Solving the unsolvable problem in human resources. Implicit bias in hiring is so hard to root out because, well, it’s implicit. Even when managers talk a good game about increasing diversity at the office, their actions rarely match their intent: In three studies, researchers at MIT and Indiana University found that organizations that tout meritocracy actually show the greatest bias against women. And homogeny isn’t only unfair -- it’s bad for business. Companies with the most ethnically diverse teams are 35 percent more likely to have returns above the national industry median, according to McKinsey.
But how can a company fix the problem, and avoid fueling managers’ conscious and subconscious biases? A new crop of startups has a solution: blind recruitment. It’s a hiring method that conceals candidates’ gender, race and education background -- enabling a person to interview or perform job-related tests and be considered solely on those merits. Think of The Voice, but with a job offer rather than a recording contract. Here’s how three startups can help you go blind.
GapJumpers
The GapJumpers team strips a job description of subjective junk (like passionate and team player) and creates an objective test for candidates, pulling from more than 750 challenges that span domain expertise and specific skills. “Just by applying blind auditions to the hiring funnel that already exists, we’ve seen a 60 percent increase in diverse applicants making it through to the interview, and a 200 percent increase in women,” says cofounder Kédar Iyer. GapJumpers has done more than 1,600 blind auditions for companies including BBC, Dolby and Return Path.
Interviewing.io
This platform allows tech companies to assess coding skills through an anonymous system. If a candidate is up to snuff, the interview can be handled through voice-masking technology that obscures the applicant’s gender. (A 2014 study found that candidates with “vocal fry” -- a low-pitched, creaky-sounding speech pattern common among young American women -- are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy and less hirable.) Twitch, Lyft and Asana are early embracers of the site.
Blendoor
Created by Stephanie Lampkin, an African-American woman who was once told that her background wasn’t technical enough for a job -- despite an engineering degree from Stanford and past gigs at Microsoft and Deloitte -- this app matches applicants to open positions Tinder-style (but minus photos). Hiring managers can swipe on profiles scrubbed clean of identifying info. If both sides have interest, they set up an interview. Launched in March, Blendoor is being tested by companies including Airbnb and Twitter.
Your logo is a visual representation of everything your company stands for. Think of McDonald's golden arches or the Nike swoosh-these two impressive logos embody these companies well. But many companies still skimp on developing this key identity piece.
Ideally, your company logo enhances potential customers and partners' crucial first impression of your business. A good logo can build loyalty between your business and your customers, establish a brand identity, and provide the professional look of an established enterprise.
Consider Allstate's "good hands" logo. It immediately generates a warm feeling for the company, symbolizing care and trust. With a little thought and creativity, your logo can quickly and graphically express many positive attributes of your business, too.
Logo Types
There are basically three kinds of logos. Font-based logos consist primarily of a type treatment. The logos of IBM, Microsoft and Sony, for instance, use type treatments with a twist that makes them distinctive. Then there are logos that literally illustrate what a company does, such as when a house-painting company uses an illustration of a brush in its logo. And finally, there are abstract graphic symbols-such as Nike's swoosh-that become linked to a company's brand.
"Such a symbol is meaningless until your company can communicate to consumers what its underlying associations are," says Americus Reed II, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who's conducted research on the triggers that lead consumers to identify with and become loyal to a brand. But building that mental bridge takes time and money. The Nike swoosh has no inherent meaning outside of what's been created over the years through savvy marketing efforts that have transformed the logo into an "identity cue" for an athletic lifestyle.
Growing businesses can rarely afford the millions of dollars and years of effort required to create these associations, so a logo that clearly illustrates what your company stands for or does may be a better choice. Even a type treatment of your company's name may be too generic, says Placitas, New Mexico, logo designer Gary Priester, principal of gwpriester.com, the Web arm of design firm The Black Point Group. Priester believes customers should be able to tell what you do just by looking at your logo.
Getting Started
Before you begin sketching or learning how to design a logo, first articulate the message you want your logo to convey. Try writing a one-sentence image and mission statement to help focus your efforts. Stay true to this statement while creating your logo.
But that may not be enough to get you started. Here are some additional tactics and considerations that will help you create an appropriate company logo:
Look at the logos of other businesses in your industry. Do your competitors use solid, conservative images, or flashy graphics and type? Think about how you want to differentiate your logo from those of your competition.
Focus on your message. Decide what you want to communicate about your company. Does it have a distinct personality-serious or lighthearted? What makes it unique in relation to your competition? What's the nature of your current target audience? These elements should play an important role in the overall design or redesign.
Make it clean and functional. Your logo should work as well on a business card as on the side of a truck. A good logo should be scalable, easy to reproduce, memorable and distinctive. Icons are better than photographs, which may be indecipherable if enlarged or reduced significantly. And be sure to create a logo that can be reproduced in black and white so that it can be faxed, photocopied or used in a black-and-white ad as effectively as in color.
