We’re not fans of producing work on spec or for free. We’re not the only ones, Spec Watch is a site exposing the dark side of crowdsourcing design. In general you get what you pay for. Follow Spec Watch on Twitter.

At the 2009 risd Commencement, Sir Ken Robinson gave an inspiring speech on… creativity, finding passion, being determined, giving opportunities, challenging what you take for granted, the hierarchy of subjects in education (art near bottom), education systems designed in the 19th century, the importance of art in our lives, if you love something your whole life is transformed by it, cherish diversity, look for relationships not distinctions, life is not linear, the pointlessness of planning, be open to possibilities, create the right conditions for creativity to flourish, death valley flowers, use everything you have… Some Friday inspiration for you…

There’s a very funny short film called Truth In Advertising in which the characters speak about their motivations and what is on their minds rather than “normal” dialogue. Example: “I’m just interrupting to instill some fear and humilate Bob here.” (Clips from Truth In Advertising are on YouTube.) Now there is a single panel cartoon version for the design industry called Business Guys on Business Trips Example: “Printing every single page of our 1,500 web site is very important to a middle manager like me.” It’s funny because it’s true. Go look.

Google has a blog on their solar panels. They work better if they’re clean. Who’d have thunk it? Duh!

At the World Science Festival 2009 Bobby McFerrin demonstrated that the pentatonic scale is embedded in our brains. See below (embedded from Vimeo). Worth a look.

Nick Asbury turned company overviews into poetry. Good to see them put to some use at last. For example:

Thanks to Flashblock I don’t waste a lot of time loading pointless Flash animations in my browser. The few times I do enable Flash it’s usually to watch video. With HTML5, though, this too will not be necessary because HTML5 includes a video tag. Rejoice! Adobe, probably not so pleased.