In a world of gadgets when is digital type art? The Type Directors Club Judges Night Salon
/The Judges Night: TDC Typeface Design Competition 2012
A panel discussion with Roger Black, Matthew Carter, Paul Shaw and Erik Spiekermann. Moderated by Maxim Zhukov.
Working overtime doesn't increase your output. It makes you stupid.
/Which is where sleep comes in. Although we might all like to imagine that we can work happily through the night, once again the data's all against us. Lose just one night's sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. Yet we regularly hail as heroes the executives who take the red eye, jump into a rental car, and zoom down the highway to the next meeting. Would we, I wonder, be so impressed if they arrived drunk?
The reason sleep is so important is because fatigue isn't simple. When we are tired, our performance doesn't degrade equally. Instead, when you lose a night's sleep, the parietal and occipital lobes in your brain become less active. The parietal lobe integrates information from the senses and is involved in our knowledge of numbers and manipulation of objects. The occipital lobe is involved in visual processing. So the parts of our mind responsible for understanding the world and the data around us start to slow down. This is because the brain is prioritizing the thalamus—the part of your brain responsible for keeping you awake. In evolutionary terms, this makes sense. If you're driven to find food, you need to stay awake and search, not compare recipes.
The Week's Links (1.29.12)
/All the links posted to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ this week:
- 6 Hugely Successful Products Originally Invented for Something Else owl.li/8IPNP
- The Fast, Fabulous, Allegedly Fraudulent Life of Megaupload's Kim Dotcom owl.li/8IPrYFascinating.
- 5 Things To Look For In This Year's Super Bowl Ads owl.li/8IP1R
- Where do good ideas come from? Rejectionowl.li/1gXJy8
- How Do We Identify Good Ideas? owl.li/8IwbITake a break and be happy.
- Vivid Pop Culture Thumbtack Art owl.li/8F0wz Fantastic.
- Embark a great new free app to plan your mass transit trip. Many cities available. It even has NJ Transit. owl.li/8HFbp
- The 350 Best Education Resources Curated by Edudemic owl.li/8EZxV
- MediaShift Idea Lab: Why Non-Profits Need a Powerful Tool for Finding Potential Alliesowl.li/8F0kp
- Leo Burnett's classic speech "When to take my name off the door" animated owl.li/1gWxsV
- Reddit: How the site went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force.owl.li/8CCe8
- M.I.T. Physicist Gives Scientists an Online Interview Outlet owl.li/8EZqz
- Creativity Top 5: Week of January 23, 2012owl.li/1gVpsY
- Who Were Fisher and Price? owl.li/8EY9w
- Take the new Vimeo for a spin owl.li/8EXqw
- Vimeo Festival + Awards - 2012 New York City is back with new categories. owl.li/8FzDK
- "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" app/book/film nominated for Oscar for Best Animated Short owl.li/8ELfU
- Lego relaunches Rebrick as a social network for adult fans. owl.li/8EIvV
- Google's new privacy policy: The good, bad, scary owl.li/8F7na
- Notification Control, 1 minute to clean up your notifications owl.li/8EFve Inspired by My Permissions owl.li/8EFvf
- RIM Reboots: New CEO, New Board, New Plan to License QNX Software owl.li/8EEU7
- Marketing Leader Jim Stengel On The One Thing Businesses Need To Grow owl.li/8EEIv
- Celebrating Manet’s Birthday with 25 Reclining Nudes by Various Artists [Possibly NSFW]owl.li/8EC2a
- Creativity's Agency of the Year and 2011 A-Listowl.li/8DNVQ
- Creativity Top 5 owl.li/1gTLOS
- The Rhythms of Work vs The Rhythms of Creative Labor owl.li/8CcN5 Great insight from Lewis Hyde's The Gift owl.li/8CcN6
- 100 Best Companies to Work For 2012: Full list from FORTUNE owl.li/8CDAy
- 12 Things Happy People Do Differentlyowl.li/8CcF5
- L.A. Opera to start dynamic ticket pricing next season owl.li/8CcCz
- A Typographer's Letter to Brad Birdowl.li/8CCaC Verdana? Why? I had the same reaction.
- Ira Glass on the strange life of the producerowl.li/1gSxeA
- How Stanley Kubrick Invented the Modern Box-Office Report (By Accident) owl.li/8CbYz /via @daringfireball
Where do good ideas come from? Rejection
/The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what’s actually worthwhile.
Nietzsche stressed this point. As he observed in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human:
Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration … shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…. All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.
Notice the emphasis on rejection. Nietzsche eloquently describes the importance of not just creating but recognizing the value of what has been created.