With an increasing number of mobile design options emerging by the day, creative people are finding new and powerful ways to flesh out their visual concepts while on the move. The era of the mobile studio is upon us, so we thought we’d share a handful of brilliant apps to help you capture your inspiration whenever–and wherever–it may strike you.

Adobe Ideas

A vector app for iOS and Android that lets you finger paint and sketch. In addition, It works seamlessly with the desktop versions of Illustrator and Photoshop so you can take your creations to the next level when you get home.

http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeideas.html

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeideas.html

Adobe Photoshop Touch

Create multilayered images, apply filters, and share your creations using your Android tablet. Not only this, the layers are preserved when you bring you creations into Photoshop on your desktop.

http://www.photoshop.com/products/mobile

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/touchapps.html

Air Display

Brought to you by Avatron. Multiple monitors in a coffee shop for ten bucks. Hard to argue the creative benefit when paired with your laptop and your favorite creative software.

http://avatron.com/

Bamboo Paper

A simple and effective sketchbook app from Wacom, the ever-popular tablet people. Use your fingers or try their Bamboo Stylus for even greater precision.

http://www.wacom.eu/index2.asp?pid=294&lang=en&gm=3

Moodboard2

Collect and organize things that inspire you. Plan your creative projects when the mood strikes, then share with friends or clients.

http://www.atinytribe.com/apps/moodboard

Source: http://www.atinytribe.com/

Photoforge2

Full resolution editing and layer support make this one powerful tool for creative nomads.

http://photoforge2.com/

Source: http://itunes.apple.com/app/photoforge2/id435789422?mt=8

Procreate

Savage Interactive delivers a whopping 1920x1408px canvas to your ipad. Use their intuitive interface to sketch, paint, and even edit photos.

http://savage.si/procreate/

Source: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498?mt=8

Sketchbook Pro

Autodesk introduces their digital sketching software to iOS and Android. Voted one of the “5 Must-Have iPad Apps” by Wired Magazine.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=6848332&siteID=123112

Snapseed

Nik Software brings us a stunningly simple photo editing app for iOS that features some innovative new filters and options.

http://www.niksoftware.com/snapseed/usa/index.php?view=intro%2Fmain.shtml

Source: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snapseed-for-ipad/id439438619?mt=8&ls=1

And last, but not least… the zero dollar app that requires no installation:

Light Table Pro-Series Alpha: Championship Edition

Photo courtesy of Andrew Heine. All Rights Reserved.

Now go download one or a bunch of these apps and hit the road!

Throughout the year, Duarte host several events to raise money for one goal: purchasing a veritable mountain of toys! … that we donate to Mountain View’s “Cops That Care” program, who then distributes the gifts to children in need of a little—or a lot—of holiday cheer.

Although I must admit it’s very tempting to keep them.

I will also admit that the raising of the funds isn’t too terrible. From the good old fashioned bake sales and Taco Tuesdays, to screen-printing parties and extravagant auctions and raffles, we have a great time parting with our dollars.

Duarte has been collecting and matching donations for several years now, but this year, we toted a camera along, and captured photos of children’s sheer delight. And we’ll share those with you now. Because, obviously, we’re really good at sharing.

A little more info about Cops That Care program:

This wildly successful event, founded by Officer Ron Cooper, provides gifts for children whose families may not have the means to purchase gifts on their own.  Children who have an affiliation to the Mountain View community will be able to visit the North Pole (also known as the Police/Fire Auditorium at 1000 Villa St.) and select a toy from the thousands available.

[Source: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=2232 ]

Happy Holidays from the Duarte Family!

The results are in! Check out the prize-winning pumpkins. We hope you liked them!

In addition to Pumpkin Palooza, we turned our competitive energy toward another Halloween tradition: costumes. This morning we had a Costume Parade in lieu of a Staff Meeting. Best Monday ever. Even our newest Duartian dressed up, on her very first day!

Happy Halloween from Angel and Zoolander, and everyone in between.

If you’re at all familiar with Duarte, you know we’re more fun than the average bear. And bears are a pretty good time. Take Yogi for example. When he’s not stealing your lunch, that guy is a hoot.

But I digress.
Duarte is fun.

Case in point, last week marked Duarte’s 4th Annual Spirit Week. This year’s theme: Summer Through the Ages. Every day, we paid homage to a different era, by dressing up and doing an activity appropriate to the time period. We ended with week with a (dress-down) day at the park, complete with good eats, cold drinks, and a Spirit Week Relay Race.

