I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: “Am I being joyful?” And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you’re writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/18/commencement-speeches-2/

The missing condition is the arresting of time, without which the sidewalk is merely a poor man’s camera obscura. To create a photograph I needed a way to record time’s passing. Conventional light-sensitive photo paper (the kind used in a darkroom) is too sensitive and expensive to handle in an uncontrollable environment like the city street, so I opted for blueprint paper, which is more forgiving. Years ago, the blueprint — or diazotype — was the tool of the architect, but its use has steadily declined with the advent of CAD and digital plotters. Still, the medium exists — due mostly to demand from emerging economies — so I was able to procure a steady supply of paper and my own processor.

http://places.designobserver.com/feature/platos-home-movies-photographs-of-tr…

One of the most logical ways for companies to capitalize on this trend is to integrate their social media campaigns with their websites. Unfortunately, some websites treat their social media links as an after-thought, and it shows. These sites will often use stock icons supplied by the social media outlets that do little to coordinate with the look and feel of the website itself. In other cases, the links might just be shoved into any blank space that was previously unoccupied. Either way, this is no way to treat such a potentially valuable marketing tool.

http://www.noupe.com/design/websites-with-seamless-social-media-integration.html

It’s really nice to check out how many good designers share their creations for free at Dribbble. It’s definitely a network to keep an eye on. Today we gathered a few free textures from Dribble to show you, so make sure to check out each designer’s page to download some goodies.

http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/10-free-textures-from-dribbble

There is no denying that the future of the web, will be a responsive web. Everyone practically has a smartphone, or a tablet, some sort of mobile device and they use it primarily to access the internet and social networks. So what do we as designers and developers need to do to adapt? We need to build responsive web sites.

The Process Of Writing Great Copy

Everything is easier with the right process. If your approach to copywriting is “I’ll just try to be convincing”, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

You don’t even need to be a “natural writer” to come up with excellent copy, you just need the right process and some key principles about writing copy that sells.

The best processes are simple, as those are the ones you actually use.

Here are the six steps of effective copywriting process:

1. Research: customer, product and competition.
2. Outline and guideposts.
3. Draft copy.
4. Conversion boost.
5. Revise, rearrange.
6. Test.

And now let’s get to the details:

Short, sweet and neat little article.

Working from home sounds like a dream come true but unless you take the time to organize things properly, the whole experience can turn into a nightmare. Here are eight things you will need to pay attention to if you choose to work from home.

http://www.graphicdesignblender.com/8-tips-for-making-the-most-of-working-fro…

The good side of this is that it made the planning and production side fairly painless on my side. Due to the nature of how I was shooting, I would be forced to keep the lighting fairly simple and portable. There were no elaborate sets, nor would I need to worry with shooting permits for any of the multiple locations we shot at around Atlanta. What I did have to concern myself with was making sure I got things right for them since the planing and production side was anything but painless on Coke’s side. This involved them arranging for us to shoot at each location, paying numerous employee’s / models to work with over the course of the shoot, and even pulling a brand new Coke truck off the road along with one of their drivers for a day. 

Thanks for sharing, Keith!

LEBANON William Simone, a local photographer and business owner, died Tuesday night, May 15, 2012, in Lebanon.

This is no mere shop. It’s clear at once that you’ve entered the cavern of a collector of gargantuan, if not uncontrollable, curatorial appetites who has fashioned a bombastically seductive retail environment that is also a private museum and lair. It’s a deep, narrow space organized as a sequence of themed chambers. There are packages, bottles, boxes, toys, lights, pictures, gadgets, gas masks and clocks, printed ephemera by the truckload, crazily overstocked side rooms devoted to bathroom and kitchen wares, and somewhere far away at the back, beyond the vintage porn pictures and the life-sized anatomical model with removable organs, is a retro clothing room and possibly even other wondrous departments that I never reached.

I have an affinity to this sort of thing. My office contains a lot of toys and artifacts from the world of trinkets… including a tiny green dinosaur that moves from shelf to shelf seemingly by itself…. hmmmm…..