This is a trailer for the documentary Lemonade.
More than 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this “Great Recession.” Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.
A great video from the Economist. It focuses on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology.
Last year I put together my first Geek Gift Guide. Take a look since most of those gifts would still make great gifts for the geeks on your list. But here is my latest list of perfect gifts for the geek in your life, or the geek in you.
Paper product: Action Method
Price: $5-$15
As much as I love my laptop, I don’t use it to take notes in every little meeting I am in. What I love are Action Method notebooks. The Action Book was designed by the Behance team and is based on the Action Method. The four distinct zones on each page provide a flexible template to get the most out of meetings and everyday brainstorm sessions. Each page of the notebook is divided up into 4 sections.
The Action Method was designed to help us push projects forward by organizing our ideas and focusing on action steps. The Action Book is used by leading creatives in the agency/advertising world as well as at top design studios and innovative companies across industries. The 2008 TED Conference also featured a limited edition TED Action Book to help participants make ideas happen.
Artwork: DNA Portraits
Price: Starting at $199
The perfect gift of original art that no one could ever replicate! I love these portraits because they are simple and modern and yet would fit in almost any home setting. Here’s how it works.
If you are giving the artwork as a gift, when placing your order simply select “this is a gift” instead of selecting a color. Then the person who is receiving the gift will get the DNA kit in a nice metal presentation box.
Gadget: Magic Mouse
Price: $69
It wouldn’t be me if there weren’t an Apple product on this list. The Magic Mouse is the world’s first Multi-Touch mouse. Need I say more! It’s the perfect gift for anyone with a Mac who uses a mouse. It’s a great upgrade to any computer. It will change the way you use a mouse.
Apple Gift Cards are always good too.
Organization: Grid-It
Price: $22
Every geek has a laptop bag, or a back pack, or something that they keep all of their gadgets in. But the hardest thing is not organizing your gadgets, it’s organizing all the wires, chargers, and other accessories that you have for them.
The Grid-It organization system is a unique weave of rubberized elastic bands made specifically to hold personal objects firmly in place. Designed to provide endless configurations of digital devices and personal effects. Slim design and conveniently sized for your current laptop bag or travel case, lets you easily find what you need. It also has a rear zippered pocket for additional storage.
I hope you enjoyed my little gift guide. And keep in mind that geeks aren’t always just about gadgets, we appreciate good design and clean lines, there are food geeks, and fashion geeks, tea geeks, all kinds.
Take a look at what I got Drew for his birthday. It’s a print by an Etsy artist from Drew’s favorite movie Say Anything. It was the perfect gift. Not the most expensive, not the most “geeky” but just right.
So pay attention to the geek that you are shopping for, many times the best choice is the one you wouldn’t expect, the one that comes from the heart.
I hope you find the right gift for your geek this holiday season.
Let me know what you are shopping for in the comments.
This morning I came across an amazing post by Smashing Magazine entitled “The Death of the Boring Blog Post”. It’s a great post that I wish I could re-blog here, but I honestly can’t because of the way the post is designed. (go look at it!)
It talks about the trend of Blogazines (blog that is designed like a magazine) not a magazine wordpress theme but rather designing a creative layout for each new blog post, based on the content itself. This requires skill, patience, dedication to the content and, most of all, effort on the part of the designer!
Reading these blogs is amazing. The content speaks to you visually and really pulls you in with the design. One such blog is Dustin Curtis. Here is what he said about creating this type of blog.
What prompted you to create a “blogazine” instead of a traditional blog?
I’m never satisfied with my work. Invariably, two weeks after finishing a design, I feel like I can do better. When I originally tried to design my blog, I kept finishing a design, hating it and starting over. This happened ten or twelve times until I finally gave up. Eventually, I realized that each post could stand on its own and be its own design that fit the content. Despite the holdbacks of HTML and CSS, it has worked much better than I had even anticipated.
Advantages?
The main advantage is one I didn’t anticipate. Doing a blogazine article requires a lot more work than a traditional blog post, and that has kept me on my toes; because such a large investment is required, I publish only what I feel are my best articles.
This seems to keep the quality fairly high. I start four or five articles for every one I publish. If I had a normal blog, that wouldn’t be the case — the other four articles would be published too, even though they wouldn’t be as good as the ones I do end up publishing.
Disadvantages?
The biggest disadvantage is that CSS and HTML are terrible technologies that weren’t designed for page layout. They were designed for structured content presentation, like for a newspaper, where all the elements throughout the website are the same and are re-used. But I’m trying to make a magazine, where the content and presentation are inextricably mixed and unique. The way presentation CSS is supposed to be decoupled from the content HTML is totally counter to the mission I am trying to accomplish, and it makes coding the articles frustrating, messy and time-consuming.
My solution to this problem has basically been to ignore convention and use inline styling for most of the presentation code and extract the website-wide presentation layer into a separate CSS document. This takes forever and is not ideal. To put it lightly, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with CSS.
I have often wished that I could create blog posts in InDesign. I come from a layout design background and I always had so much fun with InDesign and Photoshop creating interesting, yet still readable design. Unfortunately it would be very difficult for me to create this type of blog. While I do posses the design skill, I do not have any real HTML or CSS knowledge to bring the post to life online.
I hope to see more blogs like this one in the future. I think they are a great way to highlight online content.
Many people have been talking about twitter’s new RT beta feature and it may seem like most people don’t like it. But I thought I would throw my 2 cents in the ring about what I think of the feature.
In case you are unaware, Twitter is rolling out an official retweet feature that is in beta right now. It allows users to RT with just one click (no more copying and pasting tweets), and it provides a way for people to easily see how much their tweets are being retweeted.
Now there are some obvious drawbacks to this. The new feature only lets you RT the tweet as it was originally written, you can’t modify it or add your comments. For some people this is a drawback, but for others it’s a plus.
It’s a drawback if you frequently like adding comments to the things you RT, and it could be positive because tweets no longer need to be short enough to add your username to be “re-tweet-able”. A tweet that is exactly 140 characters can easily be retweeted now, where in the past it would have needed to be shortened to allow space for RT @that persons username.
One reason that I like the new RT feature is that it helps to regulate fake RT’s and is a great way to discover new people to follow.
A few things I would change:
1. Avatar correction. I would want the avatar to be the person that I am following who is choosing to share this information with me. After all, the people I follow are people that I trust. So seeing what they retweeted to their followers should be reflected by showing their avatar in my timeline.
2. RT alerts. Similar to the way that Tumblr shows users alerts when someone else has liked or reblogged your post. If a simple one line alert showed up in my timeline letting me know that my tweet had been retweeted it would make the whole process easier and more encouraging for users.
3. 3rd party support! Currently desktop and iphone apps are not taking advantage of the RT feature because it is so new. There is no place in tweetdeck or tweetie for me to see my retweets the same way I would see @replies. In fact, if someone retweets a tweet that has my username in it using the official RT function, that tweet won’t show up in my @replies of a 3rd party client at all.
The fact is that it will be very hard for twitter to rope in a feature that was created by the users and standerdize it. That can’t force you to stop retweeting the old way, so they new way will be hard for people to adopt.
What are your thoughts on the new feature?
Let me know in the comments.