From Luke Wroblewski at UX Matters: Though many business strategies and publications continue to trumpet the power of simplicity in the design of digital products, for lots of companies and product teams, simplicity doesn’t come easy.

From Fuel Your Creativity: Fast access, global demand, short deadlines and quick turnaround have made it all too easy to stray away from the basics of design. If you had a professor in college who taught you design fundamentals, the basics should be engrained in you. If you are self-taught, you may have a book on your desk that you refer to on a daily basis. For the masses, the internet is both a valuable resource, and possibly the source of a design epidemic.

Developed by AIGA, this insightful e-book by Andrea Marks is designed to help people who think in pictures—a segment of learners that by some estimates includes almost 30 percent of the population—gain skills and confidence in their writing abilities. It takes full advantage of its rich media format with a wealth of images and links to articles, books, websites, blogs, wikis, video and audio podcasts. Written with the visual thinker in mind, Marks offers a feast for the eyes—from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks to video of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll—adding depth and dimension to the written word and encouraging readers to explore their thoughts and ideas in text. Writing for Visual Thinkers approaches the craft of writing from many directions, all with the ultimate goal of unblocking the reader’s verbal potential. Both experimental and pragmatic, Marks’s methods will result in stronger, more verbally confident artists and designers.

From Ginva: The showcase of typography in modern architectural design for your inspiration.

From Information Architects: 95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

From NY Times: Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.

From Anne Midgette in The Washington Post: A couple of weeks ago, I started a long blog post about the fact that Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, had gone after a freelance blogger for WQXR and managed to get the station to take down a blog post she wrote that was critical of him. I’m annoyed that I didn’t post my piece -- somehow I was prevented from finishing it to my satisfaction -- because it focused on two topics I thought were relevant to the story. One is the state of journalism in today’s media climate: the institution that hosted the blog clearly didn’t understand the nature of journalistic responsibility (including the fact that once something is published, you can distance yourself from it by plastering it with editors’ notes, but taking it down is not kosher). The other is the way that people who get criticized respond to criticism in an age when you can answer anything, immediately, on-line.

From Hoefler & Frere-Jones: Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ's Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.

From strategy+business: A more strategic approach to costs can help you prepare for the next round of expansion. Drawing on experience from Ikea, Aetna, Pitney-Bowes, and elsewhere, this step-by-step article shows the three actions that can make a company ready for growth.

From FastCompany: For decades, companies have made you feel inadequate in order to get you to buy things. In an excerpt from his new book Story Wars Jonah Sachs traces the history of the growing field of marketing products in ways that make us better people and the world a better place.

From FastCompany: In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues that returning to the question of why five times cuts to the quick of a problem.

From FastCompany: Shane Snow, founder of Contently, says to win at business, brands need to make content, and make it about their audience.

From FastCompany: Every day is a negotiation for an entrepreneur. Whether advancing a cause, making a request, or persuading others of the merits of our view, negotiating for what we want--often and effectively--is a survival technique for a business owner. We can use it to go after what we want, to create options where there were previously none, and we can use it to defend what is ours and what we need. Perhaps the best news of all, this is a skill that can be learned.

From FastCompany: As the water crisis documentary Last Call at the Oasis opens, Participant Media executives Christopher Gebhardt and Chad Boettcher explain how they use social media to turn complex, overwhelming issues into hope and action.

From FastCompany: Collaboration. Everyone talks about it, but only a few know how to do it well. Here's Motley Fool's chief collaboration officer on best practices for working together better.

From University of Texas: With its sprawling pastures, gleaming skylines and rugged hills, the Lone Star State looms large in American culture. Just the word Texas evokes images of rootin’ tootin’ cowboys in 10-gallon hats shouting “howdy y’all!” Venture into a honky tonk or a rural Texas town, and you’re likely to find more slow-talking cowpokes than you can shake a stick at. Yet researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found Texanisms like “might could” and “down yonder” are dissipating, especially among young city slickers.

