Worth Reading: Behance Founder and CEO Scott Belsky’s “Making Ideas Happen”

Like previously reviewed books, looks just as good without the jacket.

Following our review of Seth Godin’s book “What Matters Now”, my colleague Joe Giovenco and I turned our attention to “Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality” by Scott Belsky. He is the Founder and CEO of Behance, whose mission is to “organize the creative world.” Sounds like a tall goal, but the company strives to do so through its organizational framework Action Method, which is applied to its products, mainly the Action Book.

Total time: 15:52

The staff at Behance also developed and maintains the popular network of sites for creative professionals. Its annual 99% Conference (referring to Thomas Edison’s “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”) helps incite people to start doing, that is, “make ideas happen.”


This time, a quick outline of talking points were jotted down.

Big thanks to Nick Owen and Amanda Pritzker of Portfolio for the speedy delivery of a review copy. And big thanks again to Joe for collaborating on the review and for lending his recording tools and space.

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Related: Read Marketing Strategist Seijen Takamura’s use of Behance’s Action Book. In the June 2010 issue of Fast Company magazine, Scott Belsky is part of “The 100 Most Creative People in Business”.

Creative Role: The Like-Minder

When a performer is put in front of a crowd, the typical advice is to “Be yourself.” Like other pieces of terse advice, it’s easier said than done. The same applies to making things—especially things aligned to what you think a product or service should be and therefore would want to use. The next step, logical but still not easy to arrive at, is to learn if other people appreciate what you made for yourself.

One example of such like-mindedness is design-and-advertising agency-turned maker-of-interesting “outside stuff” Coudal Partners, founded by Jim Coudal. Their mission is to “create clients, not find them.” As Coudal put it:

“Well, we have this audience that comes to our Coudal.com site all the time, and they must be like us, if they read the things we put up. If we can find a way make, create, sell things that we need, then this audience might need it, too.”

For starters, one’s self is always a dedicated audience. There’s potential to grow this audience of one to many, and caring for them while being true to yourself.

Tap into your inner like-minder.

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This is the second piece of a series focused on the lively cast of characters whose roles make the play of Creativity. In case you missed the first, meet the Slow Cooker.

Typographic illustration, tailormade for this series, was done by Shawn Hazen. Read his Designer’s Quest(ionnaire).

Introducing nateburgos.com

I never thought about having a personal domain name to present my design portfolio and projects. Not because I was against it. Rather, I was content with my work as part of Design Feast’s address: http://designfeast.com/nateburgos. It’s been this way for a while.

But when I was doing some domain name scraping at the start of the 2010, I discovered that nateburgos.com was available, so I bought it. It was impulsive, because domain names are fleeting, but I also thought it was just time.

Initial goals and efforts
With the satisfaction of the domain name I wanted, I worked on the interface. There were a few goals I had in mind:

• My site will be a one-scrollable screen. Nothing wrong with multiple pages. This was how the previous version of my site behaved and I wanted to stick with it. There’s also something simple about having all content, all on one page.
• My site will have fixed navigation—so scrolling doesn’t make it disappear.
• My site will be mostly black-and-white.
• My site’s grid will be self-evident.

I went straight to making a sketch:



Except for the interactions, the layout doesn’t deviate too much from my previous site. In late March, I contacted my webdev buddy Megan Coleman, who also worked on my other site of Design Thought Leader. Her reaction to the sketch was that it “…looks very clean and simple, very you!” By April 1, Megan made an interface mock-up:



One thing that I noticed was the area for the image. The width became shorter than the previous site version. This bugged me. But I got over it with a workaround: going tall and honing in on varied details of the work. This presents the image of each project like a collage.

Easy editing with Unify
By mid-April, Megan had a working version with, as she put it, the “fancy scroll-on-click functionality”. More fancy than this was what Megan recommended for editing the content. Designers can be constant tweezers, and I am certainly one of them. I wanted to edit the text and images of my personal site as much as possible. Megan recommended Unify made by Unit Interactive founded by designer and writer Andy Rutledge. Unify is described as “the simple content editor that anyone can use.”

I’m glad that Megan integrated Unify. Like its tagline, it’s a web-based tool that’s simple in its purpose and presentation, which made it easy to anticipate and use. I poured my content into the coded interface. The process was smooth. Having a good tool like this helped quicken work on the content. But it proved wise to wait and having let the content—mostly dealing with projects—take shape over time with my previous long-standing site. So I had a version of evolving content to work with.

Time and tool: a great combination
Now that it’s live, I took comfort in the two factors of taking time and using a good tool. Echoing Megan’s reaction to its design, my site feels like me.

Next steps: Update and tweeze nateburgos.com, over time.

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Update, 6-8-2010: Big thanks to Andy Rutledge and Unit Interactive for featuring nateburgos.com in their Unify Gallery!