Creative Community Bulletin 29 August 2013

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

  • The 80 Rules Of Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]
    “So you want to get good at social media?

    You need to have a plan. A guide­book. A strategy.

    You need some rules.”

  • Design Fail: Why Isn’t There A Standard Way To Swipe A Credit Card?

    The only thing uni­ver­sal about credit-card swipe info­graph­ics is that they’re unclear. Designers address the every­day misdirection

  • The Best Free Script Fonts for Creating Vintage Logos

    You have three options when it comes to cre­at­ing a trendy vin­tage style logo or insignia: Buy a pre­mi­um script font, draw your own or use a free font. The free option sounds great but it can be dif­fi­cult pick­ing out qual­i­ty type­faces from the hoards of cheesy dis­play fonts that lit­ter free font libraries. In this post I’ve com­piled the best script and cur­sive fonts that would suit a vin­tage style logo. All these fonts are tried and test­ed and avail­able for com­mer­cial use, mak­ing them per­fect for both fun and client project use.

  • 5 Golden, Press Release-Free Keys To Building Successful Buzz For Your Startup
    Forget gener­ic press releas­es. If you want to get your start­up noticed by blog­gers, media out­lets, investors, and cus­tomers, you can do it your­self. And usu­al­ly for a whole heck of a lot less mon­ey than hir­ing a pub­lic rela­tions firm.

    Start…

  • The Placebo Effect Is Real. Now Doctors Just Have To Work Out How To Use It
    The recent research find­ings do beg a seri­ous ques­tion, though. Are we going to see actu­al treat­ments based on pills that are no more than sug­ar as alter­na­tives to active drugs? How might med­i­cine incor­po­rate the work that Kaptchuk and oth­er pl…
  • 10 Packaging Designs That Changed My History

    This is not an arbi­trary selec­tion of beau­ti­ful pack­ag­ing designs found in books. It is a per­son­al col­lec­tion of what Guillermo Dufranc, Graphic Design Coordinator at Tridimage, calls “design-facts ” – which influ­ence the way pack­ag­ing design is con­ceived. Read more after the jump.

  • Courting Bookworms, Kobo Debuts 3 New Tablets, New E‑Reader, and a Plan to Gain An Edge Over Amazon #eprd­ctn

    Kobo, the e‑reader and tablet com­pa­ny owned by Rakuten (aka Japan’s answer to Amazon), is today tak­ing the cov­ers off four new devices — three new Android-based Arc tablets and a new Aura e‑reader. And it is using the occa­sion to kick off a redou­bled effort to focus on a spe­cif­ic seg­ment in the mar­ket — die-hard book­worms — to help itself gain an edge over Amazon and dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself bet­ter in the mar­ket. Now, in addi­tion to its cat­a­logue of 4 mil­lion books, Kobo has built in inte­gra­tions with Pocket, new reading-focused store­fronts (start­ing with a store for children’s books and one for mag­a­zines), and two new Android feau­tures, a launch­er Kobo calls “Reading Life” and a new Reading Mode, both designed to put read­ing front and cen­ter on tablets more than it has ever been done on tablets before.

  • Turn your design pas­sion into a steady prof­it in just 11 days (ebook)
    This two-pronged approach is designed so that you not only learn how to build a killer design busi­ness but you also act on what you learn to start build­ing your busi­ness right away!
  • Are High-End Brands Rejecting Social Media?

    But we were wrong. Oh, sure, we saw the usu­al Facebook logos and web URLs, usu­al­ly placed dis­creet­ly on win­dows or on lit­tle sil­ver signs by the cash reg­is­ter, but even those were absent in some big-name, high-priced stores. Think Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Banana Republic, Godiva and on and on. All with­out even a sin­gle URL on their print­ed mate­r­i­al or a classy lit­tle Twitter bird. It’s not as if these com­pa­nies aren’t using social media–most of them have more than a mil­lion fans on Facebook, active Twitter accounts and big Pinterest accounts. Their absence was conspicuous.

  • 10 Amazing Illustrator Tips To Change How You Design

    We’ve all had that mixed feel­ing of ela­tion and frus­tra­tion when we dis­cov­er a new tip or tech­nique in a design app. You’re both amazed at how easy this new tech­nique is while in dis­be­lief that you nev­er knew about it before! I’ve put togeth­er a list of the top 10 Illustrator tips I’ve learnt over the years that have com­plete­ly changed how I design. Hopefully you’ll learn a few new tech­niques too that will com­plete­ly trans­form you every day workflow.

