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Sponsor: DesignScene  →

DesignScene is a real-time inspiration iPad app for designers. Get inspired by creative images — from logos to architecture, illustration to photography — and save them into collections.

We’ve handpicked over 60 sources to show you the best creative images from around the world to spark your imagination. Additionally, keep up with the latest insights and tutorials from sites like PSFK, Smashing Magazine, Imprint, and more.

As you find images you like, add them to your collections. You can have collections for projects you’re working on, collections of great art, or collections that remind you of Sundays.

Download from the App Store today. Or watch the trailer.

* * *

My thanks to DesignScene for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: DesignScene

“Dear Friends”  →

This video with and about Charles Schulz, done right towards the end of his career and life, is both moving and sobering.

What strikes me is the brief reference to the possibility that Schulz never fully felt like the talented artist he was. He was an amazing artist who diligently drew and wrote day in and day out for decades; many, many people loved his work and paid for it. And yet, perhaps, he never internalized his talent in such a way that he felt confident in his abilities.

That stands out to me because, at least in part, don’t we all feel that way? We’re just doing the best we can. And it seems to us a miracle that anyone would show up and find joy from the art we create. How often do an artist’s fans see something great, while the artist herself sees only a humble, meager offering which is not all that special?

“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” — Jane Austen

At Circles Conference 2012, Joshua Blankenship’s session, titled “You Know Magic, So Stop Being Such a Terrible Wizard”, touched on this issue. The audio from his session is available here, and if this stuff interests you at all then I highly recommend you give it a listen.

“Dear Friends”

A Month With the iPad mini  →

Andrew Kim reviews his iPad mini (with some fantastic pictures) and compares it to his 3rd-gen iPad, his original iPad, his Nexus 7, and his Kindle Keyboard:

To really appreciate what the iPad is doing, it’s worth remembering what the iPad used to be. The mini gives me the same feeling that I get when I hold a beautifully engineered Japanese pen with a tiny diameter. It’s a product that has been reduced to its essence and concentrated to an extract. The iPad mini won’t be the right choice for everyone. It’s like a Moleskine or a paperback novel, where the larger iPad is like a magazine. If you watch movies or do a lot of photo work on the iPad, the 9.7” display will be better for you. When the mini first came out, I was skeptical. But after a month of use, I haven’t felt the need to pick up my Retina iPad once. In fact, I’ve given it to my mother.

(Via Patrick Rhone.)

A Month With the iPad mini

Pushpin iPhone app for Pinboard [iTunes Link]  →

Pushpin is a new-to-me Pinboard app for iPhone. I’ll continue to use Pinbook on my iPad because Pushpin is not a universal binary. But the latter wins on the iPhone because: (a) it has quite a few more features, such as browsing your tag list, editing a bookmark, and browsing the Popular list; and (b) thanks to this bookmarklet you can use Pushpin to add a new bookmark. And for (b) alone Pushpin is worth the price because it’s a workflow that beats the pants off Pinboard’s mobile-hostile web site.

Pushpin is $10 in the app store. If you’re an avid Pinboard user it’s worth it because, frankly, it’s the only option out there for a full-featured Pinboard experience on the iPhone.

(Via Federico Viticci.)

Update: Turns out you can edit a bookmark within Pinbook. You do so by opening the bookmark and then there is an “edit” button (lower-left on iPhone, upper-right on iPad). Somehow this obvious element has eluded me for the past several months I’ve been using the app.

Also, here is a bookmarklet that works with Pinbook, allowing you to use the app to create a Pinboard bookmark from your iPhone or iPad. This bookmarklet differs from Pushpins in that it doesn’t send you back to Safari once you’ve created the bookmark.

Needless to say, this new-to-me functionality of Pinbook is a pretty big deal — the app is obviously much more feature rich than I knew. My apologies.

Pushpin iPhone app for Pinboard [iTunes Link]

You Probably Write a Novel’s Worth of Email Every Year  →

Megan Garber (via, appropriately, Dave Pell’s NextDraft email newsletter):

Those 41,000 words are 41,000 words’ worth of time and effort and creativity that we’ve invested in manufacturing the industrial product that is email — the social artifact that is made to be shared and yet that is ultimately defined by privacy.

This reminds me of something John Gruber said in my interview with him a few years back. I had asked about his history in writing and how he found his voice as a writer and got into publishing DF, and he replied:

I was working for Bare Bones Software, and there was a question on the Mailsmith-Talk mailing list from a customer asking for help with a script that would count the number of words in all the messages in a mailbox. So I wrote a script that did that, and I ran it against my own outgoing message archives. The script was smart enough to count only words that weren’t in quoted passages, ignored signatures, etc. I forget the exact result, but the result was just preposterously high. Based on some common rules-of-thumb, I’d written several books worth of email messages over the previous five years — posts to mailing lists and a ton of personal correspondence, all of which I tried to write the hell out of.

Around that same time, it became obvious that the outlet I’d been waiting for was available: I needed to start my own weblog.

You Probably Write a Novel’s Worth of Email Every Year

“Print Is Dead Is Dead”  →

One of the ten things Kai Brach learned over the past year of launching and shipping Offscreen magazine:

Print is dead is dead
While newspapers are shutting up shop one after another, new independent magazines are popping up like daisies all around the world. Print may be having a hard time in areas that rely on traditional advertising models, but there’s never been a better time to produce high quality print products for niche audiences. Offscreen was born in the midst of this change and (in my opinion) more than any other magazine understands this technological shift by embracing the constraints of the printed format in a very unique way.

If anything, the future of print isn’t death but new life. Sure, the commodity print items like newspapers, paperback books, and magazine-stand periodicals are all in a metamorphosis. But there is certainly a long life ahead for higher-quality, well-designed, long-shelf-life, niche publications like Offscreen, 8 Faces, The Manual, and the like.

“Print Is Dead Is Dead”