“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]

German publisher Eichborn pulled off a great stunt at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. 200 fly’s, each towing a miniature banner, let loose to buzz the attendees. Watch the video. I’m going to go wash my hands…

Found on Publishing Perspectives

Check out the Chameleon Guitar, developed at the MIT Media Lab. They’ve made an effort to combine acoustic qualities and digital capabilities. Very cool. You can view the MIT Lab Cast video for an introduction to the concept, or jump over to Ars Electronica 2009 for more plus lots of other cool stuff. Or just go to http://www.thechameleonguitar.com

The High Line is just around the corner from our offices, currently located in the Chelsea Market, and I finally made my way there for a walking tour. I shot a few photos while I was there but these pics from the High Line Flickr Pool provide a little more variety – but what’s up with the copyright on all these pics from the Flickr Pool. None of them have a Creative Commons license. None!

There’s more going on besides a walk on the High Line. Check out highline.org for events happening in and around the park.

Image by ArtJoy4Ever

Ideally, you should never see a 404 error page, but if you do, I hope it will be something interesting or entertaining. The 404 error occurs when a page is not found on a website. It’s mostly likely not due to any one of the mysterious server or Internet glitches that we blame everything else on. It’s because the web site owner has a link to a page that isn’t there. Maybe it used to be, or maybe it’s just a hastily typed link that they never tested.

Smashing Magazine has a nice 404 design gallery they posted back in January and Web Design Resources has a gallery as well.   Better still, go discover some of your own. Here’s a couple I’ve found.

Swiss Miss 404

Laughing Squid 404

Kottke 404

Failure is an option, or , how you fail has options. 404 pages are there because shit happens. Shit you didn’t plan. So make it a memorable failure. Something you can be proud of. Something that doesn’t look like a failure. Alternately, make it not-broken, have the page redirect to your home page, or make it a search page. Smashing Magazine’s solution is to direct you to their 404 Gallery. Just don’t make it a broken, boring, oh my God I fucked up page.

If you are using Wordpress with a decent theme, you should be able to customize your own 404 template easily. Just go to Dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor -> 404 Template.

You can see my 404 page by clicking here, or trying some odd URL of your own like… http://mediarosa.com/wtf.