The journals have countless pages of inspirations and ideas in them. My favorite part of this whole project is that the pages are created by ordinary people, not artist or designers. Allowing new ideas and unique and unusual concepts to emerge. It is simply brilliant.

There are still 1,000 journals circulating around the world… who knows, you could find one.

Check out 1000journals.com or buy the book with Amazon

You’ve gone to school and learned about proper design theory. You can identify fonts from a mile away, know your analogous from your complimentary colours and even your dreams line up to a grid. Now you’ve turned to the web but something’s missing. Websites need to be more than great looking, effective communication design pieces, they need to function well as well. For the most part, this isn’t a default tool in the designers toolbox, though it should be.

There’s a great introduction to Information Architecture that will bring newbies up to speed and provided season veterans with a few refresher ideas. Go check it out!

I guess all new story ideas have been used up in literary circles, and writers have to turn to rewrite the classics. And that’s right, Seth Grahame-Smith went there. Read about it here, and order it on amazon.

Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World

The follow review by Mark Busse was originally published on TAXI Design Network:

David B. Berman has been demonstrating inspired design leadership for nearly three decades and this book is no exception. After decades of volunteer work as an international ambassador for the communication design industry, Berman’s book Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World is another fine example of his tendency toward helping others—and not just graphic designers, but all of us.

The book presents a well-researched and clearly articulated argument that design matters—more now than ever before—and like the First Things First manifesto referenced in Erik Spiekermann’s foreword, Do Good Design serves as a call to action to designers everywhere to stand up, take our seat at the boardroom table and start changing the way the world looks at design.

The book begins with Berman explaining that he intends to shock us. Even the title page is a bit of a jolt, the first words reading, “Why does this book need a title page?” challenging the publishing paradigm, leaving me wanting to read every stitch of fine print. The very next page doesn’t disappoint either, with scribbles in the margin—as though the proofreader’s marks were left in place, immediately setting a fun, irreverent tone.

Berman keeps his promise of shock. Arguing that we are now all designers, and we have far more power than we thought—in fact, enough to solve the greatest design challenge of our lifetime: to repair the world. “In a well-designed future,” claims Berman, “it will be the message crafters, the product designers, and the experts in transporting ideas and artifacts across great distances and generations who may hold the greatest responsibility.”

A chronicle of one man’s journey as a creative professional, Berman describes his discoveries and frustrations and the wisdom they brought him. Infused with passion and sincerity, the thoughtful prose is accessible with dozens of illustrated examples and titillating photographs—many of which taken by Berman himself during his travels.

Unlike most design books, Do Good Design isn’t filled with examples from Berman’s portfolio. Rather, it predominantly showcases the work of others. Some good. Some embarrassingly bad. All demonstrating the positive and negative power of communication design. Berman shows how design was at the core of the botched 2000 US elections. He demonstrates how the export of North American consumerism has eroded culture as well our physical environment. He warns of the dangers of branding, calling to task the likes of Coke, Nike, big tobacco—even all of North America itself—for endorsing the use of communication design in order to deceive. Berman argues that “designers are at the core of the most efficient and most destructive pattern of deception in human history.”

But this book is not all doom and gloom judgments by a jaded nay-sayer. Rather, it’s an honest and balanced examination of this important issue based on real experiences over decades of exposure to design. In fact, he includes numerous examples of brands and advertising design being used for good by many. But as a Fellow and Ethics Chair of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, the first elected President of RGD Ontario, and currently a vice-president of Icograda, Berman even questions the standards set by our very own industry.

From a purely design perspective, the book is refreshing and immediately apparent that a skilled typographer was at the helm during the book’s graphic design. With call outs, bolded statements for emphasis, mini stories along the face edge, and whimsical comments scribbled in margins as though by the editor’s Sharpie, the book is easy to read and engaging. The black and white reproduction seems to have been slightly sacrificed, likely in an effort to make a sustainable printed product, which admittedly irked me slightly.

