Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #46

Design + Branding:

• Relaunching NO!SPEC with 28 Talking Points
• The History of Visual Communication
• Running a successful web design business
• U&lc lives
• “I am a type snob!”…(and proud of it).
• Johanna Lenander
• Virgin Galactic
• Pentagram’s Paula Scher on drawing with type
• The 7 Biggest Challenges in Merging Design and Business
• Adobe MAX 2010: Interaction Design for Graphic Designers
• New Work: No.17 Submission

User Experience:

• Google TV, Usability Not Included
• Wozniak: Android Will Dominate iOS [Updated]
• Different Approaches to Mobile App Design
• The Kinect effect: how Harmonix mastered Dance Central’s menus
• Google Launches Interactive Book to Teach Everyone About the Web
• Innovation Calls For I-Shaped People
• iPad Owners, Get Ready for TweetMag [Preview Video]
• The difference between searching and finding
• Reactions to being listed on Darkpatterns.org
• More mobile usability testing sleds…

Other Tangents:

• “Where I Live” .CA Impact Awards Call for Entries
• Introducing the Mashable Startups Channel
• How to Snatch an Expiring Domain
• How to Start a Successful Bootstrapped Web App Business (12 hours of audio)
• 35 New Social Media Resources You May Have Missed
• A Contextual and Theoretical Christmas

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #16

Design + Branding:

• BBC to rebrand Radio 1Xtra
• The new CS5 branding
• Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes
• Web Design across Cultures – 9 Advices
• Secrets from a search marketing manager
• The Village Voice covers of Ivylise Simones
• Tel Aviv-Yafo by Michelle Haft
• Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight
• Puma’s new shoe box – is not a box!
• A rose by any other name?
• Infographic of the Day: How to Pick the Perfect Typeface
• 20 Font Driven Websites Showcase
• Play that Funky Music Y Boy
• CR Annual: the iPhone App

User Experience:

• Confirming Passwords Is Annoying: Is There a Better Way?
• Information Software and the Graphical Interface
• Some Gaps To Fill Between Web Apps and Desktop/Mobile Apps
• Revisit: Visualizing the Temporal Dynamics of Twitter Streams
• Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline
• Designing for the Web in the World—Timo Arnall
• The World Bank Data: Open Data Access can be Beautiful
• Google Government Requests Needs your Information Design Input
• Touch Gesture Diagrams
• BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartography
• Social Visualization Software Review: IBM Many Eyes

Other Tangents:

• 40+ Essential iPhone Apps for Freelance Web Designers
• Analytic.ly Provides Real-Time and Historical Twitter Analysis
• 5 must-read books for learnng CSS
• Facebook’s ambition
• Derek Sivers’s talk on How to start a movement…and Herd behaviour
• Losing It
• From Logs to Logarithms
• Why I Believe in Pricing Work Based on Value
• Microsoft links Office to Facebook

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #14

Design + Branding:

• Stop Designing Logos, Start Developing Brands
• New identity for Cable & Wireless Communications
• Paula Scher gets serious: TED Talk
• IKEA Subway Advertising In Paris
• Gravity Flooring
• The Danger of You Centered Branding
• 25 Unusual website layout for design inspiration
• The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Theme Design
• 20 Clean White Letterpress Business Cards
• The Secret of Nike Air
• The World’s Fascination with the Infographic
• Black Book Sessions by Vicente Morillo
• Weave Magazine Interview About Creativity With Jason Theodor
• April Fools: Dunkie Drinks Dunkin’s Coffee
• French School Book Covers
• Design for Disassembly
• 30+ minimalistic wallpapers inspired by Helvetica
• 88 Illustrations from REWORK
• Snapper Snaps Sam

User Experience:

• 20 Cutting Edge Ecommerce Stores for Inspiration
• Essential Tips to Improve E-commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Consistency: Key to a Better User Experience
• 10 Excellent Tools for Creating Web Design Wireframes
• Building Your Freelance Business Around WordPress
• Weekend fodder – arm and a leg: Healthcare Inforgraphic
• Pushing Infographics Too Far? The Ford Fusion Competition
• Perceived Affordances and Designing for Task Flow
• Location check-ins during South by Southwest
• Application Maps
• Data Monday: Smartphones vs. Feature Phones

Other Tangents:

• The Cohen-Miller Report: Change Management
• Jason Fried: Why You Can’t Work at Work
• Essential Facebook Fan Page Resources
• 5 Tools & Services I Recommend to Every Blog Owner
• Trefis: Understanding How Products Influence Stock Price
• When opening the wallet becomes a no-brainer
• enthusiasm as currency

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #13

Design + Branding:

• 33 Letterpress Business Cards for Inspiration
• Design Chats Interview with Rick Valicenti
• Royal College of Art goes for Neville Brody
• NYC’s absurdist Subway map
• Protest Posters, Parisian Style
• Horror Government (and Logo)
• Lazarus brands: Coming back from the dead
• The Future of Design Stanford Conference
• NetCom: A Whole Lot of Happy
• Periodic Table of Typefaces

