Perhaps you’re afraid that if you try, you’ll fail. The startling truth is this: Just about anyone can do great things, can live a life that’s remarkable, purposeful, excellent, and yes, even heroic. If you want to be a hero, you can be. How? That’s what this book is all about. Will you choose to do it? Will you decide to journey heroically, instead of spending your life merely marking time? If so, this is the book for you. Welcome to your heroic journey.

    According to the author, traditional managers have relied on a two-step process to make decisions, which he calls "knowing" and "doing." Yet in today's innovation-driven marketplace, managers need to insert a middle step, called "making." Making is a phase in which assumptions are questioned, futures are imagined, and prototypes are tested, producing a wide range of options that didn't exist before. The reader is challenged to consider the author's bold assertion: There can be no real innovation without design. Those who are new to Marty Neumeier's "whiteboard" series may want to ramp up with the first two books, THE BRAND GAP and ZAG. Both are easy reads.Covered in THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY: - the top 10 "wicked problems" that only design can solve- a new, broader definition of design- why designing trumps deciding in an era of change- how to harness the "organic drivetrain" of value creation- how aesthetics add nuance to managing- 16 levers to transform your company- why you should bring design management inside- how to assemble an innovation metateam- how to recognize and reward talentFrom the back cover: The complex business problems we face today can't be solved with the same thinking that created them. Instead, we need to start from a place outside traditional management. Forget total quality. Forget top-down strategy. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovations, we can no longer "decide" the way forward. Today we have to "design" the way forward--or risk ending up in the fossil layers of history. Marty Neumeier, author of THE BRAND GAP and ZAG, presents the new management engine that can transform your company into a powerhouse of nonstop innovation.

    But how can you be the person who comes up with those ideas? In this revised and expanded edition of his groundbreaking Thinkertoys, creativity expert Michael Michalko reveals life-changing tools that will help you think like a genius. From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you’ll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life. Michalko’s techniques show you how to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different.  With hundreds of hints, tricks, tips, tales, and puzzles, Thinkertoys will open your mind to a world of innovative solutions to everyday and not-so-everyday problems.

    It is the product of preparation and effort, and it's within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it. All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life: In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative. In The Creative Habit, Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow -- whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew. When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities. Tharp's exercises are practical and immediately doable -- for the novice or expert. In "Where's Your Pencil?" she reminds us to observe the world -- and get it down on paper. In "Coins and Chaos," she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order and peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind and body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," she shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight. To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost). Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing. And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!

    Art Starts with a Line is approachable for artists of any skill level, no prior drawing experience needed! This form of art requires minimal tools, making it both affordable and portable.   Following a brief introduction to tools and materials, as well as some easy exercises and techniques for warming up to basic drawing tools, you will explore a variety of subject matter. You'll draw plants and flowers, architecture and cityscapes, animals, and everything in between. These projects aren't restricted to black and white either! You'll find techniques for adding color with colored pencil, marker, pen, even digitally.  Art Starts with a Line presents everything you'll need to know to learn how to successfully create line drawings of all types. Whether your goal is to create a custom logo for a client, or to simply decorate your planner, it's all here.

    The translator, Lev Shulyak an accomplished inventor, engineer and TRIZ expert published the book at his own expense to bring it into American classrooms. This new edition has been revised extensively by Shulyak and editor Steve Rodman, who have added valuable information not found in the original.Topics include an introduction to the development of the TRIZ theory, and a wide range of problems and the solutions that TRIZ helps produce.

    What can we learn from the ways great designers think-and how can it improve our lives? In CAD Monkeys, Dinosaur Babies, and T-Shaped People Warren Berger, in collaboration with celebrated designer Bruce Mau, revolutionizes our understanding of design and unlocks the secrets of the trade. Looking to the creative problem-solving work of design professionals, Berger reveals that design is a mindset, a way of looking at the world with an eye toward improving it. The practice of design-thinking opens readers to their innate capacity for reimagining the world around them.

