Police question Pakistan's Amir

Pakistan bowler Mohammad Amir is being questioned at a north London police station over allegations of corruption.

Gaza militants vow Israel attacks

Militant groups in the Gaza Strip vow to step up attacks against Israel, following the first direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in nearly two years.

Prescott urges phone hack review

Lord Prescott says he is prepared to take legal action to find out whether News of The World journalists hacked into his phone messages.

Fox rules out French 'ship share'

Defence Secretary Liam Fox rules out the UK sharing aircraft carriers with France as part of closer defence co-operation.

Fugitive Asil Nadir at Old Bailey

Fugitive tycoon Asil Nadir arrives at the Old Bailey for his first court appearance on fraud and theft charges.

Carragher urges Kopites to lay off Owen

Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher has pleaded with fans attending his testimonial not to direct abuse towards former team-mate Michael Owen, who will be playing in the charity match on Saturday.

Man City and Real Madrid wanted Borriello - agent

Roma's new €10 million signing Marco Borriello rejected an approach from Manchester City and also had an option to join Real Madrid, according to the player's agent.

FIFA panel praises Rooney World Cup performance

Despite coming under fierce criticism for failing to set the World Cup alight, Wayne Rooney has received a commendation from FIFA for his performances in South Africa, and was named as one of England's three best players at the tournament.

Milan boss Allegri happy with Berlusconi 'presents…

AC Milan coach Massimiliano Allegri has thanked club owner Silvio Berlusconi for bankrolling a spending spree just before the transfer window closed, after the Rossoneri snapped up Robinho and Zlatan ibrahimovic to bolster their attacking otions.

Gerard Houllier interviewed for Aston Villa job

Former Liverpool boss Gerard Houllier has emerged as a leading candidate to replace Martin O'Neill as Aston Villa manager after being interviewed by the club's owner Randy Lerner.

Police question Pakistan's Amir

Pakistan bowler Mohammad Amir is being questioned at a north London police station over allegations of corruption.

Federer progresses as seeds fall

Roger Federer overcomes windy conditions to beat Andreas Beck and reach the US Open third round, but seeds Nikolay Davydenko and Maran Cilic crash out.

Beckham eyes 11 September return

Former England captain David Beckham hopes to play for the LA Galaxy against Columbus Crew on 11 September.

Queiroz gets six-month suspension

Portugal coach Carlos Queiroz is suspended for six months after it is ruled that he disrupted an anti-doping test ahead of the World Cup.

Wozniacki through after whitewash

Top seed Caroline Wozniacki cruises into the third round of the US Open with a blistering 6-0 6-0 win over Chinese Taipei's Kai-Chen Changon.

Technique to trace persistent CFCs

Ultrafine measurements of atmospheric gases could help scientists track down the last sources of CFCs thought to be slowing the recovery of the ozone layer.

Openness urged on UK's emissions

The government's chief environment scientist calls for more openness in admitting the UK's cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are an illusion.

'Lights out' help migratory birds

A growing number of New York sky-scrapers switch off their lights at night to help reduce the number of migratory birds hitting the buildings.

Miracle free-kick 'was no fluke'

Physicists explain one of football's most spectacular free-kicks, showing that Roberto Carlos's 1997 "impossible goal" was not a fluke.

Ants protect trees from elephants

A species of acacia tree found in Eastern Africa seems to be protected from elephant damage - by the ants that live on it.

Depositors Panic Over Bank Crisis in Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s top bank official tried to calm fears of a meltdown at Kabul Bank, while scores of Afghans were unable to withdraw money from the bank.

Experts Fear Mideast Talks Are Too Ambitious

Some veteran peace process practitioners say Israel and the Palestinians should first aim for a partial solution because the gaps between the positions are too wide.

BP Says Limits on Drilling Imperil Oil Spill Payou…

The company, which had committed to setting aside $20 billion for damage claims and penalties, says proposed legislation could disrupt those efforts.

News Analysis: France’s President May Have a Tou…

As Nicolas Sarkozy prepares to take over as president of the Group of 20 on Nov. 12, analysts say many of his proposals appear to be hamstrung from the start.

North Korea Takes Steps to Extend Dynastic Rule

North Korea’s leader is to convene a ruling party meeting where it is expected that his son will be given an official post, a step on the road to leadership.

