2012

Daniel Pinchbeck has a great new documentary out, directed by Joao Amorim. It features Sting, Ellen Page, David Lynch, Paul Stamets, Shiva Rea, and many more talking about the changes they see coming in the next few years through the lens of Design and Community.

As many folks are feeling like the world is spinning out of control, our group of visionaries see excitement and opportunity for positive change. It is rare that a documentary leaves you with a sense of hope and some directions on how to expand your consciousness like “2012 Time For Change“. Let’s all take a moment to counteract the doom and gloom media tactics so that are so pervasive these days and look at possible new methods of doing things. The holistic approach of this documentary makes it a user manual for the third millennium.

Watch the BBC Review.

(Thank you Rachel)

I have PSD

“Photoshop dexterity (PSD) is a skillset acquired by proficient users of Adobe Photoshop, the world’s most ubiquitous digital tool for creating visual ideas. Qualities of PSD include supernatural powers of imagination and an overwhelming desire to constantly make the world more beautiful. PSD affects people from different walks of life. In fact, there is a high probability that you have PSD.”

I Have PSD from Hyperakt on Vimeo.

Have you seen World Without Photoshop?

(I admit it, Photoshop has been taking over my life. I do Control-Z in my head whenever I drop or spill something, I pull up the saturation panel when I feel like my surroundings could use some more ‘umpf’, and yes, I have toyed with the idea of photoshopping my freckles. And I’ll now always think of the Layer Lock when locking my apartment door.)

Laptop Backpack

My friend asked me for a recommendation for a Laptop Backpack, and now I can’t stop looking for the best-looking-most-practical-model out there. I love my ACME Slim Pack but would definitely consider getting this FREITAG Model, would I be in the market for a new one. Nice to see that backpacks are coming back.

(via stilsucht)

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography

(via brainpicker)

INFLUENCERS

INFLUENCERS TRAILER from R+I creative on Vimeo.

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends & creativity become contagious today in music and fashion.

Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture.

I am looking forward to seeing The Influencers this fall.

(via the hansen family)

Kleiderstiele

“Kleiderstiele,” or clothing-sticks, is a boiled-down coat rack—a broomstick to hold garments, designed by Berlin-based Johanna Dehio.

(via Core77)

Facebook Blocker

I am beyond excited to have found Facebook Blocker. As you might guess, I am not fond of all those like buttons popping up on every site in the internetz-universe. When I discovered the first Facebook Like Button over on Apple, I nearly fell off my chair. Here’s a brand, Apple, that I thought would *never* implement a Facebook button. I guess I was wrong.

Obviously I am not the only one that would love to see the web with less of those blue thumbs up buttons. So, a big thank you to Webgraph for having created the Facebook Blocker. This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.

Don’t worry: sites that use Facebook Connect for sign in purposes, or that use Facebook as a conduit for other functionality will continue to work as expected.

Download for Safari (How to install Safari Extensions)
Install for Chrome
Install for Firefox

2011 TED Prize winner

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JR is an anonymous photographer and artist and the 2011 TED Prize winner. In his work, JR embeds into neighborhoods, favelas and villages around the world, photographing the people who live there and learning their stories — and then pasting his striking images onto massive local canvases: buildings, buses, roads and bridges. His latest global art project is called “Women Are Heroes.” (Watch the emotionally powerful trailer)

JR embodies the many characteristics TED looks for in a winner: creativity, vision, leadership, and persuasion. His work is not just stunning. It is innovative, using collaborative storytelling techniques, which move the art of photography in a new and exciting direction. His work is about unlocking the power of possibility, revealing our true selves to those who live around us and then sharing those stories far and wide.

JR attracts loyalty and respect from both his subjects, his friends and volunteers who help him mount all of his exhibitions. The scale of his work is huge, not just the size of each individual portrait, or the amount of space each exhibition covers in one place, but the number of communities and countries each project involves.

