Premium Linkage, pg. 2
Veer: Visual Elements for Creatives.Stock photography, type, and killer tees. Genuinely recommended by Authentic Boredom.
Forget all that fake worn/aged stuff. Try executing the real thing instead. Rumsey Taylor writes, “For the notcoming horror splash page I printed out the type in capitalized Bodoni on a sheet of paper, wadded it up several times, kept it in my back pocket for the larger part of a day, photographed it, inverted it, narrowed the levels and did a bit of brushing up, and voila: wavy, beat-up (and, hopefully, really scary looking) type.”
Registration now open for Web Directions North (Vancouver). Book between now and November 3rd and qualify for $200 off standard pricing. Can’t beat a conference with a ski trip included!
“I once had lunch with a gentlemen who, at the time, was the CEO of one of the largest freight companies in the world. Here is how he told me he set the foundation for his amazing growth. He took a look at his list of money he was waiting to receive from his clients and how long it was taking to get paid. He set out, himself, to visit each and every customer and tell them ‘We are not a bank. If you want to continue to be our customer then you need to stop treating us like one. You certainly do not want to start paying us like one.’” From “Pay Fast. Get Paid Faster.” by Howard Mann.
You so want a flying car for just over $3 mil.
Parallels tips: Don’t forget Parallels Tools and Bonjour.
An impressive list of CSS tutorials and techniques.
“The other consensus that seems to be emerging is that while people expect the web to deliver everything for free, when people access it on their phones they’ll expect to pay for the same thing. […] This isn’t going to work, particularly in the youth markets who are the early adopters here. Kids don’t see any difference between using their phone and the PC and woe betide you if your business model makes this unfounded and unproven assumption. They’re going to expect it for free and if you don’t give it to them on this basis, someone else will. You have been warned.” From “Web 3.0” by Russell Buckley.
From the Google blog: “If you visited [mobile.google.com] yesterday, you would have seen some pretty basic information presented in a fairly simple format. Today you’ll find a streamlined layout and some new ways to learn about Google’s mobile offerings.” You’ll need to visit with your mobile browser (you won’t see it with a desktop browser), and preferably something other than Opera Mini as device detection for this site fails on Mini. But once you get there, you’ll find easy access to Google’s mobile offerings, including a mobilized version of Google Maps compatible with most mobile devices.
Workshop: Mobile Web In Developing Countries.
Hey Floridians… psst.
Greenery Restaurant and Market. Nicely designed, Brandon.
Lucha del Gato. No further explanation required.
The inspiring work of Anthony Hurd lacks no color, creativity, or ingenuity. Love it. Prints also available.
iStock: search.php?text=grunge (vector and raster).
iStock: Concentric Corners (vector).
Paid Content and its network of sites soft launches a new design, powered by Expression Engine. Congrats Airbag and crew!
Drew McLellan: “Can Your Website be Your API?” This question was the catalyst for a recent presentation (PDF), which aimed to demonstrate “how the use of semantic markup and microformats on your public-facing pages could obsolete a lot of common read-heavy API methods.”
Andy Budd: “7 Habits of a Highly Successful Freelance Web Designer”. Among other sound advice in the article is this: “It’s important not to specialise at the expense of your other skills. Clients and agencies like well rounded people with a wide set of interests. Your skills should resemble an inverted T. Generally very broad but with one (or preferably more) areas of deep knowledge.”
A brief overview explaining proper web usage of en-spaces, em-spaces, thin-spaces, non-breaking spaces, zero width joiners, and zero width non-joiners.
“Our latest TV ad — featuring massive paint explosions — took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.”
Keith Robinson has been eyeing the mobile web space for some time now, and shares 7 observations.
Expression Engine top 10 tips: Part One, Part Two.
Admittedly I’m late to the Beck party, but his latest release, The Information (iTunes), is actually pretty impressive, having given it several spins the last couple of weeks.
Flickr: Flipper.
Great site by Capital Corporate Commmunications. Love the blend of origami and hanging rope navigation.
That line about good designers fixing problems, great designers preventing? Here’s an excellent example: Water damage stickers in mobile phones. “As a designer, I would much prefer to look at the problem as ‘How can we improve the sealing of phones so that water ingress is no longer a major problem?’ than ‘How can we design something to cover our backs and shift all the blame onto the user for our design fault?’” Via Kottke.
dotmobi has posted mobilized XHTML templates for download (free; see links at bottom). From what I see they’re mostly a cookie-cutter starter kit (of course), but perhaps a good place for mobile web dev newcomers to begin.
Shirt: “Google Is Ruining Everything”.
CNET reviews IE7. “The bottom line: IE 7 was Microsoft’s one chance to leapfrog ahead of the competition, but the company has only barely caught sight of the current front-runners. For more features and greater security, switch to Mozilla Firefox.” The other bottom line: Like it or not, most of your clients’ users will soon be using IE7. Via DF.
IE7 officially released (Windows XP SP2 users, English version).
Seeking a design degree? Consider reading “What the Industry Expects from Graduates”.
A preview of some pretty impressive drag & drop UI enhancements coming to Backpack.
“FTF Flama is a straightfull sans serif initially designed for signage mixing aspects of both, European and American sans serifs. With its ‘neutral’ flavour, FTF Flama proves to be highly efficient for signage, corporate as well as for editorial design.” (Thanks Jesse)
“No Ideas But In Things is a library of controls, animations, layouts, and displays that might be a source of inspiration for interaction designers. Dan Saffer is the curator.” (Thanks Coudal)
Media Temple unveils a site design update, including new data about the Grid-Server, which aims to eliminate “roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email.” Update: Oops. Looks like the markup didn’t get an update…
Zeldman: Web 2.0 Thinking Game. “Web 1.0: Pointless Flash widgets. Web 2.0: Pointless ‘Ajax’ widgets. Now you try it!”
Not yet big in Japan? Try 10 ad tricks in Tokyo’s train stations.
UX Mag redux. New design, same great grid flavor.
piotr m’s Flickr photostream contains a wealth of fantastic canine photography: I, II, III, and IV.
Veerle’s archived tutorials are plenty rich in design how-to, including her latest: Creating a ribbon in Adobe Illustrator.
Roger Johansson: Opening new windows with JavaScript. Note this is a tutorial for those who need to generate new windows for one reason or another without the use of the target attribute, and not a discussion about the worth or value of popup windows.
Bulletproof Design with XHTML and CSS with Mr. Incredible himself, Dan Cederholm. Boston, November 2. [Insert pun about a target and not missing this workshop.]
A few good free fonts included in this font list posted at Smashing Machine.
Khoi Vinh interviews Jeffrey Zeldman in preparation for Tuesday’s AIGA NY appearance. “We solve really big problems and then we move on. I don’t think that�s a bad thing for anyone concerned. I think it’s a good thing. […] Once the big problems are solved, it makes sense to have their in-house people or a lower-profile (ahem, cheaper) agency take over. […] They will not be a ‘B’ team compared to us; they will be an ‘A’ team that does a different job from the job we do.”
Nokia WidSets, currently in beta, are much like Dashboard widgets for your mobile device. I downloaded it earlier this morning (thanks Christian) and have been playing with a bit since. Looks like there are 3 main parts: An app that sits on your phone (the dashboard), widgets that you or other people create for either mini versions of desktop sites or standalone web apps, and a desktop counterpart to enable you to manage your widgets. It’s way too early to tell if this is the “future” of the mobile web per se, but it could certainly become an integral part of it.
Daring Fireball: BBColors 1.0. “BBEdit’s text colors have been configurable ever since syntax coloring appeared in BBEdit 4.0 in 1996, but there’s no means to save or change them en masse. So, I’ve put together a little command-line tool called BBColors; it lets you save, load, and share text color preference schemes for BBEdit and TextWrangler.”
How-to: Show thumbnails on link hover using Javascript and CSS. (Demo)
Moo’s business card-like Flickr MiniCards. “These little beauties are ideal for sharing details of your flickr photostream, sets, groups and contact details when you’re offline.”
Etelka Light Pro. Haven’t used this typeface yet, but I’m somehow enticed to do so.
Tuesday, October 3 2006 (photo) by Rob Bernhard.
A couple more fonts from TheTypeTrust that you certainly won’t be fired for using: Ezzo and Boycott.
Dave Rau, whom you might recognize as Mr. Red Labor, just released The Peace River into the wild - a beautifully worn site for the Southwest Florida Water Mgmt District.
Great photography work from Jeremy Cowart: Flickr | Portfolio. Photosets: Album Covers, Random Abstractions. (Thanks, John)
Vitamin: Redefining Content Management. “When most of us think (or talk, or read) about content management we are quick to associate it with a specific technology - the CMS. That, my friends, is our first, and probably our biggest, mistake. ‘CMS’ should in no way define content management. If you’re currently in content management = CMS mode you should really take the time to step back and look at what you’re doing.”
Natalie Jost’s lovely Pink for October design. (Mouseover issue on logo in FF/Safari?)
Nice big list of AJAX, DHTML, and JavaScript libraries. In German, but no translation needed.
O’Reilly eBook: Using Microformats.
CSS Globe. Member-contributed news and resources.
“10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website” based on AU Interactive’s perspective at the recent Future of Web Apps Conference 2006 in San Francisco.
Kathy Sierra’s vintage 1966 Silver Streak (Airstream) office. “I [wanted] a space that matches my enthusiasm. All that changed when I learned that Dori Smith had rented a 1957 Airstream office. I’d lusted after Airstreams for years, and when I went to visit her, I knew it was exactly what I’d been looking for. Finally, after two years of looking (and saving), I found and bought a vintage 1966 (recently restored) 23-foot Silver Streak trailer.” Via Airbag.
Happy Cog Philadelphia. Congrats all!
I feel ashamed admitting it, but it had been a little while since I hit up Andy Rutledge’s site with a browser, and I like what I see. Some interesting layout techniques, and a good blend of fresh content on the home page.
Lovely new design over at The Morning News. The Deck ad is nicely placed, too.
Jason Santa Maria dons his Halloween costume right on schedule (though I’m a bit late to make note of it).
Kate says, “I noticed all the little ‘frilly’ bits (for lack of better word) around the site; I’m wondering whether you made these yourself, or if you found them somewhere else.” Love the term, Kate! I get asked this question quite often. The canned answer is it’s a blend of clip art and the Nat Vignette and Type Embellishments One font families. The uncanned answer has not yet been approved by the FDA.
Matt P. says, “I was just wondering if there would be any way to get a vectorized
version of page 56 of your ‘Nine Skills’ presentation (the one with the Good Designer vs. Great Designer table). I’d like to hang a copy on my wall.” I would love to do this myself but regrettably I’m way overbooked this week. Anyone care to do the honors?
(4)
Airbag: Scab. “Look, design doesn’t just happen. It’s a process of creation and deconstruction that can take days-to-months before every element, color, and bit of typography is in the right place. […] When someone ‘borrows’ my work s/he is cheating because they didn’t have to go through the love and hate process that it took for us to create that layout or element detail.”
2Modern. Contemporary home furniture and decor. Favs: I, II, III, and IV.
Undeniably inspiring work by Seth Weisfeld. Via Newstoday.
New site design by Travis Beckham, aka Squidfingers, purveyor of fine pixel patterns but also of some extremely impressive portfolio work. Via Croftie.
UC Berkeley isn’t taking this interweb thing lightly. First came UC Berkeley on iTunes a few months back, and now there’s UC Berkeley on Google Video.
Jason Gaylor releases another round of Photoshop brushes: Tasty Tattoo. Vector files are now available for purchase for the same set, as well as Fresh Foliage II.
ALA: 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards. “There are plenty of excellent books and articles out there, […] few of them acknowledge that using CSS to create standards-friendly sites requires a mindset that is alien to many experienced developers. […] I’m writing to convey the most important lessons I�ve learned so far.”
Web Directions North, Vancouver, Feb 6-10. Three days of instruction, two days of skiing… Perfect.
Goggles, the Google Maps flight simulator. Crazy!
“These pictures are from a web standards workshop (taught by me) in Seoul last thursday and friday,” writes Suman Park. “It was a very good time. Many web developers in Korea are paying attention to building web standards-based websites.”
.mobi general registration begins today. Here’s a list of accredited registrars.
Three seats just became available for the previously sold-out Designing Elegant CSS Interfaces — grab ‘em quick!
Milton Glaser: Ten Things I Have Learned. Part of an AIGA talk in London, 2001. I’m particularly intrigued by #5, “Less is not necessarily more”, as I made a similar argument in Friday’s “Essential Web Skills” presentation.
Booreiland.nl. Filed under “Good one-page portfolio sites”.
Dust off those old floppies and build your own Floppy Disk Bag.
Ma.gnolia Roots bookmarklet shows Ma.gnolia community info for any website.
@media 2007 will convene in San Francisco and Hong Kong(!), in addition to its home town in London.
Your office space needs wall decals, you say? Blik.
The HP Diet Plan: Buy our cameras. “Can you believe this? HP is pitching a new ‘artistic effect’ called the slimming feature.”
Miles Davis and John Coltrane performing “So What” live in 1958. Noted for those of you attending my session this Friday at Webmaster Jam Session (come and you’ll see what I mean).
Igor Falecki, 4-year-old drummer. Sheesh, they keep getting younger. Pretty soon they’ll come out of the womb with sticks in hand.
Wilton Foundry. Some solid fonts here. Favs: Petronella and Duet 2 with Flourishes.
Maciej Hajnrich, Graphic Designer. Very inspiring, to say the least. Lots of distressed/worn stuff, too.
COBA Hair. Ginormous photos. That Text Box Look. Nice.
Some Javascript and CSS geekery: Automatic pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS and Crossfading animation effect.
Search the works of Shakespeare. The results are incredibly contextual, just as you’d expect. Well done.
JPG reborn, with 8020 Publishing under the hood.
General registration for .mobi begins Sept 26 — only one week from tomorrow. FYI.
“One second I’m enjoying my late night breakfast, the next thing I know there was a nasty stinky sock on my plate.”
“Please, No Blogging in line.”
Jon Hicks knocks out a CSS file to highlight microformats in Safari, Camino, or Omniweb (for those of us without access to the Firefox Tails extension). I’ve been using this for a few days now and it works beautifully — it’ll really open your eyes to just how many sites are already using microformats.
New Chameleon icon sets. Dan upgrades the popular icon set with Chameleon Graphite and Chameleon Mini.
Imagine trying to explain the world in which we live using only 3x5 index cards and (mostly) Venn diagrams. Behold Indexed.
“Designing Elegant CSS Interfaces” is now sold out. Rumor has it we may see it come to the states, so hang in there if you aren’t able to attend this time around.
Fusionfox redesigned. Clean, light-text-on-dark design by Clifton Labrum.
Collylogic: The importance of window-width. An older journal entry, but still relevant given the fluid vs. fixed-width discussion ‘round these parts.
The Rachel Ray Show debuts here in the US beginning today. I’m not really into this kind of thing, but I am into cutting out useless communication jargon. The 9/11/06 issue of TIME magazine reports: “Ray — who has no teleprompter, earpiece, cue cards or even write — has a finely honed sense of what is and is not Rachel Ray. When the Vegas affiliate wanted a promo in which she would say, ‘Join me for an entertaining and unpredictable hour of television,’ she refused. Instead, she blurted out, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but if you want to know what happens on my show, you’ll have to check it out at 10 a.m.’ The audience went nuts.”
DF: Showtime: The Big Picture. On overcoming digital movie issues, why Jobs’ on-stage enthusiasm varies, and state of the iPod/iTunes empire. Couldn’t agree more with this: “Vaporware pre-announcements distract customers from currently available products, but in this particular case I think Apple felt they had to reveal [iTV] now, because if they hadn’t, the lack of an answer to the ‘But how do I play these videos on my TV?’ question would been more of a distraction.” Precisely my thoughts too — iTV was likely announced to encourage users to buy movies now rather than wait.
“That Old Piece of Cloth” from this morning’s NPR broadcast was undeniably genuine.
Looking for someone to transcribe the audio from my W3C mobile seminar (slides here). Needs to be delivered by Thursday morning, Sept 15. Pay $100 by PayPal, delivered as RTF or Word document. Contact me if interested. Found someone. Thanks.
JPG to be 8020 Publishing’s first magazine.
iMockups, Wired’s roundup of “the best and most entertaining [Apple product] ideas floating around the net.”
Seconds 1:17 through 1:24 (slow-mo) make this robot dance worth watching. Crazy cool.
Lego Star Wars II. My boys love the first one… but no Mac version this time?
In memorium, from the archives: The Fallen Will Forever Stand. Incidentally this was written as a chiasmus.
Atari 2600 plug and play keychains actually play games. Sweet! Via Dan C.
Google AdWords hit cellphones.
One of the very first books I read on web design was Web Sites That Work by Roger Black. Earlier this week Roger unveiled a new website. Bold design, but I’m with everyone else on this one — the white drop-shadowed text on red is painful to read.
Crazy as it sounds (6+ months away), it’s time to begin thinking about booking a hotel for SXSW 2007. The good ones go incredibly fast, and usually by November or so they’re filled. Don’t say I didn’t warn y’all!
