Smarter Creativity

The Week's Links: May 17, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

All the links posted on social networks this week:

These Stunning Photos Show Miraculous Plane Crashes Where No One Died ➞
This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She's a Girl) ➞
The 10-Year-Old Inventor and the World's Cutest Patent Drawing ➞
Shakespeare 'first great writer entrepreneur' ➞
BBC: The arts get less than .1% of public spending but deliver four times that in gross domestic product, report says. ➞
Is Massively Open Online Education A Threat Or A Blessing? ➞
50 Jaw-Dropping Examples Of Street Art From Around The World ➞
Richard Branson Wants You To Be Good ◉
Creative Review names Bloomberg Businessweek Design Studio of the Year ➞
Ballet students from 18 international schools perform together via livestream at Toronto conference ➞
A Focus on Distraction ➞
Masterpiece In A Mug: Japanese Latte Art Will Perk You Up ➞
The robots speak! Daft Punk On 'The Soul That A Musician Can Bring' : NPR ➞
Lessons in Creativity. ➞
Two Dozen 15,000-Year-Old Words We Still Use Today ➞
Apple : Lincoln Center :: Google : Broadway ◉
5 Lessons From Warren Buffett's Office Hours ➞
If you want to see which kids will grow up to be the most successful adults, visit their second-grade classroom. ➞
Steven Heller: Do Good Logos Need to Actually, You Know, Look Good? ➞
The Design That Conquered Google ◉
A brief history of admission tickets. ➞
The true value of a live performance audience. ➞
Artists behind iconic Houston sculpture sue Honda over ad claiming the ad stole design. ➞
The Most Important Details From Google I/O So Far ➞
A year inside The Australian Ballet: Boys' Day, Episode 4 ◉
Adobe Explores the Future of Responsive Digital Layout with National Geographic Content ➞
Lost Lands Found by Scientists ➞
Street Art Across The Globe: The Best Cities In The World For Graffiti And Urban Art ➞
Ha: 38 Signs You’ve Been in Advertising Agencies Too Long ➞
Amazing: National Geographic Traveler Magazine 2013 Photo Contest ➞
How to Spot a Weak Argument ◉
YouTube Launches Trend Map To Show Who's Watching What Where ➞
Creativity Top 5: Week of May 13, 2013 ◉
Games Before Bed Will Help Kids Sleep Better ➞
Elephants Communicate in Sophisticated Sign Language, Researchers Say ➞
How to Listen When Someone Is Venting ➞
Project Re:Brief, the documentary ◉
Mario Batali on digital strategy: How a Restaurant Menu Is Like a Website ➞
Rock’n’roll + Typography = Rock That Font ➞
Cheap Nanotech Filter Clears Hazardous Microbes and Chemicals from Drinking Water ➞
The Story Behind 'This Is Water'. Without permission, video agency created an amazing homage to David Foster Wallace ➞
A Few Rare People Hallucinate Musical Scores ➞
Eight New Things We've Learned About Music ➞
What Countries Around The World Eat For Breakfast ➞
Joi Ito’s Trends to Watch in 2013 ➞
The Scientific 7-Minute Workout ➞
Businessweek has a fantastic profile of Reed Hastings and the Netflix turnaround from a year ago. ➞
It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories ◉
Space Is Now a Reality TV Show. A very good reality show. ➞
10 Great Quotes From The Great Gatsby ➞
Oreo's New "Wonderfilled" Campaign Wants to Sap the Cynicism Out of Your Day ➞
Fast Company's The 100 Most Creative People 2013. Topping the list, Nate Silver. ➞
Charlie Rose interviews 'Bill Gates 2.0' on 60 Minutes: the man after Microsoft ➞
Fmr. Frog Design Strategist: What We Need For Wearable Computing To Work ➞
The Quest For Perfection ◉
Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’ ➞
The Invention of David Bowie by Ian Buruma: The New York Review of Books ➞
Around the World in 80 Instagrams ➞
The illusion of simplicity: photographer Peter Belanger on shooting for Apple ➞
Two.js is a two-dimensional drawing api geared towards modern web browsers. ➞
Molecules in the brain trigger aging. Activity in the hypothalamus affects cognitive and physical decline. ➞
Creative People Say No ◉
The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI ➞
What Is Nothing? A Mind-Bending Debate about the Universe Moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson ➞
The 100 Most Creative People In Business ➞
Merlin Mann: Broken Meetings (And How You'll Fix Them) ◉
Sir Ken Robinson: 10 talks on education ➞
Our Very Normal Solar System Isn't Normal Anymore ➞
Theater's Expiring Subscription Model ➞
Watch ABC app: First live stream by broadcaster ➞
Merrill Brockway, Producer of TV’s ‘Dance in America,’ Dies at 90 ➞
iPad apps for young coders ➞
Infographic: Majority Of Earth’s Population Resides In This One Relatively Small Circle ➞
The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI ➞
Five overlooked abilities of the Finder's Path Bar ➞
Why Is Facebook Blue? The Science Behind Colors In Marketing ➞
A Clever iPad App Gets Kids Drawing On Paper Again ➞
Better way to add Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and any other external scripts ➞
Colours: The colors of the web. ➞
MIT Can Put A Digital Interface On Any Object ➞
Type design inspiration: Inside the evolution of typography at Monotype ➞
Behind The Scenes Shots From Popular Movies ➞
How I Work: IDEO's Duane Bray On Creating Great Digital Experiences ➞
27 Bits of Wisdom from 2012 Commencement Addresses ➞
The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing ➞
How to Really Understand Someone Else's Point of View - Mark Goulston and John Ullmen ➞
José Luis Antúnez: What is Design? ➞
Can you tell a four-word story? ➞
The Economist explains: How does China censor the internet? ➞
The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013 ➞
What happens to our brains when we have stage fright: The science of public speaking ➞
25 Gorgeous Typographic Experiments ➞
10 Display Faces that Digital Forgot ➞
Study: Teenagers Feel More Entitled Than Ever. Teens are less willing than ever to work hard ➞
Bringing Backstage Onstage with Social Media ➞
Are you scaring your customers with how you talk about your art? ➞
Steven Soderbergh on the state of cinema. ➞
Meet A Modern-Day Master Of The Classic Neon Sign ➞
Why "The Great Gatsby" Endures: The New Yorker ➞
Carl Sagan’s Undergrad Reading List: 40 Essential Texts for a Well-Rounded Thinker ➞
Google teams up with the RSC to create Shakespeare for the internet age ➞
What makes The Great Gatsby great? ➞
So clever: An Ingenious Cookbook Uses Infographics Instead Of Words ➞
Scientists Figure Out What You See While You're Dreaming ➞

