Team Blog

Mark Shead's blog, Productivity501, ran a contest (with Action Pads as prizes) for insights on different ways to manage to-do lists. His readers shared some interesting ideas and best practices. From using a highlighter to clasify tasks as completed to using 3x5 cards (one for each task) covering what could be called an "Action Wall!"  Good stuff.

Congrats to the winners, Desi and John. We wish you much productive creativity.

The Behance team is nearing a few deadlines on some of our projects. Late nights yield some interesting conversations and insights in the office.

We're fueled by sugar, caffeine, and the bits of positive energy that we generate for ourselves or find elsewhere. We really appreciated Derek Davis' post in his journal today about our efforts to practice what we preach...we're certainly trying to! We also like the motivating links that Michael Sampson posts in his "Daily Report" that we tend to read when we take a break from Behance projects.

Only for those that are interested in some of the coverage Behance had around the blogosphere in late April and early May (and have nothing better or more productive to do right now), here are a few highlights...

HOW design had some nice comments to share on the Dot Grid Book, a product that has come an essential utility for us in our design efforts. We also appreciated shout-outs from Kineda, New Ending, and Uncrate on the Action Product line in Behance's Outfitter that continues to evolve.

I (Scott) dropped by PSFK headquarters a few weeks ago and had the opportunity to discuss trends on creativity in the workforce with Piers Fawkes. Piers is great at capturing insights and synthesizing them with his other observations and research. He's passionate about ideas, and I was thrilled to share some of Behance's thoughts, some of which can be seen here. I wish our team could attend his next conference in London, but we're swamped with work in NYC.  Hopefully next time around...

Sometimes I gloat. I can't help it. I'm a programmer that codes all day and has no friends so I'm forced to try and show my talents harder to people that will read. I'm kidding... or am I? In any case I ran this nifty marketing tool at HubSpot that analyzes how marketable any website is, based on some SEO criteria. We got a 96, which means we scored higher than 96% of other websites that have used this tool. They say they've had thousands of people use it so I'm happy. Not only that but it alerted me to the fact my Google Page Rank is up to 3 after only two months of existence. Surprisingly I found that some pages had a PR of 5.

All people interested in boosting their rank in search engines should pay attention to what Hubspot has to say. I've done SEO work for a bit now and agree with all of their suggestions. Also if you are curious to see any site's Google PR you can get the Live PageRank add-on. It's interesting to see how your favorite sites compare to your own.

Oh I almost forgot to say, my score was 94 originally, but within 5 minutes of work from their suggestions I had it up another two points. Check back soon because I may just post a blog specifically about SEO tips.

I (Scott) was psyched to share some of Behance's tips on running productive meetings as a guest on MSNBC in mid April. Our team has learned a lot from the Action Method. We practice it ourselves, and we have collected feedback from a bunch of creative teams at places like Apple and Miramax. We keep the insights organized (as reference items, of course), and we will share them whenever we get a chance!

Our Tip posting on the concept of "Action Areas," something we really swear by, got some nice coverage at LifeClever, LifeHack, and on Craig Child's blog. There were some interesting user comments left on the LifeClever post including one person who described the concept as a good way to "democratize the work place and creating a stronger sense of community amongst the work force." We're going to continue generating tips, or "behancers" as we like to call them, that are hopefully helpful to the creative professional community and beyond.

We were thrilled to see a review of Behance on Josh Spear's site, one of our favorite, well designed sites that provides a great platform for quality creative energy.

We're also fascinated with what Josh & Team have done with the Spear Collective:

"Spear Collective is our artist management collective, and we're proud of it. We believe it's comprised of some of the most promising, progressive, and definitive talent in the art and design world today. Our aim is to curate art and design in a more sustainable and honest way within brands - not just as advertising, but as true reflections of what a brands mean through our artist's eyes. If you're interested in chatting with us about potential opportunities for shows, artist-series products, or if you see something that catches your eye and would like to talk about working with any of these talented creatives, please feel free to contact us today!"