Top 10 best presentations ever. Couldn’t agree more about Dick Hardt’s presentation. I’ve seen that several times now and I’m amazed every time I see it — totally unlike most presentations you’ve seen.
Coudal’s In Real Tight winners revealed. Now it’s your turn to identify the objects in each photo for a chance to win some Coudal swag.
Blue Flavor gets new office digs. Usability lab included.
Not easy to get a direct link to it because of frames, but here’s one showing wicked gorgeous bamboo and leather inset helmets by Indigo Snow and Bogner. A mere $650 takes one home.
Mint: A Year in Green. “Mint has been a competent source of income for a household of two for the larger part of the past year. It has survived Measure Map, Crazy Egg and two brushes with Google Analytics. Mint is still selling strong into its second year. There have been ups and downs and there will always be alternatives and detractors but it doesn’t look like Mint is going anywhere anytime soon.”
“These days, there are a lot of options to close [off stairs] using very ugly devices called baby gates. You rather put chicken wire on it and I guarantee it will look better than any of the options that Babies R Us offer. That’s why I decided to take matters in my own hands.”
Stunning advert from Ariston with clothing as if it were sea life.
An Event Apart Austin. November 6th.
Photos of Todd Dominey’s recently completed home office: I, II, and III.
draft.media. The smell of wood grain fused with magenta is undeniably succulent.
The Big Picture on Microformats. Still plenty of time to board this train if you haven’t done so yet. “It may come as a surprise […] that the level of adoption by tool developers, publishers, and aggregators is significant, and that you probably visit sites with microformatted content all the time, without even knowing it.”
Veerle: Creating grunge brushes.
“In case you were wondering how much money you have to spend to get Apple to bend over backwards, that number is $12,718.19” and other observations as Greg Storey returns from an extended leave from blogging oops, writing, that is.
The Morning News: Drumroll Please. For a former marching band quad player who grew up in Blue Devil country, this is a fascinating read. “Five hours of drumming and dancing and bugling is, it turns out, not for everyone. And yet, according to the proud simulcast announcers, more than 20,000 people nationwide purchased tickets to watch the quarterfinals in their local theaters. Meanwhile, ESPN2 is predicting over a million viewers for tonight’s [Tuesday] airing of the DCI finals.”
New k10k.net.
Keith Robinson’s new site, of which I become immersed in the color scheme, among other wonderful details.
A few more typefaces, all from TheTypeTrust, you probably won’t get fired for using: Diego, Sneakers Script, and Musee.
popurls mobile. See also Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators, which I shamelessly stole from popurls.
So You Want to Be an Interaction Designer, 2006 edition by Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path. “And if you are good enough, you’ll work with companies whose technology and/or influence is so great, you can make a significant difference in the world. But in order to do this, I think there are three essential traits you need: temperament, training, and experience.”
popurls. Huge one-page aggregation of sites such as Digg, Flickr, Newsvine, YouTube, and more.
Philips Readus Prototype has a flexible roll-out screen for increased viewing area on a device that’s still as small as a mobile phone.
Two weeks after announcing “Designing Elegant CSS Interfaces” the seats are half gone. Would love to see you there — now’s the time to register!
Veer Summermixes. I can’t imagine their taste for music being any less astute than their taste for creative elements.
April Zero has all the stylistic flavors of Web 2.0… but I still like.
A rarity: Freebie fonts from FontShop, a few of which are actually quite nice.
New Treo 750 photos. Nothing terribly exciting to see, continue on folks.
Portland Studios T-shirt store (mentioned here a few days ago) is now open for business.
Free Mobilists’ mobile RSS reader. Stay abreast of mobile technology with 15 sites. Good little app, actually, just gave it a run. Supported on most phones, or so it says.
Pattern utopia at Print & Pattern. Sensory overload! Via Hicks.
Video showing a Lexus self-parking car.
Cross-reference Pantone, CMYK, and RGB Hex values with LogoOrange’s color codes matching chart. (Keep in mind these are approximations.)
Flow, a money manager for freelancers and small businesses. Wow, that was fast, Mark.
I’ve seen at least a couple sources citing Chumby, a low cost, wifi-enabled delivery device, as the most interesting news to come out of Foo Camp ‘06. More from Christine.net: “Once you’ve plugged in your chumby, it connects to your home network via wifi. Select ‘Trust the chumby’ and it will autodiscover. Once you’ve registered online and picked from a selection of free widgets, the chumby displays a Flash stream of whatever you’ve configured - weather, news feeds, alarm clock, movies, pictures, stock tickers, etc.”
“Try looking through heathersloane.com without grinning,” writes Pete K., reader. I tried. I failed. Beautiful, light-hearted illustration work.
Adobe’s del.icio.us bookmarks.
Phoenix-based Obadiah Parker’s acoustic cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya”.
SlideShowPro v1.3.5 now includes optional thumbnail nav.
NTT DoCoMo’s liquid-inspired charge indicator. “[The phone] has a motion sensor that detects tilt, affecting the ‘liquid’ inside the display appropriately. As battery level drops, so does the level of the liquid.”
More Utah vintage signage stuff: Urban Typography Project. Letterpress prints based on imagery found in and around Salt Lake City. (thanks, Sam)
Sign a petition to get Google to create a doodle for Prematurity Awareness Day (March of Dimes).
Mighty Mouse reviewed rebuked.
Two from Khoi today: Shorty, TinyURL-like link shortening, but on your server.
Khoi’s feed icon will likely soon show up all over the place; the first instance I’ve seen being NorthTemple. Nicely done.
20% off Chato Band, a grungy script font.
Yay! New dictionary.com design. There were a few cogs involved in this, one might say.
Jeff Croft: Has accessibility been taken too far? A delicate sorta delicate but appropriate treatment of the issue. “I believe too many people are trying to make accessibility a binary (yes or no) matter. It can’t be. It has to be a continuum. Every additional thing I’m expected to do for the sake of accessibility has a trade off of some kind. At the very least, there’s a time and effort trade off.” (Side note: I wasn’t aware of the Apple screen inversion Jeff mentions. Give it a whirl: ctrl-cmd-option-8)
.Mac’s slow death. “Then Google introduced (free) Gmail with oodles more storage than .Mac offers, calendars and so on. To make a long story short, I’m about to give .Mac the boot for good. After the jump, a breakdown of why.” I honestly thought we would have seen the impending death already by now. I toyed with it briefly several years ago and haven’t seen any value in it since.
FontShop with another excellent newsletter listing typefaces used on popular consumer packaging. Loving this series — I hope to see more.
Jquery tool tip. Simple but useful UI enhancement for those ever-present question marks next to form fields. Will find use for this soon… (thanks, Jesse)
A couple of readers’ sites worth noting: Auchtertool Parish Kirk and Die Kleidermacher (loosely based on some of the techniques in CSS Mastery).
On a roll with photography today… Scads of inspiring print work at Sesame Letterpress’ Flickr photostream.
Jan Von Holleben “Dreams of Flying” series photography with objects and children lying on their sides as if floating in the air/water/land. Exquisitely unique and beautiful. Love kids throwing giant rock.
Flickr: Early Morning, April 4. From a recent trip to the National Civil Rights Museum. See also Lorraine Motel.
Digg Labs. Hadn’t even seen this until today. Digg Swarm is really interesting to watch, to say the least.
Videos of Web Design World presentations by Jeff Veen, Molly Holzschlag, Cal Henderson and others. Via Stylegala.
Vintage Utah signage. Up until recently, I used to pass the Rexall signs every time I visited my parents.
Speaking of tees, A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer “told through the shirts that have been a significant part of the Apple story” (hardcover).
Upcoming tees from the talented illustrator chaps at Portland Studios.
Tetris magnet set. Geek out your fridge.
American Express card holder and business owner? Submit your product for space on the 2006 Holiday WishList.
Today’s Inspiration, an ongoing collection of illustration from the 40’s and 50’s.
Mike Ibach and Stuart Sandler unleash Font Bros to the world, with faces from Astigmatic One Eye, Mark Simonson Studio, Alphabet Soup, Fonthead Design, and others.
On hiring your first employee. “Percentage-wise, that first employee is doubling the size of your company. It’s the most important hire you’ll ever make. And you need to nail it. […] Don’t make this jump unless you’re willing to put your butt on the line for the person you’re hiring.”
Aaron Foster’s incredible collection of artwork created with vintage license plates. Pottery Barn offers a canvas print of his USA map. (thanks, Amanda)
Dave Shea on using Parallels Desktop for Mac to switch instantaneously between Mac OS and Windows on Intel-based Macs.
“Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the [Firefox] crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky.” If I ever see any of my work as a gigantic crop circle, I just might fall over dead with amazement. Via Airbag.
Creating flexible buttons using Photoshop shapes and styles.
“8020 Publishing is out to create the ultimate web/print hybrid magazines. We’re just getting started now and our first magazine is coming in November. Wanna come along?”
Mondays are typically full of meetings. Just in case you need to get out of one.
This is wacky… but perhaps one of the best targeted emails I’ve seen recently. Send a “Snakes On A Plane” email to a friend with Samuel L. Jackson making jests about him/her based on the character traits you choose. (Thanks, Jesse)
“Just for fun, I’ve decided to share my first published writing on the subject of typography. It appeared in the April 19, 1977, issue of Metropolis, the Weekly Newspaper of Minneapolis.”
FontShop takes a trip to the supermarket and identifies typefaces used in the packaging for Izze Juice, Tazo Tea, and others.
Basecamp Dashboard widget. Be sure to enable the Basecamp API (Account tab).
Help SXSW Interactive decide panel programming for the 2007 event. Tons of great topic suggestions, and this could kick things up a notch next year. You might vote for “After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration” and, um, I just might be a part of the panel. Speaking of inspiration…
“These pieces are done on 8”X8” plywood, sealed with several coats of varathane. They have the feel of ‘tiles’.”
Belkin wi-fi Skype phone. “The phone connects to any free Wi-Fi hotspot, allowing you to access your Skype account and place free, unlimited domestic and international calls over the Internet to other Skype users.”
Todd Dominey is looking for another crew member (web designer). Brief details here (scroll down about halfway).
Flagr. Flag/tag locations with comments, photos, and more using your mobile phone or PC. Like in case you need to find public toilets (which, in the US isn’t a big deal, but to find them elsewhere can be).
Speaking of logos, behold LogoPond (logo gallery).
Raja Sandhu, one of the most talented logo designers I know, boasts a jocular but very appropriate, spot-on contract design FAQ. “‘This doesn’t look like something from your portfolio?’ I always love this one. […] Your company is called Bob’s Dart World and you told me I have to use red green and black in the logo, you said it also must contain a dartboard and a flying dart. Those aren’t exactly the elements I work best with. The results will indicate that.”
CNN profiles Dennis Hwang, the artist behind Google’s logo interpretations.
I draw pictures all day (Veer shirt).
Jon Hicks: “Time Machine - Great idea, but my goodness, Apple’s designers must’ve been overdoing the weed. That is the cheesiest interface I’ve seen in a long time.” No kidding. I honestly thought it was merely a metaphor, not the actual interface, when I first saw it.
Otterball. Plenty to be inspired by here.
Coudal’s latest endeavor, In Real Tight photo contest. “Take an extreme close-up of some everyday object that makes for an interesting composition, but also makes it difficult to identify the object. Send a link to the photo to us.” Selected winners receive some cool CP stuff.
Kottke: How I Blog. Great advice for anyone posting links on a regular basis.
33% of all blog posts are in Japanese (only 1% less than posts in English) and other blogosphere stats from David Sifry.
Mobile WordPress.com. Type m.wordpress.com into your mobile device and blog, link, and get stats.
“At this year’s DEFCON Jesse D’Aguanno of Praetorian Global demonstrated a program called BBProxy that can cause your RIM [Blackberry] handheld to give malicious intruders access to your remote network by tunneling through your device’s link to the mail server mothership.” More from Engadget.
FYI, a few URIs to get live WWDC 2006 coverage: MacRumors, AppleInsider, and MacNN to name a few. (Another with photos.)
The release of iTunes movie rentals is one of several unveilings anticipated in today’s keynote. Give me tabs in Leopard’s Finder and I’ll be giddy.
If you’ve been dying to code on the go, DragonEdit is a text/HTML editor for Palm Treo. Crazy.
Eons is apparently a new social networking site for the 50+ crowd. If they were really cool they would have called it Boomr.
Missed my W3C mobile web virtual seminar? Grab the audio and PDF slide deck and you’re golden.
store.purevolume. Hot. Simplicity and audacity rolled up in one. Love Kreuger Bars.
Mark Boulton, grid and typography extraordinaire, is leaving the BBC to go freelance. “Yes, I’m scared to death. I think it’s natural, but also a good thing. I’m sure it will make me work hard to make this a success.” Success? Bah, it’s in the bag, Mark. Congrats on making the leap.
Enter the 15th Annual HOW International Design Awards. Winning entries to appear in the April 2007 issue of HOW. Last year’s winnners shown here.
Tick - time tracking app, but with time budgeting (progress bars and other indicators) for each project/task. Looks like a pretty good app after a few mins playing with it.
One of the best “how to get here” pages I’ve seen in a while: 4-step macro-to-micro instructions for getting to the Wickaninnish Inn.
7 stock icon sets for $5/each at IconBuffet.
Dave Shea: “According to CNET, Internet Explorer 7 is going to be sent out automatically to XP users as a priority Windows Update upon its launch. We’ll see a massive migration, and IE6 numbers will take a sharp dive in the very near future. This is a good thing. However, a sharp surge of immediate adoption could be a little painful for those not currently testing in IE7; now is most definitely the time to start, if that’s you.”
“You’ll shoot your eye out, kiddo. 144 times.”
NY Times: The Brand Underground. “Branding […] is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional.”
As Mark Boulton drowns in a “thickening quagmire of paperwork”, he finds release by developing his own custom invoice/estimate app, EE powered. Looks promising, and a good app for creating estimates is long overdue.
How to save for the future if you don’t have a nine-to-five. Kill credit debt, start with short-term saving, put 10% of each check towards savings, open a Roth IRA, buy a CD, and other good tips.
Brian Fling’s slides from what appears to have been a brilliant “Designing for Mobile” workshop at Webvisions 2006. The diagram on slide 38 is phenomenal. Love the “Jargon Alert” idea, too.
“For one of the projects they create a typography poster for a typeface they are assigned. Students are to research and write a paper about the typeface and then design a poster based on their research of the typeface and time period. We’ve started posting samples of some of the best posters in our Flickr typography set.”
Behind the scenes: Yahoo! FIFA mobile site. “To make sense of the chaos, Yahoo!’s team first selected a target group of ten phones. They were all widely distributed, and their browsers ran the gamut from high-end to barely functional. As the thinking went, if the site worked perfectly on all of them, it would perform reasonably well on the rest of the world’s phones.”
Merill Lynch: Time to pull the plug on ESPN Mobile. Amen.
Web 2.0 Show episode 24, with yours truly. Chris, Josh, and I chat about design, mobile gadgets, .mobi, and tons of other great stuff.
So I’m bummed big time today. 30 glorious years with 20/20 vision have finally come to an end. I’ve never worn a pair of glasses. Ever. I’m off to shop for some tomorrow. Any tips on what to look for? (comments on) (26)
How to fix an iPod with the sad iPod icon. “I held it and slammed it onto a pad of paper on my desk (providing some cushion so I didn’t crack the case), charging port down. And like mana falling from heaven, the tunes started playing.”
Gorgeous icon work from Stefan Dziallas.
Nintendo DS + Opera screen grabs. Update: YouTube video showing DS Browser. Forget mobile phones — maybe this is the future of browsing on the go… (Thanks, Shaun)
One more Atari link while we’re at it: “You’re a starship captain in an asteroid field!”
Jeff Bezos invests in 37signals. Wow. Rock on.
Learning from Atari: “Thinking back on my childhood, I remember Atari always being great marketers because of one gigantic realization: suspension of disbelief. […] When you played something like Yar’s Revenge, you didn’t see a bunch of inflated pixels, you saw giant mutant house flies. Atari set up the pieces, and let your imagination fill in the blanks.” Bonus reading (viewing): 1981 Atari Game Catalog.
W3C Mobile Web Best Practices “checker” is essentially a validator for checking how well your mobilized site adheres to the BP guidelines.
ebon. I can’t understand a word, but the perceived simplicity of this site is excellent.
Weightshift is back… in pink! a magenta alternate of some sort. (Thanks, Ryan)
Stunning aged and worn display faces from Device.
On becoming a Geographic Arbitrageur (living where cost of living is low while charging big-city prices): “In this century of high metro real estate prices and flattening paychecks, GeoArb could become a way of life for millions of knowledge workers. Suppose you lost your high-paying white-collar job in a big city. What would you do? […] In all likelihood you’d set up a home office and try your hand as a consultant. That’s what some 300,000 Americans have done since 2000.”
