Damascity

DigitAllmagazine has 5 interviews on Brand 2.0.

Web Worker Daily chats with Jason Fried. Most of the interview centers around 37 Signals belief in working separately and outside the office is almost always better.

Shahidul Alam, a Bangladeshi photographer, discusses mental hospitals in Bangladesh.

Yopos links to to the best pocast on being an entrepreneur.

“I found this podcast where Ted Rheingold, the founder of dogster.com leads a panel discussing how to start a web company. It’s one of the best entrepreneur panels I’ve ever heard.

These guys are actually talking about the early days of a web startup rather than talking about what you need to know once you’re big and famous. So go listen and enjoy!”

From SvN: A collection of documentaries on some of the great artists. So far I watched the ones on Mliton Glaser, Mark Romanek and Petnagram. Very intersting stuff here.

EDIT: I have to say the the Paula Scher documentary was inspiring. I also learned a new word: syncopate

EDIT #2:  I just watched all of the videos and they are all amazing. For some strange reason I just happened to pick up Step Inside Design magazine’s Sept/Oct 2005 issue and I had the serendipity to find that they had an article where Hillman Curtis provides his thoughts about the documentaries.

Checking their website I see they have a link to a Hillman Curtis giving a brief presentation of his setup and interview style. See: http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEPMagazine/Article/28498

Creative Latitude is a worldwide community that unites various creative disciplines for collective promotion, education and ethical business practice.

Check out their Resource section where they have many useful documents and tools for designers.

They also have a nice selection of Profiles.

Also from Signal vs. Noise is this NYT article about “The Brand Underground“.

Excerpt:

• “But understanding or “seeing through” the branded world is not the same thing as rejecting it. What bothers Casarella about mainstream branding are big, blatant logos that turn the wearer into a walking advertisement and are supposed to function as simplistic “badges.” That approach, he suggests, is what makes big brands as shallow as most Top 40 music or Hollywood movies. It is not that these forms are inherently bad; it is that they always seem built for the lowest common denominator, and the contemporary consumer demands more — more originality, more sincerity, more not-in-the-mainstream, a greater goal than just making money.”
• “the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.”

From the Signal vs. Noise blog is a link to this article from Inc.’s article about “Zingerman’s: The Coolest Small Company in America“.

Excerpts:

• “The key was having partners who were real owners,” says Weinzweig. “We wanted the passion. We wanted people who had visions of their own. Otherwise, whatever we did would be mediocre, and the whole idea was to elevate the quality of each element of the company.”
• To give good service, after all, you really do have to “1. Figure out what the customer wants. 2. Get it for them — accurately, politely, enthusiastically. 3. Go the extra mile.” What’s more, it’s important for employees to know that.
• “What we look for is elegant simplicity”
• “We want to leave a lot of flexibility while providing enough structure for people to be successful. That way, the ZCoB doesn’t become a collection of businesses that have nothing in common but ownership.”
• As for the founders, “currently, our exit strategy is to die”

Tarek Atrissi has done some amazing design work, especially in regards to Arabic typography in design.