Note: I do not in anyway fancy myself the supreme expert of Design. Nor do I think anyone is or ever can be. Design is a living, breathing entity that will forever evolve, push limits, and astound. This blog is simply some exercises that can help broaden your horizons even if it’s the slightest bit. Also keep in mind, they are in no particular order. That being said, on to the list!

1. Do online tutorials.
The dreaded vacuum. As designers, we avoid it like the plague (or should). We strive to break out of our own design shells constantly, but what about our Photoshop shells? Photoshop is such a unique and complex tool, sometimes when we learn how to do something one way, we stick with it. Even if it’s not the most efficient way. Try doing something strange and off the wall – like setting someone on fire. You might learn something new about photoshop and/or a more efficient way to do something.

2. Use a design style from one of the greats.
Sometimes it’s not enough just to look at inspiring pieces from the great graphic designers throughout history; sometimes you need to scoop it up and play with it. Try designing in a style that is opposite of your own. If your design is clean and precise, try designing a piece inspired by Stefan Sagmeister or David Carson. If you love wild and crazy design, try designing something inspired by Josef Muller-Brockmann or Yusaku Kamekura. Obviously, I don’t mean recreating the works. Use some elements and the general style to make something new and unique. It will challenge you and force you to think differently.

3. Use colors you rarely use.
Look at old designs. Do you have a tendency to use blues and grays? Design a piece that is only oranges and yellows. Go to Kuler and find a crazy color palate and stick with it. Splash around in the color wheel and don’t be afraid to go crazy. Sometimes you’ll discover use of color you were afraid to use before.

4. Design upside-down.
I am constantly guilty of this: I start a homepage design and I whip up a heading and navigation that I love. I gain momentum and pretty soon I’m almost done with the design. Oh yeah, I need to design the footer. Well, everything else looks great, so I’ll just throw in a bar of color with text links and call it done. Who scrolls all the way down to the bottom anyway? What? What am I thinking? My design should have love and attention from top to bottom. That’s what makes a truly inspired design. A way to combat this is design upside-down, top to bottom (and no, I don’t mean stand on your head – but I won’t stop you if you want to try). Not only will you give extra attention to things you sometimes forget about, you’ll also approach a design in a very unique way.

5. Steal a fellow designer’s PSD
No, I don’t mean literally. Ask a fellow designer if you can borrow an old PSD of one of their designs. Only use the elements in their design and create something new(don’t add anything, don’t change colors, don’t change fonts, etc). Blow elements up, shrink elements down, do whatever you can to make it different and interesting. By limiting yourself, and using design elements you’re less familiar with, you force yourself to learn new things and see things differently.

There you have it. Obviously some of these exercises are not always going to work for client work, but try to put aside time to design just for the fun of it. Be your own client and always try and push your own limits.

Seeing as How Magazine was nice enough to bring their annual design conference to Denver, I thought it made sense to go down for the day and take in a few sessions. I’ve always been a fan of How Magazine. They tend to have business focus in a lot of their articles and are less about just showing lot’s of nice design work. I have also been to a How Conference before and felt that I got a great deal of inspiration out of the experience. I still remember David Carson’s talk and his great sense of humor.

For this year’s conference I chose to attend sessions by Tony Mikes, Sam Harrison, and John January & Tug McTighe. Tony Mike’s session was titled, “Is Your Agency Interesting.” As an agency owner I was drawn to this session as we are always trying to better differentiate ourselves. I came to the conclusion that I think Imulus is interesting, but that we could probably communicate that more effectively than we are currently and we could also be doing a lot more interesting things. Tony was a very compelling speaker and I will definitely be checking out his Second Wind company.

Next came Sam Harrison’s session on “How to Sell Your Ideas to Bosses, Clients and Other Decision Makers.” An author of several books, I found Sam to be a very polished and interesting speaker. His ideas were well organized and I learned a lot that I can apply to how we present ideas at Imulus. The idea that he left us with, that it was “All About Energy,” really summed it up for me. If you put all your energy into preparing and presenting your idea your chances of success are much higher. If you aren’t excited about your own idea, how can you expect the person on the other side of the table to be excited.

By far the most unusual session was “Everything I Needed to Know About Advertising I Learned from Star Wars.” John and Tug were very entertaining in their cleverly constructed presentation. Utilizing lessons drawn from all the Star Wars films, they were able to show parallels where those lessons apply to the life of a creative. And while the lessons were good, the heart of the presentation was the humor and clever concept. I will always remember that there is a Death Star out there ready to kill my next great idea.

The resource center had some interesting booths and lots of quality shwag. Adobe was showing off CS5 and bunches of paper companies were hoping that designers will continue to design printed pieces for a bit longer. Threadless was nice enough to give out free drinks at the happy hour at the end of the day. Thanks for the beer!