“One thing that students might overlook when using InDesign for the first time is the document size that by default it displays in pica increments. This is one thing Roberto missed when setting up his brochure project for the shoe company Kangaroo. Roberto’s 9” x 12” tri-fold brochure was unknowingly sized at 9 picas by 12 picas - which lead to a final brochure which was just 1 1/2” by 2” in size.” Full story by Amanda Kern. (How’s that for a graphic designer’s surname.)
Indiana-based Gautam Rao paints with oil on masonite, and a share of his work is “web-based”, notably CAPTCHA series and New Folder. Several items are available for purchase.
More Jason Gaylor brushes: Fresh Foliage 2.
Big Cartel. DIY store/cart builder that seems to have some potential. Nice site, too.
Seth Godin: How to live happily with a great designer. “#10 - This one may surprise you: don’t change your existing design so often. Not when your kids or your colleagues tell you it’s time. Do it when your accountant says so.” Precisely. (Though I’d probably change that last sentence to “…when your market research says so.” By the time it affects bottom line and shows up on the accountant’s desk, it’s way too late to start planning a redesign.)
“The Hope Garden is live and growing. […] a virtual community garden that allows you to plant a custom made flower and attach a message for a loved one, then pass an e-card message on that links back directly to your flower. Users can navigate the 3D garden and browse other inspirational messages with the option to ‘water’ flowers that touched them.” Beautiful work, Paul.
“IUseThis looks as if it will become the cork�d for OS X apps.” –Jon Hicks
Wow, this Nokia spot by Helios is 30 well-spent seconds of creative euphoria. Every element executed beautifully. Via Coudal.
Christopher Fahey refutes the usefulness of eyetracking studies in User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 2: Research as a Design Tool: “Again, it is possible that, like chicken soup, eyetracking can’t hurt a redesign process […]. But unless you are working with graphic designers with no talent whatsoever […] it’s hard to believe that the recommendations of an eyetracking study would be a meaningful influence on a design process, much less form the very basis for the redesign.” Via Stan.
I missed the news, but apparently Opera plans to release browsers for both the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii. With the success of alternate user agents such as Opera Mini, I suspect Opera will continue to penetrate the non-desktop browser space and decrease development for the desktop over the long term.
Daring Fireball: The Mac OS X Tipping Point. “The difference between the old Mac OS and Mac OS X isn’t that it used to suck but now it’s great. The difference is that Mac OS X’s appeal is broader; it is good in more ways than the old Mac OS was. It’s this increased breadth of appeal that has grown Mac OS X’s share of the nerd market. What makes nerds ‘nerds’ is that they care to an irrational depth about certain specific things; Mac OS X covers more of those things than did Mac OS 9, and so it appeals to many more nerds.”
So my cousin tells me he surfs on Lake Austin (inland, about 200 miles from the shore). Didn’t believe it until I saw the video. Turns out with enough weight in the boat and at the right speed, it’s do-able. Crazy.
More Photoshop brushes from the infamous Jason Gaylor: Graffiti brushes.
Bak Dergisi. Gorgeousness!
“Anuncios publicados en la revista ‘Cl�nica Rural’. A�os 60-70.” Simply magn�fico.
ideasonideas: Creativity is a discipline of learning. “About a year ago, I acknowledged that much of my design work simply wasn�t good enough. As much as I wanted to believe that I was on par with some of the people I admired, it simply wasn�t the case. This was a liberating sensation. By acknowledging my weaknesses I was free to learn more, push harder, and seek growth more honestly.”
CSS World Awards winners recognized by CSS Mania. I had the opportunity to stand in as one of the judges. Congrats to the nominees and winners.
Speaking of Webvisions, there’s a ton of great sessions and workshops this year. An entire track on mobile, no less, more than half of which cover the mobile web, including Brian Fling’s workshop.
In preparation for his session at Webvisions 2006, Bill DeRouchey has started blogging about the history of the button. “The Button is nearly a character on the show [Lost]. It’s an entity. It’s a thing that holds sway on our heroes and divides them. The button has believers and detractors, a Man of Faith and a Man of Science. The Man of Faith believes it his destiny to be the caretaker of The Button. The Man of Science sees no reason to believe, but logic tells him it’s better to wait, learn and see.”
Reasons Dan C. enjoys flying. Pre-completed Sudoku puzzles rock.
Tutorial for pixel perfect (background) patterns in Photoshop.
Hockneyizer. Create a simulated collage from a single photograph. Hand-off to Flickr is pretty easy (sample). Tool inspired by English artist David Hockney.
Love the tabs on SaraJoy Pond.
Distressed design, sample sites. Cool visited technique on the thumbs, too.
Nope, my boys didn’t do it, but I bet they could have. (Thanks, Michael.)
Beginning CSS Web Development. Another forthcoming book, this one by fellow author Simon Collison. I enjoyed his lighthearted yet technically sound style of writing in CSS Mastery. An entire book done up in that style should be well worth the money.
JavaScript tabifier. Sweet. Cut-and-paste for dynamic tabbery. (Thanks, Jesse.)
Snipplr. “Share your code snippets with other coders and designers.”
Several time tracking and invoicing apps reviewed. I’d likely go for a Blinksale/Harvest mashup, too.
A couple of JavaScript debuggers: FireBug for Firefox and Drosera, which “lets you attach and debug JavaScript for any WebKit application—not just Safari.”
Bookshelves inspired by Tetris. Via Netdiver.
Veerle’s interesting links. Mostly CSS. Veritably resourceful.
Transcending CSS. Andy Clarke’s forthcoming book, unveiled at @media. If it’s anything like his presentation, it’ll include plenty of fresh thinking about how we use CSS moving forward. Molly’s comment at dinner, “How would you mark that [plate of food] up?” is only one of many ways you’ll begin to think differently about markup.
UC Berkeley on iTunes. Sweet. I’m now an unofficial continuing ed student at Cal.
“Maxdox� Mobile Publisher software provides the tools to rapidly create content rich mobile publications.” I believe it’s (very) loosely something akin to Dreamweaver for mobile content, though I haven’t had time to play with the software yet. Had a good chat with Maxdox execs at @media.
Ornate fleuron characters available in Fleurons Two.
Speaking of US v. European TV: NY Times blog, “The Sins of American Sportscasting”. “It’s easy to see why O’Brien and Balboa announce this way. They are simply calling soccer games the same way all American sports are called. And yet the fact that there is such dissatisfaction with a very traditional, mainstream announcing team speaks volumes not just about the way soccer is presented on American TV, but about the state of American television sportscasting in general.” Via Kottke.
Flickr: Standing in the shadows at the end of my bed.
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 status is now Candidate Recommendation. Sample guidelines include short entry-point URIs, access keys on nav items, text equivalents for non-text elements, and 120px minimum screen width.
Scott Shaffer asks, What really is mobile search? “There will come a point when there is more internet traffic from mobile devices than PCs. What happens to search engines then? What happens to the Golden Goose of advertising when people won’t be using a search engine to do their surfing? […] Advertisers are still trying to catch up with the eyeballs that left TV to the stationary Net. What happens when the net shift goes from the PC to the cell phone?” An excellent read. Not a lot of answers, but the questions certainly merit pondering.
Flick’d away. Zeldman’s Pro account expires without notice, and 200+ photos immediately disappear. Good to know — mine expires next week. I’m off to renew immediately…
Mosso, “the world’s first hosting system for people who build websites.” Via Jesse.
Justin K. is looking to trade a new Veer 15” laptop bag for the 17” one. Excellent condition. Email kaitel {at} gmail dot com.
Peel-and-stick embossed wallpaper-like patterns by Inhabit. Hot. Via WDIK.
Firewheel adds Scott Raymond and Keegan Jones to the payroll. Congrats, guys.
Amigo unveiled. “An application that helps site owners find advertisers for their e-mail newsletters […] and that helps advertisers find new, unexploited advertising opportunities in e-mail newsletters.”
Kevin Mears’ illustrative interpretations of @media 2006.
The small team at Oddica could very well be poised to give Threadless a run for its money. Fantastic designs, affordable pricing, and American Apparel threads. I’m particularly fond of the Tape Bird and Exploded Boombox tees.
Behind the Veer booth at HOW Design Conference in Vegas.
d.Construct 2006 announced. Hot conference put on by the good folks at Clearleft.
I’ve been so wanting to take continuing ed courses for some time now. Jason’s account of his letterpress course only makes me long to do so even more.
“iDrops restore the health of your iPod (all models), iBook, eMac, and iMac G5 by bringing back the plastic, polycarbonate, or acrylic’s original factory finish and shine.” I’ve got a bottle on order. Excited to see how well it works.
18-year-old Tau Siroko’s portfolio, Rayform. Lovely.
Kirk writes: “While perhaps not important I thought I might point out that [the Rolleiflex MiniDigi you linked to] is really more of a novelty than a serious digital version of the classic. I’ve heard from other photographers who ached to try this that the results [sample pics here] are not nearly as good as a camera phone.” Listen up, Kirk knows a thing or two about photography.
Design by Fire re-emerges, new design and all. “There will be no comments to articles from now on. […] In short, I’d rather not look at you and say, ‘You’re an idiot and I have no idea why you’d think I’d even want to discuss such an irrelevant point on my site.’ So in order to escape that predicament, I’m practicing avoidance behavior.”
Design Observer redesigns and a raft of design discussion ensues. Tan of Speak Up: “The new DO is like that bottle of wine we just finished —expensive but pedestrian, insipid but functional.” Khoi of Subtraction: “It’s not a revolutionary design, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. The new look is austere, tasteful and orderly, and I like it quite a bit even if I do wish the text was larger still.” Me? I’m still digesting it, but I’m probably somewhere in the middle: Solid work, but it leaves one expecting just a bit more. Though I’ll certainly continue to enjoy the superb content regardless. (A bit of old news, but I’ve been out of the country the past 2 weeks!)
Airbag pixel ruler. “So here it is, here you have it, a simple image that can be applied as the background to most block level elements that will help you get an idea what’s going on between browsers and platforms without the need for another application.”
A digital version of the Rolleiflex 2.8F camera immensely popular in the 50s and 60s. Same square frame, same ability to shoot from the hip, only now in digital format.
Flickr: Tilting World. I don’t know how Molly does it. My in-flight photography always turns out like Boeing 777 aircraft windowage. Hers turn out like sub-orbital masterpieces. Impressive.
iCal: FIFA World Cup timetable. (English ver)
World Cup begins today (woohoo!). Wise up and get to know your national team nicknames.
Coudal Partners’ Field-Tested Books 2006. Limited-edition poster and reviews PDF now available. Just ordered both.
Opera Mini 2.0 released. Yes, I realize this is duplicated linkage, but Opera Mini is that good. If you don’t have it on your phone yet, you’re missing out big time. I have it installed on 4 different phones (Treo 650, RAZR, Nokia 6680, Nokia 6800). Chances are it works on your phone, too. Just point your phone’s default web browser to mini.opera.com, click the download link, and the rest is taken care of.
Pixelgraphix. Nice makeover.
The Alien Duck X-ray. And (Veer) Contest.
Remember the discussion about what designers read to their children? Turns out Lane Smith has a blog. And not surprisingly, it’s replete with illustrations, sketches, and more. (Thanks Kirk.)
Buy A Baldy. Great cause to help pay for chemo medication for a close friend’s sister. Raise enough money and 8+ people shave their heads. Donate via PayPal, CafePress, or Firefox downloads.
Follow-up to HTML markup graphs: An applet to create one using your site URL (or any other site for that matter). You’ll get a kick out of watching it build on the fly.
On using HTML markup to generate graphs: “HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I’ve written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.” Beautiful.
Carlo Longino: Is .mobi kickstarting the mobile web, or holding it back? Includes a response in the comments from Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. In related news, mobile companies can now register their trademarks as .mobi domains. Registration open to the general public August 28.
YouTube now supporting mobile uploads. More fodder for the masses, this time with mobile flavor.
Opera Mini 2.0 released. New features include image/mp3 downloads, skins, multi-engine searching, and more.
MadeinMtl. Plenty of visual enjoyment found within. And the “I want to…” search results (select menus at top) are pretty slick.
“Refresh those stylesheets, folks. ‘Operation: My Last Design Was Okay But Ultimately Unsatisfying So Now I�m Starting Over’ has wrapped.”
Several new job listings added. A fair number of readers have found jobs through these listings. You might be next. Grab the RSS feed if you’re looking or think you might be in the next few months.
3rd Edge. Texture, wornness, and portfolio goodness. Yum. Via Netdiver.
Mojizu, a contemporary character design community. Via Powazek.
Elitist Snob. Simple layout, good color, fun type.
Part I of Design Patterns: What do we mean by design patterns? A logical start, indeed.
“When Titanic went on to make James Cameron the king of the world, George Lucas sent this card to him, which I happened upon and will now share with you.”
Big UI changes over at Flickr. Includes smaller changes such as shifting the photo sets from left to right sidebar on the Photos page, to much bigger changes like pop-up menus for the main nav and iPhoto-like improvements to Organizr. I thought the previous nav worked just fine, but that’s just me apparently. (5)
Seth Godin on different kinds of traffic: “Should Jeff Bezos be in mourning? After all, MySpace is killing Amazon in traffic. […] The problem here is that Amazon users visit to buy stuff, and MySpace users visit to flirt. Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.”
Big congrats to Ian Lloyd and his successful publishing of Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, which “teaches web development from scratch, without assuming any previous knowledge of HTML, CSS or web development techniques.”
“So, once again, I’m going to offer up The Commencement Address Nobody Will Ever Ask Me to Give, and hope you’ll send it to a graduate: […] You probably will want to go out into the world and ‘make a difference.’ Odds are, you will end up making a sameness. College is a big bureaucracy that trains you to be a successful bureaucrat.”
Autograph Sketch Pro by Eisner+Flake could potentially make for some interesting app icons, among other things.
Bottle cap tripod. Precisely as it says.
If a couch rests in the forest, would anyone sit on it? This stunning photo seems to answer the question.
Viquae - A portfolio of Kevin Davis.
Five days, five heatmaps. “Over the next five days, starting Monday, 8th May, we’ll publish heatmaps from five of the sites we’ve tested.” Today: Amazon.co.uk.
Linotype: Fonts on football (soccer) jerseys. Yes! I love lists like this. But then you already knew I’ve got a little experience with soccer jerseys…
Best Flickr screen name I’ve seen in a while. Great pics to boot.
“200% more beta” must certainly mean hot chocolate, pink, and Jared Christensen. Nice work, Jared.
Light on Dark. “A showcase of well-designed and coded websites with light text on a dark background.”
Gorgeous aerial photography by Jason Hawkes.
Gapers Block: 05012006.jpg by Ken Ilio.
“Perspective shots of [Safeway] store aisles are distorted back out of perspective so that the shelf forms a rectangle in the picture plane instead of trapezoid. Then four passes of motion blur @ 999 to arrive at a kind of loose average or wash of the shelf’s chromatic contents.”
Exclusively for the scientist who always dreamt of blasting a porta potty into space.
Daring Fireball: Good Journalism. “Oh, zing! Not just an opening vignette, but the opening vignette with the ironic twist! See, I thought he was going to say Daines was using a Windows PC, because, you know, that sort of scene plays out millions of times a year to Windows PC users. You’d think I would have seen the ‘but he was using a Mac’ twist coming, given the various ‘Macs are not immune to viruses’ headlines that the piece ran under. But Goodin’s masterful storytelling bamboozled me.”
MomAdvice. Hard not to like the visuals on this one. I’m enchanted by the tab mouseovers.
Kelly Goto: Say Hello to Helio. “With MySpace in their back pocket, the promise for converting an initial percentage of the MySpace crowd is high. […] The trick is to convert an audience who is comfortable with the desktop model of MySpace into an integrated mobile space. […] MySpace On Helio may prove to be the next ‘killer app’ the industry has been searching for.”
AEA NYC. If you make it to only one An Event Apart, this might be the one. Stellar line-up of speakers.
The Art of No. Or perhaps, the art of asking why instead of saying no. “When you say ‘why’ instead of ‘no’, you open a design conversation that can help inform both sides.” (Love the blockquote styling btw, Derek.)
New focus indicator proposed for Firefox. Somewhat Safari-like. Love it? Hate it? Better chime in.
Comment design showcase. Only until recently while working on a forum app redesign did I understand just how much time one can spend on comment design.
Huge collection of Google Calendar tips.
BYU’s undergrad biz program ranks in top 10, not far behind Wharton, MIT, and Notre Dame. Right on. The diploma on my wall shines a bit brighter today.
Kyle rebooted. Soak in all that color, baby. Tastefully executed.
Jeff rebooted. Love the separation between article data (content, sidebar) at top and comment/recent entries at bottom. Seems to really open things up. Very uxmag inspired overall. Beauty, Jeff.
Blinksale Reloaded. Woohoo! I’ve been using this fantastic app for every one of my invoices since July 2005. I couldn’t ask for a better app, and this week it got even better. Invoice filtering / tracking / printing, tags, API, and much more. You’re missing out if you haven’t signed up already.
Drew McClellan and his 5 most important considerations when planning a site. Who is it for, what will visitors do, what do YOU want them to do, how frequently will they visit, and how will success be measured. Yup, that about sums things up. I’m off to alter my project questionnaire…
Jon Hicks: I heart people who send me art. Wow, so do I suddently. Beautiful.
