Creative Community Bulletin 16 December 2013

Great con­tent found by Pariah and shared to the design and cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties on social media.

• 90 Creative Coming Soon Page Designs and Resources
  “If you plan­ning to launch new online project or your new site then com­ing soon pages can be handy tools for you as under con­struc­tion page proven to get most out of these ear­ly announcements.

  ”

• Navigate Files Like a Pro with These Finder Tips and Tricks
  “Finder isn’t the most excit­ing thing about OS X, but it’s the back­bone for how you nav­i­gate the oper­at­ing sys­tem. It’s your file brows­er, your search engine, and your man­age­ment area, but few of us real­ly dig into every­thing it can do. With th…
• The 7 Key Components of a Knockout Infographic

  “I love me a good info­graph­ic – espe­cial­ly when it’s an info­graph­ic about info­graph­ics. So when I came across this awe­some one from Socially Sorted, I had to give it some love. 

  ”

• Amazingly Realistic Scale Model Photographer Recreates Any Scene on the Cheap

  “For over 25 years, he has been cre­at­ing an imag­i­nary world called “Elgin Park,” filled with scaled mod­els of old cars. They’re 1/24th the size to be exact. He choos­es appro­pri­ate sur­round­ings for these mod­els, and then uses his cam­era to cap­ture the most real­is­tic shot pos­si­ble. The kind of shot that you have no idea is with­in a tiny world.”

• 7 Tips For Great Selfies

  “Whether you’re recon­cep­tu­al­iz­ing your self-image or just giv­ing a visu­al shout-out to your friends, here’s how to look your best.
  ”

• How The Most Productive People Master Nonstop Travel
  “A six-year vet­er­an of Yelp, Miriam Warren estab­lished the user-generated review com­pa­ny’s London out­post and over­saw its European expan­sion, most recent­ly into France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Swed…
• Fine Print: Fonts Designed for Small Text

  “Type designed specif­i­cal­ly for use at small sizes attempts to solve the prob­lem of too much to say in too lit­tle space. When con­serv­ing resources (ink, paper, etc.) comes at the cost of leg­i­bil­i­ty, it’s best to plan your type palette around faces made to per­form below con­ven­tion­al text sizes. How will you know which faces hold up small? Here are a few prin­ci­ples to consider:

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• Desktop Design Principles Don’t Work for Mobile. Stop Using Them.

  “There are sev­er­al old desk­top prin­ci­ples we’ve adopt­ed in mobile design, and it may be time to recon­sid­er them. The key to great design is under­stand­ing how peo­ple use dif­fer­ent devices — and then design­ing for that functionality.

  ”

• Do You Have Gadget Sickness?

  Apple’s ini­tial release of iOS 7 caused a flur­ry of user com­plaints that the mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem was mak­ing them queasy. (“Note to self: get Dramamine,” Mia Farrow tweet­ed.) It’s not the only tech-induced ail­ment; office drones and teen phone addicts alike are com­ing down with ill­ness­es as trendy as the devices that inflict them. According to recent research, that hunch­back you’re devel­op­ing might real­ly be your cell phone’s fault.

• 3 Quick Ways To Finally Organize Your Inbox
  “Is your email inbox get­ting the best of you? You’re not alone. Follow these 3 easy steps to get a han­dle on your email once and for all.”
• Craft a Leathery Text Effect in Photoshop

  “So today, we are going to cre­ate a hang­ing leather text effect in Photoshop. In this tuto­r­i­al, I’ll walk you through the process of cre­at­ing this text effect by using some inter­est­ing tech­niques, pat­terns, and tools. Let’s get started.

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• Creative Scan-and-Draw Color-Changing Pen Design
  “Any artist or design­er who works with col­or knows that the best inspi­ra­tion and per­fect col­oration can often be found in real-life objects all around us. What if you could take your trusty draw­ing pen and sim­ply scan any col­or you want and the…
• 15 Popular Logo Redesigns and Makeovers in 2013
  “While some got so much atten­tion in the design indus­try because of prop­er direc­tion and exe­cu­tion in redesign­ing their logos, some went viral because of the strik­ing neg­a­tive feed­back they received.
  A change in com­pa­ny logo is a major aspect t…
• 10 Highly Creative Packaging Designs