As a fellow Canadian design professional, I am proud of the well-informed, international perspectives found in Berman’s book. I’m proud that someone in our field had the guts to say these things and put the blame squarely where it belongs: on all our shoulders. Proud that he has continued his struggle to redefine the role of the designer. A role that should include social responsibility. We designers have an obligation to use our power with caution. Berman’s book lays in sharp contrast the things we’ve not yet achieved as an industry and the work left to do. This book doesn’t present all the answers, but it does ask some poignant questions. And it presents a well-defended argument that design does indeed matter—now more than ever before.

While much of Do Good Design delves into serious subject matter such as consumerism and its impact on the environment, global economy and society, the book itself is a light and delightful romp with a somber message for designers: Our occupation may not be the highest-paying profession, but our power and influence has increased and with it our responsibility. This book isn’t just for designers, it’s for anyone interested in design and its role in the world. A world in dire need of help—help we can all provide by the choices we make and ways we behave.

Designers love to make things, it’s time to make change.

To take the Do Good Pledge, please visit the Do Good Design microsite at www.davidberman.com/dogood

All photos copyright David Berman. All rights reserved

We’ve used FunctionFox‘s TimeFox web-based time and project management tools for years and love it. Their new TimeFox Premier release has added handy functionality such as task management, to-do lists, calendar and scheduling tools, timeline overview, project blogs, email alerts and iCal integration—things we’d been hoping and asking for for sometime.

But that’s not what this post is about.

FunctionFox also regularly publishes a great newsletter and resource centre on their site containing terrific articles about issues creative professionals and firms face on a daily basis. For example, they recently posted an article entitled Balancing Your Business by Heather West that examines issues such as how many clients should you serve? In what categories? Or where?

As a small, but growing agency ourselves, we find we need to regularly re-evaluate our client mix and clarify our understanding of who our ideal clients are. It can be tough, but deciding when its time say no to some clients and good bye to others is a crucial step in growing your business and focussing on what you’re good at, what makes you happy and what makes you profit. This informative article shares some wisdom on this important topic that we should all take to heart—I know I do.

This afternoon, I read David Pogue’s review of a new phone offering, the Shadow, designed and sold by T-Mobile in the US.

The review starts normally enough, praising the phone’s physical shape and layout, hard controls and aesthetics. It then describes the enormous list of features the Shadow has: WiFi, voice dialing, Bluetooth, stereo audio output…

But then Pogue gets into the phone’s software, built on Windows Mobile 6 which he succinctly describes as “a mess.” He describes the dozens of taps required to make the phone go, the wait times between screens (wait times on a phone!?…), bad navigation, hidden menu choices of important items, counter-intuitive functionality…in short, says that “it’s a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.”

The review is clever and cuts to the heart of the matter.

So why does this matter to me?

Because I’ve been reading Getting Real, by 37signals. And one of the things they hammer home is that it’s better to deliver half a product than a half-assed product. They argue that leaving features out in favour of delivering something simple, smart and coherent is critical. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Get a few things right.

I think that the Shadow phone Pogue describes is the sort of fully-featured, half-assed product 37signals had in mind. It’s loaded with everything a user could want and a lot more, but its navigation is so dreadful that it’s likely to be impossible for them to find what they are after, let alone use it. Whether this is the fault of the software built on Microsoft’s platform or of the platform itself…well, I’ll let you decide once you’ve read the review and handled the phone.

Now, consider Apple or Palm products for a minute…

Palm (and later, Handspring, then Palm again), for all its faults, for an operating system and products that some have described as “stale” in recent years, got it more or less right the first time around: deliver something that works as a phone, syncs perfectly every single time, and delivers single button access to the four major functions. To do this, they dumped a lot of functionality and kept things simple: no multi-threaded operating system, heck, there isn’t even a “Quit” button in most Palm applications. Palm explicitly told its developers that they shouldn’t use one, that they didn’t need one. They told developers to keep important, frequently used things on top, one click away, put less important things in menus or secondary screens.