An Easter rocket. One mother’s quest to satiate a child’s need for bedtime stories.
Close Enough. “An experiment about working together.”
John Gruber dives into Daring Fireball full-time. As my father would say back when he was a tail gunner in a B-52 in Vietnam, “I’ve got your six.” And so do thousands of other readers.
PureVolume widget goes live and straight to my Dashboard. Sweet one, guys.
CSS Mastery reviewed by Roger Berea, Ian Lloyd, and Alex Giron.
Yahoo’s FareChase puts all those mundane “we’re now searching for flights” splash screens to shame. Give it a whirl and you’ll see what I mean.
Photoshop brushes: Botched Ornaments 01. “….made up of a handful of decorative elements each distressed to varying degrees.”
Veerle: A brief typographic history of Chalet.
A recent eyetracking study conducted by Jakob Nielsen reveals a recurring F-shaped pattern for reading web content. I’ve seen similar results before, but this might be the most practical data Jakob’s put out there in some time.
Hiring the right design manager. Khoi Vinh offers up four solid tips for securing the right candidate.
Turns out Doug Bowman worked on Google Calendar. Now fill in the blank: “Ah ha, no wonder it ____ (looks sharp, is intuitive, etc)”.
Under the Loupe: #5 Visual Thinking.
Angela Moll’s quilted journals. No relation, but this is quite interesting. “The pages of my Secret Diaries are actual journal entries screen printed on fabric… Each fabric page is a layering of different entries, the superimposition of a day onto the next one.” (Thanks, Edith.)
Apple how-to: Developing Dashboard Widgets. Archived for that elusive 25th hour of the day, when I finally find time to knock out one of these.
Greg Storey on turning 35. “There is no secret sauce to what I have done with one exception, I never stop working on my confidence.”
Design Observer: The Propensity for Density. “Today’s decorative leanings, however, appear to lean less to the geometrical than the overtly botanical. I’ve participated in judging several juried exhibitions this year in which I’ve seen a preponderance of twisted and winding viney things, which I’ve taken to referring to as ‘thornament.’” Thornament. Love it. Though Jessica Helfand seems to be arguing that excessive thornamental design may inevitably lead to “barfing on the page”. Yikes.
The visual work of Scott Hansen. Sweet mother of texture! Some unbelievable work here. And don’t skip the tees. (Thanks, Timothy.)
Following an exhausting weekend of painting, here’s a fun little interactive app by Sherwin-Williams for comparing colors in actual room settings.
Brian Fling: Mobile device UI design. Scads of great info here. “Many point to Apple to solve the Input/Output problems of the mobile phone. Maybe they will someday, but why wait for Apple to invent new hardware when designers can begin to solve the problem on screen?”
Contextual relevance in action: Jeff Croft on the thinking behind the mobile version of lawrence.com. “Still up at 4:30am and need to know where you can get some french toast? Just hit a few buttons on your phone. mobile.lawrence.com tells you what’s open, and when it closes. Perfect.”
Famous rapper or dead author? I didn’t fare too well with this little quiz…
For anyone who’s ever asked, How much do I charge? - Raise your rates. “This leaves you with 24 ‘billable’ hours in a week, or just over 1150 billable hours in a year. So what do you need to bill per hour to pull your $XXX? Well, dividing your $XXX by 1150 tells you $XXX an hour is your billable rate. It’s that simple.”
Eddidit. The portfolio of Edmund Hall. Love the textures. (Though those big fat images on the home page need to be clickable.)
Flickr: The pattern of the individual.
Why .mobi is a good thing. Or at least Russell’s opinion of it. “.mobi is a great way to restart the mobile web by giving it a standard naming and navigation scheme for that first step.” I still haven’t settled on a final opinion myself.
Gotomobile: Handheld style sheets and getting to Zen. “Russell Beattie wants a mobile CSS Zen Garden. Dave Shea has a lot on his plate, but I think we should support the effort and help to make it happen!” This would make for a rather interesting experiment, indeed.
A small collection of newspaper mastheads. I find the detailing of this one to be quite exquisite.
You certainly have missed out big time if you have yet to see the opening titles for “Thank You For Smoking”. Perhaps just as stunning is Stephen Coles naming 23 of the 28 typefaces used in the titles.
Campaign Monitor’s “A Guide to CSS Support in Email”. Wow, this is incredibly comprehensive. Covers popular PC, Mac, web-based email clients.
“Go into Microsoft Frontpage and select Build > Community > Non-Designed > Ugly > Cash Cow and just wait for someone to offer hundreds-of-millions to buy you out.” Greg Storey on the “non-design” discussion raging of late. (I’m still laughing as I post this in MT.)
Armin on why designers must write: “Work those e-mails as if they were the last e-mail you would send for any given project. Work on your exclamation points, avoid ‘I’ and say ‘we’, use emoticons just in desperate cases and finish with a nice closing, whether it’s ‘cheers’, ‘later’, ‘tata’ or ‘best’. There is nothing worse than an e-mail without cordial closure.”
ideasonideas on why designers must write. “I find that as my ability to shape both written and oral communication improves, I am better equipped to direct the work of others. I can uncover a verbal method of responding to what I feel emotionally when I view a project.”
PayPal goes mobile (login required). Send money by phone, or even better, buy stuff with your phone using Text to Buy.
Chicago is up next in the An Event Apart tour.
Got an insatiable desire to round off just about any corner in sight? Now you can with Nifty Corners Cube.
Is ugly design getting too much credit?
Basecamp API announced. Even for free accounts, no less.
Chax adds a variety of improvements to iChat, but the tabbed chats feature seems most promising.
Zeldman: Unmixed. What he learned at Mix 06 by not being there. Not just because all the cool kids are linking to it, but because it’s really worth a read.
Shaun Inman’s wildly in-depth account of SXSW. Biz cards, mini Wiki, and more.
The surprising truth about ugly websites.
Red bearded madness. Rob Weychert’s SXSW photoset.
Design Observer: “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content”. “Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or — even better — subjects about which I’ve become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work. I believe I’m still passionate about graphic design. But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else.” Coudal, Gruber and I had a brief chat in the hall at SXSW on this very topic. Something along the lines of it being healthy for creatives to spend just as much time as they do in design in things other than design. Part of the reason I’ve started drumming again.
Slide deck and comps from the Plazes redesign at SXSW (“Holistic Web Design” panel).
“How an A List Apart Illustration Comes Together” written by none other than Kevin Cornell.
Someone handed me some Sweetriot Cacao Peaces while in the green room at SXSW, and they’re suprisingly tasty. Cacao bean pieces covered in chocolate. I just might order a case or two…
Academics of Worn. Greg Storey’s original article, republished for UX Magazine. If you missed it back in 2004, now’s your chance to read up.
Big.com. Yup, it’s big alright. Bold Predictions 2006 Edition - 0. That Fisher Price Look - 1.
Only one day left to bid for your chance to Skype-a-Celeb.
Seen the latest Veer catalog? Sure you have. But did you catch the associated mini-site and contest? (As a side note, Jon Parker tells me their team spent two weeks on just the first 9 print pages — amazing.)
From online game start-up to Yahoo buyout: A brief history of Flickr. In contrast to my “first to profitability” rant, here’s a story of two people doing something they love and eventually turning it into an incredibly successful business. However, this is by far the exception to the rule.
Pure gorgeousness. Best words I can come up with to describe Veerle’s redesigned blog.
Speaking at SXSW? Dave Shea offers 11 tips for better speaking. And don’t forget “How to kick butt on a panel”.
Lifehacker: A guide to email triage. How timely, Keith. Been spending way too much time in a swamped inbox lately.
Apparently I’ve been WordPress themed. Just as heads up (since I’ve already received an email), I don’t offer support for this template as I didn’t design it.
Mark Bixby does Airbag: “After a few more rounds with ‘he who shall not be named’, we arrived at the following design.”
Get a picture taken of yourself and a copy of CSS Mastery. Win an iPod.
Shaun Inman: The making of Mint (workshop slides).
Greg Storey: The making of Ma.gnolia (design process).
Thong. “Thorry — I type with a lithp thometimeth.”
Maybe Wufoo can help me build a contact form once and for all.
Flickr: Early bird. Shots like this don’t come from a can.
What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging? Marvel at the branding / packaging / identity / whatever lessons this parody conveys. Absolutely brilliant.
Unpacking the set. It’s been 7 years since I sold the last set just before getting married. Hopefully it won’t take another 7 to learn how to play again.
In addition to foliage, I’m certain my clients need Plainpicture pattern mixups right about now too.
More foliage, this time in font format: Blossomy by T.26. Via Hicks.
Jason Gaylor: Gorgeous hi-res foliage brushes for Photoshop. (Fingers crossed) my clients suddenly need foliage imagery for their projects.
VW: Un-pimp my ride. (Thanks, db.)
AOL and Yahoo to charge for email? Both are planning to give preferential treatment to companies who pay anywhere from $0.0025 to $0.01 per email for “guaranteed delivery”. I’m having a hard time seeing any positives to this approach. Via Mark Wyner.
Refreshing Cities is “a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.” Good directory site for a movement that’s gained a lot of traction the past year or so. Who’s gonna start SLC?
Find your contacts on Flickr with Stalkr. Found via SGC v5.
MySpace goes mobile. Via Russ.
Flickr: Moon for the misbegotten.
Flickr: Say no to drugs, don’t eat farmed fish.
This morning’s Photoshop Tennis / Dodgeball session at Coudal’s Campfire.
Live by the mockup, die by the mockup. Some very valid points here. Via Keith.
Seth Godin: How can I get more traffic? “People never say, ‘how can I earn more traffic?’ or ‘How can I rethink the core of what I’m offering so that it organically attracts people who want to see it?’”
New York Guitar Festival. Love the logo. So simple. So spot-on.
Measure Map (and Jeff Veen) sold to Google. Shoot, I didn’t think this was even available to the public yet…
Joyeur.com. Joyent’s blog redesigned and realigned. Bryan Bell plays off of my earlier design and introduces a darker, richer theme. I presume the content will be less corporate this time around. (Nachos, anyone?)
In case you missed it, the newly unveiled Engadget Mobile is giving away cellphones daily for the next 30 days. This week? A Treo 650 or 700w.
Flickr: Brillant Crank. I mentioned Greg Storey’s foray into Flickrland earlier when I threw a bunch of links into my del.icio.us account, but it’s worth mentioning a second time here. Fantastic work, Greg.
Step into my office. Well, not my office, but wish it was. Though that’ll be changing soon. Stay tuned…
From the makers of Engadget: Engadget Mobile, “a new spin-off site with obsessive daily coverage of the world of cellphones and wireless.”
Getty Images acquires iStockphoto. Crikey!! $50 million? Way to go, Bruce.
Got spare time tomorrow (Friday, Feb 10)? Drop me a line if you’ve got CSS skills, decent design skills, time during the morning/day tomorrow, and a PayPal account. 2-4 hours of coding/design work. Found someone. Thanks.
The mobile designer. Yet another excellent write-up from Kelly, covering screen attributes, hard/soft keys, text entry, and testing.
More refurbished Apple gear posted today, much of which are iMac G5s ($849 and up). Visit the Apple Store and click the red “Save” tag in the lower right.
World’s smallest pong game. No really, it’s actually playable.
Clearbits. GIF icons with what I call “reverse transparency” to allow the color of the icon to be set by CSS. It’s an easy trick, perfect for apps that are customized by the user, e.g. forum software. Link pulled. Sorry, I agree with Ethan on this one.
The case of the plane and the conveyor belt. Kottke muses an answer from Cecil Adams while readers give their own 2c. Apparently this physics question has been around for some time but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Linotype A-Z typeface catalog. At $16, this is an absolute steal. (Though shipping to the U.S. will run you another $25). 584 pages laden with typeface samples.
Dude, this is so reminiscent of Bubble 1.0. Wasn’t there a thing that did the same 5 years or so ago? Speak up if you remember (comments on). (5)
Variable fixed width layout. Now isn’t that title ironic. Richard catalogs this recent trend as seen in the wild.
iTunes billion songs countdown. LOVE the scroller at right. Brilliant. Oh hey, I just saw Herbie Hancock scroll by. And there went Johnny Cash.
Navigation magnification using CSS. Kinda like the Mac OS X dock. Highly experimental. Highly questionable where it would be useful. But hey, that’s what makes sandbox stuff like this fun.
HyperStrike. Sharp little site with a minimal dose of Flash and unique column arrangement on the secondary pages. Via CSS Import.
Wired: Make your own ringtones. Just in case you’ve been dying to get those New Kids on the Block tracks on your mobile but couldn’t find them anywhere.
iStockphoto articles: “Know Your Type” by Red Labor. Great stack of tips here.
Iron-On Resistance. Lovely independent art products from Red Labor. I think we can officially term this style “That Red Labor Look”.
Shaun Inman: tagsToLowerCase(). Filed in “Keep this handy in case needed”.
Backpack widget for Mac OS X 10.4. How’d I miss this until just last week??
Under The Loupe #3: Critiquing.
Mrs. Fields’ Chiller Email Blender. Fun little app designed by Utahn Paul Mayne.
@ Typophile: “I’ve been wondering for the longest time and nodoby seems to be able to give me a straight answer. Why Apple? It’s the industry standard, it’s the only type of computer they use in the design labs at my school. Designers love them. But why?” Chime in.
Remember those 4 books I mentioned in the Amazon article? They arrived. I believe it’s high time to brush up on some speed reading skills.
CollyLogic: “Width-based layout” redesign notes. Similar techniques seem to be gaining traction of late.
Monday Flickr round-up: Web 2.0 logos, Footbagger, and Mist and Mystery.
On behalf of the judges, I’m pleased to announce the ExpressionEngine $15,000 Shootout. Got an EE-powered website? Submit it by February 28 for a chance to win one of 30 prizes. I reckon y’all git yur six shooter spinnin’, ya hear? (Simon’s got a little more about it here.)
Tony Royster Jr., the 12-year-old featured in that Google video, is now 21. Someone get that talented kid a new site.
CSS Mastery book site now live. Props to Andy for knocking out this one. Sample chapter available for download.
Screencasts of Ruby on Rails. Ruby in action.
UX Magazine. I’ve recently given this site a second look (though it’s been live only a short while), and I must say the layout, grid, and design are all quite well-done. Home page isn’t bulletproof (e.g. text resizing), but sharp nonetheless.
Plan59. Loads of mid-century paraphernalia, blog included.
Scalable logos with Flash. Hicks said it best: “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Holy… Holy… Well, I can honestly say I was nowhere near as good as this kid as a 12-year-old drummer.
I’m way behind on linkage. So I posted 20 or so new ones to del.icio.us/authentic. Easier than doing so here today.
Suzanne and I did the math over lunch today. By the time Hudson is 2.5 years old, we’ll have changed over 14,000 diapers among 4 boys. So that’s where all the income went…
If the General Lee had been a VW van…
Sweet, I’m a contender for Battle of the Ad Blogs 2006. Cast a vote if you think this site is deserving of “Best Design Discussion Blog”. Though I will say I’m humbled to be stacked up against the likes of Design Observer, Core77, and Speak Up. Somehow me thinks they’re on a more elevated level than I…
Interested to hear how a designer makes a living in New Orleans these days? “Life is getting better,” says Scott Simon, New Orleans native and talented graphic designer. “My family and friends are finally starting to get their homes back together. There are lots of things going on but with a third of the businesses and people back, it’s tough. Just trying to stay above water with my web design business. Just like you and some others, I’m trying to find more work out there that is both excited and interesting.” Need web, identity, or print talent? Drop Scott a line, or enjoy his latest work, I (heart) Nola.
Wes Womack says Oklahoma has Alabama beat (license plates). 115 or so. Let’s get to the bottom of this — first person to find facts/evidence showing which U.S. state has the most custom (special) license plates gets a free copy of “CSS Mastery”, due out in February. So far Florida, Nevada, Alabama, and Oklahoma have been mentioned in this sidebar/linkage. Email me your answer.
“This is what a Honda feels like.” Incredible commercial uses a human chorus to mimic Civic engine, road, and feature sounds. (Thanks, db)
How to kick butt on a panel. SXSW panelers take note.
How-to: Wicked worn + bulletproof liquid. Nothing horribly complex here, but a good basic tutorial.
Eric Meyer with another technique for CSS bar graphs. I echo his words, “I’d done something very, very similar almost three months before the AtO article’s publication date…” And so did I last summer for English360’s language app and never got around to writing about it. Thankfully, others have.
FreshArrival. One amazingly cool thing, every weekday.
Kelly Goto: A brief round-up of mobile web standards. Good primer. Interesting to hear that SVG might make a come-back on mobiles; “come-back” as in “it still hasn’t taken hold on the desktop web, but maybe it’s got a better chance on mobile.”
Under The Loupe #2: Hierarchy and Focal Point.
Patrick Douglas Crispen says Alabama has Nevada beat: Custom license plate sets one, two, three, and four.
