Four Essential Members of a Great Design Team

My friend Mike Roller wrote this interesting post on the Four Essential Members of a Great Design Team. He concludes that a successful design team needs to be diverse in its leadership skills, its creativity, its sense of reality, and its types of analytical thinkers. He calls the four essential types of members the Evangelist, the Conductor, the Dreamer and the Surgeon. The Evangelist is a high level design strategist that pushes the limits. The Conductor is an analytical thinking that turns all the little ideas into something harmonious. The Dreamer is a blue sky free thinker with wild ideas. And the Surgeon is the one who perfects the details.

10 Principles that Might Make Your Work Better

As previously announced, Frank Chimero is my new source of design wisdom. I read his 10 Principles that Might Make Your Work Better or May Make it Worse, last week, via Aisle One. And it has been on my mind ever since. It is full of good advice. My favorite is number 6: Embrace the subconscious. Frank - Please publish this as a pamphlet so I can have it on hand at all times - Thanks.

Multicolr Search Lab

There are many different ways to search photos, one of the more useful ones is by using colour. Multicolr searches 10 million Creative Commons Flickr images, using colour as its search parameters. The process is powered by Idee's visual similarity search, Piximilar. It allows users to specify between one and ten colours to search. The results link directly to the photo's Flickr site, providing easy access to the images.

Life Cycle Analysis Calculator

IDC in England has created this simple Life Cycle Analysis Calculator. This free online tool was developed in response to a need. IDC surveyed a number of design and engineering firms that all agreed - paying attention to a product's environmental impact throughout its life is becoming increasingly more important, but that many firms don't currently do the calculations. The Life Cycle Analysis Calculator helps estimate the carbon footprint and embodied energy of any product and its packaging. This is a great resource for designers. Its quick and easy. I will definitely use it in the future. (Found through Core77).

BBC's British History Timeline

The BBC's British History Timeline is a (insert best British accent here...) gorgeous (...end accent) way to brush up on your British history. It's a simple but sophisticated interactive timeline that lets you explore significant events in British history from 862BC to today.