    Exercises range from creating a typeface in an hour to designing a paper robot in an afternoon to designing web pages and other interactive experiences. Each exercise includes compelling visual solutions from other designers and background stories to help you increase your capacity to innovate.Creative Workshop also includes useful brainstorming techniques and wisdom from some of today's top designers. By road-testing these techniques as you attempt each challenge, you'll find new and more effective ways to solve tough design problems and bring your solutions to vibrant life.

    

    Kurtz delivers another intimate and engaging journal for anyone who loves to explore ideas, record thoughts and feelings, and capture those fleeting but amazing moments of everyday life.   Unlike a linear journal, this book can be opened up to any page, encouraging and engaging readers time and time again through continued use. Rather than simply complete tasks and turn pages, users are encouraged to leave their mark, and if they land on the same page days or weeks later, they can review, reflect, and revise their previous response.   Feeling lonely? Pensive? Peeved? Questioning? This deceptively simple book offers perspective, hope, and a twist of existential metaphor – and is perfect to pick up again and again.

    This comprehensive guide is intended to advance the progress of designers seeking to deepen their typographic expertise. Typography Essentials is a practical, hands-on resource to distill, organize, and compartmentalize—but not to oversimplify—the many complex issues surrounding the effective use of typography. It is for designers of every medium in which type plays a major role, and is organized and designed to make the process enjoyable and entertaining, as well as instructional.This book is divided into four easy-to-use sections: The Letter, The Word, The Paragraph, and The Page. Each of the 100 principles has an explanation and examples representing the principle in action.

    And we need constant reminders to keep us on the right path.With the support of his clients, Sagmeister transformed these sentences into typographic works, from billboards in France to sign-toting inflatable monkeys on the streets of Scotland. Accompanied by essays from design historian Steven Heller, Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector, and UK psychologist Daniel Nettle, as well as Sagmeister's own words, the series is revealed as a complex blend of personal revelation, art, and design--an eclectic mix of visual audacity and sound advice.This book consists of 15 unbound signatures in a laser-cut slipcase. Shuffling the sequence of the signatures will produce 15 different covers.

    These pages will guide you through the basic principles of illustration by concentrating on easy-to-learn shapes that build into complex drawings. With the step-by-step guidelines provided, anything can become easy to draw. This book contains a series of fun, hands-on exercises that will help you see line, shape, space and other elements in everyday objects and turn them into detailed works of art in just a few simple steps. The exercises in this book will help train your brain so you can visualize ordinary objects in a different manner, allowing you to see through the eyes of an artist. From photorealistic faces to holiday themes and tattoo drawings, How to Draw Cool Stuff makes drawing easier than you would think and more fun than you ever imagined! Now is the time to learn how to draw the subjects and scenes you've always dreamt of drawing. How to Draw Cool Stuff is suitable for artists of any age benefiting everyone from teachers and students to self-learners and hobbyists. How to Draw Cool Stuff will help you realize your artistic potential and expose you to the pure joy of drawing!

    Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog-gapingvoid.com-and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures.MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity. How do new ideas emerge in a cynical, risk-averse world? Where does inspiration come from? What does it take to make a living as a creative person?Ignore Everybody expands on MacLeod's sharpest insights, wittiest cartoons, and most useful advice. For example:-Selling out is harder than it looks. Diluting your product to make it more commercial will just make people like it less.-If your plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.-Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.-The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.After learning MacLeod's forty keys to creativity, you will be ready to unlock your own brilliance and unleash it on the world.

    Dr. Meg Myers Morgan, an expert in personal and professional negotiations, deconstructs our preconceived notions about adulthood, parenthood, and career paths and illuminates how they can limit us. Drawing from her experiences personally mentoring and professionally coaching her graduate students, raising her kids, and achieving success in her own career, this is a must-read for high-potential women balancing work and life. Chock full of powerful advice, case studies, and laugh-out-loud stories, this humorous yet commanding book will inspire you to clarify goals, overcome doubts, have a healthy relationship with ambition, and set the terms for the life you want.