Hurry Up and Wait

In summer 2008, at the height of the U.S. financial crisis, husband-and-wife photographers James Tribble and Tracey Mancenido packed up their NYC apartment and hit the road to document one of the more obscure necessities of American consumerism first-hand. Armed with little more than a commercial license, tips from...

Levi's Workwear x Billy Reid

For both the neo-Americana-obsessed and denim-heads alike, menswear designer Billy Reid's collaboration with Levi's is a holy brand pairing, marrying Levi's workwear roots with Reid's modern cuts, fabric choices, and finishes. This behind-the-scenes video (a Cool Hunting exclusive) visits Reid at work on the craft of deconstructing garments for...

American Ruins

While photographer Arthur Drooker's ruins aren't the castles and shrines that usually come to mind, his infrared images of prisons, mansions and other sites of U.S. decay evoke all the moody history and past lives of their tourist site counterparts. The Mill Valley, CA-based artist's "American Ruins" exhibit (opening...

A+: The Young Designers' Platform

An opportunity for emerging designers to showcase their work, A+: The Young Designers' Platform took place earlier this month during the Accent on Design event at New York's International Gift Fair. The American Design Club curated the event, aiming to highlight raw new creatives and their recent contributions to the...

Link About It: This Week's Picks

1. Gilpin Family Whiskey For this weekend's gross-out conversation starter, go no further than researcher and diabetic James Gilpin's extreme DIY project. Pointing out the ways we can "harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance," he recently started purifying the naturally sugar-rich urine of diabetics...

Check Out These Beauties

I just watched a new Vern Fonk Insurance commercial on TV, and it led me to search for the spot online. Alas, the new spot (where customers seeking auto insurance get slapped upside the head by non-Fonk agents) is nowhere to be found. But fret not, I found these gems, and they are really something.

Crispin Spinoff Gets On Their Harley And Rides

Crowdsourcing agency Victor & Spoils is busy doing spec work for Harley-Davidson on the heels of the company's split with Carmichael Lynch, their agency for 31 years. According to V&S's John Winsor: We love the Harley-Davidson brand (just like most everyone). And we've talked to a bunch of our creatives and strategists (I dare say some of the best in the world) in our 1,800-strong creative department, and H-D was also at the top of the list of the brands they most loved. So, instead of going through the typical steps of credential decks and pitches, we thought we'd try something different. We're getting to work. Just yesterday, the Victors & Spoils team did some quick strategic research pulled from public sources and went ahead and wrote a very open brief. Today, we launched it on our simple work-creation platform called The Squirrel Fight. And right now, creatives and strategists from all over the world are working against your brief. I bet you didn't know that V&S had "a creative department" with 1800 people in it. I know I didn't. Of course, it's not a traditional creative department. It's a community of creatives willing to pitch their ideas for free to agency types and their clients in hopes that they might get paid, someday. But let's not get lost in that. Let's think bigger thoughts. Here's one...is Harley's marketing organization--used to working with one of the best ad agencies in the world--ready for something new and different? Here's another thought...is pitching from one's blog or Twitter stream the new three-martini lunch? In my experience, landing new business takes great ideas, but it also takes connections, phone calls, lunches, dinners and lots of cocktails.

