it it's. Well it's just another subject Ryan that we often comment on is that we can be sort of falsely confident that everybody knows the people we're talking about the books that we're familiar with and when you're in the niche market and soon as you step out of it. You're surprised to say who is that who is that person but it's you know people are still just in which is superb are still just discovering many of these theories of marketing that we now feel with so familiar with. Yeah, and I think you know not to fanboy over him too much but I think quite a lot of that probably has been driven by Mark Whitson. You know so many people now have done his mini MBA and would have been exposed to a lot of of those theories and you know the thinking in marketing that has been done over you know decades but you know a lot of people as he as he has often pointed out. Simply didn't have any form of marketing education and hadn't been exposed to it and so that they're working sort of blind and sort of on fear with your life. And I think that really is changing I think that I think there's a much greater appreciation of the role of education in good marketing practice. Yeah, I find that interesting as well because there seems to be the very diverse use as you say it's fantastic that so many people are now getting qualifications in marketing and there's the science behind it from people like Byron shop and then you'll get the other extreme of the old school thought you're Dave Trot who can be quite disparaging about the graduates who arrive and he really advocates for sort of like old school on the ground learning. What do you think about those sort of differing views very diverse I know. Yeah, well I look I don't think that there's necessarily a clash there but I mean I like Dave as well. And I think he's absolutely right about the kind of the and it's actually a Rory Sutherland's term for is the era of democracy and it's you know that that's kind of taken over the world of advertising in particular to its detriment. And I think there is a subtle difference between kind of marketing as a discipline and and then kind of the creative expression of marketing and you know advertising in particular, which is really where more where Dave is coming from. And I think that's where things can get a bit muddy you know I think the scientific people can get a bit caught up in aspects of advertising that you know that can't be explained by numbers and you know whatever criteria need to be inserted into every ad and all that kind of stuff and we've just I think an excellent example of that is that you know that me Donald's ad, you know there's been a lot of debate around you know other other brand assets distinctive enough is there enough, you know, focus on the product and all that sort of stuff. And that's where I think these these two opposing schools of thought sort of, you know, do clash of it. Yeah, look, as Martin says, and I know I quite him too much so I apologize. But but he has always said look, as a client as a marketing client you know your role is to is to set the set the strategy and make sure the positioning is right and all that sort of stuff. And then brief the agency and let them go so let the creative process take place subsequent to those decisions, you know, and don't kind of involve yourself in the creative process and I think that's you know he is essentially agreeing with Dave there. And I think, you know, in a perfect in a marketing utopia, Mark Ritson would be the client and he'd hand over to Dave and you'd have the best dad that you've ever seen probably. Yeah, I mean I think we've come full circle ever coming back to as you say the power of creativity and really creative ideas like that can't be measured sort of on the efficacy scale and you know we're measuring the strength of the brand can you see and then, as you say along comes an advert like the current McDonald's one where the product isn't even in the advert, you know, and you just think well that's. And again, I was really inspired by that because there's often conversations about the sort of dirge of creativity and then you constantly do see new things coming along and it sort of reinforces. Yeah, enforces that and as you say with all of this concern about chat and you know ai taking over then you see things like that and you think there's hope for the world. It restores your faith to some extent doesn't it. Yeah, it's been it's been a really interesting discussion about that and and I think I'm very reassuring really that most people have have kind of been favour of and thought this is what advertising you remember you remember what it can do. And interesting enough, although you say you know, it's hard to measure something like that. The system one people did actually measure the effective you know, do you know john yeah john. And it came up, you know, I mean it was just it exceeded all expectations basically and you know one of the most effective ads they've ever run through their system so it just goes to show that you know I think to some degree you probably can measure these things but but not in the in the way that kind of the number conscious necessarily thinks I think it would be. Well