“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.”
WALL-E Easter Eggs
“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…”
The Top 50 Productivity Blogs Of The Year
“If you have ever looked back at the previous day / week / month and realized that you didn’t get as much done as you wanted to then you might want to look at your productivity and make some improvements. Making better use of your time can help grow your business, make you happier, give you more income, and allow for more time to yourself and your family. The following list represents the top 50 blogs on productivity from around the Internet. Reading through them will help give you the tools to make your life and business more productive and allow you to reap the benefits. Enjoy!”
Congrat to XPLANE founder Dave Gray for making the list!
Welcome back to the United States. Now let's see what's on your laptop
“Authorities need a search warrant to get at a computer in your home, and reasonable suspicion that you’re up to no good to search your laptop in other places (like if you’re surfing bomb-making sites while using WiFi at a coffee shop).
But the rules change when you’re crossing the border back into the United States. And that has raised concerns from business travelers, privacy advocates and some lawmakers about the vulnerability of the huge amounts of information people carry on their laptops and other digital devices.”
Deceptive Areas
“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.”
Brilliant, Engaging, But Modest It’s Not
Rick Poynor: “Stefan Sagmeister’s latest book may reveal as much about the state of graphic design as it does about its compelling author.”
Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different That Previously Thought, Technology Shows
“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.”
Gene Weingarten – Yanks Thump Sox
“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.”
The Story of VizThink
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…”
García Media | Blog
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.”
