“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle. There’s something about this that resonates… even though I’d like to think that not all good ideas start as mistakes…
“Perfect is the enemy of good enough. When your product or service is good enough, get it out, because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides, unwanted features, not perfection, come with more time. By shipping, youll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It’s definitely a trade-off your reputation versus cash flow so you can’t ship pure crap. But you can’t wait for perfection either.”Even though we don’t sell our product, I found the third step in Guy Kawasaki’s article The Art of Bootstrapping timely as we work to employ a more agile approach to software development.
This beautiful combination of musical notation and typography comes from a poster advertising an art expo opening today in Stockholm, titled The Art of Music.
From the curator: The Art of Music reflects upon the profound influence that music has on art and simultaneously art has on music and recognises their common creative approach. The leading idea of the show emphasises the fact that artists tastes in music are always strongly related to their work. Each artist has been asked to design the poster for the concert of his or her dream, including the line-up of choice and in any venue imaginable whether existing or not.
I’m one of the least typographical guys in our group. But even I can appreciate a good cross between typography and 80’s cartoons with the Optima T-Shirt :)
“Our design and editorial teams are storytellers. Design begins in a laboratory atmosphere where we create ideas from scratch. We develop the recipes, the crafts, even the decorating ideas, we design and build the sets, we choose the colors, we choose the photographer, then we finally after all of that sit down to design the story and that’s why for us design is both the creation and execution of the idea from start to finish.”The process that Gael Towey explaines Martha Stewart uses to tell stories.
“Anthropology is too important to be left to the Anthropologists.”Grant McCracken talks about the opportunity for designers to add extract value by helping shape culture and adding anthropology to the core competency of design.
“If it comes easy, you’re not doing it right”Malcom Gladwell speaks on the discipline of creativity @ the 2008 AIGA Business and Design Conference. (Hint: If you don’t have the patience to watch the entire forty-minute presentation for this quote at the end, you have little hope of having a personal creative breakthrough.)
Wordle for last October’s General Conference, via Larry Richman. Nice job—love the font and color choices!
Clarification: Connor Boyack is actually the one who created this arrangement, using Wordle. See the comments for more info.
Zoom far into a document in the new Photoshop CS4 and pixel lines automatically appear, a nice touch to help define specific colors and fine tune your designs. (Above is 18pt Caecilia LT Std at 3200%.)
Vintage RobFoster™ style illustrations by Patrick Leger. Above: “After the Heist”. Rob, I want to see one of these in your lounge ASAP.
Numbered Type’s Seeing Eye Calendar.
On the topic of giving things time… This article from the NY Times talks about the “Slow Blogging Manifesto”, and the idea that “not all things worth reading are written quickly.”
“In spite of the fact that our rockets have only gone as far as the moon, the world busies itself with worries and preparations for intergalactic travel.”Kenya Hara in “Designing Design” makes a comment about the technological over-reaction which is applied without question to problems in business and society. He argues that perhaps technology should move a little bit slower. We should allow time for trial and error to help us produce stable systems. Instead we might be damaging society by continuing to produce a flood of information through unstable and untested means.
Subtle marketing strategies from Threadless.
“It’s about whittling. It’s about taking something and whittling and whittling and getting it sharp and perfect. Then you’ve got something.”James Victore – Designer
“When we misuse authority by preventing failure, we diminish accountability and capacity for learning.”Barbara Tanner from George Wythe University . The context was in education, but I think it applies to allowing teams and individuals to take risks in the workplace as well. This made me think back to Scott Berkun’s session on spectacular design failures at UIE 13, as well as his essay on learning from mistakes. If we are so afraid of failure that we risk nothing, then we don’t grow.
While reading an interesting interview with the designers of the logo for Obama’s campaign, I discovered a cool little UI element on the New York Times website. If you select a piece of text, a little icon appears. When clicked, a window opens with options to define, search and other actions. Very nice attention to detail.
case study
Using a CSS Framework in a
Large Organization
So the other day Tadd linked up some work in progress code which hinted that we are using the Blueprint CSS framework in some of our sites under development.
This decision went through many heated debates internally where some were excited for it, and others were repulsed.
So what were the reasons behind the need for looking into a framework?
Gmail is now skinnable. It hasn’t been rolled out to GAFMD accounts yet, but looks like it’s available to all standard users. Most of the themes are actually pretty nice; although I won’t see them much as I rarely use a web-client for email. For when I do though, these are some nice new options. The best change is simply how they tightened up the interface. They don’t provide the option of creating your own yet. I wish the themes persisted across the other apps (calendar, docs, etc).
New trailer just out for Pixar’s new movie “Up.”
The color palette and texture in this new movie looks nothing short of gorgeous. I was so taken by the look of the trailer that I had to play it again just to find out what it was about. I also had to wipe a little drool from the corner of my mouth.
I’ve posted some screenshots of some of the more luxurious shots here. Just look at the texture on that kid’s uniform. Man, that’s nice
