My Favorite Design Blogs

Many online resources exist for today's designers. Check out my list below for sites that review tools, showcase products, provide tutorials and link creative people to other creative people. Even if you are not a designer, these sites are just plain fun to look at.

Web Designer Wall: A wall of design ideas, web trends, and tutorials.

Creative Nerds: Tutorials, news, inspiration and freebies.

Smashing Magazine: Hacks, tips, freebies, tutorials, fonts and more.

Uselog: The product usability weblog.

WeFunction: Web design company that posts links to free themes, inspiring before and afters and tutorials.

Design Reviver: Providing web designers with valuable information such as tutorials, free downloads, sources of inspiration, and articles covering a wide range of web design related topics.

Fuel Your Creativity: Articles, links and samples for designer block.

Boxes and Arrows: Devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business.

Core 77: Articles, discussion forums, extensive event calendar, portfolio hosting, job listings, a database of design firms, schools, vendors and services.

Design with Intent: Design for sustainable behavior. How do people use products, systems and environments? How can designers influence interaction?

Doors of Perception: Starting new conversations on design and innovation.

Photoshop Star: Free Photoshop tutorials.

Outlaw Design Blog: Free resources, product reviews, tutorials and a guide to passive income.

Vandelay Design: Provides helpful and informative posts that meet the needs of web designers or online entrepreneurs.

Noupe: News for designers and web-developers on all subjects of design, ranging from; CSS, Ajax, Javascript, web design, graphics, typography, advertising & more.

Devlounge: Design, web apps, interviews and code.

Just Creative Design: Designer Jacob Cass posts articles about graphic design, logo design, web design, advertising, branding, typography, and icons.

Jhames: Seattle designer James Elliott shares insights about techniques and about the design industry.

Spoon Graphics: Tutorials, techniques, links and inspiration.

Six Revisions: Practical, useful information for the modern, standards-compliant web designer and web developer.

Emily Chang: Award-winning web and interaction designer, technology strategist and entrepreneur.

Web Designer Help: Tutorials, interviews, competitions.

Elite by Design: A design community dedicated to providing helpful and insightful articles in the fields of web design, web development, and Photoshop.

Viral Entertainment Shows How To Squeeze Creative Juices

This is quality online entertainment. Ever wonder where creative juices come from? Just squeeze a skinny designer. Watch this hilarious video "The Harvest" (above) created for The South West Regional Development Agency, a group promoting South West England.

The video was made by Bristol-based viral video gurus Rubber Republic. In addition to making the video, they sent 2000 bottles of "creative juices" (you'll understand once you watch the video) to London creative agencies.

Check out the Creative Juices microsite.

Gary Vaynerchuk Content Creation Pep Talk

Gary Vaynerchuk created a big buzz with his recent keynote talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. Pacing the stage, he implores the audience to stop doing things they hate. He created Wine Library TV and has become an internet celebrity and successful businessman. He discusses how we are living in an age when the old media controls are crumbling and the new content creators have numerous chances to monetize their own personal monkey business. Create!

3D Animation Gets Gooder and Gooder

A host of new 3D animators are cranking up the quality bar. Check out these examples of cutting edge technical and creative wizardry.

Emily: She's not real
Image Metrics (the production company that created the animations for Grand Theft Auto) made a splash this week with Emily, created using their new 3D modeling technology. It captures the movements and expressions of real actors and re-creates it all in the computer in a creepy way.

Oktapodi
A student film about amorous octopi from Gobelins, the French school of visual design that has produced tons of amazing animators.

Also, don't miss the "making of" video.

Big Buck Bunny
Big Buck Bunny is an open source movie made with open source software from The Blender Foundation. They created this movie under a software development type model, all to promote the use of their tools.

Check out the "making of" video.

My Morning Jacket Music Video
For their song, Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Pt. 2, My Morning Jacket had the creative team at Mixtape Club create an amazing 3D animation.

NYT Article Takes Pulse of Web Video Scene

A great recent article in the New York Times titled "Night Life Reprogrammed" explores the nightlife and social scene that has sprouted up around the next-generation web industry that is newly emerging. Special emphasis is placed on web video companies and their interactions with the industry and the world at large. The article mentions a bunch of great internet video content and entertainment sites such as the following:

• Wine Library TV
• Video blogs like Downtown Diary and Pop17
• Digital media production company Dinosaur Diorama
• Online video entertainment pioneer Blip.tv
• Hip Hop video blog Ill Doctrine
• NY Video 2.0

For more companies like this, check out my 4-part series about digital media content sites "They Promised Us Convergence".

My Interview with Brian Goldfarb

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Goldfarb, Group Product Manager of the UX Platform and Tools Strategy group at Microsoft. We spoke in Orlando after his keynote speech.

We chatted about multimedia, creative teams, designers, developers, Silverlight, desk clutter and endless email sessions.

