You may already be familiar with the Jambox, Jawbone’s portable bluetooth speaker, but now they’re offering it in a custom combination of colors and grill textures. The Jambox is great as a portable speaker for music, but it can also be used as a bluetooth speaker phone for conference calls as well, making it a favorite for creatives.
Restored by Devious Design Studio; a look inside the technology of the Polaroid SX-70.
Apple ad “The crazy ones”, narrated by Steve Jobs.
Dieter Rams filmed for his thoughts on “The Black Cube“, a project more about the human ability to project value, ideals, and utility onto a simple form, to transform an object into a symbol.
CUBE Dieter Rams from Andreas Unteidig on Vimeo.
5 Rules for a Creative Culture
By Ben Chestnut, CEO of MailChimp
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).
Make FontExplorer X and InDesign 5.5 play well together.
Recently, one of our clients wanted to start using a font management suite. They decided on FontExplorer X (FEX) Server as the solution. The thing is, they had also recently upgraded to Adobe CS 5.5, so would it work?
Currently, FEX can auto-install plugins for Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator 5.0 and below from the Plug-in Management tool right in the client app, so if you have 5.0 or below, the FEX client app will automatically detect them, and you can install the plug-in from the management tool. Great, but what if you’re running CS 5.5?
The FEX plugins for CS 5 work in 5.5, but the auto-install feature only works for Illustrator 5.1 (version for the 5.5 suite). For Photoshop 5.1 and InDesign 5.5, you have to manually install the 5.0 plugin (go to the app folder for the earlier version under “Plugin”, and copy the FEX plugin to the respective folder for the updated app).
This worked perfectly for Photoshop and Illustrator 5.1, but when InDesign 5.5 was launched, there was a notification that the FEX plugin wasn’t compatible.
It took a while to figure out what the issue was, but apparently the latest updates for InDesign 5.5 break the FEX plugin. To solve the issue, InDesign 5.5 was uninstalled, then re-installed to remove the latest Adobe updates, then the plugin was put back in the “Plugins” folder for InDesign 5.5. Problem solved.
If you use FEX and are thinking of upgrading to CS 5.5, wait to run updates for InDesign until a new FEX plugin is released that’s compatible with the 5.5 version. Hope this helps some folks going down that road.
The New York Times just wrote an article on how new ways of exchanging contact info are steadily replacing the time-honored business card exchange. They mention the advent of QR codes and sites like hashable.com being allowing easier exchange of information.
QR codes seem to have made their way into ads and shop windows all over the city. To be able to read them, you need a QR reader app on your phone (like Redlaser for iPhone/Android, or BeeTagg for Blackberry) and though they are free, not everyone has an app like this installed.
The question is, exchanging information via business cards is still as simple as handing one over, is it worth it to have a potentially awkward conversation trying to explain what a QR code is, and if the other person has an app on their phone that can read it?
For now, perhaps an analog business card with a QR code on it is the best option.
Behance’s 99% blog has a few tips from Brian Eno, progenitor of the Ambient Music genre and Oblique Strategies (if you’ve never heard of it follow the link!), on why your best creative moments come during relatively mundane tasks.
The TypeClock app from Dong Yoon Park is simple, elegant and a typography lover’s dream. Check out the video to get a full preview.
Ask Ars: what’s the relationship between CPU clockspeed and performance? http://t.co/juVvRB0 via @arstechnica