Board Tour Video from Creonomy on Vimeo.

I love this Flat 3D mockup kit by our friend Frank. Go get it here.

Vinyl machines can cut, they can give you a circle and a square, but they can’t give you the passion of a sign painter. – Bob Behounek

Sign painting is a disappearing occupation but it never stopped fascinating me. As for many other creative professionals, you can really see sign painters are enjoying the process as much as the finished product.

“Sign Painters” is a documentary telling the story of these extremely passionate artists.

There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade

Here is the trailer:

But, history aside, there is more we can learn, and it’s something about our own creative purpose.  Painter Doc Guthrie shares his point of view:

You have fifty years of work ahead of you, and it should be something that you really love. I never got rich, but I provided a living for my family and owned a home — that’s a working-class American success story.

How do you define success in your own job?

(The most dramatic keyboard perspective we could find.)

We haven’t been blogging in a while and we have some new features coming out soon, but we wanted to give you just one little thing.

We’ve just added keyboard shortcuts to Board. You will get the same functions of our Chrome extension but of course there’s no need to click it (by the way, if you are new here and want to grab it, here it is). This is how the shortcuts work:

Alt+1: single image.

Alt+2: crop.

Alt+3: visible page.

Alt+4: full page.

That’s it. We are sure this will be a nice time-saver and, as always, we are eager to know your opinions.

Board was born to help designers and creative professionals collect and save images in the best and fastest way possibile. With that in mind, we couldn’t avoid integrating with some of the most used and trusted applications.

This is why we are happy to say you can now connect Board with Gimme Bar. Gimme Bar is probably one of the most loved app by designers and creative people of all kind. And, as we’ve been listening to users’ feedback, it’s also one of the most requested integration. And now you can import your Gimme Bar collections as private boards.

From your account link on the top of the page, you can navigate to a new section “Import from other services”. Here is where now and in the future you will be able to connect with third-party services. And see what’s on our roadmap

From there, everything is going to be extremely easy. You will be able to choose which collection you want to import and in a matter of minutes your collections will be like any other boards.

As always, Board is going to keep the original image’s URL so you can always go back to the original source.

Give it a try.

During the last few months I’ve met and interviewed a lot of designers to get some feedback for Board. Quite often the conversation went on about their on-line presence and general “marketing” strategy.

Now, 90% of them usually reply “I have my on-line portfolio and… then… I am on Dribbble and Behance”. Cool, but just like in the ’90s most companies’ on-line strategy was “We’ll have a website so people can read about us”, being a Dribbbler and a Behancer may be useful, but you are still quite invisible since thousands of other people are doing that too, .

Moreover there’s a raising “design awareness” among clients and users. Both are getting better and more demanding at choosing the designers to work with. So, what can you do?

1. Leave the screen

I have being hearing an incredible number of designers saying they would like to work at some start up. And I can’t count the number of start up founders who told me they are looking for a designer but can’t find one.

Now, most start ups are usually quite proactive at searching for talents. But very often the designers themselves are the one hiding a little bit too much behind their screens. Please leave that screen and get outside.

You don’t have to become a party animal, but attending a start up meet-up once a month can give you some initial exposure and spread your name in the start up community. If you don’t know where to look for such events, start with “StartupDigest“.

Interesting things happen off-line too so leave your screen, dont’ hide, and get out.

Above: one of the many events for startups taking place in Berlin every week. 

2. Start working for a company…before they hire you

Years ago, designer Ito Morabito started the first virtual label “Ora Ito” by designing fake products. People loved it so much they started to order the products from his website. No need to say he got the big brands’ attention and soon the virtual products became reality.

More recently, Andrew Kim, a 21-year old student, got a job a Microsoft by re-designing the whole company visual identity. In three days. The work was amazing and covered by the main tech magazines including TechCrunch, Mashable, The Verge, Fast Company, Business Insider.

Pick a company you love, give them some “unsolicited advice” and go viral.