The truth about Flash in email. Can you handle the truth? “Flash was built for the browser, and based on these results — that’s where it should stay.”
Kyle Rove tells me Nevada’s license plate options outnumber Florida’s. At 28+, he might be right…
I’m sold. “Takk” by Sigur Ros is as good as our Brit counterparts say it is. Finally bit the bullet and bought a copy. Listening bliss indeed.
Introducing Web Inspector (Safari). “The Web Inspector lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window, catering to the needs of web developers and WebKit hackers alike.” Or in laman’s terms, right-click on any element and view the HTML/CSS source for that element. First run with a nightly build tells me this is quite handy. Via Subtraction.
A List Apart: “Web 3.0”. Jeffrey speaks from the heart. At least that’s how I read it. I found this to be highly motivational, surprisingly. “These problems and others will be solved, most likely by someone reading this page,” says Zeldman. “One points to these issues mainly to dent a swelling of unthinking euphoria. We have been down this road before.”
I’m looking for some design assistance on a tight deadline. Need someone who can knock out two Photoshop templates (home page, secondary page) by Jan 24 for a small website, possibly something like this site. Contact me if you’ve got the time/portfolio chops. Found someone. Thanks.
In Design Observer’s “In Praise of Slow Design”, Michael Bierut follows the aesthetic evolution (or the lack thereof) of The New Yorker and relates it to something he calls the Slow Design Movement. A fantastic read.
Greg Storey asks, “What are the design related sites that you look at every day? And If you had to pick one which is the best?” and you respond.
A Google page that strips content down to raw HTML for mobiles? Similar to the others covered in Part 2 (see method #2) of our mobile web series. Though Google’s truncates the HTML and splits it up into several pages.
New mobile dev blog on the block: MobileCrunch. “Our mission is to identify, profile, test and even help develop the technologies, applications, services and devices that will define the next generation of connected mobile computing.”
Webstock. New Zealand conf with a nice, clean site design.
Clockr. Lovely little app that displays the current time using Flickr images. Via Veer.
John Gruber’s Daring Fireball added to The Deck. With it comes solid, witty conversation and savvy readership. Congrats, John.
The Apple Store has refurbished iMacs as low as $749. Hurry, these things go super fast. Click “Special deals” in the right col (from the store homepage).
Speaking of Flickr, am I seeing double?
Dave Shea’s “First Weekend” photoset on Flickr. Love “Fern Growing out of Drain”.
Typographica on Paula Scher’s paintings of giant, colorful maps.
ROKR disappears from Cingular phone list? Anyone surprised?
Blue Flavor’s 2006 Prediction Show.
Art Backwash. Blog of the talented illustrator Von Glitschka.
Salt Lake Craigslist: Make offer on new Xbox 360 Premium and brand new Canon 20D @ $1100.
In “Browsing: The Mobile Data Killer App”, Russ Beattie recaps a preso from Nokia regarding SmartPhone usage. “The key takeaway for me,” says Russ, “was that browsing is the number one (by far) mobile application that uses data, and interestingly, carrier decks only account for 50% of the traffic. That’s great! That means people are actually going outside the gardens and hitting other sites.” This is pure gold for those of us expecting mobile web usage to rise significantly this year — especially usage outside the so-called carrier walled gardens.
Apple ditches 800x600. Amen.
Engadget: Macworld 2006 keynote coverage.
“There’s nothing closer to nothing than 1.” Best line I’ve read all day (see #11).
2006: Slashdot out, Digg in? “There’s always been a sense of frustration among those who submit news to Slashdot. Sometimes your story is picked and sometimes it isn’t. After a while, you start to wonder why Slashdot’s small group of dictators (err, I mean ‘editors’) are qualified to decide what’s interesting news. Haven’t we figured out that the crowd is generally smarter than any one individual in the crowd?”
Russ Beattie with more on Yahoo! Go.
Brent Phelps’ “About The Image” stock photo blog.
David Bean of Visual Reserve goes full-time photography. With a portfolio like that, he won’t be begging for work any time soon.
iStockphoto.com redesign launch planned for sometime today. Keep the ol’ eyes peeled.
While many of us jumped the corporate ship to sail the seas as a freelancer this past year, Khoi Vinh does just the opposite and signs on with NYTimes.com as Design Director. If 2005 was the Year of the Kottke, I suspect 2006 will be the Year of Big Biz Buying Up all the A-List Talent.
More promo airfare from Spirit Airlines: $9 and up.
“If everything is big how does anything stand out?” Big, Beautiful, Dumb.
Index Open is offering a 50% discount on hi-res RF stock photo subscriptions through Dec 31.
Panic® tees. I’ll take the ‘Spinner’ and ‘Transmit’ tees. Shoot, I’d take a tee with the Transmit truck on it and nothing else.
Particletree: A Guide to Starting Your Business. Loads of resources here.
On freezing light: “Physicist Matt Sellars has found a way to hit the brakes on light, slowing a speeding laser pulse and capturing it inside a crystal. [His team] managed to slow the laser light down from 670 million miles an hour to a mere 670 miles an hour — about the speed of a bullet being fired from a gun — before stopping it altogether.” Wow.
Oops, sorry to those of you subscribed to the Linkage feed that saw “CSS Mastery…” as the title for the DIY photolamp link. I decided to replace the book mention with the photolamp link at the last minute, but forgot to change the title. 10 lashings for me.
DIY photolamp using a Maglite, 250 GSM paper, and some adhesive foil.
CSS worn type technique. Funny, I actually developed a *very* similar technique for this site before going live back in early 2004. Never was pleased enough with it though, so it never rolled out with the redesign. Via Dan C.
Veer has a sweet little character zoom tool, part of the makeover upgrades. Test it here.
Are we getting stupid? No comment.
iPhoto-like image resizing using Javascript. I smell application in fluid layouts somewhere in there. Via Daring Fireball.
Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. Interesting list. Though I wonder if the blanket term “Web 2.0” is appropriate for all of these.
Molly: Anatomy of an XHTML document. Superb. Thanks, Molly.
The web dev process, anime action figure-style.
Airbag’s 2006 predictions, in classic Storey style. “37 Signals, tired of the web, will convert into an adult easy listening station: 37.7 WSGL. Macromedia Fireworks will be killed by Adobe in the kitchen with the candlestick.”
Veer redesigns. New tabs, big photos, extra hotness.
gotomobile: The mobile internet or ‘mobile web’?
Right on! Eli Antebi has translated “Freelancing: 10 Things…” into Hebrew. That’s just downright cool.
Put your photo on Times Square’s interactive Person of the Year billboard. No, really. But read the disclaimer — you grant the right to Time Magazine to copyright your image.
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. Let the digging and deliciousing begin!
Flickr: Molls in Sundance.
“It is innovation’s biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives — more features, more function, more power — and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And, in an Escher-like twist, the technology that’s simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create.” Fast Company: The Beauty of Simplicity.
Ebay Redux: A Design Exercise.
Blue-eyed wedding beauty. Another gorgeous composition from BellePhotos. No surprise that Daniel was the one to shoot the photo on my About page.
Engadget: Treo 650 tips. Also for personal archival, for when I have a little time to go through all these.
Accessibility and usability for interactive television. For personal archival purposes now, though this is bound to come up at some point.
How’d I miss this? MyFonts.com now has an ajaxy-like sample text change-on-the-fly thingy. Try the Best Seller page and change the sample text (don’t press the submit button).
T-minus ~30 days til the end of the year. Are you current on email design guidelines for ‘06?
LaCie lego-like stackable hard drives. Via Core77.
Lunch with Kristian. Too kind, Kristian. Great food, no? Good friend Carl Peterson and I have also dined there previously during his stay in UT.
Emotions by Mike. Love the simplicity of this site.
A List Apart issue #208 includes two fabulous articles, one highly experimental and the other a much needed reminder (nice work, Keith).
Kelly and crew launch the gotomobile blog covering mobile usability design and user experience research & testing. Nice site design, too.
Joyent acquires TextDrive. Holy Hanna!
Couple of conferences worth noting: Carson’s Future of Web Apps (quite the speaker line-up) and Clearleft’s Ajax Workshop.
“But with the new IconBuffet, we wanted to solve both problems. Now, when you make a purchase, that download is saved forever in your account. And when you browse the IconBuffet store, previous purchases are highlighted in green for easy reference. These may seem like obvious touches, but they are touches I wish more digital stores would embrace.” Agreed. Josh Williams on finishing touches to the IconBuffet store.
“Once said Pandora’s Box was opened, it didn’t take long for the notion that hacking CSS was a ‘good idea’ to spread far and wide in the web design and development community […] Nevermind that so many of the hacks violated the above-mentioned principles. Those ideas spread and mutated without any such strings attached.” Tantek Celik on CSS hack history and proper usage thereof: Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions.
Why do we love rounded corners?
RegisterFly.com is offering free .be domain name registration for a limited time. This was sent in an email, so I don’t have all the details on hand, other than limit 10 per customer and probably other fine print too.
Shaun Inman’s concise account of Cre824 in Chattanooga. Making a Mint conference slides to boot.
Veerle’s account of the new Valencia opera house, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia. Downright stunning.
Riffs: Your social recommender. Jason summarized it well: “[…] a more flexible, freeform Epinions-like site”. Jon tells us Safari support is coming soon. More about Riffs here.
John C. says MagicTracer is worth checking out. From the site: “MagicTracer is a raster-to-vector conversion program that delivers highly accurate and fast results at a very affordable price.”
I Heart Rootkit. “Everybody is digging Sony these days, and we truly feel that no Sony fan should be without a t-shirt to show their love for rootkit.” Hilarious. From Josh Williams and crew.
Tennessee Vacation. Wow! Love the detailing on this site. Anyone know who’s behind it? Via CSS Import.
Cingular reverting to AT&T brand. Um, okay. I thought the Cingular makeover was a welcomed one for the stale AT&T brand. Perhaps a brand legacy hangover is at fault.
Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit. “Sony rolled out this incredibly invasive copy-protection scheme without ever publicly discussing its details, confident that its profits were worth modifying its customers’ computers.” Only yesterday had I heard the term ‘rootkit’ for the first time. Boy do I feel lame.
Wednesday lovelies: Icon for Chat Transcript Manager and Borders Gifts.
Particletree opens the hood on dynamic resolution-dependent layouts - changing the layout of a page on the fly, dependent upon browser width. Demo. Tagged with “hot” and “will find use for this soon”.
JSM: Branding your wedding. In which Jason makes we design + married folk proud.
Finally: Apple Store comes to Utah (Gateway). Grand opening this Friday, Nov 19.
Google Base is now live. Additional reading: I, II, and III.
Hurry, they’ve listed more refurbished 17” iMacs for $849. I can’t link to it directly (session timeout), but go to the Apple Store, click the red Save tag in the lower right, and scroll towards the bottom. Mac Minis for $379 also available.
Get ready for Newsvine from Mike Davidson and crew. “Newsvine is a news company, not a Web 2.0 company. Our site doesn’t rely on Ajax, RSS, Wikis, or any of the other technologies you may be hearing about way too often these days. If you’d like to use some of the fancier aspects of our site like tagging or feeds, go ahead, but even with no knowledge beyond standard pointing and clicking, Newsvine is a best of breed news site. In other words, even your pappy can use it.”
PowerPoint vs. Keynote, Gates vs. Jobs. Classic. Perfectly demonstrated with photographic comparisons and presentation tips to boot. Excerpt: “Mr. Gates needs to read Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points, ironically published by Microsoft Press. Atkinson says that ‘…bullet points create obstacles between presenters and audiences.’”
Congrats to Andy Beeching for landing the first position from a Gigabits job listing (at London-based firm double-eye), which in turn lands him a shiny new iPod nano. Happy listening, Andy!
Any doubt the new media job market is hot right now? This job board comparison shows it perfectly.
Flesher on Flickr. Love some of Grant’s pics, this one especially.
A few lovelies for Tuesday: mad4milk and Kutztown University Comms Dept.
Refurbished iMac G5 20” for $1150. They’ve had a few killer deals on refurbished G5s lately. Saw a 17” one last week for less than $900. You might keep an eye out on these if you’re in the market.
Copy Goes Here is here. And here and here and here. The DVD + tee? It’s here.
A pair of lovelies for a Friday morning: Restaurant Tirolsk� izba and Hannah King web design.
“Fruitcast automates the process of inserting ads into podcasts. We download a podcast’s MP3 audio files, add the advertisements on the fly, and then send them to the podcast’s subscribers. Each time a podcast episode is downloaded, the advertiser is charged a certain amount, and a significant portion of that amount is credited to the podcaster.” New from Forty Media.
Designers back in the day. I don’t have any photos on hand to pass the baton, but if you’ve got memoirs of mullets and tight jeans, you might do so.
So it really was true: Here’s the $9 airfare to the Carribean on Spirit Airlines. Deal is only good from about a dozen east coast cities, must book before Nov 7, must fly on certain dates, taxes/fees apply yada yada… but still, $18 round-trip is impressive.
Aaron writes: “If you like Unicoder Latin, you should really check out Unicode Font Info. I’ve been using it for several months now, and it’s one of those apps that’s always open on my home and work computers.”
Vonster.com. Love Von’s illustrations. New version of his site makes them all that sweeter.
“In its November 14th issue, Forbes magazine published a cover story titled ‘Attack of the Blogs!’ The deck read, ‘They destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?’” Stephen Bryant on the Attack of the Blog Bashers.
ASCII email address encoder. Been using this for a little while now, mostly for contact info on Gigabits listings. Though I question how effective it really is in hiding email addys from spam spiders — anyone know? (Comments are on.) (7)
Good collection of road signs in vector format on iStockphoto. Just used a couple from the warning signs group for a client layout, in fact.
QOOP Flickr photo printer. Probably came from the same department as Molly’s pic.
From the Finally Posting This department: Molly’s Soft Waves on Perfect Sand.
Rumor has it Spirit Air is offering a $9 promo on airfare to the Caribbean. I can’t get to their site (probably due to being hammered with traffic), but perhaps you can.
Who says worn is dead? FontShop’s worn/weathered/stamped tutorial published last week. Still the most read series on my site (“That Wicked Worn Look”) — either it’s still a hot topic, or my writing has been uninspired since…
Unicoder Latin - characters on demand. I spy potential. Kinda like the Character Palette and BBEdit’s HTML Entities Palette rolled into one for use anywhere in OSX? Haven’t given it a spin yet so I’m guessing here.
Russ Beattie categorizes trendy Web 2.0 (and other) startups. Mashed Ups, Social Anything, and Firefoxing to name a few.
Alex Robinson’s “In Search of the One True Layout” describes how to code equal height columns without having to use faux columns, how to align elements vertically across columns, and the like. Examples found here, not the least of which is a Tucows makeover that’s easy to digest.
Big launch #1: NIXON*NOW. Paul Nixon returns from a half sabbatical only to come out swinging in style with a new site, “vidcasts”, and more Nix goodness.
Big launch #2: 31Three. Jesse rolls out a shiny new CSS version with blog included.
Big launch #3: Mean Tangerine. Tyler Young updates his mean collection of pixel fonts, images, and Keynote templates. You’ll discover a huge collection of lovely pixel fonts for use in Flash, Photoshop, and the like. Stop by the blog too.
Mullenweg does did CNET. Old news five days later about Matt leaving CNET, but nonetheless noteworthy.
Authentic Happiness, previously at #1 when googling “authentic”, is now less important to the human race than Authentic Boredom. We’re all doomed. Doomed.
Apple “Wet Floor” look with Photoshop Actions. Well shoot, finally time someone coined a name for that technique. Though it’s bordering on “over-cooked” at this point.
Ahoy seaworthy bloakes!! The Moll crew cometh!
20 best license-free official fonts. Just like it says.
Coudal flaunts Astros banner. I would too if I were the talent behind the identity system, logo, and uniforms.
Web Developer/Designer job listings at newly launched CSS Monster, courtesy of CSS Beauty. How ‘bout that.
Supercharged. Lovely site. Builds on some of Powazek’s details. Not overly extravagant, but doesn’t need to be given its savvy use of Georgia, Avenir, and color treatment.
Seth Godin: The new rules of naming. While the bulk of this post is good, it’s the last couple of paragraphs that warrant a link.
Brief commentary on Sound Studio 3. Agreed, this is a well-rounded, lightweight audio editing app.
Plugs for New Media jobs continue to roll in, most of which I add directly to Gigabits. Why not have a bit of fun with it? I’ll send a shiny new iPod Nano to the first person hired from one of these listings. Who knows how we’ll establish proof of that, but so be it. (I suppose an email from your work address after the first day on the job would do. Oh, and temporary/contract work is excluded.) Update: Congrats to Andy Beeching for landing the first position (at London-based firm double-eye). Happy listening, Andy!
Remember that whole discussion about mobile rapid-fire reading? Well, Dick Hardt’s recent presentation at OSCON 2005, “Identity 2.0”, might be the equivalent of it in live presentation format. Insane. Watch the first 60 secs and I guarantee you’ll have a tough time not watching the full ~20 mins. Via English360.