Recommended This Week:

American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition: A Novel By Neil Gaiman
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch By Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett
The Sparrow: A Novel By Mary Doria Russell
Then We Came to the End: A Novel By Joshua Ferris
Tree of Codes By Jonathan Safran Foer

Apple : Lincoln Center :: Google : Broadway

Antonio Ortiz — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:30:21 +0000

Google I/O is currently going on and Apple's WWDC is around the corner. This has led to many conversations between my developer and tech friends about which one is better, which one is moving ahead and which one is staying behind, and on and on.

For me Apple is to Lincoln Center as Google is to Broadway.

They both offer a multitude of products in various forms. They both have specific visions and financial goals. They both offer merchandise that intrigues me and makes me want to find out more. When they are good I seek them. But I definitely gravitate towards one and check it out first and more often because it is more in tune to what matters to me and what I enjoy.

Updated: Jed Bernstein, who led Broadway’s trade group, will take over as president of the performing arts center next January.

The Design That Conquered Google

Antonio Ortiz — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:00:56 +0000

Matt Buchanan, The New Yorker:

In April, 2011, the Google co-founder Larry Page took over as C.E.O. Besides moving to streamline Google’s increasingly sprawling scope as a company, he immediately launched Project Kennedy, an initiative to give all of Google’s products a more consistent look, so everything would be easier to use.