See my recent coverage of his presentation, including Silverlight video of the whole talk.

The Conference on Creativity & Technology

Highlight video of our recent trip to the CRE8 Conference in Orlando this spring.

Microsoft Silverlight Presentation by Brian Goldfarb part 1

(Install Silverlight to view this video.)

The video above is part one of a keynote speech given by Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft at the 2008 CRE8 Conference. I attended the conference in Orlando and you can review my earlier posts from the show.

A cultural change is afoot at Microsoft, where the oft-neglected designer is finally getting a long-craved-for hug from the Borg. This time it really seems like they are serious about respecting user experience and good human-computer interface design best practices. For instance, Microsoft is part of the OpenAjax Alliance and they have even launched a full-on designer community.

Check out his presentation to learn about Microsoft's new approach to the entire "ecosystem of developers" which involves "collaboration between teams of partners". Microsoft is not only trying to provide tools to do tasks, but they are also addressing the need for workflow solutions. How do teams work closely together, freely exchanging ideas, files and deliverables? With the new products, a designer can open up a project that has been coded by a developer and vice versa.

Goldfarb leads teams dedicated to building upon Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), their unified application framework. Among other things, it allows developers to apply basic windows functionality (like spell check) into multimedia applications.

He spoke broadly about general changes in Microsoft culture and practice. He mentioned that their server is now standards-based, and the "browser is getting better, I promise".

He shared a variety of example Silverlight sites from their Gallery, including Break.com, HSN,and the mind-bending "Deep Zoom" technology on the Hard Rock Cafe site.

At the time of this presentation, Microsoft was seeing over one million downloads a day of the Silverlight plug-in.

The new products support HD video, adaptive streaming solutions, XAML, and DRM-ready features. Read my post about a recent all-day Silverlight training event I attended at Microsoft to learn more about all this stuff.

Goldfarb stressed that they are building demand. Now they need creative people to develop the supply. To that end, they are offering 10 gigs of free hosting! The video above takes advantage of this. They are encouraging the developer network by providing a free place to get started.

Silverlight is driving plugin adoption by offering content developers a free hosting and streaming service: "Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac."

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

Want to edit (or warp) your images? Want to avoid spending $1,000 on Photoshop? The fun and informative LifeClever blog has a great post about free online image editors. LifeClever offers design advice, productivity tips and life hacks for designers and non-designers.

Cre8 Day 3: Michael Eisner, the Master Digital Story-Teller

Yesterday the Cre8 Conference kicked off with keynote speaker Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney. He is a consummate story teller and master business man. Here are some of the creative ideas he shared.

Think inside the box.
Make sure the box is the right size.
Micromanage it.

Eisner is a notorious micro manager. Often this is a negative connotation, but for him it worked. He even called the front desk of our resort this week to complain about the shampoo and conditioner. Where were the easily-readable designs he instituted during his all-seeing reign?

He had great stories of his film-world adventures. There were the flops like 1980's "Raise the Titanic". Producer Lord Lew Grade once said of the over-budget fiasco, "It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic."

There were the hits like "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Apparently that scene where Indiana Jones shoots the sword fighter came about because Harrison Ford had digestive problems as they were getting ready to shoot the final fight scene. Spielberg finally said, "Oh, just shoot him and you can go home." And thus was born a classic comedic scene where once was a planned battle scene.

He's doing some exciting things now-a-days. His new company Tornante is making short-form entertainment for digital distribution on mobile and Internet platforms. His son makes advertisements and is spending $1.3 million for 30 seconds. Eisner and his new stripped-down crew are spending $1,200 for 30 seconds. He called the Internet "creative experimentation." He's making "story-driven Internet video." Tornante is creating series like "Prom Queen" thru his company Vuguru.

He's a major stake-holder in Veoh, one of the top 30 sites in the US and the video site with the longest "engagement metrics" (people watching videos for more minutes than other sites). He also recently bought Tops, and is re-vamping the 50 year old brand best known for baseball cards and Bazooka Joe.

He talked about consistency and managing every little detail. Find out what the brand stands for and what it doesn't stand for. How big is the box? When he joined Disney, the international division was translating/dubbing the films with startling inconsistency. Huey, Dewey and Lewie were often being voiced by the same actor. Mickey had a different voice (and thus personality) in every country. By the time he left, you could barely tell the international versions of the films apart except that the characters were speaking in different languages.

He quoted famous industrialist Thomas J. Watson who once said "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." Eisner also said that "to punish failure is a good way to encourage mediocrity. Fearful people will settle for mediocrity."

He sounds like he is having fun. He says he's making it up as he goes along. The Internet is a story-driven medium. He is a self-described Internet addict. He's helping to create a new form of distribution and learning how to generate programming for the Internet. His vision for the next 20 years is that digital is the place to be, the Internet will overtake all mediums as the distribution platform for modern story-tellers.