The Tanning Effect Series by Steve Stoute

Former music executive Steve Stoute presents The Tanning Effect video series coinciding with his new book “The Tanning Of America: How the Culture of Hip-Hop Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy.” Stoute takes a closer look at how pop culture transformed a generation of listeners and created a new global marketplace. In the videos, Stoute sits down with Jay-Z, Pharrell Williams, Lady Gaga and Jimmy Iovine to speak about how today’s generation have rewritten the rules of the new economy. For an in-depth look, purchase the book online and at retailers out now.

Live Views of Creative Agencies

I’ve really enjoyed taking a peep at these live videos from agencies across the globe. Maybe you will to0…just select the photo to view it live:

Business of Art + Design

Paul Reed Smith and Paul Miles ’91 deliver keynote talk to commence MICA’s new Master of Professional Studies in the Business of Art + Design on Sunday, May 29, 7:30-9:30 p.m.

(More MICA events here)

“It Feels Good To Go Somewhere & Come Back Different”

Amanda Diva talks about why she prefers Paris, why she contemplates moving there and the value of a fresh perspective.

It’s Ok To Steal…

Austin Kleon wants you to know that all artists steal.

As much as creatives don’t want to admit it, WE ALL STEAL. The thing that separates the good ones from bad ones is that the good ones steal from many places to create new combinations, while the bad ones steal from only a few places and their work just looks jacked. Either way stealing is just one of 9 points of contention that writer Austin Kleon talks about on his blog. So head on over, you might learn a thing or two about being creative. (Source: AnotherFaceInTheCrowd.com)

The Print Biz Lives On

Publishing is being democratized, print is becoming personal, users are demanding choice in the content they consume and the manner in which they consume it, and production is being fulfilled on demand. This is especially true in the magazine publishing industry. In the US alone, consumers spend more than $10B a year on magazines, across 18,000 titles.

MagCloud, the revolutionary new self-publishing web service from HP, is changing the way ideas, stories, and images find their way into peoples’ hands in a printed magazine format. Whether you are a novice or experienced publisher, MagCloud offers you a way to create commercial quality magazines, printed on demand with no upfront costs or minimum print runs. MagCloud is creating new ways to bring consumers and publishers together in a web-based marketplace where choice, flexibility and print on demand are the cornerstones of the community.

The Elements of Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is undoubtedly a hot topic in web design right now. To some degree, the popularity of the concept of responsive web design is well deserved because site users are increasingly diversifying their methods of accessing a website.iPad, iPhone, Android mobile devices, desktops, netbooks — we’re in a time where our web designs must function in a multitude number of ways. Read more

10 Excellent SEO Tips That Will Improve Your Web Design

A great website design is important to any business trying to find success online, but if a website doesn’t have a chance at good search rankings, very few people may ever get to see it. To avoid having a website that is not search engine friendly, you simply need to take into consideration some basic SEO principles and good content development practices. Read more

10 Techniques for Customizing the WordPress Admin Panel

A while back, I wrote a guide on how to improve the WordPress Admin Panel as an exploration of how we can customize the user interface of WordPress for end-users. In this post, I’ll take you even further with some awesome tricks, techniques and snippets from my website, WP-Snippets.

In the previous post, we removed a lot of clutter and things that we didn’t need. Now we’ll focus on things that happen behind the scene that can enhance the user experience. Read more

Life of a startup at SXSW

At SXSW this year, I had the unique opportunity to understand “brand” from the perspective of a startup. I spent much of SXSW with two unique startups, Giftopera.com and Voyurl.com. Both of these are distinct products with quite different founders. Giftopera was founded by a developer I’ve known for years named Vineet Choudhary and his business partner Simon Tiemtore. It’s a group gifting application that, once built, will allow people to pool their money to buy a gift for a friend. Voyurl is founded by Adam Liebsohn who has seemingly scraped every dollar he has into the creation of Voyurl while maintaining a full-time job at an award-winning ad agency. Voyurl allows users to elect to be tracked as they move around the Internet with the trade off that they can then see their own stats and compare them with their friends’. The idea is to even the playing field against Google, Facebook and others who are tracking our online activity with every click. (more…)