...

Nearly a year later, the crisp design cues of Google Now and the Kennedy Project have swept across Google, and cards are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users. In other words, a card will be the atomic unit of information display across all of Google. In addition to Now and Google’s Glass wearable computer—where all information is displayed as a card—they have started appearing across a multitude of Google's services and applications, like the Play Store, Gmail on iOS, and mobile search and Plus, to name a few. And today, cards are invading two of Google’s most important products outside of search, with a dramatic design overhaul of both Maps and its Plus social network. That change might seem minor in some ways, but there are profound implications in the proliferation of cards, given that they will become the way that billions of people consume and digest bits of information they’re seeking from Google over the next few years.

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How to Spot a Weak Argument

Antonio Ortiz — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

A brief excerpt from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett:

When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!

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Creativity Top 5: Week of May 13, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

At number 5 the "I wish my son had cancer" campaign is potent and heartbreaking.

It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories

Antonio Ortiz — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Jag Bhalla for Scientific American:

It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival.
Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored universally in healthy children. Every culture bathes their children in stories to explain how the world works and to engage and educate their emotions. Perhaps story patterns could be considered another higher layer of language. A sort of meta-grammar shaped by and shaping conventions of character types, plots, and social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.

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Creative People Say No

Antonio Ortiz — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Kevin Ashton on Medium:

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.
Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.

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The Week's Links: May 10, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:45:25 +0000

All the links posted on social networks this week:

