Came across this 9 month old blog post, Another 23 Signs You're Becoming a Design Geek, from the guys at Crestock and just had to share. "How dare you post anything so ancient?!" you ask? Well I found it quite funny that a few of these entertaining warning signs have come up from time to time within our team convos, especially numbers 12 and 13, which have becoming running jokes here on the 2nd and 7th floor.

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Indeed a list of harsh realities - a testament to the fact that design isn't created, but observed. And true designers exist in that space 24 hours a day! Learn to spot the warning signs in time - you know you're becoming a design geek when:

1. You smile that spanking-kind-of-smile when you use the CSS property: padding-bottom.

2. You know exactly what I'm referring to when I say "Make my logo bigger".

3. Every now and then you go through a 'herbal tea' phase to try and reduce your dependence to coffee, but you always go back to the inky demon eventually.

4. You've caught yourself more than once hitting CTRL or CMD+N when you need a coffee refill...

5. Sleep and nighttime are no longer irrevocably linked.

6. You have woken up in the middle of the night your sleep and started recreating the dream you just had in Photoshop.

7. When getting up, you wish you had a healing brush/patch tool for those unsightly blemishes and undereye luggage.

A flashmob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.

One of the Flashmobs I witnessed took place at the National Mall, couple hundred gathered and carried out a massive pillow fight. Good thing AOLers caught on this tradition and used it to create designs in a quick fashion. Also, its a great deviation from your regular routine and lets you think outside the screen.

Last Friday, Oct 9, PBS Design team had their first flash mob with four participants and four different topics: Photography, Type, Pattern and Colors.

Erin Lassahn

An integral part of any good design is color selection. If you're anything like me, you troll sites looking for pleasing palettes, maybe you even have ColourLovers bookmarked and make regular visits to the site. However, sometimes a photo can inspire your palette and you want an easier way to save and create the color table from the photo. It can be done quickly with Photoshop in three easy steps.

1. The first step in this process is to convert your photo from RGB color mode to Index Color Mode. Experiment with your own settings but you can use the settings in the image below to start with.

Over the weekend I watched Wait Until Dark, the 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn, Richard Crenna, Alan Arkin, and the awesomely named Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Here's the summary from Netflix:

"Audrey Hepburn was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Susy Hendrix, a blind woman terrorized by a criminal (Alan Arkin) who's after a stash of heroin that was planted in her apartment -- inside a doll -- without her knowledge. He manages to isolate Susy, and she must find a way to defeat him in a thrilling, chilling battle of wits."

Based on a play from 1966, Wait Unitl Dark is a textbook example (and that is not meant to be derogatory ) of the idea "If you introduce a gun in the first act, be sure to have it fire in the third." Through out the movie, small elements and conversation pieces grow and become important during the climax. Characters expose motivations at the end, all in relation to previous set pieces and dialogue.

And while there aren't any guns, there sure are a lot of knives.

"But Jones", you say, "what does this have to do with design? What made you even think this could be a post?"

Simple: If you introduce a gun in the first act, you should fire it in the third. Stop making arbitrary design decisions just because something seems cool.

This entry is the opinion of the writer and it is the writer's alone.

Audio on the internet has generally been an after thought. From over-used midi loops to badly compressed, royalty-free sound effects, audio is an abused, non-visual design element.

Originally, when I started this entry, I wanted to showcase, well... the good, bad, and you get the point. However, while searching around on the internet it became wicked-clear to me that only a handful of industry-specific sites actually care about the soundscape they are creating. My hat goes off to you all in the gaming, movie, education and journalism industries.

Now for the rest of you. Lets talk. I know audio is not meant for everyone, however audio is not by the same token excluding anyone. By this I mean you can have your corporate, non-profit, hibbity hubbity website and with just a few well thought out audio bits create a non-visual level of communication with your user that will only enhance the experience. Do note "well thought out audio". Those same audio triggers if linked to some canned audio effect will decrease the user experience.

Product designers use foam to mock up products all the time. But it's not the first thing you think of using for UI design. Yet, it was a perfect material for teachers to use to prototype a video player. Add to that a tested method for brainstorming ideas and you can quickly dash (or SCAMPER*) to your next great idea.

Here is the process I used with ten teachers—with widely varying degrees of tech savvy—to create a video player and customize it in the space of a half hour. Why foam? Because it was immediate and non-threatening. The teachers looked at it as a craft project. We started with where they are, not where we want them to be. Taking the tech out of it put them at ease and produced some remarkable results.

1. Each participant was given a bag with a variety of pieces of foam, from an art supply store, in various geometric shapes and colors.

2. To introduce the exercise I asked them not to invent but to reinvent. This is an important idea to emphasize to minimize the fear of creating we all share. Reinvention is the primary means we arrive at a new idea or product. Most ideas are evolutionary, not revolutionary. I began the with the story of the Honorary Chairman of SONY Akio Morita and his idea to combine two devices to create a new entertainment product. SONY engineers had shelved a project that they believe had failed: the smallest possible stereo tape recorder. Chairman Morita saw the potential of this tape player when combined with another new idea—light weight headphones—and the SONY Walkman was born. "This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day. They'll take it everywhere with them, and they won't care about record functions." The Walkman led to the iPod—and It was easy to find one of those in the room.