1. intro
A common element in most great ideas is the holy grail. The holy grail is a goal that’s so high, so unattainable, so difficult, that we never actually reach it. Think “Solution X” from 12 Men (hardly ever achieved, I don’t think) or the “Chinese secret of happiness” (many years and many billions of dollars later).
Holy Grails are obviously rare. But they are not unique to software; they are something you can find in all kinds of industries. They are the aspiration-setting pinnacle of business practices, products and services; all the things you want, but can’t really achieve because they are just very difficult to do…
In fact, holy grail highlighters have been around for almost as long as there have been highlighters: electric ones were invented in 1891 and electric pencils in 1892; electric flashlights were invented in 1897; electric typewriters first appeared in 1899.
A key question is whether or not a product or service has a holy grail. This is usually decided by asking whether customers would buy it if it had that killer feature (e.g., an amazing feature like instant messaging or video conferencing). In other words: Would you rather have this product? If yes, then it has a Holy Grail feature. If no, then it doesn’t have a Holy Grail feature.
So what does this mean for us? It means we should always be thinking about our products with their holy grails at the centre of everything we do – everything!
2. type of highlighter
When you hear the term “holy grail” you probably think of an elusive object or person, but that is not the case. The term is generally used in reference to something that is sought-after and treasured. The holy grail is a creative product or service whose success depends on its uniqueness and value.
In this post I will focus on what you can do with a highlighter (most notably, in the context of startups). Specifically, I want to talk about how designers might use highlighters to create more engaging user interfaces and how developers can use them to speed up their development process by focusing on one thing at a time.
I’ll give some examples of ways you could use highlighters in your app, including:
• Symbolizing progress or progress towards a goal (like “one month”)
• An actionable or measurable step toward that goal (like “Contacts conversion rate”)
• Breaking down an activity into its parts (like “Developers working on localization”)
I hope this post helps you think about how you might use highlighters in your app. Maybe it’s time for a second look at your app design! ?
3. how to use highlighter
Highlighter is a tool that lets you quickly highlight text, so you can take it out of the way. But what is it? It is a computer program that runs on your browser to highlight text and then highlights the highlighted text in a different color (or shades) to make your writing easier to read.
The best highlighter for Mac (that I know of) is Safari’s TextEdit, which has an interface that many find quite useful. It also supports multiple highlighters, so you can easily change the color of a single highlight or all (like what they do in Windows).
Highlight is one of those tools that people have used for years without even knowing it. In fact, there are some other software programs (such as Evernote and OmniFocus) that let you use highlights inside their products as well (they even have plugins to bring them into your other tools!).
I use highlighting a lot in my own work; when I write articles about our company I often want to emphasize certain words or phrases along with the main headline. So I build my own custom highlighting system; here’s how:
I use Highlight so I can quickly highlight any part of the page as soon as I start writing something. Then whenever someone tells me something interesting about our product or our strategy, I can look at my notes and see what’s been highlighted! Since “highlighting” means changing colors instead of just changing font style, it gives me more information about what my audience sees when they look at my article.
Here are some commands:
Highlight any word or phrase on the page. This will make all instances of “our product” or “our strategy” stand out in bright red Italic font and make it easy to see them later on. To do this in one-off documents and emails, simply hold down Command + 1 on your keyboard until each instance appears in red capital letters at the top-left corner:
And if you want to see an example of how this works…you need only open up Safari and go to this site: http://www.janeqwatson.net/highlights/ . Here are some examples from Jane Q Watson:
4. choice of highlighter
In the last 7 years, I have been fortunate enough to meet and work with a number of great highlighters. I have even tried to use a few of them myself. The ones that stand out for me are either from the category of “holy grail” brands (think Pigma, Sharpie, Wite-Out) or are so uniquely different that they belong in a completely different category (Lipstick, StazOn).
I’ve tried using many other brands and none really stand out so much as others. However, there is one brand that has consistently stood out as something special: Dali.
This brand is not just an ordinary highlighter – it is a highlighter for an extraordinary purpose: getting noticed in an extraordinary way.
The reason why Dali stands out is because of its uniqueness; the reason why it stands out from the other highlighters is because of its usefulness.
5. conclusion
The holy grail highlighter is a wonderful tool, but it is not a magical solution to the problem of #reinventingwork. It is a great tool and a fantastic productivity enhancer, but it does not have the magic to solve your problems. The magic comes from being able to find the right problems for your product and the right people you need to solve them for.