Along with Daniel Pink, one of the most intriguing speakers I saw at last month’s TEDGlobal 2009 was notorious graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s opening session was a tough act to follow, but Sagmeister made an impression with some striking observations on career sabbaticals.
Sagmeister illustrated a traditional career as a timeline comprising three distinct “eras:” learning, work and retirement, with each “era” roughly taking up a third of one’s lifetime; around twenty-five years each. Read the rest of this entry »
If it takes a village to raise a child, it’s possible that it takes a vast digital village to raise a teleworker. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our work habits, tools and business perspective are at least partly influenced by the people and ideas we encounter online.
Take a moment to think about the blogs you regularly visit, the high-profile professionals that you consider your mentors, and the groups you interact with online. How have they shaped your work? What extraordinary ideas have you learned from them?
As I pondered this myself, I identified the most important ideas that have helped me as a web worker. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems like I am always looking for inspiration. In my case, I need inspiration for the many places where I contribute blog content: WebWorkerDaily, Fast Wonder, Shizzow, and others. I work on client projects and need inspiration for ways to solve issues and find innovative new approaches for community building or social media engagement. I manage online communities and help organize events and user groups where I need inspiration to find new and interesting topics of conversation.
While all people and all professions need to find inspiration, it can be particularly tough for web workers, especially those of us operating solo freelancing oe consulting businesses with no coworkers, bosses or others to help come up with ideas. We can sit in a dark room and wait for inspiration to hit us, or we can seek it out. I get most of my inspiration from listening to podcasts, reading, having coffee with smart people and browsing around online.
I was recently talking to Hideshi Hamaguchi here in Portland, Oregon when he mentioned that he was working on a new project. He described it as, “totally different, super simple, but something help people to get inspiration” and offered me a sneak peak. I couldn’t resist. It was an excuse to talk to someone so brilliant that it always makes my head spin after a conversation and learn about a new product focused on inspiration at the same time. This week, the product launched as Lunarr elements. Read the rest of this entry »
Writer’s block. Creative constipation. Mental block. These phrases are just fancy ways of saying something simple: you’re stuck.
There’s nothing wrong with being stuck, since it happens to the best of us. But there are several reasons to get yourself moving again, especially if it’s unreasonable to do the usual routine of going for a long walk or bringing your laptop to the coffee shop. There are deadlines, paychecks, impatient clients, and, more importantly, the simple internal drive to do the work.
But how can you do it if you can’t get started?
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As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.
Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites – onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.
These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ – I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context – and in a connected era – is strangely unsociable.
Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