we've covered so many subjects in this short time Ryan and I've really found everything that you said, extremely interesting I do thank you for agreeing to join us here today for this 42 courses chat and I hope that everybody who took the time in their day to join us. I've enjoyed it as much as I do. You actually say Ryan you don't have a copy of the book. I certainly don't know if you can get hold of Ryan's book I really do recommend it it's a great, it's a great hoot. Today what we'll do is we'll put up a list of all of the influential people and their books that Ryan has mentioned. And again, I thank you Ryan for joining us today I've really enjoyed our chat and I hope that everybody else has to and I hope you'll join us again. Thank you for one of our 42 courses speaker events. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. And am I allowed to do a little plug at the end. You absolutely are. So, so we do, I do have a sequel to delusions of brands are coming out hopefully in the next couple of months. And I'm wondering how things go, but yeah, Giles Edward to is my partner in crime is currently working on it. So, yeah, that hopefully it's it's basically more of the same. So if you like that then, yeah. We look forward to it. Thank you very much Ryan for joining us. Thank you everyone for joining us. And I hope that you'll join us again at a future event. Thanks for joining us. Thank you everyone. Thanks everyone. Thanks so much Ryan.


All right, I'm gonna go, whoa, that's really bad. I'm gonna step away from the microphone. I'm gonna go ahead and get started. My name is John Ferris. I'm the lead front-end developer at Atten Design Group based out of Denver, Colorado. We're a design development and strategy company and we do a lot of droop work. And this is the flavors of SVG. When I got the, kind of the idea for this talk is as I started diving into using SVG, I really found that there's a lot of nuances in it and you use it differently depending on what you're trying to achieve, what kind of browsers you need to support. And then the things you can actually do with SVG depend on how you actually use it. So just real quick, SVG is Stance for Scalable Vector Graphics. It's essentially an alternative image format. So it's vector graphics meaning that you're basically giving the computer instructions on what to draw on the screen, like draw a circle here, make it this color, add a rectangle and stuff like that as opposed to like roster graphics where you're essentially, you have an image that's a grid of pixels and you're just telling the computer which pixel in that grid should be which color and whatnot. But SVG is much more than just a graphic format. It's actually markup. So it's XML based markup language for defining graphics. So in HTML, you have stuff like your H1s, your paragraphs, image tags, stuff like that. In SVG, you have a similar structure. You have tags for shapes and paths and filters and animation. So in this example, it's markup graphic at the top. All the code for that is below. So we just have a circle. We tell what size it is, color orange. We have rectangle and there's attributes on that for the size and color. And then we have the actual text and it's all placed in there. And it's pretty concise for a graphic that can be scaled up big and small and it always kind of maintains the fidelity. So when you're thinking about SVG, just keep in your mind that it's actually markup. So essentially, whatever you can do to HTML with JavaScript and CSS, you can pretty much do that same stuff to the actual graphic. So it provides a ton of flexibility and opportunities. So some of the stuff that you can do with SVG, you can scale it up and down and it's never gonna be like anti-Alist unless you go too small with it. But it's almost always gonna maintain those like crisp edges and look really good. It can be animated. There's different ways of animating SVG. You're gonna use CSS animations. You can use JavaScript animations and it actually has its own built-in animation syntax. You can filter it. So filters would be like, so like Photoshop filters like blur and blend modes, CP atone, that kind of stuff. You can style it with CSS and you can script it with JavaScript. So here's an example of the, I'm actually not sure if it's Smill or Smile animation. It stands for something I don't really know and it's not that important. It's like synchronized multimedia in interpreted language, I don't know. I don't know what the I is. But here we're just taking, so we have this Kool-Aid man SVG and we have a group of shapes in there that has an ID of left arm in there and we're using the animate transform tag to actually just wave his arm up and down. So we say we wanna animate it from angle of zero to, let's just highlight this, maybe it's easier to see. From zero to 20 degrees using this particular point on the grid for the rotation points. And we're rotating it back and we're gonna do that for two seconds and we're gonna repeat it indefinitely. So Kool-Aid man will always be waving his picture at you and it never spills. So you can do filters too. So this is an example of a blur filter. So we just have a tag that's filter. We give it an ID so we can actually