Behance was pleased to throw a party for New York's Internet Week - gathering leaders in the creativity community together for a good cause. Attendees were encouraged to bring their idealism, and leave behind Action Steps with resources, connections, and next steps to help three non-profits make their ideas happen. The featured non-profits at the event were City Year, StartingBloc, and Sustainable South Bronx. Check out the photos by Behance Network member Rachel Feierman.

The event was co-sponsored with our friends at AllDayBuffet.

Whether you're a designer, economist, brand strategist, copywriter or ball juggler; we're always on the lookout for talent.  Behance is a start-up and we believe we're in the first inning with many more exciting things to come in the future.  We're currently hiring freelance writers, online ad sales associate, junior web developer, and interns.  If you have a strong passion for creativity, productivity, and making ideas happen, please visit www.behance.com/Talent to apply!

Behance founder Scott Belsky presented "Tips for Making Ideas Happen" at this year's HOW Design Conference in Boston, MA. Over 4000 people attended the conference this year. The session included a selection of tips from Behance's 200+ interviews of creative teams (many of which are profiled on BehanceMag.com) as well as the methodologies developed by the Behance team. We have come across an early blog review of the session as well as a few blogger recaps here and here.

Behance's research on how the most productive creative teams operate is the featured cover story in the June 2008 issue of HOW Design Magazine, one of the biggest design industry magazines in the US.

The story covers a list of the "obstacles" observed by the Behance Team as well as eight tips that all creative teams should consider adopting...

One of the Behance Network's most important features is each person's "inner circle." Your inner circle is a collection of your colleagues and people you know and/or respect.

Every time you publish a new project or join a new group, your inner circle is notified. This becomes a powerful way to get feedback and disseminate your latest work.

BUT, WE CAN RUN INTO A FEW PROBLEMS WITH INNER CIRCLES:

(1) If you join the inner circle for people you don't know, then you will get lots of notifications that you don't care about. Messages from your inner circle will start to look like "spam" unless you curate your inner circle CAREFULLY. Inner circles were designed to be small and important...

(2) If you like someone's work, just ADD THEM TO YOUR WATCHLIST (in "Tools" within each project). At Behance, we refuse over 90% of inner circle invitations. But we have huge watchlists of members we love to watch...

(3) If you send too many messages to your inner circle, they may leave you! We encourage you to use your inner circle wisely (just like you would use your close network of peers in the real world).

INNER CIRCLE MAINTENANCE

Want to better manage your inner circle? Maybe you should CLEAN IT UP! Here is how you review, remove people, and edit your inner circle:

(1) Go to "Circles" and select "My Circles." Then select the Top Circle in "My Circles" - your Inner Circle.

(2) Select "Edit Circle"

(3) Select "Participants."  Click "remove" next to anyone that you wish to remove from your inner circle (don't worry, they won't get a message). You can also use this space to add any members that you know well or truly respect.

We came across a little story in Behance Network member Adriana de Barros' visual journal today. She explains that she has been meeting many new artists in the network and received an invite from painter Simon M. Smith for input on a special project: 

"This is something I’ve never done before: seek ideas, input, intervention in one of my paintings. If anyone out there is interested in taking my existing image and interfering with it in some way, and then conveying the results back to me, I’d be very pleased to hear from them. (…) I’m particularly interested in what those of you working outside the realm of painting might make of it."

What follows is Adriana's fascinating journey to interpret his work through an entirely different artistic medium and vision. We encourage you to check out her story at "Interpreting the Abstract."

Also, the original painting work, as well as Adriana's interpretation, is posted in Simon's portfolio as a project title "Collaborative Invitation."

(co) Simon M. Smith

The Behance Network homepage is now "Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!", as the W3C would say. If you are a developer you might want to check out the HTML Validator yourself. Even if you think "Bah, that's far too technical for me" it can help you spot random HTML typos, as it did for me.

So here are some of the many changes and tweaks to the network this week:

GigList to JobList

We figured it was about time we changed the wording from "Gig" to "Job" to make things clearer for you and the people wanting to hire you. In case you have yet to check out the page, there's a good listing of creative jobs there.

Full Screen Video

It was long overdue, but now user's can click an icon under each video to see things full screen. This should make our HD videographers extra happy.

Re-ordering Re-done

The reordering system for your inner circle and projects has been redone. This makes it compatible with more browsers, including Safari 3.

Don't Forget About Us

Circles now have the "Us" tab defaulted to on instead of the "Our Projects" tab.

A few more thoughts from the annual TED Conference.

One great quote overheard from the designer of the Jawbone bluetooth headset and the OLPC $100 laptop (and he gave the quote as something he had heard before): "Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal..."

Also, here's an Action Book spotted in the main hall at TED (courtesy of our friend Josh Spear's phone camera):