Adaptive Path’s Measure Map still isn’t out yet, but Jeffrey Veen slaps up a screen grab of it on Flickr. From the related post, “Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs.” As an aside he jests about using the Ambient Dashboard in conjunction with it. (How sweet would that be…) Update: Well lookie here, Andy has more to show/say.
Daring Fireball: Brief observations and comments on the new Apple stuff announced Oct. 12. That’s double the hook-up love for DF today.
“Look, just stick with the orange rectangle with ‘RSS’ written inside it in white text… All the early adopters of RSS feeds used this quasi-standard, why should IE7 enforce a standard onto the community when it is so late to the party?” Comment left in response to “Microsoft Team RSS Blog: The orange icon”. Via Daring Fireball.
“In a perfect world, the client would’ve had the business rules worked out prior to starting a project, leaving the designer to wallow in artistic brilliance while a co-ed rolls by on a Segway drinking a soy protein shake, but as you all know, utopia doesn’t exist and it�s almost impossible to drive a Segway with one hand.” Oh how I adore Greg’s literary style. More importantly, when he pens article titles longer than one word, it’s must be for ALA: Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason).
On link specificity. Hey 37signals, mind pulling out the ol’ “define this in 10 words or less” thingy?
Keith Robinson on why Google might be your site’s new homepage.
Worn Photoshop brushes for high resolution, vol. III.
Seen today on a job listing: “Must be connected: Culturally-current. Not just in touch with the advertising world, but with the broader world of youth culture, street art, graffiti, music, etc.” I imagine that’ll only continue to become commonplace for creative positions…
Reader Michael D. asks, “I was recently hired on at [ABC Company] to help establish corporate design guidelines and redesign a slew
of sites. Guidelines will apply to the parent company and most of
its affiliates/partners. Any recommendations, books/sites, tips,
people, etc. on ways to establish design guidelines across an entire
company and its affiliates?” Care to offer Michael your 2c? Comments are on for this entry, or email me your 2c and I’ll roll ‘em Michael’s way. (5)
“As soon as we become professional designers we lose the ability to look at our work in an untutored way. We see it ‘differently’, which causes much of the frustration and antagonism that exists between clients and designers.” Design Observer on the vulnerability of inevitable client interference. Don’t skip the comments.
37signals’ Writeboard is now live. Give it a test drive by answering the question, “Mondays: Excellent or lousy for deadlines?” (Password: authentic)
Inkjet Haiku, vol. II. And last month’s winners.
“Next time you have to explain kerning to a layman, you’ll have a live demo just a zip away.” Sharp merchandising like this doesn’t come from a can, people.
Help name Thomas Phinney’s blog, win Adobe stuff. Phinney is Adobe’s main man regarding all things type.
Symantec is seeking a Senior Graphic Designer for its PowerQuest division (Orem, UT). Candidate to take ownership of graphical quality on the Global Services website. Apply here or send mail to tom{underscore}sullivan {at} symantec.com with “Req #42846” in the subject line.
“You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads” (Miles Davis). And other fabulous jazz quotes from the annals of Matt Mullenweg’s jazz quotes.
Who’s the most famous person you have ever met? Me? Tony Bennett. Yes, depressing, I know.
Mobile Web Series co-author Brian Fling, Design Eye confabber Keith Robinson, DWM colleague Nick Finck, and we-rode-in-the-same-van-at-WebViz Matt May collaborate to form Blue Flavor, an experience design firm. Best wishes, crew. Go give ‘em some work.
456 Berea Street: CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 1. Rather replete. Still timely.
The world needs more Charlies. Weis grants little boy’s dying wish — a pass to the right on the first play. Little did Notre Dame know they’d be on their own 1-yard-line for that first play, a rare call when backed against the goal line.
Scrivs asks, “Who’s on your 80/20 design list?”
Stop Being Sheep, vols. II and III. Wow, what a pleasure to see not one but two new volumes of reader commentary from the archives of Speak Up. Call it a pair of 28-pg, Mohawk Fine Papers-laden designorati collectibles.
“Typical german car-trader magazines are printed on rough paper, except for the front and back covers which are very glossy. [Nigrin] placed their ad in the back of the magazine where the rough meets the glossy. By doing this, they displayed a very simple approach of the advantage of [their car] polish.” Brilliant. In fact, have a look at the entire Advertising / Design Goodness site while you’re there. Via The Skinny.
Only yesterday did I find out that Christopher O’Riley released his second grand piano tribute to Radiohead earlier this year, “Hold Me To This”. If you enjoyed the first you might very well enjoy the second.
If you consider yourself part of the serious original score elite, consider the soundtrack for Batman Begins. In a rare pairing of powerhouse composers, the score employs the combined energetic efforts of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Love the fact that each track bears Latin names of bat species. My only complaint? Most, if not all, of the score is digitally rendered. But a fine job regardless.
Chameleon, the color-changing icon set. Buy the ready-made set of 6, or use the nifty hex preview to create your own.
ALA 203. A print CSS extravaganza.
Richard Rutter, Jeremy Keith, and Andy Budd team up to offer Clearleft web design and accessibility consulting. Go Speedracer, Go!
Avast! Another pointy circle thingar. Walk the plank ye lubbers!
Marko Dugonjić rolls out a beta version of Typetester, a handy little app for comparing screen type. Lots of potential here. Marko with more about it.
Screenspire. Full screen inspiration. Start at the archives if you have an insatiable desire to see more. Via CollyLogic.
Those of you wondering where Part 3 of the Mobile Web Design series has disappeared to, rest assured it’s coming soon. Brian and I have been debating at length the tips and techniques we’ll cover, and it looks like we’ve finally settled on an outline. Article to be posted soon.
Swedish interactive design firm North Kingdom. Love the identity, type, and color splashes of this site. Via Styleboost.
Part 4 of Mark Boulton’s grid series lays down five simple steps to designing grid systems. Also linked from the same article (and rather ingenious, might I add): Subtraction’s Grid Computing and Design, in which Khoi describes how a temporary grid bg serves as a positioning template.
UPDATED: Sherwin-Williams is seeking a Senior Web Designer. Says Jon Linczak, “This would be an amazing opportunity for someone to help manage the design direction for sherwin.com as well as many other brands that we host here.” Offices located in Cleveland, Ohio, with relocation assistance for qualified candidates. Send resume and portfolio work to jnkozik {at} sherwindotcom.
Wow! How’d I miss this? New digs from Derek Powazek. Downright lovely.
My never-ending quest for knowing exactly where I’d end up if I dug a hole straight through the earth directly under my home has now ended. $5 says you can’t leave the page without first digging under your home.
Novell shows off its shiny new site, replete with new navigation scheme, sharp design, and XHTML/CSS goodness. Brian sends his thanks to those of you who participated in user testing.
Copper 2005 project management software. Host on your server or theirs.
Friendly option links, as explained by Jeremy Boles. Long story short, use the same unordered list to show a raw list to handhelds (and other JavaScript-challenged devices) and a <select> list to JavaScript-friendly user agents.
Designer/coder with a little one on the way? Josh Lehman sets the bar high.
Oops. Looks like SicolaMartin failed to do its homework before launching a new identity for Quark. Speak Up’s account is one of the more thorough ones I’ve seen so far.
It’s that time of year again. Anil Dash: Web dev trends for 2006.
How LogoWorks.com can charge so little for logo design?
Apple is seeking a XHTML / CSS / JavaScript zen master. Need we say more? Via Stylegala.
The Upper Deck Company is seeking a Multimedia/Web Designer. Read and apply here. Ability to lift 50 lbs… Who knew?!
BBEdit user? CSS fanatic? Then give the BBEdit CSS Syntax Checker a spin. From the ever-affluent Mac mind of John Gruber.
A Brand Apart. No, nothing to do with Happy Cog. Yes, probably well worth $50.
A List Apart: Hi-res Image Printing. Was pondering this dilemma just last week. Perfect timing.
An Event Apart debuts in Philly. Lightning strikes indeed. Hoping it strikes a bit closer the second time around.
Jon Linczak, the other (better) half behind Hiram.edu, is leaving Hiram College. Consider taking his spot as webmaster. And should you choose to renew the contract currently in place once hired, you and I just might have the chance to team up.
I give up. I may never create another poster again after being schooled by these lovely beauties.
Yay! Mint is now available. Beauty of a site, too.
Khoi Vinh breaks down the 16-column grid behind the TheOnion.com redesign.
Teach yourself programming in ten years. A stark reminder of properly valuing long-term education and experience, in direct contrast to the ubiquitous “24-hour” titles that line store bookshelves.
After Thursday’s trip to Novell, head over to the Utah State Fair. Yeah, the one with those zany Napoleon D. TV ads.
Live in Northern Utah? Novell is seeking 8-10 people to participate in a research study for the upcoming redesign of Novell.com. Stop in Sept. 8 and you’ll enjoy lunch and a $100 Amazon.com gift cert. Brian Sweeting tells all.
Be ESPN’s next Creative Director.
Let’s settle this whole copyright expiration dispute once and for all with a nice big flowchart.
For those who have inquired about mobile stats: Cell phone feature usage (U.S). Cell phone shipments (worldwide).
“These are much better news than the latest ALA redesign.” Or so Simon says. (Jests aside, hats off to both Jason and Doug.)
Though I have little idea what this lamp may illuminate, it sure makes for a gorgeous shot.
SXSW 2006. If you make it to only one conference next year, this is the one. And rumor has it the Design Eye crew just might rear its ugly collaborative head yet again.
Kottke on “WebOS”. Innovative thinking for the Web 3.0? Or a rehash of the ASP model? Either way, it’s plenty worth a read.
“The paper softwall is a beautiful, lightweight, freestanding wall that can be arranged into almost any shape, or easily compressed into a compact sheaf and stored away.”
Jason Santa Maria takes us backstage with the A List Apart redesign.
Pantone ‘Flight Stool.’ Purports to “bring the iconic pantone chip to life in three dimensions.”
Blogs.Adobe.com. Nascent as of August 15. What value they’ll offer TBD.
Design In-Flight is back, albeit in web format. But hey, RGB is the new CMYK. Or something like that.
Adept at Flash? MWI is seeking contract Flash designers, regardless of location. Contact Josh here.
“Is this you? A web designer employed by a non-design company. High-profile redesigns and flashy product launches? Not bloody likely. More like mind-numbing updates to a manually maintained company phone-list. And it has to work in Netscape 4. Maybe it’s 50,000 variations on the same banner ad, using those same 2 corporate colours… the hex codes are tattooed inside your eyelids.” Designers Inhouse mailing list. Via BD4D.
Film titles designed by Saul Bass.
Some doodle. Some blog. Some garner big ol’ comment counts. Some do all three.
CSS Thesis. These galleries seem to come a dime a dozen these days.
IDI (Orem, Utah) is seeking to fill the position of Web App Designer. Coincidentally, this is the same position I held a couple years back, though it appears to have morphed somewhat since. Read and apply here.
Coudal/Veer debut “Copy Goes Here” trailer. Quite possibly a sign of good things to come.
“So the first beta of Internet Explorer 7 has been released… Great news! Or is it?”
Opera Mini for Mobile. Announced yesterday. Looks like a server-side version of Small Screen Rendering (SSR). Excited to see where this goes and how this impacts other mobile developers.
Hiram needed more content front and center, so we refreshed the homepage. Same styling as before, but more beef.
Enter Veer’s Inkjet Haiku contest and your haiku could appear on the back of bazillions of Veer catalogs. Shoot, even better, your NAME will grace the back cover. Fancy that.
Mint Me. Do indulge yourself with a Mint. Shaun Inman’s next-gen statware. As seen in SGC v4.
WebFX Slider. I’m sure this link has been around the block a fair share, but a rediscovery on a recent web app project. Degrades well, skinnable with different CSS files. Demo.
Correction to Mobile Web Design, Part One: Turns out OpenWave is part of MWI after all. W3C’s Dean Jackson chimes in.
Red door, empty shoes, note. Go, tell your story.
Nick Finck shares a few job openings: Boeing (Info Architect) | Second Story (Interactive Media, Dir. of Operations)
Wednesday Design Observer thievery: PixelRoller - paint roller that paints pixels | “Design Matters” radio program discusses design blogs | Lenny Kravitz starts design firm
A collection of blog headline styling.
veer.com/clash. That was a trip to watch. Rewind and hit me again.
Yesterday’s T.26 font newsletter delivered Chippies by Wassco straight to my inbox. Lucky me.
Apple Mighty Mouse. Looks hot. Name’s not. Google it while the real Mighty Mouse is still on top.
Mark Wyner speaks for Campaign Monitor: Optimizing CSS presentation in HTML emails.
Treesquirrel.org. Thoughts such as “lovely” and “assortment” and “of photography” come to mind.
Studeo is seeking a Senior Art Director and a Senior Production Designer. Inquire and apply using the email address in the Employment section.
Whoa, finally making use of my Flickr account. Uploaded a few photos from a recent trip to Escalante, nestled in a very remote area of Southern Utah.
“I’m disheartened that so many people, especially those in the design community who are (ideally) focused on creating a good experience for users, don’t judge an application by the goals it’s supposed to accomplish.” Anil Dash wonders if there’s too much Ajaxy speak (among other things) and not enough customer speak.
Phinney/Bischoff is seeking a Senior Designer, Copywriter, and Interactive/IA Designer. Apply here.
“My parents split the business when they divorced, and shortly after I was out of highschool my mom lost an eight-month battle with cancer. So I ended up with her company at the ripe, old age of 18.” Interview with Josh Williams of Firewheel / IconBuffet / Blinksale fame.
Britney called. She wants her shirt back. Or so began a hilarious chain of emails between Grettir Asmundarson and Veer’s (apparently stellar) customer support.
What?! Editorial layoffs hit Wired News. Somewhere in San Fran, a moist tear softly strikes the desk of Douglas Bowman.
Boston College is looking to fill the newly created position of Instructional Web Producer, who “creates and maintains all forms of web and multimedia projects as a part of the Instructional Design and eTeaching Services team at Boston College.” Required skills range from XHTML/CSS to Photoshop/Illustrator to Flash/multimedia. Find the full description and application here. (Thanks, Cheryl.)
Humaniz, creative shop for Motorola and Iomega among others, is seeking a graphic designer with web experience including Flash (ActionScript experience would be nice). Illustration skills a plus. Apply here.
Caught someone stealing bandwidth? Consider seeking remedy the Jeff Gates way.
Blinksale is now live! Dive in and enjoy shamelessly easy invoicing, courtesy of the Firewheel Design crew.
Paige Pooler Illustration. Downright gorgeous stuff. People like Paige make the world more better.
“The last two weeks of my linguistic activity have been peppered with ‘dude’. Just last week someone told me that they never thought they’d hear me say ‘dude’, and they told me as if they were proud of me, the way a parent might praise a child for speaking their first word.” Dude.
Potterganda. A fine demonstration of Shaun Inman’s prowess beyond the desktop. As if you didn’t already know that.
Firewheel lays out 50 free buddy icons over at the Sparkplug blog. Buddy up.
John Peele reviews English360.com at Stylegala. Thanks, John.
Audio version of BJ Fogg’s presentation at WebVisions 2005. Well worth your time (45 mins) is a horrible understatement.
I’m not into Flash much these days, but for those of you who are, Michael K. informs me of this site, complete with source files.
Sometimes I have a hard time getting things right. Like a recent weekend trip to a vacation lodge. Suzanne explains the Molls’ best mistake yet.
Make your site mobile-friendly in two minutes.
Two Point Three. “Cut to the chase” might very well be the mantra for this new venture and its design.
Jody Ferry, SGC IV’s winner, announces the launch of Storybook Heirlooms. Just as delicious as the original entry.
Worn Photoshop brushes for high resolution: Part 1 and Part 2. Go get ’em.
.mobi TLD approved. Though the W3C won’t be throwing a party anytime soon. (And why not just .mob?)
Client presentation scheduled soon? BBC’s step-by-step guide to charisma.
The Great Design Show 2005. $10,000 to the winner, $15,000 to the rest. Apparently part of a promotion to kick off a new publication called Imagine.
MarketingProfs: Don’t bore me with your blog. Take note.
Red Labor Redux. A lovely reincarnation of this classic online presence. Even backpack pins are promised this time around.
Stop reading this headline and get back to work. 2.09 hours of “unproductive time” daily spent browsing the Web by employees. Though staying current on trends and refining one’s knowledge through Web reading — if that’s how the time is being spent — is hardly unproductive.
ArtBitz stock illustration and design. The sports collection is oh so 80s-7th-grade-manila-folder reminiscent, no?
Better late than never, Hash FC won summer’s division championship a couple weeks ago. Way to go crew!
Design In-Flight closes shop and will offer a free mini-issue on July 15. Thanks Andy, the ride was a pleasurable one while it lasted.
Desert Island Fonts - Final Round. Lucky me, I managed to secure a spot on Andy’s coveted island.
IYHY. More timely goodness.
Greg B. must have enjoyed a fantastic weekend, ’cause he generously upgraded my Flickr account to bona fide Pro status. I suppose it’s time I finally add some respectable photos…
Proxima Nova now available. Enough to warrant a few more fireworks for the weekend’s celebration.
