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This week Smashing Magazine has a great overview for creating Style Guides for brands and websites. It covers the basics from Logos to color treatments, and even gets deeper into grid and icon use for websites. A comprehensive list of beautiful visual examples and related articles. A must read for designers who are new to the world of branding.
CSS iPhone is a great resource for well designed iPhone formatted websites. Good for anyone researching mobile web design and looking for inspiration.
Stickybits is a service that lets you attach comments or media to any barcode. Instead of generating QR codes, you can make an object social by using the barcode it already has. To tag an object without a barcode you can either download a custom code to print yourself or buy Stickybits barcode stickers.
Download the Stickybits iPhone or Android application and track down a barcode. Using the app you can tag an object, view your tag archives, or see what other people have tagged near you. Each item gets its own page on Stickybits.com where you can comment, upload media and follow the conversation from the web.
Frankly, I’ve been waiting patiently for QR codes to matter but with companies like Stickybits using pre-existing targets, and the huge advancements in image recognition software QR has a hard road ahead. Stickybits is currently only on the iPhone and Android platform, but their unique strategy around making codes social may push them to the front of the pack.
Check out Stickybits and get the app here.
Thanks to Jeremy Kutner for introducing me to this one.
Mobile Awesomeness is a design showcase for the best mobile formatted websites. Submissions can be voted on and the gallery can be browsed by category or searched. Mobile Awesomeness also has a great list of links to mobile resources, as well as a blog focusing on mobile innovations and announcements. A must visit site for anyone designing or building smartphone formatted versions of their websites.
Iconfinder is a search engine for (you guessed it) icons. It’s a great source for graphic designers to get inspiration or even download icons for commercial use. A search for “music” yielded 12 pages of results, the first of which is displayed below.
The site’s functionality is fairly basic but does allow you to change the color behind the icons to see how they work on multiple backgrounds, filter by the type of license, and filter by size.
An interesting article showing a correlation between prolonged overtime work and a sharp decline in productivity. It’s amazing to see studies done by Ford at the turn of the century, and those done in startups showing almost exactly same loss in productivity with sustained overwork. Good for short bursts of productivity, but a loosing strategy if it becomes the norm. A great read.
http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html