User Experience:

• How banks can use social media and mobile apps
• Rich & Mobile Form Design—Luke Wroblewski
• What Movie UIs Say About the Future
• In search of an identity
• The Spectrum of User Experience (1)
• An In-Depth Look At My Wireframing Process
• 40+ (Funny) Error Messages You’ve Never Seen Before
• Lego of My Boardroom!
• Web App Masters: Designing for Interesting Moments
• 10 Principles of UX
• Trial & Error 101
• Changing Things—Mike Kuniavsky

Other Tangents:

• Life On Mars?
• Spigot (Oracle’s Reflection) by Jason Salavon
• A.K. Kimoto – 1977-2010 R.I.P.
• The Day Dot-Coms Were Invented
• Strategy Basics: It’s Really all about having a Plan
• Why we are getting rid of our hourly rate
• Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive
• SXSW Interview: How to Turn Ideas into Action
• Facebook Measures British, Canadian, and Australian Happiness, Serious Case of Mondays
• Animated GIF Paranoia
• A Crash Course in Creating E-Commerce Websites with WordPress

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #12

Design + Branding:

• Circle Gets the Square
• The Ins and Outs of Working In-house
• Infographic of the Day: The Best Jobs in America
• Brother, can you Spare a Square?
• YouTube and creative suicide
• Inspirational 50 Twitter Backgrounds Showcase
• Paula Scher: Type is Image by Hillman Curtis
• Chaos and Creativity by Jason Theodor
• 18 Search Engines For Designers – Creativity Boost
• 10 Great Tools to Create a Mobile Version of Your Site
• What can design bring to strategy?
• 20 Identical Logo Designs – Copy or Coincidence?
• Transforming the Magazine Experience with WIRED
• Interview with Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo
• Logorama: Best Animated Short Film Award

User Experience:

• Explaining User Experience Design to High Schoolers (and other new audiences)
• Email verification – is your call-to-action strong enough?
• Forms On Mobile Devices: Modern Solutions
• Visualizing the Issues behind Food Dependence: How to Feed the World?
• Flexible Credit Card Inputs
• Show/Hide Annotations Omnigraffle Script
• Google Public Data Explorer
• “What Are You Suggesting?” Using Images to Influence
• Canada: the country that pees together stays together
• Obama Loves Infographic Movies (and Edward Tufte)
• Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web
• Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide (TED Talk)
• Better Mobile Form Design
• Accusing Google’s Business Practice through (another) Infographic Movie
• Radio Johnny: Joe Lamantia on Augmented Reality
• Data Underload #12 – Famous Movie Quotes
• Why UX is really Marketing

Other Tangents:

• When a freelancer changes the game
• 15 Free Guides That Really Teach You Useful Stuff
• 40 Powerful CSS Tools And Generators To Automate Your Workflow
• Foursquare: Hit or miss?

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #11

Design + Branding:

• The Future of Design Stanford Conference
• Cultivating Innovation And Creativity, Not Managing It
• Current Trends in Design Lab 25 | 25
• CreativeMornings Video: Allan Chochinov of Core77
• How imitation is hurting Chinese brand development
• Paul Rand Store + Free iPhone Wallpapers
• Scribd gets Designd
• Typographer at Law: An Interview with Matthew Butterick
• Egypt, Now Less Arid
• 40 Free Minimalist And High Quality Fonts
• Comparing the 100 Largest Sites on the Internet
• David James: Out of Print

User Experience:

• 365psd.com
• A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design
• Invisible Revolution
• An Hour With Bill Buxton
• Jason Calacanis vs. David Heinemeier Hansson on This Week in Startups
• Newborn Babies Now Crawling in Infographical Data
• Ageing Icons with Freshness App
• Video: Rich & Mobile Form Design
• A Defense of the Unknown in Infographics
• MIX10: The Type We Want
• MIX10: Designing & Developing for the Rich Mobile Web
• See For Yourself: About the Power of Observing
• The Right Way to Wireframe—Fred Beecher
• US Department of State Visualizes Your Opinion about Foreign Affairs
• Nokia S60 Wireframing Stencils
• Windows Phone: Input Controls
• Designers, meet Agile
• Data Monday: Usage of Mobile Devices

Other Tangents:

• Martha’s un-‘glittering’ SA debut
• 1969 Holden Hurricane
• Aaron Swartz on how to read more books
• jQuery for Complete Beginners: Part 1
• Avoiding Typographic Fiascos: H&FJ Offer Tips.

