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Friday Five with Tina Roth Eisenberg

Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss designer gone NYC and often referred to as swissmiss, her popular design blog. Besides running swissmiss the blog Tina organizes a monthly lecture/breakfast series called CreativeMornings, runs a collaborative workspace in DUMBO and is the force behind the simple, browser-based to-do app called TeuxDeux.

The human spirit, the force behind the people that I admire, are my Friday Five focus. Here are a few individuals that I highly admire for what they do, or how they shaped and inspire me.

1. Jessi Arrington | luckysoandso.com
Jessi Arrington is my studiomate and personal rainbow (metaphorically speaking, of course). She is a fantastic designer and one of the founders of Workshop. She runs a color-loving blog called Lucky So And So and some of you might know her because of last year’s rainbow birthday. She is an overall magic force constantly emanating fun and colorful energy. Jessi recently gave a talk at TEDActive about her mission of only buying clothes at thrift stores. Do yourself a favor and watch the 5.5min talk. You’ll understand why she is one of my all-time favorite people. We all should have a Jessi in our lives.

2. Cameron Kozcon | fictivecameron.com
Cameron is my studiomate and entrepreneurial inspiration. He has been cracking the entrepreneurial whip on all of us in our space and with quite some success. He believes that we designers have everything we need to create a product/service and should, if we are so inclined, try to start our own product and say goodbye to client work. If it wasn’t for him, I’d still have clients. He pushed to me make the plunge and start my own products. Together we started our to-do app TeuxDeux.

3. Joey Roth | joeyroth.com
Creator of the beautiful Sorapot, the Ceramic Speakers and now the latest prototype the Felt Mouse. Joey is a young entrepreneur that is not afraid of questioning product-status-quos. I am hugely inspired by his ‘doer mentality’ and enthusiasm to learn. He is not afraid of plunging into industries that he has no idea about. He figures it out as he goes along. Strong-willed and driven. As his poster explains it, he is a hustler.

4. Andrew Zuckerman | andrewzuckerman.com
Andrew Zuckerman is an amazing force. The amount of work he puts out in form of books, videos, apps is astounding. And he does it all with such passion and focus, it’s dizzying. In his humble CreativeMornings talk he explained that curiosity and rigor are what gets things done. His Wisdom book is one of my favorites.

5. Marco Arment | marco.org
If there is one app I would not want to have to live without, it’s Instapaper. It let’s you save interesting articles on the web for later. It syncs it to both my iPhone and iPad which means I always have a repository of interesting articles to read. Also, I use it to archive articles for later use. Instapaper makes me read more, makes me want to have to sit on a train or airplane. It makes standing in line enjoyable. From what I know, Instapaper is entirely run by Marco Arment, he runs everything on his own and he never took and VC money. I have a huge amount of respect for what he has built. Major hat tip off to Marco!

Jaime Derringer, Founder + Executive Editor of Design Milk, is a Jersey girl living in SoCal. She dreams about funky, artistic jewelry + having enough free time to enjoy some of her favorite things—running, reading, making music, and drawing.