The Forty Story is the story of a boy born on the day Pentagram opened and how his life has been tracked (and kerned) by forty years of Pentagram design. This short film is more than a celebration of Pentagram, it is a master class in some of the most iconic design of the past forty years. 

(via creativity-online.com)

Clay Shirky describes five student projects that he thinks are pushing the creative boundaries - from interface design to how people cluster to build new work.

(via collaborativefund.tumblr.com)

In the third episode of A Year Inside The Australian Ballet they take a look at life on the road. 

Previously:
A Year Inside The Australian Ballet, Episode 2
The Secret Life Of Dancers 

Ideas are a son of a bitch like that, because they always come when you are least prepared to preserve them. Inspiration is like some sort of weird collision, where the idea is always sweeping across the landscape, through the neighborhood, or in and out the bedroom window. For that idea to hit you, you must be moving as well. If you’re standing still, the idea will whip right around you and keep going. It is like some sort of weird reverse game of chicken, where the sole way to make contact is by trying to miss one another. The only other things with the perfect and unfortunate timing of good ideas are the internal clocks of long-forgotten ex’s that tells them to appear everywhere during the first couple weeks of a new relationship.

 Chimero’s book The Shape of Design is a must-read. 

• Facebook: Running the world’s largest social network will be a technical and financial challenge as it grows. owl.li/aZgUW
• Frans Johansson: The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas owl.li/9i0gM
• How To Encourage Learning By Making “Smart Mistakes” owl.li/aZgS4
• A List Apart: Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point owl.li/aZgPn
• This looks like it’s going to be fun: Introducing The Monitor, Wired’s New Video Series About Pop Culture owl.li/aZiMc
• An Intro to Metadata and Taxonomiesowl.li/aZgNq
• It Turns Out There Is Accounting for Tasteowl.li/9i0ad
• Tha’st a way to stand out: The World’s Greatest Cover Letter By Hunter S.Thompsonowl.li/aYrVg
• Diane Ragsdale on Surviving the Culture Change owl.li/9i0fo
• What’s responsive Web design all about?owl.li/aYrlx
• The Brain is What We Do with It owl.li/aYqZo
• Seth’s Blog: The quickest way to get things done and make change owl.li/aYrIq
• Paulo Coelho’s Top 10 Tips for Writing Wellowl.li/aYqSE
• Creativity Top 5 owl.li/1jOTwy
• Pixar’s Randy Nelson on collaborationowl.li/aVvLQ
• Coffee, is not just for caffeine anymore: Art in My Coffee owl.li/aW4eH
• 6 Ways MIT’s Media Lab Envisions the Opera of the Future owl.li/aW4u8
• So excited about this collaboration between MIT and Punchdrunk: Remote Theatrical Immersion, Extending Sleep No Moreowl.li/aW4Fx
• Clever. FF Chartwell: a graph-making fontowl.li/aW1hm
• Ha! Meet Pentametron, A Bot That Only Tweets In Iambic Pentameter owl.li/aW1c7Check out pentametron.com
• Love this. The Illustrated 99% Conference 2012: An Epic Episode in Words & Pictures!owl.li/aW4rb
• Cocktails with Stan Lee and Jane Espensonowl.li/1jOd7a
• How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internetowl.li/aVGV8
• Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brandsowl.li/aVw9N
• 100 Geeks You Should Be Following on Twitter owl.li/aVvfP
• Dieter Rams On Good Design As A Key Business Advantage owl.li/aVuP2
• Do you know who Ma Jun is? He is #1 in Fast Company’s The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 owl.li/aVe36
• Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo owl.li/aSw8z
• Pixar’s Randy Nelson on collaborationowl.li/9i08W
• Seattle library hides 1,000 books around town for young people to find owl.li/aSw6k
• Love this: “Beautiful Dancers on the Town” Photo Gallery by Richard Calmes owl.li/aSvOt
• Study: the bigger the font, the bigger the emotional response owl.li/aPGf9 /via @davepell

(via creativity-online.com)

Hosts Jenna Busch and Stan Lee welcome Jane Espenson, whose writing and producing credits include Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, Battlestar Galactica, and Once Upon A Time, to their new web series. Stan and Jane compare notes on the art of creating villains and heroes.

Stan and Jane have written some of my favorite pop culture stories. Now if only the two of them would collaborate on a project together. 

I love exploring the fine thresholds between noise, sounds and music. I’ve shared The Effects of Sound, There’s Music In Every Sound and Disney’s Imagineers On Sound Design. Today we take a look, or rather listen to, a Marketplace segment on audio branding and how it is moving beyond television and electronics and into banks, appliances and other every day experiences as companies seek to build consumer allegiance through sound.

Clive Thompson on the Importance of Fan Fiction, Wired.com

Paracosms are the fantasy worlds that many dreamy, imaginative kids like to invent when they’re young. Some of history’s most creative adults had engaged in “worldplay” as children. The Brontë siblings, in one famous example, concocted paracosms so elaborate that they documented them with meticulous maps, drawings, and hundreds of pages of encyclopedic writing.

It now appears that, like the Brontës, kids who engage in paracosmic play are more likely to be creative as adults. In 2002 researchers Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein conducted an elegant study. They polled recipients of MacArthur genius grants — which reward those who’ve been particularly creative in areas as diverse as law, chemistry, and architecture — to see if they’d created paracosms as children. Amazingly, the MacArthur fellows were twice as likely as “normal” nongeniuses to have done so. Some fields were particularly rife with worldplayers: Fully 46 percent of the recipients polled in the social sciences had created paracosms in their youth.

Why would worldplay make you more creative in your career? Probably because, as the Root-Bernsteins point out, it requires practical creativity. Fleshing out a universe demands not just imagination but an attention to detail, consistency, rule sets, and logic. You have to grapple with constraints — just as when you’re problem-solving at work.

Damien Walter: Fandom matters, the guardian.co.uk

It is the emerging culture of fandom, empowered by the internet and social media, that explains the phenomenal success of crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter. The platform’s most high profile success stories – The Order of the Stick’s $1m fundraiser, for example – tell only a part of the story. More informative perhaps is author Chuck Wendig, who raised just under $7,000 for the latest instalment in his Atlanta Burns series through crowdfunding. Wendig isn’t a superstar (yet) and doesn’t have a huge established readership (also yet). But what he has gained is the warm regard of a fandom through his Terribleminds blog. Every fan who buys a piece of Wendig gets to feel a real sense of ownership, far more than if they had just walked into a shop and paid for the book itself. In a very real sense Kickstarter makes fans as important as creators, because it is the fans who directly empower the artist to make the art.

Fan Art: An Explosion of Creativity, PBS Off Book

Tattoos: Pop Portraits, Japanese Traditional, American Eclectic
Art In The Era Of The Internet: The Impact Of Kickstarter, Creative Commons & Creators Project
Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium
Off Book Series One: The Complete Series

(via creativity-online.com)

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

- Bertrand Russell

(via brainpickings.org & swiss-miss.com)