My Swiss reader Karin just reminded me of the Young Me site. People reinact old photos of themselves. This one, with George the monkey is particulary adorable. The Ab Workout made me laugh out loud.
Ten Things | Milton Glaser
How did I never come across the Ten Things I have learned by Milton Glaser? Did I study Graphic Design under a rock? I must have.
(thank you savita)
Zurich/CreativeMornings with Dr.Peter Hogenkamp
After a fantastic first Zurich/CreativeMornings at Google Zurich with Ario Jafarzadeh talking about Priority Inbox, I am excited to announce our second Swiss chapter CreativeMorning with Dr.Peter Hogenkamp, head of digital at the NZZ Group.
The event will take place on October 8th, 2010 and will be generously hosted by supercool Cafe Casablanca (photo), in the heart of Zurich.
More info over at zurichcreativemornings.eventbrite.com. You will be able to add your name to the list starting monday October 4th, 11am. (Mark your calendars, we fill up quickly!)
A big thank you to Daniel Frei, who is running the Zurich chapter!
Watch the video of last months talk by Ario Jafarzadeh
Photos of last month’s event.
Follow Zurich/CreativeMornings on Twitter.
A big giant thank you to our breakfast sponsors Cafe Casablanca and Kalkbreite Optik. (YAY!)
Follow Zurich/CreativeMornings on Facebook.
Follow Zurich/CreativeMornings on Twitter.
DeClutter
This is the tweet-wish I put out a few minutes ago: (I realize that 3rd party apps have the feature I am wishing for.)
Melanie De Vrieze had an interesting suggestion called DeClutter. It is a javascript bookmarklet which will remove from your timeline any tweets which match a “blacklist” of keywords you’ve defined.
About DeClutter: Once you’ve started following more than a handful of people, you’ll occasionally find your timeline filling up with tweets about things that you’re really not that interested in. You’d rather not take the nuclear option and unfollow those involved, as they generally have interesting/useful tweets. But equally you’d rather not have to scroll through 3 pages of automated tweets about foursquare checkins, app downloads and the like. DeClutter is a javascript bookmarklet which will remove from your timeline any tweets which match a “blacklist” of keywords you’ve defined. Below you can enter a series of terms which you want to banish from your timeline (one term per line). After entering them, you can either copy and paste the resulting javascript in to a bookmarklet in your browser, or drag the DeClutter link at the bottom of the page to your browser’s bookmarks bar. Once it has been saved, log on to twitter.com and click your new bookmarklet. Straight away you should see tweets disappearing from the timeline. This filter will re-apply itself automatically in the background every time you click “more”, “@ replies”, etc, so you don’t need to re-click the bookmarklet whenever your timeline is refreshed. This can lead to some odd behaviour, such as only 3-4 tweets appearing instead of 20 when you click “more”, or not additional tweets appearing when you click the blue “new tweets” bar. This means that tweets which have been loaded matched your filters, and have been removed without ever being displayed to you.
Has anyone of you tried DeClutter? What’s the verdict?
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.
Definitely a new favorite on my long list of TED talks.
gridulator
Tell Gridulator your web-layout width and the number of columns you want, and it’ll spit back all the possible grids that have nice, round integers. Just the thing for pixel-based designfolk. There are inline previews, courtesy of the canvas element, and when you’re all set Gridulator can crank out full-size PNGs for you, ready for use in your CSS, Photoshop docs, or what have you. And there’s full keyboard control for you snazzy power users.
(thank you zoya)
Retro Desk Calendar
A beauty of a vintage desk calendar from the 70s. It has a simple rolling mechanism for each day, date and month. The friendly shape surrounds a minimal black face with white uppercase helvetica letters and numbers. Text is in german. Wishlisted.
What is good Design?
What is good design is one of these questions I am being asked constantly. The sheer complexity of the answer usually makes me break out in a nervous sweat. And so far, nobody nailed the answer better than Dieter Rams in his Ten Principles for Good Design.
What is your reference that you keep coming back to?
Contxts
We all know the scenario, you just got back from your gathering of professionals and you want to connect with all of the people that you met. So you pull out your stack of cards and you go through your social network of choice searching for each one by one. Or, you were at an event and ran out of cards, or forgot them, which happens a lot to me. Fear no longer, Contxts is here to help!
Instead of giving your new friend your printed business card how about you, save a tree and, txt them your virtual one. This action automatically places them in your online contact list and if they have a profile on contxts.com you both are connected. There are two ways to connect with another person. Regardless of whether they have a profile on contxts or not you can exchange your credentials.
From your phone, you txt “send 3034759204” to 50500 (where 3034759204 is your recipients 10 digit number): Your recipient will receive all of your contact information.
Or
Your contact txts “username” to 50500 on their phone: You will receive a request confirmation (unless you have it turned off). Upon accepting, your contact will receive your information.
Your txt business card is not just an exchange of credentials. It’s also a request to connect profiles through our network. Each and every contact that you make is added to your virtual rolodex. From here you get access to whatever additional information they provide (flickr, twitter, linked-in).If the person that you are connecting with doesn’t have a profile yet – no problem. When they do create a profile all of their information in your rolodex is automatically updated.
