A Creative's Brief Guide to Productivity

via inspirationfeed.com

Maintaining productivity at a rapid but high quality level is a daunting task. It can seem overwhelming to even try to begin. How can you keep yourself going without burning out? How do you know that you’re heading down the right road with whatever new initiative you’ve got in your brain? Where should you begin? Are you just crazy?

Overcoming doubt and hesitation about creative endeavors — blogging, making videos, coming up with new products — can seem overwhelming in and of itself. Let’s look at tried and true successful techniques and methodologies for maintaining that productivity that you need in order to be profitable in a highly competitive world.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

5 step process for promoting content on social media quickly

via techi.com

In an ideal world, marketing content through social media would be an extended process because we would all have the time to do it the right way. We could focus on positioning it, nurturing it, and timing everything out exactly like it should be timed. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world and we have to maximize our results while minimizing the time and effort to achieve them.

There are plenty of shortcuts that make promoting content on social media faster and easier and there are plenty of techniques used to make the promotions more effective. The real key is to find the right mix of the two to get the most out of it. Here is a process that can be used to get the most exposure for the content without spending too much time on it.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

Building Something That Your Users Will Actually Want To Buy

via smashingmagazine.com

How do you make sure all the software products you spend time building are something that your customers will actually want to buy? It’s one thing to spend a few weeks coding your next big idea. But are you sure that you have an audience of customers that want what you’ve built?

The last thing you want is to create something, invest in Adwords, only have your potential customers arrive non-plussed, and then navigate away, never to return again. Before you ever start coding, it’s essential that you “pop up” from the keyboard, and learn what your customers actually want to use and will pay for.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

The logistics of voting

via techi.com

Voting sounds easy, but have you ever had to organize a poll big enough for the entire united states? I didn’t think so. Two million poll workers get together for each federal election, almost the same amount as worldwide Walmart workers.

For these poll workers, it isn’t just a side job for extra money, it’s real work, and is accessible to most Americans. Even high school students are eligible to be poll workers, so long as they keep their GPA at a solid 2.5 and are a US citizen.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

35 + Logo Sketch Design Inspires you Inspiration

via designshareblog.com

Today I’ve chosen 35 Logo Sketch Design Inspires you Inspiration Sets! In this collection you can see Hand-painted Sketch Transform Specialty Logo Designs.

We are also inviting you to type in your comments and suggestions and send this article to your social media friends as well. Enjoy!

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

My Thought Process For Creating This Logo

via vanseodesign.com

A logo helps identify your brand. It isn’t your brand, but it’s a symbolic representation of it. A logo communicates. Whether direct or subtle, it says something about your company and what people can expect from you. What thoughts go into designing a logo, particularly for a freelance designer?

When I began this series about the redesign of this site, I meant to talk about the logo earlier. I wanted to share how and why it looks the way it does. Then I got distracted with other things. Better late than never I suppose.

Perhaps the most important thing to know is I’m not a logo designer. I needed a logo and didn’t like the previous one, but a logo designer I am not. Still I wanted to create the logo for the site instead of letting someone more capable do the work. Please keep that in mind while reading this post and any time you look at the logo.

Posted via email from Inspiration

What To Do If You Get a Virus on Your Computer

via howtogeek.com

Whether you saw a message saying a virus was detected or your computer seems slow and unreliable, this guide will walk you through the process of dealing with your infection and removing the malware.

While many viruses and other types of malware are designed simply to cause chaos, more and more malware is used by organized crime to steal credit card numbers and other sensitive data.

Posted via email from Inspiration

The Creative Process of Professional Designers

via sixrevisions.com

Have you ever wondered how other designers do their jobs? How do they come up with incredible ideas? What tools do they use to get their tasks done? How do they manage their time?

I had the great opportunity to talk to seven awesome designers from all over the world about their creative process. Whether you’re just starting out in the design industry, struggling on working on your projects or just plain curious about how other designers perform their work, this group interview will hopefully help.

Posted via email from Inspiration

8 methods to speed up the blogging process

via techi.com

Blogging can become time consuming and a bit overwhelming. Researching and gathering information to include in a post, then having to actually sit down and write it can take time you just don’t have. Organization plays a major role in writing high-quality content, fast and easy.

Posted via email from Inspiration

Tips to Improve & Boost Your Creative Process

via justcreative.com

The importance of the creative process dawned on me the other day when I was making a cup of tea. It’s been a long road on the way towards tea snobbery, but the experience has taught me that like with producing great art, producing great tea must be done with care.

Posted via email from Inspiration

First Intel-powered smartphone launches

via theglobeandmail.com

The first smartphone powered by Intel-designed microprocessors is going on sale, just as the world’s biggest chipmaker launches a third generation of Core microprocessors that it intends will defend its PC territory from mobile competitors.

The Xolo X900 from the little-known Lava handset maker is available in India from today for around $423. It represents Intel’s attempt at a breakthrough into a phone world dominated by chips based on designs of the U.K.’s Arm.

Posted via email from Inspiration

10 Funny and Fabulous Flowcharts

via mentalfloss.com

Flow charts are wonderful for mapping processes for machines, as they lay out a sequence of binary decisions, meaning yes or no. When you think about it, most of what we do in life is also based on yes/no decisions -you just have to break the problem down into small pieces to see that clearly. In these flow charts, we see how life choices can be broken down into a set of binary decisions taken to a ridiculous degree.

Posted via email from Inspiration

A 10-Step Process to a Successful Freelance Career

via freelanceswitch.com

As many freelancers eventually realize, going into business for yourself means you actually take on two separate (very different) full time businesses. How’s that for a surprise when you originally thought that you could blissfully code away and somehow the money would start rolling in?

Posted via email from Inspiration

MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip

via wired.com

WESTBOROUGH, Massachusetts — Call Anant Agarwal’s work crazy, and you’ve made him a happy man.

Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. The lab is housed in the university’s Stata Center, a Dr. Seussian hodgepodge of forms and angles that nicely reflects the unhindered-by-reality visionary research that goes on inside.

Posted via email from Inspiration

The Secrets to a Successful Interview

via openforum.com

"What’s your biggest fault?”

“Tell me about a time you disagreed with a supervisor”

Please.

With all due respect to the highly trained HR insiders out there, I think traditional, wishy-washy interviews suck.

It’s my experience that sticking to the pre-approved, PC interview script means the interviewee only says what he or she thinks you want to hear, and you end up missing out on asking a lot of the questions you really wanted to ask...

Posted via email from Inspiration

The 6 pillars of Steve Jobs' design philosophy

via technolog.msnbc.msn.com

Everyone who cares, even modestly, about design can name a few decisive events that set them on that path. Steve Jobs was no different, but he was also extraordinarily lucky: The formative design lessons he got were so far ahead of their time that they would lay the groundwork for Apple's success with the Macintosh, the iMac, iPhone and the iPad. Here's six of the defining design lessons that Jobs learned, and which imbued every product he created.

Posted via email from Inspiration