As someone who graduated from a very tough design program, Jack Moffett’s advice on disowning design rings true:

It can be devastating to have a project that you spent a lot of time on and thought was decent be ripped to shreds by your professor and peers. It is, however, a necessary experience. One must not only learn to accept it, but embrace it—welcome it, knowing that it will make the end result better. To do this, you have to disown the work, and see it as something other than yours.

On a slightly exaggerated level it calls to mind Alec Baldwin’s epic scene in Glengarry Glen Ross:

You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this — how can you take the abuse you get on a sit?! You don’t like it — leave.

When ideas do happen, it is not by accident. What separates creative people who make their ideas happen from the constant dreamers? Perhaps we all have an obligation to show our ideas some respect. Behance is partnering with Cool Hunting to host “99%”: a conference that focuses less on inspiration, and more on how idea generation and organization come together to make ideas happen.

– from the 99% Conference

As much as I think some conferences are important to go to, I can’t go to them all.
I learned about the 99% Conference only a few days ago. It looked interesting – although I wasn’t down for $490 per ticket (whether or not my company was paying).
The good news is we have people like Tina Roth Eisenberg always online and in attendance at these events. Now I can grab some of the nuggets of knowledge she mined and posted:
99% | Cheryl Dorsey
99% | Ji Lee
99% | Seth Godin

Amazon releasing a Kindle application for the iPhone was a very smart move. Like a lot of the news I’m reading today, I’m happy to see Amazon make this move and not try to wall off other devices. While it’s not going to replace the Kindle 1.0 my wife bought me for Christmas, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to read e-books I bought from Amazon on my iPhone.

Now some of you are thinking right now, ‘But Mike – you don’t seem to have any problem with your beloved Apple and their gated community of iPhone applications? Why aren’t you demanding the same openness Amazon is showing with its Kindle app from Apple and its iPhone?”. Ah – but I’m a proponent of the content being open, not the platform. Amazon is selling media files for the Kindle (books, magazines), the same way Apple is selling media files in iTunes (music), and if you remember, Apple didn’t want DRM on their music, the record executives insisted on it because we’re all nasty little thieves. Google made the same move with Google Docs publishing out to standard (albeit Microsoft proprietary) formats like .doc and .ppt instead of inventing its own.

With each succeeding year, it becomes more and more clear why Amazon isn’t just a website that sells stuff, they’re clearly a company focused on innovation.

So Khoi Vihn, over on his blog, Subtraction, has a post about design magazines and how he perceives – and inevitably handles them differently than the beat-up copy of the New Yorker in his bag.
With regard to publications such as Eye and Print:

It’s taken me years of subscribing to these magazines or buying them on newsstands to finally admit to myself that, more often than not, they sit on my desk upon arrival and don’t get read. Whether consciously or subconsciously, I consider them to be objects to be stored and protected from the ravages of reading.

This calls to mind one of my favorite quotes, from the book, The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he
does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless
thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

My advice to Mr. Vihn is to do his best to get over his phobia of using magazines. I’m not saying he needs to go as far as to dog ear the pages, but use them, break them in like a good baseball mitt. Believe it or not, the books and magazines I’ve knocked around a bit tend gain more value to me than the museum pieces I haven’t touched for years.
I feel the same way about electronics. The more you try to keep them scratch-free and perfect, the more upset you’ll be when they get scratches, nicks and dings (I’ve written about this before).

I saw this in Borders during my trip to SF.
Allen Ginsberg’s collected poems next to a biography of Backstreet Boy Lance Bass. Yeah. Ok. I guess it’s democratic – all books are equal and living peacefully together, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t almost throw up in my mouth when I saw it.

Here’s a few articles I ran across that kind of strike a cord with me, and in some cases that I both identify with and find funny in their attempt to define something they don’t understand – the youth now entering the workforce.
Attracting the twentysomething worker (Fortune)
This article starts out sounds like an out-of-touch parent:

Nearly every businessperson over 30 has done it: sat in his office after a staff meeting and – reflecting upon the 25-year-old colleague with two tattoos, a piercing, no watch and a shameless propensity for chatting up the boss – wondered, What is with that guy?!