  “Creative pack­ag­ing is regard­ed as one of the most com­mon­ly seen illus­tra­tion of graph­ic design. Aside from show­cas­ing rel­e­vant and essen­tial prod­uct prop­er­ties, details and facts, the pack­ag­ing is now a fun­da­men­tal sales instru­ment as most con­sumers choose a prod­uct with cre­ative, eye-catching pack­ag­ing design when decid­ing on which prod­ucts to buy. Therefore, hav­ing a cap­ti­vat­ing and excep­tion­al and unique pack­age design will make it a major com­pet­i­tive edge for com­pa­nies and sup­pli­ers. The col­ors, illus­tra­tion, typog­ra­phy and how items are wrapped and pre­sent­ed are just a few ele­ments that design­ers need to pay atten­tion to come up with an effec­tive pack­ag­ing which can impress the cus­tomers through it cre­ativ­i­ty. Here 10 eye-catching and infor­ma­tive pet prod­uct pack­age designs for your inspiration.
  ”

• Mastering The Art Of Conversation: 7 Steps To Being Smooth

  “In The Art of Conversation: A Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure, Catherine Blyth gives some great tips on han­dling the sub­tle nuances of polite interaction.
  Here are sev­en of my favorite bits:”

• Mastering The Art Of Conversation: 7 Steps To Being Smooth

  “In The Art of Conversation: A Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure, Catherine Blyth gives some great tips on han­dling the sub­tle nuances of polite interaction.
  Here are sev­en of my favorite bits:”

• 25 Best Free Fonts for Print and Web
  “A good design­er knows that print design and web design are like apples and oranges-what works for one medi­um may not work for the oth­er. Nowhere is this more appar­ent than with fonts. Due to the lim­i­ta­tions of some imprint meth­ods, there are c…
• Business Card Design Ideas That Will Impress Your Clients

  “We col­lect­ed lots of dif­fer­ent exam­ples of busi­ness cards, whether they be extra­or­di­nary or super min­i­mal. some which are try­ing to give off a clean and min­i­mal­is­tic look and oth­ers which give out a superb first impression.”

• 18 Tech Tools To Make You More Efficient At Work
  “From sched­ul­ing and account­ing to mobile pay­ments and e‑commerce, here’s how to use the lat­est tech to help increase rev­enues and decrease headaches.
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• Opening Multiple Files from Lightroom as Smart Objects in One Photoshop Document

  The abil­i­ty to open mul­ti­ple files from Lightroom into Photoshop as Smart Objects – and place them into a sin­gle doc­u­ment a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time when com­posit­ing. The only restric­tion is that you must first open a doc­u­ment in Photoshop. Since I typ­i­cal­ly work with a blank can­vas to begin with, this require­ment doesn’t both­er me. Once you have your Photoshop doc­u­ment open, select the images in Lightroom (yes, you will have to be in Normal screen mode in Lightroom to do this) and drag and drop them on top of the open Photoshop doc­u­ment. Each image will be placed one at a time – dis­play­ing trans­for­ma­tion han­dles for resiz­ing to the desired size upon placement. 

• ‘Preferred’ Pronouns Gain Traction at US Colleges
  ““Because I go to an all-women’s col­lege, a lot of peo­ple are like, ‘If you don’t iden­ti­fy as a woman, how did you get in?’ ” said sopho­more Skylar Crownover, 19, who is pres­i­dent of Mouthing Off! and prefers to be men­tioned as a sin­gu­lar they, …
• ‘Preferred’ Pronouns Gain Traction at US Colleges
  ““Because I go to an all-women’s col­lege, a lot of peo­ple are like, ‘If you don’t iden­ti­fy as a woman, how did you get in?’ ” said sopho­more Skylar Crownover, 19, who is pres­i­dent of Mouthing Off! and prefers to be men­tioned as a sin­gu­lar they, …
• Get A Raise: 10 Steps For Getting Your Boss To Think You’re The Best
  “People always want to know how to ask for a raise. 99% of whether you get a raise has noth­ing to do with wording.
  ”
• Blinkist Summarizes Important Parts of Books for Quick Learnings
  “If you can’t find the time to read the whole book, Blinkist takes you through the most impor­tant parts of non-fiction writ­ing. The app is entire­ly human-powered, sum­ma­riz­ing learn­ings from the book in sim­ple lan­guage, short­ened for a quick rea…
• 9 Tips for a Better Company Culture
  “We spoke with nine entre­pre­neurs to get their tips for build­ing a great team and retain­ing the tal­ent. Have any more tips? Let us know in the com­ments below.

