QuickBits Archives

APNG

Open source animated PNG project. Currently works in Firefox, Opera, KSquirrel and XnView (a browser I’ve never heard of until now).

Vertigo Theme

A rather thorough Tumblr theme based on Saul Bass’ movie title work (via @weightshift)

Anonymous Pro

Mark Simonson’s new version of a “fixed width sans designed especially for coders”. Haven’t given it a spin yet, but it looks/sounds excellent.

Perch CMS

Created by Drew McLellan and Rachel Andrew, “Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS.” It looks like a fantastic solution, and be sure to visit a short page like this one, and refresh. Watch the trees and birdy grow and slide into place. That’s craftsmanship.

Apple’s Navigation bar using only CSS

John Allsopp and Satoshi Kikuchi tackle recreating apple.com’s nav bar using CSS3 and no images. It also acts as a great primer for the vendor-specific CSS3 properties that work in some browsers today, and the power and flexibility of embracing progressive enrichment.

DigitalSoaps

Realistic renditions of video game controllers (and other stuff) in bars of high-quality soap. Why not.

10 Great Free Fonts for @font-face embedding

Ran across this post from almost a year ago, while doing a little research for a fictional case study. Not a bad little list of fonts that specifically allow @font-face embedding. Surely, there are many more.

Neutraface Slab

New slab serif version of House Industries’ Neutraface. Very nice, and I’m digging the addition of the Stencil style.

Owltastic

Deputy Designer here at SimpleBits, Meagan Fisher, rebrands/redesigns her personal site. It’s beautiful… and incredibly owly (that’s a good thing). Congrats Meagan!

Think Brownstone's AEA Seattle sketches

I especially like the macro/angle framing.

The White House on Flickr

The official photostream of The White House is fascinating as well as encouraging. I also love that the first photo set is titled, “Delivering on Change”.

Zeldman's book for free

Jeffrey Zeldman releases his 2001 book, Taking Your Talent to the Web, as a free downloadable PDF. The book is, “…for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding.”

Tweetie for Mac

I’ve been loving atebits’ Twitter iPhone client, Tweetie, for a few weeks now (late adopter). On Monday they’re releasing a desktop version, and from the preview video it certainly looks excellent (and unique).

What's Coming in Firefox 3.5

Turns out, Firefox 3.1 is being renamed 3.5 due to all the new stuff that’s being added. I’m particularly excited about this release for further progressive enrichment ammo, namely: @font-face for downloadable fonts, -moz-box-shadow and text-shadow (since Webkit has those as well) and more.

Fieldrunners

I’m not usually a big fan of violent video games, but Fieldrunners is a fun, incredibly addictive iPhone game. Worth your dime.

Ampersand Book

Andy Mangold’s beautiful custom leather-bound accordian fold style book. He explains, “I went through all 900+ fonts on my computer and selected what I find to be some of the most interesting, beautiful, or historically significant ampersands” (via).

Never have soggy cereal again

The Eatmecrunchy bowl (unfortunate name) features a shelf that covers 70% of the base, separating cereal from milk. I might buy one if they threw in a free ShamWow.

Exploded 2600 Tee

Surprised it took this long for someone to do this one (via).

The Dieline

A nifty site that’s “… dedicated to the progress of the package design industry and its practitioners, students and enthusiasts.”

Ignacio Macri

Argentinean identity and logo designer. Excellently solid stuff.

Looking into HTML5

Even without the audio, Christopher Schmitt’s presentation slides give a nice overview of HTML5 with comparison code examples, etc.

Deluxe carrying case for an ampersand

A serious drawing by Marc Johns.

jQuery Sparklines

“This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript.”

Fluid Grids

Ethan Marcotte combines the rigidity of grid-based design with the fluidity of the web. Eureka moments ensue. A must read for anyone building flexible systems.

Rubik's Cube Salt and Pepper Shakers

Ingenious use for authentic Rubik’s Cubes, where “… only the top layer of the cube rotates to operate the mill and grind the salt & pepper”. What we need now are Missing Link napkin holders.

Inconsolata

A free monospace font alternative inspired by Consolas, Avenir, Franklin Gothic and others (via @beep).

A free font success story

Richard Rutter demonstrates how @font-face can work today, using the beautiful (and free) Museo typeface.

Defender of the Favicon

A tiny version of the classic game, Defender, whereby: “the idea was to push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16 × 16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.” (via)

Horror Vacui

Shaun Inman is making games. In 8-bit style. We like this.

String Development

Speaking of guitar strings, D’Addario & Company (my longtime favorite string brand) is looking for a Web Applications Developer in Long Island, NY. Could be the perfect opportunity for an axe/code shredder (insert better witty geek/music pun here).

Lorem ipsum for web designers

Handy options in this dummy text generator, including number of words or characters, specifying pixel width, number of paragraphs (with tags), etc.

FoxTab

Although I primarily use Safari, this sure beats a bunch of horizontal tabs. And I’m guessing we’ll eventually see iTunes-style thumbnail browsing in Safari.

Japanese Manhole Covers

I’d noticed how beautifully unique the manhole covers could be while in Tokyo. Turns out they’re quite an art form (via).

The Rise of HTML5

Jeremy Keith’s entry is chockfull of links regarding HTML5. Like it or not, there is some fascinating stuff happening out there in the markup world. Also see Eric Meyer’s write-up of the newly redesigned An Event Apart (also written in HTML5) and John Allsopp’s foward-thinking piece for A List Apart, where he writes about applying semantics to HTML attributes.

iPhone Sketching

Disney artist, Stef Kardos, showing off Brushes, an iPhone sketching app. Be sure to watch the video to see how it’s done. With zooming in and out and various brush weights, the results are pretty amazing.

Understanding Web Design

A wonderfully insightful talk by Jeffrey Zeldman, captured on video at AIGA’s Gain conference this past October.

Brink's Site Map

Quite possibly one of the most useful and well-designed site maps the web has ever seen. Take note, the river of information doth flow.

The Grid System

“The Grid System is an ever-growing resource where graphic designers can learn about grid systems, the golden ratio and baseline grids.” Looks to be a great resource for griddies (did I just coin that?).

Web Directions North

Early bird pricing ends December 10th. See you in Denver?

Ampersand cutting boards

House Industries continues to serve up ampersanded goods. Who knew a maple cutting board could be so stylish?

Rijksoverheid Serif and Sans

A new typeface designed as part of a new brand identity for the Dutch government. Love the sans u, m and n. A shame it probably won’t be available to the public though (via).

New Work: Rogue Amoeba

A redesign by SimpleBits went live last week. Rogue Amoeba creates wonderfully useful audio software for the Mac. And they have a clever name and mascot. Congrats to the RA team for implementing the new design!

Sleeveface

“One or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.” Also see the Sleeveface pool on Flickr.

NPR's Hourly News update

New favorite thing to listen to on the short walk to the office: a bite-sized, 5-minute MP3 of the latest NPR news via their iPhone-friendly mobile site (via).

If Photoshop were real

Probably no color profile issues with this version (via).

Wonderfully candid photos of our next President

Callie Shell followed Barack Obama for much of the last two years, and captured some excellent photos (and micro stories to go along with them). Keep clicking ‘Show More Images’ at the bottom to see them all.