Fast Company's annual celebration of business innovators who dare to think differently. They're the ones taking risks and discovering surprising new solutions to old problems. This year, they tell you exactly how they do what they do.

From FastCompany: How one agency’s enforced No-Meeting Zone made one creative think outside her comfort zone.

From FastCompany: A new study shows: Ad people love advertising and social media. Other people, less so. Also, ad people are more likely to behave badly at office parties.

From Fast Company: In the collaborative marketplace, companies will have to join forces with other businesses.

From Fast Company: If your team spends its days asking for permission before executing, taking an hour to complete expense reports or time sheets, attending redundant meetings, or answering irrelevant emails, you’ve got a problem.

From Fast Company: Forget the idea of a lone inventor coming up with a genius idea in his garage. The future of innovation is in the crowd, and by using a big group’s best ideas, you can find the best way to solve any problem.

From Fast Company: Scott Anthony, a managing director at the innovation consulting firm Innosight, offers a step-by-step guide to building innovation into your company's DNA.

From Customer Think: Meta-analysis of a new Aberdeen report provides important insights into the most important customer feedback management differences between successful companies and unsuccessful companies. What is really interesting is that the drivers of success are less about collecting customer feedback and more about what you do with it.

From FastCompany: Ideo.org, the design company’s division for nonprofits, is just getting off the ground, but they’ve already found a few key things that any impact-based organization can learn from.

From strategy+business: How conjoint analysis, a tried-and-true market research tool, can be used to support organic growth.

From strategy+business: Behind many a successful product, there's a sharply focused intention to improve lives. The former global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble describes how he learned to foster a brand's aspirational value.

This guide covers the fundamentals of information architecture for organizing website content. We will look into popular IA design patterns, best practices, design techniques, and case examples.

From Forrester: Our clients tell us that they're eager to use customer journey maps because they see the documents as ideal tools to analyze and communicate their customers' perspectives on the interactions they deliver. However, even enthusiastic organizations sometimes struggle to determine the objectives they should pursue with customer journey mapping. Forrester interviewed five companies that use customer journey maps to understand how the approach has benefited them. This document outlines the business value that these firms derive from customer journey mapping and the variety of objectives that journey mapping can support.

Forrester clients tell us that they're eager to use customer journey maps because they see the documents as ideal tools to analyze and communicate their customers' perspectives on the interactions they deliver. However, even enthusiastic organizations sometimes struggle to determine the objectives they should pursue with customer journey mapping. Forrester interviewed five companies that use customer journey maps to understand how the approach has benefited them. This document outlines the business value that these firms derive from customer journey mapping and the variety of objectives that journey mapping can support.

From Forrester: Because customer experience is a fairly new business discipline, many customer experience professionals aren't sure what to focus on, how to structure their programs, or how the challenges they face compare with what others are dealing with. This report is designed to give customer experience pros a market overview of the state of the practice against which to compare their own efforts in developing an experience-driven organization. If that comparison shows gaps, the data can also help practitioners make the case for added investment to keep up with what others in the marketplace are doing.

From David Carr at NY Times: Newspapers run corrections all the time, but a mistake on television news, like NBC's misleading editing of an audio clip by George Zimmerman, is often followed by silence.

From FastCompany: The inverse relationship between number of ideas and amount of resources is what Smart Design's Gordon Hui calls "the pipeline paradox." But it can be avoided.

From Krista Tippett: There has been a dramatic break with ways of being spiritual and religious that held, in the West, for many generations. And there is a new evolution underway.

From Jon Katzenbach at strategy+business: Leaders can learn a lot from the late Apple CEO, but not all of it should be emulated. Applying Steve Jobs' leadership style to the wrong strategy, market, or product could sink a company.

From Dr. Daniel Amen: Losing your memory or developing brain fog in your forties, fifties, sixties, or even seventies is not normal. It is a sign of trouble.  Be smart and stop waiting for the problem to hit you in the head before you decide to do something about it.

From Customer Think: Guide your employees through the often treacherous waters of what they can and cannot do as they engage with social media. IBM's social computing guidelines are an example.

