Between the beautiful illustration, simplicity, CSS3 shout-out and the responsive design, it is no wonder I absolutely love this site. Hey guys, I am coming to Auckland, New Zealand on Wednesday, any chance to meet?
"
5 Rules for a Creative Culture By Ben Chestnut
1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).
2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.
3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.
4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.
5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1).
"— This quote comes from a Fast Company article on how MailChimp’s creative culture works. I don’t doubt it’s impact on their success. Every designer I know is keenly aware of them and what do they do? They make the mundane of e-mail newsletters actually fun.
An Overview of Web Font Services
I have recently become interested in typography especially after seeing Lost World’s Fair. While scanning the Internutz, I came across a nice overview of the various web font services.
Reason #43 I like SXSW - willing to add artistic flair to what is typically mundane (the conference bag) at other events.
“A Table Through the Forest,” Award-winning Office Design found via Core77
"Web design is responsive design, Responsive Web Design is web design, done right."
— I don’t care about Responsive Web Design by Andy Clarke
Font Pairings
Like a sommelier trying to pair a great wine with a fantastic meal, one of the challenges a designer has to deal with is how to pair two fonts together. This cannot be taken lightly as not getting it right can make a website “feel off”.
FontFuse is a website that you can browse, rate and create your own font pairings.
They are currently running a contest to win a free VIP trip to SXSW where I am hosting a panel called “HTML5? The Web’s Dead Baby. The Web’s Dead.” Please come check it out if you come to SXSW!
I love a challenge that is simple and creative. Designer Kyle Tezak has challenged himself:
Lately I’ve been working a lot with icons. Trying to capture the essence of an object or idea with only a few lines and at the same time maintaining its elegance is pretty much design in a nutshell. That’s what so great about icons, they’re tiny poems. I decided it would be a fun project to attempt to sum up some of my favorite books, movies, historical events, anything, with just four icons; the meat and potatoes. This is an ongoing project so I plan to keep adding to the collection and testing ideas out on Dribbble so tell me what you think. It might make a cool poster at some point.
His Four Icon Challenge is brutally awesome in my book.
"MoMA has acquired 23 digital fonts for their Architecture and Design collection, a recognition of the ongoing power of typography and design in contemporary culture."
