“Blending celebrity and international diplomacy in a near-future Paris, Valentine crafts an intimate thriller than unmasks the players in the game.” —Publishers Weekly When Suyana, Face of the recently formed United Amazonia Rainforest Confederation, is secretly meeting Ethan of the United States, a potential ally for her struggling country, the last thing she expected to be was a victim of an assassination attempt. Daniel, a teen runaway turned paparazzo hoping to make a name for himself, witnesses the first shot targeted for Suyana. Without thinking, he jumps into the action telling himself it’s not selflessness, it’s the scoop. Now Suyana and Daniel are on the run—and if they don’t keep themselves one step ahead, they’ll lose it all.

In this limited edition, French makeup legend, beauty mogul, and esteemed photographer François Nars unveils his long-awaited collection of more than 300 new photographs—dramatic and provocative portraits of creative figures of all ages that capture the beauty and essence of each persona. Persona reveals an extraordinary production of cinematic, avant-garde portraits of an exclusive list of contemporary creative icons. The celebrities, artists, designers, musicians, and actors featured include Tilda Swinton, Naomi Campbell, Kyle MacLachlan, Sharon Stone, Bella Hadid, Isabelle Adjani, Cindy Sherman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Marina Abramovic, Liv Tyler, Christian Lacroix, Tadao Ando, and Marianne Faithfull. Nars has never sought to hide the imperfections and oddities that give faces their personality, but rather to accentuate them in dramatic and surprising ways—think bold, dark, painstakingly crafted eyes offset by clear, almost bare skin. The arresting images in this volume, shot in color against a rich black background with dramatic lighting, explore themes of provocation, sharp humor, and unconventional beauty, always with an edgy dose of glamour. This undoubtedly unique and gorgeous volume, printed using specialty inks to produce images in ultrarich vibrant colors with high gloss, is a true collector’s item for style, culture, and photography enthusiasts alike.

Data-driven personas are a significant advancement in the fields of human-centered informatics and human-computer interaction. Data-driven personas enhance user understanding by combining the empathy inherent with personas with the rationality inherent in analytics using computational methods. Via the employment of these computational methods, the data-driven persona method permits the use of large-scale user data, which is a novel advancement in persona creation. A common approach for increasing stakeholder engagement about audiences, customers, or users, persona creation remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, the availability of digital user data, data science algorithms, and easy access to analytics platforms provide avenues and opportunities to enhance personas from often sketchy representations of user segments to precise, actionable, interactive decision-making tools—data-driven personas! Using the data-driven approach, the persona profile can serve as an interface to a fully functional analytics system that can present user representation at various levels of information granularity for more task-aligned user insights. We trace the techniques that have enabled the development of data-driven personas and then conceptually frame how one can leverage data-driven personas as tools for both empathizing with and understanding of users. Presenting a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes, we illustrate applying this framework via practical use cases in areas of system design, digital marketing, and content creation to demonstrate the application of data-driven personas in practical applied situations. We then present an overview of a fully functional data-driven persona system as an example of multi-level information aggregation needed for decision making about users. We demonstrate that data-driven personas systems can provide critical, empathetic, and user understanding functionalities for anyone needing such insights.

There is a lot of interest in today’s culture about the idea of Persona and the psychological mapping of one’s inner world. In fact, the interest is so strong that the superstar Korean Pop band, BTS, has taken Dr. Murray Stein’s concepts and woven them into the title and lyrics of their latest album, Map of the Soul:Persona. What is our persona and how does it affect our life’s journey? What masks do we wear as we engage those around us? Our persona is ultimately how we relate to the world. Combined with our ego, shadow, anima and other intra-psychic elements it creates an internal map of the soul. T.S. Eliot, one of the most famous English poets of the 20th Century, wrote that every cat has three names: the name that everybody knows, the name that only the cat’s intimate friends and family know, and the name that only the cat knows. As humans, we also have three names: the name that everybody knows, which is the public persona; the name of that only your close friends and family know, which is your private persona; and the name that only you know, which refers to your deepest self. Many people know the first name, and some people know the second. Do you know your secret name, your individual, singular, unique name? This is a name that was given to you before you were named by your family and by your society. This name is the one that you should never lose or forget. Do you know it?

The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas offers a practical guide to the creation and use of personas, which can help product designers, their team, and their organization become more user focused. This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the particular tool or method is the right one. The book discusses the five phases of persona lifecycle: - Family planning — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help one get organized - Conception and gestation — Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to completed personas - Birth and maturation — Strategic techniques to get the right information about ones personas out to ones your teammates at the right time - Adulthood — Specific tools that will ensure that ones personas are used by the right people at the right times and in the right ways during the product development cycle - Lifetime achievement and retirement — Basic ideas and a few tools to you measure the success of the persona effort and prepare for the next one - Practical and immediately applicable how-to reference guide for building and using personas – from planning, creating, launching, evaluating, and determining ROI - Invaluable guide that gives you a quick reference for incorporating personas into a product development process - Features all the essential how-to material from its parent book, The Persona Lifecycle, as a quick, at your fingertips companion

Long held to be among the world's greatest filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman shaped international art cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s. Among his many works, Persona is often considered to be his masterpiece and is often described as one of the central works of Modernism. Bergman himself claimed that this film 'touched wordless secrets only the cinema can discover'. The essays collected in this volume, and published for the first time, use a variety of methodologies to explore topics such as acting technique, genre, and dramaturgy. It also includes translations of Bergman's early writings that have never before been available in English, as well as an updated filmography and bibliography that cover the filmmaker's most recent work.

Named one of Fortune Magazine’s “5 Best Business Books” in 2015 See your offering through the buyer's eyes for more effective marketing Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this book provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes. Readers will learn how to segment their customer base, investigate each customer type, and apply a radically more relevant process of message selection, content creation, and distribution through the channels that earn the buyers' trust. Rather than relying on generic data or guesswork to determine what the buyer wants, the buyer persona approach allows companies to ask the buyer directly and obtain more precise and actionable guidance. Buyer personas are composite pictures of the people who buy solutions, services or products, crafted through a unique type of interview with the people the marketer wants to influence. This book provides step-by-step guidance toward implementing the buyer persona approach, with the advice of an internationally-respected expert. Learn who buys what, and why Understand your buyer's goals and how you can address them Tailor your marketing activities to your buyer's expectations See the purchase through the customer's eyes A recent services industry survey reports that 52 percent of their marketers have buyer personas, and another 28 percent expect to add them within the next two years – but only 14.6 percent know how to use them. To avoid letting such a valuable tool go to waste, access the expert perspective in Buyer Personas, and craft a more relevant marketing strategy.