I read Dan Pink’s latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need cover-to-cover in less than 37 minutes. It’s no A Whole New Mind or Free Agent Nation but then again it’s no typical career advice book either. Working with illustrator Rob Ten Pas, Pink harnesses the kinetic, if sometimes ridiculous, energy of manga to drive home five sensible lessons for achieving a successful and happy career:
1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses
3. It’s not about you
4. Persistence trumps talent
5. Make excellent mistakes
6. Leave an imprint

It’s a perfect book for high schoolers trying to figure out how to pursue their skills and passions.… more

A great new ad for Discovery Channel:

Boom-dee-ada, boom-dee-ada, boom-dee-ada, boom-dee-ada…

(Thanks Clay)… more

Such a cute idea: YoungMe-NowMe! A Ze Frank photo challenge over at ColorWars.

(Thanks Åsk)… more

Al Gore recently updated his Inconvenient Truth presentation and premiered it at TED last month. It’s well worth watching. In it he moves beyond making the case that climate change is real and important to challenging us to act with a sense of “generational mission” to set it right. This coincides, incidentally, with his launch of a three-year, $300 million climate change campaign, one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history.

… more

Generalists not wanted here – Larry Borsato at The Industry Standard writes about how “…in the Web 2.0 world we live in, where new products and APIs are introduced seemingly every other week, specialization loses its allure.”

(Thanks Garrick)… more

The office at which I work, Airborne Mobile, is populated by an eclectic crew of seriously talented and not-so-seriously funny people. We have an opt-in internal email list called “Fun” and it’s where the serial web link forwarders and jokesters post their “non-work” nonsense. I’m on it along with dozens of others – including one Tom Inoue, a senior graphic designer with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work with on a couple high-concept projects. He’s a supremely skilled visual artist with a sharp eye and some major Photoshop chops. As it turns out, he’s also got some impressive Google-fu when it comes to finding just the right completely random image for the moment.… more

Check out this recent NY Times article about Madeline Gins and Arakawa’s $2-million Long Island house which they claim restores youth, boosts one’s immune system, and even opposes death. And it’s a real-life romper room.

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.… more

The Royal Mint in the UK has revealed the new designs of its various coins. The result of a public competition announced in August 2005, the winner among over 4000 entrants is 26-year-old London-based graphic designer Matthew Dent. His beautiful design treats the coins as a loose set which when placed together form the Royal Arms. “I felt that the solution to the Royal Mint’s brief lay in a united design – united in terms of theme, execution and coverage over the surface of the coins. … It’s easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar – being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.” Very cool!… more

The slides below are from a presentation, What’s Next in Marketing + Advertising, delivered last week by Paul Isakson. An absolutely brilliant synopsis of just how profoundly marketing has changed — in light of shifts in product design, the huge influence of social media, the movement to content as currency, and the increased value placed on engagement and utility — in a fairly short period of time. Pass it around. … Paul is a Senior Strategic Planner at Minneapolis-based brand agency space150 and the “What’s Next?” theme is from a monthly lunch they hold to exchange ideas and thoughts, to inspire insight.… more

Last year Gavin Heaton and Drew McLennan released a new and interesting book, The Age of Conversation. It was an experimental project featuring 100 voices — mostly marketing types from all pockets of the biz and blogosphere, including Roger von Oech, Gareth Kay, David Armano, and Andy Nulman — writing on the importance of debate and discussion. All proceeds go to charity. It’s received lots of net buzz and is enjoying Amazon bestseller status.

Here’s its promotional description:

If ideas are the currency of our times then this is, undoubtedly, the Age of Conversation, for without the art of dialog, the cut and thrust of debate and discussion, then the economy of ideas would implode under its own heavy weight.… more