If you haven’t seen this before, it is worth a look. J.J. Abrams the creator of LOST among other things speaks at TED about “The Mystery Box”. This theme is quite applicable to the digital world and most specifically our roles in social media. With the so called “democritization of technology” everyone has access to tools to do fantastic things. But what will you do with those tools is what differentiates us.

I hope this inspires you as much as it did me.

Last week I was chatting with two of my colleagues: THE Michael Schneider and Doug Gould. The topic of the conversation was the temporary nature of online creation. Doug talked about how the nature of online creation prevents people from actually holding it in their hands or displaying it on their shelf. Will magazines or books or newspapers ever go away? Of course not. But more and more , technology is enabling people to bring things with them digitally.

Change happens. And creative people learn to adapt to the new parameters. Take album cover art for example. There was quite a divide at the dawn of compact discs where fans of the large format art on album covers were upset with the small format of CD jewel cases. But people adapted. Now you can find some pretty cool and innovative ways that designers have made CD covers just as precious (albeit smaller) as their vinyl counterparts. Read more…

I recently read a very well-writen post on the I Love Typography Blog called, “On Choosing Type”. It is a great course for those studying typography and design and for people like me, a great refresher in why I love design so much in the first place.

Very frequently, we as working designers have no choice in typefaces for our clients. So often, we default to what we know looks clean and is fool-proof. But every so often, you may have the opportunity to make some choices. Gone are the days of choosing typefaces strictly for what looks great on paper. We now need to think about screen options big and small. In fact, with the birth of mobile marketing, we need to rethink what is legible for an entirely new screen size.

The first paragraph of this article struck a huge chord with me: “Typography is not a science. Typography is an art. There are those who’d like to ‘scientificize’; those who believe that a large enough sample of data will somehow elicit good typography. However, this sausage-machine mentality will only ever produce sausages. That typography and choosing type is not a science trammeled by axioms and rules is a cause to rejoice.”

I encourage anyone who creates or evaluates creative to take a trip over to the I Love Typography Blog and read more.

Inspiration comes in all forms. Even Hamburgers bombing Sushi.

There is order in nature and order in everything we do and it is called math. In order to prevent totally revealing how nerdy I really am, I must say that math has always influenced my art.

Whether it is the Golden Section, Fibonacci’s Sequence, or this Moebius Transformation (below), math can create order in grids, color sequences, type hierarchy, and brand structure. As a creative, where do you find inspiration and order?

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY[/youtube]