André Felipe Menezes has amassed a beautiful collection of posters, with a focus on graphics and typography, and is cataloging them in an online museum for everyone to view. It's sort of a wiki-style museum, as contributors, once invited or accepted, are tasked with organizing their own directory of posters. Simply amazing work.

In most design firms (and hopefully in most in-house departments, too) before presenting ideas to clients, the various designers and art directors will gather round and have a critique. The idea is to refine the work before presenting it, hopefully making it better in the process. The only problem with this system is that most designers don't have any idea how to give and receive effective critiques. They make vague criticisms of work and take the whole thing too personally. Here then are some suggestions on how to give and receive critiques that will improve the work, rather than just tearing it down.

The web is full of some really interesting articles that compile great examples of beautiful web graphics, and these can serve as great inspiration. I have, in fact, been known to tweet a few of these articles, from time to time. What I worry about, however, is a confusion I sense among designers (well, to be perfectly honest, mostly among web designers) who equate fun web graphics with great web design.

I review a lot of portfolios. It's what I do for a living. And the single biggest mistake I see in those portfolios is that people don't show the kind of work that I'm hiring for. As designers, we are trained to take the client's needs in mind when we are creating new work. What most of us fail to do, however, is to keep those same needs in mind when putting together a portfolio. What follows are based on my notes from the presentation I gave in April at the AIGA Minnesota 2009 Portfolio One-on-One.