From Jeff Veen: “If you’re looking for work as a designer, the old cliche is true: a picture is worth a thousand words. That is, your portfolio is your most important calling card. I’ve been involved in hiring all sorts of designers — freelance, contract, full-time, in all sorts of disciplines — visual, interaction, illustration, print. Through this process, I’ve seen a lot of portfolios; some good, many bad. Here’s a few things I’ve learned while wading through them all.”

“At first glance, there’s nothing unusual about the January 2006 cover of Harper’s Bazaar. It showcases a famous woman looking pretty, pledges to reveal the ‘Season’s Must-Haves,’ and trumpets a big, meaningless number (635, the quantity of ‘New Looks’ purportedly dished up within). To the untrained eye, the cover appears elegant but tame. To the editors of women’s magazines, however, it is a cold glass of water thrown in the face of convention. Why? Because it’s green.”

“kuler is brand new from Adobe Labs. kuler helps you explore, create and share color themes from your web pages, design projects and other creative work.

“Deep down inside every software developer, there’s a budding graphic designer waiting to get out. And if you let that happen, you’re in trouble. Or at least your users will be, anyway…”

“Just for fun, I’ve decided to share my first published writing on the subject of typography. It appeared in the April 19, 1977, issue of Metropolis, the Weekly Newspaper of Minneapolis. Metropolis unfortunately folded about six months later, but it was an incredible place to work. I may write more about it sometime.”

“Yesterday was my last day at TechCrunch. It’s been a good run but I’m excited to get back into consulting for non profit organizations and startup businesses. This is a post about how I did my research while writing for TechCrunch, written in the belief that the more valuable information a person shares the more likely they are to be hired to share even more information as a consultant.”

“I sign most of my emails with ‘Best’, especially when I don’t know the person particularly well, and I definitely don’t mean it as a brush-off. ‘Sincerely’ is too formal, ‘Warmest regards’ is a lie (you can’t give absolutely everyone your warmest regards), and ‘xoxo’…I’m not a girl. So “Best” it is…don’t take it the wrong way.”

“I received a great reader question today from Nicole about how to go about buying a small letterpress, so I thought I would share my answer with all of you in case this is something others have been wondering about.”

“A collection of podcasts of Steven Heller’s lectures from the School of Visual Arts and other talks to watch and listen to. Downloadable interviews by Steven Heller from PRINT, AIGA VOICE and other sources. There are several interviews with Heller as well.”

“One of the problems of mapping between the HTML and the CSS is that they usually differ in structure. The HTML is (if you‚Äôre lucky) structured like a convenient semantical tree while the CSS often is ordered by something random like fonts, colors, and positioning. To make moving between the two worlds easier we want to make them as similar as possible.” (Thanks dangerousmeta!)

Once again, as I do every year, I forgot to note xBlog’s anniversary. This year we mark approximately 2,555 days of visual thinking linking. That’s seven years and 5600+ posts. xBlog went public 11 Nov 1999 and I’ve been posting here on a near-daily basis since then. Whew. The link goes to a circa-2000 xBlog page on Archive.org. Anyway — Happy Thanksgiving, America!

“Last week I set a personal record: started flamewars on four mailing lists. It would have been six or seven, but I realized I was edgy, and decided to not watch the mailing list folders for a few days until I cooled off. But I never cooled off. And I wondered why. I recalled a recent blogpost by Adam Greenfield (hilariously if inaccurately mocked by ok-cancel) and I found a clue. I think he, and Peterme, and Lou and Peter Morville… well, we’re all outgrowing our favorite pair of jeans: IA.”

“If you discount CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (which is officially the Largest Machine in the World; then the biggest MOVING machine build by humans would be the giant bucket wheel excavator ‘Bagger 288′ built by Krupp in Germany in 1978. “

“XML is approaching 10 years old. How closely depends on how you’re counting. The W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 was published on 10 February 1998. Work on XML started around 1996, however, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML. The design principles for XML, which guided its development were published on 25 August 1996. The first working draft, published on 14 November 1996 defined documents very similar to the majority of XML you might see today.”

frogdesign starts a blog: “There’s been a lot of attention on the intersection of the business and design worlds recently. The goal of this blog is to explore some of the many topics that fall under this broad umbrella. Some of these areas: strategic decision-making, innovation strategy, systematizing innovation, business transformation, new tools and methodologies, and education. And whatever else happens to strike my fancy.”