I recently had the pleasure of attending a Glug event here in Auckland and thought I’d share several snippets of knowledge that stuck with me.

For those of you who don’t (yet) know what Glug is all about, I’ve got you covered:

“Glug is a series of events for the design and creative community established around 2007. Based around a series of talks and informal networking, Glug has become one of the most exciting, credible and well attended creative events around.”

So this thing has been around for many years and is just now slowly taking off in New Zealand from what I’ve gathered.

Nathan James Cooper

First up was Nathan James Cooper, who is a Digital Director at TBWA and also runs the blog rubbishcorp among other things.
This was probably the most genuine and entertaining talk of the evening, as the crowd attentively listened to every piece of advice they were offered.

When talking about his own journey, Nathan stressed the importance of side projects, especially for those working in a creative industry. We don’t always get to do what we want during our day job, since we’re not the only ones involved in it. There are compromises to be made and that’s okay. And here is where side projects come in to fill that creative gap. If you spend 50% of your creative energy at work, you still have 50% to spend on a project you really like, without having to please anyone but yourself in your free time. How cool is that?

For these side projects to take shape, however, you have to stop being lazy and do something. Try out new stuff - who cares if it doesn’t work out.

“If you”re going to fail, fail fast.”

Instead of holding onto a lingering project for several years in hopes that it might amount to something, it’s best to go all in from the start and move on if it fails. After all, the more stuff you make, the more chances you have of at least one turning out decent, right?

He also touched on the 80/20 rule, which goes against any perfectionist’s mindset.
To sum it up, if you are in the process of getting good at something, it ought to be enough to settle for 80% mastery of that thing. Supposedly, trying to close the gap from 80% to 100% in order to reach perfection is a waste of both time and energy since those 20% more won’t really make any difference in the big picture.
In fact, at this stage you could just be satisfied with your current skill level and move on to learn new skills instead.

Casey Eden

Next up was Casey Eden, the co-founder of Neighbourly, who shared insights about the start-up life and his business practices.
Among the more surprising revelations was the absolute transparency at his company. In fact all employees know pretty much everything business-related about their colleagues. Yes, even salary.

Some of the points he made were already mentioned by Nathan so I won’t repeat myself here.

Mike Van De Elzen

The final speaker for the evening, famous chef Michael Van De Elzen, looked back on his old lifestyle when he ran the Molten Restaurant. He realised how much his job had taken over his life which slowly led to unhealthy habits such as regular 100-hour weeks, lack of exercise and overall stress.
He solved this problem by learning to let go little by little without having to be in control of everything all the time.

Even though success comes at a price, he reached a point where his hard work hurt him more than it helped him, so Mike took a step back and looked at the bigger picture.

His new life style is more relaxed and he enjoys family time much more than before, even though that doesn’t stop him from having many new projects in the pipeline which include a new book on healthy cooking for busy people.

So there you have it. I just realised that there is a big disparity between my recaps, but that doesn’t mean I did not enjoy what everyone had to say. There’s only so much one can remember in a single night.

With the recent release of Semplice, there is no more excuse to put your portfolio on the back burner. This beautifully crafted framework is integrated into the WordPress backend and allows for lots of custom options. In fact, this is not your regular theme as you’ll find yourself starting with a completely blank slate. You shouldn’t let this intimidate you though.
While coding skills are not required thanks to a well thought out WYSIWYG interface, you can push things further and add your own lines of code into the mix if you feel like it.
Semplice really shines when it comes to creating individual case studies for each of your projects. You can choose different layouts, colour schemes, hover states and menu appearances to truly immerse visitors in your work.

Unlike other portfolio services such as Squarespace, Dunked or Cargo, you don’t have to pay a monthly fee to maintain it. For a one-time fee of $89 you’ll be able to install it on your own hosted Wordpress site.
This highlights another major difference which sets it apart from the competition: Semplice allows you to keep the code of your website forever. Yes, that’s right.

The only downside so far seems to be the support which is limited to a FAQ section including a handful of video tutorials to get you going. Since the project launched only recently, I would expect it to grow with customer feedback. If you’re curious or want to get a glimpse of what you can do with this builder, you might want to take a look at the showcase of portfolios running on Semplice.

Lately there have been quite a lot of so-called “unsolicited redesigns” posted all over the web and I do applaud the effort, don’t get me wrong. I just can’t help but wonder why you would want to take a shot at Microsoft, Facebook or even Apple’s new iOS interface.

These concepts really do look superb and you can tell a lot of hours have gone into those projects. However, there is only one tiny detail that leaves me skeptical about this approach: the final product is already out there and set in stone. So unless you work at said companies, chances are pretty slim that your design would actually get noticed, much less have an impact on how people use the product. At least I tend to think that’s what it’s all about in the end: having a positive impact on your users. Making life easier and more enjoyable.

Granted, if you are lucky and the right people notice, you just might turn that concept of yours into reality. I mean it worked out alright for Andrew Kim after all.

I guess it’s worth a shot, but why not try to fix things that are in dire need of fixing instead? Think of products you use on a daily basis that leave you really frustrated because of poor design decisions. Pick it apart, figure out what could be improved and get to work.

Now please excuse me while I finish up my redesign of twitter.

What started out as an internal project for Benedikt Lehnert eventually became a valuable typographic resource for writers all over the world. Making life easier for his fellow designers in their daily adventures with typography was the main reason for this custom-made “cheat sheet”.

While typoguide will not replace an old fashioned and more complex book on the subject, it will certainly provide a lot of insight for those unfamiliar with certain typographic practices.

I like that it is light-weight, easy to navigate and straight to the point. A printed copy is also available.

It was not too long ago that the guys over at Bohemian Coding announced the retirement of their font management app Fontcase. Apparently, the main reason behind this unfortunate move was because:

“[…]a large percentage of our customer base just didn’t get the idea of font activation and why such a thing was ever needed.”

However, in a recent turn of events Bohemian Coding released a brand new app called Fonts — Simple Font Organizing. It is based on a completely new build and should not be looked at as a simple revamp of the now defunct Fontcase. Surprisingly, some of the key features of traditional font management software have been removed, most notably: font (auto-)activation. Instead, your Fonts Collection is now directly synched with Font Book and other Mac apps.

As for the visual side of things, the user interface has adopted a fresh flat look and feels like it just broke out of iOS 7. It may take some time getting used to it but hey why not? The designers might have started a new trend right there.

In my book, this doesn’t qualify as a font management app, because a key feature is missing: font activation. For me, this is a deal breaker. The developers complained that people did not understand why they should use Fontcase back then, but now that a major feature has been removed (among others it seems), I don’t see how you could attract new users this time around since all it does, is give you a preview of your Font Book.

It’s wait and see for now. I’m not pulling the trigger unless some significant changes are made in the future to improve Fonts.