Nikola Tesla's Amazing Predictions for the 21st Century ➞
The Newspaper of Tomorrow: 11 Predictions from Yesteryear ➞
The Secret to a Long Life May Be Deep Inside Your Brain ➞
Eight New Things We've Learned About Music ➞
10 New Things We Know About Food and Diets ➞
Five Innovative Technologies that Bring Energy to the Developing World ➞
Pop Culture Through The Lens Of Nostalgia: The Evolution Of 8-Bit Art ◉
Five Surprising Facts About the Common Cold ➞
Scientists Figure Out What You See While You're Dreaming ➞
So clever: An Ingenious Cookbook Uses Infographics Instead Of Words ➞
'Vogue,' 'Wired' to Launch Online TV Channels This Month ➞
How To Be Gracious, And Why ◉
The Story Behind the QWERTY Keyboard ➞
Michael Benson's Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System ➞
The Vast World Of Lego Art ◉
The Strange Beauty of David Maisel's Aerial Photographs ➞
The Earliest Stop Motion Animations are Weirdly Wonderful ➞
Can Cloning Giant Redwoods Save the Planet? ➞
Ancient Maya Were Cultural Sponges ➞
The Center of the Earth Is as Hot as the Sun ➞
Slaves To The Algorithm ◉
The First LPs Weren’t for Music—They Were Audiobooks for the Blind ➞
This New Robot Has a Sense of Touch ➞
PBS Idea Channel: Are Hologram Tupac and Hologram Freddie Mercury Nostalgia or New Aesthetic? ◉
Saturn’s Mysterious Hexagon Is a Raging Hurricane ➞
It’s Crazy to Move a Hundred-Year-Old Tree, But This One Is Thriving ➞
Physicists Have Been Waiting For This Painfully Slow Experiment for Nearly 86 Years ➞
Check out today's fantastic Google Doodle celebrating the birthday of brilliant opening title designer Saul Bass. ➞
Where Are the Centers for Education Innovation? ➞
6 Influential Stop-Motion Movies From Ray Harryhausen (RIP) ➞
And now a few moments of joyful humanity, brought to you by Russian dash cams. ➞
Tribeca transmedia: The power of "Sandy Storylines" ➞
Creativity Top 5: Week of May 6, 2013 ◉
Inside the MIT Media Lab ◉
Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom on What Really Happened When Facebook Bought Instagram: Vanity Fair ➞
MIT Brain Scans Show That Entrepreneurs Really Do Think Different ➞
Typecast: How New Technology Is Reinventing Typography ➞
47 Top Typography Tools and Resources ➞
Adobe Abandons Its Creative Suite to Focus on Creative Cloud ➞
New York Times launches web-only documentaries with Retro Report ➞
Brand Thinking: Seth Godin, Dan Pink, and Other Mavens on How and Why We Define Ourselves Through Stuff ➞
Robert Krulwich On Becoming Yourself ◉
High Speed Photos of Flying Liquids by Manon Wethly ➞
Gorgeous: Incredibly Surreal Scenes Where Women Defy Gravity ➞
What do we talk about when we talk about the economic impact of the arts? ➞
Permission to Play: Let's Make Fixing Things Cool Again ➞
World's smallest movie: IBM uses individual atoms to make record-breaking short film of boy kicking football ➞
Some timely perspective: HERE IS TODAY ➞
Musicals are booming ◉
Good Science Fiction ◉
Michael Bierut: Typography, Modern Applications, and Timeless Communication Challenges ➞
The 15 Most Important Minutes Of The Work Week ➞
Tony Fadell: Building With Atoms, Electrons, Frustrations & Constraints ◉
How to Get More Done: The 1-3-5 Rule ➞
Why Kickstarter Can't Usurp the Hollywood Entertainment-Industrial Complex ➞
How Australia is transforming their libraries. ➞
How Coffee Influenced The Course Of History ➞
Why Caffeine In Coffee Is A Miracle Drug For The Tired ➞
WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Design. ➞
Life in the City Is Essentially One Giant Math Problem ➞
The 50 Most Perfectly Timed Photos Ever ➞
10 Beautiful Words About Love That Don’t Exist in English ➞
Who Was Mather? Meet the Lesser-Known Men Behind Famous Agency Names ➞
Meet The Accidental Designer Of The GitHub And Twitter Logos ➞
MIT Technology Review: Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface ➞
An Introduction To Programming Type Systems: Smashing Coding ➞
20 Amazing Outdoor Libraries and Bookstores From All Over the World ➞
Sir Ken Robinson: Why We Need to Reform Education Now ➞
Hermione Hoby spends an evening backstage with the unsung heroes of opera: the dressers ➞
What Happened To Opera? When you weren't looking… some things changed. ➞
TED Playlists: Words, words, words. Ten talks on the wonder of words. ➞
Secrets of the Most Successful College Students ➞
Amazon's bid for rights to sell secondhand ebooks ➞
For the First Time Ever, You Can Now Hear What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like - Technology ➞
NYTimes, Grantland and now Microsoft deliver a responsive essay: 88 Acres ➞
Well done BBH, well done: This Heartwarming Tale of Friendship out of BBH London is a Must-Watch for Parents: ➞
First NYTimes and now Grantland deliver a responsive essay: Out in the Great Alone ➞
Artificial Intelligence Is The New Uncanny Valley ➞
David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity ➞
How to Tell a Story with Data ➞
10 Secrets to Eye-Popping Package Designs ➞
An Exit Interview With the Man Who Transformed the Oxford English Dictionary ➞
How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built: A New Theory in 3D Animation ➞
The Abstraction Method of Problem Solving ➞

Recommended This Week:

Hallucinations By Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition By Oliver Sacks
The Business Side of Creativity: The Complete Guide to Running a Small Graphics Design or Communications Business (Third Updated Edition) By Cameron S. Foote
Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire By Bruce Nussbaum
Graphic Artist's Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines By Graphic Artists Guild

How To Be Gracious, And Why

Antonio Ortiz — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Esquire's Tom Chiarella:

Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not. Do not mistake mere manners for graciousness. Manners are rules. Helpful, yes. But graciousness reflects a state of being; it emanates from your inventory of self. Start with what you already possess.

...

Remember that the only representation of you, no matter what your station, is you — your presentation, your demeanor.