From Maz Iqbal at Customer Think: Customer-centricity is at least as vague a term as CRM and CEM. Is it a strategy? A state of mind? A loyal relationship?   Personally, I’ve defined “being customer-centric” as delivering value that customers care about. The end results should be more loyal customers.  But it’s not quite that simple. How do we explain the success of Ryanair, which offers a low-cost service, gets lots of travelers and makes money, but can hardly be said to have raving fans?“

From Customer Think: Comparison of organizational thinking in the Industrial/Information Age and the Customer Age

From Customer Think: Organizations embark on CRM implementations with an objective to improve organization efficiency and effectiveness in connecting to their customers. However, most of CRM implementations fail to achieve the desired ROI. Among all the reasons highlighted, customer data issues stand out. The more effective CRM implementations that have delivered the desired ROI have made a focused effort on customer data integrity.

From DreamGrow: Based on the accumulated data of Shareaholic, Pinterest has already surpassed Google+ in terms of referral traffic as of January 2012 and has been ranked as the 3rd largest social network right after Facebook and Twitter. Statistics has it that Pinterest accounts for around 1.05% of all the referral traffic in the web. With the aim to increase traffic with the Pinterest social network, the majority of online marketers and bloggers opted for Pinterest as one of their preferred referral traffic providers. And what’s great about this is that the referral traffic stream coming from Pinterest doesn’t seem to slow down.

We're a community of professionals who collaborated on a book that teaches simple, powerful ways to define and reinvent "personal business models." Our key tool is the single-page Business Model Canvas, the subject of Business Model Generation, the global bestseller created by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Patrick Van der Pijl, and Tim Clark, all founding members of this Forum. Members enjoy access to blank Canvases, Forum discussions, and all other materials on the BMY site, plus the ability to find like-minded colleagues among our 1,200 + members.

From Chad Bauman: Healthy arts organizations have equally robust campaigns focused on new acquisition and retention, and increasingly we are focusing on improving the overall lifetime value of our customers. For those with retention problems, I would still advise spending a majority of your resources reducing attrition before launching costly acquisition campaigns. There is nothing worse than spending a significant amount of resources enticing new patrons in the front door while your current customer base runs out the back door. And from a financial perspective, that is one of the easiest ways to sink the ship.

That said, if attrition and renewal rates are within the range of industry standards, more than likely it is time to concentrate on acquisition. Here are a couple of thoughts.

From Forty: Brands are a basic human social concept, and that the same patterns and ideas tend to repeat themselves over time, such that what we now consider “brands” are roughly equivalent to archetypal characters in literature, religion, folklore, mythology, etc. They’re a way for us to understand ourselves and affiliate with others, and by associating them with those common themes and characters, we can better understand how consumers connect with brands.

From Chris at Forty: One of the things that I’ve always seen as a differentiator between good and great teams is their willingness and courage to ask questions that go beyond the usual surface level stuff.

From brand channel: Brands are ‘pinning’ it on Pinterest with increasing savvy, and although the site doesn’t carry advertising or sponsored content, publishers and brands are quickly getting hip to how to leverage the social thirst for sharing images to drive awareness and traffic to their own digital touchpoints.

From strategy+business: This social entrepreneur pioneered a new model for mentoring startups in emerging markets. Now she's replicating it around the world.

A report from Wallace Foundation: We've posted a report previously unavailable on our Web site: an Aspen Institute assessment of an early Wallace experience in the "theory of change" method, with a slew of lessons on using the approach.

From Wallace Foundation: A case study of a "learning community" set up by The Wallace Foundation for its education leadership work offers insights into these groups and recommendations on how they can aid grantees and advance philanthropic efforts.

From FastCompany: You flex your management muscle all the time. You are constantly pushing your team and making sure that everyone is focused on the right priorities, that deadlines are hit, and that together your group is functioning like a well-oiled machine. But that's not what leadership is about.

