About This Site

Mike Industries is the personal site of me, Mike Davidson. It is littered with original articles, shared items (mainly found video and links, via Tumblr and Delicious), and overshared items (mainly thought vomit, via Twitter). If you’re here because you found something interesting on the site, I humbly invite you to subscribe to the Mike Industries RSS feed so you never miss a new item.

As for me, I live in Seattle and am known for several things, none of which will be remembered in 1,000 years:

I am founder and CEO of Newsvine, which was recently acquired by msnbc.com.
I invented sIFR, a technology which has enabled tens of thousands of designers to beautify the web with tens of thousands of typefaces.
I led the redesign of the first major media site to support web standards, ESPN.com in 2003.
I have no tolerance for the intolerance of imperfection on the web.
I went to school with Leonardo DiCaprio and appear adjacent to him in our 3rd grade yearbook.

So now it’s time to decide what you want to do here:

If you want to check my availability for a speaking engagement or press interview… please shoot me the details and I’ll try and respond as soon as possible.
If you are just getting into the design industry and would like specific advice… please check out “How to Make Friends and Influence Art Directors”.
If you just want to drop me a line… please use this form. Sometimes I return mail in hours… other times, weeks.

Shared

Did You Hear We Got Osama?:

This is a really great post; one of the clearest, most concise, and personally important ones I’ve read in a long time. It’s important to understand that the reason most people consume news is in order to entertain themselves. This isn’t the aspirational reason… it’s just the true reason, in most cases. If you can get your news consumption refined to the point where you are staying amply-informed without being overwhelmed, you stand to be a lot more productive.

NFL Logos Redrawn with Manningface. This is fantastic.

Solitude and Leadership:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think.Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information…

Takes a little while to get going, but overall a great article about the virtues of seeking solitude from distractions in order to develop your own original thoughts.

“I think you’ve got a pretty good imagination, despicability-wise!”

“Look Around You - Computer Games”

Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this BBC series before. Brilliant. Make sure to watch them all. (via daringfireball)

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers:

Do you think Chelsea Clinton asks herself if her mom would understand something complex? No. Because her mom is a badass.

How Doctors Die:

If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity.

This is the most concise, easily understood article on the perils of end-of-like care in the United States I’ve ever read. It is a must-read, and frankly, a must-heed, in my opinion. (via kottke)

Lost Type Co-op | Browse Fonts:

A nice collection of pay-what-you-will typefaces from Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran.

How to interview a designer with the perfect design exercise:

These sorts of tests are common for engineering hires, but it’s nice to see an example of a good design-oriented one.

Jessica Hische's Lovely Blog:

Embarrassed I had never seen this until today. Lovely work all around. (via drawar)

This recently unearthed video of Steve Jobs at work during the early days of NeXT is a remarkable look inside how he ran meetings, how he created culture at his startups, and how others — like Joanna Hoffman around the 11 minute mark — called B.S. on his reality distortion field. It’s also remarkable in that it reveals Jobs to be a man who picks carrots in pressed work shirts.