"The purrfect Lorem Ipsum alternative." Yet another lipsum generator variant, this time with cat-related words & phrases.

"A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code."

A wiki catalog of "user interfaces designed to trick people": "Normally when you think of 'bad design', you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind."

"The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives."

A lot of very nice fonts, and a beautiful site!

"A journal focusing on creativity, risk, and what connects us as artists": a series of interviews with artists & designers in an elegantly designed format.

Heavily designed articles by Trent Walton, with fancy CSS.

Home of Joshua Davis, early Flash pioneer (remember Praystation?) and procedural/generative artist.

From the 1960s and 70s.

Another great little essay from Pinboard Overlord Maciej, on the concept of the "Social Graph" and why an attempt to create a Platonic facsimile of our social world is largely an impractical pipe dream steeped in utopian nerdism.

An experiment in "minimalist" branding: stripping established branding down to essentials.

I really like the normal Tabasco branding, tho I wish they'd do something else with the neck label (no foil) or remove it altogether. Otherwise I wouldn't touch their label at all.

I think the #2 and #3 Polo redesigns are improvements (tho #3 may be going too far), and I just don't get #4. He's just...using what he considers a more neutral font? Let me guess: Helvetica Neue. Just because Helvetica is seen as the "default font" by lots of designers doesn't make that design "more minimal"...it's not "neutral", it's still a font choice, and the original font works way better.

By contrast, the #4 Guinness redesign doesn't bug me too much, as the colors on the can are so iconic and work so well. Still tho, it looks a bit worryingly generic. I think designs #2 and #3 are improvements, though, and #3 feels particularly elegant.

And with Evian, I'm completely behind the redesigns. Their label is hideous, and I actually prefer Helvetica to their font, so #4 it is.

I have no problem with candy packaging being garish -- I mean come on, it's candy! But if M&M's really needed a more restrained look, #3 is the way to go. They have a good logo, and #4 crosses into cheap-knockoff territory.

OK I know I just wrote that I'm down with garish candy packaging but I think the Jelly Belly jelly beans bag actually manages to fuck it up. Why are there pictures of jelly beans all over a jelly bean bag with a big window on it? We can see the real thing. So I like that the designer scrapped the jelly bean pictures, and I like that he kept the window. I think he improves on their (already good) logo in #3, but the bag design is a bit austere for candy. My preference would be the bag design of #2 with the logo of #3.

All of the Duracell redesigns are better than the original, and I don't have much preference regarding font choice. The blue in #2 is actually pretty nice.

I don't really like any of the Smint designs, but the redesigns are all better than the original. Don't feel strongly enough about any of them to have a preference though.

Vanish #3 and #4 are definitely improvements for me, and #3 is my preference. #4, as usual, is just kind of boring and generic. Even the hot pink doesn't help.

And Lemsip...Lemsip is just ugly. #3 is the least ugly, and #4 is actually the worst option.

"[Steve] Jobs: equal parts insightful, vicious, and delusional."

Obit/book review about Steve Jobs & Walter Isaacson's biography about him, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell proposes what I think many of us suspect, that though Jobs was brilliant, he was not a visionary inventor but an obsessive "tweaker": someone who took others' ideas and tweaked them to what he saw as perfection.

Being a "tweaker" is no easy task, and Jobs was one of the best. But Jobs would take credit (or be given credit) for things he didn't make and would not abide others tweaking his tweaks. From the article:

"It [Windows] used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. ‘They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,’ Isaacson writes. ‘Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ’

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. ‘Well, Steve,’ Gates responded. ‘I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.’"

The main thing I always found troublesome about Jobs and Apple is what Richard Stallman (hyperbolically) called "the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom" ( http://stallman.org/archives/2011-sep-dec.html ): Apple products have long been as closed as possible, devices that couldn't be opened or altered, devices where the users can't even be trusted to replace their own batteries. Jobs seemed to feel that his tweaks were truly perfect, or at least nothing anybody else could ever improve upon; he seemed to hold a deep disdain for everyone else, including his employees and customers: "The architects [of the new Apple complex] wanted the windows to open. Jobs said no. He ‘had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. ‘That would just allow people to screw things up.’’"