More about TED Prize
JR’s Bio

New York Times Article
Fast Company Article
New York Magazine Article

(Thank you Casson)

Black Tie Beach

Not sure how I missed this Improv Everywhere Mission called Black Tie Beach. Talk about being overdressed for a venue! Several hundred agents spent a day at Coney Island / Brighton Beach wearing black tie attire. They covered a mile-long stretch of beach with a diverse group of people of all ages (from babies to sixty-somethings) laying out, playing games, and swimming in the ocean, all in formal wear. Agents were instructed to find cheap tuxedos and ball gowns at thrift stores for the occasion. Watch the video below. It made me smile:

Framework

Framework is a series of posters highlighting the most iconic men’s eyewear of the last 100 years. The collection includes a compilation poster featuring 28 glasses from male personalities in music, film, entertainment, and politics; as well five posters highlighting iconic individuals. The posters were designed by Glenn Manucdoc of Moxy Creative.

(thank you Shane)

Gangsta Lorem Ipsum

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Gangsta Lorem Ipsum.

(thank you John)

Time-Savers For Web Designers

This Smashing Magzine post called 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers is filled with amazing tools that I have never heard of. Take the Browser UI tool for example. It creates a browser window around any size Photoshop document you can throw at it. The Browser UI is easily installed and helps you get around with your Photoshop documents.

House of Buttons is a growing collection of various buttons spotted in the wild by Jason Long. Incredibly useful collection, and submissions are welcome.

PDFsam is a free open source tool (GPL License) designed to split and merge PDF documents. Whether it be only extracting sections into a single document or changing the order of the pages. The basic version can be downloaded and simply used on every platform with a Java support.

Typographic Sins (also available as PDF) by James Godfrey and Patrick Wilkey covers 35 mistakes commonly made by novice designers. The website puts them in a neat orderly list, but the PDF showcases them visually. It’s a great reference guide and learning tool if you want to learn better typography design.

Is email a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time.

Check out the entire list of 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers.

(How excited are we here over at Team TeuxDeux for our app being one of them? *Sooo* excited!)

The right thing

Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

– Caterina Fake

(via startup quote and michael’s post about the ‘power of time off‘)

NYC/CreativeMornings with Liz Danzico

I am delighted to announce next week’s NewYork/CreativeMornings with my friend and UX Expert, Author, Educator Liz Danzico as our speaker.

WHEN/WHERE

NewYork/CreativeMornings, October 29th 2010, 8.30am – 10am. This month’s event will be hosted at the Blurb PopUp/NYC store on Mercer street in Soho.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Liz Danzico is part designer, part educator, and part editor. She is an independent consultant, and user experience consultant for Happy Cog Studios. She is chairperson of the MFA in Interaction Design program, which will see its inaugural class graduate in spring 2011 at the School of Visual Arts, and co-founded the program with Steven Heller (our last month’s speaker). She’s a columnist for Core77 and Interactions Magazine, and is proud to be on the advisory boards for the Austin Center for Design, desigNYC, Design Ignites Change, and Rosenfeld Media. Find more about Liz and her thinking on her fantastic blog called Bobulate.

HOW TO SIGN UP

R.S.V.P will open at 10.55am on friday october 22, 2010 over at creativemornings.eventbrite.com!

Please let us know if you r.s.v.p’d but can no longer make it. Our events fill up quickly and we usually keep a waiting list. Thank you! And at the morning of the event, make sure to put on your chatty networking hats!

BREAKFAST SPONSORS

Breakfast will be sponsored by our main sponsor MailChimp and this month’s host Blurb.

MailChimp is a fantastic service that makes it easy to send email newsletters to your customers, manage your subscriber lists, and track campaign performance. A big yay-hooray to the team over at MailChimp!

Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the joy of books – reading them, making them, sharing them, and selling them. Blurb developed a creative publishing service simple and smart enough to make anyone an author – every blogger, cook, photographer, parent, traveler, poet, pet owner, marketer, everyone. (This means you.)

