Icons Times features cleverly designed icons that attempt to encapsulate a specific news story. It's a fun idea, and interesting for design types, but pretty limited. Every icon requires an explanatory line just to make sure we know what the story is.
Distribute content via Twitter
Unlike most other large file sending services, Ge.tt allows the recipient to start downloading at their end while the file is still uploading at the other end, with obvious time advantages. Now the startup offers Twitter users the opportunity to easily tweet their ge.tt download link. Followers can then click and start downloading with very little fuss.
Sumopaint a Middleweight Contender
While unlikely to supplant Photoshop, Sumopaint is a surprisingly smooth and powerful image editor. Unlike Photoshop, Sumopaint operates in your browser. Powered by Flash, the program sports many of the same tools as Photoshop. The program also supports layers and filters. The filters are available only if you pay a one-off fee, and for slightly more, users can download an offline app version. The interface is very clean and professional. Now to search for a browser based image editor that runs on html5...
Cloud of Words
Generate a cloud of your own words online at Wordle. Not sure what any given word cloud reveals (beyond one's tendency to overuse certain terms). Too many polysyllabic words might be a prompt to use plainer language. Or not.
An Amazon Resumé
A very inventive résumé that takes amusing liberties with a famous ecommerce portal...
Paper Weights
If you ever have to calculate the weight of a print job for postal/shipping purposes, try the calculation here. The formula looks complicated, but it's really just a matter of filling in the blanks. Hat tip to DMZine, an Australian site doing stalwart work educating designers on the business side of design.
Google searches for Design
Founded by software engineers, Google's various apps and interfaces have often seemed curiously 'un-designed'. Clean and utilitarian they may have been, but also aesthetically problematic. That has changed in the last year or so under Larry Page — Google is finally designing very attractive and highly usable interfaces, eschewing Apple's skeumorphism and setting a surprisingly high standard. The Verge has an extended take on this development with plenty of examples.
Local Author Launches "Scent of Belonging"
Rosie Abbott will be launching her excellent book "The Scent of Belonging" at Readings Hawthorn on 20 February 6.30pm. Her book is set in country Victoria on the eve of World War Two. Free event, bookings not required.
"The dominating physical presence of the countryside makes her feel small – a hill country landscape scarred with dark-green fissures of hidden valleys, suffused with cloying smells lurking in the heat. She shrinks back into the bedclothes, away from the penetrating curiosity of people whose everyday conversation is loaded with unfamiliar directness and unsettling silences."
Every Dot a Person
Cue dropping of jaw. Clever geek takes US census data and renders it to a online map where each dot (341,817,095 in total) is a single person. Keep on zooming in and grey splotches and stipples gradually break down into tiny irreducible dots. The concentrations of said dots/people subtly reveal the presence of roads, mountains, rivers, rainfall patterns, soil types and more. Really amazing, and leaving one wishing for a whole world version.
Covers for January
Science fiction epics, an essay on Paris, the memoir of a prison officer, a post apocalyptic thriller and a book of poetry all feature in this month's roundup of cover designs.
Roll Your Own Adobe Alternative
Lifehacker puts together a list of programs that might, if you squint a little, resemble the Adobe Creative Suite. As they admit, their alternative collection is not as powerful as CS, but the price of free would go a long way to excusing that fault in the eyes of many users. Professionals will still want the heavy artillery, but casual users will find much of interest in this list.
All the Books in the World
If the resources of your local library just aren't enough, would ten thousand libraries do? WorldCat allows you to conduct meta searches of the "collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide". This amounts to a total of more than 1.5 billion searchable items. Perfect for finding obscure items in specialist libraries, or conducting in-depth research from remote locations.
Taming the Word > HTML workflow
Quite a bit of web content was originally created in Word for Windows. Word is infamous for creating messy html. To cut time spent on fixing tags, try this free service. Word2cleanhtml "strips out invalid or proprietry tags, leaving clean HTML behind for use in web pages and ebooks". Now to find a similar service for cleaning word docs for use in page layout programs...
From Cover to Cover
Recent cover design work has been varied, and the demands on typeface use and composition always engaging. Subject matter has ranged from literary fiction to memoir, and spirituality to medieval history. Some titles have been ebook only, while others were destined for offset print runs.
Generate Your Own Charts
Information Graphics predate the Internet by centuries (witness this fascinating diagram designed by Charles Joseph Minard), but the last few years has seen a radical democratisation of this kind of information presentation. With millions of bloggers, news services and social media sharers presenting data of all kinds in visual forms, several start-ups have responded to the demand with online tools for massaging such data. Infogram gives users many templates to choose from, to which they can then add data, customise to their own requirements, and publish to the web. Visual.ly does something similar, with the mission statement of "telling stories with data". Students, bloggers and marketers can all use these new tools, and if they heed the sage advice of Edward Tufte, guru of rational information presentation and famed disdainer of all things Powerpoint.
Small Demons
Each great book is a kind of universe, but it does not exist in isolation -- books influence other books via their authors. Small Demons explores the books, places and people mentioned in books and exposes the endless web of influence and inspiration that permeates literature. Click on Moby Dick for example, and the site shows you works referenced in the book, books that reference it, people mentioned in the book, including mythical figures, and also artworks, places and so forth. As the sites creators continue to populate it with literary information, the web of associations will no doubt grow richer. An intriguing use of the Internet that adds to rather from detracting from the literary experience.
Social Networks for Private People
If you like communicating with your friends and family online but also like your privacy, Glassboard might be a viable alternative to Facebook. As stated on their home page, "Glassboard has no privacy settings — because everything is private. It’s that easy." Those in your selected network can share as per a 'normal' social network, but without the exhibitionist posing for the rest of the world. Other recent options in this space include everyme and Path. Because, let's face it, when boiled down to essentials, you are just an abstract piece of potential advertising revenue for Google or Facebook, whatever the high flown rhetoric used to sell such services.
Crimes Against Designers
Designers like to grumble about occasionally unreasonable clients, but this collection of classic client comments was collated for a good cause (fund raising for an Irish children's hospital). The comments are all real, with "I have printed it out, but the animated gif is not working", "can you turn it around in Photoshop so we can see more of the front" or "I'm the target market and I don't like it" revealing a certain gulf opening up between client and creative.
Book Marketing Goes Vertical
Leo Shatzkin weighs in with some interesting thoughts on the road ahead for book marketing. He believes books (and he sees a largely digital future) will be marketed vertically — that is, by audience segment. Publishers will use the Internet and social media to discover and understand common audiences and then create and market titles tailored for those audiences. They would no longer promote books one big title at a time, and older 'dormant' books might be revived if marketers manage to connect them to their appropriate community/market. If books are to be largely digital, then shelf-life is no longer a deciding factor for the long-term success of a book.
Atlas of True Names
Been to New Yew Tree Village lately? Or have you recently returned from the Great Land of the Tattooed? What about a trip to the Island of Happiness? The first place is New York, the second is Great Britain, and third is Sri Lanka. The enterprising people at Kalimedia have carried out a great deal of research into the real meanings of thousands of place names around the world. The world revealed is full of fascinating surprises and poetry. From the Place of Water Dogs and the Land of the Thicket Clearers to Wild Plum Village and Boiling River Town, the world is made anew by this atlas.