Your business name will affect your logo design. If your business name is "D.C. Jewelers," you may wish to use a classy, serif font to accent the letters (especially if your name features initials). For a company called "Lightning Bolt Printing," the logo might feature some creative implementation of-you guessed it-a lightning bolt.
Use your logo to illustrate your business's key benefit. The best logos make an immediate statement with a picture or illustration, not words. The "Lightning Bolt Printing" logo, for example, may need to convey the business benefit of "ultra-fast, guaranteed printing services." The lightning bolt image could be manipulated to suggest speed and assurance.
Don't use clip art. However tempting it may be, clip art can be copied too easily. Not only will original art make a more impressive statement about your company, but it'll set your business apart from others.
Avoid trendy looks. If you're redesigning your old logo, you run the risk of confusing customers-or worse, alienating them. One option is to make gradual logo changes. According to Priester, Quaker Oats modified the Quaker man on its package over a 10-year period to avoid undermining customer confidence. But don't plan to make multiple logo changes. Instead, choose a logo that will stay current for 10 to 20 years, perhaps longer. That's the mark of a good design. In fact, when Priester designs a logo, he expects never to see that client again.
Watch Your Colors
One thing you need to be careful of as you explore color options is cost. Your five-color logo may be gorgeous, but once it comes time to produce it on stationery, the price won't be so attractive. Nor will it work in mediums that only allow one or two colors. Try not to exceed three colors unless you decide it's absolutely necessary.
Your logo can appear on a variety of media: signage, advertising, stationery, delivery vehicles and packaging, to name just a few. Remember that some of those applications have production limitations. Make sure you do a color study. Look at your logo in one-, two- and three-color versions.
Hire a Designer
While brainstorming logo ideas by yourself is a crucial step in creating your business image, trying to create a logo completely on your own is a mistake. It may seem like the best way to avoid the high costs of going to a professional design firm, which will charge anywhere from $4,000 to $15,000 for a logo design. Be aware, however, that there are thousands of independent designers around who charge much less. According to Stan Evenson, founder of Evenson Design Group, entrepreneurs on a tight budget should shop around for a designer. "There are a lot of [freelance] designers who charge rates ranging from $15 to $150 per hour, based on their experience," he says.
But don't hire someone just because of their bargain price. Find a designer who's familiar with your field . . . and with your competition. If the cost still seems exorbitant, Evenson says, "remember that a good logo should last at least 10 years. If you look at the amortization of that cost over a 10-year period, it doesn't seem so bad."
Even if you have a good eye for color and a sense of what you want your logo to look like, you should still consult a professional designer. Why? They know whether or not a logo design will transfer easily into print or onto a sign, while you might come up with a beautiful design that can't be transferred or would cost too much money to be printed. Your logo is the foundation of all your promotional materials, so this is one area where spending a little more now can really pay off later.
Using and Protecting Your Logo
Once you've produced a logo that embodies your company's mission at a glance, make sure you trademark it to protect it from use by other companies. You can apply for a trademark at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site.
Then, once it's protected, use it everywhere you can-on business cards, stationery, letterhead, brochures, ads, your Web site and any other place where you mention your company name. This will help build your image, raise your company's visibility and, ideally, lead to more business.
Creating a logo sounds easy, doesn't it? It can be. Just remember to keep your customers and the nature of your business in mind when you put it all together. In time, you'll have succeeded in building equity in your trademark, and it will become a positive and recognizable symbol of your product or service.
Compiled from articles written by David Cotriss, Kim T. Gordon and Steve Nubie previously published on Entrepreneur.com, and from excerpts from Start Your Own Business .
Apple, which has been infuriatingly secretive about it’s efforts to build a self-driving car, has sent the strongest hint yet about its so-called Project Titan. In a letter submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the tech giant states that it is “investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation.”
The letter is Apple’s official comment on the federal government’s automated vehicle guidelines, released last September, which has already drawn feedback from many companies working on autonomous cars like Google and Ford. And speaking of Ford, Apple’s letter is signed by a man named Steven Kenner, the company’s head of product integrity who up until very recently was the global director of automotive safety at Ford.
Apple has been working on Project Titan for several years, but has never formally acknowledged it. Lately, the autonomous car project seems to be in flux. Recent reporting suggests that the company is no longer attempting to build its own electric car to compete with companies like Tesla, but is instead focused on developing self-driving software it can deploy in partnership with existing carmakers.
