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Less is a bore, as Robert Venturi once said. Minimalism has held a tight grip on the modern design industry for the past decade. We embraced the Apple aesthetic, extolled the logic of Helvetica, and worshiped at the church of Dieter Rams. It served its purpose, most recently, as a correctional to the excesses of the 1990s. But lately, as dispatches from Milan Design Week have shown, asceticism has given way to audacity. Every April, hundreds of thousands of people trek to Milan for its trendsetting design week, which ultimately influences the furniture, accessories, and textiles that make their way into homes, offices, hotels, restaurants, and virtually every other interior. This year the artistic influences ranged from ’30s art deco to ’70s eclecticism. Designers and manufacturers experimented with digital fabrication–like 3D knitting–and rediscovered artisanal craft techniques, like lacquering, metal casting, and jacquard weaving. But one thing was consistent: They’re embracing luxurious materials and textures, testing ambitious silhouettes, and piling on the details to yield products and furnishings that are visually enticing and emotionally evocative.In other words, minimalism is dead; maximalism has arrived....
Via Jeff Domansky
EMany of us bemoan the fact that creativity seems to be in decline in America.Research by KH Kim finds that the ability to think creatively is down among children and adults, which suggests they may be less able to come up with creative solutions to problems. This trend worries those in the business sector and beyond, who fear it could spell disaster for the future of innovation. But what if the biggest block to creativity isn’t the inability to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems, but our inability to accept and recognize them? This idea is at the heart of Jennifer Mueller’s new book, Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It. Mueller, a former Wharton School management professor, uncovers the way our minds react to uncertainty and how that can get in the way of embracing creativity. Her book aims to give us the tools we need to be more open to creative ideas and to communicate them to others....
Via Jeff Domansky
Creativity is undoubtedly an asset in the workplace, not only just for individuals but also for organizations. It's positively correlated with job performance, leadership potential, career satisfaction, and well-being. In fact, creative people, on average, have even been found to get a leg up in the dating pool. Still, no human quality is universally beneficial, and even a trait as appealing as creativity can have its downsides, particularly in certain work contexts. Here are a few reasons why being lesscreative at work might sometimes be a smart move.
Via The Learning Factor
Tributes to the work of Prince continue to appear, more than a week after the legendary songwriter and performer passed away at age 57. A recent story showcased Prince's strengths in the realms of creativity and talent development--and revealed how his passion for music was the key to his prolific career. Here are five highlights: 1. Prince had a work ethic born of passion. Even after he was a famous and rich superstar, Prince's work ethic never waned. "He'd come to rehearsal, work us, go work his band, then he'd go to his studio all night and record," is what James "Jimmy Jam" Harris, Prince's high school classmate and producer, tells EW. "Then the next night he'd come to rehearsal with a tape in his hand and he'd say, 'This is what I did last night.' And it'd be something like '1999,' and you're just like, 'Who does this?'" 2. Prince was a molder of young talent--a superboss. His proteges included Scottish singer Sheena Easton, dancer Carmen Electra, and his former drummer, Sheila E. "He loved working with women and helping them and encouraging them and saying, 'Hey, I think this would be a good song for you,'" Sheila E. tells EW. Like Miles Davis and other "superboss" artists, Prince prided himself on being the foundation of a talent tree, and watching his branches find their own paths.
Via The Learning Factor
Static marketing content is as outdated as print-only newspapers. Just as day-old newspapers become litter in the streets, static digital content is useless to the average reader. With such an inundation of static marketing content, one piece hardly stands out from others, meaning brands blend and ideas fade. Readers crave the dynamic nature of interactive digital content. An ion Interactive studymeasured the success and general feeling from marketers regarding interactive content. In terms of effectiveness, 93% of marketers say interactive media is great at educating buyers; 88% say it’s effective at differentiating brands, whereas static was found to be only 55% effective. Not convinced yet? Did you know that interactive content also drives 2X more conversions than static content? Despite these numbers, many marketers shy away from interactive content. It might be because it has a reputation for being expensive and labor-intensive. But that is an unfair reputation. Creating interactive elements is, in fact, easy, fast and even free....
Via Jeff Domansky
Useful for browsing or reading, this ebook describes 168 top websites from companies like Tumblr, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox, Bose, Coin, Reebok, and Nest, not to mention newcomers from around the world. Many examples are dissected and explained, along with 7 best practices for web design into 2016. This 158-page ebook provides anywhere from 18 to 31 examples of these popular and powerful techniques (along with analysis of what works well for the sites)....
Via Jeff Domansky
hDid your boss ever catch you covering an important memo with Escher-like scribbles? In high school, did your teacher call you out for drawing on the desk, your sneakers, your skin? Today, the doodle nay-sayers are being drowned out by a growing body of research and opinion that indicates that connects that seemingly distracted scribbling with greater info retention and creativity. Companies like Dell, and Zappos, and Disney are eager for employees to doodle on the job—they even pay consultants to help them.
"I can’t tell you how important it is to draw," says Sunni Brown, whose creative consultancy Sunni Brown Ink, teaches "applied visual thinking"— a.k.a doodling—to coders, designers, and even journalists. "It gets the neurons to fire and expands the mind." Just why and how this happens is the topic of Brown's recent book, The Doodle Revolution. Here, she shares her doodling "dos."