reference it and apply it to different shapes. And inside of that filter, it has a Gaussian blur filter applied to it. And then below that, we're just applying that to the Kool-Aid man by referencing that ID. And you can apply that filter to just different parts of your image. Your graphic. So here's an example of style in it. All the shapes within the Kool-Aid man SVG that actually have that red Kool-Aid color have a class applied to the tag of Kool-Aid. So we just use fill purple and it applies that to all those shapes. So the most things you can do with applying CSS to HTML, you can do, I won't say most. There's a lot of overlap in the actual style attributes that you can apply to SVG shapes as you can with HTML. And as we see here, the fill property, there's no fill property for HTML. So that's one that's specific to SVG. So there is a little bit of difference there, but the syntax is all the same. And this is one of the really cool things with SVG is you can actually, you can embed your styles within your SVG and you can include media queries within that graphic. So in this example, we've added the media query or max width of 360 pixels. So if this image is smaller or as big as 360 pixels or smaller, we'll change the Kool-Aid to orange, we'll hide the oh yeah and we'll show the oh no. And the cool thing about this is if you actually, if you're embedding these media queries in your SVG file and you're embedding your SVG with like say an image tag, it'll actually, it takes those media queries based on how big your image is, not how big your viewport is. So in this example, this is the exact same file of the Kool-Aid man, same SVG, it's just shown at different sizes. So the media queries apply accordingly. So let's talk about those embed methods because that works a little bit differently depending on how you actually embed your SVG. So the most basic version is just use an image tag, you know, instead of like sourcing a PNG file or a JPEG or a GIF, you could just use SVG. It's super simple. Support for that as far as SVG features, you can animate it using the smell, smile, syntax. You can't animate it with CSS or JavaScript. Excuse me. And when I say you can't animate it with CSS and JavaScript, I'm talking about the innards of your SVG. You can animate it just like you could animate a JPEG, you know, you can rotate the whole thing or translate it and move it around. But if you're embedding SVG this way, you can't actually, like we couldn't use JavaScript or CSS to wave the Kool-Aid man's arms. You have to use the smell syntax for that. You can't script it with JS, same thing we're talking about the innards. You can style it with CSS if you embed those styles within your file. You can't use external CSS. And then the other benefit is if you're using SVG in this way, the actual SVG file gets cached across page loads. So fallbacks for that, a very simple fallback to implement when you're doing image SVGs is just to add some inline JavaScript, which is a little dirty, but it's also super simple. So I think it's all right if you're doing, if you're just applying like, you know, maybe have a single SVG on your site and you wanna provide a fallback for that. It's very simple, you just add on-air attributes and if this airs out, like the browser can't load the SVG, then we'll just replace the source attribute with a PNG. And then we also add this on-air equals null to prevent like an infinite loop if for whatever reason the PNG doesn't load. Like we messed up the path or whatever. So it checks once, if that airs out, then it just says no, you don't get any image, you just get the alt tag. So that's super simple. There's a tool called SVGZ. This essentially does that same thing, but it kinda does it in bulk and it'll just go through, you add the script to your page, it'll read all your image tags that are linked to an SVG, replace all those with PNG. So it's kinda up to you to actually make sure you have PNG fallbacks using the same exact name as your SVGs. It's really a simple solution if you're just using those image tags. Then there's the picture fill fallback. This uses a picture element. I'm not completely sold on this, I think it has a very narrow use case, but the idea is that you use the picture element and different sources for your SVG within that using your base image as a fallback PNG. Kind of the downside of this is it's only gonna work for you if you're actually using the picture fill polyfill. And the reason for that is that there's way better browser support for SVGs than there is the picture element. Picture element's still really new. I guess the advantage to using this method is that you can apply some art direction. So depending on your different break points, you can provide a completely different SVG as opposed to one that's just sized or scaled differently. The other way you can use it is background images. So very similar just using the background image property in CSS and pointing to an SVG. Support is also pretty much the same as an image tag. As an image tag, fallbacks for this, just a general fallback using Modernizer. Modernizer, that can be your fallback for anything really. Here, we're just using Modernizer. If you don't know what