...

So listen. Be attentive to what people say. Respond, without interruption. You always have time. You own the time in which you live. You grant it to others without obligation. That is the gift of being gracious. The return — the payback, if you will — is the reputation you will quickly earn, the curiosity of others, the sense that people want to be in the room with you. The gracious man does not dwell on himself, but you can be confident that your reputation precedes you in everything you do and lingers long after you are finished. People will mark you for it. You will see it in their eyes. People trust the gracious man to care. The return comes in kind.

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Slaves To The Algorithm

Antonio Ortiz — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Intelligent Life magazine takes a look at the effects of algorithms in our everyday life:

Algorithms decide what we are recommended on Amazon, what films we are offered on Netflix. Sometimes, newspapers warn us of their creeping, insidious influence; they are the mysterious sciencey bit of the internet that makes us feel websites are stalking us—the software that looks at the e-mail you receive and tells the Facebook page you look at that, say, Pizza Hut should be the ad it shows you. Some of those newspaper warnings themselves come from algorithms. Crude programs already trawl news pages, summarise the results, and produce their own article, by-lined, in the case of Forbes magazine, "By Narrative Science".
...

An algorithm, at its most basic, is not a mysterious sciencey bit at all; it is simply a decision-making process. It is a flow chart, a computer program that can stretch to pages of code or is as simple as "If x is greater than y, then choose z".
What has changed is what algorithms are doing. The first algorithm was created in the ninth century by the Arabic scholar Al Khwarizami—from whose name the word is a corruption. Ever since, they have been mechanistic, rational procedures that interact with mechanistic, rational systems. Today, though, they are beginning to interact with humans. The advantage is obvious. Drawing in more data than any human ever could, they spot correlations that no human would. The drawbacks are only slowly becoming apparent.

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Creativity Top 5: Week of May 6, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:32:24 +0000

Stop motion atoms, that is all.

Inside the MIT Media Lab

Antonio Ortiz — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:30:09 +0000

Clive Cookson writing for the Financial Times delivers a great profile of the MIT Media Lab:

For 25 years or so after it opened in 1985, Media Lab focused on multimedia computing and communications – the interfaces between people and electronics – and it came up with important new technologies such as the electronic ink used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. Such research continues to thrive but Media Lab is spreading its academic wings to address broader social issues, says Joi Ito, who became director in 2011 after an unconventional career as an internet entrepreneur and social activist in the US and Japan.

...

“We want to be anti-disciplinary – which means filling in the white space between disciplines,” he says. “City Science is a great example of something that brings together work from many fields across the lab. When you bring in kids who are interested in architecture, design, transport, energy, urban gardening, mobility and big data, you get a different way of looking at things.”

Higher education is almost always about honing your skills and research into one specific area. Media Lab is about the opposite, the juxtaposition of skills.

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Musicals are booming

Antonio Ortiz — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

The Economist:

Musicals have odds like venture capital: only one in ten makes money, and two out of ten lose it all. The hits, however, are huge. “Cats” probably made a 3,500% return for its initial investors. Since it debuted in London 27 years ago “The Phantom of the Opera”, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, has grossed $5.6 billion worldwide, more than any film or television show.

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Good Science Fiction

Antonio Ortiz — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam" - Fredrik Pohl
— joanne mcneil(@jomc) May 4, 2013

More about Pohl. His books.

The Week's Links: May 3, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

All the links posted on social networks this week:

