If you keep your original and backup files in the same physical location you may lose them both at the same time because of theft, fire or other misfortune. It's a good idea to have an off-site backup for your files besides your local Time Machine disk.

If you have a fast internet connection, you can consider to get online backup as it is the easiest automated option. Here are the top 5 most recommended services.

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The Cannes Lions 2010 Awards are being announced. I'll be collecting and displaying the winners on Ads of the World and you can also see them on the official site too.

Cannes Lions 2010 Winners on AotW
Cannes Lions Official site

It is really annoying when you close an important tab by accident in your browser. But worry not, there are ways to get it back. The procedure is different for each browser so it's a bit hard to remember.

In Safari 5 you can simply undo to the closing operation. Just press Apple-Z (Command-Z).

In Chrome open a new tab and find the "Recently closed" section to see all closed links.

In Firefox you can press Apple-Shift-T (Command-Shift-T).

Excerpted from 3D Typography (Mark Batty Publisher)
By Jeanette Abbink and Emily CM Anderson


Sentences
Japanese paper artist Aoyama Hina creates super fine lacy-papercuttings with a pair of scissors. For Sentences, Hina weaves passages into organic webs of text and flourish. The pieces are labor-intensive—a short work will take up to five hours to make, while a long work could take up to three months. Hina, who lives and works in Ferney Volaire, France, says of her work: “I don’t follow tradition, but I am trying to create a mixture of the traditional and modern styles, to produce my own world through this technique.”

Read further on Graphics.com

Tuaw and many other sites reported that the Korean girl known as applegirl002 playing on iPhones got a pro record deal after she accumulated more than 4 million views on YouTube. See the videos below.

If you share a computer with someone, or your office computer is accessible to prying eyes and you want to hide a file or folder of private documents, it’s quite easy to do without the need to download any software.

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It just makes sense that when something is created, whether it be a work of art or a corkscrew, its success will depend to a great extent on the degree to which the creator kept the end user in mind. But how can you anticipate with any certainty just how people will react to your latest poster design, website or application, to bring things closer to home? An updated version of the bravely-named Universal Principles of Design proposes to help you do just that.

I say brave because we've increasingly moved away from the position that humans are somehow knowable in an absolute way, even within a particular time, place and culture, let alone universally. The certainties of the early psychologists have evolved to embrace a more nuanced approach to what it is to be human, thank goodness. Even such a long-accepted master in the art of defining the essence of humanity, Sigmund Freud, has in recent years begun to be re-evaluated as more properly positioned in the philosophical tradition, rather than that of a scientist who "discovered" fundamental, universal truths about human nature.

Read further on The Graphic Design Forum Blog

4tomorrow is an independent, non-profit organisation based in Paris, with its activities focused on Poster for Tomorrow, an international project to promote active citizenship through the medium of design. It works to encourage people, both those in and outside the design community, to make posters to stimulate debate in the local and international communities on issues that affect us all. This began with last year's competition drawing attention to the repression of freedom of expression. I've included a few of my picks below and you can browse a gallery of the best 100 entries.

This year the theme is the death penalty, with the brief stating in part that, "We want universal abolition of the death penalty in 2010. It’s simple. The death penalty is a violation of human rights. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: 'No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.' How does that fit with beheading, stoning, hanging, lethally injecting or shooting someone?" Hard to argue with that.

Participants are invited to make a poster with the potential to be exhibited around the world on October 10, 2010, the World and European Day Against the Death Penalty. That day Poster for Tomorrow will ambitiously hold 100 exhibitions in 100 cities of submitted posters calling for universal abolition of the death penalty. The organization is working with Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, Reporters Without Borders and the World Coalition Against The Death Penalty, to raise awareness of this cause. The final posters will be chosen by a jury of 12 graphic designers from around the world, including Michel Bouvet, Kiko Farkas, Ahn Sang Soo and Lucille Tenazas. The deadline for submissions is July 18, 2010, with more information available on the Poster for Tomorrow site.

My picks after the jump.

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When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

- Steve Jobs

Excerpted from Name Tagging: COST, EDEC, SURE and FAUST (Mark Batty Publisher)
By Martha Cooper


COST

Writers give you and REVS credit for being the first to make use of stickers. Is that true?

We weren’t the first to write on stickers but were among the first who ran with it prolifically in the mid-80s. In the mid-to late-80s, graffiti was in a transitional period as train graffiti was being eradicated with buffing and cleaning as maintaining the transit system became more of a focal point for New York City. Writers began to surface from the depths of the transit system as they were literally pushed out and above ground.

