Last week we brought together 400+ leading creatives and 18 visionary speakers in New York City for the fourth annual 99% Conference, presented by GE. For two days we devoted our full attention to exploring the inner-workings of idea execution. The attendees came with a laser-like focus on taking action on big, bold creative projects, and the energy in the crowd was absolutely electric.
As a production team, we challenged ourselves to take everything up a notch - curating a killer studio session lineup, adding still more incredible speakers, expanding our branded conference materials, and even including a TinType photobooth.

So what did we learn? Below, we give you the full monty on making ideas happen with an exhaustive recap of the insights shared by our 2012 99% speakers.

Cat cafés are huge in Japan right now. As the name suggests, these are coffee shops where cat lovers go to sip overpriced lattes and hang out with an adorable smoosh pile of kitties. In the past five years, exactly 79 such cafés have popped up all over Japan. What’s weird is that the café cats aren’t expensive pedigreed felines like Persians or those other ones with the funny bendy ears, they’re just the everyday mixed breeds you might find in the back lot of your local supermarket, cats who, in the immortal words of Brian Setzer, “slink down the alley, looking for a fight/Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night.” Likewise, in the past few years, there’s been an explosion of photo books and DVDs featuring average-joe cats. If people are so fascinated by what are essentially domesticated alley cats, why don’t they just swoop one up from the legions of strays all over Japan and take them home? I’ll tell you why: because landlords in Japan are dicks.

I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.

I say "again" because I wrote about cloning a bit over a year ago. Since then, it's just continued to become a bigger issue in the game industry.

Pinterest is an online pinboard.
Organize and share things you love.

I don't mean to create an instructional reference like Jesse Schell’s game design lenses or The 400 Project. What I'm aiming for is less about function or theory and more about inspiration, the sort of thing that might trigger an idea or insight, or maybe not. Light enough that you can try whatever a card advises without thinking about it too much, or simply let it drift in your mind while you do other things. 

We need an antonym to “gamification” which means adding pointless fun instead of functionless points.

The role of a visionary on a creative project is an essential and demanding one.  Many companies that consistently produce great products owe much of their success to their visionaries;  Apple has Jobs,  Pixar has Lasseter,  Nintendo has Miyamoto, etc.  But visionaries are nothing without talented teams to realize their vision.  Vision needs to be communicated, reinforced, inspected and adapted to the emerging reality of the game.  This is the visionary’s fundamental responsibility to the team.

Game Developer Magazine

Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit.

Dear Members of the Cult of Done,

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

Photoblog, also with animated photographs

yowayowa camera woman = natsumi
Lives in Tokyo with two cats.
Photographs mainly levitating self-portraits (and cats not levitating).
yowayowa is a Japanese term meaning "weak" or "feeble."
Since I'm yowayowa, it's really heavy to carry SLR cameras around.

Ob Logo-Design, Visitenkarte, Flyer, Webseite, Werbebanner... Stellen Sie jetzt Ihr Projekt ein und bewerten Sie bereits nach wenigen Stunden die ersten Designvorschläge.

As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.

Welcome to Creaturekebab Downloads!

You can now make your very own Creaturekebab characters from paper! All you need to do is save & print out the templates (on to craft card if you can get it) below, grab your scissors and glue and get crafting!

Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5"x11" page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.

Dead End Thrills is a website dedicated to videogame photography, an emerging art form that’s as far from the average screenshot as it is the average photograph. In the virtual worlds of modern 3D games, the snapper has something their traditional counterpart does not: a supernatural level of control. Light, gravity and time are just toggles, sliders and developer commands. The rules of the game can change.

The importance of colors can be described by only one sentence – “Color to life is like salt to food”. Colors can change your mood, determine your attitude, whenever you see color you can feel its pleasing effect within your soul. In other words, in life colors express a lot of meanings without saying anything.

Today we have collected some captivating examples of elegant colorful web designs for your inspiration. Have a look.

Hans Rosling redux: Mixing analog with digital visualization

You have probably heard Hans Rosling's presentations on world population using the cool Gapminder software before. In his latest presentation — his sixth for TED — he mixes in some analog technique as well. This new analog teaching technique he picked up from Ikea, he says. This presentation below is excellent and is a good example of mixing analog and digital visualization techniques that result in a memorable short-form presentation. Watch the video below.

iPad web apps are websites that are optimized for the multi-touch device. This page is constantly updated with the best iPad web apps available. Is there a great web app that we missed? Please contact us and let us know.