Muddy Colors: How I Make a Picture Book ➞
10 Practices from the Most Innovative Organizations ➞
Digital Public Library of America Launches with 2 Million Items ➞
Neuroscience Explores Why Humans Feel Empathy for Robots ➞
Best of Fluent 2012: /Reg(exp){2}lained/: Demystifying Regular Expressions ➞
Sleep: Everything You Need To Know ➞
Daily Rituals: A Guided Tour of Writers' and Artists' Creative Habits ➞
"This Is Coffee" A Vintage Film For Coffee Lovers ◉
Scientists Identify Neurons That Register Itch ➞
A Night at the Museum with the Smithsonian's Laser Cowboys ➞
Why Hewlett-Packard is hiring dancers ➞
Chili Peppers Do To Your Skin What Migraines Do To Your Brain ➞
The Film before The Film ◉
Read the book in one go, great intro to it here: How to Find Fulfilling Work ➞
Paul Miller: back online after a year without the internet ➞
Coffee: From Balzac to Beethoven, it has fueled artistic endeavor for centuries. ➞
The Mathematics of Planet Earth ➞
Ken Burns: A Great Story is 1+1=3 ◉
Gorgeous timelapse: MIDNIGHT BARCELONA ➞
Top 14 World Albums, Spring 2013 ➞
TED Playlists: How to tell a story ➞
When Will We See A Macklemore Or 50 Shades-Style Blockbuster--In Movies? ➞
Will we ever… understand why music makes us feel good? ➞
Sketchnoting 101: How To Create Awesome Visual Notes ➞
The Digital Public Library of America: a hub for books, made an API so anyone can build a reading room. ➞
How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future ➞
Creativity Top 5: Week of April 29, 2013 ◉
The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection ➞
A sperm whale’s head is actually an oversized nose ➞
10 Incredible Repurposed Train Stations ➞
Jonathan Harris On Reshaping Culture In The Digital Age ◉
A Brief History of the High Five ➞
Say It Out Loud: How David Sedaris Makes His Writing Better ➞
The 10 Fastest Growing Megacities In The World ➞
This Art Is Made From Food, But It's More Than Just Playing ➞
This Art Is All Made From A Newly Invented Kind Of Wood ➞
What Job Candidates Really Want: Meaningful Work ➞
Brain Puzzle: What is Perception? ➞
10 Inspiring Type Designers From A New Generation ➞
Get that tune out of your head ◉
The Future Of Opera Is An FX Extravaganza ➞
The Company That's Buying Up All the Key Pieces of the Online-News Ecosystem - Technology ➞
The Digital Public Library of America Opens its Doors ➞
Have Headphones Changed Your World? ◉
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hair ➞
The Story Of Superstorm Sandy Through The Eyes Of NYC's Digital First Responders ➞
Hopscotch: Coding for Kids ➞
How to Work with Creative People ➞
An important reminder that the universe has three spatial dimensions and is best appreciated with all three engaged. ➞
Click a few dots, and this program will try to guess your age. ➞
Amazing: Insects Caught Mid-Air With Laserbeam HD Camera Rig ➞
How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future ◉
Infographic: Plotting Comic Books' Rapid Takeover of Hollywood ➞
Intuition as the Basis for Creativity ➞
From Love To Bingo In 873 Images ◉
Michael Bierut: Typography, Modern Applications, and Timeless Communication Challenges ➞
Illustrations from a Victorian book on Magic (1897) ➞ /via @Coudal
How Sriracha was introduced to the US. ➞ /via @Coudal
More Than 50 Years Of Putting Kids' Creativity To The Test ➞
What 15,000 Years Of Cooking Fish Tells Us About Humanity ➞
Jill Bolte Taylor: 10 TED talks on human nature ➞
How Google Creative Lab Links Product to Stellar Storytelling ➞
TED-Ed: Who invented writing? - Matthew Winkler ➞
Fantastic: Revisiting the Original 1992 WIRED Media Kit ➞
Cool: Branding the Presidents of the United States ➞ /via @Coudal
Was Shakespeare a Humble Schoolmaster During His ‘Lost Years’? ➞
Andy Day: Documenting the high-flying world of parkour ➞
Some of these are terrifying: 11 of the Most Unusual Elevators ➞
The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses: Walter Benjamin's Timeless Advice on Writing ➞
The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens: Scientific American ➞
How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet ➞
Kickstarter for Surgery Lets You Help Those in Need ➞
My Video Gamer Is Smarter Than Your Honor Roll Student ➞
The greatness of the grilled cheese, explained. ➞
How One Family Helped Change the Way We Eat Ham ➞
Seven Counterintuitive Ways to Be Insanely Productive ➞
E-Book Subscriptions Are Coming ➞
Brain scans predict how much you'll pay for music ➞
In A Fragmented Cultureverse, Can Pop References Still Pop? ➞
CSS-Tricks: Slide In (as you scroll down) Boxes ➞
Design/UX: Transitional Interfaces ➞

