Spotlight Series

Spotlight Series

We already had a spotlight series in the past (search the Archive for “spotlight”). However we haven’t been publishing new posts in that series for a while.

In October 2021 we revived the series with this Spotlight of Patrick Bardo.

Below we are documenting how to create a new Spotlight Post.

(1) How to create the Spotlight content (text)?

  • create a new issue, describing who you want to interview
  • interview the engineer using Google Meet (using the questions in this template)
  • transcribe the answers in a Google Doc
  • add the google doc link to the issue created above

Want something more nerdy? (we do!!!)

You need to use Google Chrome for this to work!

  • Turn on captions in the Google Meet
  • Use the Meet Transcript plugin to transcribe the captions to a Google Doc (this transcribes in real-time to a doc)
  • Use the transcribed document as a base for writing the blog post

(2) Creating a headshot picture without background

  1. ask the person presented in the Spotlight for a headshot picture of themselves
  2. open designify.com and upload the headshot picture to automatically crop out the background
  3. download the design called “Transparent BG” (the downloaded file will be called transparent-bg-designify.png)

(3) Creating the images for the Spotlight post

For blog post/twitter/facebook

  1. download MeltwaterEngTwitterTweet.psd
  2. go to photopea.com
  3. open the file MeltwaterEngTwitterTweet.psd (File => Open...)
  4. under Layers make sure that Spotlight => Photos is selected
  5. insert the new headshot (File => Open & Place => select transparent-bg-designify.png)
  6. center the headshot between the left border of the image and the text
  7. change the name of the person under layer Name (double click the |T| icon next to Spotlight => Name to make text field editable)
  8. change the role of the person under layer Job title (we use roles like “Software Engineering”, “Product Owner”, “Agile Coach” i.e. something that is likely to be understood universally outside of Meltwater)
  9. Save the file as JPG (File => Export as. Choose JPG. Set Quality to 100%. For use in the blog we prefer filenames like karl-neyvaldt-spotlight-blog.jpg.)
  10. Resize the image to what you need (e.g. 500px width for use in the blog post)

For Instagram

  1. download MeltwaterEngInstagramTemplate.psd
  2. go to photopea.com
  3. open the file MeltwaterEngInstagramTemplate.psd (File => Open...)
  4. under Layers make sure that Spotlight => Photos is selected
  5. insert the new headshot (File => Open & Place => select transparent-bg-designify.png)
  6. change the name of the person under layer Name (double click the |T| icon next to Spotlight => Name to make text field editable)
  7. change the role of the person under layer Job title (we use roles like “Software Engineering”, “Product Owner”, “Agile Coach” i.e. something that is likely to be understood universally outside of Meltwater)
  8. Save the file as JPG (File => Export as. Choose JPG. Set Quality to 100%.