…but it also makes some valid points as it tries to find its way:

No one joins a company hoping to do the same job forever. But these days even your neighborhood bartender or barista aspires to own the place someday. What’s more, the ties that have bound members of this age group to jobs in the past – spouse, kids, mortgage – are today often little more than glimmers in their parents’ eyes. So if getting Gen Yers to join a company is a challenge, getting them to stay is even harder.
The key is the same one their parents have used their whole lives – loving, encouraging and rewarding them. What that amounts to in corporate terms is a support network, work that challenges more than it bores, and feedback. “The loyalty of twentysomethings is really based on the relationships they have with those directly above them,” says Dorsey, the “Reality Check” author. “There’s a perception among management that those relationships shouldn’t be too personal, but that’s how we know they care about us.”

US Gasoline Prices Spur Telework (Slashdot.org)

The price of gasoline may finally be changing the way many people commute and communicate but the picture isn’t all rosy. Anecdotal evidence says teleworkers are growing rapidly as a direct result of the cost of driving.

Back in the Day (The New York Times Magazine)

For Ahmad, ‘back in the day’ was the period of his youth, not any specific historical period. . . . It’s not just used in the temporal sense, like ‘back in the days of Ronald Reagan, blacks was catchin’ hell!’ It can also be used to index a particular cultural value, such as modesty, integrity, as in ‘back in the day, we ain’t have no $150 Air Jordans — we wore whatever we got our hands on.’

Prior to reading this book, I had an idea of the intelligence behind Google, but I had no idea of the vision. While one may debate (ethically, morally, etc) the direction(s) Google is heading into with their technologies, you cannot argue their ingenuity.
While this book doesn’t delve too deeply, it does give you a solid understanding on how Google started, how they’ve changed over the years and what their work methodology is. It’s not the writing that makes this book so fun to read, it’s the story.
One thing I find truly amazing in design and scale is how Google created a new hardware/software synthesis – Googleware. It’s not just that Google has servers that process search requests from users – its the fact that they have hundreds of thousands of computers networked all across the world that are inter-connected and run on custom software they developed. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed their model for search engine computing, it was one-of-kind, a true innovation.
This is just one of many great pieces in the book, there are many more, and when taken all together, it kinda blows your mind. Blew mine at least.
Whether you need a motivational book for starting your business or you want to know more about the company behind that simple webpage with a logo and search box, its a great buy.
The Google Story on Amazon.com
The Google Story – Official Website

I had a dream this morning that I woke up to 1010 WINS on AM radio and there was a news report that O.J. Simpson had written a book and in it he talked about how he would have killed his wife and her boyfriend if he had done it.
The not-funny part is that I wake up to 1010 WINS every morning (because I haven’t bought a home docking unit for my Sirius radio) and I wasn’t dreaming.

Looks like Edward Tufte has a new book out, new to me at least:

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward R. Tufte

I’m proud to announce that my brother Mark has published his first book at the old age of 23. To say that the book is a collection of clever away messages wouldn’t be giving it justice. When Mark sent me a copy of book I thought it was hilarious, but then later he sent me the introduction and the conclusion and it made me realize that he really went beyond publishing a collection of things. Anyone can collect a bunch of stuff – He has a methodology behind his away messages and he empowers the reader to do the same.

Where There’s A Will, There’s Away… Messages:<br/ > A 21st Century Guide to the Art of Absence From the back cover:

Book Description What do Canadian Evangelicals, stupid pelicans, and the Associated Press have in common? All are all mercilessly lampooned for the sake of comedy in Where There’s a Will, There’s Away. Messages: A 21st Century Guide to the Art of Absence, a book that explores the limits of the Away Message as a vehicle for shameless amusement. Each page features a different Message, gathered into curious subcategories such as, “Fun with Advertising,” “It’s A Thinker,” and “Religious Shmreligious.” Prefaced by an analysis of the creative process and the author’s personal writing philosophy, this collection irreverently undermines the purpose of Away Messages while surveying the extent of the instant messaging phenomenon. Perfect for the college student and business executive alike, Where There’s A Will, There’s Away. Messages is THE book with a finger on the pulse of digital pop-culture. About the Author Mark Mulvey is a native of Long Valley, New Jersey and a graduate of Rutgers University where he earned his B.A. in Music and cultivated an affinity for satire and writing. This led to an outpouring of daily posts over the Internet. He currently lives and works in New York City.