Check out the photos below, and hearken back to the good (and maybe not-so-good) ol’ days.

MONDAY – ’80s DAY

Totally.

Jump (For My Love)

Babies of the '80s

TUESDAY – ’70s DAY

Duartians, diggin' it.

Our pets rock.

A paisley pet.

Sleaziest frame salesman this side of the Mississippi.

WEDNESDAY – ’60s DAY

Mad Men are standing, hippies are sitting in.

Mad Men & a madman.

Jam sesh.

THURSDAY – ’50s DAY

Too cool for school. Or work.

Wanna rumble?

FRIDAY – PICNIC DAY!

Relay Activity # 1 - Water Cup Fill 'er up

Spoonful by lovin' spoonful.

Nothin' but bucket.

Relay Activity # 2 - Picture Puzzle

They don't call it a relay RACE for nothin'.

Relay Activity #3 - Ahem, cornhole.

Winners of the Spirit Week Relay! (And proud owners of the coveted rainbow giraffe trophy.)

The gang's (almost) all here.

Big thanks to Mark, Nancy, and all my fellow Duartians for making Duarte such a spirited place to work.

Yay,
Paula

We like photography. We also like fun, and Saturdays, and San Francisco, and sunshine. And we really like each other. Recently we went on a Photo Field Trip, and had the chance to enjoy all of these things, simultaneously. I know.

Our assignment: Take photos of contrast. Or take photos of whatever you want. Joe went rogue (typical) and took video. Then he compiled the footage with our photographs to make this. Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed ourselves that day. Aaand pretty much all the time.

Communicating in any medium is hard work. Graham’s dances did not come easily to her. When the idea for a new dance was starting to take form, it was “a time of great misery.” Graham worked late into the night, propped up in bed, writing down thoughts, observations, impressions, quotations from books—anything that could help feed her imagination. “I would put a typewriter on a little table on my bed, bolster myself with pillows, and write all night.”

She read widely as she searched for ideas and inspiration, studying psychology, yoga, poetry, Greek myths and the Bible. Gradually, the ideas that filled her notebooks would begin to reveal a pattern, and she would write out a detailed script.

In her work, Graham repeatedly portrayed a woman called to a high destiny and forced to overcome fear before she could answer the call. This was personal, as Graham herself believed that she had been given “lonely, terrifying gifts”—a sort of divine command to penetrate the interior of the human spirit, no matter what comfortless truths she might find there.

In 1955, the U.S. government asked Graham to tour major cities in seven countries as a cultural ambassador. She gave lectures at each stop, but was a very nervous presenter. In her biography of Martha, author Agnes de Mille describes the scene: “She hung onto the barre, clung to the walls. She couldn’t think what to do with her hands, with her robes, with her feet.” Finally, she escaped into her dressing room and locked the door. But Graham tried again and again, and overcame her fear. Eventually, the State Department officials named Graham “the greatest single ambassador we have ever sent to Asia.”
Until she was 90, Graham continued to deliver lectures, which she had developed into an art form. A striking figure with a seductive voice, poetic insights and a faultless sense of timing, she learned how to hold an audience spellbound.

You could say that by trying to discover herself, she founded the world of modern dance. During her long journey, she invented a new way of moving, a unique dance language that has thrilled audiences all over the world and enlarged our understanding of what it means to be human.

She was protesting. Stark. And American. Some called her ugly, others called her revolutionary.

All of us are unique. We each have our own pattern of creativity, and if we do not express it, it is lost for all time. Graham defied customs, broke through barriers and presented new ideas. She was loved and reviled, yet persistent in overcoming her fears to communicate what she felt in her soul. By remaining committed to communicating how she felt, she changed dance for all time.

P.S. Happy belated birthday, Martha. On May 11, Google paid homage to her with this lovely animation. We wanted to honor her with our own little piece of the web.

Although primarily known as a dancer, Martha Graham was also a powerful communicator. She developed characteristics that anyone who aspires to become a great presenter must cultivate and nourish. She stood out by moving against the grain of society. She persevered in spite of seemingly overwhelming obstacles. She fought against and overcame her fears. She respected and connected deeply with her audience. And she never held back from communicating her deepest feelings.

Graham spent her life challenging what dance is and what a dancer can do. She looked upon dance as an exploration, a celebration of life, and a religious calling that required absolute devotion.

