Today is International Women’s Day.
XPLANE teamed with Kronos, a global leader in workforce management, to create new video to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. It’s a visual homage to women and how their role in the workforce has changed throughout history, making all of our lives exponentially easier, safer and more productive.
Do you know who Melitta Bentz was? Or Ida Forbes? Or Ruth Wakefield? No? Then watch and learn.
Doors + file cabinets = Desks! XPLANE circa early 2000s.
When I was combing through dusty hard drives and ancient project folders the other week looking for that old Robonaut XPLANATiON, I found an old text file (saved in BBEdit!) called “Core values: Things we believe in.”
It came from conversations and emails with Dave Gray, XPLANE’s founder. It was shared with all employees, even back when we were just five or six people working on desks made of doors and file cabinets. I’m pretty sure it dates to 1999…
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Way back in 2002 XPLANE did an XPLANATiON for NYSE magazine about NASA’s robotic astronaut, which was then in development and expected to start flying in 2004 or 2005.
Click above to view larger.
Well, yesterday our friend Robonaut finally blasted off aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. While Robonaut 2 is the first humanoid robot to go into space — this is the shuttle’s 39th and final flight.
We’re very happy you finally made it to space, even if you’re never coming back.
But don’t be too sad, folks. You can follow Robonaut’s space exploits on Twitter: @AstroRobonaut.
Hi. It’s Monday — the start of the work week for most of us.
But before you get started, let me ask you a few questions… Did you know that 40% of workers say they bring work home to complete at night, or work overtime at least once a week? That 15% of people admit that they are addicted to email — some confess to checking their email at the beach, at weddings and even at funerals? That the number of workers who work remotely is on the rise — in 2009, 28% of the global workforce worked remotely and by 2016, an expected 43% of the workforce will become remote workers (and did you know that studies show that working remotely improves productivity by 15%)? Did you know that a whopping 26% of Americans say they never take vacations?
If you didn’t, kick off the work week by watching this:
Because we get a kick out of seeing our beloved founder Dave Gray wearing a tie, here’s a great interview he did with Dr. Martin Eppler of the University of St. Gallen. It’s about visual thinking, effective communication and change. It’s about 15 minutes long and was recorded during Dave’s stay at the =mcminstitute in Switzerland.
Hang around the designers’ corner of the internet for any amount of time and you quickly are overwhelmed with great work and lame work, sound advice and bad advice, rules, ideas, maxims, quotes, plagiarism, inspiration and inanity.
Over the last few years all of these things have been getting mashed up and spread around, especially on Tumblr, Posterous and sites like FFFFOUND. I can’t even count the number of simple but lovely posters, graphics and sketches featuring an inspirational quote or a set of rules or a piece of advice set in a condensed gothic font and overlayed on a moody photograph. Don’t get me wrong — for the most part I like them. Sometimes they make you think or give you a needed kick in the butt — or at the very least give you a peek into another creative person’s head.
I’ve had the above poster hanging in my home workspace for several years now. It’s a constant reminder, and I like that.
But it seems that pretty much everywhere I go online lately I am being told what to do…
Last month at VTS our St. Louis studio did an exercise we called “What’s in a triangle?” Basically, everyone drew a triangle on a whiteboard and had five minutes to turn it into something. So from a very simple starting point we ended up with a lot of clever and creative sketches. The idea was to make something out of nothing — to exercise our visualization muscles.
Brian Williamson came to that VTS. We had been talking with him about the designer position we had open. Afterwards, Brian went home and took that single triangular starting point all the way to the finish line: He made his niece a beautiful book called ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ: An alphabet book of drawings inspired by the simple triangle — and he sent us a copy.
Brian started working with us in our St. Louis office last week.
What a year!
We worked hard, traveled the world, learned a lot, met a bunch of wonderful people, had some fun and expanded our family — in April we joined the Dachis Group and now count the folks from Dachis, Headshift, Stuzo and Archrival as colleagues (Update: And as of yesterday, the folks at Powered!).
So to celebrate, we asked our new friends from around the world to send us their favorite local holiday recipes: Amsterdam, Austin, Lincoln, London, Madrid, Philadelphia, Portland, St. Louis and Sydney. And as an added bonus, we’ve thrown in some silly charts about the chow along with some serious information about infodesign.
The recipes include Marionberry cobbler, Cocido madrileño, Grilled tri-tip, Texas pecan cake, Boerenkool Met Worst, Pavlova, Philly cheesesteaks, Mince pie and Gooey butter cake.
We hope you enjoy these dishes as much as we do — and here’s to an amazing 2011 and beyond.
Seen on Dave Gray’s site: “A short, 5-minute chat with Jason Fried about nature and how it influences his work.”
A refreshingly different and light podcast touching on design and creativity, nature and springtime, inspiration and solutions, evolution and adaptation, complexity and simplicity — with sketches!
It’s kind of fascinating peeking in on other people’s iPhone screens. What apps do they use? Are they organized or a total mess?
The other day I casually mentioned Genius Scan to Dave and it quickly became his favorite app (at least for now :-)
Most of us have our favorite apps and our guilty pleasure apps, some of us have those “it’s for my kids” apps and all of us have our can’t-live-without apps. And everyone has their own system for arranging things. Click the image to see mine…
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Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
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