'LifeSphere currently offers more than 90,000 unique products and is more than likely run by one person in a suburban bungalow in Phoenix. As far as I can gather their process consists of ALPHABETICALLY(!) applying every single image in the Public Domain photography archive to every object Zazzle offers. Amazingly almost everything they make is amazing. From doggy clothes featuring macrophotography of Chex Mix, to “Thanksgiving Shrimp” skateboard decks, LifeSphere proves 90,000 times over that rigorous process-based design yields infallibly fresh results.' (via Nelson)

'The New Aesthetics, or at least the aspect I’m looking at, is inspired by computer vision. And computer vision is at the point now that computer graphics was at 30 years ago. The New Aesthetics isn’t concerned with retro 8bit graphics of the past, but the 8bit graphics designed for machines of the now.' -- ie, The Robot Readable World, etc. Great essay, and exciting stuff

'Now that Dublin is in our bag, on our Tea Towel and across our Aprons, The Cake Café is going to create a new map of Ireland. We want to fill this map with all of your favorite places in land. Please send us locations that turn you on, fire your imaginations, or just fulfill your dreams; what ever you think should be included. Please pass the request on to friends in far flung parts of the land so they too can send their suggestions; natural or unnatural, animal or man made, a view, a corner of a field, an island or even a journey or hidden places to enjoy a picnic. -- thecakecafe /at/ gmail.com'.

Their map of Dublin is a work of genius -- I love that they include a decent chunk of the Northside, which was a notable failure of the Alljoy Design version. I can't wait to see what they come up with for Ireland.

'a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.' this is like a patent-infringement lawsuit magnet, surely. Will make an interesting test case...

Amazing stuff from Adrian Cockroft at last week's QCon. Faceted object model, lots of Cassandra automation

word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : 'A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines'

'organizing your data for efficient processing, especially with respect to cache misses etc.' -- essentially an approach to breaking good OOP design practices in order to gain performance, seems to have come from the game-dev community

'the insidious practice of color-grading every movie with a simplified, distilled palette of teal and orange', thanks to digital post-production (via Eoin)

'nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.' (via Nelson)

'a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites'; 'includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.' Very, very nice, AL2 licensed (via Mick Twomey)

"As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed."

a great collection (via Bruce Sterling)

still fantastic advice, even after 4 years.  I think it's time for a re-read

having worked on a product which was tangentially a Dropbox competitor, this is fascinating. they have good tech and great smarts, and of course a great foundation in S3

"Google Image 'People' = Ethnic Diversity". bwahahahaha

from one of GitHub's designers, good tips on how the URL UI needs to work these days

'steps towards the glory of REST'. 3 steps, namely: "Level 0: the swamp of POX", "Level 1: Resources", "Level 2: HTTP verbs", and "Level 3: hypermedia controls". +1

The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too

excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)

Phil Gyford reworks the Grauniad's website using their open content API. I really like the navigation and just-the-text nature, but I still feel a need to know what other articles are "nearby", which this doesn't quite provide. Still, excellent work

'Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo.' hoho! hoist by their own petard

"How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under The Financial Crisis". but the data is less interesting than the excellent dataviz technique used to display it

a lot more awesome than the title would suggest (via TTT)