Good Magazine recently published a quite interesting article on how social networking is changing the way we identify ourselves, leading to a behavioral shift. For the last hundred years, we’ve distinguished ourselves by our car, clothes and houses. Now we’d rather spend our time expressing our ideas, opinions, the causes we support and showing photos of our life, instead of tending to the lawn. Read more and join the conversation..

Santa Monica College Graduation 2009 from Santa Monica College on Vimeo.

We produced this highlight video for Santa Monica College’s 2009 graduation. It was a fun project w/ an accompanying microsite which aggregates social media around the event.

Ever seen a really cool business card and wondered, “How’d they make this? And how much do these things cost?” FPO - For Print Only (a division of Under Consideration) is a handy website showcasing gorgeous print work, who printed it, what processes/fonts/paper were used and how much it all cost…right at your fingertips.

Rockport Books and author Aaris Sherin have joined forces to release a guide on sustainable materials and techniques for graphic designers. Being over a decade since the last release of a handbook of this kind, this book is a great resource and example of sustainable implementation : every cover is created from the unused spreads in production. Great effort toward eco-friendly printing and production. Solid work.

SustainAble

Inspiring and truly original fonts from Hype For Type.

Hey kids…one of our sites — TripKick.com — was nominated this year for a Webby. Check it out! Super useful tool for power-travelers.

But, if you can’t afford an agency like Fluidesign, here’s a do-it-yourself guide to manage your brand and get free marketing through social media.

1. Get online identities. This may sound obvious, but I’m constantly amazed at how many companies aren’t yet embracing social media. Sign up for Twitter. Get a Facebook Group going. Create a company page on LinkedIn. Depending on your industry, get a MySpace page. There are also countless industry-specific online identities.

2. Create a blog. Wordpress is quick, easy, and free (we can help you with customization if necessary). Publish content often (quality over quantity, however) to gain an audience.

3. Link the identities together. Install the Twitter App on Facebook so updating your Twitter status automatically updates your Facebook one.

4. Encourage key employees to set up their own Twitter accounts and link them to their own Facebook statuses.

5. Sign up for Twitterfeed and link your blog(s) to it. Encourage key employees to do the same. Then, when anyone posts a new blog entry, this service automatically updates the associated Twitter accounts, and if the Twitter accounts are linked to Facebook, those Facebook statuses get updated automatically. Done right, your message gets blasted to thousands (or tens of thousands) instantly.

6. Use Twitter’s search to routinely monitor what people are saying about your company and your products/services.

7. Be responsive – if your customers/fans take the time to write something about your brand, take the time to respond. The more responsive you are – even with negative issues – the higher your company’s reputation will be. Studies show that when customers have a problem if they get a response from the company quickly they actually become more satisfied with the brand than if they had never had an issue to begin with.

The above tips represent a crash course in online reputation management and using social media to blast out blog posts, press releases, product announcements, and really anything your company has to say. Remember, in order to stay relevant, you need to push content out often, and respond quickly to what others are talking about. Do it right, and your social media presence will quickly become more relevant with greater ROI than anything offline.

Great to see old school (Jayhawk era) friend of mine, Dan Funderburgh featured on QBN today. His work is looking ever so tight — as usual.

Image Spark is a nice little web app that let’s you upload and create a library of images that inspire you, and also allows you to share them with the web community. It’s a fairly slick solution for a problem that pretty much every designer has: how to best organize your visual research.