Ian Glass, of “This American Life” fame, talks about the aspects of storytelling. Incredibly engaging, Ian discusses the building blocks of storytelling (part 1), editing your story (part 2), pursuing ambitions of good taste (part 3), and some of the common pitfalls (part 4). It is 100% worth the time to watch all four parts. Enjoy!

This short, heart felt documentary reveals the fading tradition of hand painted advertising as told by the painters struggling to keep it alive. The trade is nothing short of amazing, involving a highly artistic touch, inordinate amounts of time, and grueling labor. Up There is directed by Malcom Murray, and is produced by Mekanism with music by The Album Leaf.

Alan Siegel, a branding expert and a leading authority on business communication, stresses the importance of clear, concise, and simple language for use in government documents and literature directed at consumers. Armed with a research lab that specializes in measuring the comprehensibility of documentation, Alan has taken it upon himself to redesign several documents including tax forms, credit agreements, and healthcare legislation. He is a true savior and inspiration for anyone fed up with unintelligible legalese pervasive in today’s culture.

Robert Cialdini, professor of marketing at Arizona State University, studied for 3 years working in the fields of sales, fundraising, and advertising. In this short excerpt from the documentary “Social Reality” with Philip Zimbardo, Cialdini shares the 6 universal principals of influence he distilled from his experiences. If your interested in learning more, his book Influence: Science and Practice is a good quick read with practical advice and great anecdotes about his experiences researching this topic.

Bsquare, the embedded systems firm behind the new Coca-Cola Freestyle soda fountain talks up their role in providing the brains for the device. The concept is brilliant, but clearly from the video, the embedded computer is quite underpowered and the touch-screen experience is more akin to an old ATM than the experience found on the latest smart phones. Nonetheless, the new fountain serves over 100 different flavors of soda, water, and juice. Also, check out the brief history of the Coca-Cola soda fountain too.

Dan Hill, designer and urbanist, talks at Interaction ’10 about urban landscapes and the information that inhabits them. Dan loves to identify all of the data points that are embedded in cities and expose them through meaningful ways. In this video, he provides a wonderful tour of the many projects that he and others have worked on. After watching the video, it is difficult to ignore the pervasive bits of information that you once passed by without ever considering how exposing them might change people’s behaviors.

Aaron Koblin talks about his use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace to explore the ‘emergence of new labor systems in the information age’. His largest project, The Sheep Market, entailed paying people $0.02 to draw a sheep facing left. Pointing the individual artists to a custom drawing tool, he captured the drawing process for each one. Accumulating a total of 10,000 sheep, all of the drawings are now visible at TheSheepMarket.com.

Richard Seymour, co-founder and director of Seymourpowell, shares two quick anecdotal stories about preparing people to receive new ideas. As much as people ask for new and innovative designs, they are often very resistant to embracing them unless they are well prepared to do so. The clip is wonderfully concise and does a great job at illustrating just how important storytelling is to the salesmanship process.

Jensen Harris, in 90 minutes of awesomeness, talks at Mix ’08 about the design process which led to the creation of the ribbon toolbar which appeared in Microsoft Office 2007 and has become a widely used design pattern. Revealed in the talk are many prototypes of early designs as well as the story behind the ‘ribbon’ name. Jensen still works at Microsoft and is now working on Office 2010.

Rob Ingebretsen, part designer and part developer, speaks at Mix 2010 about lessons he has learned over his roughly 10 years of experience as a designer. A few of these include: Starting a project by creating a ‘mood board’. Having a theme to unify the functional and visual aspects of a design. Be better before you are new. Learn lots of techniques. Sweat the details. As well as to follow an iterative process of working hard, get feedback, and refining. Rob is one of two designers at Pixel Labs and runs a good design blog at NerdPlusArt.com.