The Mysterious Save For Web Color Shift

Color profiles make my head hurt. Follow these instructions to disable Photoshop’s sneakiness and all will be well. Every time I set up a new machine, I always forget at least one of the steps involved. Bookmarked for the future (via @cliffwegner).

Star Wars origami made from dollar bills

“The most amazing thing about them is that they’re all made from real money — the Falcon alone is made from three individual dollar bills. That’s $497 cheaper than the LEGO version, at least.” (via)

Take On Me: Literal Video Version

“Ever wish songs just sang what was happening in the music video? Well now they do.” (via)

TrackThePack

Simple package tracker that uses Google Maps to show progress (via @greghoyboy).

Wurdle

A few weeks ago, Meagan suggested Wurdle, a simple word puzzle game for the iPhone. It’s now the cause for late night iPhone-swapping battles here between my wife and I. The most consistently addictive game I’ve downloaded from the App Store yet. My only criticism is the logo, which has no bearing on how excellent a game it is.

Cabel Sasser On Wedding Design

I want to get married again after reading this (Kerry: to you, of course). Pixel art letterpress invitations? Brilliant.

Ampertees

A variety of hand-screened, web font ampersands on t-shirts. We love this, naturally.

Double ended red/white wine glasses

For those indecisive evenings. Or perhaps when surf-n-turf is on the menu?

Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions

Sadly missing is -ms-border-radius.

Museo Sans

I’m dumbfounded that type designer Jos Buivenga gives his fonts away for free. But he’s done it again, with a sans serif version of Museo (a wonderful, also free, semi-slab serif).

A better way to RFP

Airbag Industries has improved the RFP receiving process with a smart new app. Web craftspeople of the world should take notice.

Microformats Moo Stickers

Brian Suda has tapped the Moo API, allowing anyone to order their own pre-designed microformats sticker book.

jParallax

A jQuery plugin that “… turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.”

Automatic Awesompersands

Patrick Haney kicks it up a notch, automating awesompersands using jQuery. A few other worthy points are brought up as well: unbolding to get the proper italic version, and Jeremy Keith’s clever suggestion that an ampersand is in fact an abbreviation (of the Latin et), therefore we could use <abbr> instead of <span>. Jeffrey Veen later added (at the An Event Apart San Francisco speakers dinner) that the lang="la" attribute should be added. I feel a SimpleQuiz resurrection coming on!

Web Directions: East 08

I’ll be heading to Tokyo this November for latest installment of the Web Directions conference series, along with Eric Meyer, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Veen. The site for the show has just launched, featuring super mega turbo lifestream speaker pages.

iPhone 3G Suede Jacket

Minimalist case, boasting “low profile slides easily into your shirt or jeans pocket”. That’s key. Plus, anything I’ve purchased from Waterfield has been top notch.

The tee I'm wearing today

Yep, another ampersand. Although the print on mine is light grey instead of black.

Silverback

Getting caught up on things that happened over the last month or so, Clearleft has launched Silverback, their “spontaneous, unobtrusive usability testing software for designers and developers”. A desktop application that captures screen and participant activity right from your Mac, then exports all of this to a Quicktime movie. Looks fantastic, and I’m looking forward to using it on some real work in the future.

House Industries ampersand tees

For the ampersand lover in your life. See also: mousepads and cast metal sculptures.

BusinessWeek on the Sphere redesign

I chatted with a friendly writer over at BusinessWeek recently, and the result is a little article focused on the redesign of Sphere. Part of a larger Web Design Special Report published last week.

Huge Job

I recall being impressed with Huge Inc.’s redesign of IKEA (em-based layout, no less). They have an intense client list, and recently listed an open Web Architect position. Huge opportunity?

This Ain’t No Disco

Need workplace design inspiration? TAND showcases the “inner sanctum” of some creatively-executed spaces.

Ceramic Atari joystick candle holder

Trying to justify the £50 price tag, and failing.

Cork coffee cup sleeves

Not only do they look cool, they allegedly insulate better than paper sleeves, and are made from renewable cork bark, which is harvested without cutting the tree down.

1% for the Planet's new blog

The first post offers this great news: “Our members can now be found in 27 different countries and we’re channeling over $12 million annually to a myriad of environmental groups (more than 1,500) around the world.”

Wordle

“Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.” Here’s what Wordle did to an old article I wrote way-back-when.

NetNewsWire for iPhone

Great news. My favorite RSS reader will be released as a native iPhone application. Hopefully around the same time the app store launches (via)

Abbreviation Venn

Tweet about an internal debate on how to correctly mark up “ABBA”, semantically, and good things happen.

dConstruct 2008

Brighton, England’s affordable one-day conference is back. Great lineup. I also particularly dig their idea of mashable badges (add your own background image) to help promote the event.

Tetris ice cube trays

Play fast, before they melt.

SOFA

Love the simplicity and execution of this site design (makers of the recently-released Versions SVN client for the Mac).

iPhone Sun?

Just last week, I was complaining to my wife about the lack of progress regarding solar-powered electronics. It’s as if the inventors of the solar-powered calculator (and watch) gave up after those world-changing technological wonders. I have similar questions about the next potato-powered device, but that’s neither here nor there. In all seriousness though, being able to go outside to rejuvenate a dying iPhone or iPod would make the world a better place (via).

Pretzel type

Delicious (via).

Pork and Beans

Weezer’s brand new internet meme-tastic video is a great one. (via).

Cubescape

Brilliant application for creating isometric pixel illustrations by Cameron Adams. Be sure to watch the construction animation on some of the Popular pictures. There goes the day.

Shipwrecks & Sea Disasters

Great collection of shipwreck photos from around the world.

XHTML + CSS template for Nutrition Facts

I just had to mark-up and style a “Nutrition Facts” label that matches the layout found on food packaging here in the US. Jonathon’s templates just saved me a few hours work.

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

A new book by Luke Wroblewski published by Rosenfeld Media. Highly recommended.

Designing for the Social Web

Josh Porter wrote a book about “social design” and it’s out and available now from New Riders. If you’ve ever heard Josh speak or read his blog, you know this will be a great one. Congrats to Mr. Porter!

Koloroo for iPod

“Simply select your base color by moving your thumb over the Click Wheel. A suggested color scheme is automatically displayed in the four corners. To match the color of an object, simply hold your iPod next to it like a paint swatch.” I’m going to assume an iPhone version is also in the works.

Boston Web Studio

Congratulations to fellow Salem resident, Markup & Style Society member and all-around good guy, Marc Amos on leaving his day job to go out on his own (today!). Cheers to more independent web craftspeople in the Witch City.

Beck's 8-Bit packaging

And speaking of retro 8-bittyness, loving this experimental packaging (via someone on Twitter who I failed to note while bookmarking).

Rainbow Tennis: red, blue, yellow, green, 3 more colors!

Photoshopp’d Atari 2600 game box covers of yesteryear.

Cooking With Rockstars

Jennifer Niederst Robbins (author of Web Design in a Nutshell) interviews super-cool music people (Apples in Stereo, Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, Jack Black, etc.) about cooking and food.

Authentic Jobs Affiliates Program

Just weeks after SimpleBits became a partner, Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs rolls out some cool new developments. Earn $75 per full-time listing and $25 per freelance listing when you become an AJ affiliate. Also announced today is a brand-spanking new Authenic Jobs API for job-related mashup goodness.

Creatively carved food

Photos of various foods carved into people, animals and other objects (site is in Russian).

