LOL - Team Work

Gaian.me

The Gaian Project celebrates nature. With its yearly
digital album release inlcuding designs, music and
articles it inspires to preserve our planet.

Over the past six years a group of over 10.000 designers - members
from Behance, deviantArt and other big design websites - joined us.

In 2010, Steffen Knoesgaard, Fredrik Ekholm and Simon Holmedal,
created the first ever moving imagery for the community art
project Gaia: The Gaia10 official trailer. Two years later the
project has evolved from coordinated yearly releases, into an
ongoing collaboration as the community run website gaian.me

To mark the new direction of the community, curator Marius
Bauer returned to Steffen and Fredrik and commissioned an
updated trailer. Seeing this as an excellent opportunity to blow
off some creative steam, they conceptualized an idea to recreate
the trailer based on the original thoughts, but updated for 2012.

During the process designer/animator Linus Lundin - a long time
collaborator, joined the project as well as musician and sound
designer Jochen Mader.

More about the project at Gaian.me

Life lessons study'n design does not teach you

Over at graphicdesignblender.com I found an article that really spoke to me. It all about the life lessons study'n design does not teach you.

I hate to just copy and past the article but this one I can not top. ^_^

Head over to GDB if you want to read the full article.

5 critical lessons your design professors never taught you

When I started out as a designer, I thought that the client had the final say on any work you do. This was a lesson that took me a little time to learn. In many of my classes we all sat around discussing the “why” behind our design before we ever revealed the final result.
I always got the impression from many of my design professors that I would have to suffer through many years of low-paying design jobs before I really “made it” and got to start working on fun, lucrative projects.
Finding new clients can be really hard. In fact, it’s one of the most requested topics here at GDB.
You don’t have to be a puritan all the time.

Lesson 1: Clients pay the bills, but the customer’s not always right. 

And in some cases, that’s true.

But I quickly learned that our entire existence is not solely for the purpose of designing what the client thinks is best. In fact, I think it’s one of the biggest myths of graphic and web design.

If you position yourself correctly, you can establish a partnership with your client where they will respect your decisions and opinion. At that point, you become more than just a monkey with a Wacom tablet. You become a true designer.