“VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.”

“Do you communicate formally or informally? When you give a talk, is it highly structured and laid out in formal blocks, like a city? Or is it an untamed wilderness; a confusing tangle of references? What about your website? How about your work environment? What does it communicate?”

“Every design profession needs its iconic success story. Architects have the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Product designers have the Apple iPod. And now, at last, graphic designers have an icon to call their very own: a little pill bottle, about 4 inches tall.”

“That great bane of contemporary media, the Listicle, made another appearance last week. This time, it was in answer to that nagging question: what were the 40 greatest magazine covers of the last 40 years.”

“This article distinguishes between influence in marketing and in sales. While there is overlap between the two, marketing here refers to activities you use to get visible in your target market. ‘Sales’ refers to face-to-face conversations you have with prospects. Following are eight ways to apply the principles of influence to your marketing strategy and tactics…”

“As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with.”

“Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.”

“Design is a distinctive way of thinking, a tool kit for looking at life and deciding how to live it. This Web site is an invitation to people from all walks of life to share stories and evidence of how they use design in their everyday lives. People use design to solve problems, improve situations, and invent ideas and make them physically real. How do you use design at home, at work, and in your social world?”

“The monster that will devour the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News isn’t even on the radar of the bosses at Knight-Ridder. And their plans to curtail news coverage and print more advertising will only make this creature more powerful. That monster is Google…”

“I need help understanding the concept of kerning fonts. Is there a formula to it, or is it really what looks ‘best?’”

“Painters say 5 days, it takes 8. Designers say 2 weeks, it takes 4. Programmers say 3 months, it takes 5. Government says it will take $X and it takes $XX. It’s been a very rare occasion (in my life, at least) that estimates have been anywhere near accurate. Even people in business for 20 years seem to have a bad time making accurate estimates. I realize an estimate is just a guess, but there’s a lot of bad guessing going around. What is it about people that make us such bad estimators?”

“We‚Äôre starting to see the first round of sites and pages breaking due to the CSS fixes we have made. We would like to ask your help in cleaning up existing CSS hacks in your pages for IE7. It is has been our policy since IE6 that under quirks doctype we will not make any behavioral changes so that existing pages will continue to render unmodified, but under the strict doctype we want to change behavior to be as compliant as possible with the web standards.”

“The 40 greatest magazine covers of the last 40 years were unveiled today at the American Magazine Conference… Rolling Stone’s January 22, 1981 cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was named the top magazine cover to appear since 1965, while Vanity Fair’s cover featuring a naked, pregnant Demi Moore (August 1991), ranked as the # 2 cover.” (More info)

We’re going to take a short break to do some backend upgrades and watch post-season Cardinals baseball. We’ll be back shortly. In the meantime, check out XPLANE CEO Dave Gray’s weblog, COMMUNICATION NATION.

“Originally delivered at the Festival of Cartoon Art, Ohio State University, October 27, 1989. The text of Watterson’s speech is presented here in the spirit of intellectual discourse.”