“Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration” – Thomas Edison Don’t let that quote, the inspiration of the conference 99%, lead you to believe that this is anything less than creative. Just take a look at the list of speakers, past and present. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the President of RISD John Maeda , Scott Thomas who was design director for Obama for America. It’s one thing to be a creative thinker. It’s another thing to be creative AND productive. Kudos to our art department for always impressing me there. But I see a lot of creative energy elsewhere frittered away and it makes me sad. Yes, I will acknowledge there are a lot of bad ideas flying around, but the good ones… the good ones shouldn’t die because we don’t know what to do with them. So check out the site for the 99% conference, and if you go, would you… um… let me know how it was? 99% April 15-16 The Times Center New York City [link]

Daily Drop Cap is an ongoing project by typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische. Every day, or work day, Jessica designs a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap. Each new character is posted on Daily Drop Cap along with a snippet of code to make it easy for anyone to add her lovely work to their blog or website.

I love seeing the work produced by people who make a very public promise to produce something new every day to share with the rest of us. Here are just a couple of collections that I know about. If you can offer any others please share them in the comments.

• A Painting A Day
• Monster A Day
• Skull A Day

A t-shirt for the type obsessed to wear with pride. HEL fuckin VETICA – yeah! Dig just a little deeper into the Wire & Twine site to find some wonderful one of a kind items by Kelly Deal of the band Breeders Digest.  If you knit and you tour with a band, or even if you don’t… tour, you might want to take a look at Kelly’s new book Bags That Rock, knitting on the road with Kelly Deal. If you do spend a lot of time on a tour bus you might also need to some some stretching, so pick up Barbara Templeton’s Complete Idiot’s Guide to Stretching at the same time you pick up Kelly Deal’s book on Amazon.

Whenever I’m asked about QR Codes I usually end my response with “in Japan”. Try it yourself to discover the truth about QR Codes. Just add “in Japan” to any of these statements.

I’ve seen some great QR Code advertising ________.

Consumers will respond to a QR Code ad________.

Mobile phones already have the software needed to read QR Codes________.

Everyone knows what a QR Codes is________.

Now that I’ve established that QR Codes are a really cool thing… in Japan. Here’s a cool implementation from, you guessed it, Japan.

Teradadesign Architects are responsible for an innovative commercial building in the city of Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan, constructed with a QR Code facade. The QR Code resolves to a site which includes up to date shop information. Interestingly an unofficial iPhone application is available which allows the building to be viewed in real-time with an overlay of Twitter feed comments located via GPS tagging from inside the building. The video below shows what this looks like.

I know this has made the rounds previously – but what a wonderful flip book this is.