(Personally, I would also love to see some kind of “city rebranding” = pick a city and develop a complete visual identity. There’ a lot of work to do!)

Above: sketches, notes, old and new Microsoft logos by Andrew Kim.

3. Quit Instagram and start a blog

Let’s face it: you could spend your time a little bit better.Yes, I know: that Amaro filtered cappuccino and croissant looks great but it’s not going to get your name out. So spend less time on social media and make a better use of you time.

As stupid as it may sound in 2013, just start a blog. It’s pretty hard at the beginning but can be very rewarding, to the point of almost addictive. Don’t worry, you don’t need to start another Smashing Magazine. Just start and share your thoughts. This way your clients will know much more about you. And your website will become a living organism instead of a static one-in-a-billion website.

Now, the reason many people don’t start a blog is usually because “I have nothing to say”. No need to say if you are a designer there are thousands of things you could write about. Just to name a few: tell people what’s your vision; write about the problem you face; or interview other designers. Or many other designers.

Above: the perfect thing to get more calories. Probably not more clients. 

4. Turn yourself into a writer

Once you’ve started your own blog and grew a some personal audience, you may further spread your name writing e-books or how-to guides. You can either decide to charge for them or release them for free. I would probably suggest the first option as you will have more incentives to write great content and the audience will inherently consider it more valuable.

The aim here is to let other people know you have some deep knowledge in your field. Writing an e-book requires some time but can be a great maketing tool.

Some good examples are “Color Theory For Start ups” and “Step by Step UI Design” both by Sacha Greif (the first is free, the second is yours for $5.99); Nathan Barry’s “Designing Web Applications“; Bootstrapping Design by Jarrod Drysdale. Read this post and this post and this post where Sacha, Jarrod adn Nathan share some of their lessons and numbers.

The cool thing is that an e-book can be a by-product of your blog and therefore you don’t start from a blank page. 37Signals made a lot of money with both “Getting Real” (now free) and “Rework“. And both are mostly a collection of their blog posts.

Above: image by Nathan Barry who made more than $26.000 in 24 hours thanks to his e-book. 

5. Start a side project…or your own conference

Do you have a side project? Something you are just doing for your own pleasure? Read this post by Sacha Greif. And be sure to check his video and slides in this post.

But if a small side project does not excite you enough, why not starting your own conference?
Do not aim at making money here, just try to break-even: your goal is to connect with other designers and, once again, get your name by putting yourself next to big names in the industry.

You already know Ryan Carson of FOWA and FOWD fame so I am gonna skip it.

But you probably do not know Feed The Brain, a nice conference organized by Invenio Design, which brought to Italy people like Vitaly Friedman, founder of Smashing Magazine and Mike Kus, co-founder of WorkFu.

 Above: you don’t need to have a big team to start your own conference. “Feed The Brain” is organized by just one person (or should I say “brain”?)

Do you have any other tip or experience? Use comments below!

During high-school I used to love sneakers and that was the time when I first read the name of legendary Nike shoe designer Tinker Hatfield. What I did not know was that he was hired by Nike as an architect to design the company’s headquarters and show-rooms.

Now, when you think about a running shoe, you don’t usually think about buildings and architecture. But it was only after a trip to Paris that he was inspired to design a new kind of running shoe. And the inspiration came from the iconic George Pompidou Center.

He was fascinated by the use of color and by how the architects designed the structure to expose every part, in sharp contrast with the surrounding Paris buildings.

The Air Max became one of the most iconic Nike shoe and change the company direction forever.

I am fully convinced that, had I not seen the building, I might not have suggested that we actually expose this airbag and make it visual and let people see inside the shoe.

Enjoy the the story in his own words.

Full Page Screenshots

With our Chrome extension you can now take full page screenshots. So, in addition to single images, crops and capturing what’s visible, you have now one more way to collect visual inspiration.

