Design Business Links 12 March 2014

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

  • Kids Can Learn Programming Basics With “Make Your Own Flappy Bird” In 20 Minutes

    Kids have a new incen­tive to learn pro­gram­ming. Thanks to Code​.org, they can design their own Flappy Bird game in 20 min­utes. The “Make Your Own Flappy Bird” tuto­r­i­al is designed for kids as young as six-year olds. It’s a great idea to lever­age a pop­u­lar game and tap into its glob­al craze for teach­ing kids about the basics of pro­gram­ming. Children don’t even have to dive into intri­cate blocks of code and wor­ry about func­tions, return val­ues, loops and con­di­tion­als. It’s 20 min­utes of fun.

  • 9 Ways Startup CEOs Can Help Their Teams Avoid Burnout
    “Nine founders share their advice on how to help your team step back and decompress.
  • Seven Downloads and Extensions to Make Dropbox Even More Awesome

    Dropbox is eas­i­ly the inter­net’s favorite cloud stor­age provider—at the very least it’s our favorite. There are plen­ty of clever things you can do with it right out of the box (get it?). However, there’s also no short­age of apps and exten­sions you can get to make using Dropbox itself even easier.P

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  • Why You Should have a Messy Desk
    “Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Mark Twain. What is one thing these three vision­ar­ies have in common?
    They all had very messy workspaces.”
  • AIGA: Rejustified, Christopher Simmons

    I’ve gone from one of the most out­spo­ken crit­ics of AIGA’s Justified design com­pe­ti­tion, to an entrant, win­ner, judge and now com­pe­ti­tion chair. This arti­cle explains how the com­pe­ti­tion (and I) have changed, and why more design­ers should con­sid­er enter­ing it. 

  • The 10 Stages of the Creative Process

    Listen to your hunch­es, sponge up ideas, let them mar­i­nate, and know when you’re done.

  • 20+ Free Sets of Line Icons for UI / UX Design
    “Outline or line icons are cer­tain­ly one of the key design UI ele­ments in mobile apps and web designs espe­cial­ly when design­ing in iOS 7 style. As a design­er, you may always need to have a col­lec­tion of var­i­ous icons, espe­cial­ly free icons to h…
  • End With The Beginning In Mind

    But the chal­lenge for cre­atives is that we often don’t know what that end should be. We are work­ing our way toward the end as we go about our work each day, iter­at­ing, col­lab­o­rat­ing, and press­ing toward our (often vague) objec­tives. If we endeav­or to pre­ma­ture­ly deter­mine the solu­tion to our cre­ative strug­gle, we will like­ly wind up (a) blocked, (b) under-performing, or © burned out. We must hon­or the role of process, no mat­ter how far it leads us into uncertainty.

  • Why Every Tech Company Needs An English Major
    “Every tech­nol­o­gy has a great sto­ry behind it, but not always a great storyteller.