Coda Confidential

Interesting presentation by Panic’s Cabel Sasser. Covers the history of the company as well as interface design challenges while creating Coda, their web development app.

New UK coin designs

The Shield of the Royal Arms, cleverly split among six coins. Beautiful.

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface

A four part article series from Cameron Moll, filled with bulletproofness and scores of resources for creating flexible designs.

On Being a Web Craftsman

Josh Porter’s write-up and slides from the latest Markup & Style Society mini conference earlier this month, in Boston. Josh’s talk was a great one, filled with great quotes and thoughts on web craftsmanship.

Wine label design

A tear-off tab to easily remember the bottle you’re drinking. Excellent idea (via).

Color palettes from photos generator

I’ve often talked about the method of extracting color palettes from photos of nature (see Luke Wroblewski’s article from 2003). Here’s a tool that takes any image URL, and creates the palette for you instantly (via Rowan Simpson).

Webstock Recordings

Recordings from last month’s Webstock conference in Wellington, New Zealand have been posted. Every talk is available as a video steam, MP4 video and MP3 audio.

Melpo Mene

It’s not everyday you hear great music during a Volvo commercial, but Sweden’s Melpo Mene has a sweet, Elliott Smith vibe that convinced me to hunt them down via a Google search. Looking forward to that new album that will hopefully be available in the US.

ROFLCon

From their About section: “Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.” Tempting.

Parking Garage: Beyond the Limit

Mark Odlum on reaching for the summit: “It’s the tallest garage in this town, and not many people have done it and made it. I decided I was going to do it.”

iPod and phone recycling

Apple will send you a pre-paid label or mailer to recycle your old iPods and mobile phones (any brand).

Hex silliness

Andrew Huff realizes that l33tspeak could be applied to hex values and shares the results (via).

Money Celebrities Pictures Gallery

The top 26 photos from a contest combining celebrities with the faces on money from around the world (via).

Archer

Everyone’s buzzing about Archer, the new colorful slab serif typeface from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Liz Danzico made beautiful use of it in her presentation at Webstock last week, and I have to say after seeing it on a 10-foot screen — it’s a keeper. Love the “c”.

CSS Type Set

Fancy interface for visually setting hypertext. Could be helpful for those first learning the CSS properties we have at our disposal.

Silverback

Ingenious use of layered, alpha-transparent PNGs (resize your browser window). Not to mention a wonderful Jon Hicks illustrated gorilla as well. Who cares what the app does? I kid.

Rainbow Dividers!

For future reference. Be sure to refresh a few times for maximum enjoyment, but please avoid visiting this link if you suffer from Photosensitive Epilepsy (via).

Instapaper

It’s like delicious, but simpler. Basically a quick way to save bookmarks for future reading. I’ve been using delicious to save things immediately, re-posting a select few here as QuickBits — but Instapaper might be an easier way to handle that.

Use CSS3 to hide an image behind text

Erik Kastner whips up a neat little demo that hides an image behind text. The image is revealed by using the ::selection pseudo-element found in CSS3. You’ll need Firefox or Safari to see the magic.

Passage

A seemingly simple little 5-minute video game by Jason Rohrer. You have to play first, then read about it (via).

Lego Mario

I think it’s the flute soundtrack that makes this a winner (via).

Barcode Yourself

Create a unique barcode by entering personal information about yourself.

Feet First floor mats

Reproductions of popular city manhole covers. Made from 100% recycled truck tires. Wants (I have an odd obsession with floor mats).

IE8 passes ACID2 test

Dean Hachamovitch: “I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode.” Now that is excellent news.

Elastic IKEA

Patrick has just tipped me off that IKEA impresses us with an elastic (em-based) layout. Try resizing text if you’re not sure what that means. Nicely done! Now if I could just figure out where this extra hex nut goes… Update: Naz Hamid tells us (via Twitter) that HUGE was behind the redesign.

Overheard.it

Neat little Twitter app that collects tweets prefaced with “overheard” or “OH:” from Sidebar Creative.

CommandShift3

It’s like Hot or Not for web design. You may also find some familiar faces as easter eggs when submitting a new site.

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

Inquiring minds want to know.

The Rissington Podcast

A beautiful design that gets even better when you resize your browser window (check the layered footer!).

A Christmas Story House

The house from the classic movie, restored and open for tours in Cleveland. Complete with BB gun range in the backyard and leg lamp giftshop.

Blue Beanie Day

“On Monday, November 26, 2007, don your blue beanie to show your support for web standards and accessibility.” But hasn’t that war been won? Not really. Just look around the web in general. Plenty of room for improvement.

The rise of the micro-app

Adam Keys gets it: “… go out, build the sucker and figure out how to have fun with it.”

Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?

Josh Porter: “The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.” More really interesting thoughts on what great design on the web means.

Understanding Web Design

Zeldman: “The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.” This entire article should be printed on a t-shirt and worn at every design shop or web depatrment worldwide.

MobileSafari ViewS

Shaun Inman iterates on Anthony Piraino’s aforementioned iSource, adding the ability to create a JavaScript bookmark for push-button source viewing in MobileSafari. Excellente.

Coffee Drinks Illustrated

Fellow Bostonian and Lightbox creator, Lokesh Dhakar, beautifully illustrates all those fancy coffee drinks. See also his equally educational baseball pitches illustrations. Great site design to boot.

Favikon

Amazingly great tool that will crop and/or resize your uploaded image and turn into a favicon. As someone who has touted the importance of a good favicon in the past — and how cropping can sometimes be the answer — I think this is pretty darn cool.

Sleevage

A promising blog covering album cover design (via).

Content AND Presentation

Mark Boulton: “… the medium of social interaction is language, and the way language is shaped and looks is typographic design.” Interesting thoughts on how the separation of content from presentation can leave typography out of the mix.

How-To: Get Rid of the Glass Dock in Leopard

Historically, I don’t customize much of the OS and Apple’s defaults are typically right on the mark for me. Not the case with the new Dock. My biggest complaint is the extra space required for the reflections. Take those away and you can shrink the Dock back down while still being able to see things clearly.

The Superest

A continually running character illustration battle drawn by Kevin Cornell, Matthew Sutter and guests.

Web Directions North '08

Canada’s finest web conference has been announced once again. I had an absolute blast last year, and am sad to miss it this time around (the lineup looks fantastic). The Vancouver/Whistler area is beautiful, and the conference/ski combo makes for quite a trip.

MRI

A browser bookmarklet for web developers that allows you to test CSS selectors on any given page. The “suggest selectors” option seems particularly useful for troubleshooting inheritance issues.

The Marble of Doom

“… the OS X spinning wait cursor is well-known and well-dreaded by Mac users around the world.” Enter time wasted in OS X and commiserate with other other beachball (what I’ve always called it) watchers worldwide.

The Human Icon T-Shirt

Please call my agent for more t-shirt modeling requests. Cottyn’s brand new tee is now available! And dare I say it’s the most comfortable shirt I’ve ever worn. Don’t even try to hack it this time, Mr. Rubin.

U-Haul's ems

Had to rent a van today to pick up a new/used dining room set. What I was surprised to find, is a fine example of an elastic (em-based) layout on a large corporate site.

Pixel It poster

“… consists of two layers of paper. Cuts on the white outer layer allow the user to fold parts out and therefore create a ‘Pixel-Structure’ by showing the coloured layer underneath.” Does want (via unstoppabot).

