10 Lessons For Young Designers

Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, John C Jay, shares his 10 most important lessons for designers. However, these lessons could apply to any creative discipline, including the games industry.

10 lessons for young designers:

1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.
2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.
3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.
4. Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
5. Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.
6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.
7. Try not to work for stupid people or you'll soon become one of them.
8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.
9. The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.
10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Original article @AIGA

My Blog Design

Several readers has asked me about how I make my blog so interesting as it is both informative and pleasing to the eye. And lets be honest, most private technology blogs are usually boring/unattractive and "beautiful" blogs are usually well beautiful. Having said that, there are many other blogs & sites that are really well designed and written to serve its purpose and deliver the message to the masses. To those authors, I'm deeply grateful you choose to share your knowledge with me.

Back to the question, I tend to keep to several rules regarding my blog design:

1. Choose a simple layout & template.
2. Modify it to to have an outstanding color. Ensure that everything complies to a set of color template.
3. Post away with as much visual aid as possible.

I read lots of technology articles & blogs; may it be games, software or technology in general, each day (during office hours shhh...). There are lots of information out there and the only problem is taking time to read them. Therefore I prefer to squeeze in as much information and publish my own condensed version with visual aid for a fast but educational read. Very much how I do it in the good old university days. 

This is how I like my blog to be - short & sweet heavy with awesomeness.

Hope everyone enjoys it ~

- dc

Dungeon Raid

I love RPGs & I love puzzles. What is more interesting then both of them combined into one? Dungeon Raid has done it in a RPG-Match3 game.

This game basically is a match minimum 3 of a kind by simply connecting them together. To connect enemies you can slot in weapons in between to deal more damage. This game is pretty cool cause you have all of the basic RPG elements like item collection, dealing and receiving damage and also upgrade!