The New Audience: John Lasseter

Academy Award winner John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and principal creative advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering, at the Academy event "The New Audience: Moviegoing in a Connected World."

Before there was Photoshop

lynda.com celebrates 25 years of Photoshop showing us how Konrad Eek works up a print using only darkroom techniques. Fascinating, so much is done by feel. 

Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions — in design and life

Book designer Chip Kidd knows all too well how often we judge things by first appearances. In this hilarious, fast-paced talk, he explains the two techniques designers use to communicate instantly — clarity and mystery — and when, why and how they work. He celebrates beautiful, useful pieces of design, skewers less successful work, and shares the thinking behind some of his own iconic book covers.

The Man Who Broke the Music Business

One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to a party at the house of a co-worker. He was angling for a permanent position, and the party was a chance to network with his managers. Late in the evening, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, a fixture at clubs in Charlotte, an hour away, had never heard any of the songs before, even though many of them were by artists whose work he enjoyed.

Later, Glover realized that the host had been d.j.’ing with music that had been smuggled out of the plant. He was surprised. Plant policy required all permanent employees to sign a “No Theft Tolerated” agreement. He knew that the plant managers were concerned about leaking, and he’d heard of employees being arrested for embezzling inventory. But at the party, even in front of the supervisors, it seemed clear that the disks had been getting out. In time, Glover became aware of a far-reaching underground trade in pre-release disks. “We’d run them in the plant in the week, and they’d have them in the flea markets on the weekend,” he said. “It was a real leaky plant.”

And that's how Stephen Witt's The New Yorker profile of Glover begins. Then it goes on to describe how Glover became the source of much of the music downloaded by the masses via Napster in the nineties. The article was the precursor to Witt's book How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy.

What's the Most Important Element of a Good Story?

At this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, we asked a group of writers, journalists, and producers to explain what makes a story great. According to House of Cards showrunner Beau Willimon, the answer is a simple one: "The most important element in a good story is conflict. It's seeing two opposing forces collide with one another." Other panelists include Michael Eisner, Catherine Burns, Jay Allison, Jon Lovett, Yoni Bloch, Paula Kerger, and Jonathan Harris.