Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 14 January 2015

The day’s best and most impor­tant design- and design business-focused arti­cles, tuto­ri­als, and resources hand-picked by Pariah Burke.

  • 25 Fun, Quirky, and Memorable Ways to Thank Your Customers

    While “thanks” has a nice ring to it, words just don’t car­ry the grav­i­ty of actions. If you’re in the cus­tomer ser­vice business—and every busi­ness is, in some capacity—you should strive to con­tin­u­al­ly show your grat­i­tude to cus­tomers in fun and mem­o­rable ways.

  • The 10 Most Incredible Productivity Articles of 2014 for Entrepreneurs

    From productivity-amping morn­ing and night­time rit­u­als, to Jerry Seinfeld’s dai­ly pro­cras­ti­na­tion crush­er, to the hyper-efficient habits of the world’s wealth­i­est moguls, we’ve got you cov­ered. Here’s a count­down of our top 10 most-read arti­cles about pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in 2014. Read them and tweak.

  • 5 Intellectual Property Considerations for Startups – Part II
    In this arti­cle, we intro­duce the remain­ing three considerations:

    How do you iden­ti­fy and pro­tect your com­pet­i­tive differentiators?
    Do you have an idea or solu­tion that is eli­gi­ble for patent protection?
    What is your IP strategy?

  • From Lycos to Ask Jeeves to Facebook: the 20 most pop­u­lar web sites every year since 1996

    Sites like AOL and Yahoo did exist — and were pop­u­lar. But the eas­i­est way to make that point is to share with you this graph­ic, which shows the 20 most pop­u­lar sites in December of each year, accord­ing to comScore. More inter­est­ing­ly, what it shows is when cer­tain sites became and then stopped being popular.

  • 5 Predictions for the Freelance Economy in 2015

    As we’ve writ­ten about pre­vi­ous­ly, the free­lance move­ment is in full swing as busi­ness­es and work­ers engage in more flex­i­ble, on-demand work arrange­ments. And while this labor trans­for­ma­tion has been well dis­cussed dur­ing the last year, the real ques­tion is what will the future look like? What should com­pa­nies and work­ers expect in 2015 and how should they plan accordingly?