Recommended This Week:

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes By Maria Konnikova
Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long By David Rock
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less By Barry Schwartz
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present By Eric Kandel
The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good By David J. Linden

The Film before The Film

Antonio Ortiz — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

“THE FILM before THE FILM” is a short documentary that traces the evolution of title design through the history of film. This short film was a research project at the BTK (Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule) that takes a look at pioneers like Saul Bass, Maurice Binder and Kyle Cooper by showing the transitions from early film credits to the inclusion of digital techniques, a resurgence of old-school style, and filmmakers' love of typography in space.

Add this one to the long list of favorite things related to opening title sequences.

Creativity Top 5: Week of April 29, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:30:00 +0000

The VW Beetle YouTube pre-roll ad skipper is so clever. The Boston Magazine May cover is very good.

Get that tune out of your head

Antonio Ortiz — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:30:37 +0000

Richard Grey, Science Correspondent, The Telegraph:

They are the songs you cannot get out of your head. Now scientists may have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop.

Researchers claim the best way to stopping the phenomenon, sometimes known as earworms – where snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain – is to solve some tricky anagrams.

This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, they say, allowing it to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts.

But they also warn not to try anything too difficult as those irritating melodies may wiggle their way back into your consciousness.

For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel may also do the trick.

Recently the 1812 Overture took over my mind. I have no idea how it got there, all I know is that for the rest of the day I had the last five minutes (cannons and all) playing on a constant loop in my head while I was trying to work. If only I had known that a quick game of scrabble would have taken care of it.

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How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future

Antonio Ortiz — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith in Wired:

We know what Moore’s Law is and how it works, but not many people reflect on why it exists. Yes, there are often physical barriers to innovation. But there’s no imminent physical barrier to the realization of a bit: A bit is merely presence or absence of something, say a voltage, which means it can get exponentially smaller. So with no physical limitation, Moore’s Law reflects the top rate at which humans can innovate. If we could proceed faster, we would.

There are no shortcuts at the edge of discovery and invention.

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The Week's Links: April 26, 2013

Antonio Ortiz — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:30:00 +0000

All the links posted on social networks this week:

