1. “Do a minimum of products, well.” — Dave Harris
2. “Policies are an admission that you have failed to lead.” — Shawn Wood
3. “Google gives you the ability to get inside people’s minds via what they’re searching for.” — Bobby Gruenwald
4. “As a designer, I feel most comfortable with constraints. I like to be swaddled.” — Nathan Smith
5. “A dream has very specific outcomes attached to it. Dreams can make us do hurtful things.” — Phil Vischer

I love it when people smarter and more experienced than me articulate thoughts I haven’t been able to fully get out. You should go read the whole article.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. [But] people who make things, like programmers and writers…generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started…When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster.
— Paul Graham, The Maker’s Schedule

I can’t begin to detail the number of times I’ve left the office at the end of the workday thinking, “why didn’t I get anything accomplished today?” I’m beginning to realize it has everything to do with my calendar and what lies between the 9–5. Meetings wreck me. Silly, but also true.

Of course, as wrecking as they are, meetings are necessary. Not all of them, but at least some of them. We can make them better, more valuable meetings, but they’re still on the calendar, chopping the maker’s workday into useless chunks of an hour here, 30 minutes there, 45 minutes in-between lunch and the dreaded meeting you know will last until the end of the day.

Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.
— ibid.

If your manager is good at their job and realize the differences/function of all the people on their team, the workplace can be very friendly to the makers of the world. There’s always tension, there are always meetings, but the more we can articulate the environment we need to get stuff done, to make, the more the managers of the world can help protect it. Then they’re creating consistent wins for their team by cultivating productivity.

And what manager doesn’t want that?

I’m on my way to Dallas this morning with Ken Wilson and his crew to attend the Echo Conference. If any of you will be at Echo, come say hello.

We’re smack dab in the middle of the Age of Immediacy.
— J.J. Abrams

Pursue the best! Weed out the rest!
— Tom Peters!

You can try to make it more complicated. You can dress it up, drag it out, or blame politics for why you don’t pull the trigger. But no matter what, almost everything your organization does is carried out by people. And if you don’t have the right people on the team, you’re not going to accomplish much of anything beyond maintenance of the status quo.

And that ain’t much.

I like the fact that design is audience-related. I like the fact it’s not art and that you’re typically collaborating with other people.
— Stefan Sagmeister

There’s a 30×10′ curved wall in the NewSpring student building that’s been blank and lonely for far too long. I can’t wait to see this thing come to life at full scale next month.

My hand hurts, the old scanner is tired, and I killed my fair share of Bic GripRollers in the last two weeks. I’ve never worked on a project where I said, “Oh, it’s almost done… just one more hour” so many times. Then again, I’ve also never gotten the chance to run amuck with 300 square feet of environmental graphics that will visually anchor a public space either, so who’s complaining? Not this guy.

I hate the word ‘branding’ as a claim of expertise. An expert is someone who has a deeper knowledge of the subject than others trading in the area. I wonder if there’s even such thing as a branding expert. There are just too many people in it and very, very few that have meaningful knowledge that others do not. A designer claiming expertise in branding is like a fish claiming expertise in swimming. It’s not expertise; it’s the price of entry.
— Blair Enns, Win Without Pitching

If your experience with client work has been anything like mine, you’ve done a lot more pitching without winning than winning without pitching. And even when you get jobs, they’re often poor fits with bad clients—which is still a loss. I’m only recently discovering what Enns has to say about client work and business in general, but it’s good stuff. You might start by perusing his website or subscribing to his monthly-ish email newsletter.

Start listening to people who are smarter than you. Your bottomline will thank you later.

For the U2 fans out there, guitarist The Edge is capturing the current tour via TwitPics. Can you imagine the 70′s if bands could get content directly to fans this quickly and easily? Led Zepplin Japan ’74 tour, day 8, here’s a few more underage groupies. And cases of booze… On second thought, maybe it’s a good thing they didn’t have the internet and cellphones.

The Tron: Legacy trailer digs way back into our collective nerd consciousness. Go Disney.

According to this article, an IT firm was just awarded the six-month contract to rebuild the government stimulus spending transparency site Recovery.gov for $9.5 million. The irony is so thick, it’s almost easy to forget that HOLY CRAP GUYS DID YOU READ THAT? WE’RE TALKING ABOUT A $10 MILLION DOLLAR WEBSITE. (via 37signals)

One of these days, I’m going to make it to the San Diego ComicCon to take in all the nerd absurdity. In the meantime, it’s nice to have friends like Lee Gilmore who take copious amounts of photos of people in crazy costumes. I mean seriously, it doesn’t get much better than Leisure Suit Boba Fett.

Photographer friend extraordinaire Jeremy Cowart has switched up his website content to better fit, well, who he is. Nice change of pace, and I’m loving the categories he’s using to organize the site now. Oh, and the photos are, of course, amazing.

File under: People I’d Like to Meet — Kevin Stewart, Fashion and Style Director of ESPN The Magazine. You might have seen his style on The Sartorialist or New Dandyism. As a general rule, if you dress like that, but work for a sports mag, I am immediately interested in meeting you.

Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people.
— Eleanor Roosevelt

You should get out more. Go to the lake. Or the beach. Or the mountains. Or anywhere other than where you typically reside.

Trust me,
Joshua

P.S. For bonus points, go somewhere that doesn’t have wifi. Or cellphone reception.

A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.
— Clay Shirky

Looks like Gmail Tasks is all grown up now (even though it’s still under the Gmail umbrella, not the standalone product Google umbrella.) Whatever the rain gear, I’m just glad to have it on a mobile platform with a mobile UI. Yay for integration.

GIGANTIC collection of Charley Harper art, including a treasure trove of original paintings. Harper’s style just slays me in the best possible way.

Yewknee‘s annual Summer Mix Series is, if you’ll pardon the pun, really starting to heat up. Tons of great music so far, more than I could possibly take in completely. Highly recommended.

Good Monday morning, internet. Let’s start your workday off right, with a wonderful live version of Vicente Amigo‘s Tres Notas Para Decir Te Quiero. If you like, I’d suggest watching more videos of Vicente or picking up the album Ciudad de Las Ideas.