Modernizer is, it's a library that does feature detection on the browser. So you just add a feature check for SVG support. If the browser doesn't support it, it'll add no SVG to the body tag on your page and then you can apply alternative styles for that. So here we're just saying if this page doesn't support SVG, I'm sorry, no SVG, then use the PNG as your fallback image. And then there's the object tag. So the object tag's very similar to an image tag. We're just using the data attribute to embed this SVG. And the main advantage of using the object tag over say an image tag or background image is you can actually access the innards of that with JavaScript. You still can't style that stuff with CSS, but you can access the elements with JavaScript, which is nice. And it has a nice clean fallback in that if you just place an image tag within your object tag, that's PNG. If the browser doesn't support that SVG that it's trying to load in, it'll just pick up the PNG. So that's super easy. And then there's inline SVG. So you can take your SVG code and just plop it right inside your HTML. And this has the best support for all the features. So yeah, you can animate it pretty much any way you want. You can script it. You can style it with external styles. The one downside with this is that your image does not get cached. I mean it's loaded, you get to save an HTTP request because all your image data is embedded in the page, but it's not gonna get cached externally. And that actually may be fine if you're using an SVG for say like some kind of opening an animation or it's your navigation on the homepage or it's a very specific use case. If you're only using it on that one page by all means, just load it in there. So to kind of compare all those, you see that using the SVG as inline has the best support, but there is a lot of simplicities to using the image and background image. So if you don't need all these extra features and you just need the scalability of SVG, then by all means use it as an image or background image. So there's nothing here that's like completely perfect and covers all the bases. There is a library called SVG Injector. And what this does, it'll take, you put an image tag on your page, set the source to your SVG and give it some kind of identifiable class that you can target. You load the SVG. I'm not sure if you can actually see that. It's kind of dark. You load the script and then you kind of tell it which elements you want to inject the SVG. And what this will do is go through it'll read all your source attributes, find out where that file is and take that file and just inject that SVG markup right into the page. So then you can do all your JavaScript moving things around and that asset will be cached. So this is really great if you have something, maybe it's a navigation that's on every page and you want to cache those bits. This is a great way to go. The one downside is it actually requires JavaScript. So let's look at some of the uses for SVG. This is our Atom logo and some pseudo code for what's actually defining this. We have our SVG opening tag and we have our styles which you just have to pretend that those are there. And then we have different groups for like the mark, the actual sun. Then we have a horizontal version which you don't see here and then a stacked version and in that stacked version it's got its own mark. It has the Atom name and then design group. And then what's in that actual style tag we have our media query. So by default we're gonna hide the actual words and just show the mark like it's a, as if it were a square. And we have our horizontal versions and our stacked versions that are using aspect ratio media queries. So what this translates into, so we have our logo, just add some crop marks so you get an idea of where the bounding box is on this. And depending on how we embed this in the page and how it fills that box, it'll actually adjust. So if it doesn't have enough height, we'll hide the design group and just stick with that and then this would be the default where it's more of a square aspect ratio. We're just showing the mark and then we have the horizontal view. So we can use one file wherever we need to use this on any kind of site, which is pretty handy. And all those media queries are just baked into the file so we don't have to worry about adding extra CSS or anything other than the CSS that would be required to actually kind of size the box that it's living in. SVGs are great for icons. This is probably how, I mean, it definitely is how we use SVGs mostly, use it on a daily basis. So this is just an example of an icon set. And these are, it's kind of a sketchy looking icon set so your SVGs don't have to be like these crisp, perfect things.  