Kiva High School : A new effort by Kiva that enables high school students to organize themselves in microfinance clubs with the intent of educating others. I’m a big believer in microfinance, and since March 2008, Authentic Jobs has funded 222 loans by donating 1% of its total monthly revenue. … Read the rest here
Two sizes of dive slates, as displayed in my shower. I’ve written before about showering as an ideal model for creative pause —minimal distraction, mental freedom, and a change of scenery. What I haven’t written about is how to capture what comes of the pause. Inspiration is elusive and fleeting, and if it isn’t captured when it comes, it’s often gone for good. … Read the rest here
The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk. : Jocelyn K. Glei, writing for The 99 Percent: Though we are more likely than ever to be tethered to others by our iPhones and Blackberries, it’s more important than ever to carve out periods of uninterrupted contemplation. To take our brains out of their scattershot Internet patterns and navigate a new city, take in nature on a long walk, sit quietly and read a book, or have a serendipitous conversation with a stranger. I’d refer to this as creative pause , and I agree with Jocelyn’s remarks about it being a necessary element in the flow of creativity. … Read the rest here
dConstruct 2010 : Having spoken at this conference before, I can vouch for a quality conference put on by Clearleft each year. And the design of this year’s site? Stunning, fresh, and love the parallax effect as you widen/narrow your browser window. … Read the rest here
Symphony of Steel : I finally framed this photo by Sara Flemming of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall . “Stunning” doesn’t cut it, but that’s what it is—both photo and building. … Read the rest here
In October 2009, the hashtag #lessconf began showing up repeatedly in my Twitter stream. The tweets were remarkably positive for something I’d heard nothing about previously. It turns out Steven Bristol and Allan Branch of Less Everything , the bright minds behind LessAccounting , were hosting a conference. Crush It! author Gary Vaynerchuk, Wufoo founder Kevin Hale and others spoke, and nearly 200 of you attended. This year’s LessConf 3010 resumes in Atlanta, Georgia, May 21–22… Read the rest here
Dribbble , masterfully crafted by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett , went live over the weekend. I don’t recall all the details, but probably sometime in 2008, Dan Cederholm and I had a conversation about an app he was considering building. Fundamentally, the idea was to build a community loosely based on the same concept as the “ Screen Grab Confab ” posts on my site. (Remember those?) The concept was simple, embracing the brevity and utility of Twitter and adding to it visuals: Share a snippet of what you’re currently designing, but only a snippet. Let others reply. Dan asked if I had any issues with the idea… Read the rest here
This year’s HOW Design Conference resumes in Denver, Colorado beginning June 9. Some of the brightest minds in the design industry, including Debbie Millman , Armin Vit , and Von Glitschka , will speak on topics that cover design inspiration, making the leap from print to web, copywriting, business plans, Photoshop tips, and much more. I’ll be giving a reprise of Good vs. Great Design. … Read the rest here
ColosseoType.com, An All-HTML5 Endeavor : The site for the Colosseo poster is my first production-ready website with HTML5 under the hood. I’ve coded sites semantically with HTML5 class names before (see Jon Tan’s article ), but this is the first with legitimate HTML5 elements such as and in the markup. IE doesn’t yet recognize HTML5, so I’ve added Remy Sharp’s HTML5 shiv script , which forces IE to acknowledge the new elements. Granted, the Colosseo site is a one-pager, but hey, it’s a start. Update: It looks like Firefox 2.x doesn’t play well with HTML5, either. Here’s another article from Remy Sharp on getting Firefox 2 to recognize HTML5… Read the rest here
Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks: Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDF s or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too. … Read the rest here
Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks: Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDF s or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too. Cheese Diaries ) – where I take snaps of cheese labels to remember what I ate… Read the rest here
It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. … Read the rest here
It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. I shut down SidebarAds, I never worked on Snitter, and I never finished Haylia, FontSmack or any number of other personal projects that I wanted to work on… Read the rest here
If you’ve got 4 minutes spare, treat yourself to this video of printmaker Paul Catherall explaining how he produced the beautiful linocut prints that were commissioned by Transport for London under the title “A new view of London”. An exhibition of his work is on display at the.gallery@oxo in London South bank’s until May 18, and the posters are available in the London Transport Museum Shop . Comment on this … Read the rest here
Yesterday at noon I turned in my employee badge, laptop, and other employer-owned property. Goodbyes and K.I.T.’s were exchanged. A Snickers was indulged, just because. And with that, I concluded a chapter from the last three years of my life. Today I begin full-time employment as founder, principal, whatever of Cameron Moll LLC. This is a decision that has been quietly (and carefully) considered since November 2008… Read the rest here
Discovery are a new project by members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot. Vampire Weekend was my favourite album of 2008 – like a breath of fresh air to my collection – and this looks set to be a contender for 2009. Go see the Discovery site created by David Emery and his team of boffins. … Read the rest here
Recently I made the switch back to HTML 4 for DOCTYPE s and px for font-size (sound like 1999 again?), and I’ve tweeted about it occasionally. I’m documenting the switch more thoroughly here. HTML 4.01 Strict I’ve chosen to go with HTML 4.01 Strict as the DOCTYPE in my projects moving forward, favoring it above XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 5. I’ll briefly explain my reasoning. XHTML 1.0 Strict – This is what many of us in the industry, including myself, have been using for the past few years… Read the rest here
The redesign for Authentic Jobs , which is coming along swimmingly thanks to your feedback, will include a blog to allow myself and others to post articles on the topic of employment, freelancing, and the like. The following is one such article. I’ve been bookmarking the links below over the past few months in anticipation of the new blog. However, because the redesign is taking longer than I had hoped, I’ve decided to post the article now given the timeliness of the subject. The last 6 months or so have been rocky for just about everyone and every business, and with layoffs and budget cutbacks, job search is certainly no exception. Many more applicants, but far fewer job openings… Read the rest here
In creating the combo-bar charts for the survey report , I stumbled into an Explorer bug that I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and Google didn’t turn up anything that seemed to be related. This could easily mean that I’m the only person who ever did something this insane and thus found the bug. It could just as easily mean that my Google-fu has failed. Either way, I’ll write it up here so it can enter the collective memory. … Read the rest here
At last—at long, long last!— the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available , along with the anonymized raw data we collected. There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. … Read the rest here