Each Monday, for the foreseeable future of 2010, Cubicle Ninjas is launching a new project aimed at making beautiful custom design painless for the everyday consumer.

Today we’re launching Postcard Ninjas. After months of creative exploration we’re proud to share the final result. We hope you enjoy.

Last week we debuted Business Card Ninjas. And in such a short time we’ve been honored to featured on more than 15 design galleries and receive thousands of visitors. But most importantly, we’ve had a chance to create unique collateral with many amazing companies we would never had the chance to meet. Thank you.

In the coming days we will be sharing our the exploration process behind both sites. As always, we’re excited and humbled by your feedback. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch (good or bad) and we will take your thoughts to heart.

See you next week for a new and exciting launch!

Josh Farkas
Creative Director, Cubicle Ninjas

Cubicle Ninjas’ mantra is to make beautiful design for the masses.

Today we’re launching the first of over ten new sites aimed at this goal. Each Monday, for the foreseeable future of 2010, we’ll launch a new project focused on making custom design accessible to real people. Some will be benefit small businesses, others non-profits, others the design community itself. All share the same hope: that the design industry is changing for the better and we can have a say in its future.

After months of creative exploration and testing we’re proud to share our work. Please enjoy Business Card Ninjas.

In the coming days we’ll be sharing our the exploration process behind this site. As always, we’re excited and humbled by your feedback. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch (good or bad) and we will take your thoughts to heart.

And please stay tuned – the best is yet to come!

Josh Farkas
Creative Director, Cubicle Ninjas

When people come to a creative company they don’t look for the latest editions of Photoshop or Illustrator. In spite of what schools may tell you, there is a surplus of talented software wizards. People pay creatives to think for them. We solve their problems by knowing how to implement ideas. We iterate potential directions until they find the one they can proudly stand behind. We exist to mediate bad decisions. In effect – we’re their outsourced brain.

If creating were as easy as using software proficiently, everyone who knew Word would have created novels in their spare time. Those who knew Excel would have balanced their budgets with aplomb, and skilled Outlook users could send Html emails to their family without batting an eye.

And so more important than learning the tools, a young designer must accept that their first job is rooted in psychology: How do you lead a team through a series of open-ended decisions?

We’ve found that the greatest obstacle to decision-making is fear. It crops up in emails, or in conference calls, veiled through feedback, or tucked away in a hurried voicemail. Giving up control even for a moment is hard. It takes trust and respect and asks you to forget the potential failures that could lie ahead. Most people invite fear in for dinner. And once inside your heart, fear doesn’t leave easily. It makes itself home and infects choices and undermines your ability to act. How can a project possibly move forward when filled with so much doubt?

“I’m afraid for my job.” “I’m afraid my board won’t like this.” “I’m afraid the president will hate that.” “I’m afraid customers will dislike it.” “I’m afraid we went too far.” “I’m afraid we didn’t go far enough.”

We’ve worked with hundreds of start-ups. Every single start-up that had a problem deciding on a design for a logo or business card has failed. Not one, not five, every single one.

And the reason is that small decisions are reflections of larger decisions. If you are filled with fear and doubt when it comes to pointing at a brand you admire, you’ll see this same fault amplified 100x when the important business decisions arrive. After all, the color of your logo won’t matter if you don’t satisfy your clients in time.

So a note to the young designers: When looking for good clients, find the fearless. They don’t have time to mull over doubt. You’ll see them by the trail of success they’ve left behind and the strength to trust over worry.

And a note to entrepreneurs: Your job is to stare fear in the face and keep moving forward.

“If you want to kill time, try working it to death.”
- Sam Levonson

To those people that tell you work isn’t life:

• You will spend at least 2,080 hours per year working a full-time job in the United States
• This equals 87 straight days working per year without a single break to eat, drink or sleep
• If you begin working full time at age 18 and stop at 65 you’ll spend 97,760 hours at work
• Or we can look at this as only 4,073 continuous days without a break
• To put this in perspective, at a child’s eleventh birthday they’ll have barely experienced 4,000 days
• Factoring out sleep, we only have 242 days per year to be awake
• This means you spend greater than 36% of your waking time working
• If we average 2 hours a day eating then we only have 212 days to call our own
• And this increases our time spent working to greater than 41%
• The average time spent behind the wheel each day for Americans is 87 minutes
• If we consider this part of your work day, then you are at work for 45% of your time

Each year you will work:

• 460 hours (57 work days) more then a peasant in 13th century England
• 716 hours (90 work days) more then an average worker in Germany
• 1456 hours (182 work days) more then the !Kung Bushman (a group of hunters and gatherers)

Anyone that says work is not life is asking you to waste half of your life. Make every minute on this planet valuable. Find what you love to do and share your passion with the world.

“When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dinosaurs live in your office. They stomp in packs mudding up the foyer, grazing lightly in the kitchen, and sleeping with one eye open in the boardroom. These are career business animals.

We can imagine they woke up on college graduation day with such hope for their future. What couldn’t they conquer then? And how long was it before the hopelessness set in? Now they are moving office scenery, following their daily paths with no passion and infecting the workplace with the warm comfort of apathy.