Look At This Shiny New Thing! (And Please Ignore A…

Speaking at Apple's annual press conference in California yesterday, chief new product promoter Steve Jobs announced the launch of Ping, a music-centered social network that lets iTunes customers share information about music and concerts, as well as allowing them to see what friends and their favorite artists are listening to and downloading. Ping is built into the latest version of iTunes, which has160 million users worldwide, and can be accessed from Macs, iPhones and iPod Touches. Why is it that I don't care? Maybe it's because I already share my musical interests on Facebook, MySpace and my blog dedicated to the topic. No, that's not it. Maybe it's because I have an external hard drive full of hundreds of albums I BOUGHT from the iTunes store that are unplayable on our new Apple machines, courtesy of Apple's use of DRM and the fact that I changed my identity in the iTunes store. Yep, that's it. Now, I only purchase from iTunes if the song or TV show is not available elsewhere, and Amazon is working hard to make sure it IS available elsewhere. Ergo, my entertainment money goes to Seattle, not Cupertino. Speaking of things that don't work, I've been using Tweetie (a service Twitter purchased some months ago) on my iPhone for a year or more, but no longer. The app won't authorize my ID and password. This pain isn't mine alone, it's being felt around the Twittersphere. Henry Blodget of Business Insider, for one, is pissed. Well, it happened. A few months ago, when Twitter announced that it was going to kill a boatload of startups that had sprung up around its ecosystem, I wondered whether that meant I would eventually be forced to abandon the app I spend about 18 hours a day using (on desktop, mobile, and laptop) -- TweetDeck. And based on what happened yesterday, it seems the answer to that question is "yes." Blodget updated his post, saying readers lambasted him for being dumb as a rock because he didn't know that some OAUTH thing was the problem. He admits he doesn't care about OAUTH, he just wants his TweetDeck to work. This morning, Twitter sent an email to users that tried to explain. Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use "OAuth" to access your Twitter account. What's OAuth? OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access Twitter on your behalf with your approval without asking you directly for your password. Desktop and mobile applications may still ask for your password once, but after that request, they are required to use OAuth in order to access your timeline or allow you to tweet. Uh huh. WTF does this mean? How do I get Tweetie to work again? There are one million assumptions in Twitter's email and zero steps to take. Oh, and Twitter dropped 99.9% of my @replies from my @bonehok account. They've been missing for a week now, and the company's response to my support ticket said nothing other than they're aware of the problem. Is Twitter understaffed? Underfunded? Or simply lacking what's truly needed--a clue?

Beastie Boys Wannabes "Want It"

The city of Toronto wants to help residents get rid of electronic waste. Naturally, to promote the effort, the city needed to create an awareness campaign. They got one from Publicis, who wisely veered away from the mundane and expected flatness of municipal advertising and headed in a different direction.

Can Ads Help Change Perceptions Of Muslims?

We're approaching the 9th anniversary of 9/11 and tensions are already high over a proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero. Yahoo! News reports on one attempt to promote more tolerance of Muslim-Americans. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released a series of advertisements today that will run on national television, clearly intended to counter some of the furor over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. In one spot, a New York firefighter who was a first responder after the Sept. 11 attacks talks about losing a loved one before announcing that he is a Muslim. 9/11 Happened to Us All @ Yahoo! Video It's a good effort, but I'm not sure advertising is gonna break down stereotypes and prejudices. Plus, I'm not sure the people who need to be watching and listening are paying attention. And is anyone else slowly getting desensitized to this kind of stark, black and white, talk-directly-to-the-camera confessional style of commercials?

Subservient hunter hawks Tipp-Ex white-out

Leave to a brand of ink-correction fluid to create the most entertaining YouTube campaign since the Old Spice response videos.

Quaker is a morning person in Juniper's ads

Quaker Oats makes morning sound almost palatable in its new "Wake Up" spot from Juniper Park in Toronto.

Smoking likened to being eaten by zombies

Zombies are everywhere, it seems, even in American Legacy's latest "Truth" commercials.

Drake University's ad campaign gets big D+

Officially are scrambling to explain why they thought "D+" would be a great theme for a recruitment campaign.

Hong Kong advertises canisters of fresh air

This parody infomerical, nicely produced by DDB and the Clean Air Network, urges environmental protection.

Volkswagen Coupé Cabriolet Eos: Air collection

Advertising Agency: Agence V, Paris, FranceCreative Director: Christian VinceArt Director: Frédéric DurandCopywriter: Arnaud LabillePhotographer: Jean-Noel Leblanc-bontemps

NATURAL HAIR CARE - HENNA POWDER

Henna Powder is used in India largely for mehendi designs - a traditional art that uses a woman's hands and feet as its canvas on special occasions, mostly weddings. Henna Powder is also used for hair conditioning and nourishment, making the hair shiny, smooth and beautiful.Agency: Mudra DDB, Chennai, IndiaClient: Natural Hair Care - Henna PowderAssociate Creative Director: Arvind RamalingamArt Director: Krishnamurthy IyyappanIllustrator: MuraliPhotographer: Ramesh Kumar

Wonderbra!

An interesting viral ad for Wonderbra!

Pepsi - Dare for more!