DeVillain Centerfold

The world’s first folding electric guitar. Crazy.

Radiohead: In Rainbows

Their new labeless album due out October 10^th. If buying the digital download, you decide how much to pay for it. The music industry watches (or continues to keep blinders on).

My Star Wars Collection

Josh Budich created little pixel illustrations of his enormously huge Star Wars action figure collection. Jaw hits floor (via).

Webstock 2008

“5 full-on days. 9 hands-on workshops. 19 kick-ass speakers. 24 must-see presentations. Truckloads of design, development, user experience, web standards, content, community, innovation & inspiration.” It’d be an understatement to say I’m excited to visit (and present in) New Zealand next year. See you there?

Note to self: quit Parallels next time you want to watch and/or encode a DVD in OS X. Otherwise, the newly-inserted DVD is unrecognized by either OS, and the eject button is useless. You’re stuck. Once Parallels is shut down, the DVD shows up on the Desktop as usual. Yay.

:-) turns 25 tomorrow

I’d be more interested in when the beer c(~) emoticon was invented, and by whom.

Lake Michigan

Cannot wait for the new Rogue Wave album due out next week.

Dockables

Add clickable OS X system events to the dock. (via)

A Brief Message

Design opinions expressed in 200 words or less. A new venture from Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico. Short and sweet rules the web.

There are no social networks

Cameron Adams: “If you don’t want to be part of the system, if you don’t want to play nice with others, if you think that you can be my social network, then you’re seriously mistaken.”

Airbag's guide to properly stealing design

Greg Storey doth speaks the truth: “There are no circumstances that will ever make it a good idea to link to the site you stole the design from … It’s how you’re going to be caught”.

Regrets: Hobbies

Jim Coudal showed this film (by Steve Delahoyde) at An Event Apart Chicago as part of his hilarious and inspiring talk. My sides are still hurting (and it hits close to home).

The Markup & Style Society (meetup #2)

Bostonians, join Mr. Marcotte and I for a second installment of informal beers and conversation on September 26th. And do Let us know if you can make it — we’d love to see you there.

Eric Meyer's CSS Sculptor

A new CSS layout creator for Dreamweaver, whereby Mr. Meyer does the hard work for you. Also, best animated header graphic in the history of animated header graphics.

Heima

What looks to be an amazing tour film by Iceland’s own Sigur Rós. (via)

Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme

In all of it’s circa System 6 glory. The week after I bought my monochrome Mac Classic II, the Color Classic came out. And so started the cruel cycle of Apple product releases vs. my purchase dates. This beautiful theme helps dry my tears a bit (via).

What crisis?

Jeffrey Zeldman on the W3C: “But a glacial pace isn’t all bad, especially if you’re driving off a cliff (which I gather we are). Driving off a cliff at a glacial pace affords you the luxury to turn around. I loves me some glacial pace.”

Unstoppable Robot Ninja

The beautiful new home of Mr. Ethan Marcotte. I really hope the robot’s eyes blink on the t-shirt, too. Wait, there will be a t-shirt, right?

Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards

Jessie Scanlon’s Business Week article profiling Zeldman and his giant impact on the web.

Gary Vaynerchuk on Conan O'Brien tonight

Gary Vaynerchuk of Cork’d and Wine Library TV fame, will be a guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien tonight. How cool is that? DVR set. Update: Gary was hilarious and had Conan eating grass, dirt and rocks.

XRAY

An ingenious bookmarklet from Westciv that exposes the box model for any element on the current page. Works with Safari and Mozilla browsers.

Type the sky

A photographic alphabet created by buildings and sky (via).

The Small Stakes posters

Beautiful silk screened music posters by Jason Munn.

Bokardo Design

Fellow North Shore Bay Stater and social design whiz, Josh Porter, has announced the launch of his new company. Congrats!

Better Know A Speaker

A little interview with the fine folks of An Event Apart, where I’ll be speaking again in Chicago next month.

Gary Vaynerchuk featured in Time magazine

Totally Uncorked by Joel Stein: “I want to drink whites at room temperature so I can really taste them, and hell, yes, I want to get my mom to try something other than Yellow Tail, and goddam, I do want to break up these stupid cliques of Pinot Grigio chicks and Pinot Noir snobs and Chardonnay old ladies.”

Color Inspiration from the Masters of Painting

An article on pulling color palettes from famous paintings.

12 years of zeldman.com

Zeldman.com turned 12 last month (holy cow, congrats!) and Jeffrey posting retrospective “best of”s featuring past Daily Report gems — still in their original clothes.

dConstruct 2007: User Experience Design Conference

September 7th in Brighton, England. Great lineup and great site for the event as well. Love the clickable timeline switcher at the top that dynamically takes you from wireframe through final design.

Distinguished Characters: Modern classics of type design

Profiling type designers Matthew Carter, Zuzana Licko, Sumner Stone and Gerard Unger. The MyFonts email newsletters consistently have great type info, interviews with designers, etc. Recommended for discovering new (and old) type.

Wine for the Masses, Courtesy of the 'Average Guy'

A nice profile of the new Cork’d commander-in-chief, Gary Vaynerchunk, over at ABC News.

Building Community Focused Web Apps with Rails

I’m hearing Dan Benjamin gave a great presentation at RailsConf last week in Portland, where he talked about building Cork’d. The slides are up in PDF and Keynote format (featuring excellent movie screenshots, I might add).

An Event Apart Chicago opens its doors

“Tickets are now available for An Event Apart Chicago, August 27–28, 2007, at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. It’s two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration from … amazing thought leaders and artists.” See you there I hope?

The Human Icon T-Shirt

Ryan Sims grabs a couple Sharpies and creates “… my human icon shirt. So people will stop thieving my torso.” Hilariousness! We’ll see if it works.

Halvorsen

Recently found and purchased. Possibly for an upcoming project.

The Web Design Survey, 2007

A List Apart asks: “People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?” The answers will surely be interesting and highly valuable — if you take the survey. Yes, you.

Long s

For thoſe like myſelf, who thought otherwiſe: “The long ‘s’ (ſ) is subject to confusion with the minuscule ‘f’, sometimes even having an ‘f’-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only.” Thank you, Joe!

Meloriac

“… a pseudo-retro, unicase display font. An obvious tribute to Futura Ultra-Mega-Freakin’-Black and Avant Garde Heavy Heavy Heavy Heavy; Meloriac is ideal for tight headlines and logos. Squish! When we say tight kerning, we mean disco-slacks-tight 1970s kerning.”

Let’s say you were in the market for a label printer. And let’s also say you’re on a Mac. Don’t bother with Brother. Get the Dymo that costs a little bit more, but doesn’t require a driver that never ends up working (when’s the last time you needed to install a driver on a Mac?) and that comes with software that works like you’d expect label printer software to work (hello terrible Windows 3.1 port!).

That’s all for now. Label on.

SimpleFools

A Flickr pool of yesterday’s April Fool’s logo hijinx. I’m still chuckling over each and every one of these. Bravo, folks!

Something tells me my legal team is going to be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very (Update: very very) busy tonight. Note to self: get a legal team!

I probably missed some (Lauren Smith has a comprehensive list here), but I love you all. Hilarious!

Hello Chalkwork

Dave Shea releases a beautiful set of stock icons.

Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas

I only caught the first half of Dan Saffer’s presentation due to our panel directly following it, but what I heard was a really interesting comparison to Vegas and user experience.

Hivelogic T-Shirt

Featuring the newly-introduced (and SimpleBits-designed) logo, which also “helps reduce the damaging effects of lower temperatures on beings without an exoskeleton, such as reptiles and humans.”

Virb

Boston’s own Virb goes live today. MySpace weeps. But seriously, congrats to the team — with a special shout-out to Ryan Sims who knocked one out of the (Fenway) park with the design. We haven’t seen a community/social/media hub as cleanly organized and beautifully crafted as this.

Five Principles to Design By

Joshua Porter: “In a great irony of the world, bad design is much easier to see than good design. It raps us on the head like a bully. Because of its success, great design is often invisible.” I had just typed up a presentation slide titled “Great Typography is Invisible”. Lots of head-nodding throughout Josh’s post.

Where is Your Startup? Does it Matter?

I’ll be sharing a panel with Brian Oberkirch next week at SXSW. We’ll be talking about ValleySpeak for the Rest of Us: Developing Apps Outside of InternetVille AKA: how location might play into buidling web apps these days. Looking forward to it (and the return to Austin as well).

Where Our Standards Went Wrong

“I found that approximately fifteen percent of my time was spent mired in invalid code.” Ethan Marcotte on validation and web standards at A List Apart.

Synchronized Fangs

The result of browsing a search for “dog” on Flickr to amuse the Little One while checking email.

How to Make Square Corners with CSS

“Below is our coveted 84 step process for creating beautiful square corners. Follow our lead and you’ll soon be basking in splendid perpendicular glory.” Via Twitter.

Planet Microformats

A giant master feed of anything and everything tagged with “microformats” from Brian Suda.

Happy Cog relaunches

Beautiful redesign unveiled today with new structure, new look, new words, new semantics, etc.

Stikkit API

Values of n opens the back door to Stikkit. Surely there’s some really cool stuff to come out of this.

Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X

A major update to Dan Benjamin’s soup-to-nuts tutorial. If you want to run Rails on your Mac, go read this now.

Brusheezy

Rate and download free custom Photoshop brushes and patterns. Looks to be recently launched, but promising.

Mint 2: The Freshmaker

Shaun Inman releases a big update to his popular and invaluable stats tool. There’s also a fresh coat of paint on his personal site. Bravo!

Fishing With Sandy

Jack Handey: “Dexterous as he is, he has broken about seven or eight of my fly rods … When I got it back from Sandy, he had tried to tape it back together with a piece of black electrical tape. The tape didn’t hold, but just making the gesture was so Sandy.”

BookCrossing

Mark a book you’ve read with an ID number, leave it in a public place, then watch others pick it up, read it and log journal entries about it. A bit like Where’s George?, but for books (and less illegal!).

@media 2007

The tri-continental web conference site goes live, in a trippy, “Magical Mystery Tour”-esque design.

Bulletproof Ajax

A new book by Jeremy Keith for front-end developers. I couldn’t think of a better author to carry on the “bulletproof” adjective to another aspect of web development. Look for it next month.

The Office: The Best of Andy Bernard

Well, it is Friday after all.

AEA Boston Registration is open!

There’s an early-bird discount through February 26, but SimpleBits readers can save an additional $50 by entering the following coupon code at checkout: AEACEDE. A full schedule of the kick-ass two-day event has also been posted. I certainly hope to see you there.

Max Fischer: Official Uniform T-Shirt

“Inspired and modeled after the attire worn at Rushmore Academy, this full-print t-shirt features a collared shirt, loosened tie, and navy velvet jacket wrapped into one easy-to-wear piece. To top it off, we are including two very special pins that will add the final flair to your ensemble (and truly need no explanation).” Brilliant. (via)

Hivelogic podcast

Dan Benjamin interviews Daring Fireball’s John Gruber about what we might see from Apple at next week’s MacWorld 2007.

Röntgenschall

Setting out to be the first band in history to tour online. Also loved this in the footer: “It’s private, non-profit and supernaturally beautiful.” (via)

Some Cork'd updates

Buddy icons (finally!) and improved buddy search. Get on over there and upload away, my fellow wine fans.

Operator

A new Firefox plugin that does some very cool stuff by extracting microformats, then using that information on various sites and applications.

DS Buttons

Wear your desire to battle strangers on your Nintendo DS Lite, in button form. I just received a sample pack of these little guys, and I must say they are the bomb (oh wait, I still don’t have a DS Lite though. Oopsie).

Coming soon from Mark Simonson

Three new fonts inspired by the hand-lettered titles in 1940s films.

Firebug 1.0 Beta Screencast

Seeing is believing. Firebug looks to be an incredibly handy tool for web developers. (via)

I just read a really interesting blog post on color theory from the perspective of a former Hanna-Barbera background painter by the name of Art Lozzi. Examples of his work on the Yogi Bear cartoon are used to explain his tips on using color via the tools of the time: namely brushes, sponges, chalk, etc. I found the bit about a main background color (he chose “salmon” because Yogi looked good on it) peeking through other layers particularly interesting:

You can see the peach sky in the little holes in the hills where the sponge didn’t paint. This gives the effect of mixing the main BG color with the other colors in the BG and it ties them all into one harmonious color scheme.

This sort of “layering” to create a unified theme is certainly made easier these days with Photoshop, etc. (as pointed out in the Drawn! post that led me to this). Great stuff.

Woodpixel

Create your own pixel art using wooden blocks. (via)

I’m getting a kick out of following referrer links to this site that describe the recent unstyling of SimpleBits as shocking, lazy, unprofessional, disappointing or all of the above. Not to worry — this was meant to be a very temporary excercise, and one that’ll be over in probably just a day or two. But I have to say, it’s been fun — and it’s spreading!

eboy's FooBar poster

Spot the web logos (including Rollyo!). There is already one of these currently en route to SimpleBits HQ. (via)

Dave's lunch

But specifically, the beer (Blanche du Chambly) — a really great beer I also tried once in Quebec City. Mmm.

I’m tearing things apart around here in order to put them back together again. This site will look terrible for awhile, but it’s the only way. Eventually, there’ll be something brand new to see — but it requires some heavy lifting in terms of templates.

Sometimes the only way to get something done is to just take a leap.

Happy Cog Studios: About us

Happy Cog grows, and strategically partners with bits of the simple variety.

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design

A peek inside Andy Clarke’s new book. Looks absolutely fantastic.

Newly Supported CSS Selectors in IE7

Who put the child and adjacent sibling combinators in my Internet Explorer?

A tip for Pearl owners that are having trouble deleting mail from both the device and your mailbox (in my case, an IMAP account): go to options and permanently set the removal to both “handheld and mailbox” (it’ll prompt you otherwise on each delete). Setting this fixed the issue for me, and now I can trash spam while I wait in line at the post office. Woo.

I’ve been trying out (and thoroughly enjoying) Twitter. Another quick, simple way of creating content, and much of what I love about posting to sites like Flickr, Cork’d and others. The article-based format of title/description is hindering what I write about these days here at SimpleBits. Often I’m putting too much thought and emphasis on each entry — treating an entry like an article, when most of the time it’s a quick thought about a particularly timely subject. But the web moves too fast for me, and a lot of thoughts don’t get published at all. Drafts abandoned. I’m going to experiment with the format here on the Notebook to help me get back into the fine art of crafting a true weblog. We’ll see how it goes.