Holy Hanna, I just used BrowserCam’s Remote Access service to test a client’s site in Windows, and it’s just too good. Log in and use the machine remotely just like Virtual PC (but faster access), and avoid the capture-wait-see-fix-recapture-wait mess. (On a Mac and need a VNC for remote access? Try Chicken of the VNC. Thanks, Jesse.)
The inaugural post for Macromedia’s XD blog is nothing other than a foray into mobile design. How timely.
Missed the auction for a jar containing breathing air from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? No worries. Bid now on the slice of toast that bares the image of the so-called Celebrity Jar, or even better, the slice of toast that bares the image of the slice of toast that bares the image of the Celebrity Jar.
A bit of old news to some, but new to me: Garrett Dimon shows off the Bright Corner business card, devoid of titles yet replete with individual descriptions. Love it.
“Ninjas killed my family. Need money for kung-fu lessons.” A bit of smart homeless marketing, I’d say.
One wicked cord manager I can easily afford. | One equally wicked coffee table accessory I won’t be affording anytime soon.
“Um, honey, you ain’t gonna believe what just popped out.”
Fully penned. Off to the printers this weekend. Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm.
“Graphic design is easy, of course, so we kill ourselves trying to make it hard.” Design Observer on why avoiding the obvious is painfully sought after in vain.
Honda ‘Grrr’ wins Cannes Grand Prix. View the spot.
Combine hoops and a DC Shoes training facility and you get DC Hoops. Insane. Via Coudal.
CSS Import. Unaware of this one until now? Shame on me.
Forbes slideshow on the costs of actually being Batman.
Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova typeface is reportedly due out by the end of this month. Fans of Avenir will embrace it readily, while font savants will enjoy the standard and alternate glyphs for lowercase letters such as the a, i, and l.
Oblivious to the budding market of bluetooth-enabled cars? Same here. That is, until I stumbled on The Bluetooth Car Weblog and this NY Times article.
Welcome our new Ajax overlords whilst ridding ourselves of six JavaScript features we (apparently) no longer need.
Mike Davidson leaves Disney. See, told you it was the Year of the Kottke.
Firewheel Design launches its teaser site for Blinksale, which could very well be one hot app in the making for creating, managing, and sending CSS-formatted invoices to customers and clients. Yay!
Apparently Saddam loves Doritos, and apparently that’s newsworthy. A slow day in news, I suppose.
A bit of old news at this point, but me, myself, and I are completely confident “Fix You” from Coldplay’s latest album is 100% sheer bliss.
Try your hand at Wall Street Journal-like imagery: Kristian demonstrates the Andromeda Cutline Filter for Photoshop.
$100 at Campaign Monitor was just added to the SGC vIV prize package. Total value of the package now well over $200. Last chance to add your screen grab before we wrap up the contest.
Michael Dell: “If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.” Hmm…
Is Microsoft Acrylic a potential Photoshop competitor? Fireworks competitor? Neither? Slashdot readers weigh in (see comments). Thanks, Devin.
I’ve got an old typewriter from the 40’s lying around; a family hand-me-down of sorts. Double-dog dare me to do this to it.
Seth Godin: The seduction of good enough. I don’t know that I completely agree with Seth on this one. The relentless pursuit of better, or RPB as Seth coins it, is definitely good for most products and services, but not all of them. After all, it’s often the relentless persuit of good enough that often keeps prices dirt cheap.
24 ways to slice Helvetica. I’ll venture a guess that Helvetica is still a long way away from exiting stage left.
Josh Lehman’s latest (re)incarnation of File Me Away is easy to enjoy.
SGC vIV will draw to a close before the week is over. Don’t pass up the chance to add your screen grab, with a shot at taking home a couple fonts, a Veer tee, a Miles Davis album, and a Jewelboxing 20pack.
WaSP interviews Jonathan Linczak on Hiram College’s move to web standards. You go girl. Er, guy.
Authentic socks worn by Jon Hicks up for grabs at eBay. Scoop here.
“Dashboard seems to be nothing more than extremely watered down version of Sherlock, but perhaps I’m missing the point.” Is he? Or not? Greg is all ears.
New ShaunInman.com. No further explanation required.
New addition to the portfolio: Life Memorials logo. Speaking of humility, this was a highly collaborative process with the client, perhaps more so than before. Thankfully, no arm wrestling bouts broke out, but it did take several rounds and input from the likes of Hicks, Storey, and Bennett-Chamberlain to finally nail the logo (thanks, guys). Adobe Trajan Pro and P22 Dearest (slightly modified) round out the type choices for this project.
“…it seems like we’re nearing the end of this fun side project. However, we’ve come this far, we can’t just let the thing sit and waste away on this site, can we? Well, we may not have the media budget, but we’ve got something sneaky planned that’ll get this thing seen. Stick with us—more revealed soon.” From the ever informative Jewelboxing blog.
Make your own 1920’s style bluetooth handset. Chalk up another for the growing list.
What’s in Russell’s gadget bag? Apparently a lot more than in mine.
AJAX Spell Checker. Source code available for download. Via Matt.
Ambigrammible names. What the ‘flip’ is an ambigram, you ask? Look no further than John Langdon’s work.
John Gruber shares a few Intel-Apple odds and ends, while MacRumors’ live WWDC 2005 keynote coverage will likely give it to us straight from the horse’s mouth.
Deer Park Alpha 1. Nope, it ain’t a sci-fi flick. Nor is it NASA’s next mission to the moon.
Russell Beattie is playing with comment forms in feeds.
Planning an email marketing campaign anytime soon? A stop at MarketingProf’s Email Vendor List may warrant a visit.
Minnesota’s 2005 interactive showcase, AIGA Exhibit A, includes a few rather interesting submissions, such as these: {1} and {2}. Drop a comment or two while you’re there.
Car maker Mini accessorizes with MOTORmate.com. Another round of jocular ads from Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Informercials {1} {2} and {3}.
“Different” by Acceptance is this week’s free iTunes download. Dive in and enjoy.
10 bad project warning signs. A caveat emptor of sorts: Let the freelancer beware.
Mezzoblue’s shiny new Markup Guide. Quite handy indeed, Dave.
William Drenttel shares Maps of Cyberspace over at Designer Observer. Several intriguing examples, including this one, which apparently shows one user’s mouse paths for an entire week.
Mom to advertisers: Place your ads on my baby. Ethical for parents? Ethical for advertisers? Are ethics even a concern? Discuss.
I experienced a rather unusual email outage over the weekend. If you emailed me Friday afternoon through Sunday night, please resend your email and I’ll respond promptly. Thanks.
Mike Davidson tells us Disney Internet Group is hiring in a big way. Go. Apply. Make beautiful things.
Pak-Lite 9V battery snap-on flashlight. I can think of a dozen places I’d store one of these.
A random spattering of job openings: Agency.com Web Designer, Priceline.com Web Designer, CompUSA Web Designer, Yahoo! Senior Web Designer, MyFamily.com Web Designer, CafePress.com Web Designer, and of course don’t miss the ubiquitous “Online” Web Designer, not to be confused with Offline Web Designer.
Hazzard County is a callin’: DukesFest 2005 is just around the corner.
Learn to dance with Napoleon Dynamite.
Dockable Comments. Slick trick from Derek Featherstone for “docking” the comment form in a sidebar. Easy to implement right away if that next redesign isn’t slated anytime soon.
I’m not exactly privy to what “aproapedependentdebere” means, but a fitting translation might be “good place to find a few identity ideas.”
Stunt City. Imagine an entire city of stunt citizens. Add a product and 60 seconds of reel time and you’ve got one unbelievably well-done commercial.
Just now noticed: Hicks’ ladder metaphor for The Escape Committee’s logo is brilliant, both the shadowing and the extension beyond the red box.
IconBuffet goes wild: The entire SoHo icon set is on sale for a mere $5, and the angled perspective on the new Kyoto icon set is quite fascinating.
iPod Giveaway #2. This time around, place an iPod Shuffle into notable historical context and win. Love some of the entries so far.
I’m lacking time right now to do the full write-up and continue passing the musical baton, but the last CD I bought was “Hopes and Fears” by Keane (absolutely fantastic), and well-played songs include Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead, Comeback by Josh Rouse, Creepin’ In by Norah Jones, and Canteloupe Island by Herbie Hancock.
Still confused about exactly what Ajax is? Derek Powazek’s concise but solid write-up, “Ajax, Ajax Everywhere” spells it out in plain English.
“The premise is simple. Create an exact replica of a Western Electric 500-series model phone handset from the 1940s, bung on a mobile phone connection and you’ve got the latest retro headset.” The Phobile mobile phone handset.
Backpack Mobile now available.
If you’re bad we’re going to McDonalds (SpeakUp guest article). The ethical responsibilities of designers? Don’t skip the comments.
Levi’s 90-second World Gone Pretty ad is making the rounds. Brilliant or bland? (3)
A pair via Blake: A brief history of Amazon’s tabs and Min-width for IE.
Another highly simple but subtly elegant work from Brian Biddle and Josh Lavine: Bulk Herb Store.
In Flash, “best” is often better than “high”. Saw this linked several times but failed to click. Was worth the click finally.
Essential bookmarks for web designers/developers. Another big fat list possibly worthy of bookmarkage.
Some advice on logo design for non-designers.
Endorsement-free hookups: Photos to Go Unlimited @ $99/6 mos, Index Open @ $599/6 mos w/free XM Radio, and Accounts 1.8 for OS X.
Randy Bacon Photography. Lovely site design by Jason Gaylor.
CSS Organization Tip #1: Flags. Smart trick adding the ‘=’ before commented text, Doug.
Interested in splitting the costs for a BrowserCam account? Friend and colleague Jesse B.C. is seeking up to 25 users. He’s got the OK from BrowserCam, so contact him if interested.
The B Word. A brand is a memory model of a thing, says Peter Flaschner, paraphrasing Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.
Humaniz, developers of Iomega’s and AdvancedMD’s websites among many others, is seeking a junior web developer for standards-based website development (HTML/CSS/Javascript) with some skills for back-end programming (JSP,PHP,ASP). SLC Utah position. Apply here.
If you’ve got any interest in Lenya or enjoyed Jon’s series on the subject, help him make it to Boston to meet with Lenya’s creator to promote the use of this unique CMS in colleges and universities.
“Responsible for leading a site-wide redesign” of a tiny little site called NYTimes.com. They’re hiring a design director.
Mark Boulton’s 5 simple steps to better typography: Step 1 and Step 2 (so far). Keep an eye on these.
Adobe to acquire Macromedia. Wow. This is a big concern. Too much of the industry’s software in the hands of one company? (19)
John Leonard tells me he didn’t laugh when he took the Insanity Test yesterday. In fact, he shuddered. John writes, “If you lived in Ireland you would know that the background sound for that is a mobile phone ringtone called ‘Crazy Frog’ from a company called Jamster. On the TV here in the prime 6-15 demographic advertising slot, that blasted advert, featuring that blasted ringtone, plays in every ad break. I live in constant fear of somebody’s phone actually playing that ringtone within my earshot — I would surely make them eat it.” (3)
Thursdays are perfect for administering the Insanity Test. I failed miserably. Made it a full 2 seconds before a chuckle, and then full laughter at 5.6 seconds.
Idaho’s House of Representatives doesn’t have a blog to praise the fame of Napolean Dynamite’s Preston city, but hey, at least they’ve got a bill for it.
coda.coza. Can’t pin down exactly why, but I’m in love with this site’s homepage structure.
Poster hope for a Monday morning: Alternative motivational posters from Right Brain Terrain and a collection from Dan Benshoff (EPSN’s creative director).
Fleurons of Hope. Spectacular sets of over 400 glyphs from designers across the globe, as part of Font Aid III.
A few Monster picks: Macromedia interactive designer | Getty Images user interface designer | Boston start-up CSS designer
The lovely Octic Gothic typeface. No excuses needed to use this beauty.
Beautiful golden chopped Mini (the car). Now imagine carrying this around on your hip.
Portable rotary cell phone. Yes! Imagine carrying this around on your hip. Oh the opposite sex you’d attract…
Molly tackles the naming and location of RSS / XML / Atom and feeds / syndication / subscriptions.
7 steps to better handheld browsing. Or better yet, better handheld web design.
Two for Fools: The Flop and Pimp My Font.
Something I wish I’d thought of if I had the money: Free iPods for everyone.
Something I wish I’d thought of if I had the skills: Browser stickies.
The very lovely RobWeychert.com Version 4 is now live. A lie two years in the making, Rob says. I’d say it’s a beauty two years in the making. Via Airbag.
Half naked in a dark parking lot. Work safe, and quite amusing.
Erik Spiekermann corrects my account of Frutiger’s history in “The non-typographer’s guide…”
Photoshop CS2 Leak or early April Fool’s? Either way, Image Warping is long overdue, among other things.
Calling all volunteers (3/28): I’ve received 131 submissions in response to “Calling all musicians.” We now need a volunteer or two to assist us in coding this data in a table format of some sort. If you have the time, know HTML tables (data tables, not layout tables), and have a knack for presenting data in a readily digestable format, please contact me. We’ll post a generously sized link to your site in exchange. Deadline is roughly one week from now.
More on OS X login delays and damaged font caches: Font caches gone wild. As for myself, I managed to reduce my login delay from 14 minutes down to 2 minutes by 1) discontinuing the use of Suitcase and 2) removing the bulk of my fonts from /Library/Fonts (seems Font Book may have been activating fonts on its own, whether or not they were activated in Suitcase). And then with John’s suggestions, I managed to reduce that time from 2 minutes down to 27 seconds, which, for a 3-yr-old PowerBook is not bad at all.
Insane credit card signature pranks that are too hilarious to ignore. Chuckle and learn. (Love the negative tip.) Via Coudal.
I met Shaun Inman’s fiancee at SXSW as just that — the fiancee. I had no idea it happened on the plane ride over. Congrats, you crazy cats.
Design Eye’s Paul Nixon moves to Apple. I so wanted to see him to break the news at SXSW. Don’t know how he held back. Best wishes, Paul.
Pimp My Safari. As if the peek Hicks gave us in SGC v3 wasn’t enough, he goes and launches an entire site with it. Sheesh!
OS X login delays and damaged font caches. An article of this sort is long overdue. I too was googling it just last week, as my login time has grown to 14 minutes (!). Much appreciated, John.
Building of Basecamp Utah - Petition. Chime in if you’d like to see Mr. Fried swing our way.
Samsung 7 megapixel 3x optical zoom PHONE. Yes, you read that correctly — a phone, people. And you won’t see me with one anytime soon.
Metalcarver aluminum guitars. Yup, speechless over here too…
Flickr: Plate of lobster fist. Seriously, this is baaad.
Exploding Dog: Take Me. One of Sam Brown’s drawrings straight outta SXSW. I was amazed not at the technical ability but the speed with which Sam brought audience members’ suggested titles to life. (This one, for example, was both conceptualized and drawn in less than 5 minutes.)
Seth Godin: “I get away with this heresy since I, in fact, have my own fancy MBA from Stanford. The fact is, though, that unless you want to be a consultant or an i-banker it’s hard for me to understand why [an MBA] is a better use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated reading of 30 or 40 books.”
Devin Boyle writes: “Every morning, more than 300 newspaper art directors from around the world send their front pages to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., via the internet. And every day the museum prints 68 of them in large format to post in its outdoor exhibition kiosk on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the museum will reopen in 2007. ‘Today’s Front Pages’ is also available for daily online reading.”
Nick Finck, whom I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting at SXSW, is simply too kind in his blog entry announcing my interview with Meryl Evans (thank you both!).
Hiram College is seeking a graphic designer. If you live in Cleveland, have print experience, and are seeking employment, please apply.
Featured at SXSW: Tivoli Audio Model One. A mono FM/AM radio that accepts line input from the iPod, among other devices. Apparently it boasts incredible sound, and if anything it’s guaranteed to look swanky in your office space.
Featured at SXSW: iPodLinux.org. I sat there in awe as I watched the iPod reboot in Linux, and then suddenly have access to controls such as mic input (without any adapters, no less).
The completed redesign for Design Eye for the Idea Guy, in case you missed that overly obvious announcement from a couple days ago.
The Big Noob™ features such n00bs as Brad Smith and Ryan Sims. Yes, this is the one Sir Justwatchthesky spoke of, and she’s now live.
CSS Zen Garden: November. Love it. From the creative mind of Alen Grakalic.
Veer: Capture Personality. Lovely set of six portraits by Veer’s creative team. Complete with accompanying desktop wallpaper.
Narayan pushes etherfarm v4.0 live. Love some of the finer details on this site. Take a few minutes to soak it all in.
A lovely sampling of (mostly) outdoor signage from American Sign Museum.
This spam scoring tool from gravityMail seems to work rather well for determining how well your next HTML email newsletter/advertisement will hold up against SpamAssassin and other spam filters.
Vintage bike styles and several originals from Memory Lane Classics.