Titles: "Surfer", "Climber" and "Boarder"Creative Directors: Veikko Hille, Sebastian Hardieck, Toygar BazarkayaArt Director: Michael PlückhahnCopywriter: Dietmar Neumann Beratung: Heike Flottmann, Annika LauhöferArt Buying: Birgit PaulatProduction: Stefan Kranefeld Imaging, DüsseldorfAgency: BBDO GermanyThey´ve just won the Grand Prix at the Epica Awards. The motifs are inspired by the famous Pepsi-Logo in red, white and blue and show adventurous pictures. Thanks Markus for sending me the ads.

Jump higher!

Advertising Agency: Advico Young & Rubicam, Zurich, SwitzerlandExecutive Creative Director: Urs SchrepferArt Director: Marietta AlbinusCopywriter: Martin StulzPhotographer: Markus WeberVia: I believe in adv

Hell Under Wheels

Photo from Teun Voeten's newly reissued book on New York's Tunnel People.

Climate Change Chocolate Update

Update on Climate Change Chocolate and other ideas for offsetting carbon. Originally published August 17, 2009.

James Victore: Straight Up

"Few designers have done more to render typography foundries irrelevant than Victore. The human hand, his hand, is always in evidence." Michael Bierut on James Victore's work.

Death to Design Awards

Essay attacking design awards for stifling innovation

Lunch with the Critics: Park51 & 15 Penn

"Lunch with the Critics," a new feature on Design Observer: Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange travel to midtown to visit the Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.

Malware Attack: Update

This site was hacked pretty severely sometime (or multiple times) in the last few weeks. I’m still ridding the server of the affected files, and still finding new ones. I'm working hard to fix it. Thanks for the patience.

My (revised) video setup: Canon EOS 7D

After just a couple weeks of testing, I gave up on the Canon HG10 w/35mm for shooting HD video. Not only was the quality not stellar, but it's a hack that's cumbersome and really difficult to work with. Following an enormous amount of deliberation and questioning if so many dollar signs were really worth it, I bit the bullet and sprung for a Canon EOS 7D and some quality lenses. No mistaking, this thing shoots incredible photos and equally impressive 1080p HD video. I still have plenty to learn about the camera and photography in general, but so far I'm really pleased with it. I took it with me to film the Colosseo being printed earlier this week, and the footage looks fantastic. (Video coming soon.) I bought the 7D body only and skipped the lens it comes bundled with. Taking cues from Eyepatch Production's 7D tutorials and comments on forums around the web, I picked up a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM prime lens and Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM zoom lens. Suzanne already had a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens with her Canon 40D, and that seems to do fine with the 7D for shooting macro stuff. When filming the Colosseo, I kept the Sigma 30mm on most of the time. What's crazy is just two weeks ago I didn't even know the difference between prime and zoom lenses. The mics I'm using right now are the RODE VideoMic, a great little shotgun-style mic, and a wired Audio Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Condenser Mic. The ATR-3350 lavalier mic can be pretty noisy, but for $30 it's a decent start for now. Additional links and notes about the equipment shown in these photos are available on Flickr.

My video setup: Canon HG10 with 35mm adapter

Update: I've switched to a Canon 7D. I've had a penchant for filmmaking ever since I was a little kid. I've never had the right equipment, though. I'm trying to finally change that, while still trying to stay within budget. The photo above shows the setup I've been piecing together over the last few weeks. I haven't shot anything with it yet, but I'll give it a good run in a couple weeks when I film the Colosseo letterpress poster being printed. We'll see how it goes. Two years ago this would have been a killer setup--it's similar to the setup Benjamin Reece used to shoot "Fifty People, One Question". Nowadays, a Canon 7D or similar is probably the way to go for those of us doing indie-style film stuff. Check out this fantastic video shot with a Canon 7D: I've had my HG10 for a while now, and I've been able to do some decent shooting with it (see "Roma Italia"). I'm not ready to make the step-up investment to a 7D just yet. So I'm doing what I can with the HG10, while making sure much of what I'm purchasing will also work with the 7D at a later date. It's taken quite a bit of research to piece all of this together, so I'm documenting my equipment here for those of you searching for something similar: Canon HG10 HD hard-drive camcorder (you can get these for under $400 on eBay nowadays, though I'd recommend something more recent like the Canon HF S100 if purchasing your first non-tape camcorder) Greg Tay's GT35pro 35mm depth of field (DOF) adapter Nikon NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4 AI manual focus lens (this one is from the late 70s, snatched on eBay) Opteka X-Grip RODE VideoMic Sima LED video light Check back in a few weeks to see some of the video I'll shoot with it. Fingers crossed it turns out okay.