You can do this, you can do it with an icon font but you can't do that with like PNG sprites. And the advantage that an SVG icon set has over an icon font is that you can do multicolored SVGs. So if you look at this example, the tool on the bottom, the Google Drive and Flickr, they actually have multiple colors in it. You can't do that with an icon font unless you do some hacky like lane icons on top of icons, which is really weird. So that's a big advantage. How we actually implement icons on our sites is using GruntzCon. And GruntzCon is a tool that will take, basically takes a folder of SVGs. You run it through GruntzCon's command line tool based on Grunt, that wasn't obvious. Takes the whole folder, runs it through and creates these different files. So it'll create a CSS file that has all your SVG files, URI encoded into the file, attached to a class. So it's essentially creating a sprites. You have all these classes that has all your files in it. You can apply those throughout the page. It'll check for support for SVG support. If your browser doesn't support SVG, it'll load the PNG version of the file, which is the same thing. It's just data encoded PNG files into one style sheet. And then if you have a browser that doesn't support the encoding or SVG, it'll just load like a standard set of classes that reference external PNGs. And it creates these PNGs for you on the fly, which is super nice. It's a good workflow. You get pretty much all the advantages that you get with a sprite without dealing with the mass of like trying to move things around like your background positioning to find the right icon and whatnot. We use this all the time. I'm a big Gruntacon fanboy. If command line isn't your thing, they have Grumpicon, which, and when I say they, this was all built by the filament group. They have Grumpicon, which is an actual browser tool where you can take your folder full of SVGs and just drag them into the browser and it'll spit out all these files for you. You know, it's good if you don't want to, if you're not comfortable with the command line tool, it's an okay way to go, especially if you're just doing this kind of once. But if you're building out a big site over time and you're constantly making changes to your icons, you're adding them, changing them, removing some, then you probably, it's worth the time to actually get Grunt set up and it's really not that hard. Another alternative for icons is using the SVG Spriting method. I don't actually use this and mainly because we do work in Drupal and Drupal is not always that easy to add the markup that you need everywhere. And this approach involves adding an actual SVG markup to your page. So kind of the gist of how this works is you create a single file that has all your SVGs in it and you just group them or you give each one of those SVGs an ID. And then where you actually want to use an icon within the page, you drop in an SVG element and SVG has a use tag which references just another fragment of your SVG. And you can actually reference an external file. So you have your icons.svg file and then the HTML is referencing just a fragment, just like one piece of that file and pulling it into the page. So it's really nice. I actually don't think, even though this is embedded SVG because you're using the use tag, you can't actually style the internal bits of the SVG that you're pulling in. If you apply style to it, like a fill color, it's gonna apply it to your whole icon. And one of the downsides of that is Internet Explorer supports SVG from version nine up, but it doesn't export or support these external fragments. So there is a polyfill for this called SVG for everybody that you can drop in and take advantage of that. Okay, so SVG is good for animations. Just an example, this is from CodePen. This is from Sarah Drasner, I believe. This is just showing how you can actually use SVG to provide feedback on a form input. So here we've, in theory, we've entered something into the form. Yeah, we still get a success. But yeah, it's just showing you the actual feedback of, you know, I did something on the site and waiting for it to load. It's a little bit more interesting than just seeing the little tiny whatever rotating circle at the top of the browser. So SVG is really good for data visualization as well. I'm actually gonna pop out this and just show you the actual site. So Google just released this pretty interesting infographic called the Evolution Web. It's built all in SVG and it kind of goes through all the different open technologies that the web is made up of and kind of maps out the different browsers over time and how they supported them. So if we go and just kind of highlight this SVG curve, we see that it became a standard in like 2001. Didn't actually gain support until Opera 9 was the first to support it. Whoops, that's Canvas. And just goes through and shows it's kind of a, it's a very interesting infographic. It could be a little weird to use, but it's super cool just to kind of mess around and see how things were adopted over time. But this is all built in SVG. Another use is just non-rectangular interfaces. We build the web, everything is boxes. This is an example of site that we built for UC Berkeley. We had done some branding work for them. We built out or we designed a logo for them. They kind of had this interesting isometric shapes going on with things overlapping. And we wanted to bring that into the actual site. And to be honest, when I first saw this when our designer came up with the idea and she's like, oh, do you think this will work? And I opened it up and I was like, no. Like, no, there's no, this is, this is, yeah. Yeah, it's air and