Fun-looking mail art project.
ze frank: on feeling uninspired
“Who was this person that said you had to wait for inspiration to start making something?” Yeah!
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The Nerd Handbook
“A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.”
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How Creativity Is Killing the Culture
“Michael Fallon presents the interesting idea that creativity–or at least the mandate for it–can create boredom, discontent, depression, and a lot of cruddy work. Agree? Disagree?” (Thanks fimoculous!)
Cartographies of Imagination
“Cartographies of Imagination, by me, Sarah B. Nelson, is about navigating the world of collaboration, through methods, tools, techniques and ideas. I’ll share methods, tools, and ideas to inspire you to draw on the collective wisdom around you. I’m an interaction designer and design strategist at Adaptive Path.”
Staying Motivated
“Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?”
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design|snips
“design|snips was born out of my realization that most sites I add to my ‘Design’ folder are bookmarked because of a few elements that are really well designed. Whether it’s the headline style, callout boxes or other modules, I usually am inspired by a few key parts of each site. design|snips will collect and categorize these elements and hopefully help you when it comes time to start on a new interface.”
Visuals of the World
“Scroll through yards of inspirational images. Share and contribute, see what you can do. Add a personal link to your submission or just engage anonymous. Be part of the longest visual website in the world!” (Note: Could have NSFW images…)
Raiders of the Lost Ark and the mystery of inspiration
“At a conference recently, I heard Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits talk about inspiration. He showed a bunch of different techniques he uses, including how he uses Photoshop’s mosaic filter on an image to blow up giant pixels representing the basic colors in the picture. He uses those as pallets for the design work he does. Very cool.
Inspiration can come from process, but it can also come from the most unexpected places. For example, when we were designing the data-over-time visualizations for Google Analytics, we were totally stuck with bar graphs. We’d iterated dozens of times, scoured the web for examples to steal, and had tried just about everything. The result felt muddy and chartjunked…”
Design students/professors: How do you critique?
“Question for everyone: How extensive/thought filled are your critiques that are conducted in class? Two parts to this question: …The reason why i ask this: In my classes, i’ve heard a lot of students unable to speak their mind. I hear a lot of ‘cool’ ‘i like it’ ‘i don’t like it’ all mixed in with the word ‘like’ about 20 times in a sentence. The critiques are often lacking substance, and teh students don’t back up their opinion.”
