Great Quote

From Leeclowsbeard (Twitter)

Try being inspired by the world around you. Better to rip-off God than CA.

HOW Conference - Get your discounts here!

In the spirit of giving and sharing, we've partnered with the good folks putting on the HOW Design Conference, the In-HOWse Designer Conference, and the Creative Freelancer Conference (all happening around the same week in June).

Use this promo code for $50 off when you sign up:
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See you there!

Fontplore

Fontplore Showreel from Mphasize on Vimeo.

There is some great thinking here. Love the idea of how to search the fonts and there are some definitely experimental interfaces going on. Would like to see the evolution (whether it is us or the tech) and how this becomes practical.

Scratching the surface

Amazing work, cinematography, soundtrack. Inspiring.

Some of the best Inspiration for a long time.

TBWA quote compilation on change on mad-blog.com

View more presentations from Mad Blog.

From TBWA, it just made my morning.

Ignite Show

I LOVE this idea. The idea of opening a speaker presentation to the audience and turning it into a night of inspiration. Watch the videos, kudos to the presentation and to the creators of the idea.

Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. Imagine that you're on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you're ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.

Ignite Show Via Boing Boing

"Start Where The Energy Is"

The title is a quote from John Cleese regarding the creative process and getting out of being stuck. I think it's brilliant insight. Read the excerpt here to get the idea in full.

(via swissmiss) 

The funny walking photos are cool, too, no?

Mobile Bench

Love simple and functional design. I'd put one my garden. But I don't have a garden. Regardless, pretty cool.

Found on SwissMiss.

Festival of Lights, Etc.

This shot is from a recent festival in Berlin, but the article has some other really cool night-light art.

Grammar Of Ornament Flickr Set

For the traditional ornamental pattern lovers. Link.

Word Cyclone

Alice in Wonderland with Processing from zeh fernando.

This is cool. I'd like to see it used in an automobile spot, perhaps, with powerful copy at just the right places. The spot starts out dark like this, but as it goes on, a country road scene fades in just slightly, maybe even something suggesting the Wizard of OZ, but the scene does not overtake the copy cyclone. At the end, the object of the ad comes rushing through the cyclone, scattering the words, which turn into falling leaves. The car is filled with, of course, Dorothy et al.

That'd be neat.

I'm a sucker for club flyer graphics. I've been out of the loop for awhile probably due to the fact that I don't crawl the urban landscape like I used to. But I did happen upon this on the net. I say its simple but neato.

I Love Typography Presents...

A couple of beautiful links. Go here.

Little Magazines

Sometimes you discover beautiful little oddities in random used bookstores or seconhand shops. That's not what happened here, but I'd love to find some of these little magazines somewhere!

Clip/Stamp/Fold has a cool little timeline (1960's-1970's) of these little architecture magazines that seem to recall the short lived publications of the Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, and later the dadaists. 

This description from the site may be useful for all periods mentioned:

Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. The terms “little” and “magazine” are not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived radical magazines, Clip/Stamp/Fold includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals along with professional magazines that experienced “moments of littleness,” influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.

Check it out.

Defenestrate

Warning: this post is for the readers, those people, who like me start off almost every creative endeavor with words rather than images. Sorry, no eye candy here.

Okay, so readers of the BBC online submitted their favourite (BBC's spelling, of course) words and the BBC published 50 of them with some comments here. Some of the comments are pretty interesting. I love word-association-thinking and lists of words. It's often the creative jolt I need to get my brain seeing things differently, and as language is a shared experience, words often take me to images that will be surprising, but somehow shared, as well.

The first word on the list was Defenestrate, which means "the action of throwing something or someone out of a window." The first thing I remembered was an experience I had in 9th grade. Forgive me the indulgence, but I'll share it here.

I was in math class, and we were going through a homework assignment, which I did notoriously poor on. After grading our own work by switching papers with a peer, our teacher surprised us by asking that we turn it in. Well, like I said, I didn't perform too well on the homework, which is why I crumpled it up and threw it out the window. Despite the logic of my actions, my teacher didn't believe me when I said I didn't have any work to turn in. I was taken out to the hall because our discussion got a little heated... finally I had to confess, with embarrassment, the reason I couldn't turn anything in, and to prove the validity of my confession, he made me produce the evidence. I found my homework on the lawn next to scholl and did my best to iron it out on my way back to my second-story classroom. In the end, he chuckled a bit, and we were a little more friendly towards each other after that. Perhaps he had his own defenestration history. If only I'd known that word back then, I could have really impressed him.

Found Alphabets

I used to work with a program called LINK in Seattle, where volunteers worked with local artists, giving workshops to high school art students once a month. One of the projects we did was a polaroid exploration of the city looking for letterforms in the environment. It was more difficult than it sounds, as we found out, and the kids had a chance to push each other further to find more graceful, more expressive, and more true-to-form letters. They all  really showed up and did a great job and the exercise had us all seeing our world differently. Such a valuable thing to practice. 

The above images may inspire you to do something similar next time you need a creative boost. Check out more alphabets (not found, but cool regardless) here.

Binth Screen-Printed Playing Cards

There's a screen printing kit in my garage that I might have used once. This deck of cards and Binth studio's other work is truly inspiring. Now, if I could only find time to get out the inks and screen, plus a few years to attain something like the same skill...

Creative Discovery: To Be Sure Without Knowing

Okay, I'm about to get a little woo-woo. Josh Doorman is an artist who works with maps, and consequently with memory – he's currently working on a project involving memory and Alzheimers and dementia patients. But here's the woo woo part: In his artists' statement, he writes, "As I get older, it gets more difficult to write about my own work. However, the less I am able to articulate what I do, the more I trust in my process."

I find that to be a beautiful truth about life that we can rarely implement in design as it is very rare to find a client who trusts in the artist within the designer. It doesn't seem billable if we can't rationalize it. And that's a huge part of our training , right? There's an adage, design is about solving problems, art is about creating a problem to solve, or something like that. Our value to business as visual communicators and designers is to solve the problem our clients/employers face, to "find the pain" and figure out how we can help, as a friend put it to me recently. 

Still, there is mystery in the western, post-enlightenment sense, a puzzle to solve; and then there is that Greek version, much more Eastern than we're comfortable with, the mystery which when we dive into, requires that we leave our reason behind and then provides for us a place to settle in, to be surprised, to discover. To be sure without knowing.

Well, that's probably enough woo woo for now. It's just that sometimes it's nice to take a break from what's billable and enjoy the process of creative discovery. That's partly what I like about Josh Doorman's map art. Check it out. 

Bruce Mau Design at the Democratic National Convention

If you've never experienced Bruce Mau Design in some way, shape or form, I'd highly recommend checking this out. I'd also recommend the book he and the Institute Without Boundaries put together: Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future Global Design Culture. I found the book incredibly inspiring for creative thinking in all aspects and directions.

The Future of Interfaces

Smashing Magazine has posted 10 future user interfaces

that are pretty mind-blowing to those of us whose work is produced mainly on paper. And speaking of paper, the holographic technology used in Musion's Eyeliner 3D (in video above) would certainly take the paper fashion show to new levels; of course, it wouldn't be paper then, would it? 

New great technology is great, but I offer Khoi Vinh's perspective on the need for simplicity 

to put the new stuff to good use. Enjoy.