A book cover designer John Gall shared his five rules of book design.

You can check out the video here: 

http://media.barnesandnoble.com/?&fr_story=7db6b96ab6a251fe4e0ba1f0d1994613abcd86a0

Below is one of the book cover that he had designed.

Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today’s China (1996) by Howard Goldblatt.

Let’s take a look at his five rules briefly.

Rule 1: Read the book.

Rule 2: Inspiration is everywhere.

Rule 3: Be thrifty with fonts.

Rule 4: Practice sound time management.

Rule 5: Rules are meant to be broken.

I believe the five rules above are also applicable to creative brain labors, such as programming, web design, and so on. Here I have paraphrased these five rules for programmers:

Rule 1: Understand the problem that you want to solve. Study everything that is related to your customer and your product. 

Rule 2: Don’t sit in front of your monitor for 24-hours. Try to go somewhere and find your inspirations.

Rule 3: Be thrifty with variables, functions, and all the words in your code. Write less code.

Rule 4: Get a shorter milestone, and iterate your work. Rinse and repeat.

Rule 5: Forget all the methodologies that you have learnt in software engineering courses. Find tailored ways that are best fit with your product, organization, and market.

For a simple exercise, try to apply John Gall’s five rules to your work. What would it look like?

N-Gage by Nokia has made a creative promotional website using stop-motion pictures and tons of real people. The video is nicely done and the classic game of breakout is quite fun to play.

One of the unique things about stop-motion pictures is the way producers create ’special effects.’ Even though the viewer recognizes that it’s a stop-motion video, it makes them wonder how did the producers pull it off. Intriguing.

Here are some of the scenes from the video, jumping over swimming pool:

The real breakout game:

Pretty big crowd featured in the video:

The scene above makes me wonder, how long did this shoot take, or how tedious it must’ve been to make everyone move step-by-step.

Nokia’s website seems to got its inspiration from a rather famous YouTube video, Tony vs Paul:

A.G. Lafley became the Chairman & CEO of P&G in 2000.

Since his taking charge, the profits have tripled to more than $10 billion on $76.5 billion in revenues.

Although lots of growth was from the acquistions, what was also impressive was its organic growth.

An average growth of 6% an year is really big considering the gigantic size of its revenues.

So how did he do it?

He did it by focusing strictly & primarily on the Customers and Innovating the way of Innovation.

When he analyzed the situation of P&G right after his inception, he realized that the customers were turning away form P&G products.

So he set 2 simple goals.

1, The First Moment of Truth : Make customers choose P&G products over other products.

2, The Second Moment of Truth : Make customers re-buy P&G products.

To reach this goal, P&G had to understand its customers in & out.

They needed something more than the regular market research and FGIs.

So they came up with 2 new programs called ‘Living It’ & ‘Working It’.

‘Living It’ program is a program where P&G workers actually live with their customers for a few days to observe the purchase & usage behaviors of their customers in the most delicate but rigorous form.

‘Working It’ program is a program where P&G workers go to work on the retail stores to observe how the customers actually ‘meet’ and shop P&G products. This was really improtant since it had great implications for goal no. 1.

By reflecting their understanding of the potent needs of the customer and optimizing the delivery route to the customers in detail, they experienced great improvements.

It is also said that Lafley induced intuitive & comprehensive ‘design thinking’ into P&G organization. While cutting other work forces, he increased the number of design related employees by 4 times.

In my understanding, this was not just to improve the ‘design’ of P&G products, but it was to enhance the emphatic sensitivity of the organization as a whole.

After adding designers, Lafley sent his designers, marketers & managers to the retail stores and asked them to discuss what they felt in their visits.

Interestingly, marketers and managers said things mostly about the composition of their product mix, while designers talked mostly about how their customers might feel in the store in relation to P&G products. This was due to the fact that most marketers & managers were accustomed to think logically and analytically but designers were more prone to use right-side of their brains.

This example also illustrates another emphasis made by Lafley, which was that ‘Innovation is a Team Sport’. He emphasized that all barriers between departments should be fallen in order to truly appreciate every idea and every capability of the company.

He took this step even further to outside of P&G. To embrace all the innovation happening outside of the company, he pursued ‘open innovation’ which was applying outside ideas & technologies in developing new products. He deemed that this could improve the R&D productivity and it’s now often known as C&D (Connect & Development).

The wholesome innovation culture of P&G can be summarized as 4Cs and a O.

Courageous, Connected, Collaborative, Curious and Open.

Finally, Lafley says that innovation leader should be a ‘Pragmatic Dreamer’.

So where do you stand? Are you a ‘Pragmatic Dreamer’?

A cat playing with toy mice, then heads into a quilt.

Simply hilarious. (although the voice sounds a bit creepy)

Video SFW:

Have a great weekend!

We’ve added a neat feature to Papree. When you try to collect a picture, it automatically suggests relevant pictures that you might also like to collect.

Have a look at the screenshot below:

Pictures of fashion, food, lovely places… You can pick whatever you want, then Papree will list up a nice suggestion for you with relevant images.

You can test the new feature by clicking on one of the pictures below, give it a try.

image from photobucket.com    

image from dailymail.co.uk

image from www.weddings-abroad.com

I love products with neat inspirations and actual purpose. Today, let’s take a look at a couple of cup designs I stumbled upon while surfing the web.