1930s Fashion Designers Imagine Year 2000 ➞
MIT Technology Review: Moore's Law and the Origin of Life ➞
Say It Out Loud: How David Sedaris Makes His Writing Better ➞
Your Office's Fluorescent Lights Really Are Draining Your Will To Work ➞
Mindfulness: Observing Without Questioning ➞
What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art ➞
Clay Shirky On Pushing Creative Boundaries ◉
A shorthand for designing UI flows by Ryan of 37signals ➞
Design/UX: Transitional Interfaces ➞
10 super-helpful mnemonic tricks ➞
Dieter Rams: Ten Principles For Good Design ➞
The Productivity Diet ◉
What motivates us at work? 7 fascinating studies that give insights ➞
The New $100 Note is, well, see for yourself: ➞
Powerful, Emotional: Boston Magazine's May cover, made from the runners shoes. ➞
The 55 TEDGlobal 2013 speakers who tweet ➞
A Year Inside The Australian Ballet: On The Road, Episode 3 ◉
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Predicts the Future of Streaming Video ➞
Creativity Top 5: Week of April 22, 2013 ◉
How a Gang of Pickpockets Shut Down the Louvre ➞
What's the Real Origin of "OK"? ➞
Great Big Ideas: Free Course Features Top Thinkers Tackling the World’s Most Important Ideas ➞
Everything we have to do ◉
Your Favorite Authors’ Favorite Musicians ➞
The Lavish Sets of Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby ➞
Frank Chimero on Ideas ◉
The Killer Feature Every Cloud-Based App Should Have ➞
Street Artist JR Creates iPad App to Help You Track Down His Work ➞
HOW TO WRITE LIKE SHAKESPEARE - More Intelligent Life ➞
Work Mode: The Writer Behind "Dark Knight" And "Man of Steel" On Multitasking, Meditation, And Using Your Good Ideas ➞
How to Think Like Shakespeare: The Positive Value of Negative Capability ➞
20 Words We Owe to William Shakespeare ➞
If you happen to be the first person to make contact with aliens, here’s a handy guide: ➞
A Wandering Brain Zips Around Toronto To Encourage Creativity ➞
Content or Objects: Neil Gaiman and the future of books ◉
Wow, just wow: 7 Billion World - 7 billion people on 1 page ➞
Forecast Makers: "It's now a web app. It's an app you install from the web." ➞
Cocktails with Stan Lee and Jane Espenson ◉
Earth Chorus: Dancing to the beat of Earth ◉
Globe launches indoor theatre with The Duchess of Malfi and opera ➞
Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967-8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary) ➞
Lovely: Haunting Figure of a Woman Made with Wood and Bamboo ➞
When Dickens met Dostoevsky ➞
10 Words That Will Win You Any Game of Scrabble ➞
World Book Night is tomorrow! ➞
The brand is a story. But it's a story about you, not about the brand. ➞
How To Make Your Websites Faster On Mobile Devices ➞
Check out the new and fully responsive Wired.co.uk ➞
Should we be suspicious of stories? ➞
How to win at poker: Sleight of hand ◉
This Is Your Brain on E-Books. When we read on dead trees, do we retain more? ➞
Audio Branding: Company Logos Expand Into The Sonic Realm ◉
The McKinsey Global Institute just released a fascinating new iPad app, Urban World ➞
The Modern Data Nerd Isn't as Nerdy as You Think ➞
Massive Volunteer Collective Proofreads 25,000 Public-Domain Books ➞
Stop Doubting Yourself. Be Bold. ➞
How the Banner Ad Was Born ➞ /via @daringfireball
How to Stimulate Curiosity ➞
What e-learning can teach us about journalism ➞
The 25 Books Every Kid Should Have on Their Bookshelf ➞
The Story of a Revolution: The best of Wired 1993-2013 ➞
Revealed: The Part of Our Brain That Makes Us Like New Music ➞
Outsider Thinking: What Science Can Learn From Art ➞
Enjoy this New Yorker article while having a nice cup: In the Land of the Coffee Nerds ➞
Thousands of Roman Artifacts Have Just Been Sitting Under London’s Financial District ➞
Merlin Mann: On Chasing the Right "Zero" ➞
jQuery 2.0 Released ➞
Study: There Seems to Be a Universal Brain Response to Music ➞
How great plays are (eventually) made ➞
Great resournce: The Collective Legal Guide For Designers (Contract Samples) ➞
Art of the Title takes an in-depth look at the title sequence for Skyfall (2012) ➞
How To Raise Your Email Above Inbox Noise ➞
A field guide to the Meeting Troll ➞
TED-Ed and CERN unveil “The beginning of the universe” ➞
5 Things to Know When Designing for iOS ➞
Redesigning the Save symbol. ➞
The Grammar of Interactivity ➞
Responsive Nav: A Simple JavaScript Plugin For Responsive Navigation ➞
One man's quest to build an AI that can create games ➞
David Byrne on bypassing waffling and his remote collaborations with Brian Eno. ➞
You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help. - The Chronicle of Higher Education ➞
Cool: Paper Sculptures That Defy Expectations ➞

Recommended This Week:

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain By David Eagleman
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything By David Bellos
Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age By William Powers
The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind By A. K. Pradeep
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion By Robert B. Cialdini