From Austin Center for Design: Jon Kolko's book was started with the intent of changing design and social entrepreneurship education. As these disciplines converge, it becomes evident that existing pedagogy doesn't support either students or practicioners attempting to design for impact. This text is a reaction to that convergence, and will ideally be used by various students, educators, and practicioners:

From FastCompany: In Wicked Problems: Problems worth solving, author Jon Kolko argues that involving end users in the entire design process ensures a humane design solution.

From FastCompany: Marketers have flocked to Pinterest, but aside from a few retailers and media companies, few have attracted huge followings. So, instead of focusing on who’s biggest, we’re providing some inspiration from some of users who have made the most of the platform creatively.

From FastCompany: The only way to bring the world out of the recession and onto a better track is for everyone to tap into a collective sense of responsibility toward each other.

From FastCompany: Some highlights from author Brent Schlender’s recently unearthed conversations with Steve Jobs.

From FastCompany: A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.

From BigThink: We have all experienced “dehumanizing” technology – software or hardware that seems to diminish our ability to communicate with others or to function effectively in the world. Technology that creates new boundaries between people rather than erasing old ones. With this in mind, Big Think is proud to announce Humanizing Technology, a virtual expo in partnership with Bing. The goal of Humanizing Technology – which will culminate in June, 2012 with a live event and prize ceremony in New York City – is to identify new technologies that integrate themselves seamlessly into our lives, capitalize on our unique strengths, and amplify the best of human nature.

From FastCompany: Our economy is based on domination, not collaboration. If we’re going to stop burning through all our resources, that will need to change.

From FastCompany: Sheryl Sandberg leaves work at 5:30. Barbara Corcoran shuts off her phone for half the day. And that rascal Tim Ferriss somehow gets away with only working four hours a week (allegedly). But they're all superstars. Here's what normal people can do to set healthy work boundaries.

From strategy+business: NSEAD professor Soumitra Dutta's Global Innovation Index helps show which nations are oIn the rise and which are not.

From GrantCraft: We talked with funders working in the US, Europe, and internationally about when, why, and how it’s useful to scan the landscape for new ideas and new directions. This updated edition of a 2004 GrantCraft guide reflects key changes in philanthropy, from the rise of social media to a growing tendency to scan continuously for changes and opportunities.

From FastCompany: A new list of the most admirable companies has some curious additions, including oil and tobacco companies. Is there more to being a good business than not destroying people or the environment?

From FastCompany: Venture-capital firms have been the engine of the United States’ innovation economy. At Google Ventures, the search giant’s investing arm, Google thinks it can build a better one.

From Forum Corporation: Maggie Walsh, Practice Lead for Forum's Leadership Practice, explains the importance of adaptability in today's uncertain world. While some leaders are naturally adaptable, Maggie shares some adaptability tips and tactics for those who aren't.

From Hubspot: Every now and then your website needs a refresh. Radical redesigns are a great way to transform your site into a beautiful new butterfly. A redesign can be a huge success – or it could fail terribly. After all, it’s a long and tedious process. That’s where checklists can make your job a whole lot easier. Whether you’re working with an agency or redesigning in-house, this checklist will save you from some headaches.

Webby honorees, nominees and winners represent the best of the Web. They are but a small percentage of total entries and chosen by members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. See them all here.

From Ryan Tomayko: One of the things I'm most excited about working at GitHub is the opportunity to take our time and think through organization and process problems from first principle instead of blindly copying other companies or adopting status quo approaches developed in the last century. We're beholden to no one except the good people that pay us for our products and that gives us the freedom to build a company optimized for delivering the best experience - whatever it takes.

Last year, as GitHub began to grow rapidly, I was promoted to Director of Engineering. That makes me a manager of sorts. Gross, right? Actually, it's turned out not to be very horrible at all. Like most things at GitHub, I was given complete control and encouraged and expected to define the role in whatever way made most sense to me. I want to share some of what I've come up with.

From Smashing: Emotional design has become a powerful tool in creating exceptional user experiences for websites. However, emotions did not use to play such an important role on the Web. Actually, they did not use to play any role at all; rather, they were drowned by a flood of rational functionality and efficiency.

