Creative Community Bulletin 4 October 2013

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

  • Breaking: Adobe hacked, 3 mil­lion accounts compromised
    “The mas­sive attack expos­es cus­tomer names, encrypt­ed cred­it or deb­it card num­bers, expi­ra­tion dates, and oth­er infor­ma­tion relat­ing to cus­tomer orders.”
  • Picking the Price of a Self-published Book

    Pricing is an impor­tant aspect when it comes to self-publishing. It’s a deci­sion authors hag­gle with for days. Add in the fact that you are putting out the first book of a series – and that deci­sion might take just as long as writ­ing the book. Pricing wasn’t some­thing authors thought about too much before…”

  • Illustrations in Typography by Teagan White

    Teagan White is a design­er & illus­tra­tor from Chicago, cur­rent­ly liv­ing and work­ing in St Paul, Minnesota, where she recent­ly earned her BFA in Illustration from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. Her body of work encom­pass­es intri­cate ren­der­ings of flo­ra and fau­na, play­ful depic­tions of cute anthro­po­mor­phic crit­ters, illus­tra­tive typog­ra­phy, and every­thing in between. The sub­tleties of nature and rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ships between organ­isms are her pri­ma­ry inspi­ra­tions, and her work typ­i­cal­ly incor­po­rates flat, lim­it­ed col­or, dec­o­ra­tive arrange­ments of organ­ic forms, and obses­sive detail. Below, we made sure to pick the very best from her illus­tra­tions and typog­ra­phy. Enjoy!”

  • How the Flat UI Design Style Affects Interface Text

    Wait, what? Can a design trend real­ly influ­ence the way we use text in an interface?

    Yes, it can. We saw last week that design and con­tent influ­ence each oth­er, and that includes pure design trends like the flat UI look that’s all the rage right now (includ­ing right here on site​point​.com).

    So if you’re apply­ing the flat UI aes­thet­ic to your web­site, here are a few easy ways to make sure your text best sup­ports user inter­ac­tions to with­in that visu­al context.”

  • Mozilla Releases Free New Firefox OS Typeface ‘Fira Sans’ by Erik Spiekermann

    Designed by German typog­ra­ph­er Erik Spiekermann, the open-source type­face aims to inte­grate with the style of the OS and “cov­er the leg­i­bil­i­ty needs for a large range of hand­sets vary­ing in screen qual­i­ty and ren­der­ing,” accord­ing to Mozilla.

  • 20 (Really) Beautiful and Unique Photoshop Effect Tutorials
    “20 hand-picked beau­ti­ful and unique Photoshop effect tuto­ri­als from around the Web. The author per­son­al­ly tried all of them and found them quite inter­est­ing and infor­ma­tive. Hopefully you will enjoy them as much as he did.”
  • 10 top pack­ag­ing design resources
    “You’ll get tons of advice and inspi­ra­tion on the sub­ject of pack­ag­ing design from these free resources.”
  • 5 Websites For Every Portable Application On The Web

    Portable appli­ca­tions are incred­i­bly use­ful. If you’re some­one who is con­stant­ly car­ry­ing around a flash dri­ve, you should always have a few of your favorite portable appli­ca­tions (or even a portable appli­ca­tion suite) on it. I’ve found that portable appli­ca­tions are just as use­ful for a wide vari­ety of uses — like when you’re set­ting up syn­chro­nized fold­ers. I have a fold­er in my Dropbox ded­i­cat­ed to no-installation-required pro­grams, and sync­ing it to any new desk­top or lap­top means that I imme­di­ate­ly have sev­er­al appli­ca­tions avail­able at my fin­ger­tips. It’s rather helpful.”

  • Principles of User Interface Design
    ““To design is much more than sim­ply to assem­ble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add val­ue and mean­ing, to illu­mi­nate, to sim­pli­fy, to clar­i­fy, to mod­i­fy, to dig­ni­fy, to dra­ma­tize, to per­suade, and per­haps even to amuse.” – Paul Rand”

  • If You Could Control Someone’s Attention, What Would You Do With It? TED Video

    Apollo Robbins, in won­der­ful TED talk, shares his obser­va­tions on how people’s atten­tion can shape real­i­ty. He talks about how a human’s brain when asked to process data (per­haps in the past) will not be able process data in the present. He does a much bet­ter job explain­ing this con­cept than I, so check out the video below.”

  • The Development and Design Story Behind Adobe New Hardware, Projects Mighty & Napoleon

    Project Mighty and Napoleon are Adobe’s Exploration in
    Cloud-Enabled hard­ware for touch screens.

    A design-lead inno­va­tion project from Adobe XD, Mighty and Napoleon were conceived
    and devel­oped entire­ly by Michael Gough’s Adobe XD, projects led by Geoff Dowd (Adobe XD) and pro­duced with the domain exper­tise of:

    Ammunition Group – Industrial Design
    MindTribe – Product Engineering
    Adobe Ideas Team – Software Engineering
    Adobe Executive Sponsorship”

  • Eight Creativity Lessons From a Pixar Animator

    Bernhard Haux is a “char­ac­ter tech­ni­cal direc­tor,” which in his case means he mod­els char­ac­ters and works on their inter­nal motions (I think—I didn’t ful­ly grasp the lin­go). It means he is just a small piece in the larg­er Pixar machine, but a piece that’s aware of what every­one else is doing too. He’s worked on major movies such as Up, Brave, Monsters U, and oth­ers in the last six years. Bernhard was gra­cious enough to show us around the Pixar cam­pus, and while we couldn’t real­ly dig into their super-secret process, we did get a few glimpses of the magic.P

    And as a result of these small glimpses, I learned some sur­pris­ing things. I’d like to share them here, in hopes that they’ll inspire oth­ers as they inspired me. P

  • 44 Alluring Websites Powered by WordPress

    There are mil­lions of dif­fer­ent web­sites pow­ered by WordPress run­ning online, with new launch­es hap­pen­ing each month. I put togeth­er this gallery focus­ing on 44 eye-catching web­sites run­ning on WordPress. You can use these designs as inspi­ra­tion for your own ideas. WP them­ing is a big top­ic and it’s worth study­ing so that you can build your own themes.”

  • Should Corporations Fire Personal Brands?

    The real issue for busi­ness man­agers is that per­son­al brands are not always cal­cu­lat­ed employ­ee cam­paigns designed to ele­vate their pub­lic per­sonas. We can’t sim­ply weed out social influ­encers and social per­son­al­i­ties because not all are seek­ing to increase their pop­u­lar­i­ty at the expense of – or on the backs of – the cor­po­rate brand and pay­roll. Many are tru­ly uncal­cu­lat­ed or well-intentioned and frankly, ben­e­fit the employer.
    Technically, a per­son­al brand is instant­ly cre­at­ed when­ev­er an employ­ee sets up a pub­lic pro­file in any social net­work or begins blog­ging. It becomes a mat­ter of degree.”

  • 10 Inspirational iOS Apps for Graphic Designers

    Rather than return­ing to your desk or your col­leagues with notes on a tat­tered nap­kin or a vague idea that’s been dimin­ished with dis­trac­tions, you could cap­ture your design idea with remark­able clar­i­ty using the right mobile app. Mobile devices with the wrong apps installed can end up being detri­ments or dis­trac­tions, but with carefully-chosen design aids, your time spent away from your desk can be a real boon to your work. Let’s take a look at 10 unique apps that fos­ter inspi­ra­tion and cap­ture cre­ative breakthroughs.”