Michael Bierut on clients

Michael Bierut is such a down-to-earth, practical designer (and speaker) who works hard to do amazing work without the typical stigma associated with graphic designers. This practicality is clearly evident in the video above, a presentation given at CreativeMornings in New York City. And if you haven't seen Helvetica, you need to see how his commentary really helps the movie shine. Michael's presentation on clients is one of those "should be required viewing" kind of presentations. It's fantastic. Clients are the difference between design and art. I would go insane trying to work ... without clients.... I really need clients to provoke me as a designer to do work. Thanks to Tina Roth Eisenberg for making this happen.

Colosseo: Available March 2010

Watch the full resolution video on Vimeo. This project began 12 months ago when Suzanne and I purchased tickets to Rome. It's consumed a good portion of my working life since then. This is a sneak preview. Sign up to be notified by email when it's available:

Making Geometric Type Work

For graphic designers beginning to experiment in type design, a geometric or modular typeface is a natural starting point. Illustrator and other programs offer a simple collection of elements such as circles, squares, and triangles which can be combined to create a passable alphabet. This is the same route I took when dissatisfied with the [...]

Fraktur Mon Amour, 2nd Edition

Fraktur Mon Amour is the work of Judith Schalansky, written while she was a student of the Communication Design program in Potsdam. She developed a serious passion for blackletter and was disappointed to find all the reference books about this fascinating genre are very dated and often quite staid, and in many cases not easily [...]

Bonesana

Special thanks to Gestalten for sponsoring the Typographica nameplate for October, 2009 with Bonesana. Gestalten is known for very contemporary designs — the modular and the post-mod — so this tribute to the 18th century is quite a departure. Designed by Matthieu Cortat of Switzerland, Bonesana was initially developed for the new edition of the book [...]

Audio from the Web Fonts Panel at TypeCon2009

Yesterday at TypeCon2009 in Atlanta, 11 representatives from the type community packed a stage to discuss the controversial and convoluted issue of licensing fonts for the web. The full two hours of audio is now online.

Marlene

Marlene is an elegant, high contrast Egyptian face with a distinctive and contemporary calligraphic flourish. When I first saw it I was impressed at how incredibly crisp it was, as if drawn with a pen so sharp it could just as easily cut the paper as leave ink there. The italic expresses this sharpness with [...]

My other iPad is a Kindle

The new Kindle has a lot going for it. It’s inexpensive compared to a full-featured tablet computer like the iPad; you can slip it in your back pocket, where it’s more comfortable than an old-style paperback; and it includes a Webkit browser. This last point is where folks like us start to give a hoot, [...]

Episode 18: Roger Black on web type and templates

Legendary art director Roger Black guests on tomorrow’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped in front of a live internet audience. Roger co-founded the following new companies: Webtype, creators of high-end fonts for online typography; Treesaver, a platform that uses CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the principles of responsive design [...]

HTML5 For Web Designers: The eBook

Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers is now available as an epub at books.alistapart.com. If you bought the paperback, watch your inbox for a special discount on the ebook. (To take advantage of this offer, enter the discount code in page 2 of the shopping cart’s checkout process, after you put in your billing information.) [...]

Announcing Lanyrd

No, it isn’t a Happy Cog project (it’s by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe) but we couldn’t love Lanyrd, the social conference directory any more if we’d created it ourselves. Lanyrd uses Twitter to tell you which conferences, workshops and such your friends are attending or speaking at. You can add and track events, and [...]

HTML5 Pour Les Web Designers

Sacrebleu! The French edition of the ebook of Monsieur Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers is in the top five sellers in the iTunes Store Français. To answer your other questions: an eBook version in English is coming to books.alistapart.com next week, will soon thereafter also be sold via the iTunes Store, and will be [...]

