“Ah, URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been widely reported and almost uniformly lamented, the ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.”

“Pixar is known to fill their films with fun easter eggs and WALL-E is no different. Here are some of the things you probably missed…”

“People are poor at accurately judging areas; they do much better comparing linear measures like the lengths of a bar or the heights of a point. Areas can be useful where precision’s not important—circles can be scattered over a map, for example, to allow readers to scan for trends. But too often designers indicate data with areas because shapes are cooler than lines and you can arrange them in pretty patterns.

Regardless of the shape chosen, because we have a hard time judging areas, it’s vitally important that sizes are calculated accurately: namely, proportional to the value they represent. Otherwise the designer is telling lies.”

Rick Poynor: “Stefan Sagmeister’s latest book may reveal as much about the state of graphic design as it does about its compelling author.”

“Scientists have been interested in the movements of our eyes while reading for forty years. However, until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently.

Now ground-breaking research by cognitive psychologist Professor Simon Liversedge and his team at the University of Southampton has shown that this is not actually the case. They found that our eyes are actually up to something much more exciting when we read — our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion.”

“If you are like I, you are pretty sick of reading articles about how the financially-troubled newspaper industry is making desperation budget cutting moves: Downsizing its products, laying off staff, buying prostitutes for advertisers, and so forth. But believe me, you’d be even sicker of it if you were INSIDE a typical American newsroom these days, where it’s sometimes hard to hear over the 200 decibel background drone of human whining.

One frequent newsroom complaint is that they are cutting back drastically in the use of copyeditors. It’s true, but I for one am not complaining. I say good riddance.”

Congrats to the VizThink team on their one-year anniversary!

“As you may have noticed in our earlier post today, June 25th is VizThink’s one-year anniversary. One of the questions we get most often is, “How did VizThink get started?”. So, we thought this might be a good time to re-tell that story…”

Famed newspaper (re)designer Mario García launched a blog last month: “A blog about storytelling, design, the projects we work on, the things we learn along the way.”

“Yesterday, while the humidity in New York grew to more than an inch thick, Bryony and I had the pleasure of spending the day inside the Herb Lubalin Study Center (HLSC) in famed Cooper Union. Founded in 1985 — and first curated by Ellen Lupton until 1992, and now headed by Mike Essl and Emily Roz — the HLSC houses one of the most impressive (and one of the few accessible) collections of graphic design work from the twentieth century.”

Check out this new XPLANATiON that XPLANE put together:

“Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money — by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks.”

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Derek Powazek: “For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine — real, live printed magazine — with no giant pile.”

“Coudal Partners started as a traditional ad agency. Then Jim and Co. morphed it into something else: a multidisciplinary design consultancy that does everything from running an ad network to creating consumer products to cultivating a vibrant community of creative types. We caught up with innovator at the Seed Conference, a design and entrepreneurship pow-wow he helped found. Here he discusses Coudal’s business model and popular blog.”

“Ideas. They’re at the heart of every creative process. However, almost no really good ideas are flashes of inspiration. They may start that way—a single glimmer of something special—but in order to work, they need to be honed. Like a really good cheese, they need to mature. Indeed, the ‘flash of inspiration’ idea—the Eureka moment—is only part of a longer process that, if ignored, will see most ideas simply fizzle out.

So, how do you ‘have’ ideas? Sit about and wait for them to pop into your head? If only most of us had the luxury to do so. No, for most of us, ideas have to be squeezed out of us every day. To stand up to this challenge, you need to arm yourself with some good tools.”

“If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.

Working with bad projects or bad clients generally boils down to mismatched expectations and inadequate communication. Your best safeguard is to make sure you and your client are on the same page before any work has even begun using a Terms of Service Agreement, which essentially puts into clear, written language what you expect from your client and what they should expect from you.”

“A Wayfinding system incorporates branding, signs, maps and directional devices that tell us where we are, where we want to go, and how to get there. An effective wayfinding system can add an important dimension to the image of a museum, a transit system, an airport, an office building, or an entire city. It can be designed as a savvy helper that gives information and direction to people in a clear, appropriate, user friendly way, to assist them in finding their way into, through, and out of an environment.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)