Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica has been shown at over 200 film festivals, museums, design conferences, and cinemas worldwide, and is now available on DVD. Get more info about the film...

Boots is a command line utility for Bootstrap. It will let you build a custom instance of boostrap without leaving your terminal.

Google Chrome was a fairly latecomer to the browser wars but was an overnight success that instantly became the favorite of Mac and Windows users alike. Everything about Chrome, from its minimal and highly practical interface to its solid Webkit Core and robust extension system, makes it hands down one of the best ways to access the web.

For all you Chrome lovers out there, we’ve got an awesome collection of 25 extremely useful Google Chrome Extensions for Designers and Developers. Whether you’re looking for a quick way to validate your page or create a custom grid overlay, we’ve got the tool for you.

Twitter Bootstrap is a toolkit to develop web apps and sites fast. It includes basic CSS and HTML for creating Grids, Layouts, Typography, Tables, Forms, Navigation, Alerts, Popovers etc.

In this and consequent pages, w3resource covers Twitter Bootstrap tool in detail, which will equip you to build web apps and sites using the tool.

The average man considers which flavor of Doritos will taste good with his Heineken. The sophisticated man considers which cheese will pair well with his choice of wine. The designer of course considers which two fonts will look great on the same page.

Today we’re going to use the Google Font API as a playground for mixing fonts and finding ideal pairings. You’ll be able to skim through and instantly grab out selections that you think are appropriate for your projects. The best part? You need only to copy and paste our code to implement these fonts on your site. It’s completely free and there are no downloads required.

Okay, so, “Daring Fireball-style Linked List posts,” for the uninitiated, refers to the publishing style of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. For the most thorough explanation of how this works, see Shawn Blanc’s excellent 2009 article, “The Link Post,” in which he calls this kind of link “The Out and About”:

What especially sets The Out and About apart is its feed format. Because not only do the Link Post titles point directly to the linked-to content, but so do those in the RSS feed.

That’s basically how I implement link posts here on the candler blog. Regular posts feature unadorned headlines while link posts are denoted by an additional glyph at the end of the headline. I use the double arrow, ⇒ (⇒ in HTML).1 The headlines of all link posts go to another site, both in your web browser and in your RSS application. They also feature a permalink at the bottom of the post so you can always find a way to get back to my site, which usually features commentary of some lasting value (I hope).

Puppet labs's use of the term puppetmaster is rather clever (in contrast to other un-necessarily offensive uses of "master" in the software world).

While I appreciate the clever name, I'm less impressed with the concept.

At May First/People Link we've spent the last several years (including the last couple months in earnest) working to transition management of our 90-some servers from a collection of hand-written bash scripts to puppet.

Over the years, we've worked hard to keep our servers as secure as possible. We have a team of about a half dozen people who all have root access on all servers. It's all key-based access. To help mitigate a disaster if one person's keys were compromised, we've implemented monkeysphere on all servers, allowing us to easily revoke access.

After spending so much time thinking through our root-access strategy and fully implementing the monkeysphere to reduce our exposure to a single point of vulnerability, I was disappointed by puppet's use of a puppet master. For those less familiar with puppet, it goes something like this:

One server (or god forbid multiple servers), run an externally accessible daemon. Each and every server on your network runs a daemon as root that periodically communicates with the puppet master, receives new instructions, and then (again, as root) executes these instructions.

In other words, if your puppet master is compromised, I'm not sure exactly what you would need to do, short of rebuilding every server in your network.

To make matters worse, it seems as though some users generate and store all server ssh keys (private and public) on the puppet master and then push the private keys to their respective nodes. That means an intruder doesn't need to write to the puppet master, just reading these keys would be enough to compromise all servers in your network.

Pick the perfect color from your mockups with Gradient's custom picker or use the standard color window to choose it.

If you have a value to match, type it in the input pane choosing either RGB, HEX or HSL and activate the alpha transparency by simply changing its value.

If you're like most people, you feel like a baby when it comes to visual design. You sometimes have a vague sense of what you want, but can't articulate it or make it come about. All you can do is point and cry. This guide will help you communicate with conscious skill. It will show you how to create designs that are easy to understand and attractive.

Beyond giving you practical tools, I hope this guide inspires you. One of my favorite quotes is, "I open my eyes and I see paradise." What a great gift vision is! What an incredible way to connect to the world around us and to each other. My hope is that this guide will allow you to communicate with more creativity and more control – and that you'll want to learn more.

Tinderbox is a tool for notes, a personal content assistant. The Tinderbox Way takes a close look at Tinderbox and its underlying ideas, exploring not just the program's mechanics but also its design and its spirit.

From the elements of writing more effective notes to the frontiers of information farming, from the classroom and conference hall to the research laboratory, The Tinderbox Way explores a new approach to working with and representing interlinked ideas.

From Chapter One:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasnt written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices.

This is a set of shapes for making wireframes (low-fidelity web page schematics) in OmniGraffle version 5.x (Mac OS X). It consists of most of the basic elements you'll need to create user interface specifications. The screenshots below show all of the stencils in this set.

Stencils for OmniGraffle

Quarterly Co.™ is a subscription service that enables people to receive physical items in the mail from influential contributors of their choice. Let’s get started!

RT @simplebits: The brand new http://veerle.duoh.com/ is live and it is full of inspirational awesomeness. Congrats @vpieters! #design

Dribbble - What are you working on? http://dribbble.com/ #design #art