Flaunt: Designing effective, compelling and memorable portfolios of creative work by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit of UnderConsideration.
Simple, get the book (hard copy or .pdf) and study it to prepare either your very first portfolio or to weed out and refresh your current one. 41 case studies. 18 experienced designers feedback. Pertinent vendors, services, stores, materials and suppliers to help you find equivalent locally.
As Shaughnessy states: “You should never consider your portfolio finished and you should always be dissatisfied with it.. Your portfolio requires endless work.. This never changes no matter how successful you have become.”

A portrait of Generation Next: Millennials are 18-29
They are: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.
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They embrace multiple modes of self-expression
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They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults
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Love tatoos and body piercing
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Technology use is 24%
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More upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures
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Placed privacy boundaries on their social media profiles
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3rd life preoccupation: Helping others in need
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To become the most educated generation
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Interesting: they sleep with their mobile phone
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A majority say that the older generation is superior to the younger generation when it comes to moral values and work ethic.
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Download the full report.
March 8 is International Women’s Day! Celebrate women around you by letting them know what a difference they make daily in your life: Grandma, Mother, Lover, Wife, Partner, Friend, Colleague where would we be without them?
Respect to all the powagirrrls who rock the design scene with more than pink design.

This picture is not a work of art (although it is strangely beautiful) nor is it retouched. A friend from Chile has contacted me and asked to relay this information. If you can and have room in your heart to reach out, any amount will make a difference when so many have lost everything (and we’re not just talking about stuff here).
Please donate via (a verified Paypal account) Un Techo para Chile.

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Picture courtesy of: Chile Tree Days After (more pictures)
Talk to Me. I’ll Turn Off My Phone an interview with Tachi Yamada.
Favorite excerpts:
“I don’t micromanage, but I have microinterest..
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I don’t tell people what to do.
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What is the one thing that everything else hinges on? I’ll spend a lot of time understanding that one thing.
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You have to have people in an organization who are willing to truly embrace change, because if they don’t, then what you have is an organization that’s constantly fighting to stay at the status quo.
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Native intelligence is critically important. I don’t think you can train people to be more intelligent.
Intelligence is often more displayed in what I would call complex abstract thinking, and there’s nothing more complex and abstract than human relationships. And if they can work their way through a human relationship problem intelligently, my guess is that they’re very smart people.
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I also look for people who’ve moved. This kind of thing is often very informative about how people have had to deal with crisis, different circumstances and how they’ve had to adapt or change.
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I think one of the hardest things to do is to figure out what your North Star is. What is it that you really are interested in? This helps you to weigh one option versus another. And then keep your eyes and ears open.
Be open to new challenges. I don’t think anyone should do one job for too long a time. I think every five to eight years you should be willing to take on some different challenges. It’s so easy to get stale.”
Cheers to Saying No by Tim Aidlin
“Where do you draw the line with projects? When do you push back on a feature, request, or even the project itself?”

Dropbox is revolutionizing the way people think about and access their files. In particular, they make it easy to securely sync, share and access your files from anywhere. Job opening: they are looking for a User Experience (UX) Designer.

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs.
Read the original release post to get more info.
It’s a jewel of a book and must have desk reference for anyone working in web design.

Weeee! Mashable ran a poll (an encore expected this week): HTML5 Knocks Out Adobe Flash in Reader Vote by Ben Parr
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via: Michael Uman
How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive by Brendan I. Koerner
“Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.”
Go tell your boss on Monday!
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via: Scott Cook
This just made my day! CSS Mess pictures compares any normal browsers to IE6! Download the larger version to read all captions.


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via: Boulat and JF
Melting snow on my back balcony that caught my eye (no retouching). Snapped a snow shaped E! Snowgraphy???

Last November the Translations 03 symposium took place, which was about authorship in design. View the title movie and how the poster serie came to be in order to visualise the five different authorships in design. Go see the making of.
Nice DIY concept and approach.

Dear Sesame St. by Bran Dougherty-Johnson
“We, the undersigned, would like to register our concern over the contest you are now conducting with Aniboom. We are concerned that your contest includes a solicitation of original design concepts, characters and content to be produced on a speculative basis by cartoonists, artists, motion designers and animators.”
Just signed it! Please DO so too!

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via: Michael Urman
Sigh.. up to my ears looking for the bits & pieces.. Fuzzy concept.. fussy research. My moto: research till you drop (the idea) onto the canvas.
Heading out to elucidate what’s the latest concerning accident I had past September. There is still numbness, swelling, the scar of the open laceration still quite sensitive and gross nail growing after 2x surgery to derail infection.
X-Ray of my ‘alien’ right thumb. Was taken 3+ months after accident. Look at the tip you can still see the fracture. As Doc said: “It took a massive impact to smash the bone as that!”

The Goteborg Opera house new website is a nice tour de force from FB (Forsman & Bodenfors from Sweden). The interface is enticing, navigation simple and detailed enough. Pick one of the featured shows, choose listen, and see what happens. Nice touch!
While browsing, each sections is well written and presented with photography and even video clips. For visitors and fans, easy to get tickets and even book a table for dinner.



Reserves just recently released four new typefaces, one of which is Sevigne, a highly refined couture inspired sans-serif which includes more than 130 unique ligatures.

What is the ratio of signal to noise? Much more noise. Prefer no hype, just beautiful?
Trending? Another craze for miniatures? This time mid-century modern chairs as hand-made (in Montreal) bling: Tiny Little Chairs pendants by Bruxe design with Uranium.