  • The Perfect Client is Not So Perfect After All

    While the word per­fect is high­ly sub­jec­tive, I can state with some degree of con­fi­dence that the “per­fect client” for us web design­ers would be a client that:

    Gives us com­plete cre­ative control
    Tells us what they want
    Leaves us alone to get the job done (i.e., they aren’t a micro-manager)
    However, I can tell you from my expe­ri­ence that hav­ing a client that goes over­board on those three things is far from perfect.

  • A Designer Guide to Create Your own Superhero Logo

    Had it ever crossed your mind when­ev­er you are going through your favorite com­ic book while sip­ping a cup of frap­pé’ that What went through the minds of the design­er when they were design­ing the age old logo of the Caped Crusader or the Man of Steel or the Punisher?

  • GUERRILLA INNOVATION: The Field Designer
    Sticky-note style essay on field design by Jimi Filipovski. Written in a café, away from the desk in the spir­it of true fieldwork.
  • Los Angeles Contemplates A Plan For Free Citywide Wi-Fi
    Free munic­i­pal Wi-Fi is pop­ping up in cities around the coun­try large and small. L.A. could become the largest to attempt it–if an ear­ly pro­pos­al finds its legs.
  • Create a Folder From Any Selected Items in the OS X Finder

    Need to toss a bunch of items in a fold­er real­ly fast? OS X has a nifty short­cut that man­ages the oper­a­tion in one fell swoop so you don’t have to make a fold­er and then take fur­ther action to pop­u­late it.

  • Home Working Life VS Office Working Life. What’s better?

    In ear­ly 2013 Yahoo!’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, inad­ver­tent­ly shot Yahoo! to the top of media news sto­ries after she issued a memo to the firm’s 11,500 US employ­ees. It read, “Speed and qual­i­ty are often sac­ri­ficed when we work from home, we need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with phys­i­cal­ly being together.”

  • Not Just a Useless Time Suck: The Most Valuable Uses for Facebook
    Facebook is a known pro­duc­tiv­i­ty killer. However, it has one advan­tage over oth­er apps: every­one uses it. You can use it for more than just cat memes and baby pic­tures. Here are some of the most use­ful things you can do
  • Retailers, Take Note: Young Shoppers Don’t Care About Owning Your Stuff

    What does this mean for the future of our con­sumer cul­ture? Can we still define so-called mil­len­ni­als as mate­ri­al­is­tic? This is a gen­er­a­tion ush­er­ing in the “shar­ing econ­o­my,” and trans­form­ing phil­an­thropy with “crowd­fund­ing.” Could this be the gen­er­a­tion that rad­i­cal­ly alters the very mean­ing of ownership?

  • 450+ Adobe Illustrator Patterns #vec­tor
    Repeating pat­terns are often more pop­u­lar in web­sites to fill the whole screen at any res­o­lu­tion. Similarly pat­terns can be placed into posters and oth­er print art­work. And this col­lec­tion includes over 450 var­i­ous design pat­terns you are free …
  • Whitespace and invis­i­ble char­ac­ters « FontShop Blog

    One thing I’ve been mean­ing to cre­ate as part of Using Type is a height­ened vis­i­bil­i­ty for the invis­i­ble, non-printing, and oth­er­wise under-appreciated for­mat­ting char­ac­ters that hap­pen to not make any marks on the page, but do hap­pen to con­tribute quite a lot to our read­ing experience.

  • Business Design Toolkit
    “The BDT has been test­ed exten­sive­ly on cor­po­ra­tions both large and small, start-ups, non-profits and even gov­ern­ment agen­cies (where it would be called the Organization Design Toolkit). So now please print it out as a big ban­ner, (2+ meters wi…
  • Use Your Anger To Smash Creative Blocks
    Hall of Fame bas­ket­ball play­er Michael Jordan is famous for his world-class tal­ent, but what set him apart from his peers was that MJ knew how to get angry. And Michael Jordan was always angry.
  • 33 Ready to Print Premium Magazine Templates

    Another set of 33 Premium Magazine Templates from GraphicRiver is com­piled in this next post for writ­ers and pub­lish­ers out there! Check out what’s in and what’s not with the lates tem­plates in the web. Enjoy browsing!!!

  • Awestruck Your Creative Views With Negative Space Designs

    Today you’re about to see a col­lec­tion of cre­ative­ly done neg­a­tive designs made by Tang Yau Hoong. Tang is a Malaysia-based Graphic artist/illustrator who loves mak­ing neg­a­tive space and illu­sions in his works. He spe­cial­ize in con­cep­tu­al, sur­re­al and min­i­mal­ist designs that you’ll love. Scroll down and be puz­zled by his art­works. Come, take a peek, and be awestruck.