I just found this half-hour pitch on the now legendary identity system for Bell by Saul Bass.

For logo-nerds such as myself this is top entertainment, and my fascination for the graphic design work of this era helps too.
It’s quite fun to watch how far the design field has come since those days, and at the same time, which things stay as true today as they did then.

From hilarious design statements:

“In the contemporary world, stripes have a message. “

To this simple sign of the times, about the new uniforms for the female employees:

“More flattering than anything offered by the airlines.”

Enjoy.

I love the new look that Google just rolled out for Gmail and its related services.

But it made me think of one little improvement; something that could reduce my inbox count to its happiest state of zero in no time (and yours, too).
When arriving at work to sort through all the new mails, I have to either click into each one separately and delete/archive/label them, or in the inbox, select the ones I want to archive, then click archive, than go through the list again if something needs to be deleted, and so on.

So this is my idea. When hovering over a new mail in the inbox, delete/archive/spam (maybe even label) buttons pop up, and you can go through your whole inbox like a magic wand, email receipts and stuff nicely stacked going towards the archive, boring newsletters hurled in the trash.
I even made you a little mock-up of what it might look like, to give you an idea.

What do you think?

I’ve had a lot on my plate these few days, so it’s been a little quiet on the blog. But fear not, my return will be swift!

In the meantime, here’s a friend of mine remixing another friend, to amazing results. I give you; Skatebaard‘s remix of Njaal‘s Me and Hugh, out now!

Image credit: Feltron

As you may have noticed, I regularly post images to my inspiration blog Adrian, that you see a small feed from in the sidebar of this site. In this post, with content from Adrian as examples, I’m trying to delve deeper into that material, and show you how I look at the material I see every day.

It is a common myth about all designers, musicians and artists in general that all of our work comes purely from a mental connection to the cosmos; as an artist and “creative person” we just make stuff completely out of nothing. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. Whether one is aware of it or not, we pick stuff up from all around us all the time. Some artists claim to be 100% original in all that they do, my proposition is that they simply are unaware of how they acquire their inspiration.

The “Ether” is a more fitting description than the “cosmos”, I suppose. Some things are just floating around, and we end up picking it up often without being aware of it. One of the more established definitions of the word creativity is the ability to see connections where no connection seem visible, which is exactly what this post is about. The most important skill taught in art school is in my opinion, is the ability to see how and why something is inspiring, and so be able to draw inspiration from nearly anything, by analyzing it.

The inspiration blog I keep mostly as a tool in my own creative process, as a toolbox of ideas that can be tweaked and hopefully made better in my own work. I have one basic rule: I’m not posting images, I’m posting the idea behind the image. Also, the idea has to be actionable. Let me give you an example. Continue reading →

I often get requests to do stuff for free, like most people in the creative business. Usually I would love to help them, but resources are limited, so referring to this chart helps. Feel free to share it.