“The purpose of the Persona, I believe, is to add empathetic focus to the design. Empathetic focus. By focus I mean that the design must be clean and coherent. It is not a collection of features added willy-nilly through the life-span of the product, even if each feature by itself makes sense. Rather it is having a clear image of what the product is meant to be ó and what it is not meant to be ó and rejecting features that do not fit, only accepting ones that do.”

“Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover.”

“A function to show an ëimage loadingÖí message and subsequent fade-in of a photo. Inspired by the Flash-like effect on Couloir.”

“An experiment in replicating Flickr-like capability, or, imitation is the highest form of flattery. My favorite feature of the Flickr photo sharing service is the ability to annotate sections of a photo, like I did with a screenshot of my PC desktop. (Mouse over that picture and you’ll see what I mean.) This is very cool, and I don’t want you to have to click through to Flickr to see it. I want to be able to annotate my own photos here on Scribbling.net.”

“The results of the U.S. presidential election have been mapped in a number of ways. For some, there are two Americas, and one of them is, um, Canada ó instead of running away to Canada, some think Canada should come to them. Fun.” More, more and more.

“Stylegala aims to promote, discuss and inspire the web audience in the areas of design, CSS and web standards ó combined.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“This month’s Wired has a stunning article by James Surowiecki about the failing currency of brands as a form of intangible corporate asset. This is a timely piece because the rhetoric of branding has been used to make unprecedented incursions against privacy, competition and speech.”

“If you write captions, listen here: 1. Don’t state the obvious. We can see that he’s waving, that they’re shaking hands, that she’s sitting at her desk. Tell us something we don’t know. If there’s nothing to tell, tell nothing.”

For example, Ford: “Mr. Ford’s right-hand man, Harold Wills, earned money printing business cards in his teens, so when Henry was looking for a logo in 1903 he dusted off his old John Bull printing set. The typeface was the one he used for his own visiting cards. The oval appeared in 1912, and blue was added for the Model A in 1927.”

“Many jobs that before were only performed in established economies ñ including white collar jobs ñ are moving to transitional economies: from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, from North America to Asia. Alternately called ‘outsourcing’ or ‘offshoring’ this trend is accelerating faster than most of us realize.”

“This week marks the 100th anniversary of the New York subway system, and what better time to recognize the beautiful achievement represented by Massimo Vignelli’s subway map of 1972.”

“By making a conscious effort to integrate narrative into our work, we are better able to support creative learning, problem solving, and task completion by the people who use the things we build.”

“Here is a long chapter from Beautiful Evidence. Comments appreciated. The chapter will be up on the board for a few weeks. Thanks, E.T.”

“It’s a given that we at Cooperóand most of you reading this articleóbelieve design is the right tool for translating market needs into tangible product specifications. The people who hire us to design their products or who attend our Cooper U courses think the same thing. Unfortunately, the best designs and the best intentions won’t always lead you to success, because the problem goes beyond your product and beyond your design or development process. Building better, more innovative, and more profitable products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult level.”

Thank you. Here’s some extra info, courtesy of a.wholelottanothing.org: Find your polling place, What to do if you run into trouble voting. States where your employer legally must give you time off to vote.