Bar Code Revolution

Design elements integrated into product barcodes. (via)

Joe Clark Micropatronage

Donate to support Joe while he starts up a research project.

Study: Red wine helps fat mice live longer

Huzzah!

IE7 CSS tweak show and tell

Zeldman asks for your IE7 workarounds. Good thread so far: min-height: 1px; for triggering hasLayout looks to be very promising (and valid!).

How to build Pacman and The Ghost halloween costumes

“A Buddy and I decided to create a large version of pacman and the ghost for our office Halloween party this year”

Web Directions North

Registration is now open, with an early-bird discount.

Can Your Website Be Your API?

Drew McLellan on how semantic markup and microformats may just be all you need. Great topic.

“The Great Salt Lake” video

Great song, cool video from Band of Horses.

Mobile Web Design, the book

Coming soon from Cameron Moll. Awesomeness.

Markup Maker

A neat little tool that takes a simple list of page IDs and converts that into a valid XHTML document.

Airbag on design theft

Great write-up by Greg Storey. Some really interesting (and varied) comments follow. Also see Exhibit A.

Microformats Bookmarklet

Shows an overlay window of all the hCards and hCalendars on the current page. (via)

Cork'd t-shirts ship once again

If you’ve been patiently waiting for a Cork’d t-shirt, we’re happy to announce the new shipment has arrived fresh from the printer.

tools.microformatic.com

Some cool microformats tools from Drew McLellan.

The new JPG Magazine

Relaunched with memberships, more themes and voting.

Highlight Microformats with CSS

Reveal existing microformats on the page with a simple stylesheet. Nice!

Targeting CSS for IE7 only

*+html to the rescue. Helped with the aforementioned vertical centering trickery (while avoiding conditional comments).

Text-Resize Detection

Lawrence Carvalho and Christian Heilmann devise a script that detects font size changes. Nice!

Beginner's guide from a seasoned CSS designer

Nice round-up for those just getting started.

Atari 2600 keychains

Oh, and they actually play real games when plugged into a television. (via)

Toy Logos

The birth of a potentially ongoing art project. Join the fun (if you’re sleep-deprived, yet loving parenthood, like me).

Pageviews are Obsolete

Ev: “There’s a big opportunity (though very tough job) for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of factors.”

The Big Picture on Microformats

John Allsopp’s excellent round-up of what’s happening right now with microformats. See also his Vitamin feature and new blog.

How to charge a client

Picasso on the value of time vs. results.

Flying V Uke

Yes, please. (via)

Ken Knowlton Mosaics

Amazing computer-assisted mosaic portraits.

Vitamin Interview

The unstoppable Ryan Carson interviewed me in London during @media about Cork’d. I answered in a hopefully interesting fashion, oftentimes chuckling for no apparent reason.

TMNT

As Ethan pointed out, it has the old-school black & white comics vibe (one of the only comics I actually enjoyed way back when).

Arcade Daze

Free, 8-bit retro glossiness. (via)

Pixelated Mosaic Edges

Wish I had this tutorial prior to creating my own. By hand and by resizing using “nearest neighbor”.

T-shirt sale

A handful of SimpleBits tees on sale for $10 before printing a new batch. All gone!

Purevolume.com Store

Slick design, cool t-shirts.

Celtics.com seeks budding standardista

In the Boston-area? NBA fan? Intern for the kings of the GAHden.

The (soon to be new?) Iconfactory

A hilarious tale is unfolding in pixels over at The Iconfactory.

Nintendo 64 Kid Goes Crazy

The sweet, fist-pumping victory of getting Nintendo’d.

Learning from Atari

Where JSM takes us down memory lane and assembles perhaps the best photo set in history. Atari fans, brace yourself.

FlipClips

Turn your digital video clips into animated flip books. (via)

Taco Town!

Not too far from reality.

A Love Song to CSS

“Tonight I need your CSS. Coding in the darkness. From now on no more tables nest. You will meet web standards.” Hilarious! (via and the story behind it)

Transcending CSS

The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke. Coming this Fall.

Veerle's CSS links

Was gathering links for a client presentation, and realized I could point everyone here. Great collection of resources.

d.Construct 2006

A one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications. September 8 in Brighton, UK.

Cindy Li's @media notes

She live-blogged much of the conference. Great site design as well!

Wine & Flowers

How Cork’d and Ma.gnolia are talking to each other.

microformats.org turns 1

Wow, 12 months since the launch of microformats.org! And there are t-shirts, of course.

Recent Rebrandings 10

Speak Up rounds up three recent rebrandings: Bazooka, Sprite, and St. Pauli Girl.

Technorati Microformats Search

Search for contacts, events, or reviews published on blogs and other web sites.

Chuck Cunningham syndrome

When a regular character in a television series is removed with little or no explanation and is never referred to again.

Summer Reading

Bulletproof Web Design, the way it was meant to be consumed.

Safari Tidy

Handy plugin that auto-validates markup as you browse. Also extends source view to highlight any errors.

Cork'd Updates

After popping Cork’d a little over a week ago, we’ve be fixing, tweaking and adding cool new features (oh, and t-shirts of course). Get the latest over at the Cork’d Blog.

SlideShowPro Director

Todd Dominey’s new photo adminstration app for SSP. Also loving the redesigned supporting site.

Markup automation in TextMate

Quicktime screencast of some incredibly handy tag automation key commands. As a long-time BBEdit user, I’m testing the waters.

Boo Boo Walker t-shirt

An AT-AT with a lampshade collar. Printed on a t-shirt.

TinkerTool

OS X app that does a lot of preference customization, but worth the download alone for the speeding up of animated sheets (especially in Safari). Via Dan B.

Oddica

Looks to be a hip new t-shirt shop, opening later this month. Great designs, and a generous royalty for artists. Via k10k.

US Postal Stamps Desktops

Stamps are tiny. These are big. Some are a bit busy for a desktop, but old stamps are fascinating.

Is Lost a Repeat?

Incredibly focused and useful. And with RSS feed, of course. Via Mule Design.

Seonna Hong

Wonderful artwork. Tim Biskup is apparently her husband, equally talented. They must fight about what hangs on their walls.

Semplice Pixelfonts

Free pixel fonts. And very nice ones at that. Via wdik.

Start Small

A mini is all you need.

I Invented ... the Apple Logo

What thanks did Rob Janoff get for all his hard work? ‘Not even a holiday card.’

High DPI Web Sites

An interesting read about a proposed future for multi-resolution web design. A topic we’ll be seeing more and more of. Via Veerle.

Kubb

An ancient Swedish lawn game invented by Vikings. I haven’t played yet, but am told it’s fun times.

CD Lamp

Now that my collection has gone digital, this could be an option for all those archived CDs. Via Jeff.

Vitamin

A new resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs brought to you by the fine folks at Carson Systems.

Hivelogic's software setup

Dan Benjamin’s app list. I’m always a fan of posts like this, where you’re sure to find out about a cool app you hadn’t known about before.

Dave's home-roasting process

Another use for that popcorn popper.

Happy Cog redesigns Advertising Age

‘Twas a pleasure working with the Cog on this.

Bill Gates: 'We need microformats'

Yes we do.

