A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower when the doorbell rings. The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs.

When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next door neighbor. Before she says a word, Bob says, “I’ll give you $800 dollars to drop that towel.”

After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob. After a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 dollars and leaves. The woman wraps back up in the towel and goes
back upstairs. When she get to the bathroom, her husband asks, “Who was that?”

“It was Bob the next door neighbor” she replies. Read more…

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.

Take a good look at this picture. What do you see? Do you see appetizing raisins, cashews and peanuts? Is your mouth watering with this enticing imagery? Or does it look like a garbled mess of shapes that look like the contents of a Death Star trash compactor?

This “First Class Snacks” image that I took at Logan Airport in Boston last week can tech us an important lesson in scale. Some things in this world should not be magnified larger than life. What makes Cashews delicious is not the shape or the texture. It is the taste. Save the beautiful food close ups for eggs and strawberries.

This enlargement of first class snacks just makes this look disgusting. When thinking about the scale in which you represent a product or service, keep in mind what make that product appealing in the first place and lead with its strengths.

Ivan from CreativeBits posted links to over 300 JPGs that would be incredibly sueful for those working on identity design. Many times, it is important to give an idea of how a new logo or mark would look like on various products, surfaces, and corporate gifts.

This collection, downloaded from diegomattei, contains over 300 JPGs primed for your new identity design. Stuff like billboards, stationery programs, and wine bottles are all there. All you have to do is drop in your design in Photoshop, apply the Multiple Layer option and voila! Read more about it here.

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.