Amy Tan’s TED Talk On Creativity

Author Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife) gives a wonderful talk about creativity and how it intertwines with her/our lives. You’ll have to wait until the end to see what’s in the bag at her feet.

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Sometimes The Best Art Direction Is “Invisible”

On the way back from Ad:Tech in San Francisco, I saw this Navy SEALs’ ad in the May issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. I think it is an outstanding example of strategy, concept and art direction. I spent several minutes (to no avail) looking for the SEALs the ad introduces, which, of course, is part of the point. Here is another ad in the series.

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CSS Gradients in WebKit

Recently on Surfin’ Safari, WebKit—the engine used for Apple’s Safari browser—introduced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) gradients in their latest nightly builds. The ability to create gradients with code and without the need for Photoshop or other image editing applications is a great enhancement in giving developers more flexibility when it comes to adding depth found in modern web design.

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Unmaintable Code - It doesn’t have to be this hard…

Two of my all time favorite authors, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, coined the phrase, ”Code [your project] as if the next guy to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.” I truly wish more people would take that to heart.  All too often I am working on a maintenance task, and I find that I spend more time trying to figure out what the hell the code is doing than I spend actually fixing the bug.

Take, for instance, the following real code snippet that a colleague of mine recently sent me…

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AdTech and A New Way To Listen

I’ve been at Ad:Tech in San Francisco this week, which labels itself as The Event for Digital Marketing. However, as many of the speakers pointed out: What isn’t digital in media these days or rapidly heading that way?” In light of that, Ad:Tech is really about what is happening in marketing—period.

As fast as the spending in digital marketing is growing, what amazed most people here — from both the client side and marketing industry side of the business — is why it isn’t even happening faster. Most people here felt the recession or near-recession we are currently experiencing will actually accelerate the shift to digital media. Many companies, faced with a slowdown in sales, will need to find a way to sell more products or services with less resources. The general consensus is that this will push more companies to opt for the greater and immediate return on investment that webcentric marketing programs can deliver.

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