We create the stories of the connected society

One of the fundamental tasks of design and business is to stand between revolutions and life, to help people deal with change. That’s the premise of The Right Brain Rules, a strategic vision and a portfolio of assets for creating value into the future.
Voice-over and context are missing, but here’s the requested slide deck [...]

[We like to use, celebrate and design products that are both useful and beautiful. Here's the first in an occasional series of quick tips for improving your designs. Add yours in the comments or in a guest post.]
Here are two tools I use to help select and code the right colors for my designs. The [...]

The Society of News Design has announced the World’s Best Designed Newspapers, an award I conceived as chair of SND’s design competition back in 1995. Once again no American newspapers. Papers in Europe, Mexico and former Eastern bloc countries have dominated the World’s Best competition, reflecting the emergence of free expression and the flourishing of [...]

Our friend and former colleague Charles Blow has joined the blogging brethren with a discussion on all things statistical. A visual Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Charles served as the paper’s graphics director and as Design Director for News prior to leaving to become Art Director of National Geographic. Back in the day, [...]

Steering into the iceberg, the Troubled Tribune company rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic. The redesign of Trib’s Baltimore Sun and prototypes of the new Chicago Tribune are distress calls. This is what we get from the new captains, former shlock-radio execs: talk-radio on newsprint, passed off as innovation. The ghosts of Mencken and [...]

As news industry conferences go, this is the good one. The right-brainers who attend SND’s annual designfest have managed to make newspapers and websites around the world more interesting and accessible, even as their left-brainer publishers screwed up a coupla good mediums. Somehow, the creative class has remained enthusiastic about the future.
SND is sharing the [...]

The academy for journalists in St. Pete plans to unveil its redesign, nine months in the making, later this week.
Cleaner, yet still busy, the site changes to more horizontal navigation and provides access to Romenesko from all pages. It looks like Poynter has also added personalization tools. Online director Bill Mitchell describes the changes and [...]

To: ESPN broadcasters and producers:
So I’m watching bonus coverage of the Yankees-Rangers game. There’s all this annoying stuff on the screen as Michael Young comes to the plate with two men on and Rangers trailing by two runs. In an instant, Young crushes a Joba Chamberlain fastball for a three-run homer. The Rangers take the [...]

The Orange County Register confirmed it will outsource copy editing and page layout to an editorial services company based outside New Delhi, India. So much for local knowledge and the sense of place that only local publishers can deliver.

An isometric landscape, Web Trend Map 3 pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites plotted against the metaphor of the greater Tokyo area train map. Different train lines correspond to web trends such as innovation, news, social networks, and so on. Whimsy and inside jokes add intrigue and fun to the [...]

The thing about innovation is that you know it when you see it.
One version comes from Tribune Co., which has been exuberant about becoming “an oasis of creativity.” Newsies have encouraged us to watch Tribco’s Orlando Sentinel where Sam Zell’s new regime of former broadcasters is touting an innovation model for newspapers. The first [...]

“There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools,” said the early 20th Century designer and writer Eric Gill. I’m one of them. Two, fun, font games test the fool in you.
The first is “Font, coffee or baby name.” I was five for five (I [...]

One of my past lives collides with present ones in three short videos. And then there are the larger stories …
A single entry in the SND design contest from the Los Angeles Times

Web 2.0: The machine is us

My Space: I know me some ugly