Editors in Brief: Common Craft

Still mystified by Twitter, the electoral college or Google docs? The local couple behind Common Craft makes explanation of the complex simple—and makes money—using paper cutouts, a whiteboard and a video camera

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Our story opens on a demoralized marketing manager sitting in a drab office across from her boss. She pleads once again for a budget to create podcasts (or any other Web 2.0 technology) that could revolutionize her company’s relationships with its customers while also saving money. But the boss is old school and doesn’t get podcasts. The marketing manager gets podcasts, but can’t seem to easily explain what podcasts are and why they will help.

Too much information but not enough understanding is an Internet-age curse encountered everywhere. Today a marketing manager falls prey to her own bad explanation; tomorrow it might be a techie, a high school teacher or a daughter trying to explain something to her mother. All of them need a common salvation: trustworthy, simple, brief explanations that make sense of overwhelming torrents of information.

Funneling information into simple explanations was a matter of survival for Lee LeFever, who, in 2003, founded his Seattle-based company, Common Craft—initially to help his clients adopt ways of building online communities around a product or brand. He realized his clients lacked even a basic understanding of the technologies he promoted, so he started a blog to explain them. Now joined by his wife and business partner, Sachi LeFever, Common Craft’s sole product is explanation itself. And while Lee’s blog remains the delivery platform for their “product,” its main draw is no longer Lee’s text, but the couple’s short explanatory videos.

Since April 23, 2007, the day Lee and Sachi premiered their first explanatory video, “RSS in Plain English,” the pair has rescued many confused people. Their “In Plain English” series of 20 (and growing) educational videos validates Common Craft’s slogan: “Our product is explanation.” The LeFevers—Lee, the sensitive creative force, and Sachi, the project manager, editor and calming ballast—craft brief, fast-moving videos that feature a simple whiteboard, childlike paper cutouts, stop-motion animation and Lee’s voiceover with no fancy sound effects.