The world may be shrinking, but it’s growing at the same time. As we quickly approach the three billion Internet user mark, the opportunities to connect and share creative and design inspiration with different cultures and mindsets are multiplying. There are big players, and global studios are opening more international offices, but they may not be as interesting or inspiring as the lesser known and possibly more regionally rooted creatives....

When I first set out to find a standard definition of art direction, it took me three sessions — not search terms, but sessions — to dig past fluff (articles that use a lot of words to say very little), self promotion (“art direction is hey I’m really special and you should hire me”), and general writings about creative leadership (which you should look up, too, because it’s at least as important as art direction). The most succinct...

“Curated resources for everything design related.” So? “oozled brings together 586 curated resources in 41 categories.” Gaah! “Subscribe to as many or as few categories as you want and create your own feed based on your interests.” OK. Now you have my attention. Oh, and “Submit a Resource”… I’m in. The story of oozled Inspired by a talk he gave at his local college, web/user interface designer Dan Edwards compiled a list...

How do designers use their own websites to promote themselves online? What are some good ways to set up an online presence that gets you found, puts your best foot forward and actively builds your design career? This is something we’re wrestling with (again) at our studio, and I thought I’d share a few of the ways we’ve been breaking it down. As designers, we’re primarily a service, which is often harder to funnel through a marketing checklist....

This is not a management article. Well, it kind of is, but please leave your agile-lean-workplace-organization-human-resources backpack at the door. We’re here to talk about making things; making them really good with the help of others, and growing as creatives. I say this at the second re-write of this article, having slogged through academic reports, HR consultants’ white papers and the third and fourth pages of Google search results...

Typecache, the online index and showcase for type foundries and font sellers, recently celebrated a big year for type design and type literacy as they declared their top picks out of the record 550 releases announced in 2013. We've been browsing through their selections and here are our highlights. Oskar (from $67 approx.) Designed Paul van der Laan, Oskar is a beautifully-crafted update to the geometric Art Deco tradition, it may be...

The latest Firefox update has been released for general consumption and it’s loaded with big changes. The most striking, of course, is the way the overall interface has been sleekified and rearranged. The default tool bar has been stripped completely clean, giving users the option to add only the tools they want. And adding those tools is super convenient: the Customize link is easily found on the new dropdown menu. A drag and drop page allows...

Craig Rozynski may have taken on the mother of all type design challenges with his creation Comic Neue; a revival of the world’s most hated typeface. His first type design project, Rozynski’s Comic Neue loses the pretence of unevenness that the original Comic Sans employed. But Rosynski has succeeded at keeping Comic Neue friendly and approachable. Rozynski’s produced two variants, the second being Comic Neue Angular, which has...

Good design has strong ties to emotion: this is something designers do know and understand. Unfortunately, in a world driven by SEO and the never-ending evolution of web tech, it’s a very easy thing to forget. Emotion is at the core of a solid business identity. The best logos and brands, the best printed and digital experiences, capture and express very specific feelings with very specific intent. Banks focus on optimism, confidence, and...

Yay! More free pictures! We can now use millions of Getty-owned photos for free on our websites, blogs and social media channels (as long as it’s not for commercial purposes). Getty’s new offering is promising at first glance. Their description of “commercial purposes” is actually pretty lenient. However, a closer look at the program brings up some other, rather serious implications. Vigilance! Anyone who needs images to persist...

What makes an infographic successful? As designers, we want it to achieve a balance of two main things: Did the reader get the message we wanted them to get? Was the message memorable? Doctoral student Michelle Borkin of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences worked with collaborators to collect, analyze and present 2,070 single-panel visualizations from a range of publications and websites. In the “largest scale visualization...

There's a trend right now, that wavers between irritating and inspired, for redesigning corporate logos in a hipster style. Certain that hipsters could take it as well as dish it out, and inspired by the nearly infamous hipster logo generator, recently Whit Hiler and the team at Cornett Integrated Marketing Solutions decided to turn the trend on its head and redesign a collection of hipster (or rather, hipsterish) logos in the spirit...

It’s launched. It’s live. It works. You designed, built and tested it, grieved nixed ideas and celebrated solved quandaries. The gears are whirring on their axles and your final invoice is paid. Your project is done. Mostly. Before you move on to the next looming deadline, did you make some time to review the project, and clear your head along with the whiteboard? A post-launch review, or post-launch audit (a.k.a. post-mortem), is hopefully...

Origami, developed by the Facebook design team, is one of the emerging next-generation tools for designers producing interactive, flexible websites and apps. It’s also free. Origami is not a standalone application, but is actually a plugin for Apple’s (also free) Quartz Composer. While QC was originally developed to create motion graphics, Origami transforms (or evolves) it into an interaction prototyping tool. The making...