hallway design. So yeah, when I first saw it, I'm like, no. The web is rectangles, and those are diamonds. I'm like, oh, just, if you design in the browser, we want to get this kind of creativity. No, but after, so after I thought about it, but after I thought about it and she called me a baby and whatnot, she called me out, like, I was like, this is actually a perfect opportunity for using SVG. So yeah, it actually, it worked out really well. This, it's a Drupal site and essentially all all we had to do other than like creating the graphic was drop that SVG code into a Drupal TPL file and create this interface. And we can actually, because it's markup, we can use like the T function to translate all our strings. So all these, all the actual text within this page is translatable and worked out really well. So some other examples of that. Sarah Swaydan, who's done just amazing work in the SVG community has built this tool called Circulus SVG. And it's a site that you can go to and build these circular interfaces. And at first it can kind of seem gimmicky, but they've actually done user testing and an interface like this, especially on a touch device or a mobile phone. It's actually quicker for a user to target the individual links because they're targeting it based on like direction of moving their cursor or thumb as opposed to if you're doing like a dropdown or something that's more of a, it's like a distance. Like they have to be pretty precise about how far they're moving their cursor. Whereas this you hit the button and you kind of just pick the direction. So that's a pretty interesting tool. Check it out. One thing to note is that this is actually using the G-SOP JavaScript library to animate it to do that stuff. So this is another interface that was built with Snap SVG. It kind of mimics if you're an Android user, which I am, the alarm clock like feature with the latest version of Lollipop is pretty awesome as far as like the actual interface for choosing a time. So you can switch back between picking like the hour and the minute and essentially you're just dragging your thumb around to actually pick the time. It works really well. So this is actually, we can implement this in the browser using SVG and just build out these shapes. So we just take an input form, whether it's a number or a text form and we just replace those inputs with JavaScript if SVG is supported and make it a little bit easier to use. So those are the different use cases. There's tons of tools out there actually using SVG. Specific libraries, just mentioned Snap. Snap is supported by Adobe and it's an SVG specific library and then it's built for creating SVGs. It has a lot of built in methods to real high level API for just simply creating circles or animating things, moving things around the page. The predecessor to that is Raphael and this does, it's very similar functionality the big difference here is Snap is built for modern browsers and Raphael has support actually all the way back to I believe IE6 because it'll take your SVG code and translate it into VML code which is supported by IE9 and below. But everything else, if there's support for SVG it'll actually load it. You might think that that would solve all your SVG problems in terms of browsers but VML isn't supported by older Android browsers. So creating and editing SVGs, some of the vector art programs. Adobe Illustrator been using that for years that's my go-to tool for editing SVGs. Sketch is a Mac app that handles vectors really well and then the open source free alternative is Inkscape. But really when you get down to it all you really need is a text editor. So these are just examples of that. Usually my workflow if I have an image in Illustrator is I'll take that and import it or open that SVG up in a text editor and go through and clean out some of the craft and edit it there. And along those lines I do wanna point out a cool feature. So this is Illustrator, I've got some icons. If you take an icon or this whole thing and you can't see but I'm hitting Command C and opening up my text editor. I'm hitting the wrong shortcut. And you just paste that in there and it'll actually paste the SVG code from your Illustrator file directly into your text editor so you can start editing it there. And that's pretty cool. So yeah once in there you just edit it like it's text because that's what it is. And then tools for optimizing. So as we even saw with that example of pasting code in from Illustrator there's still extra Illustrator cruft that you don't need. And you don't want browsers to have to download that. So there's a few tools for actually optimizing and compressing your SVGs. Peter Cullenridge has an SVG editor online where you can either upload your file or just drag your SVG into it or copy and paste it. And it has options for what you wanna optimize. And it'll get that file size down for you. The nice thing about this is you can actually, it gives you some fine control over like what you're optimizing. Because if you're using an SV, or some of these optimization tools could really jack up your graphic. So doing something completely automated can be scary at times. So something that's completely automated. SVGO is a