Top ten reasons managers become great
8. Self aware, including weaknesses. This is the kicker. Great leaders know what they suck at, and either work on those skills or hire people they know make up for their own weaknesses, and empower them to do so.
via scottberkun.com.

Top ten reasons managers become assholes:
2. They are insecure in their role. The psychology of opposites goes a long way in understanding human nature. Overly aggressive people are often quite scared, and their aggression is a pre-emptive attack driven by fear: they attack first because they believe an attack from you is inevitable. Management makes many people nervous since it’s defined by having have less direct control, but more broad influence. A huge percentage of managers never get over this, and micromanage: a clear sign of insecurity and confusion over their role and yours.
via scottberkun.com.

Review: Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer
Milton Rogovin is one of those underappreciated photographers. His work could maybe be termed the photographic equivalent of Studs Terkel’s radio shows: Rogovin took photos of people who worked hard for their money and who often were very poor.
via  Conscientious.

Dear Designer, You Suck
Sometimes I wonder, then: given that everyone in design seems to more or less know everyone else, are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having? Are we pulling our punches too much when discussing the merits of the work that our peers turn out? To put a finer point on it: are we being honest with one another?
via Subtraction.com

Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes
05: For designers, verbal skills are as important as visual skills. Since graphic design should be self-explanatory, designers might be forgiven for thinking that the need to provide a verbal rationale for their work is unimportant. Surely the work should succeed on its own merits without requiring a designer’s advocacy? True. Except there never was a client who didn’t want an explanation for every aspect of every piece of creative work they commissioned.
via Design Observer.

The Photographer as Scientist
The April 2009 issue of Modern Painters is completely devoted to photography. The cover story is about Hiroshi Sugimoto and profiles his recent work and experimentations.

I had not heard about this before but Sugimoto has been buying up early negatives made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830’s and is now using them to make his own work from them. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that.
via Horses Think.

Magazines Blur Line Between Ad and Article
David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire, a Hearst magazine, included advertisers in cover compositions he produced for February and May, which the magazine society said it did not object to.

When he and his publisher began working on the projects, Mr. Granger said, “we came to an agreement on certain principles, and one was that there had to be real, viable reader benefit to any of the things we did.” He said that other cover treatments, like ESPN’s and Entertainment Weekly’s, “are pure advertising iterations.”
via  NYTimes.com.

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1 Comment

  1. On the “Dear Designers, You Suck” article linked, I don’t get it. Criticism is subjective, just like design is – so put the two together and you get a very subjective subject. In my profession, I get critiqued by publishers, photographers, editors, and even the sales staff on a regular basis. Everyone has an idea how things should look – including the big guys who think they know it all. It’s nothing to do with “real criticism”, people being honest, but how much that criticism is worth. Commercial or not, it’s an art, this is a creative industry, and everyone will have an opinion and if we always listened to everyone’s opinions, we’d have a pretty stagnant pool of mush.


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