You can resist. You can wake up each day and make your unique impact. You can be true to the person inside of you who still hopes and dreams. Dinosaurs be damned.

Sometimes the creative person in us goes a bit too far in judging our impact on the world.

So when the New York Times’ article “Can Design Save Democracy?” came across my computer I had the obvious answer in mind – NO. I’ll be the first to admit that I laughed out loud at the idea.

But for once, maybe the designer in me wasn’t pretentious enough. After looking further, my answer is a humble but firm “Yes”. While it might not save the free world as we know it, it would allow normal people to have a chance to get their voice heard. And in the end of the day, isn’t that a better thing?

If rethinking a simple form could impact our nation’s future so drastically, imagine what taking a unique look at everything else might do!

Knowledge is wonderful but the people backing it up – well, we’re wonderfully flawed.

People ignore trends with time, or look the other way as markets shift, and before you know it we’re trapped on an island of our own opinion from which there is no speedy return. You see knowledge expires and even the best of us need to re-examine what we “know” from time-to-time, from leading CEOs to opinionated grocery store baggers.

Take a recent quote from the CEO of Blockbuster about why Netflix is a bad product:

Interviewer: Right, but in terms of the Movielink’s catalog, it is still very small.

Keyes: This is a fascinating area for me. I’m amazed at the metrics that the external world is using to measure success in this industry. When was the last time you watched 10,000 movies, you know? I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies it doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have. So, our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles. We can also supplement that if we wish with a longer tail so we could add another 10,000 movies if we choose to acquire subscription content to Movielink.com or Blockbuster.com, which we probably will over time, but realistically, today we believe that the bigger demand is for the newer titles.

Let’s ignore the fact Netflix is dominating his company for a moment – this CEO is basing his entire company’s future on an opinion. Worse still, this opinion has driven Blockbuster into financial ruin over the past 5 years. It is an outdated and flawed idea that should be replaced. But somehow he has a full executive team happily supporting him. It would be funny if it weren’t so desperately sad.

Sometimes you’re unable to say the truth when you work for a big company. No one at Blockbuster wants to hear that their days are numbered. The joy of what we do here at Cubicle Ninjas is to try and help bring a fresh perspective. We’re happy to play devil’s advocate today in order to push the ball in the right direction.

The possibilities for your company are endless. What opinions do you have that need to be updated? Which ones should be left behind completely and given a clean start?

Coding Horror has a interesting article looking at the quantity versus quality debate. Here is an excerpt:

Quantity always trumps quality. [...]

When it comes to software, the same rule applies. If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning. Rather than agonizing over whether you’re building the right thing, just build it. And if that one doesn’t work, keep building until you get one that does.

The premise makes sense. Build enough quickly and one variation is sure to be a hit? It sounds like simple statistics. And if it works in coding software, could this work with art as well?

Look at Steven Speilburg, Stanley Kubrick, and Orson Welles as film directors. Using the quantity logic, Speilburg wins by a mile, Kubrick would fall second, and Orson Welles would finish third.

But the truth is Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane is considered the greatest film of all time. And Kubrick’s 2001, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange are considered among the very best film has to offer. While Speilburg has many classic films too, they’re not considered close to the breakthrough nature of each of these “lesser” directors.

While sure, this is a stacked comparison, the truth of the matter is most directors degrade with age. They either have the magic when they start or they don’t, and if your message is generic it will be as hard to stomach the first or the one-hundredth time.

Social media is a new phrase for an old idea.

Just like Newton didn’t invent gravity (and instead gave a set of rules for people to understand this useful concept), Guttenburg’s printing press set the rules for a new generation as well. Books were no longer exclusive to churches or universities - ideas could now travel to the masses.

The democratization of ideas using technology began

Today it has evolved into the marketing slang “social media”. Instead of needing weeks to share a concept, it can become a meme in days. It can be posted to a site in seconds. It is saved in prosperity for eternity.

Digg is one the largest social news websites out there. With over 230 million pageviews per month it has the clout to influence mainstream media outlets. In many of these cases, stories are pushed into the open that would never have seen the bright of day. Yesterday I noticed that 10% of stories I submit to Digg reach the front-page. This would mean close to 20 million people read my submissions and I never even knew.

The message here is: In a few minutes we can impact more people personally and socially than in entire generations of our ancestors. We have the tools to spread good ideas, to debate the bad, and try to learn from mistakes before we make them.

Wake up each day knowing that today might be the day you inspire millions. Today you have the tools to change the world.

When I was ten I wanted to become the world’s greatest skateboarder. Each day I’d leave my home and practice well beyond midnight. Gasping for breath, underneath the stars, my little mind spent the whole time dreaming up creative ways I would excite the world as a professional.

As I grew up, it hit me that I spent more time wanting to be a skater then actually going out and skating. So I stopped.

I run into people all the time who still haven’t learned this lesson. If you want to write, but don’t – you aren’t a writer. If you want to workout, but never do – you aren’t an athlete. And if you want to own a business but don’t – you aren’t an entrepreneur.

Do what you love and leave dreaming about the job description to someone who will never get there.