While cleaning up yesterday, I found some old sketch books. Some of then are from the era I was working on Zen Bound and early incarnation of Recast.

I thought I'd collect some sketches and screenshots how the Zen Bound level selection tree came to be and put them in a rough timeline. It was really hard process for many reasons. The total time span across about half a year, so many at many times we were diving in muddy waters. Now in retrospect it looks quite a bit more coherent process.

About
The Setup is a collection of nerdy interviews, asking people from all walks of life about the software and hardware they use.

Despite appearances, the site is not actually sponsored by Apple - people just seem to like using their tools. We're a fan, too.

The biggest hurdle for convincing someone that games can be meaningful is explaining interactivity. To someone looking over your shoulder while you play a game, gaming probably looks very mindless. If you stop playing and try to explain the design, you end up rattling off equations and rules, which just makes it sound dull. Since video games are a bit complicated, handing someone a controller and insisting that they just go at it doesn’t really work either. Interacting with the content and design simultaneously is what makes a game engaging. There is, however, something that everyone interacts with daily that communicates meaning like a video game: architecture.

We're two humans who call ourselves Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler - and yes we both own a computer - wow!?

They say that anyone could pick up a camera and start taking beautiful photographs, as long as the camera that they used is an utmost quality type. I tend to disagree. While there are apparently born gifted photographers, many have to gone through countless years of learning and hardship to achieve a remarkable standard in photography.

Peter Funch Portfolio

FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Drop by the Whitechapel Forum to discuss this week's installment.

Below we present over 50 excellent navigation menus — we feature CSS-based design solutions, CSS+JavaScript-based menus and Flash-designs. However, they all have something in common: they are user-friendly yet creative and perfectly fit to the style of their respective websites.

My name is Tina Roth Eisenberg. I am a 'swiss designer gone NYC'. swissmiss is my visual archive of things that 'make me look'. I am a graphic designer and run my own studio in Brooklyn. Contact me if you would like to team up, have a link suggestion or just want to say hello: submissions {at} swiss-miss.com.

Here you find links and information about nearly 175 free
PDF mags from all over the world with main focus on art, design, illustration and culture...

Was geht mir durch den Kopf, wenn ich aufstehe, woran denke ich auf dem Weg zur Arbeit, beim Kaffee trinken mit Freunden, beim Einkaufen im Supermarkt? '
Was spreche ich aus, was behalte ich für mich?

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.

WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820 are New York's flagship public radio stations, broadcasting the finest programs from National Public Radio and Public Radio International, as well as a wide range of award-winning local programming.

INVENTool ist eine frei verfügbare Toolbox, die Ihnen Denkwerkzeuge für die methodische Bearbeitung von Problemen zur Verfügung stellt. Diese Tools bieten wir Ihnen als informative Beschreibung, als eigentliches Arbeitsinstrument sowie mit weiterführenden Hinweisen und Beispielen an.

All content from FOWA London 2008

When you play a game at Gwap, you aren't just having fun. You're helping the world become a better place. By playing our games, you're training computers to solve problems for humans all over the world.

Illegal Advertising is an independent blog that brings you the best in underground online advertising. Illegal, banned and rejected commercials, spoofs, very virals, director cuts, underground campaigns and exclusive previews. New content is added on daily basis, so check back often.

About Matthias Pabst At the moment I'm studying media design. Secondary I'm earning my living with photographing people (business, events, fashion). My first attempts in taking serious and meaningful photos date back in 2005. Primarily, I like to take photos of landscapes, urban sceneries and portraits of people. But, I am constantly inspired to try out new things as well

"Staring at the Sun" ist das private Fotoblog von Dirk Jesse. Ich lebe seit 1995 in Dresden, bin von Beruf Bauingenieur und liebe die Fotografie.

This site is about art and game design. You'll find galleries of my latest illustrations. Also, I have extensive ramblings on a wide variety of game design topics.

The Escapist Features cover digital entertainment culture with a progressive editorial style, with articles and columns by the top writers in and outside of the digital entertainment industries. A weekly publication, the Features' magazine-style updates offer content for a mature audience of entertainment enthusiasts, industry insiders and other "NetSet" readers. Published every Tuesday, each issue of The Escapist Features explores a central theme, addressing head-on the topics relevant to gamers.

Blog with inspirational Websites

Flash Online Magazin

soDA - magazin für visuelle kultur.

nice blogroll

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community that used the wisdom of crowds to discover new business and technology ideas. Find out more about us.
Today, Cambrian House focuses on developing companies that emerged from our crowdsourced discoveries.