ABOUT CREATIVEMORNINGS

CreativeMornings is a monthly morning gathering of creative types. Each event includes a 20 minute lecture, followed by a 20 minute group discussion. The gathering begins at 8:30am with the topic presentation starting at 9:00am and everyone taking off for work at 10am. CreativeMornings are free of charge! There are currently three chapters: Zurich, LosAngeles + NewYork/CreativeMornings. (More chapters are planned but not for another 2-3months)

Be the first to know when r.s.v.p’s open up, follow NewYork/CreativeMornings on twitter!

Check out pictures of previous NewYork/CreativeMornings over at Flickr.

View all the taped talks we’ve put up on the web so far over at Vimeo.com/creativemornings.

Ramsign

I don’t know about you but I *love* the vintage feel and look of enamel signs. So, the idea of creating my own custom sign makes my heart beat faster. Ramsign is a small Danish company that specializes in making and selling classic enamel signs based upon original designs and techniques. I am tempted to get one done for our studio door with 612a on it.

Does anyone know of US based companies doing the same?

Design Observer iPhone App


Design Observer just launched its iPhone App over on the App Store. The app lets users download a wealth of the world’s best design commentary on the go. It’s available for Free, download it here. More about it over on Design Observer.

♥ / Dirty Coast Press

A big giant thank you to Dirty Coast Press for sponsoring this week’s RSS Feed.

Dirty Coast Press launched in early 2005. After Katrina their designs became in demand as a very needed badge of honor and conversation starter about why New Orleans matters. Dirty Coast Press focuses on designs that only those who understand New Orleans and Louisiana might get. They are hyper-local in that respect however have customers in every state and now, all over the world. Folks being a New Orleanian, wherever they are.

Over 2,000,000 free stickers and 80+ shirt designs later, as well as an amazing community surrounding their brand, Dirty Coast Press is proud to keep the conversations about New Orleans and Louisiana going.

Check out some of my favorite Dirty Coast Press Designs: Second Line Till You Drop, Turdrucken and Savior.

Dirty Coast is the brain-child of Creative Director Blake Haney who is with The Canary Collective.

(Interested in sponsoring a week of my RSS feed, learn more here.)

Sense vs. Nonsense

This semi-sort-of-comic called “Sense vs Nonsense” or “How to Have an Idea” by Frank Chimero had me chuckle.

(via @dsgn)

Olimpia Zagnoli



I admire Olimpia Zagnoli’s work. She is a 26 year old illustrator, based in Milan, Italy. She has an adorable logo, an amazing sense of color and, of course, drives a yellow Fiat. Best of all for us NYC peeps: We will get a chance to meet her at an upcoming AIGA/NY Small Talk event here in the big apple.

Steff La Cheffe

Steff La Cheffe is a 23 year old Swiss from Breitsch, Switzerland. Yes, in case you were wondering, that language in the above song is indeed swiss-german. For those of you that don’t know. Swiss-German is a spoken-only language and most of the time sounds like you have a sore throat. I send a hat tip to Steff La Cheffe for pulling it off to actually make swiss german sound hip and cool.

(thank you Pascal)

five people

“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”.

– Jim Rohn

Life

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

– Soren Kierkegaard

Rhythm

“Quality of life is not a question of speed.
It’s a matter of rhythm.”

– rhythm

Blobs of Gel

These computer-controlled, shape changing blobs of gel made me look. Lisa Smith of Core77 writes:

A friend of ours loves to joke that the future will have no hard edges; experience will be defined in pastel-colored gels, foams and mists that deliver your voicemail and bring you milk. Probably to his dismay, this new project from the Wakita Laboratoray at Keio University may one day prove him right.

Not only do I love the sound of the word “Blob”, I also love the idea of having gel foams bring me milk.

Shape Changing is Real: Blob Motility by the Wakita Lab