“Deadlines are a useful and ever-present factor in our work. To be a professional designer you’ve got to love and respect deadlines. But in order for you to have this proper, positive attachment to deadlines you must work to ensure that deadlines don’t become an obstacle to the quality of your work or a negative factor toward your reputation. Most of us are likely familiar with the origin of the term, but the modern aspect of deadlines in our work doesn’t need to be quite so sinister.”

“Although some of the topics are universal to all fields of design, this book is designed for the graphic designer. It’s well-suited for students and emerging professionals as a
handy reference guide. It would be perfect for a freelance designer working on their own, providing them with information that will benefit their designs and business.”

“AIGA has published a series of brochures outlining the critical ethical and professional issues encountered by designers and their clients. The series, entitled “Design Business and Ethics,” examines the key concerns a designer faces in maintaining a successful practice and speaks directly to the protection of individual rights.

Authored by industry leaders from across the country, each brochure offers clear and concise information, as well as practical and specific directions for approaching design issues. “

“For our special 50th issue we asked 50 of the most influential architects, designers and thinkers to tell us what they believe in.”

“Let’s be plain about it: Design is business. We can’t go on with suspicious…accountability. Designers, who excel at making hard things easy to understand through an interface, need to be part of the business discussion. Giving them Word docs and telling them to “make it look good” won’t cut it anymore. There is no accountability there, and worse, at that point much of the potential for really giving users what they need is already lost. If the Word doc is garbage, then no matter what the designer does will fail. Garbage in, garbage out. The scope of possibility is cut down to a narrow fraction of what it could be…of what the designer could come up with if they only had some time to think about how the strategy affects the design. As Peter Merholz says: Experience is the product.”

“The other day we got a telephone call from a guy that wanted to ‘exponentially increase’ his Internet performance. He had an existing, custom built CMS and he wanted a complete re-design and re-build. We met with him, and he explained that he would like us to ‘design everything, ready to program’. He would then send our ‘detailed plans’ to India and let a cheap team program the whole site.

His budget? $1000.” (Thanks Airbag!)

“This is an excerpt from the book ‘How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer:’ The first time I saw James Victore, he was wearing a gorilla suit. And no, he wasn’t trick-or-treating. He was headlining a talk for the New York chapter of the AIGA, the professional association for design. Titled “Mad As Hell,” the presentation was classic Victore: brash, brilliant, and unbridled. Victore didn’t focus on his impressive client roster or his singular talent, but rather crafted a presentation that discussed the designer as a master communicator who had an obligation to inspire social change. The second time I saw Victore, he was speaking at an event, along with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, for students involved in an AIGA mentorship program. Unfettered by conventional norms, James addressed the students with raw honesty, enthusiasm, and quite a few expletives.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

From Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico: “A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.”

“It’s not uncommon, when talking about designers and what to hire for, you hear about ‘T-shaped people.’ IDEO is most commonly identified with this, wherein you hire people with with a strong “vertical leg” in a specific skill, and an empathy that allows them to branch out and engage other disciplines.

Yesterday at Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2007, I sat on a panel on ‘Skills for Current and Future User Experience Practitioners’. As the conversation evolved, we started talking about design teams. Through the discussion, I had a lightning storm in my brain, where I realized that “T-shaped” is insufficient.”

Victor Lombardi: “My friend Austin wrote me, ‘I’m putting together a list of recommended books for designers interested in strategy, the business side, and jumping into entrepreneurship. Can you recommend 3-5 books you think are indispensable?’

I don’t think there’s a single book that fits that description well, and I’ve wondered if a ‘business for designers’ book would be popular or not. But pressed for an answer, here’s the 3-5 I pointed to…”

Peter Merholz: :Jess McMullin, of nForm, will present Smoothing the Way: Designer as Facilitator on Day 1 of UX Week 2007. I spoke with him to better understand his approach to facilitation.”

“Public Design Center, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in January of 2007 with the mission of providing design-studio production for groups and projects which focus on economic development and sustainability in underserved communities.

We provide print and web production for projects in impoverished areas with emphasis on rural issues, urban planning, bio, wind and solar energy, economic development, organic farming, energy conservation, microfinance, and sustainable building.”

“Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living — possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it — like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com. Coudal Partners is a small firm based in Chicago that does branding and design work for clients and has also created products of its own. Coudal.com is certainly a promotional tool for the firm, but just as certainly a constantly updated trove of interesting links and cleverly entertaining goof-off projects. Which is more or less how the Swap Meat started.”

“I came across a link to Stefan Sagmeister’s presentation at TED more than once—and it lingered in a back tab of my browser waiting to be fired up. Usually this means I’ll get overwhelmed and just close everything down, but it took two reputable reads (Swiss Miss and Greg Storey) to force me to carve out the 15 minutes to watch it… The point is, I really enjoyed Stefan’s talk and I’m glad this material is available online. If you don’t have the time to watch it, here’s a list from Sagemeister’s diary: Complaining is silly. Either act or forget…”

“In no way am I suggesting that I’ve achieved the ideal balance between the personal and professional. I’ll admit, things skew a bit towards the professional in my life right now. If anything, though, I’m aiming to tip the scales towards the personal, especially going forward. I’m better at achieving this balance today than I was ten years ago, and I certainly hope to be better at it in ten years than I am now. I don’t want to find myself, in a decade, running out of a family vacation to make a business meeting. Even more to the point, I don’t want to find myself still working at the office at 6:30p when my children are growing up without me.”