First one is “Self-stirring cup”, a smart, witty invention:

The genius of the design is that the momentum picked up by the ball stirs a tea or a cup of coffee without a teaspoon. Only downside I can see happens when you want to wash the cup, or finishing up that last sip.

from DailyMail UK

Second one is “I am not a paper cup.” It’s a green, eco-friendly cup with a widely used paper cup design:

You can enjoy drinking your coffee with a friendly design, while contributing to preserving our environment at the same time. Neat.

from Decor Craft, inc.

Third one is an art work of Monique Goossens. She’s interested in ceramic works and did an amazing job of creating interesting kitchenware. I cannot say they are all practical, but they sure are pretty cool to look at:

Be sure to check out the source for close-ups and large images: Yatzer - designistoshare 

Bernard Werber is one of the most famous French writers of our time.

His genre is science-fiction, combined with some philosophical proses and has written books like :

Les Fourmis (The Ants),

Les Thanatonautes (The Voyagers beyond Death)

l’Arbre des possibles (The Tree of Possibilites).

He is widely known for his creative & somewhat idiosyncratic imagination.

Recently I saw an interview article in an newspaper and the followings are just some excerpt of it.

- Why is imagination so important?

“Genious Physicist Einstein also said ‘Imagination is more important than Knowledge’. Anyone with a vocation might lose his identity without any sort of creativity. The starting point of a business is also in thinking of an idea. We all can create. We all do have lot more creativity than we think. Everyone can do it if they just try. One should never fear expressing his own unique world if they want to see the future.”

- How did you develop your unique imagination capabilities?

“I wasn’t good at subjects that need lots of memorizing. But I was good at subjects that required imagination. The curriculum in the most schools value subjects that need memorizing. To develop your imagination, you shouldn’t stop your own thinking just because your teachers, your parents & your friends might not like it. You shouldn’t give up midway, rather you should think hard and develop your imagination till the end. Truly unique and creative people usually don’t get understood by people around them. Like Mozart’s pieces, what is deemed as very new & creative things in their time however, eventually do become classics. So you should believe in your creativity.”

So what do you think?

I guess the bottom line is that we should all stretch till the end. And that’s how we realize our creativity within us.

So have you stopped? or Are you still hanging in? =)

Let’s take a look at a couple of photos below:

Are you surprised by the creativity of the photographers?

Sometimes, looking at such photographs can be very helpful for developing our creativity. Photos taken by amateur photographers from various situation within our daily lives might actually be more inspirational and insightful than those taken by professional photographers.

Of course, you might ask me a question, “Where can I find more of these amazing photos?”

and here’s my answer: Papree.com

Have a great week!

The year 2007 has been great for Nintendo. Not only did they top the charts on home console gaming, Nintendo DS has proven to be remarkably successful as well. Recent news on Nintendo Wii says that they won’t be cutting the price for the console machine, unlike what the ‘tradition’ for gaming hardware industry used to be.

But today, I want to point out a factor that contributed largely to the success of Nintendo’s recent adventure. Throughout Wii and DS, Nintendo have managed to change the core target customer to a more broader audience, by going for less hardware and less ‘bloated’ software. Most games these days tend to go toward the common pitfall of mislead improvements. More graphics, better sound, more enemies, faster play, longer playing time (which obviously is failing), multi-genre in one, etc.

Instead, Nintendo chose to do things less. Less graphics, less horse power, and simpler game play. They focused more on the core essence of the gaming experience, and less on the make-ups. The result was stunning. Not only did they capture a large market share, they literally renovated the gaming industry and what games should be like. They also managed to fuel other industries like brain development and memory training as side effects. The result simply put, was ‘more.’

“Less is More” adequately captures what minimalism is about. It has been widely adopted among artists and architects, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller. It is also among one of the key principles of ‘Getting Real‘ - the ebook by 37signals.

After several decades in any given industry, things usually go toward more complex, toward more of everything-but-the-core. Then once in a while, like the gaming industry, a disruptive force moves its way in, and simplifies, clearing out the mess.

We believe this is what’s happening to the software industry and the web in general. Things need to be, and will be made effective through simplification and building less.

It is widely known that people from the East & the West think somewhat differently.

Then, how is it different?

To give you an idea, try out the following example.

Seperate the objects in the diagram(chicken, grass, cow) into 2 categories.

How did you categorize it?

According to Richard Nisbett, the author of the book “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently… and why”, the way people categorize this example can reveal interesting difference between Asians and Westerners.

For example, If you’ve put chicken & cow into same category, you’ve done it the ‘Western’ way. On the otherhand, ‘Asian’s tended to put cow & grass into category since cows eat grass.

The difference occurs because Asians tend to appreciate ‘relationships’ more while Westerners like to logically define entities. Also, Asians tend to see the whole picture in a glimpse while Westeners tend to see specific objects in a more detailed manner.

This distinction seems quite similar to how the Left & the Right brain work. It is known that the left side of the brain is responsible for more analytical processing while the right side of the brain is responsible for more perception & creative processing.

Does this mean that Asians have more developed right brain and vice versa?

I don’t know.

But one think we could keep in mind is that we could try to balance them.

So whenever you’re stuck digging in on the microsides of stuffs, try to loosen up & let it just flow.

Who knows, it might give you a super inspiration. =)