And Apple’s products: plug in an iPod and it syncs. There’s no button to push, it just happens. Plug in a camera, iPhoto starts. Simple…not simplistic…just simple and smart.

The complaints about the iPhone have been loud and long – that it lacks features that are “obvious” like GPS, no flash on the camera, no picture messages, no file organiser, no Flash support. I can’t help but wonder if Apple chose to leave all these out to make sure they delivered a phone with half the features, fully realised, instead of a fully featured, half-assed phone.

You can stack complexity on Apple’s products; witness the number of developers running MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Subversion or a hat box full of excellent development environments that find a happy home on OS X. But that’s not where you start with Apple; you start with Safari and Mail, iPhoto and iTunes, simple, smart applications.

You’ve seen lots of terrible software and bad interfaces, as have I. I confess to having a very personal beef with an LCD display in the light and fan control in an overhead stove vent (“…Light…is…off…”). So there is no shortage of examples for the issues raised in Getting Real. But the clash between the sleek simplicity of this phone’s hardware and the transcendental awfulness of the its software really got my attention.

Perhaps simplicity is what separates passing fetishes from disruptive technology; witness Facebook, My Space, iPod, GMail, Flickr and others. I also think that this might be what’s driving the market away from Microsoft Vista. Start with the fact that you have to choose which version of Vista to use. We don’t want to think about versions, antivirus, antispyware, firewalls. We don’t want to play the whack-a-mole game with the interface. We don’t want to think about the interface. Rightly or wrongly, we want appliances — plug it in, insert bread, push the lever, wait, and toast pops out.

Thanks to Mark and Amanda for putting Getting Real on my radar.

It’s common knowledge (among those who know me) that I love Cuba. My wife and I were married there. I may not entirely agree with their politics, but the Cuban people are amazing—perhaps the warmest and most enjoyable culture I’ve encountered in my travels. To visit Havana is an adventure in history, politics, architecture, music, food, drinks and language. If you haven’t been, go.

In the past few years, my role with GDC has happily collided with my love of Cuba, first with the sold out Colours of Cuba holiday fiesta party we hosted in 2005, then the Shared Dreams Cuban design exhibit we were able to bring to Vancouver in 2006. Now, I am again fortunate to be able to travel back to Cuba as part of a small delegation of GDC designers to the Icograda World Design Congress being hosted in Havana October 20–26, 2007. We’re also bringing with us two deserving young GDC student members selected from an impressive field of entries to expose these young designers not only to the diverse Cuban design scene, but to the international design landscape early in their career.

A GDC colleague of mine, Robert Peters of Winnipeg’s Circle Design, is also a fan of Cuba and has made numerous trips there, studying their culture and design community. He recently published a wonderful and well-researched article in Communication Arts called Cuba Si! about life, history and politics on the embargoed archipelago and their impact on the design community. Peters himself is an inspirational Canadian design leader—there’s a great interview with Robert Peters on NetDiver if you’d like to learn more about his personal history and perspectives.

William Gibson’s stretched stooped figure curls over book and microphone under yellow lights that hang like a field of beauty salon hair dryers before an unlit neon sign tracing out the words Studio One on a wall deep within the bowels of the CBC. This was the setting for the latest installment of CBC’s Studio One Book Club. Gibson has just returned from touring in the States and Europe, hitting a dozen cities in twice as many days while promoting his new novel, Spook Country. He is honed at this point. Listening to him read, you realize that this is how his writing is best taken in. He reads like a jazz musician plays his horn, echoing Kerouac and, of course, Burroughs in the way that the words fall into punched syncopated rhythms, sentences building into what has been described by one reviewer as “miniature aesthetic jolts”.

He will tell us later that the part of the brain that writes fiction is also the part that reads it, that in fact “writing and reading are two halves of the same activity”, that the exercise of reading a book is as active a part of the process as the writing. Only upon doing so, when the words of the writer project their world onto the back of the reader’s skull is “arch of the text” successfully completed.

