Happy Podcasting

I often listen to podcasts when I'm walking or commuting. I realized on my way home Friday night that, without meaning to, I bookmark my weeks with two "happy" podcasts. 

Monday mornings, as I walk to the train station, I listen to the marvelous Happy Monday podcast, hosted by Josh Long and Sarah Parmenter. As soon as I hear the first couple of notes of the upbeat theme song I am in a good mood and ready for the week. The podcast is designed to be short, commute-sized, and features fantastic interviews with design and web practitioners. Today's edition features one of my favorites, Seth Godin. You should subscribe and listen. 

Friday evenings, as I walk home, I listen to a podcast that is in no way work related. Pop Culture Happy Hour is NPR's entertainment and pop culture round-table podcast featuring spirited discussions of movies, books, television, and nostalgia. It is hosted by Linda Holmes and features a witty, self-deprecating, group of pop culture loving friends and guests. Last week's episode was about the new tv show The Bridge and the many faces of Doctor Who. You should subscribe and listen. 

Beyond the "happy" in their titles both podcasts have a similar section. In each episode of both podcasts a recurring question is asked. For Happy Monday the question is "what is inspiring you this week?" and for Pop Culture Happy Hour the question is "what is making you happy this week?" Fantastic things to ponder as you begin and end a week. 

20 Creativity Quotes Beautifully Illustrated From Ogilvy & Mather

20 Quotes to Kick You into Creative from #CannesLions / #OgilvyCannes from Ogilvy & Mather

Photoshop's Filters In Two Minutes

Barcelona-based audiovisual design studio Device has packed all the filters from Photoshop CS5 into a two-minute video showing them applied to the Ps icon.

Think of it as a performance art demo.  

Trust Yourself

Designer James Victore at 99u: 

The first level of trust is having it in yourself—trusting that your opinions matter and are valid. Even believing that your guess is as good as anyone else’s adds a level of personal trust and self-respect. This perspective, allows you the courage to crawl further out on a limb, to take chances and make sure you are not playing safe—or, worse, “giving the people what they want.” It also allows you to listen to your own opinion without the nagging voice of well wishing, but fearful friends (“You’re gonna start a business… in THIS economy?”) whose sincerest wish is to shield you from failure, while only succeeding in protecting you from success. Or, worse, to listen to the tiny critics inside your own head who concoct the wildest scenes possible of failure, carnage and financial ruin. It takes grit to stay on course, to trust yourself, your vision, your calling, and recognize this resistance for what it is: fear.

A perfect complement to the previous post.  

What exactly is skeuomorphism?→

The Economist explains:  

The term skeuomorph was originally coined in 1889 to refer to an ornamental design derived from the structure of an earlier form of a particular object. In a paper on the subject Dan O'Hara, a philosopher of technology, gives the example of pottery jugs from Zaire, the handles of which are shaped in imitation of handles of traditional jugs customarily made of cord. The design of the handles thus survived the change of material. Other examples would be car seats made of plastic, but textured to imitate leather; plastic spoons moulded with patterns to provide an echo of engraved silver; or imitation wood-grain printed on furniture or flooring. Mr O'Hara argues that, strictly speaking, the term skeuomorphism refers only to those vestigial elements in nature or artefact that survive from an original form, even though they are no longer required. At its broadest, this definition extends to the levers and dials in a modern aircraft cockpit, for example, which no longer connect to systems directly, but instead are merely inputs and outputs of a computer that actually controls things. Such controls are skeumorphs because they are holdovers from the days before computerised aircraft, and have been left in their original form for the benefit of pilots, who are used to them working in a particular way.

So can a digital depiction of something properly be called a skeuomorph? It is more accurate to refer to it as a visual metaphor that calls to mind a physical skeuomorph without really being one. The iPhone's notification panel, with its imitation linen effect, was not descended from an object that was once made of linen. The switch that, say, allows you to switch an iPhone into Airplane Mode is not an on-screen replacement for what used to be a physical switch. In the early days of graphical user interfaces, designers employed familiar devices, such as folders, trash cans and other objects commonplace in the office. The result was that operating systems ended up being littered with depictions of things that had never existed inside a digital device; the on-screen "trash" icon is not the vestigial remnant of an actual trash can that was once part of the computer, which is why it is really a metaphor, not a skeumorph. (That said, as computer graphics became more detailed, the original blocky icons gave way to more detailed depictions of trash cans, folders and so forth, which are arguably skeuomorphs of visual metaphors.)