Doing graffiti on the streets was beginning to hold more weight and credibility within the graffiti scene as the trains were slipping from the writers’ grasp. People were using different options and mediums and trying new alternatives as well as doing excessive street bombing with paint and markers. I began to incorporate the sticker into the arsenal.

Read further on Graphics.com

The demos linked from the image above show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do. (You need Safari to view this demo.)

Excerpted from Information Design Workbook (Rockport)
By Kim Baer


Founded by an entrepreneurial CEO who figured out how to “build a better mousetrap,” simplehuman, a home product design company, created an elegant, well-engineered, yet affordable trash can that appealed to people with contemporary taste. It was especially timely given a trend toward commercial-grade kitchens in the home, complete with well-designed, high-performance appliances.

When simplehuman needed to develop a logo and a packaging language, they chose Smart Design because the firm knew the “space” well, having done similar work for OXO, another company specializing in high-end housewares.

Performance Driven. With a focus on consumer-driven products, Smart Design's packaging and branding efforts are informed by years of design experience. The designers understand that, just like the product itself, packaging needs to meet performance objectives. With little control over how the product would be displayed in large retail environments chock-full of competing products, they needed to create packaging that would stand out from the clutter. As Smart Design cofounder Tom Dair says,
“Most retail packaging is overly complex and gimmicky. We knew we could make the packaging stand out by paring back the imagery and text to the essential elements.”

Read further on Graphics.com

After the success of the widely popular stock photography sites Stockxpert and stock.xchng, Hungary based Dream Group is entering the stock photo marketplace once again with Stockfresh a brand new microstock offering. The new website aims to offer the best royalty free images in the market at prices everyone can afford - via a hassle-free, clean and easy to use interface.

At launch the Stockfresh collection features over 100,000 images for sale from top stock photographers and studios such as Yuri Arcurs, Ron Chapple's Iofoto, Monkey Business Images, Dmitriy Shironosov and many more. They can be purchased through a wide range of pay per download and subscription plans available at highly competitive prices, and with Stockfresh's exceptionally high artist commissions customers can always be sure that their money goes to the right place. In addition to this, the website's easy to use, intuitive and uncluttered interface helps customers save time on their projects.

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

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Excerpted from Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works! (SitePoint)
By Remo Camerota

Selling email services is a logical step forward for freelance web designers and developers. We will look at the practicalities of selling email to existing and new clients. Once we review the reasons you should add email to your service offering, we’ll take a closer look at the variety of email-related services that you can offer, and what is involved in selling email services. We will cover the common approaches to pricing and preparing a folio of email samples, and discuss tips for a winning client pitch.

Why Sell Email Services?
Perhaps this section would be more appropriately titled, “Why wouldn’t you sell email services?”

More than Just a Designer or Developer: If you see yourself purely as a web designer or developer, it’s time to broaden that view. The first important step in selling your email services is to recognize your capabilities in email design and delivery. Then you’ll be able to see—and present—yourself as someone who designs or develops more than websites alone.

There’s one particularly good reason why you should sell email services. If you’re freelancing, email services provide a prime opportunity to maintain ongoing, potentially lucrative relationships with clients. Designers and developers often find that they have few reasons to continue the client relationship once they’ve delivered the site they were contracted to provide. Email is a very handy solution to the challenge of maintaining close client relationships over time.

Read further on Graphics.com

Excerpted from Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works! (SitePoint)
By Remo Camerota

Selling email services is a logical step forward for freelance web designers and developers. We will look at the practicalities of selling email to existing and new clients. Once we review the reasons you should add email to your service offering, we’ll take a closer look at the variety of email-related services that you can offer, and what is involved in selling email services. We will cover the common approaches to pricing and preparing a folio of email samples, and discuss tips for a winning client pitch.

Why Sell Email Services?
Perhaps this section would be more appropriately titled, “Why wouldn’t you sell email services?”

More than Just a Designer or Developer: If you see yourself purely as a web designer or developer, it’s time to broaden that view. The first important step in selling your email services is to recognize your capabilities in email design and delivery. Then you’ll be able to see—and present—yourself as someone who designs or develops more than websites alone.

There’s one particularly good reason why you should sell email services. If you’re freelancing, email services provide a prime opportunity to maintain ongoing, potentially lucrative relationships with clients. Designers and developers often find that they have few reasons to continue the client relationship once they’ve delivered the site they were contracted to provide. Email is a very handy solution to the challenge of maintaining close client relationships over time.

Read further on Graphics.com