From Ben Yagoda in NY Times: Is it safe to talk about punctuation again? Eight years ago, Lynne Truss’s best-selling “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” took, in the words of her subtitle, a “Zero Tolerance Approach” to the subject. Although Truss’s focus on errors drew the ire, if not the fire, of grammarians, linguists and other “descriptivists,” her book was, for the most part, harmless and legitimate. Still, it overlooked a lot. Maybe more than any other element of writing, punctuation combines rules with issues of sound, preference and personal style. And as Truss didn’t adequately acknowledge, even the rules change over time. The two big players in the field are the period and the comma. I’ll start with the latter because the protocol for comma use is so complicated and contingent.

From Sean Corcoran at Forrester: The terms "earned, owned and paid (aka bought) media" have become very popular in the interactive marketing space today. In fact, taken together they can be applied as a simple way for interactive marketers to categorize and ultimately prioritize all of the media options they have today.

Yet as popular as these themes have become, they're often loosely applied across the industry and essentially no one is speaking the same language. Therefore we just published research defining each type of media and providing interactive marketers with prescriptive advice on how to best apply them. Here's a summary of how we defined each type of online media and their roles.

From Smart Blogs: Marketing never sits still for long. At a South by Southwest session, co-led by American Express OPEN and Skillshare, Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow gave his take on the shifting paradigm of marketing and how Facebook’s features are set to challenge the field all over again.

From Web Design Ledger: As you read this article, keep in mind that the shift in trends from one year to the next may be subtle, and you will probably recognize some of these trends already. But it’s our estimation that the concepts we mention below will grow and become even bigger in 2012.

From Little Box of Design: The digital age is here. Time to prepare for the brave and new face for your website design.  Alright, you are right, we are talking about web trend not fashion trend! 2012 is here, and the trend for web design has become a hot topic around the town.

a book chock full of information, strategies, and frameworks for measuring social media.

From Big Think: Guy Kawasaki is the author of ten books, including his latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.  For four years he evangelized Macintosh to software and hardware developers and "led the charge against world-wide domination by IBM."  In this video, he offers the simplest piece of career advice you don't want to hear.

From Dick Cross at ChangeThis: Just ask someone today this simple question: ‘How do you run a company?’ Invariably, you’ll be met with a blank stare. Because nobody ever asks that question. Because no one expects that there’s an answer. Yet it may be the most important question we need to answer if we want to grow our businesses and fix our economy.

From Patrick Lefler at ChangeThis: Pricing is critical, and short-changing your pricing strategy is the fastest way to leave cash on the table — money that will be lost forever and never recovered. So after that initial spark of innovation and the completion of the design, development and marketing phases that follow, don’t screw up the process by treating price as an afterthought. Have you spent as much time and resources on price as you have on your latest social media campaign? (Probably not.) The most successful organizations know that pricing is strategic and that it can affect top-line growth and bottom-line profitability faster and more directly than anything else.

From Jason Baptiste at ChanteThis: After a lot of thought, it’s pretty apparent to me what the most valuable overall skill is for future CEOs and world changers — the ability to tell a story. We live in a world where we are sold to hundreds of times a day and have become ridiculously blind to those trying to sell us something. But we’re always up for a good story. Storytelling is what made us love the advertisements in magazines that, as children, we would rip out and put on our walls and asleep under with inspired awe. Stories are the most powerful form of inspiration and persuasion in the world.

From strategy+business: According to this research, consumers who join a company's online community spend significantly more on the firm's products than they did prior to signing up or in comparison with similar customers who are not part of the network.

The Shape of Design isn't going to be a text book. The project will be focused on Why instead of How. We have enough How; it's time for a thoughtful analysis of our practice and its characteristics so we can better practice our craft. After reading the book, I want you to look at what you do in a whole new light. Design is more than working for clients.

On Vimeo: Frank Chimero is a graphic designer, illustrator, teacher, maker and writer hailing from Portland, Oregon. He also teaches graphic design & typography to eager minds at Portland State University and is managing partner of graphic design blog, Thinking for a Living.