Tuesdays With Mantu: My Adventures With a Nigerian Con Artist. Man fakes interest in Nigerian Advance Fee Scam. Documents the process. Writes book.
Wow, it’s been too long since I’ve enjoyed a new album as much as this: Jack Johnson’s new “In Between Dreams.” (iTunes)
Harvard’s Jim Heskett reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and readers respond. (Malcolm will keynote at SXSW on March 13.)
The fourth and fifth articles in Jon Linczak’s Lenya series are up. Part 4: Editing in Lenya and Part 5: Custom Navigation in Lenya.
So Overstock.com is seeking an “HTML Advanced Graphic Designer.” Is it just me, or does that smell like a lot more than just HTML?
Meanwhile, Angie questions the Kottke business model, and Greg puts him in the hot seat.
Jared ponders the centuries-old debate of why we format our code the way we do. Do you tab indent? Group selectors alphabetically or by function? etc.
Geez, this is one big fat web dev list. Possibly worthy of bookmarkage.
The top 100 gadgets of all time. I still get a kick out of seeing Ye Olde Atari 2600. Oh the hours spent on that time-sucking device…
Doing kottke.org as a full-time job. This comes as no surprise. Best wishes, Jason.
Is HTML better than XHTML? Read. Consider. Respond.
Roger Johansson’s “Efficient CSS with shorthand properties” is a good primer for some of us, a solid reminder for the rest of us.
Prart™ Subtlelistyk just oozes with style. Love the portfolio work. Via Styleboost.
kingcosmonaut. How can I *not* link to this one? (wink)
Any guesses as to when someone will set up shop for something like this? ‘Mod Your Mini’ decals: {sample 1} {sample 2}. Idea (and images) credit: John Rackerby.
Stuck? Gabi Toth might lend a few ideas.
Plenty of stuff to peruse over at the new kriskrug.com.
High school sophmore Steven Rubin tells me he’s collecting the college mailers he’s started receiving. Call it College Mail Confab, vol. I. Or something like that…
Woohoo! Illustration Friday!!
Need an idea for swag? Logo merch? Try an anodized aluminum cover spiral notebook.
Apparently I missed the news regarding the so-called Google “Allegra” update until earlier this week. In case you missed it too and couldn’t explain the changes to your “SERPs” (Search Engine Results Pages). And if I’m not mistaken, looks like they’re using META description content more than I’ve seen done previously, among other things.
SXSW Big Bag design finalists announced. Nice roundup of talent. Excited to get my hands on the finished product.
Oh-boy, oh-boy, oh-boy, OH-BOY! And with that, the cat is officially out of the bag.
Judge puts Greg in rehabilitation for 30 days, Paul steps in.
The third article in Jon Linczak’s Lenya series is up. Part 3: Anatomy of the Pipeline.
Todd Dominey’s SlideShow Pro is now available for a mere $20. Demo.
Custom machined aluminum hardcases for the iPod Shuffle and the Big Daddy. The Swami says expect a web store from this guy in the near future.
“Sooner or later you’re going to have to design a set of business cards or letterheads or something else that ultimately forces a trip to the printing press.” Read this excellent CMYK primer from Dave Shea before making the trip.
Adventure Lounge - Early Aircraft Design. Vintage aircraft images discovered in U.S. patent applications.
BrandShift is live. “…a new groupblog on the ways in which branding’s changing and adapting to evolving market forces.” Yet this initial comment is telling: “Hmmm, I’m a huge fan of collaborative blogging, however ‘all things branding’ I can get from reading your individual blogs, surely the purpose here would be specific focus.” Yes, indeed.
McDonald’s Lincoln Fry Blog doesn’t appear to be taking flight. Technorati snippets confirm the suspicion. (Check the absurdity in the comments on this entry and tell me that doesn’t reek of self-patronization.)
HP’s Carly Fiorina ousted. Go figure. Anyone foolish enough to have thought buying Compaq would actually increase profits needs to be ousted. (And yet I was quite fond of her before that move.)
SlideShowPro available 2/14. I’ve seen the preview, and it’s wicked good. This thing’ll stand up to just about any hype you throw at it between now and Monday.
Mac media center. Well, sort of.
Andy begs, “Decorate my studio.”
4-yr-old Michigan boy drives to video store and home again. Worst part? Store was closed. Poor guy.
Seeking water-resistant designers with a working knowledge of the Noble Gases. Classic.
The second article in Jon Linczak’s Lenya series is up. Part 2: Installing Lenya.
Early painting of Michael Jackson discovered. Tell me that doesn’t look like him.
Freelance advice: Retirement Planning Basics for the Self-Employed.
He’s 9. Weighs 35 kg. Scores like Pele. Juan Carlos Chera. This kid’s shooting ability is surreal. And his footwork to boot (click picture for video, watch for when he’s in the yellow jersey).
This Tiffany sterling silver pool triangle sells for a mere $1,275.
More on James’ interview with NPR.
Wow, James Archer mentions Wicked Worn in this interview with NPR’s Melissa Block. Wicked, James.
Clickworthy lists…
Brand New Box: Links
NiXLOG: Links
Pixelgraphix: Linkverzeichnis
Andy Budd: CSS Sites
Hmm. Vincent Flanders’ Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 is, well, you decide. Though I’m particulary intrigued by this line: “I’m amazed by the number of sites with ugly graphics and the number that still use animated GIFs.” How ironic, Vincent.
Flickr color picker. Interesting concept that (again) raises the question: Will Flickr eventually evolve to be, at least in part, the next iStockphoto?
Tabasco desktops. Tasty.
Adam Polselli”s Emerald Green Leaves. Stunning.
“Have you been able to replace your drum set?” is the last question. Nine others precede it in this iStockphoto interview. John Rees, who lives just minutes from my home, did the shoot and served up his own interview. (And of all my pics they could have chosen to headline, they chose *that* one, lol.)
Mezzoblue § It’s a Wrap. A mere 2,474 files later and she’s off to the printer. Pre-order.
So that’s what Didier has been up to. Soon to be seen at bedsides everywhere.
Max Design’s Listamatic CSS Lists. Stumbled across this again yesterday. Worth a second visit. You’ll click if you feel like it! Gosh!!!
Design Eye Panel @ SXSW. The silence is finally broken! Here’s the official announcement about a panel that’ll include Andrei Herasimchuk, D. Keith Robinson, Ryan Sims, Greg Storey and, well, me.
Ben Goodger, lead engineer on Firefox, is now on Google payroll. Details.
Linux Switch Ad. He’s Steve, and he’s a supervillain.
“Do you live CSS? Breathe JavaScript? Dream in Photoshop layers?” Apple is hiring. Via Stylegala.
Scrivs sold the Vault. And for lots of X’s, he tells us.
Those who expressed interest in Lenya following this article will be pleased to know Jon Linczak has started a series of articles to document and explain the open source CMS software. Part 1: Understanding Lenya.
New “File, Print” software now offers the ability to print directly from your machine to any Kinko’s location. Have yet to send a file to print using it, but the software — a glorified print driver of sorts — seems promising. (Now, if they had a Mac version, I might give it my full endorsement. But alas…)
Mike D: The iPod End Game. “Who’s to say the trademark white headphones and colorful commercials will still be hip in a year or two? Granted, Apple is the king of hip, but what if the iPod is less fashionable moving forward… What if the iPod becomes the ‘big brother’ brand and young people turn to alternative brands?”
Wow, imagine if this spot were really produced by VW. And imagine it aired. I imagine VW would be in quite a pickle. (Additional speculation found here.)
In Thinking Differently About Site Mapping and Navigation, Keith Robinson discusses sitemaps, navigation, IA deliverables and the root problems with organization and content on the Web. Yet another reminder why Keith is strikingly good at info architecture, and I’m good at, well, other stuff. (Also see related discussion with Mike D and others, comment #8 on.)
Turn any iPod into an iPod Shuffle in 3 easy steps. Uh, right.
Man goes 6 days with nail in skull. Wow, that makes Edison’s incident a bit more bearable.
Sources tell me to check the latest print issue of Communication Arts, at or around page 78. Will do so as soon as I grab a copy. (Update: Woohoo!)
How do you unblog the design of a design blog? Like this.
Joe Clark: Big, Stark & Chunky. How “low-vision” users see (or don’t see) your website, and what to do about it. My apologies, Joe, for being one of the “many developers [you] polled over a period of five months” that failed to make time to pitch in. (On a side note, check how gorgeous the type looks if you’ve got Avenir on your machine.)
SXSW Interactive registration deadline for 20% off is this Friday (Jan 14). Register now, you slacker!
Mac mini stacks. Like pancakes only sweeter.
The Buddha Board: “Based on the Zen concept of living in the moment, you simply paint on the board’s special surface with water; the image darkens and then slowly fades away.” Can’t pass this up for a mere $30.
Lawsuit pending and all, Think Secret still releases its rumored announcement list for today’s Macworld Expo (Jan 11).
Benza’s unusual lineup of products includes such gotta-haves as these plumbing vases.
48hourprint’s JobReady Print Center apparently allows you to print directly to their remote server using a special driver on your machine. Schweet.
“I Beat Anorexia.” Just barely. (Photo of a really fat guy wearing a shirt with this phrase.)
St. Anxiete, St. Concepta, St. Exacto, St. Pantone, St. Pixela, and St. Typo round out the Patron Saints of Graphic Design. Swag available.
Still stuck? Take a seat and have a read, then: Chronicle Books ~ Graphic Design.
Stuck? Try Fuszion.com. Inspiration found here.
“Church parking only. Violators will be baptized.” Nevermind…
NiXLOG redesigns and takes us backstage. “I’m not shooting for the most usable, super-validating, mega-standards compliant site around — there plenty of those out there. What I am trying to create is something simple, but very different. Something that challenges the norm. For better or worse. Something I can learn from.” Amen, and praise the brown, brothah!
The 2005 Bloggies. The real McCoy. Jason is vying for Best Asian Weblog. I, on the other hand, will settle only for Best Food Weblog.
Dictionary.com: yadda yadda yadda. Definition: blah blah blah.
Congrats to BYU rival Univ. of Utah in their Fiesta Bowl slaughter, bringing further shame to the BCS debacle. This article nails it: “Just how good is the University of Utah’s football team? We’ll never know. That’s what’s wrong with the inexplicable, nonsensical, ridiculous, maddening Bowl Championship Series.”
Roger Johansson’s Predictions and Hopes for 2005 list is one of the more sensible ones I’ve seen out there. “By the end of the year, sIFR gets mentioned in the same sentence as <marquee>, <blink>, and Java applets. This is a great shame, because sIFR is brilliant and can be used well.”
Andy Budd does his part to reach out and support the Asia Relief Effort: BlogAid. Help him extend his reach.
Jonathan Alsobrook’s poster for an annual equestrian competition is tastefully simple.
Happy Holidays to you and crew. The AB editorial calendar is already full through about mid-February, so enjoy the break and then come on back for plenty of discussion and banter alike.
Reasons for not blogging much lately. Well said.
From first contact to launch in just 11 days, Zija.biz redesign. Had to employ coding assistance from Jon Linczak to meet the deadline.
Lee Jeans Holiday Edition. Adjectives “lush” and “supple” don’t exactly fit, but they sure sound good enough to describe this beauty. Via Stylegala.
AdvancedMD welcomes its first two medical blog advertisers, Medpundit and Kevin, M.D.
Complimentary web seminar: Blogging for Business by Jim Coudal and Anil Dash. Dec. 16 @ 2pm EST.
Veer stocks the shelves with new merch, just in time for Christmas. Gift certs, Creatives Understand v2, Typography Cross, and Speak Up posters to boot.
Photo fade-ins sans Flash, vol. II. This cross-browser, accessible JavaScript feature now resizes with each photo.
NFL helmets that were never drafted. I’m particularly fond of the Bombers prototype.
Bryan Bell: “Another trick I’ve been employing is to sharpen the center parts of the icon, but leaving the edge unsharpened. It’s easy to do in PhotoShop by slightly shrinking your selection mask, then feather its edge by 1 pixel, leaving the edges untouched by the sharpen filter reduces the jagged edge effect that makes the icon look unnatural.”
Booq’s washed denim 4G iPod case. This would be doubly hip if the bottom looked like a pegged pant leg.
MSN Spaces blog service. How did I miss the announcement about this one? More importantly, why do I even care I missed any announcement at all? Looks like they’re off to an excellent start too, as reported by Melissa Della.
This news is a bit old at this point, but Adobe’s release of Bickham Script Pro is even more stunning than Zapfino. Many of the lowercase letters have an astounding 20-30 alternate forms, with likely the same auto-assistance from OpenType features.
There’s only one time FedEx has ever been the wrong answer. And it has Jennings written all over it.
Linotype’s release of the new Zapfino Extra Pro is stunning. When used in layout applications that support OpenType (e.g. InDesign CS, Illustrator CS), a complex system of contextual substitutions embedded in the font automatically chooses different variants of each character as you type. Slick.
Veer: Hiring. End of story.
Bryan Bell further cultivates his icon prowess with a lovely new icon for iDive.
A Doctor and a Pimp. “Yo man, you’re a pretty cool doctor. Do you know how to take out bullets? Yo, ’cuz sometimes me and my boys get shot and we can’t be coming into the hospital, if you know what I mean.”
Absolutely stunning shots of the Northern Lights at Robert Postma’s Distant Horizons. And he works as a nurse practitioner, no less. Various unmatted and matted sizes available for purchase. Via Andy.
Sexy Fresh Design. Fresh. Not from concentrate. Be sure to check Play > Photos for stock photo freebies. Via Styleboost.
Forty Media’s take on web design trends in 2005. Funny thing is, I just received an email from reader Matt asking if wicked worn was still in style. I’m not sure I know the answer to that just yet, as I’ve been wondering the same of late…
Andy’s Christmas Card Confab.
Society founder gets Gmail invite. Fails to realize millions of others did too. Writes press release.
Veerle’s Desk Grab Confab.
The Graphic Stylings of Ken Jennings. Speak Up documents how Jennings scribbled his way to success.
Dan says he’s joined a dodgeball league. Fun abounds, he reports.
Jeopardy’s Ken Jennings finally loses tonight (Nov 30).
American Express card holder? Snag one of nine brand spankin’ new BMW Z4s on Nov 29, Dec 13, & Dec 20 for a mere $5,000. Full details and other discounted items here.
Initial cap, drop cap, decorative cap… What’s the diff? Explained at Typophile.
Mindflood.com. “Smart, in your face and a retro pop visual delight.” –Netdiver
Plug for SXSW 2005: Tomorrow (Nov 19) is the early-bird deadline. Register now and save big dollar (the Interactive pass is just $195). There’s an all-star lineup of speakers, even a couple from Homestarrunner. And get your souvenir bag designs in by Dec 17.
“If I had a goal for the future it might be that next time I come up with an idea for the web, it might be nice if it brought my family some dough. My more successful efforts seem to have benefited the community at large without lining my pocket. That was okay with me then, but now I have a kid.” iStockphoto interviews Zeldman.
Need vignettes to complement that next layout? Try the Nat Vignette font family.
AmadeoDecada.com. Plenty here to write home about. Check the slick Men’s and Women’s menus in the Catalog section.
I hijacked Todd Dominey’s Blogger template over the weekend to produce a quick redesign for Suzanne’s site, buying time until I can offer a full redesign. Atom feed also now available.
The Jones Soda Co. Holiday Pack includes such best-sellers as Turkey & Gravy Soda, Mashed Potato & Butter Soda, and Fruitcake Soda.
“Don’t bother reading [Icon Magazine] if you want to find the very latest news on product design and architecture. Our lead times are way too long.” (And the fact that they use a Mac IE browser shot at the top of the article only pads the irony of the piece.)
The pig hath flown: No tables and (almost) XHTML 1.0 Strict validation in the new MSN search (beta).
Speak Up: A Career in Graphic Design - in Three Acts.
The Worn, er, The Work and the Glory. I’ll take a wild guess and assume this one was done by the uber phenomenal Jared Kroff, master mind behind other local film sites here in Utah. Via Kim.
Veer’s aluminum portfolio case. Someone please give me an excuse to buy 2 image CDs. Right now.
Stylegala v.02. V2 includes 1024px layout, contributed news, and plenty o’ style.
Positype font contest: Name that font and win fame and glory in the form of threads and type.
Firefox extension: Search Status. This is brilliant. Slap a Google PageRank and Alexa popularity down in the status bar. Via Blake.
The Toastabag. Why? Because you can.
Photo fade-ins sans Flash. Cross-browser, accessible JavaScript that even includes a “pre-loader.” In action: Couloir.org and Jasongraphix.
Harvard: The Hidden Cost of Buying Information. Information Overload, say hello to Information Overweight.
Troll through the Speak Up Logo Smackdown archives and you just might find a few notables, like the The Blair Witch Project and a few from Coca Cola.
A perfectly balanced mix of mark and type: The Fireplace Depot.
How do I love thee, Worn? Let me count the ways.
2 recommended buys from Josh Rouse (iTMS): Sunshine and Rise.
CSS property compatibility chart. A must bookmark. Via Mike.
Still Premium, But a Bit Dusty
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