“A thought-out domain name can save you a lot of time and bring you a lot of traffic. Search engines love topic-related domain names and they seem to be an important aspect which is being used to evaluate web-pages. Besides, if you have a popular web-site with enviable reputation, you might be willing to make sure that your visitors don’t get to some surprising web-sites mistyping your site’s URL… Let’s take a look at essential, hand-picked domain-related tools, articles and resources we’ve found in the Web during our research.”

“Deep within the archives of Print’s Daily Heller (we love it, it’s just so hard to get to it), we learn that McSweeney’s is starting a design studio.”

Find the 25 graphic and publication design terms before time runs out — and maybe win a poster. (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“My name is Andy. On the 29th of May I was hit by a motorcycle while biking to work and broke my right arm at my wrist, elbow and shoulder. Unfortunately, I’m right-handed. To my right are my ongoing attempts to teach myself to adequately draw as a leftie.”

“In an effort to increase developer productivity at Google, Steve tried to convince the company to adopt Rails (and consequently Ruby) as a programming language. When that fell on deaf ears (Google really does not want to increase the number of languages that must be supported by their infrastructure), Steve decided to do what any other frustrated programmer would do: he ported Rails to JavaScript. Line by line. In 6 months. Working 2000 hours. Steve is a coding stud.”

Hey L.A. — this event is just a few hours from now: Sunday, June 24 at 7pm at Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles, Cal.: “It is hard to believe there is anything new to be discovered about perspective drawing. But in 2004 twin artists Trevor and Ryan Oakes made a startling discovery about how to render perspectival images on the inner surface on a sphere. Their discovery is all the more intriguing in the light of recent controversy surrounding David Hockney’s thesis about the use of spherical lenses in the making of perspective drawings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

“Last Sunday I casually wrote a post about the most common pitfalls in photography. I had written the post a long time ago, but I never put it on this site. The story ended up on the front page of Digg, stayed there for nearly 12 hours and was picked up by a bunch of secondary sources, resulting in 100,000 Visitors within a day (most of them within the first 12 hours). Trying to keep my server up and alive, I learned a lot about what it takes to keep the server alive, hence I decided to slide a non photography related post in, hopefully giving everyone who finds themselves in a similar situation some points to consider.”

“Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living — possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it — like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com. Coudal Partners is a small firm based in Chicago that does branding and design work for clients and has also created products of its own. Coudal.com is certainly a promotional tool for the firm, but just as certainly a constantly updated trove of interesting links and cleverly entertaining goof-off projects. Which is more or less how the Swap Meat started.”

“I came across a link to Stefan Sagmeister’s presentation at TED more than once—and it lingered in a back tab of my browser waiting to be fired up. Usually this means I’ll get overwhelmed and just close everything down, but it took two reputable reads (Swiss Miss and Greg Storey) to force me to carve out the 15 minutes to watch it… The point is, I really enjoyed Stefan’s talk and I’m glad this material is available online. If you don’t have the time to watch it, here’s a list from Sagemeister’s diary: Complaining is silly. Either act or forget…”

“The brand new FastCompany.com homepage design that debuted today is sure to change quite a lot over the coming months. Not because we don’t love it — we do — but because we’re adopting a business strategy based on agile development, a movement embraced by the open-source software community. With agile, the idea is to move quickly, launching changes in a constant flow rather than accumulating a bucket of new features and releasing them all at once — what the software development community somewhat disparagingly calls a waterfall.”

“In no way am I suggesting that I’ve achieved the ideal balance between the personal and professional. I’ll admit, things skew a bit towards the professional in my life right now. If anything, though, I’m aiming to tip the scales towards the personal, especially going forward. I’m better at achieving this balance today than I was ten years ago, and I certainly hope to be better at it in ten years than I am now. I don’t want to find myself, in a decade, running out of a family vacation to make a business meeting. Even more to the point, I don’t want to find myself still working at the office at 6:30p when my children are growing up without me.”

“Photographer Rob Galbraith reports that Apple’s newly released Safari 3 beta for Windows is color managed–bringing color management to Windows browsers for the first time. I never thought I’d say it, but this is great news. Now there’s a cross-platform way to present accurate color images on the Web. Check ‘ICC Profile’ in Photoshop’s Save for Web dialog to include the info needed for color management to do its thing.”

“Óscar Corvera, infographics artist from La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador), sends this interesting document about the steps given to make one of his breaking news graphics and other following the facts, a great example of how an infographic artists can (should) work as a journalist. I’ll let him speak…”

” There’s no need to restate the high reverence (or pangs of envy, depending on where your loyalty lies) of Apple. They have innovated, floundered, and in recent years, risen from the ashes to make one hell of a run in computing and electronics devices. Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that they are adored by their fans. Their brand has reached that highly sought-after place in the world of marketing: they can do no wrong.

So how did they get there? Is it dumb luck? Or are they just much smarter than the rest of us? The most common reason given is Apple’s rabid devotion to design. That is, without a doubt, a key component of Apple’s success. But I think there’s more to it than that. Here are ten reasons why I think Apple is so successful today, and what we can learn from them…”

“There has been a lot said recently about Vertical Rhythm. Richard Rutter began the work on 24ways last year with the piece ‘Compose to a Vertical Rhythm’. This was built upon by Wilson Minor on A List Apart recently with his article on Baseline Grids. All sound typographic advice… At @media this year, I presented ‘Five Simple Steps to Better Typography’. Step two in my presentation was was Vertical Rhythm where I reiterated some of the excellent points Richard made in his article and also the presentation we both gave in at SXSW in March. I also added something of my own: Incremental leading, or Incremental line-height.”