The Orchid - New Mexico EP

If you like lush instrumental bands like Explosions in the Sky, you should get yourself over to The Orchid’s Bandcamp page, where you can preview their debut EP ‘New Mexico’. I’ve just picked up my copy!

Little Big Planet 2

Little Big Planet is the video game that has it all – inventive gameplay, a truly great soundtrack, costumes, Stephen Fry narration and of course the ability to make your own games. LBP2 looks set to build on that even more, but the trouble is I haven’t finished #1 yet! (Back up your game progress folks, lest you end up like me having start all over again after a Red Screen of Death)

Starflyer 59 - Changing of the Guard

There’s a new Starflyer 59 album on the way, which means 3 things: I get excited, I talk about it a lot, and people ask me who they are and what they should listen to for a Starflyer introduction. Their sound has changed a lot over the years, from the debut album Silver, and it’s My Bloody Valentine-ish droning guitars to straighter rock, via New Order and Electronica. It’s hard to pick out an introduction playlist, but I’ve had a go, and you can listen to it on Spotify. If you do have a listen, ‘Everyone but Me’ is my favourite track of all time, and Silver is in my top 5 favourite albums of all time.

White UFO

This beautiful Apple Airport Basestation was my 30th birthday present from my wife, quite possibly one of the best presents I’ve ever had. The gift of wireless. In those days it was 1mb broadband, but it was still exciting being able to work from anywhere in the house. These days it’s been overtaken by N wireless devices, but it’s such a design classic that it has to be on display. It’s new home is the windowsill next to my desk at Webble Mill.

Illustrator export artboards as png32

A recent plea on twitter for an Illustrator script has been answered! I needed to export all my artboards as 32bit PNGs (24bit + 8 bit Alpha Channel), with the artboard name as the filename, but Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in method to do this. The closest it offers is the standard export, where it can save all artboards, but it always appends the document name to the start of the filename. Big hurrays then for Dan Smith for creating exactly the script I needed! It’s already made a big difference to my workflow. If you’d like a copy too, Download Artboards-PNG.jsx. I placed mine in Illustrators Presets/en_gb/Scripts folder to make sure it’s always loaded.

A CSS3 Tip

IE8 Still Failing PNG Alpha

Smaller PNGs

Illustrator to HTML5's Canvas

Older Than...

[Podcast] Episode #20: Programming roundtable (Par…

Time: 19:38 | 09/02/2010 | Download MP3 Summary Three members of the 37signals programming team — Jeffrey Hardy, Jamis Buck, and Jeremy Kemper — answer questions from readers of Signal vs. Noise. Topics include Rails, Git, Mocha, Vim, nginx, Passenger, and more. More episodes Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.

QUOTE: Sometimes the problem has to mature beforeâ…

Sometimes the problem has to mature before the solution can mature. —Kent Beck

A couple of interesting UI techniques at Flickr

1) Interesting use of unicode characters for the UI on Flickr: That triangle up top is actually two triangle characters side-by-side. Sucks that we still have to resort to such hacks for such a common UI shape — but this is a smart solution. 2) Also interesting is this inline tour of the new photo pages. Rollover a number and bubbles pop up to show you what’s fresh for that section. More...