Zeldman: Unmixed

“my web will continue to be about good writing and good design”

Essex Image Vault

Prints of rare, historical photos and maps of Essex County and particularly Salem, Mass.

Comments on community

Jeremy Keith has some interesting thoughts on the value (or drawback) of comments.

Johnny Cupcakes

Because, who doesn’t like cupcakes?

Children's album that's actually cool

From Elizabeth Mitchell of the NYC indie rock band, Ida.

Game 6 movie

Weird. I haven’t seen or heard anything about this, even with the well-known cast and painful subject matter. Bill Buckner must be loving this.

Fl.ower.

Behind the scenes of Airbag/Happy Cog’s design of the social bookmarking application Ma.gnolia.

Veerle's blog

Stunning redesign.

Meatball T-Shirt

A red shirt with the word “Meatball” on it. I’m debating whether this is great or just dumb.

Vermonty Python

Coffee liqueur ice cream with a chocolate cookie crumb swirl & fudge cows. A new flavor I can’t wait to try.

distellamap

Atari 2600 cartridge code visualized and turned into art. Where can I get a print? Via wdik.

CSS Mastery

A photo set revealing Andy Budd’s (with Cameron Moll and Simon Collison) new book.

Vertua

The recently launched web design studio of Ethan Marcotte. I’m addicted to the stretchy header.

My Morning Jacket

Eclectic and haunting rock from Louisville, Kentucky. Has been on repeated rotation over here.

Boston-area web job

Work for my old Fast Company boss at EH Publishing. They’re looking for a standards-aware designer/developer to work on their network of sites. A Web Production Manager position is also open.

Variable fixed width layouts

Richard Rutter’s nice little roundup of a few recent implementations. Designer control, but varying width based on screen size. Interesting stuff to watch.

Solio

A portable solar power charger for mobile phones, PDAs and iPods. What a fantastic idea, and it looks like it supports a slew of connector types right out of the box. May have to give this a try. Via CP.

Russ Lieber on the Colbert Report

Please, stop supporting the big corporate kohlrabi farms.

Charting IE7b2

As usual, Mr. Meyer is spot on: don’t panic.

SuperDuper!

Simple app for creating a fully bootable hard drive backup. Love the focus of just one task. Works great. Via Dan B.

Then and now

Found a 19th century photo of the building where the SimpleBits office is located.

Wicked Worn + Bulletproof Liquid

A fluid layout with wicked worn edges by Nils T. Devine.

Mini Slide Navigation

Neat JS hover effect added to the ol’ mini tabs.

Worn type with CSS

A great, simplistic concept, despite a few drawbacks.

Centered Tabs with CSS

I get more emails asking about centered tabs than anything else. Thankfully, Ethan has written up a great tutorial as part of Drew McLellan’s excellent 24 ways advent calendar.

Wine?

An extremely important question to ask.

Treehouse: Hicks/Cederholm conversation

Jon Hicks and I interviewed each other in the latest edition of Treehouse magazine. Hope they do more of these, as it was a lot of fun.

IconBuffet's Free Delivery

Downright brilliant idea of turning free icon packs into virtual trading cards.

Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger

Dan Benjamin walks us through a complete installation of Ruby on Rails — right on your Mac.

Pandora's Box (Model) of CSS Hacks

Great stuff from Tantek on CSS hacks and their storied history.

When I'm 94

In the long run, what’s really going to happen with all of this digital stuff we’re producing?

Saul Bass

Since his AT&T logo was just replaced, a small sampling of Saul’s staggering portfolio — his work is everywhere. Via Design Observer.

WebPatterns and WebSemantics

John Allsopp takes class and id value patterns to the next level. I’m looking forward to PatternQuiz.

The Areas of My Expertise

A book by John Hodgman. I haven’t read it, but he had me cracking up on the Daily Show last night. Ignore the terribly inaccessible site.

Semantics in the wild

John Allsopp’s exploration of common, semantic class and id values. Really interesting to see where developers overlap.

Rogue Wave

In heavy rotation over here. See also: Youth Group.

Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign

Cameron Moll on the art of ‘realigning’ over at A List Apart. Cool concept. Also includes a bonus historical animated GIF of this very site’s realignment.

Neighborhoodies

Customized hooded sweatshirts (and other stuff).

To Hack With It

Eric Meyer on the non-impact that IE7 *may* have on standards-based design. I’ve had the same feeling on this as well: if IE7 is as standards-compliant as FF or Safari, then current hacks would be harmless, and more importantly still needed for IE6.

I Return to the World

You read that Hivelogic is back. You are delighted.

Treehouse

A new PDF magazine devoted to web development. October issue is free, and features a favorable review of Bulletproof Web Design.

Web 2.01 Release Notes

Nick Bradbury says: ‘Web 2.0 isn’t about the latest trend in technology’.

Wired redesign turns 3

Happy birthday to the CSS redesign that, for many (including myself), was the proof that this was possible on large-scale, commercial sites.

Jeremy Keith interview

Aaron Gustafson interviews the Dom Scripting author.

CSS: Specificity Wars

I’m still confused, but damn if that isn’t a brilliant way of explaining. I hope we see more CSS head-scratchers demonstrated with Star Wars figures.

WE05 podcasts

Be at Web Essentials 2005 in Sydney, without being in Sydney. Awesome. Via Veerle.

elfURL

Like TinyURL, but with stats via RSS, delicious tags, rel-tag, etc.

Rollyo

Roll your own search engine. A nifty new site from Dave Pell, with logo and template design by SimpleBits.

Vector Safari chrome for screen grabs

A downloadable Illustrator file, for browser-framed screen shots. Cool.

The Designer Who Made the Mac Smile

Over 9 years old now, but a great article on the legendary Susan Kare.

Cape Pond Ice Luge

Pour liquid into the top and catch at the bottom of the run for perfectly chilled imbibing.

The Odeo Player Widget

The nifty new way to listen to your favorite podcasts.

Google Blog Search

Launched today (featuring two little icons by SimpleBits).

T-shirt shop restocked

SimpleBits and Document t-shirts are once again available in all sizes. I should really set up a separate feed for shirts. T-feed? Feed-shirt?

Swedish Campground

How the unusual symbol used for the menu command key ended up on the Mac. Via Coudal.

Beware of id='tags'

An important discovery to pass along, whereby IE hiccups and coughs at a seemingly innocent attribute value.

The Mystery of Page 196

An unfortunate printing error, hilariously reported by Mr. Malarkey. If you’re lucky to own a double-page-195-collector’s-item, check in with Peachpit under Updates & Corrections.

A List Apart 4.0

An all-star cast delivers a scholarly redesign, upcoming book and events, and t-shirts. Awesome.

gVisit

Visually track visitors to your website using Google Maps. Via K10K.

Rollyo

Sign up to beta test a cool new thing.

Blogger for Word

A new plugin for Microsoft Word that let’s you edit and publish to your weblog. Could be interesting for the HTML-phobic.

ShotCodes

Interesting concept of phone-readable URLs for the non-virtual world.

McAfee.com seeks Sr. Web UI Engineer

Apply your semantic markup and advanced CSS skills on a high-profile site that gets it.

Batman Shakespeare Bust Replica

Tilt his head back to reveal a hidden, working switch (as seen on the Batman TV show). Must have. Link courtesy of Will Murray.