"Tasty, high quality patterns for your next web project." A collection of high-quality, tiling patterns that can be used freely for any purpose. Very useful resource.

A splendid gallery of film-inspired artwork & design.

From the site:

"The Silver Screen Society is a group of designers, illustrators, and friends that work toward creating art and design inspired by and honoring the many stories told through the world of cinema.

The project’s roots lie in the book clubs of yore, with each month bringing a new film and a cast of contributors that carry with them their own unique interpretations and ideas.

It is curated and organized by Brandon Schaefer, Trevor Basset and Adam Hanson."

"A fauxgo (fake logo) is a symbol or other small design created to represent a fictional company or organization that exists only on film." This blog is a collection of such logos, rendered in a cutely retro slightly-misaligned separated color print style.

A project to collect, catalog and make freely available a wide range of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed monochrome icons in SVG format. The style is that used by bathroom doors, traffic signs, and the park service. A useful resource.

Interesting. I've heard of FORM before, and seen a few of their excellent covers, so it's nice to get a little insight into what the magazine is actually about. It certainly has the perfect name for a design magazine!

I particularly like their decision to move their breaking news from the magazine to their website; I think it shows a good understanding of what people want from different kinds of publications today: print newspapers and breaking-news magazines (NEWSWEEK, etc.) today seem more and more like a waste of paper, obsolete as soon as they get printed. News used to happen on a day cycle, with the morning newspaper as the anchor. That gradually changed, with news radio and 24-hour TV news networks, but I think it's only recently with news on the Internet that we really have a sense of news-as-it-happens. Twitter's 140 chars. is perfect for a headline + a link, after all.

I feel like straightforward reporting is no longer worth sending to the presses. which is not to say it's not worthwhile at all -- there's definitely still demand for it, but the shelf-life of a regular piece of reporting is much shorter than it used to be (and it was never that long to begin with). Considering the amount of resources that go into publishing and transporting periodicals, it's probably a good thing that it's increasingly moving to the web.

But I think there's still a place for physical magazines, but it's not summed up in the sentimental line from the article, "...nothing beats the visceral sensation of turning pages...": while I agree that there's something nice about turning physical pages in a physical book, I don't think it's generally essential to the experience of reading or looking at pictures or design or comics or whatever. Pulling a record out of its sleeve and lowering a needle into its grooves is a nice visceral experience too, but if the ubiquity of <192kpbs mp3s is any indication, even the increased fidelity of a vinyl record is not always essential to the experience of the latest jamz.

But there is a (growing) vinyl market, and I think many of the same forces that make vinyl appealing now will also support a certain kind of printed periodical. My impression, from friends and from my own sentiments, is that people want to own vinyl records of the stuff that's "worth it": people buy their favorite albums on vinyl even when they already have the CD or the mp3s, or they buy new albums on vinyl if they anticipate it will be among their favorites; buying the big physical copy feels like you're making an investment, you're buying something high-quality that you'll take care of and keep coming back to for years to come. Similarly, I imagine that people are increasingly seeing printed publications as more "lasting" than ever before, in large part because of the contrast that digital media provides.

Up-to-the-second reporting no longer has a place in print, I think, but considered reflection still does: if we're going to buy something in print, we want it to reflect some real consideration and thought, we want it to be timeless, not an of-the-moment reaction to the day's news. We don't want something that will feel dated in 5 minutes. And we want it to be printed in a way that is worthy of that high-quality content. We want a well-designed object that has nice pages that feel good under our fingers, pages that we will enjoy turning. Print now has to justify itself in opposition to the web: now that anything can be conveyed with cheap, bright pixels, what kind of content is worth its weight in paper and ink?

FORM is taking what I think is the right approach (at least, from my reading of this article), keeping considered analysis in the form of longer articles in the print magazine, and moving the rapid-fire just-in stuff to their website. THE WILSON QUARTERLY is another good example: it's a magazine with a print schedule that precludes any attempt at fine-grained timeliness, so instead it chooses a topic for each issue that is relevant now and will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, and publishes a small number of longer articles around that topic. A bad example I think is WIRED, which in the print edition features a lot of short articles with not much information that leaves the reader wishing either:

* that the article was longer and contained more information, or
* that they'd read the article online, where it would have a bunch of links pointing to other sites with more information.