Smiley: An app in 24 hours

Late Monday afternoon David, Kiran, and I were discussing how we could begin to measure how our customers felt about our customer service. We’re already measuring things like response time, average tickets per day per person, average tickets in a thread, etc. Those stats are helpful for measuring internal efficiency and speed, but they don’t measure quality from a customer’s perspective. The idea We talked about it for a bit and came up with this basic goal: Let’s make it really easy for our customers to quickly rate our customer service every time we talk to them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a breakthrough idea, but it wasn’t something we were doing. It was time we experimented with the concept. We’d write some software and try it out. We’d call the app Smiley. The key The whole feedback process had to be easy, it had to be fast, and it couldn’t be a burden on our customers. We didn’t want to put people in front of some long-winded complicated survey — no one likes filling those out. We just wanted to ask them one quick question and that was it. The whole thing should take about five seconds and it should be entirely optional. We’d start there and see how it went. Linked from the email signature We decided we would add a short link to each support person’s email signature. The link would encode the support person’s ID along with the ticket number for the support request. When someone clicked the link they’d go to our site where they’d be asked to answer one question about the customer service experience they just had. That’s all. Starting on the design The next morning I went off and started designing some screens. After a few minutes I had the basic structure. There were five screens total: Three customer facing (and two of those were optional), two internally facing. (Customer facing) One screen which asked a customer a single question with three possible answers. (Customer facing – optional) One screen with a single text field where someone could choose to elaborate on their answer. This was entirely optional. (Customer facing – only seen if someone provides freeform text feedback) One thank you screen someone would see after they submitted their feedback. (Internal) One screen that showed all our customer service people along with their most recent ratings, their overall average rating, and a link to see all their ratings and feedback. (Internal) One screen that showed all of someone’s ratings along with any feedback a customer left on a particular rating. About an hour or so later I had the customer facing screens done. We went back and forth on a few iterations, and experimented with two options (“great” and “not great”) vs. three options (“great”, “fine”, and “not very good” – we picked this version), but overall the design was settled in about an hour. Originally I used some stock photo smiley faces for the mockup, but I asked Jamie to design some custom smileys for the design (you’ll see these below). The screen the customer sees after clicking a link in the email signature. The optional screen a customer sees if they answer the first question. Hooking it up Next David took the UI and began writing the Rails back-end to make it all work. While David was working on this, I started working on the internal facing admin screens. I spent a few hours messing around with some ideas, but eventually settled on the simplest version: More...

QUOTE: If you ask an artist why, the greatest arti…

If you ask an artist why, the greatest artists will tell you, “Well, it was beautiful. It inspired me. It touched me. It reminded me of this or that.” But you ask a designer why and he says, “Well, I’ve got these 15 different things that all have to coexist in this 800×600 pixel area. And if I do this, that doesn’t work. If I do this, it breaks the other thing. So in order for these three things to be in harmony, I have to do that…” That points more and more to the challenge to somebody who’s trying to get into or who’s trying to get a job doing UI design, that it’s not about looking at screen shots. Because then you’re putting yourself in the graphic design box. It’s about your ability to describe problems and your ability to show how it is that a design that you did worked. And if you can show the reasoning and the different relationships between the elements, then you can show that you really know something. —Ryan during the 37signals podcast Design roundtable – Part 2 (transcript).

Six Apart shuts down Vox

less than a month's notice, with export tools to Typepad and Flickr  

LA Times interview with the author behind Slaughte…

interesting process behind her Tumblr curation  

Informative Prints

by 16-year-old Swedish graphic artist Kiko Seiz  

Cheerleader wins lawsuit by suing the wrong websit…

Dan Quayle's son famously wrote a column for TheDirty.com [via] 

Anatomy of a Rickroll, hypnotic visualization of n…

here's an image request slowed down 40x; made with Packet Flight  

Coincidence? I think not.

submitted by clipeuh to pics [link] [277 comments]

With mild nudity and the worst excesses of Japan b…

submitted by astrodust to reddit.com [link] [707 comments]

Friend of mine finally decided to quit WoW forever…

submitted by TheCommonCow to gaming [link] [545 comments]

Please help California pass Prop. 19

Prop 19 Please help us pass this ballot. I have not seen any build up whatsoever and the vote is 5 short months away. I know that around election time the banners and commercials will come up but we need to start a grassroots effort NOW before various organizations with deep pockets nuke us with their anti-marijuana attack ads. Submitting and upvoting more pro-marijuana type stuff will definitely get this stuff into the public consciousness. EDIT: heh heh into the public consciousness submitted by bashobt to politics [link] [364 comments]

Robins can *see* magnetic fields. Seriously.

submitted by MostlyHarmless19 to science [link] [257 comments]

The Land of Strong Men by A. M. Chisholm

Language: English

Pharos, The Egyptian by Guy Boothby

Language: English

Marguerite de Valois by Alexandre Dumas père

Language: English

Scenas de viagem by Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay

Language: Portuguese

Stories of London by E. L. Hoskyn

Language: English

Justice – DVNO

http://www.last.fm/music/Justice

Justice – Tthhee Ppaarrttyy

http://www.last.fm/music/Justice

Justice – Valentine

http://www.last.fm/music/Justice

Justice – Phantom, Part II

http://www.last.fm/music/Justice

Justice – Phantom

http://www.last.fm/music/Justice