JavaScript based command line tool that will actually take your graphics and compress them down as a lot of the same options is the editor we just looked at. But you kinda have to, if you're automating this you have to pick those, like what you're gonna compress down which you're gonna remove from the file. So you have to be careful about what it's outputting. This would be a great use case for like visual regression testing. And there recently became, or launched SVGOMG which is the browser version of SVGO. And you see we dropped the Kool-Aid Man in here and I think the original file size for this was about 20K. I think if I was diligent enough and actually didn't just put points all over the Kool-Aid Man and drop pretty sloppily, I think I probably could have manually got it down to maybe like, I don't know, 10K. But as you can see, this gets it down to 6.27 from 20 when it's GZipped. And SVG, since it's marked up, it actually GZipped really well. So some animation libraries mentioned GZIP earlier. This is the JavaScript library. It's not SVG specific, but it supports SVG natively. So this is just a JavaScript animation tool. It's very powerful. It's not open source, which is one of the downfalls with it. They have some premium plugins that require membership to use, but there is a version that you can use freely. It's super powerful if you're like a hardcore animator and want to do like timeline adjustments and sequencing and tweening and all that fun stuff. An alternative is Velocity.js. Again, this is just a JavaScript animation library. Kind of replaces the jQuery animate methods. And it's supposed to be a more performant version of that, but it supports SVG out of the box too. So that's pretty cool. Just an example of what you can do with Velocity. Here's another code pin. I'm not sure who built this. I'm not taking credit for it. But it's just showing you all the different things you can actually do with animating SVGs. Data visualization tools, D3. D3 is not limited to SVG, works really well. You can use it for Canvas. You can use it for pretty much anything. D3 is super powerful. If you're doing really complex infographics and data visualization, it's probably the way you'll go. But it's also like there's a lot of work you have to do to get it to do stuff like a simple bar chart or something like that. There are some plugins for it, but it's really powerful. It's also relatively low level in terms of the actual amount of work you have to do to get stuff out of it. Highcharts is another one that's definitely more on the easy use side. It has a lot of built-in charts for line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, where it's pretty simple. You pass it the data and you get a chart back. All right, so just some general resources on SVG. I don't know, as I started researching this stuff, it was like drinking from the fire hose. There's just like so much stuff about SVG that I had no idea was there. And the actual documentation and things to find, there's tons of it. It's just all over the place. So some good resources. As I said earlier, Sarah Swade on her website. She has a great blog. She's really good at taking these concepts, these real technical concepts and just not dumbing them down, but distilling them down to something that's really easy to understand. If you go to other sites like CSS Tricks or Codrops or even the Adobe blog, and there's an article about SVG, like there's a good chance that she's actually the one that wrote it. And then there's CSS Tricks. There's tons of SVG information on there, but there's a single page that's the mega-list SVG information that has links to just all kinds of stuff. There's the SVG Immersions Podcast, which just started recently. It's actually pretty good. It has a pretty hilarious opening theme song. It sounds like Color Me Bad, singing about SVG, like slow grind music. It's pretty, it's good, it's classic. So places for inspiration. Codrops is really good for just like slick, small interactions and animations. CodePen, if you just search SVG on there, you'll find a lot of, it's more experimentation. People just messing around, trying to figure out what they can do with SVG. And then Mike Bostock, he's the guy that actually developed D3, I believe. He has this huge list of data visualization examples. So they're not, you know, there's a mix in there. Definitely not all SVG, but if you're looking to do data visualization and just want to see what's out there, that's a great place to look. Icons, or if you're just looking for, I don't want to say clip art, but like pre-made SVGs that you can just grab and either use in your projects or if you just want to mess around and see what you can do with SVG. The Noun Project is a great place for that. It's all creative commons, icons. They do have a membership if you want to use any of the icons without attribution, but any of the icons on there are free as long as you credit who created them. Icon Moon is a tool, it was originally built for icon fonts, but it'll actually allow you to build like a custom set of SVG icons and use download that and you can pick your icons from the list and it just bundles them up and you can use them. Icon Mellon is a much