Graham became a dancer against the odds. When she finally began to study dance with the idea of making it her profession, she was considered too old, too short, too heavy and too homely to be taken seriously. “They thought I was good enough to be a teacher, but not a dancer,” she recalled. But she knew what she wanted to do, and pursued her goal with the intensity that marked her entire life. Dance was her reason for living. Willing to risk everything, driven by a burning passion, she dedicated herself absolutely to her art. “I did not choose to be a dancer,” she often said. “I was chosen.”

Graham was ready to discard traditional ballet. She invented a revolutionary new language of dance, an original way of moving with which she revealed the joys, passions, and sorrows common to human experience. In place of graceful soaring leaps through space, she introduced stark, angular movements, blunt gestures, and stern facial expressions as she sought to lay bare fundamental human moods and feelings. Her dances were meant to be challenging and disturbing.

This new kind of dance wasn’t to everyone’s liking, as it was neither beautiful nor romantic. Graham was often the object of ridicule and the butt of hostile jokes. Women in America had won the right to vote only a few years earlier, in 1920, and many people were still uncomfortable with the image of the “new woman” who sought a career and voted. It was all right to be a high-kicking, scantily clad chorus girl, but a woman who ran a dance company and created works that commented on war, poverty, and intolerance seemed unnatural and suspicious.

But Graham was resolute in her desire to communicate how she felt.

Graham believed that the secret emotional world made visible by a dancer’s movement could not always be expressed in words. She wanted her dances to be “felt” rather than “understood.” Graham drew inspiration from the ugly side of life and put it on display. Each of her dances had a special significance to her, because they expressed a fear she had conquered in her own life.

In 1930, Graham premiered a haunting solo dance of mourning called Lamentation. She sat on a low bench, wearing a tube-like shroud with only her face, hands and bare feet showing. In the dance, she began to rock with anguish from side to side, plunging her hands deep into the stretchy fabric, writhing and twisting as if trying to break out of her own skin. She was a figure of unbearable sorrow and grief. She did not dance about grief, but sought to be the very embodiment of grief.

Graham recalled “One of the first times I performed it was in Brooklyn. A lady came back to me afterwards and looked at me. She was very white faced and she’d obviously been crying. She said ‘you’ll never know what you have done for me tonight, thank you’ and left. I asked about her later and it seemed that she had seen her 9 year old son killed in front of her by a truck. She had made every effort to cry, but was unable to. But when she saw Lamentation she said she felt that grief was honorable and universal and that she should not be ashamed of crying for her son. I remember that story as a deep story in my life that made me realize that there is always one person to whom you speak in the audience. One.”

Graham moved in a way that gave anger and grief back to her audiences. She had a genius for connecting movement with emotion. She could make visible all those feelings that people have inside them but can’t put to words.

This April Fool’s Day, it seems like everybody’s getting in the spirit, and Duarte is no different.

We took note of the date (ba-ha!) and decided to use our trusty stickies to have a little Fool’s Day fun. We’re no strangers to sticky notes, but this is definitely the most fun we’ve had with them.

Special thanks to our victim, Laura, for being such a good sport. And to 3M, for the ammunition.

The holidays are a happy time, but they can drive us a little mad.
Relieve some seasonal stress by taking a few minutes to create a holiday Mad Lib!

Click here to let the fun begin:
http://www.duarte.com/christmas/

Wishing you (adjective) times, and a season (past tense verb) with many happy (plural noun).

(Oh and we know it’s Christmas… but we couldn’t help hiding some Easter eggs in there.)

Seven score and seven years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most poignant, and most memorable speeches of all time. Three score, one fortnight, and two days ago, Adam Gault posted to Vimeo a lovely homage to the speech, created entirely in After Effects.

Personally, I’ve read the Gettysburg Address several times—first in elementary school, and most recently in Nancy Duarte’s Resonate, where I was able to really appreciate if for the first time; both because I wasn’t going to be tested on it, and because Nancy dissected the words so elegantly. For the first time, the words made a real impact. I didn’t just read them, I heard them.

Adam Gault’s video did the words one better—it made me feel them. The video reminded me both of the heroics that took place at Gettysburg, and also the extreme power of the combination of words and visuals. Well-chosen images have the ability to take well-chosen words to a place beyond the senses, to emotions.

Adam offers a modest explanation of the video:

“…The speech doesn’t really need pictures. But once we started brainstorming we were determined to come up with imagery that would complement the words. We wanted to use simple and subtle metaphors that would give the speech context and create evocative compositions without trying to add meaning. Hopefully we’ve done the writing some justice.”

- Adam Gault

To Adam, Stefanie, Chris, Carlo, and Mitch— Nice work. Honestly, Abe would be proud.