Want to give it a try? Get my info by texting SWISSMISS to 50500.
(via jason santa maria)
Writer for iPad
Whenever fellow Swiss Oliver Reichenstein comes out with a new product/service/site I pay attention. Given that Oliver is a smart young man and obviously works with a talented bunch over at iA, I am quite excited about using Writer for iPad. I yet have to extensively play around with it, but I am liking their approach and concept.
Read their story about the Writer of iPad.
Digital Tools helping in going Paperless
Based on my question from two days ago, I would like take the conversation a step further by asking the following:
What tools do you use (or know of) that help us in the quest to go digital and say goodbye to paper?
Here are some of the ones I use on a daily basis:
JotNot iPhone App, basically a scanner in your pocket. Email your photos as a PDF, back them up with various different services like Evernote or fax them. Fantastic app, highly recommend it to turn that receipt, that you might otherwise lose, into a pdf and store it in your files.
Don’t own one yet, but it’s on my wishlist: Neat Receipts Scanner and Filing Software.
Online based Project Management Tool Basecamp keeps me from printing out documents, knowing they are all up there in the cloud, always accessible.
Dropbox. Best $10 I spend every month. All my files, always synced on my various computers, at all times. As well always accessible on my iPhone and iPad. I have all my files on me at all times, at a click of a button. No need to print anything. Ever.
Google Docs. I used to bring a print out of my Class Rooster to class every week to keep track of attending students. No longer. I now log onto my Google Docs account while in class, check the boxes and save. Voila. Done.
What services do you use? Or dream of? What services does your company use to help you go digital?
Google New
Do you find it hard to keep up with all the good stuff Google is coming out with these days? I do. That’s why they just launched Google New, it’s the one place to find everything new from Google.
Update: I just learned that Google News is my friend Andy Bonventre’s 20% project. Awesome. Congrats!
(thank you Ji Lee)
The Feast Conference
I am thrilled to be attending the The Feast Conference October 14-16 in NYC. I thoroughly enjoyed the past two year’s events and can’t wait to see some of this year’s speakers. The list is impressive, and includes
Scott Belsky, founder of Behance
Rachel Botsman, Author of Collaborative Consumption
Adman Braun, Founder & Executive Director Pencils of Promise
John Forte, Musician johnforte.com
Dr. Mitchell Joachim, Co-founder & NYU Professor Terreform ONE
Naveen Selvadurai, Co-Founder Foursquare
Tony Wagner Co-director Change Leadership Group, Harvard Graduate School of Education
The Feast brings together leading creative entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, radicals, doers and thinkers to inspire more action, share best practices, and create valuable connections that will change the world. And I can attest that I had some of the most inspiring conference break conversations at last year’s conference.
UFOS flying around my head
The latest issue of FREITAG’s The Daily Reference made me smile. More info here.
Museum for Rescued Letters
Lucky Berliners! They have a Museum for Rescued Letters.
The Museum of Letters in Berlin is better known to the locals as Buchstabenmuseum. The gallery houses a huge collection of salvaged letters that were once part of large store and factory name signs. With the current rise in popularity of typography and a desire to preserve the past before it is too late, the Museum of Letters has been attracting crowds since its opening four years ago.
Can we please start one of these in NYC? I have the first artifact sitting right here on my desk. Look!
Online Printing Quote Machine
Young designer Shane Snow always disliked searching for printing quotes. So, what’s a designer to do? He made his very own printing price finder machine. (powered by a potato!) Designers, Business Owners, photographers, studios, freelancers, punk rock bands: You’ve all come to the right place to take the ‘sucks’ out of ‘printing’.
UPDATE: If you experience difficulties getting your quote. Try a little later. Shane just emailed me and said that the post took down his server… :(
Try Not To
THIS YEAR I WILL TRY NOT TO was born out of frustration, complacency and laziness. Most designers are seduced by design trends. They’re easy to appropriate, and even easier to imitate. The challenge is to innovate. To be new. Elliott Scott and Christopher Doyle decided the best (and most enjoyable) approach was to identify and document the most common trends they felt they had to avoid. Before long they found themselves with a checklist of DON’Ts and a new aim: to try to be new. They may fail, but they will try.
Two thumbs up!
This Year I Will from Ian Haigh on Vimeo.
The Future of the Book
Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?
(thank you daniel)
Question for my readers…
So, the other day I was talking with a friend of mine about the overall desire to go paperless. More and more companies try to print less in their day to day business but reality is, that a lot of large companies, are far away from going paperless. We are 8 people in our studio, 8 different businesses and hardly anyone ever prints anything here. (I am in charger of replacing the toner, so I know!) My friend told me that in big companies, paper still rules.
So, we were thinking about solutions. What are specific steps companies/yourself are taking to go paperless? Are devices like the iPad helping? Are collaboration technologies the solution?
Can you tell us how you do it? What your company does to get you to print less? What works?