The Donut Project

One of my favorite sites to visit for inspiration is StartupQuote.com. It’s a simple site, just quotes posted by people who run successful startups. Great words of wisdom.

Go and follow them: www.startupquote.com.

“The work you find yourself doing while you’re procrastinating is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
—Jessica Hische

Friend of the site Mig Reyes has been making some great short interviews with respected designers.

Humble Pied is a collection of creative professional advice in an on-going project where the formula is quite simple: one awesome creative type sharing one simple and inspirational tip. All over iChat.

“Rip something off.”
—Jim Coudal

“Great designers are never content, struggling with a design is okay. ”
—Nick Campbell

There are plenty more where these came from. Go & be inspired: www.humblepied.com.

Here’s a great talk by Cameron Moll on inspiration, and his experience with good vs. great design. It’s long, so listen to it in the background. I’ve watched it 4 or 5 times in the past week and it’s really lit a bit of a fire under my butt. Highly recommended.

His blog is also worth following: cameronmoll.tumblr.com.

(via SwissMiss)

Design is History is a great resource for a glimpse at the history of graphic design. The site is a great collection of the major players, sorted by design era, going all the way back to the beginnings in the 1400s.

The design of the site is well done (it’d have to be!), a credit to designer Dominic Flask, who started the site as a thesis project. Each page shares relevant information on the web, related books and videos for more information. Well done.

Go and poke around www.designishistory.com.

Unsuck It is a site to help wade thru the bullshit buzzspeak of everyday creative/agency/business life.

At [company X], we take [Y] seriously.
Unsucked: We don’t care, but our lawyers do.

Make It Pop
This looks great, but if you can make it pop a bit more, we’ll be done here.
Unsucked: Add cliche elements to a site’s visual design (e.g., ribbon, drop-shadow, bevel).

Social Media Guru
The company’s social media guru thinks we should be on Facebook.
Unsucked: Douche rocket.

www.unsuck-it.com

Join the School of Visual Communication Design in a celebration of the life and creative spirit of Eric May in an exhibition of his work from Type High Press. August 4–21, 2010

Location:
The show is to be held at the Downtown Gallery located at: 141 East Main Street in the heart of Kent, Ohio. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Friday 12-5 PM and Saturday 10-4 PM

Downtown Gallery
141 East Main Street
Kent, Ohio 44240

Reception:
A reception, open to the public, will be held at Saturday, August 14, 2010, 6pm-9pm

For more information on the show visit theericmayproject.com or vcd.kent.edu

This Fall The Cooper Union will join forces with the Type Directors Club to offer a Certificate in Typeface Design. Principles, techniques, and history are just some of the areas in which the program aims to take its participants. For more detail check out coopertype.org

To celebrate the release of The Plus Series, the next generation of the classic Pantone Matching System, Base worked with director Greg Mitnick and producer/Cool Hunting editor Ami Kealoha to give a rare look into the behind-the-scenes of the design world’s color standard.

UnderConsideration has put together a one-day event on the development of corporate and brand identity projects by some of today’s most active and influential practitioners from around the world.

The Brand New Conference is set for Friday, Nov 5, 2010 in New York City. The one-day event will run you a reasonable $250, while the live online webcast is $60.

Speakers include:
Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks
Michael Lejeune of Metro
Michael Bierut & Paula Scher of Pentagram
Christian Helms of The Decoder Ring
Tom Dorresteijn of Studio Dumbar
Connie Birdsall of Lippincott
Jordan Crane & Karl Heiselman of Wolff Olins
Erik Spiekermann of Edenspiekermann AG

More info & register at: www.underconsideration.com/brandnewconference.

Friend of TDP, designer Mig Reyes, has launched his new website. The site shows off some of his professional and personal work, along with a news section to (try to) keep up with him, and an about page that is not an afterthought like most sites.

The most exciting part though is the thoughts section where Mig will begin writing articles. Having already spoke at the HOW Conference and been interviewed by numerous people, Mig’s voice in the industry is one worth listening to. His first article is posted, and talks about the evolution of his personal site. It’s cool to see where he started years ago and the evolution to the clean, more mature site of today. It gives the rest of us hope to be awesome.

Check it out at www.migreyes.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @spigumus.