  ”

• How to Become a Reliable Person

  “These seem like com­mon sense prin­ci­ples, but if you stretch them out, you can see how they end up affect­ing your mon­ey and your life. Reliable peo­ple in gen­er­al tend to build stronger rela­tion­ships and find more secure employ­ment (there are always excep­tions, of course). When you actu­al­ly look around your com­mu­ni­ty and see which peo­ple have built a strong and sus­tain­able life for them­selves, you’re gen­er­al­ly see­ing reli­able people.”

• Corgi on a Carousel Is the Only Video You Need to Watch
  “If there is one video on the entire Internet that you des­per­ate­ly need in your life right now, it’s the one of a five-year-old Corgi named Meatball mer­ri­ly scam­per­ing around a home­made merry-go-round.”
• Check the Newspaper Before Meetings for Better Body Language
  “If you have a big meet­ing or job inter­view com­ing up, sit back and read a news­pa­per instead of check­ing out your smart­phone or lap­top. The change in pos­ture alone can help you be more con­fi­dent in your inter­ac­tion, Forbes says.”
• Digital Magazine Startup Magzter Raises $10M To Fuel Global Growth #dps

  New York-based Magzter, a start­up found­ed in 2011 to help mag­a­zine pub­lish­ers get their pubs in the hands of dig­i­tal read­ers, regard­less of which plat­form they choose to use to read. In two years of oper­a­tion, the com­pa­ny has man­aged to rack up over 900 pub­lish­er part­ners and put out over 2,850 issues of mag­a­zines, the com­pa­ny says, all pow­ered by its pro­pri­etary web-based sim­ple pub­lish­ing tool, which push­es out edi­tions to iOS, Google Play, Windows 8, the web and both Amazon and Huawei’s ded­i­cat­ed app stores all at once.

• 10 Strange Ways You’re Making Everyone Hate You

  “Ever since the kid in the grade above us kicked the ball right in our face for no damn rea­son, most of us have under­stood that humans love to hate. Throughout his­to­ry, any­thing from hav­ing the wrong col­or of skin to the wrong kind of hair has been enough to get you attacked, enslaved, or out­right mur­dered. While we in the present may be less like­ly to mur­der some­one over a triv­ial dif­fer­ence, we’re still pret­ty good at that whole “hate” thing, as seen by our appar­ent desire to loathe peo­ple for these ridicu­lous­ly minor reasons.”

• 24 Flat Designs with Compelling Color Palettes

  “From iOS7 to web­sites, there’s evi­dence every­where we look that flat isn’t going any­where. However, flat doesn’t mean there’s no dimen­sion. In fact, a num­ber of these 24 sites have a lot of depth and lay­ers. And flat designs def­i­nite­ly have fan­tas­tic col­or palettes that include both bold & mut­ed tones.”

• Why Teleconference Technology Is Still In The Middle Ages
  “Have you ever con­sid­ered how archa­ic it is to use a phone num­ber in 2013? One com­pa­ny pre­dicts we’ll soon be using screen names even on the phone.
  ”
• 10 Life Lessons You Can Learn From The Smartest Older People

  “Before the 50th reunion of Harvard Business School’s class of 1963 they asked them what lessons they would pass on to younger people.
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• How to Code OpenType Features in CSS Code

  “OpenType lay­out fea­tures are typo­graph­ic extras built into fonts, involv­ing sub­sti­tut­ing dif­fer­ent glyphs or repo­si­tion­ing glyphs to achieve bet­ter typog­ra­phy. OpenType fea­tures include things such as kern­ing, lig­a­tures, small caps, old­style fig­ures, and many more things. Support for such good­ies is part of CSS 3. However, sup­port for these CSS 3 fea­tures has been uneven in web browsers until recently—notably lack­ing is IE 9 and ear­li­er. CanIUse​.com has the lat­est gory details. As of this writing:

  ”

• From Having Sex to Banana Peeling – 10 Everyday Things We’re Doing Completely Incorrectly

  “Let’s face it—life doesn’t come with an instruc­tion man­u­al. For most of us, each day is an attempt to get from one end to the oth­er with­out mess­ing up too bad­ly or, at the least, get­ting noticed doing so. So it’s under­stand­able that while we get the major­i­ty of it right, there are some com­mon activ­i­ties we’re still just try­ing to do our best at. The fol­low­ing list is a handy guide to those parts of life where the way we’ve always done it may not be the best.”

