What does knowledge of the brain and personality have to do with creative work? As a lifelong brain geek, Ann Holm has taken on the mission to help others tap the secrets of the brain to uncover personal potential. Oftentimes we have habits that seem to work, so we are unaware that there might be better, more brain-efficient ways to do things. Other times, we feel exhausted and stretched, so our creativity suffers. In this article, she’ll share some facts and insight on brain functionality, as well as tips on how to get the most out of your creative energy. Some of these suggestions might be very different from what you are doing right now.
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Didn’t fresh ideas arrive without being asked for? Why did I have to wait until the last moment to even notice, wait until moments before these old dented ideas have to be presented? Now it’s none of these things. Now it’s different. Now it’s quiet with muted color. Now it’s something I just do. No, it’s worse. Now it’s a job. It’s not my work, it’s my job. It’s a job, and the ideas don’t arrive like they used to. I keep designing what I know.
Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues.
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Design blueprints could mean the difference between a correctly implemented design that improves the user experience and satisfies customers and a confusing and inconsistent design that corrupts the user experience and displeases customers. For those of you who create digital products, design specs could mean the difference between efficient collaboration and a wasteful back-and-forth process with costly implementation mistakes and delivery delays. Specs can help you to build the right product more quickly and more efficiently. Effective collaboration requires effective communication. Investing in the development of workflows and tooling around to make this communication easier will pay off big with the effectiveness with which products are built.
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Compared to what we can create on the computer today, the original Macintosh, with only 128 KB of memory, had limited capabilities. At the time, though, it opened up so many new possibilities. Emerging digital technology also changed typography. Some digital typefaces were updated versions of classics, while others were brand new, and there was a refreshing jolt of youthful experimentation as people moved past the limits of the rational and functional. Each of the following designers broke from tradition and changed the world of design in some way. Those who designed not only on the screen, but for the screen, ushered in a new era of digital design, mixing media and incorporating motion, sound and interactivity. Below are a few of those pioneers.
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While a good measure does improve the reading experience, it’s only one rule for good typography. Another rule is to maintain a comfortable font size. Designing on a desktop or laptop browser means that we are spending most of our time at an arm’s length from the text, and we don’t spend much time seeing how the text renders on small devices. A good font size (not too small) is readable. A good font size (not too big) promotes horizontal eye motion. A good font size with the proper line height will help your readers find what they’re looking for.
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Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, Ala Ramildi and René Keller will share some insights on how they built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript! PixelMogul is the first game that they created entirely in house. Adobe AIR and Starling made it possible for them to carry over their experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform and to focus on development. The fast-growing and active Starling community was a big plus, too. They would definitively go the same route for another project of comparable scope.
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Badges often look the same. So… is it really necessary to budge? If you have a little, different conference, you need different kinds of things. Badges included. In 2013, at the first Kerning conference, Maurizio Piacenza was asked to design the official notebook: he ended up with a really typographic design for the cover and a funny pattern on the back. And an Easter egg on the cover. It was a really funny project, so when a member of Kerning’s organizing committee, asked him to design the notebook and some printed materials for Kerning 2014 he immediately said “Yes, let’s start!”.
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The vast majority of practices from the world of manufacturing have come to influence how things are done when designing and building software products as well. Lean thinking is one of the latest approaches software development companies have adopted to maximize value and reduce wasted effort and resources by breaking down an objective into a series of experiments. Approaches like design thinking tend to be lean by nature. There is a huge opportunity, however, to take this notion even further and align design to the new ways digital products are being built and improved on. Let’s look first at the current approach towards design and how it has an impact on the product.
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New tools have emerged to address the challenges of responsive web design. And there is that’s been a leap forward in productivity for the team that Richard Knight works with. Its name is Webflow, and it could be the solution to the problems you face with static design comps produced in Photoshop and Fireworks. In this article, Richard will explore the advantages of Webflow and how you can use it to build responsive websites today. He will take you step by step through the process of creating a responsive website layout for a real project, and identify Webflow’s advantages and where it comes up short.
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Smashing Mystery Riddles are little experiments that challenge us to come up with something new, original and a bit crazy—every single time. The ideas are usually a synthesis of the things we discover, stumble upon or try out ourselves—and oh my, they take quite some time to get right. The basic idea for the most recent riddle was simple: as usual, you have a series of animated GIFs containing clues. One animated GIF leads to another, and every animated GIF contains a key that have to be discovered. Once you uncover all the keys, you construct a solution and send out a tweet containing that solution. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it?
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