smaller, just kind of a curated list of some free SVG icons, which most linked to like full paid versions of larger icon sets. But that's pretty much all I have to say about SVG. I want to say thank you for sticking around so late. It's dinner time for a lot of people. But, do you have time for questions? If anyone has questions? If you mind stepping back to the microphone. Yeah, so it seems like in terms of like, is there, I know you can animate the end of your full sale, but is there any sort of fallback or anything? For browsers that don't support SVG at all? Or, not, yeah, that's the answer. Yeah, the answer was flash. SVGs through GPL's image upload field. A partner that we're working with on a project who was very savvy in design, their designer, has created all these lovely SVG images, but they want to be able to upload them to teaser you modes. I actually went in to the image settings and I added SVG as an extension that it would accept, but then whenever you actually try to upload the SVG, it rejects it, so I was just wondering if you have any modules or if, I don't know, I just can't really do this. I actually have no idea. We haven't come across that yet. Does anybody else? All right, do you mind stepping up to the microphone and doing my work for me? Possibly the picture module, and then all the same problems you expressed. I see. So possibly the picture module, but I imagine you'd still have to upload. Like the problem is actually uploading the SVG. So I'm not sure that would fix the problem. Is there any other guesses? Transmit it. Oh really? Hmm. So maybe it's some other setting or a possible server setting? No idea, sorry. We have a problem where they wouldn't display, but that was just a configuration on the server side. We would just modify the... Oh, I think what you said, we've run into this before, is actually the SVG not displaying when you display it as an image tag because the server isn't serving it as the correct meme type. See actually, that's a fairly simple change in your htaccess file. I don't know if that applies to uploading though. All right, geeky. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, I wonder if that actually solves the problem of the user being able to upload the file though. We're gonna answer this question for you.  It's called, it's open source. Take a look, they did it. O-S-C-I. I'm curious to know how you can accessibility and all that stuff for things like inline SVG. I was looking online, it seems like it's not quite worked out yet, what do you think? So as far as inline SVG, the title tag is kind of a good alternative to adding an alt attribute. I think there's actually fairly good support for ARIA roles in ARIA attributes on the actual tags themselves. So I think that really depends on what you're doing with the SVG, like is it a simple image like a logo or is it something more interactive? If it's the simple logo, definitely the title tag. If it's something more interactive basing that on your interactions on ARIA roles, it's probably the way to go. Thanks. Definitely illustrator. The viewport, actually when we export our icons for GruntCon, illustrator will include the viewport attributes. Actually that depends on if you have, when you saved SVG from illustrator, there's a little check box that says responsive. We leave that unchecked when we export and that will include the width and height on your SVG because when we process that through GruntCon, we build our icon in illustrator to the size that we want the PNG fallback to be and including that information will actually build out. GruntCon will create your PNGs to that same size. If you uncheck that, it creates it as whatever size you have set in your GruntCon settings. But actually if you're, to get the, so if you're using SVGs, again this comes down to like how you're using it. If you are just embedding the image, it's easier to leave the view box off and leave the width settings off and then it'll just resize easier. You don't have to do the, like the max width thing that you would do on an image because it just, that's the way SVGs work natively. Very simple geometry. Yeah, actually playing with the stuff is super helpful in learning. And you do bring up a good point. The W3C is obviously kind of the definitive guide to how SVG works. With pretty much everything else front and related, I always use MDN, the Mozilla Developer Network, but their SVG content on there, I think is pretty lacking. So yeah, W3C is a great place. Thanks. Yeah, SVG Pocket Guide, I should have included that on the list. That is quality stuff. All right, well thank you very much. Enjoy dinner.


What this means is that the spirit that has collectively infected our culture is that of an angry, stroppy, bullbusting woman. Sound familiar? That's anima-possession. If it were anima-possession, you would have a very, very bullying, aggressive man infecting people. This archetype, sometimes I'll refer to it as the smother-mother archetype. If you have bad parents, like a danger daddy would be a father who encourages too much risk in his children, the smother-mother doesn't allow for any risk whatsoever. She's obsessed with safety, conformity and people doing as they're told.