1. We are extremely lucky to work in the industry we do. By having everything online, it’s just silly to not be able to work from home. When you have a group of trusted individuals who get their stuff done and are accountable for it, it is such a nice benefit to work from home. I find it funny with micromanagers in a big corporation who think working from home is an excuse to slack off. If that’s the case, you’re clearly not doing something right. But, micromanaging rants can be saved for another blog post.
2. When 2 of the 9 people in your office have swine flu, you can avoid them. Plus, you don’t actually have to take sick days. It’s so nice to stay home when you’re not feeling well, but still be able to get your work done and not cut into your vacation or personal time.
3. Fresh air and change of scenery. Everyone can use that.
4. It tests communication skills. Are we working in the most collaborative way? Does the weakness show more when we’re out of the office? If so, what do we do to solve the problem?
5. Nooners. Kidding. I swear.
6. It helps put work life vs. personal life in perspective. Some things that tend to stress me out when I’m in the office just aren’t that big of a deal and aren’t worth adding the extra years to my life. It’s good to get that periodic reality check.
7. Pajamas. Enough said. Well, not really. You also don’t have to put makeup on or do your hair…until George surprises you with a video chat. Course, it’s worse when he does that during #5. Ah, kidding again. Really.
8. For some reason, I feel like I can take a step back and become more strategic. I have the time to look at the big picture, our process, client goals, etc. I’m not sure why, but I do. Maybe it’s because I get to dodge phone calls for a day, and really focus on some of my own goals.
9. Healthier lunches. I LOVE going out to lunch with my colleagues. It provides a much-needed break in the day, and is a great time to talk about our shenanigans outside of work. However, with that comes lunches that are much larger and much higher in calories. I know, I know. With some discipline I’d be better when at work, but where’s the fun in that!?! At least when I’m home, I have a damn good reason for staying home to eat.
10. Everyone’s super duper excited to see you when you get back. It’s just one big love fest. Seriously.

What did I miss? What are you favorite things about working from home?

I’ve learned two valuable lessons recently: Don’t be lazy. Don’t be a brat. More specifically: add a subject line to your e-mails. It’s not that hard and it makes everyone’s life easier.

When I first started at Imulus, I was not accustomed to inter-office exchanges of e-mails. Most of the time if someone wanted me to complete a task, I would attach the completed item to an e-mail and send away. Naturally I would ignore the prompt asking me if I still wanted to send the e-mail without a subject line. After a while, my mail application would give up on me and stop the alerts.

Eventually, I was diplomatically informed by some of my co-workers that my neglect of subject lines may be a tad annoying. “Annoying?” I thought in my most indignant mental voice. “I’ll show them annoying.” After this cerebral conversation with myself, I proceed to add subject lines that had nothing to do with the actual e-mail. Subjects such as “sweet cuppin cakes” or “I like turtles” would crop up in my co-workers’s inbox giving them something to chuckle at or be irritated at.

My shenanigans ensued for around a year and a half until the day that cruel irony bit me square in the ass. During a dark day in Imulus’s history when we lost some information, I was doing my best as the diligent designer to help recover all that I could. This meant I had to look though old e-mails with my trusty search to help me. Side note: I am not a good organizer when it comes to my e-mail and I am a digital pack rat – bad combination. Anyway, back to our flustered heroine. As I was sorting through my old e-mails becoming increasingly murderous towards my past self I came to a harsh revelation – it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the inconvenience for maybe a couple of seconds of giggling at the silly subject line.

These days I have learned my lesson… Although occasionally I do like to slip in the old silliness, but only if it applies to the real subject line.

Recently I’ve been intrigued by the personal statistic service over at Daytum.com. In brief summary Daytum is a service that allows users to quickly generate graphs about anything they’re interested in. It then publishes them in a beautiful interface for others to see.

This new service got me thinking about how awesome it would be to have a detailed statistical overview of one’s life. I’m not talking bare bones stats, but rather in depth detailed statistics. I.E. cups of coffee consumed daily, total number video game hours played, the longest period of time spent awake, the number miles driven, the amount of jokes told, the amount of jokes flopped, etc.

Well, interestingly enough it was pointed out to me that the head graphic designer behind Daytum actually has compiled some yearly statistics of his life. You can check them out over at Nicholas Felton’s site.

Looking at Nicholas’ statistics made me start to wonder, how would you track these sorts of things? I imagine some of it would have to be guess work, maybe sitting down once every two weeks and going over your four or five big categories. “What was my average amount of sleep this week? How many girl’s numbers did I ask for, how many did I get? How much time did I spend reading?” Then, over the course of the year you could keep these life stats tracked in a service like Daytum. Or you could tweet them to a private twitter feed. Then at the end of the year you could run all this information through an excel sheet and see exactly where you stood. Granted it would be a definite time commitment, but I think it might be worth it to see an overview of your life in statistical format.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has other good ideas for how to document these sorts of things, perhaps a good iPhone app? Leave your ideas in the comments or hit us up on Twitter @imulus.

Update: Edited spelling mistakes of Feltron vs. Felton, oops.