• Brilliant, DIY Minimal Business Cards on the Go Tool

  “The ever-clever Mikey Burton has come up with a fun idea that I just may try out. He was asked to par­tic­i­pate in the “Designer Challenge” for the October issue of Computer Arts Projects and was tasked to put a new spin on tra­di­tion­al busi­ness cards. So his idea was to pare down a card to the absolute essen­tials: name, web­site and pos­si­bly a styl­ized bear illus­tra­tion, and print it in a unique way.
  ”

• WordPress 3.8 – What’s New and Why It Matters

  “This week’s release of WordPress 3.8 named “Parker” after jazz leg­end Charlie Parker shows that the plat­form (and its devel­op­ers) take this respon­si­bil­i­ty seri­ous­ly and aim to fur­ther sim­pli­fy web pub­lish­ing for every­one. You can down­load it right now from WordPress​.org or upgrade your exist­ing WordPress site direct­ly from the dashboard.

  Let’s dive in and take a clos­er look at the WordPress 3.8 release:”

• WordPress 3.8 – What’s New and Why It Matters

  “This week’s release of WordPress 3.8 named “Parker” after jazz leg­end Charlie Parker shows that the plat­form (and its devel­op­ers) take this respon­si­bil­i­ty seri­ous­ly and aim to fur­ther sim­pli­fy web pub­lish­ing for every­one. You can down­load it right now from WordPress​.org or upgrade your exist­ing WordPress site direct­ly from the dashboard.

  Let’s dive in and take a clos­er look at the WordPress 3.8 release:”

• Google Wants To Make Your Passwords Obsolete

  “If Google has its way, how­ev­er, the very notion of typ­ing in a pass­word may soon be obso­lete. In 2014, the Internet giant plans to release an ultra-secure and easy to use iden­ti­ty ver­i­fi­ca­tion plat­form that elim­i­nates the need for long, user-generated passwords.…if some­one want­ed to login sur­rep­ti­tious­ly to your account, he or she would need to know your user­name and PIN while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly hav­ing phys­i­cal pos­ses­sion of that spe­cif­ic YubiKey Neo.”

• You’ll Make More Money If You Can Code
  “Adda Birnir noticed a gen­der divide between a media com­pa­ny’s busi­ness and tech­ni­cal side (read: men) ver­sus the edi­to­r­i­al side (read: women). She cre­at­ed online tech edu­ca­tion plat­form Skillcrush to give women a way to learn mar­ketable skills…
• What is Creative Cloud for teams? [Video]
  “If you’ve heard about Adobe Creative Cloud for teams, but aren’t so sure what’s it all about, then take a look at this ani­ma­tion to learn more.”
• 5 Creative Ways to Market Yourself as a Designer

  “But not to wor­ry. Marketing doesn’t have to mean count­less hours spent pitch­ing your­self at one bor­ing busi­ness net­work­ing group after anoth­er. In fact, there are plen­ty of ways to mar­ket that just might get those cre­ative juices flow­ing in unex­pect­ed ways. You might actu­al­ly enjoy yourself—I know!. Let’s take a look a num­ber of inter­est­ing and stim­u­lat­ing ways to get your work to your poten­tial customers.

  ”

• Latest DPS Stats Show Rapid Growth in Circulation and Readership
  “This growth in cir­cu­la­tion, read­er­ship and engage­ment are clear indi­ca­tors that dig­i­tal mag­a­zines are cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for mag­a­zine pub­lish­ers to trans­form their busi­ness by gen­er­at­ing read­er­ship around the world and attract­ing high valu…
• 40 Awesome Vintage Inspired Designs
  “This show­case is made up of a great mix of vintage-themed designs that will get you cre­ative­ly inspired.

  ”

• Pinterest and Its Public API
  “And the com­pa­ny says this is just the begin­ning for out­side apps that inter­face direct­ly with its social network.
  ”
• How HTML5 Crashed, Burned, And Rose Again
  “HTML5 was sup­posed to change every­thing. It did­n’t. But that does­n’t mean it won’t.
  ”
• ‘Plastic Bodies’ Photo Series By Sheila Pree Bright Will Make You Think Differently About Beauty
  “We’ve seen what a Barbie doll would look like if mod­eled after the aver­age 19-year-old woman. But when you jux­ta­pose a dol­l’s facial fea­tures with a real wom­an’s, the results are startling.

  That’s what pho­tog­ra­ph­er Sheila Pree Bright did in h…

• 7 Bootstrapping Tips for the Resourceful Small Business
  “Small busi­ness­es must be resource­ful to stay afloat. With small­er bud­gets, big ideas need to be as proac­tive as they are cost-efficient, tak­ing into account every­thing from con­sis­tent indus­try changes, cash flow, cus­tomer needs and the unexpec…

Curated by Pariah Burke