So went the discussion at tonight’s CBC Book Club, with Gibson delivering poignant, often comic takes on how Google has replaced our memories, the inevitability of blended reality and the “complications” of sci fi, all the while riddled with deep, cerebral observations on the writing process. You got a sense that writing for Gibson — if not for all writers — is an act of discovery. “My own experience with creativity,” he tells us, “is that it is incremental.” The development of a character will begin simply as a point of view, a camera angle. Often characters are not so much created as they simply show up on the scene with their own demands and opinions so that all the writer can really do is try to “keep them on topic”.

He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different time zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I. In fact, as he continues talking, you come to understand his view of the human race as something that has evolved well past nature, that our present “natural state” is more cyborg than animal. Gibson seemed to mark the point of no return down this path as the dawn of broadcast television: “We still have no idea what the impact of broadcast television has had on us and it is pretty much a dead medium”. But none of this is to be interpreted as a pessimistic world view; a writer like Gibson has a tendency to remain agnostic on most accounts:

“I’m kind of OK with where we are,” he says with a smile. “It’s interesting.”

NOTE: A podcast of last night’s Book Club will be available for download on Wednesday, Sept 19th at Worlds at Large. Also, Part One of the CBC Radio Studio One Book Club with William Gibson will broadcast on North By Northwest Saturday September 15, between 8 and 9 am on CBC Radio One (690 on the AM dial in Metro Vancouver).  Part Two will broadcast the following Saturday September 22, same time, same place.   You can also stream live from www.cbc.ca/bc  on Radio One Pacific Time.  After being broadcast both parts will be archived on www.cbc.ca/bc/bookclub.

Read an excerpt from William Gibson’s novel Spook Country here.

It’s certainly no secret that we’re huge fans of William Gibson around here. Well-worn copies of his books Pattern Recoginition, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties and Neuromancer are found on our bookshelves. And we jump on any chance to hear him live and chat with this cool Vancouverite.

On September 6th, CBC’s Studio One Book Club will present Gibson  in person, who will do a reading from his new novel Spook Country. In 2003, he captivated a packed room by reading from Pattern Recognition and you can listen to that reading here. To see him for yourself, email an explanation why you would like to be in the live studio audience. See you there!

I’ve always appreciated defined methodologies and well documented processes with steps, procedures and documentation. It’s long been an accepted approach to developing design or technology solutions. And nowhere has this been more true than with web and software development. But these days, with Agile Programming and Open Source Communities combined with the mind-boggling rate of software change, is there a better way to develop web apps? Jason Fried and 37signals certainly thinks so and calls it Getting Real.

It’s not a technical Bible filled with techno-babble at all. On the contrary, Getting Real is more of a Coles Notes guide filled with common sense rules for building smarter, faster and better ways to build successful web applications. A fast read with good insights into how 37signals developed their products and advice how that can be applied to your own methodology—whether you’re a programmer, designer, project manager, entrepreneur, marketer or even just someone with a really great idea.

The book is written by the brilliant crew at 37signals, who know a thing or two about developing, launching and supporting web applictions, having created the popular Basecamp project management app, Campfire group chat, Highrise CRM, Backpack info organizer, Writeboard collaborative writing tool, Ta-Da Lists, Ruby on Rails web application framework and Signal vs. Noise blog. Originally a design firm in Chicago, 37signals now maintain their own products and don’t take on any design clients—they are their own client! How great is that?

This isn’t a textbook, it’s more like a manifesto-style expression of the philosophies behind 37signals’ team and workflow. It’s written in layperson language that non-coders can understand and is filled with strong opinions. At times I found myself mildly shocked—even mildly offended—by the almost flippant tone toward process and protocols, but for the most part I was releived someone I respected was finally said these things publicly. This book is the antithesis of behemoth reads, such as Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions (also an excellent read for web designers), but no less important. Getting Real challenges paradigms, blew apart old preconceptions and was quite fun to read, leading me to often think about my own design firm, inspired to apply the philosophies to our web development processes.

Read it. You won’t be disappointed.

[kudos to my buddy Tyler for the heads up on this great resource]