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #10

Design + Branding:

• Pr*tty Sh*tty interview with Paula Scher
• Fashionista: More Thread, Less Trend
• Tate modern iphone app for exhibit.
• Russia’s Sunny Bank
• What Is A Global Brand?
• The culture quiz. By Marty Neumeier
• Puma’s ambush branding move
• New thomas.matthews identity
• What Personality Traits Do Designers Share?
• Brand Research and Neuro-Linguistic Programming
• Evolution of Olympic Pictograms
• News Topics as Social Network

User Experience:

• 8 Best Practices on Mobile Design
• uxurls.com: a user experience aggregator
• Data Underload #11 – American Hockey
• Johnny TV’s 10 Must-See UX Videos
• Data as Sound: NYTimes Sonification of Winter Olympics Results
• The Different Ways to Design
• My Top Interaction’10 Videos by Matthew Nish-Lapidus
• Best of FlowingData – February 2010
• ‘A Brief Guide to Service Design’ by Paul Thurston & Nick Marsh
• Luscious: Abstract Color Compositions of Advertisements

Other Tangents:

• The Truth about Mobile Application Stores
• The State of the Internet
• Content Strategy for Web – Edmonton UX Book club’s meeting with Kristina Halvorson
• Crumpled City Maps: When Folding Neatly is not that Practical
• Think like a statistician – without the math
• Guidelines for meeting the D Dalai
• Altimeter Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management
• Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?
• How Social Is Too Social?
• Everyone’s model of work is a job
• Death By Competitive Analysis

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #9

Design + Branding:

• A Merger that Doesn’t Add Up
• Penguin Classics team up with (RED) for typographic covers
• A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services
• Ready for The Brand Quiz, Hotshot?
• Buy fonts at FontShop, host them on Typekit
• Design Multilingual Website: A Beginner’s Guide
• 60 Creative Flash Websites You Should Not Miss
• Speak Human by Eric Karjaluoto
• Google facts and figures (massive infographic)
• Measuring The Strength Of Brand Identity

User Experience:

• Using Light, Color and Contrast Effectively in UI Design
• Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences
• Five User Experience Trends I’ll be Watching in 2010
• Information Gathering: a Roundup of UX Applications
• 50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Resources and Source Files
• Take a Step Closer for an Invitation to Shop
• Mobile Application Stores State Of Play
• Design Patterns – Proxy Pattern
• Augmented reality and the ultimate user manual
• 10 Beautifully Designed iPhone [UI]tilities

Other Tangents:

• Toronto Tech Week 2.0
• Adobe Opens Up About Apple, HTML5 and Flash [VIDEO]
• 13 Ways to Run a Kick Ass Webinar
• From Do It Yourself to Do It Together
• What We All Lost When Business Lost Respect

Weekly Roundup: Design Related Links #8

Design + Branding:

• Excessively Labeled Airplane Tells You Where the Big Cheese Sits
• Future of Employment in the Decade Ahead
• The Chief Marketing Officer – A New Boardroom Role
• Smart or Beautiful?
• Flaunt, our Book on Portfolio Design
• Economists encourage businesses to think design.
• Information Overload Isn’t New
• 2010 is the year of the app
• European + Organic = Euro-Leaf
• The Missile Defense Agency Logo Conspiracy Theory

User Experience:

• Search Suggestions, Part 1
• All aboard the virtual Trans-Siberian Railway
• 15 Amazing Interactive Installations
• Information Landscapes — Muriel Cooper et al
• Information Landscapes in 1994 (MIT Prof Muriel Cooper)
• 10 UX (User Experience) Blogs to Watch in 2010
• A UI Design and Prototyping Treasure Chest
• 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources
• Campbell’s Soup Neuromarketing Redux: There’s Chunks of Real Science in That Recipe
• 11 Blogs to Help You Become a User Experience Expert

Other Tangents:

• YouTube Turns Five Years Old, But Without Google, It Would Be Bankrupt
• LinkedIn Lands In Microsoft Outlook
• Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
• Creating A Quality WordPress Theme: 12 Points to Consider
• The Fall Of The Purchase Funnel
• Work Smart: Stop Multitasking and Start Doing One Thing Really Well
• 7 Must Have WordPress Plugins For Every Blog
• MarketMeTweet: Will It Help You Find Clients on Twitter?
• How To Find Great Keyword Ideas For Your Articles
• 23 Ways to Get Fired

Learning a New Language

Recently I decided to try and learn a new language, Russian. After several failed attempts at Language CD’s & “for Dummies” books, the Cyrillic (кириллица) alphabet doesn’t translate well into print, I stumbled across an iphone application; Russian Alphabet by Andre Khromov.

One could say that this is just no more than a digital version of flash cards but I think this is pretty ground breaking for language education. Its functionality allows you listen to a voice pronounce the letter, lets you rate your answers and with the help of a progress tracking system, repeats the letters you are having trouble learning.

I can honestly say that I have learned more from this $1.99 application than the $70+ I invested in CD’s and books. Also, I can now say I’ve been introduced to the mystery which is the Russian letter “Й”, pronounced “ee kratkaya.”

Like I said, the Cyrillic alphabet doesn’t translate well into print.

To learn more about the iphone application Russian Alphabet by Andre Khromov, visit the itunes store.