Via Jeff Domansky
If you’re reading this, you’re likely bathed in several channels of cell phone radiation at once. But while we can spot cell phone towers and antennae, the waves themselves remain invisible. Following up on a project to visualize what Wi-Fi might look like in cities, artist-researcher Nickolay Lamm has imagined what cell phone radiation would look like if emitted as waves of light. Lamm worked with eight academics and engineers to verify that the images we’re looking at are accurate representations of cell phone radiation. Like radio, cell phones rely on radio frequency waves, which emit low-energy radiation. Unlike ionizing radiation--released by higher-energy gamma rays, x-rays, and ultraviolet rays--exposure to cell phones’ non-ionizing radiation has not been proven to cause serious damage to living tissue
Via Jeff Domansky
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One of the most fun things to do in design is swirling the latest color trends into your work. Color is a fascinating topic, and even a generator that understands color theory has recently been invented. Because they mean different things, companies also actively use color in their brand designs to encourage feelings and behaviors from customers. However, in different cultures, color theory isn’t all black-and-white. In this delightful infographic, SilverDoor describes color associations of different cultures, adding contrast to the way you think. Telling a person from another part of the world that you’re “feeling blue” may mean something entirely different to them. Is your favorite color offensive to another culture? Find out in the infographic below....
Via Jeff Domansky
If you live in America, chances are you've heard (or used) the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
Most of us know it means, essentially, that you shouldn't make all your plans based on one possible thing happening. But it's kind of a weird phrase, right? Have you ever stopped to wonder where it originated?
Its use in print has been traced to the novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 1600s, although it possibly was mistranslated to an inexact English idiom from the original and may have other roots in Italian phrases.
Different cultures around the world all have their own similar sayings — proverbs, if you will — that make sense to those who've grown up speaking the language but sound downright odd to anyone who hasn't.
James Chapman is fascinated by these sayings and how they translate across languages and cultures....
Via Jeff Domansky
On June 28, Brian Eno will launch a new video experience for the title track of his latest album The Ship, which was released in April. What's different about this music video is, according to Eno, it isn't really a music video at all, but rather a visual experience informed by and created with artificial intelligence.
"Just as I'm excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and new technologies, I'm so incredibly and numbingly bored with videos and the traditional music videos, that I just couldn't imagine wanting to do that," said Eno, on stage at Cannes Lions. "So really, this is an attempt to say, is there some other way we can do this thing?"...
Via Jeff Domansky
In order to arrange your design, you need a place to start. Backgrounds are the foundation of your graphics — it helps pave the path to forming a successful composition. Textures and colors help create depth and contrast, allowing your graphics to stand out and get noticed. Well composed images can help create space for you to overlay text, while visually communicating your message at the same time. Using a background can help give your designs more context and provide a visual element to help support your content. Bonus: We’ve designed most of the images in this article as templates for you to personalize! To use them for your own stuff, just click them and they’ll be ready to edit in your Canva account (No Canva? It’s free!).
Via Jeff Domansky
Andy Martin spent much of the past year with author Lee Child as he wrote the 20th novel in his Jack Reacher series. Here he describes Child’s bold approach to writing. Nobody really believes him when he says it. And in the end I guess it is unprovable. But I can put my hand on heart and say, having been there, and watched him at work, that Lee Child is fundamentally clueless when he starts writing. He really is. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And the odd thing is he likes it that way. The question is: Why? I mean, most of us like to have some kind of idea where we are heading, roughly, a hypothesis at least to guide us, even if we are not sticking maps on the wall and suchlike. Whereas he, in contrast, embraces the feeling of just falling off a cliff into the void and relying on some kind of miraculous soft landing. Of course he is not totally tabula rasa. Because he, and I, had a fair idea that the name Jack Reacher was going to come up somewhere in this, his 20th novel in the series....
Via Jeff Domansky
Metaphor is not the sole preserve of Shakespearean scholarship or high literary endeavour but has governed how we think about and describe our daily lives for centuries, according to researchers at Glasgow University. Experts have now created the world’s first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD. While it is impossible to pinpoint the oldest use of metaphor in English, because some may have been adopted from earlier languages such as Germanic, the map reveals that the still popular link between sheep and timidity dates back to Old English. Likewise, we do not always recognise modern use of metaphor: for example, the word “comprehend” comes from Latin, where it meant to physically grasp an object. The three-year-long project to map the use of metaphor across the entire history of the English language, undertaken by researchers at the School of Critical Studies, was based on data contained in the Historical Thesaurus of English, which spans 13 centuries....
Via Jeff Domansky
This eight minute song is a beautiful combination of arranged harmonies, rhythms and bass lines and thus helps to slow the heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress. The song features guitar, piano and electronic samples of natural soundscapes. A study was conducted on 40 women, who were connected to sensors and had been given challenging puzzles to complete against the clock in order to induce a level of stress. Different songs were then played, to test their heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and brain activity. The results showed that the song Weightless was 11 per cent more relaxing than any other song and even caused drowsiness among women in the lab.
It induced a 65 per cent reduction in overall anxiety and brought them to a level 35 per cent lower than their usual resting rates.
Via Jeff Domansky
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![Design School's Ultimate Guide to Designing With Backgrounds [With Ready-to-Use Templates] | Writing about Life in the digital age | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/eUy0foC9bWwH53Mpp35bKjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Ch-ch-changes. Design keeps evolving and is the end of minimalism near?