Banksy

Site of the renegade UK artist, with gallery of his(?) self-placed museum pieces and other work.

Blinksale opens

Send invoices much? I can attest, this is the most pleasurable way to do it.

Virtual Street Reality

Incredible sidewalk chalk illusions. But oh when it rains… Via Tantek.

Orch Dorks

It certainly wasn’t hip when I was in high school, though I wish it was. Love the shirts.

The meaning of iCal's July 17

Jeff Gates thought that Apple was honoring his birthday, but eventually solved the mystery with a little investigation.

centricle photos

Some really outstanding photography from Kevin C Smith.

Tagging for Fun and Finding

A nice explanation of the great tagging explosion of 2005 from Thomas Vander Wal.

IYHY

B. Adam Howell’s new service that optimizes sites for mobile devices by stripping away styles, images and other (hopefully) non-essential code.

Statler & Waldorf: From the Balcony

The two muppets review current films (although their voices don’t sound quite like the originals).

The Art and Science of Web Design turns 5

To celebrate, author Jeffrey Veen has made the entire book available in PDF.

TSN.ca: Reloaded

Brian D. Garside on the recent standards-based redesign of Canada’s sports mega-site.

Zoom layout

Doug explains how to create a one-column (yet stylish) option for low-vision readers.

Blinksale

A soon-to-be CSS-based invoice app from Firewheel Design. It already sounds appetizing.

A horrifying photograph

So very sad.

Joe Clark live blogs @media

Perhaps the next best thing to being there.

Confessions of a Pixel Perfectionist

Icon master Josh Williams reveals the software tools used at Firewheel Design. Welcome back, Yellowlane.

Summer t-shirt sale

To even out the sizes I have left in stock, the official SimpleBits t-shirt is now on sale for $12 USD + shipping. And yes, they are wonderful.

mezzoblue Markup Guide

The idea of a markup guide for clients is a good one. Interesting discussion here as well.

The Usability of Subscribing to Feeds

Jeff Veen with some excellent points.

Store Wars

The adventures of Obi-Wan Cannoli, Chewbroccoli, C3Peanuts and others. Via Rusted Robot.

RUBIKCUBISM

An upcoming exhibition by French artist Invader in LA. Love the Rubik’s/pixel connection. Via Boing Boing.

command-control-D

Invoke Tiger’s dictionary in any Cocoa app by hovering over the word with this key combination. So handy.

Modern Mosaics

Artist Norbert Bayer’s pixel recreations of mosaics found all over the world.

Ah! It's a mermaid

The woman in the Starbucks logo is a (cropped) mermaid, or more specifically, a double-tailed siren. This makes perfect sense for selling coffee.

22 Comments

Ave Tigre

New audio equipment + Mac OS X Tiger + odd inspiration = this. Hilarious.

Designline: a design timeline

Cool animated GIF of a blank page to finished design.

US may try yet another dollar coin

I’ve never received the current golden dollar coin as change. Who has them all?

24 Comments

What's in my bag?

The kinky vibe of web standards.

Fixed fashion

Jeremy Keith on making noise regarding liquid layouts.

Running your company on web apps

Evhead rounds up the web apps that help run Odeo.

Tiger did it

Joseph Jaffe creates the next Nike commercial simply by replaying the greatest golf shot I’ve ever seen.

Groovetube

Attach plastic cubes to the front of your TV for pixel-esque light shows. via artcardmike.com.

4 Comments

Pixel Trivia

Sign-up for Firewheel’s email journal to win prizes. I’m intrigued by the idea of pixel trivia.

Best Interpretation of iPod Shuffle as Food

Mike Davidson is giving away iPod Shuffles. Make one out of food and you could be a winner.

Håkon Wium Lie interviewed

Molly interviews the CTO of Opera Software and original proposer of CSS.

The Battleship

Funny story about how Steve Jobs hated the Apple Extended Keyboard.

Rob Weychert

Just relaunched, with daily haikus and sock monkey adivce. Very nice.

Posterhänger

Framing is expensive. Posterhanger appears to be a simple, elegant way to hang posters.

12 Comments

Pimp My Safari

Safari browser customizations, tips and tricks from the great Jon Hicks.

Style Master 4

Interesting new features in the latest version. Also check out the new killer icon by Jon Hicks.

Design Eye for the Idea Guy

If you didn’t make it to SXSW, follow the steps the Design Eye guys took to rebuild Dirk Knemeyer’s site.

Citgo sign gets makeover

Fragile, glass neon tubes have been replaced by specially designed LEDs that will stand up to the harsh New England winters.

Professional CSS

Coming soon: a new book by Christopher Schmitt, Ethan Marcotte, Dunstan Orchard, Mark Trammell and Todd Dominey.

Progressive enhancement with Ajax

Jeremy Keith calls for graceful degradation in Ajax apps. An excellent and important point.

ByteController

Tiny menubar controls for iTunes. Like Synergy, but free and even more simplistic. Found via What’s in your menubar? from Jon Hicks.

Float clearing caveat

The latest technique for clearing floats without extra markup dissected. The verdict? Like the others, useful for certain situations.

Vermont: Spooning with New Hampshire since 1791

Quite possibly the best t-shirt ever made. Possibly.

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AIGA LA Interviews Todd Dominey

The Los Angeles chapter asks Todd a few questions on his sites, Flash, and design in general. Good stuff.

Odeo: Listen, Sync, Create

Announced earlier today, the cool new site from Evan Williams and Noah Glass is gearing up to launch soon. I’ll be writing more about this later (why? well, we’ll just have to wait and see) but for now, check out the Odeo weblog and New York Times piece for preliminary info.

Zen Roundup

The latest issue of Digital Web Magazine features a review of The Zen of CSS Design as well as great interviews with co-authors Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag.

The Evolution of Mario

A sprite history of the evolution of Nintendo’s Mario. Interesting to hear that Shigeru Miyamoto made him look the way he does because of hardware limitations of the time. He was given a mustache to separate his nose from his face, overalls so arm movements were visible, and a hat because hair was hard to draw. Via What Do I Know.

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Kottke.org fund drive

Jason decides to quit his day job and concentrate on writing for kottke.org full-time. He’s asking for donations to support his efforts throughout the next year. As anyone who’s interested in self-publishing, this is a great opportunity to help prove that it can work.

HD Radio

This article was the first I’ve heard of high-definition radio — digital radio that’s broadcast over existing analog frequencies. Pretty interesting, and may be an alternative to subscription-based satellite radio when the receivers come down in price.

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Screenfont.ca

Joe Clark’s new project that will “research and develop a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing”. Lot’s of interesting typography information packed into this site already.

And Jeffrey said, 'To Hell'

Anil Dash reminds us that, “Four years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman said, ‘To Hell With Bad Browsers’ … And today, it’s made my job, and the jobs of nearly everyone I work with, a million times simpler, faster, and more satisfying.” Wow, four years ago. Amen.

McAfee

Standards-based redesigns of corporate sites are becoming so frequent, it’s amazing to just stumble upon great work while clicking around randomnly for research. Bravo to the McAfee team for embracing the good stuff. Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, even.

Transmit 3

Just announced, a brand new version of Transmit, now the FTP client for OS X. New in this version: column view (yay!), tabs, search and more. I can attest from beta testing this — it’s now the best option out there, and they’ve added all the bells and whistles that people have been requesting.