“In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat ive self.”

“The invited lecturer, Yuri Engelhardt, started his speech by talking about the presence and importance of graphic representations throughout the history of the human been. Diagrams, maps, charts and many kind of symbols take part of our daily life. From clock faces to traffic signs or subway maps, or even those graphics that can be found in the neswspapers, they are everywhere around us. Computers deserve a special mention, where most information is transmitted to the user through graphic representation.”

“It was gorgeous. It was abstract. It was criticized. It was confusing. And it’s back.

With its 45- and 90-degree angles and one color per subway line, the 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli was divorced from the cityscape, devoid of street or neighborhood names. It was criticized because its water was not blue and its parks were not green. Paul Goldberger called it “a stunningly handsome abstraction” that “bears little relation to the city itself.”

Now Men’s Vogue has asked Mr. Vignelli to update his subway map for the May design issue.” (Thanks Information Design Watch!)

“Planning for VizThink Europe ‘08 is well underway. The event will be held October 12 - 14 at the Crowne Plaza in Berlin, Germany. For future events, we’ve decided to open up the Call for Facilitators to the community. This is your chance to be one of the facilitators at an upcoming VizThink conference. Are you a visual thinker? Do you have experiences and expertise you’d like to share? Can you teach others new techniques and ideas? Then being a VizThink facilitator is for you!”

“The human leg has evolved continually over many eons, adapting from an underwater propeller to its current form. But on book covers and on film and theater posters, the leg has evolved very little. In fact, the ‘A-Frame,’ a cutoff-torso-spread-leg framing device, is the most frequently copied trope ever used. From steamy paperbacks designed in the ’40s (Pamela’s Sweet Agony), hardly a year has gone by without at least one ham-fisted advertisement using this perspective.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“In the vast majority of website projects that I have managed during my ten years in the industry, content is often the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications—but content? It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: ‘final content delivered.’ It’s the perennial cause of delay and the stuff of myth (I once shelved a project for three years while the client ‘wrote’ his content.) It’s a malaise that needs fixing and needs fixing fast.”

“TheDieline.com defines good graphic design and product packaging in consumer products in industries such as food and drink, bath and beauty, alcohol, and more. Well designed packaging establishes consumers’ perception of the brand and the product. We showcase the best work out there from around the world.”

“Chris Ware has returned with another animated opening for THIS AMERICAN LIFE.”

“I pulled together a slidecast, with audio, of ‘10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment.’ Bryan Mason and I gave this talk at SXSW 2008 Interactive. I’ve already described the talk here (we gave a version of it at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April) but the SXSW folks recently made the audio available.”

“Do you freak out if someone asks you to match print colors to Web colors? Or, maybe you just can’t decide whether the orange would work better with the blue or the green. Either way, many designers may not realize how easy it is to choose a palette for that new Web design. Additionally, many designers might be surprised to learn that they can stay on top of color trends with a few visits to fashion design Web sites. All those tips and more are listed below in this list of 101 color resources for Web designers.”

“Footers can be much more than an afterthought containing the fine print of a web site. With the right design they can reinforce brand awareness and drive internal traffic. Footers can also be a place where a designer can let his creative juices flow a little more freely.”

“Though I have a tolerably good handle on e-commerce software, I’ve not written much of it myself. In this respect, I’m not one to know what’s going on under the hood at any given site: maybe there is a reason why something works the odd way it does. But I’ve observed one technique that has been nearly universal: the practice of refusing to allow spaces or dashes in credit card number entry fields…

Credit card numbers are always printed and read aloud in groups of (usually) four digits, and when verifying a number after entry (which involves looking back and forth between the card and the web form) one uses the spacing to resynchronize. If there were some security or integrity reason for disallowing these characters, I guess I’d buy it, but I’ve not found a single good reason for it. The consensus among those that I’ve spoken to is that it’s nothing but lazy, sloppy programming. I completely agree.”

“The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is… A collective experiment in brand perception. All tags are generated by people like you and do not reflect the opinions of the site owner or anyone else he knows. Have fun.”

“Web designers and graphic designers are always looking for new sources of design inspiration. Of course, many of us turn to CSS galleries, and there are even more sources of offline inspiration. Personally, I find the work in many Flickr groups to be another excellent source of inspiration. Aside from the billions of photos on Flickr, there are also some groups that have been established to showcase the work of designers. Here is a look at 99 of them according to category (about half of them are general graphic design groups). Below the link to each group you’ll see the number of members and the number of items (pictures, graphics, screenshots, etc.) that have been submitted to the group, plus I have included part of the group description as listed by the moderator.”

“Writing your blog should be a fun way to stretch your mind and stay connected to trends, friends, and the greater world, not another computer task that takes far too long to get done. But that’s exactly what it can feel like if it takes you more time to find your post ideas, tweak your markup, and make everything look right than to actually get your thoughts down. Being somewhat experienced at this blogging thing, your Lifehacker editors have pinpointed a few tools and tricks that make our posts go faster and smoother. After the jump, we round up 10 of them.”