Thought You Should See This, January 20th, 2012

This week’s Thought You Should See This update, for my friends at Doblin:

Doblin’s fearless leader, Larry Keeley, gets top billing this week, for a fortuitously timed piece on Kodak’s demise. (The piece was published in Fortune the day before the Rochester giant filed for bankruptcy protection.) The Kodak Lie digs into the organization’s deeper innovation failings, so be sure and read it.

Fortune writer, Adam Lashinsky, has a forthcoming book on real life at Apple, which looks like it’ll be well worth the read. I picked up on Bob Sutton’s favorable review, which took a close look at the section detailing the company’s organizational structure.

Super old school video of designer Herb Lubalin detailing the story of the evolution of the PBS logo. Great look at the designer/client relationship–and the often fraught branding design process.

British design critic, Rick Poynor assessed ongoing tension between design and management, a continued issue for anyone looking to build any kind of design presence in the world’s C-suites.

“Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go.” Creative genius, Wayne White, will be immortalized in the upcoming biopic, Beauty is Embarrassing, which will premiere in March at this year’s South by South West Film Festival. Watch the trailer and swoon.

I went on a bit of a SOPA/PIPA frenzy, capturing multiple perspectives, including Clay Shirky’s clear description of how we got where we are. Then I decided to immortalize the day-long, web-wide protest itself (Google’s blacked out home page shown, top.) So I asked six designers to subject the protests to a design critique, and then tried to extrapolate their thoughts to see what this said about the companies’ approach to design. A stretch, perhaps, but I do believe a serious point was made among the fun. (And seriously, some of the critiques are geniusly funny.)

Nike launched the Fuelband, its way to expand the popularity of its Nike+ platform to the less obviously sporty among us. I wondered what executives at Fitbit, a startup with a similar idea but rather less funds, must be thinking right now.

In a great example of the iteration that’s so vital to the innovation process, Burt Herman explains the evolution of Storify, a site designed to “create engaging social stories.”

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