This letter comes amid news that hundreds of members of Apple's 1,000-employee-strong car team have been reassigned, let go, or have left of their own volition. The shift toward software is part of a new plan from longtime Apple executive Bob Mansfield, who came out of retirement to lead the Titan division after former project head Steven Zadesky left the company earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the federal government is continuing to collect feedback from tech companies and car manufacturers on its recently released automated vehicle policy. A lobbying group representing some of the main players in the self-driving car space, such as Google, Uber, Ford, Volvo, and Lyft, are pushing back against the government’s request for companies to share data and safety specifications. But Apple says it would be ok with sharing data.
“Apple agrees that companies should share de-identified scenario and dynamics data from crashes and near-misses,” Kenner writes in the letter. “By sharing data, the industry will build a more comprehensive dataset than any one company could create alone.”
That said, Apple also requests that the government allow for “regulatory flexibility” in order to encourage innovation. In other words, the company agrees with its peers in the tech and auto world that the feds should keep the guidelines voluntary and avoid passing any concrete rules or mandates.
We're going Red for World AIDS Day 2016 with this 3D text effect. Use Photoshop's 3D tools and settings, along with adjustment layers and filters, to create a simple, 3D cylinder text effect.
Let's quote directly from WorldAIDSDay.org on what this annual event is about:
World AIDS Day is held on the 1st December each year and is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died. World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day, held for the first time in 1988.
Create a new 1920 x 1080 px document, and then click the Create new fill or adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Solid Color.
Step 2
Use the Color#9d2323.
2. How to Create a Text Shape
Step 1
Create the text using the font Unintended, and set the Size to 250 pt.
Step 2
Right-click the text layer, and choose Convert to Shape.
Rename the shape layer to Text.
3. How to Subtract Ellipses From a Text Shape
Step 1
Pick the Ellipse Tool, click the Geometry Options icon, and set the Fixed Size‘s W and H values to 11.
Step 2
Hold the Option key to subtract the ellipse from the text shape, and then click-drag slightly to create the ellipse.
Place the ellipse in the center of one of the text's dots, and then release all to subtract.
Step 3
Repeat that for a couple of other dots over the text.
4. How to Downsize a Document and Create a Rectangle Shape Background
Step 1
This is an optional step if you want to work with a smaller document size.
Go to Image > Image Size, and enter any new dimension values you like. Here, the Width is set to 1250 px.
Step 2
Pick the Rectangle Tool, and create a rectangle shape that extends a little bit outside the document, and then rename its layer to Ground.
5. How to Create a 3D Scene
Step 1
For each of the Text and Ground layers, select it, and then go to 3D > New 3D Extrusion from Selected Path.
Step 2
Select both 3D layers, and then go to 3D > Merge 3D Layers.
6. How to Work With the 3D Scene
Step 1
To access the 3D mesh settings and properties, you’ll need to open two panels: the 3D panel and the Properties panel (both found under the Window menu).
The 3D panel has all the components of the 3D scene, and when you click the name of any of those, you’ll be able to access its settings in the Properties panel. So make sure to always select the tab of the element you want to modify in the 3D panel before you change its settings in the Properties panel.
Step 2
If you select the Move Tool, you’ll find a set of 3D Modes for it to the right of the Options bar.
When you choose one of those, you can then click and drag to perform changes (on the selected element in the 3D panel).
Use those modes to change the Current View into an angle you like.
7. How to Change a 3D Ground Mesh Settings
Step 1
Select the Ground mesh tab in the 3D panel, and then, in the Properties panel, change the Extrusion Depth to 2.
Step 2
Click the Coordinates icon at the top of the Properties panel, and then change the X-Rotation Angle to 90.
Step 3
In the 3D panel, click the 3D panel menu icon and choose Move Object to Ground Plane.
8. How to Change the 3D Text Mesh Settings
Step 1
Select the Text mesh in the 3D panel, and then click the Deform icon at the top of the Properties panel.
Change the Extrusion Depth to 15 and the Vertical Angle (Y) to 3.
Step 2
Click the Coordinates icon at the top of the Properties panel, and then change the X-Rotation Angle to 90.
Step 3
Click the 3D panel menu icon, and choose Move Object to Ground Plane.
Step 4
Click the Cap icon at the top of the Properties panel, and then change the Bevel Width to 3 and the Contour to Half Round.
9. How to Use the 3D Axis
Step 1
Pick the Move Tool, and use the 3D Axis to move the Ground meshes below the text.
The arrows at the ends of the axis move the mesh, the part below them is used for rotation, and the cubes are used for scaling. The cube in the center is used to scale the object uniformly. All you need to do is click and drag the part you want.
Step 2
Click the Current View tab in the 3D panel, and then choose Left from the View dropdown menu in the Properties panel.
Step 3
Zoom in and move the camera view around until you can see the side of the text clearly.
Step 4
Next, select the Text mesh and rotate it so that it is parallel to the Ground mesh.
Step 5
Move the text mesh to the ground plane, and then click the Default Camera tab in the 3D panel to change the camera view again.