Nowadays, if you're going to print an article, it should be a complete essay, or at least it should feel complete and well-rounded enough to satisfy and inform on its own. Print articles should make people want to look stuff up on Wikipedia after they've read the article, not while they're reading it.

50 illustrated short, pithy suggestions for aspiring designers from Jamie Wieck

A very cool, well-designed and resilient titanium bike lock. Production is currently being funded through Kickstarter.

A little manifesto on the Web, layout, and scrolling. Examine the design concepts you use in digital media that are rooted in the requirements and limitations of print. Are they still valid?

"Online software training videos", for various fields, including design, web development, video, animation, and so on.

QR Code design basics.

Awesome collection of pixelart resources!! "Here is a collection of various links that will probably come in handy from time to time."

Very nice pixel art & low-poly/high-poly 3D, very clean stuff.

Very nice site design, by Tyler Finck

A beautiful, painterly little game by David Shute (lackofbanjos.com).

From Baubauhaus.

From BLDGBLOG

Illustration, design, photography

Blog/site of Jonathan Lavigne, a Montreal QC game developer.

"The largest source of screenshot maps on the Internet, with thousands of maps of your favourite video games!"

Sweet collection of commercial-use free fonts that can be used with the @font-face CSS property. Also has an @font-face generator!

Dev blog of David Shute, indie game designer & creator of Small Worlds.

Amazing short game by David Shute. Excellent storytelling through level design, and great pixel art. Genuinely haunting.

Maps from NES games

Nice icon search engine, with lots of freeware images

from Smashing Magazine

Awesome High-res textures from Jacob Robinson

"Your Source for Cutting-Edge Music"
Very cool website layout.

Awesome blog design by some mac software devs.

A freelance interface designer and web standards developer based in Edinburgh with a nicely designed blog.

A nicely designed portfolio site by Meagan Fisher.

A web design and development article & tutorial advent calendar. Nice design, too.

Javascript grid generator for website layout

"'We Love Patterns' is a family company created in 2010 by Gastón Caba (illustrator & character designer), Silvana Marino (design & legal assistance) and Lara Caba (junior illustrator).

We are dedicated to create a growing collection of extra-cute, colorful & funny pattern artworks, hoping to help to add charm and whimsy to all different kind of products."

"A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound."

Good, cheap art!

Command-line PNG to icon converter (Linux, GNU, Windows, Unix)

Online color sceme design tool.

Adobe's online color scheme generator.

An ongoing project to explore the Beatles' music through infographics, by Michael Deal.

A short film by Jessie Goldenberg.

Site designed by me.

Norwegian freelance illustrator working in Oslo.

An incredibly clean, elegant web platform for bands.

By Miha. (Also featuring a boring, drawn-out typography flame war.)

"European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.

A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende."

A collection of free comics fonts.

"From graphics to web development, audio to video and more, get the skills you want from our family of tutorial and resource sites. Need more? We also offer a Plus program where you can access source files and bonus tutorials."

Enable HTML5 elements in IE.

The meyerweb CSS reset stylesheet.

Grid design for blogs.

Nice elegant theme (and, eventually, distro?) project. Inspired by the OSX look, but not a clone.

Nice, elegant and extensible WordPress theme.

Creator of the Flixel flash game engine and games like FATHOM, mode, Gravity Hook, and one of the devs for Cave Story for Wii.

From Bruce Mau Design. "Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project."

Great pixel art, interesting design.

Creators of flOw, Cloud, and Flower.

"Design*Sponge is a daily website dedicated to home and product design run by Brooklyn-based writer, Grace Bonney."

A tumblelog celebrating the aesthetic of pixels, whether from games, demos, original artwork, or anything else.

Ellipse wings that encircle airplanes!

fake is the new real is a collection of maps, art, and lists by Neil Freeman.

Paranoia in architecture, and so on.

Visual programming.

An interview with illustrator Gez Fry, from PingMag.