For years, Gabrielle Watson kept her art to herself. She painted large, expressionistic oil portraits of friends and relatives in her Crown Heights apartment when she wasn't at her day job as a lawyer. Some of her friends didn't even know about her art habit. That changed in September when Ms. Watson, who is 31, "came out" as an artist by participating in "GO," an open-studio weekend organized by the Brooklyn Museum, during which artists of every level across the borough welcomed the public into their work spaces.

Quick: Name the product that you can sell and customize for Lady Gaga, the Irish Times, the Toronto Star, ESPN, the WWE, AmazingRibs.com, and Suicide Girls. Give up? Kelly Abbott knows the answer.

Helvetica, the typeface so iconic that they even made a movie about it, is often accused of being a boring and obvious choice. But it doesn't have to be that way. Here we present 10 examples of creatives who have taken the iconic sans-serif typeface and done something very different with it.

According to a 2012 report by Adobe, a whopping 52 percent of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social media marketing. I would like to try and alleviate some of that pain, at least when it comes to marketing on Twitter.

Pictures and images make everything better, especially online. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather see something visual than read a big block of text. I'm sure a lot of your customers and potential customers feel the same way, too.

If you didn't have to write much before, you sure do now. Writing is pervasive in everything we do. Today's communication is dependent on tweets, posts, e-mails, blogs, presentations, profiles, resumes, websites, white papers, case studies, and proposals. Whew! And that's just for people who don't write for a living. I swear, my 10th grade English teacher Mrs. Mitchell never said it would be like this!

Twitter just introduced a couple of tweaks that make it easier to share and view media within the platform. Now, you can view large versions of photos shared on Twitter without having to leave the original page. You can also watch video within Twitter from sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter's own Vine, the video startup it acquired back in October. We wrote about Twitter's stealth rollout of Vine last week, and since then, Vine has been getting heat for a porn pic that accidentally made its way into the Editor's Picks section.

The following is an excerpt from "Strategy for Social Engagement & Monitoring: Transforming Noise to Signal" an exclusive whitepaper brought to you by Oracle. Download the complete whitepaper now and learn about the requirements necessary for an optimal SRM solution that will provide organizations with real-time actionable insights from social media through both base and advanced analytical functions.

As creatives we constantly strive to reinterpret the world in new and visually exciting ways. Yet as consumers and critics, we’re inherently conservative and often have a knee-jerk reaction when someone changes something we like. With big-brand logo redesigns, there’s the added element of jealousy – “If I’d been given half as much money, I could have come up with something better than that”.

We’ve all been total newbies. In fact, I spend most of my time still feeling like one. So researching this article was a great opportunity for me to do some more learning, and to share all of that good stuff with you.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced their new search feature, Graph Search. Along with the controversy-ridden News Feed and Timeline, Facebook considers this to be one of their “Three Pillars.” Graph Search is meant to be a private, internal search engine with the categories People, Places, Photos and Interests. For searches that come up empty, you’ll be dumped onto a Bing search engine results page within Facebook.

 Photoshop CS6 is a beast! It’s an all-powerful behemoth capable of producing sublime images, high-quality video and with CS6 Extended it can even create very passable 3D renders.

Museums sometimes seem to have a split identity — some institutions are on the bleeding edge of innovation, taking full advantage of the internet and technology in spreading access to their collections and programming. Others are stuck in the past, operating just how they might have decades ago with administrations unwilling to push technological initiatives.

Imagine Walt Disney World with no entry turnstiles. Cash? Passé: Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line. Fantasyland? Hardly. It happens starting this spring. Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.

The only thing constant about Facebook is that it keeps changing. Just when you think you’ve figured out the interface to the world’s biggest social network, the engineers there update it again. For the 600 million or so people who use their smartphones to stay on top of Facebook friends, recent weeks have been especially anxiety-producing.

Remember the days when a big-box store sounded the death knell for small business? Today, that trend may be ending due to another event: the emergence of mom-and-pops with the muscle of a major brand. Social media, online marketplaces such as Etsy and Fab, and transaction-processing technologies have enabled even micro-businesses to compete with national chains.

