From Distinguished XPLANE Alum Dan Z.: “Apparently, last week at the annual awards gala of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Little Rock, Arkansas, a piece I worked on with the Riverfront Times won a 1st-place editorial award in a category called the ‘Format Buster’ (I’m not sure what the trophy looks like). The piece, master-minded by the fine dudes at the RFT, was a series of clip-able Bingo cards designed for attendees of the world’s third largest Mardi Gras celebration, in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis. I did all the illustrations for the cards and also for the cover…”

“CreativePublic is your one-stop shop for quality forms, contracts, employee manuals, company policies and pricing for graphic designers. Download free samples.”

“One of the sad aspects of Tibor’s early death is that it puts other people in the unhappy position of having to speak for him, which I really can’t. Working on his book with him, I came to know Tibor as a person who, simply put, was uncomfortable being comfortable. His intuitive reaction to any status quo situation was first to disrupt it.”

If great photographers had posted their pix to online forums: “Hi Irv, I don’t know what you were thinking here dude! You got a pretty model (altho kind of old), but you have caught her with her eyes cloes in a not very good pose. Biggest problem is YOU NEED CROP to a vertical!!!!! Backdrop is too small and there is not enough of a sweep so you can see the crease. If you send me a file I can fix it in Photoshop and I can give you my suggested crop. If you don’t care aboout your PROFESSIONALISM you are never going to get work as a pro believe me!!! Hope I am not being too harsh. Oh well best regards anyway, M.H.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“We kicked off an effort at the start of this year to look more closely at network research happening at university and other labs, figuring that while the technologies being worked on won’t necessarily find their way into your network immediately, they might give you something to consider in making longer-term plans. We’ve covered these stories in the physical and virtual pages of Network World, including on our Alpha Doggs network research blog. Here our pick of the 10 most interesting projects, in no particular order, that we’ve come across as mid-year approaches…”

“Harris Interactive recently released a list of products ranked by brand equity, a measure of the brand’s popularity with US consumers… Marketing can be a double-edged sword. The companies who manufacture these products have done a fantastic job in marketing these products, so fantastic in some cases that the brand name is in danger of becoming a genericized trademark.”

“It can be tricky to identify the right levels of manpower for a web team. Indeed, many organisations badly underestimate the amount of work required to keep their sites operating smoothly–they perhaps imagine that once a website is put live, it magically looks after itself. As a result, only the barest bones of proper staffing are put in place. Fortunately, the problem of defining the number of people required on a web team is not insurmountable. A useful device for arriving at a good answer is the concept of ‘website scale.’”

“‘If you leave groups to their own devices, they’re going to do a very miserable job,’ says Prof. Paulus. But if people brainstorm alone after the group brainstorming session, it can be productive, he says, adding, ‘It’s ironic: You tap the benefits of groups alone. Everyone still presumes the best brainstorming is group brainstorming.’”

“Now on to the publishing history, beginning with this post on January 5, 2006: I have completed Beautiful Evidence, except for the index and a few loose ends. We are currently proofing some difficult images on press, negotiating with printers, planning the order for paper and binding, and working through other production issues. Probably the major threats to breaking the schedule will be in color-correcting images and in importing some paper used in one section of the book… Printing complete on Thursday, May 11. At the bindery, folding is underway. I picked the cloth and the color of the ink stamping on the cloth some time ago. Major issue now is the carton for mailing single books; the total weight of book and carton is just over 3 pounds, which is a substantial break point on shipping prices. We found a lighter shipping carton that works well to protect the book, but of course it is made in Switzerland…. Copies were ready Friday but the bindery was concerned that the glue wasn’t dry and thus the shipped copies might warp. So Tuesday it is for the first copies here. There are certainly some virtues to web publishing, such as glue drying avoidance. But such reflections will vanish when I hold the first book. And I in fact enjoy the physicality of bookmaking…. 10 copies this morning. It’s wonderful, just about everything I hoped it would be when printed.”

From the comments: “So charming, individually you wouldn’t really notice much about the pictures, (although they do inspire a nice eerie sense of nostalgia,) but together: after pointing out the shadowy similarity, they become a hypnotic series of mysterious and borderline nefarious snapshots of some dark anomaly stalking unassuming people on their lawns and porches… Very lovely.”

“Photoshop has so many different work areas and tools that it can confuse digital photographers. Here’s how to set up your workflow so you’re efficient, not intimidated.”

“[Gregg] Rapp is so sure of his menu makeovers that he offers a money-back guarantee that his menu will raise profits–and in his 25 years in the business, he has yet to issue a refund. The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. ‘This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong,’ he explains. ‘If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing.’ It’s better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer’s appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.”

“The best way to accept file uploads on your website!”

“Y! Answers has its problems (about half the questions can be answered better by Google searches, and about half of the questions are retarded), but sometimes, there’s an absolutely brilliant question or answer. This is one of the brilliant questions, sheerly in terms of how compelling it is. ‘Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? Think about how much technological innovation has changed our lives in the past 5 years‚Ķand what products we use every day now. What’s the next big thing that will change the way we live?’”

“A few days ago, I wondered in passing about the origins of typographical bleeping, in which asterisks or hyphens or underscores are substituted for certain letters in order to avoid violating lexical taboos. Greg Hanneman emailed an example from 1869, and this caused me to do a small search that pushed it back to 1688 1680. No doubt some readers will be able to push it back further.” (Thanks kottke.org!)