Small Leaks Sink Ships

In WWII the US government lead a campaign to minimize the effects of information landing in enemy hands. Just telling people not to talk about ship movements seems silly now in the age of satellites and the internet, but in WWII this information was hard to come by for the enemy.

Here's one example:



I found this one odd. The font is cartoony and the whole thing seems satirical. Also, only a boat is being sunk. It doesn't emphasize the dozens or hundreds of crew members. Also, I'm not really sure what they were trying to do with the colors. They almost got red, white, and blue right, but not really.

Here's a much more (in my opinion) effective poster:



It emphasizes an individual life. The colors are dark and foreboding. It also seems like whoever is responsible for getting this guy killed is in for fairly spooky haunting.

Here's a third which is sort of a combination of the first two. The picture has characteristics of the second poster, but the text is like the first poster.

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is a list of guidelines that he uses to aid his creative process. Although I'm not a designer, this rules are very cross-disciplinary. As a programmer, there is a actually a large element of creativity because it is still a very young craft, so there is a high degree of chaos involved in most software projects. Here are some of my favorite points in his list:

The title: The title of his list goes along with his points about growth. By declaring the list as "incomplete", he is stating that he allows everything that he does to grow and evolve.

Point 2 says to forget about good. He confesses that growth is not always good, but that should not discourage growth because mistakes must be made in the process as stated in point 34: make mistakes faster.

These couple of points are great views for me personally. Programming is far from a science, and mistakes are an inevitability, even for the best programmers. Programmers have to be prepared to make many mistakes, and as Mau says in point 4 - Love your experiments, we must "find the fun in failure".