Open Tabs - W23Y23
In the before times of 2017 We were approached by our friends at Sample to figure out some way we could potentially collaborate on some kind of event. The result was an irregular event series called Open Tabs. The concept was simple - we approached our clients (at the time, mostly large ad agencies) and told them if they could give us an audience in a conference room for an hour, we’d bring along four creative people plus drinks and snacks, and each of them would get ten minutes to talk about ten browser tabs they had open.
It remains to this day one of my favourite ‘marketing’ activities we’ve ever done at Jacky Winter. We got facetime with some our most valued clients, and it didn’t feel like a sales pitch because it wasn’t. It was just genuinely a fun hour, and also a chance for me to talk about my favourite topic – random links I found on the internet – while also getting to introduce clients to Jacky Winter artists and other interesting people in our orbit.
The format was also fun and contained. Four speakers, ten tabs, one minute per tab, so everything was done in 40 minutes, but we often hung out a bit after as well. I always thought of it as a bit of a mix between PechaKucha and CreativeMornings (which I was the host of at the time).
It even got to the point where agencies were calling and reaching out to us to run these events, and all went well up until lockdowns.
We eventually did a few online Open Tabs and made a killer intro video, but it didn’t hit the same as IRL…
In addition to our events, we also found other ways to sneak Open Tabs into other projects we did, like our podcast,1 and had a regular segment where we’d go over our favourite open tab for that week.
While things did fizzle out a bit during the three years of lockdown, we have started doing Open Tabs again, which can be booked through our jackywinter.vip site
So while I wait for some lucky folks to book an event, I thought that I might temporarily resurrect the format for this here Substack as there is something strangely enjoyable about writing here, so here you go!
Here are some highlights from my Open Tabs for week 23 in 2023.
1️⃣ Playbook AI
Playbook is one of those apps that always seems to pop up in my tabs every couple of months. I don’t quite understand what it does though. Dropbox for creatives? I’m not sure. It looks great though. They recently announced their AI related product and it looks like it could be interested. I like how they talk about “AI is working for you, not replacing you.” - A similar sentiment that I am keeping in mind as we do our own AI explorations at JW.
2️⃣ MoonPass Lookouts
Apart from the fact these places look intensely interesting, I was very interested to read about this approach to someone making a unique holiday property, basically crowdsourcing it by selling stays in advance. Seems risky but maybe not?
3️⃣ Murmur
I found this through Scott Belsky’s Substack this week. During the NFT boom times I was really interested in the potential how/if Jacky Winter could potentially become a DAO. While we never got too far in the exploration, it’s interesting to see how some of the tools developed during that time have adapted. Murmur looks like a really neat app to help organisations make decisions as a group, and also act as the source of truth for the documentation of those outcomes and processes. Keeping this tab open for a bit!
4️⃣ How to make a presentation make a point
We’re doing a lot of presentations at the moment. Doing presentations is hard. Listening to presentations is hard. Time is precious. We’re really trying to figure out how to do this better.
5️⃣ Colours of Pixar @ Lamington Drive
Okay this is a blatant self-promo but this is a genuinely open tab as I need to remember when the final two public events for this is. If you have little people in your life and are in Melbourne, I strongly suggest you pop in to see this. It’s a really fun show but together by some really magical humans. Also, there are A LOT of adult Disney people. I had no idea but it’s been great to have our gallery so active these last few days.
As I was googling to find the link to our old podcast, I found that page for reviews on Apple Podcasts and I literally had NO IDEA we actually had any reviews and now I want to maybe start podcasting again? This is my favourite review by far: “Well, really, what do you do with a life? you could earn money and do what they tell u. Or u could be a human and be open to things, which in the end means ur personality is into ideas and aesthetics. And if ur into ideas and aesthetics ur into culture and illustration and fashion and design and history and process and creativity. So really this podcast aids a person to live well. Not the opposite. This helps keep us human, good, calm, happy. I like it.”