Remember when Google Plus 'flopped'? Well, it didn't. In fact, it was, and still is, just part of Google's plan–but everyone (including the media) has trouble seeing it as anything other than a swing and a miss for the explosive overtaking of Facebook, which is what most people believe was Google's intention with Google Plus. Sure, I bet Google hoped in the back of its mind it would get lucky and eclipse Facebook, but Google certainly wasn’t counting on it.

I have a short attention span, but I rock at multitasking. I may get bored easy but if you capture my attention, I could become your number one advocate (or worst nightmare). Please just cut to the chase, there’s no need for lengthy instructions; to me a picture’s worth a thousand words. At about 80 million strong, by 2017 these Americans, born between 1980-2000, will have more spending power than any other generation before us. You call me a millennial, but I prefer Rachael.

Effective marketers expect to see clear cut, positive ROI for every other channel of online marketing including email, search, and display advertising. But for some reason, many seem to forget about return when it comes to channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Many advertisers think there's no harm in having countless keywords in their campaigns just to cover their bases, but this is false logic. First of all, having too many non-performing keywords in your campaign can actually bring your overall campaign down, which in turn can lead to increased expenses to generate the same results.

A customer’s experience is shaped by the entire interaction with your brand, product, service, or company--from beginning to end.

Most people will initially find you online or will visit your website or Facebook page to check you out if they heard about you via word of mouth. You want to make sure that your website and your social media pages are welcoming to diverse groups. The least you can do is feature people who don’t all look the same if you use pictures of people on your site or pages.

The participants come and go--they aren't students taking a required course at an art school. Instead, they're colleagues--accountants, engineers, artists and animators--attending this drop-in workshop for personal and professional enrichment. They all work here at Zynga, a company known for its online social games, including "FarmVille" and "ChefVille."

A few weeks ago, at the Fast Company offices, we convened an all-star panel of designers and design leaders to talk about the problems that they found most vexing in the past year, and what they were trying to do to solve them.

Content marketers now commonly offer eBooks (usually for free) and the deliverable might be a collection of articles, a portfolio of some sort, an industry roundup, a collection of stories, or a whitepaper-like tutorial (usually with a more pictorial style). There are no rigid rules regarding length, presentation, or even content type. For the purpose of this article, an eBook is a free book, a collection of informative and entertaining pages created with the goal of engaging readers seeking to gather expertise in your field.

Bad arts advertising, it’s everywhere once you start to notice it. If Hollywood movies were as bland and formulaic as their posters, there’d be no point in going to see them. If the writers, directors, and performers on Broadway were as memorable as their publicity materials, their shows would be unwatchable.

If your name is a misrepresentation or worse a deterrent, business sense dictates that you remove the obstruction. When I was executive director of The O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, I quickly moved to rework the company's logo after multiple people told me stories about its caricature of Eugene being frequently mistaken for Hitler.

If your definition of "interactive" web video doesn't include much more than clicking off the red annotations that pop up on YouTube videos, Mozilla wants you to meet Popcorn Maker, a free web app that lets you remix online videos by adding links, social media feeds, maps, and photos.

Having overseen the $100 million campaign that the society just concluded and the $65 million renovation of the society's building on Central Park West, completed last year, Mr. Hertog has concentrated his efforts on helping solidify the institution, which a decade ago teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.

"He’s been exceedingly generous," said Louise Mirrer, president of the society.

You've spent a significant amount of time setting up your business's Facebook presence and are feeling pretty good about it. You're finding content to share on a regular basis, and steadily growing your "like" base beyond just friends and family. But this isn't the time to start slacking off. In fact, it's now--when you're gaining some momentum--that you need to take your Facebook efforts to the next level.

THE company known for decades for promoting its flagship brand as "the pause that refreshes" is refreshing its corporate website for a new century, adopting an approach and attitude more akin to a consumer magazine than a business portal.