Everything happens through the browser, so there’s no need to copy the URL, paste it somewhere else outside the browser and so on. We are sure you are going to use it a lot!!
Now, we are going to write a post about how we did. Meanwhile, note the full page capture can give some problems with websites with sticky navigation or strange layout.

Star Your Favourite Boards

You can add a star to the boards you are working on the most and display them only. If you have many boards but you are currently working just on two or three, this is a great way to keep you dashboard clean and keep your focus only on what’s really important.

Your Feedback?

You can sign up and test Board for free. We are eager to know what you think. If you have any feedback, use the comments below or just go to this page where users are already posting ideas and new features requests.

This is a poster designed by Ben Barry, designer at Facebook. It pretty much sums up the entire Facebook philosophy of “Keep shipping” without losing yourself in the details.

Perfection is what everyone aims for. But getting things done is what you should probably do, especially if you are in the early stage of a project (a book, a movie or a startup).

Accept the idea of not being satisfied.

Zadie Smith put it more elegantly in her 10 rules of writing:

Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

I keep on stumbling on quotes by incredible (and frustrated) writers, entrepreneurs and artists who know their product/book/art/service could have been better.

The biggest danger of trying to be always satisfied is losing yourself in the details, slowing down your work, missing scheduled deadlines and not shipping.

Pixar is a perfect example of this. You would think their movies are superbly perfect to the finest detail.  But read what long-time Pixar employee Matt Silas said about watching one of their own movies:

[…] it can be hard to watch one that you’ve worked on, because you spend so many hours on it. You know all the little choices you made, and all the shortcuts that were taken. And you remember the riskier things you could have tried but ended up not, because you couldn’t risk the schedule. And so when you are watching the movie, you can see all the flaws, and it isn’t until you see the faces of your friends and family that you start to forget them.

If you are about to launch your product, minor details can be left to a later stage. From 37Signals, “Getting Real” book:

Success and satisfaction is in the details. However, success isn’t the only thing you’ll find in the details.  You’ll also find stagnation, disagreement, meetings, and delays. These things can kill morale and lower your chances of success. […] Don’t worry about the size of your headline font in week one. You don’t need to nail that perfect shade of green in week two. You don’t need to move that “submit” button three pixels to the right in week three. Just get the stuff on the page for now. Then use it. Make sure it works

There are thousands of other examples.
David Foster Wallace was not satisfied. Reid Hoffman was not satisfied. Walt Disney (read n.5) was not satisfied. Steve Jobs…well, you already know.

Great artists accept the Idea of not being satisfied.

We have definitely been in this “obsessed by details” stage and we are still learning to speed up our decisions and prioritize. How about you? Are you procrastinating because your product is not perfect enough? Use the comments to share your experience.

(If you are curious to test Board before we launch, you can sign up here)

Let’start from the web-app.

Drag ‘n’ Drop Image and Folder Upload

You can now find a drop area inside each board. You can not only directly drag files from your desktops, but you can drag entire folders. In this case we are going to upload every file contained. Just don’t add folders inside folders (that wouln’t work).

Image Tagging and Description

Almost everyone asked us to add tags to their images. So, here they are. But tags witout “search” would be useless right?

Live Search

You can now filter what you see by typing in the search field. If you are in your dashboard you can search boards by their name. If you are inside one specific board you can search and filter images by tags. This is a live filter and we are working on a global search. Stay tuned.

Board Sorting

Sometimes you just want to have your old board back again in front of your face, right at the top of your page. Now you can move your Board, deciding where to have what. Image sorting wil be available pretty soon.

We also made a few improvements to our Chrome extension.

New Upload Dialog and Descriptions

The new extension comes with the ability to add a description to the images while uploading. Yes, tagging is also coming.

Background Uploads

Just select your image and we’ll do the rest. So you don’t have to look at the spinning wheel anymore! You can browse around while your 40MP image is on its way.

If you like what you see, check out Board, and sign-up for our pre-launch.