Roundup of Design Feaster Blog Posts for 2009

Instead of giving a bulleted list of last year’s picks of blog posts, I thought it would be more interesting to relate them as sentences, much like the way that Things Magazine relates their discoveries about “objects and their meanings” which are written in paragraphs but could have easily been presented as a list. Here’s my try at summarizing last year’s Design Feaster Blog Posts not as a list.

When I re-capped my experience and “lessons learned” about a design lecture done badly, it was self-therapy. It was my attempt to reach out to the audience that I didn’t quite satisfy. I’m glad that I wrote it—essentially wrote it out of my system, actually. The biggest lesson: Speaking in front of a group of people, even if the group consists of only three people or one, must be prepared and done in a well-edited and engaging way—matching the Substance of your speaking with Style.

Themes that I want to uncover and write about more are creative projects or businesses started and run by families, such as e.m. papers, who design and produce printed products. Then there are brothers Rien, Alrik, Paul and Rudin Swagerman, who founded Viewbook— a web application that allows people to create and share their portfolio of visual design or photographic work.

Tied to this blogging about family-oriented creative projects are creative efforts by individuals. Interviewing my co-worker Marketing Strategist Seijen about his use of Behance’s Action Book has started a diverse set of Interviews with people, whatever their discipline, expressing their take on the creative process through very interesting projects. And creativity takes all sides, like Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s on-the-side creative obsession with typography.

Blogging helps me reflect on and discover more about… I was going to say Design. During my interview with The Curated Object (Thanks again Joanne!), in answering her question about what inspires me, I said, ‘Everything inspires me’ with the disclaimer ‘at the moment.’ To wrap up the benefits of blogging, it helps me both recognize and explore more about many people, places and things that motivate creativity. It’s an ongoing discovery that Artist-Maker Nic Webb, in his Interview, simply and profoundly described as something that is non-stop. As he put it, “With regards to staying creative: “I don’t think it is something I could turn off.”