Wim Crouwel, the legendary Dutch typographer and graphic designer, when asked about design in today’s world, had this to say: “[for young designers], the stimulus is coming from the new techniques, from the new wonders, from the freedom of life – and that makes it difficult I think. ...What I say to young designers is to keep your radar turning, and pick up everything that you love, but in the same time, be very sure that you find your own way in it, but not be brought off your path by all the things that happen in the world. You need to find out what you love yourself and try to stick with it and try to find your own way” – great advice.
Ifttt.com is an app to manage and automate all my social profiles. I love it for three reasons. First, it’s based on the dead simple concept that if I do something then it will do something else for me. So if I post on flickr, it will send that image to facebook. If a stock hits a certain price, I’ll get an email. If I publish a blog post, it will tweet about it. Each “task” is completely customizable, so I can set it up exactly the way I want. Second reason I love it, is the UI. It makes a 7-step process feel completely effortless. I wanted to take a video of it, but then I got tired and gave up. Last of all I love the sheer number of apps & services that it works with. Below is a screen shot of just the popular applications.
The app is in private beta, so you have to sign up. Additionally I have 5 invites, so if you want one and are quick feel free to reach out.
Check out Do Lectures. Looks like some interesting content (kind of like TED Talks), but that’s not why I’m posting. Take a close look at how they handle re-sizing the window. As you change width, the screen goes through a series of at least 4 seamless transformations to adapt to the new format—hiding secondary elements, re-sizing things, re-positioning. Very impressive flexible layout. (Via UIE podcasts.)
A lesser known feature in Chrome that I love, is the ability to directly search only in a given site AND end up on that sites’ search results page. To enable it, do the following:
1. Go to youtube and do a search. This is a one time step that teaches Chrome how to search.
2. Then, in the location bar, type youtube.com and hit the “tab” key
3. Type your search query
This will dump you onto youtube’s search results page. So far I’ve got it to work on Facebook, LinkedIn, Craigslist and Amazon, among others. From what I can tell it “learns” as it goes.
Great question. Here is a quote from stackexchange on the topic that is pitch perfect:
“So suppose you can save $2000 every three years by buying cheaper computers, and your average developer(or designer) is making $60k. If those cheaper computers only cost you 10 minutes of productivity a day, not at all a stretch, I’m sure that my machine costs me more than that, then over 3 years the 125 lost hours would add up to a loss of $7500. A loss of 1 minute a day ($750) would give a net gain of $1250, which would hardly offset the cost of poor morale”
Would a contractor ask his carpenter to cut with a dull saw? Full thread here.
Want to make the world a better place? I think Ghandi said “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Anything worth doing is worth doing together. Right?
Sometimes as creatives we lose our bearings and wonder what the point is. With so much raw awesomeness, illusion, tools, and effects all around us all the time, it’s helpful to remember a few things:
We need more story and less special effect.
We need more character and less manipulation.
We need more connection and less fortification.
We need more solutions and less technology.
We need more reality and less simulation.
We need more friends and less acquaintances.
We need more teams and less heroes.
We need more neighbors and less celebrities.
We need more face-to-face friendly speaking and less facebooking.
We need more substance and less superficiality.
We need more creativity and less critical passive-aggressiveness.
We need to exercise more faith and not be driven so much by “fear of offense” or “lack of control”.
People matter more than business, innovation, or invention.
What needs to happen will happen. What innovation is needed will occur when the time is right. When it unfolds, were we part of it? Or, when a great thing is invented, will we despise it because it was not forcibly willed by us according to our own timeline?
“To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.” -Charles de Montesquieu
First off thanks to all those who particpated in our survey. The data points included some surprises that I hadn’t expected. I’ll let the results speak for themselves. As for the schwag, we’ll announce that soon too!
