There is a time and place for the purposeful noisiness of busy. The work surrounding a group of people building an impressive thing contains essential and unavoidable busy and you will be rewarded for consistently performing this work well. This positive feedback can feed the erroneous assumption, “Well, the more busy I am, the more rewards forthcoming.” This is compounded by the insidious fact that part of being busy is you aren’t actually aware that you’re busy because you’re too busy being busy. You have no internal measurement of the amount of time you’ve actually spent being busy.

In my precious hour, I am aware that it is quiet. During this silence, maybe nothing at all is built other than the room I’ve given myself to think. I break the flow of enticing small things to do, I separate myself from the bright people on similarly impressive busy quests, and I listen to what I’m thinking.

Every day, for an hour, no matter what.

Design is popularly being hailed as the savior of many businesses yet many people don’t really know what design involves. This continues a cycle of doubt, underfunding, and incredulity at its true power. By revealing the inner workings of our design practices, explaining our choices, reinforcing those choices with references to provable academic theories, and teaching our colleagues what goes into every pixel placement, workflow, and word choice, we increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners. It’s the realization that designers are much more than simple pixel-pushers that will continue to bring new clients and new levels of corporate reach and achievement.

At a project’s start, the possibilities are endless. That clean slate is both lovely and terrifying. As designers, we begin by filling space with temporary messes and uncertain experiments. We make a thousand tiny decisions quickly, trying to shape a message that will resonate with our audience. Then in the middle of a flow, we must stop and share our unfinished work with colleagues or clients. This typical halt in the creative process begs the question: What does the critique do for the design and the rest of the project? Do critiques really help and are they necessary? If so, how do we use this feedback to improve our creative output?

For our purposes, it’s worth noting the difference between a critique (which happens between peers or from more senior professionals, such as art directors), and feedback (which comes from clients). In other words, feedback comes from people paying a designer to solve business problems—people who may not be suitably impressed that you implemented a 16 column grid across a golden mean. (I’ll be impressed FOR them.)

You’ve quoted Pudovkin to the effect that editing is the only original and unique art form in film.
I think so. Everything else comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

Pixar’s secret? Its unusual creative process. Most of the time, a studio assembles a cast of freelance professionals to work on a single project and cuts them loose when the picture is done. At Pixar, a staff of writers, directors, animators, and technicians move from project to project. As a result, the studio has built a team of moviemakers who know and trust one another in ways unimaginable on most sets.

I needed to make illustrations for all of our apps for the new 37signals Suite page. The goal was to give a general idea of what the particular app does for customers that may be unfamiliar with our products. The illustration didn’t need to carry all of the weight since there would be a text description alongside it. However, it had to be attractive and detailed enough for people just scanning the page with their eyes.

My final reading of my own books occurs when the FedEx man brings the page proofs to be checked. In the case of Cloud Atlas, this was back in 2003, so these days it's not uncommon to meet readers whose knowledge of the book surpasses my own. Cloud Atlas's Wikipedia entry covers the book's more obvious themes and content, so here I'll stick to "The Making Of"-type angles, and a few Roads Not Taken.

What happens to your blog post between writing and people reading it? "Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. Let's say it's Super Bowl Sunday and you're blogging about beer. You see Budweiser's blockbuster commercial and have a reaction you'd like to share. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad critics, and your ex-boyfriend can listen in."

"Great writing doesn’t typically come by chance. And in my mind, it’s an art anyone of any trade should strive to master — designers, marketers, developers, and yes, film critics."

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"From writing in the bathroom (Junot Díaz) to dressing in character (Nicholson Baker), 11 top authors share their methods for getting the story on the page."