10. How to Create a Simple 3D Material
Step 1
Select all the text Material tabs, as well as the Ground Front Inflation Material tab.
Then, in the Properties panel, click the Diffuse texture icon, and choose Remove Texture.
Step 2
After that, create the material using these settings:
Diffuse: 109, 22, 28
Specular: 56, 38, 40
Shine: 35
11. How to Create a Dot Pattern
Step 1
Create a new 50 x 50px document with a Black background.
Then, pick the Elliptical Marquee Tool and create a 30 x 30px circle in the center of the document.
Create a new layer on top of the Background layer, fill the selection with the color #eeeeee, and then press Command-D to deselect.
Step 2
Duplicate the circle layer four times, and place the center of each of the copies on one of the corners.
Step 3
Go to Edit > Define Pattern, and type Dots for the Name.
Close this file to go back to the 3D scene.
12. How to Apply a Bump Texture
Step 1
Click the Ground Front Inflation Material tab in the 3D panel, and then click the Bump folder icon in the Properties panel, and choose New Texture.
Step 2
Create a new 500 x 500px document, and click OK.
If a new file doesn't automatically open, click the Bump texture icon and choose Edit Texture.
Step 3
Duplicate the Background layer.
Step 4
Double-click the Background copy layer to apply a Pattern Overlay effect using the Dots pattern.
Save and close the file when you're done.
13. How to Edit a Bump Texture's UV Properties
Step 1
Click the Bump texture icon, and choose Edit UV Properties.
Step 2
Change the Tile values to get a result you like.
Step 3
Decrease the Bump value to 1.
14. How to Adjust a 3D Scene's Lighting
Step 1
Select the Infinite Light 1 tab in the 3D panel, and then, in the Properties panel, change the Intensity to 65% and the Shadow Softness to 30%.
Step 2
Use the Move Tool to move the light around, or enter numerical values for the Coordinates.
Step 3
Click the Add new light to Scene icon at the bottom of the 3D panel, and choose New Spot Light.
Step 4
Change the Intensity to 75%, the Shadow Softness to 30%, the Hotspot value to 30, and the Cone to 85.
Then, check the Light Falloff box, and change the Inner value to 350 and the Outer to 800.
Keep in mind that you can choose any other values you like based on the result you want to achieve.
Step 5
Move the light around until you like how the overall lighting of the scene looks.
15. How to Render Parts of a 3D Scene
Step 1
We're going to render two versions of the scene: one of the ground only, and one of the final scene.
So start by setting the Ground Front Inflation Material's Bump value to 0.
Step 2
Make the Text mesh invisible by clicking the eye icon next to it.
Go to 3D > Render 3D Layer. You can stop it any time by pressing the Esc key.
Step 3
Once the rendering is done, press Command-A to select all, and then Command-C to copy.
Step 4
Press Shift-Command-V to paste in place, and rename the pasted layer to BG.
16. How to Render a 3D Scene
Step 1
Make the BG layer invisible, and then select the 3D layer again, and make the Text mesh visible.
Step 2
Set the Ground Front Inflation Material's Bump value back to 1.
Step 3
Go to 3D > Render 3D Layer to render the full scene.
17. How to Use a Layer Mask
Step 1
Make the BG layer visible, and then change its Fill value to 80%.
Hold the Option key, and then click the Add layer mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
Step 2
Pick the Brush Tool, and select the Mask's thumbnail.
Set the Foreground Color to White, and then use a soft, round, slightly big brush tip to unmask some areas of the ground, and cover the pattern of the 3D scene's ground below it.
18. How to Adjust the Lighting and Apply Pattern Overlays
Step 1
Add a Levels adjustment layer on top of all layers, and then change the Shadows value to 7, the Gammato 0.85, and the Highlights to 235.
Step 2
Add a Pattern fill layer, and use the MBossed pattern.
Step 3
Change the Pattern layer's Blend Mode to Linear Burn, and its Opacity to 15%.
19. How to Apply a High Pass Filter
Step 1
Create a new layer on top of all layers, and press the Shift-Command-Option-E keys to create a stamp layer.
Rename the layer to High Pass, and then right-click it and choose Convert to Smart Object.
Step 2
Go to Filter > Other > High Pass, and set the Radius to 1.
Step 3
Change the High Pass layer's Blend Mode to Soft Light.
Congratulations! You're Done
In this tutorial, we converted some text into a shape, and created holes in some parts of it. Then, we created a rectangle and converted it along with the text shape into a 3D layer.
After that, we worked on the 3D scene, modified the mesh settings, created patterns and materials, moved the camera angle, and adjusted the lighting.
Finally, we rendered two versions of the 3D scene and used a couple of adjustment and fill layers, as well as a high pass filter, to finish off the effect.
Please feel free to leave your comments, suggestions, and outcomes below.
