“Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.”

“The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes.

So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)”

“Marks and meaning is a work in progress; an evolving exploration of visual language, visual thinking and visual work practices by the founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. An unfinished work, it’s a hybrid: part sketchbook, part textbook, part workbook, and continuously updated by the author, based on feedback and conversations with readers. This is version zero: the first version available to the public.”

“The definitive resource list for anyone designing, developing, marketing or maintaining websites.”

Peter Merholz: “At UX Week 2008, our Day 4 keynoter is Dr. Michael B. Johnson, who runs the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar. He’s been gracious enough to engage in an email conversation with me, which I’ll be sharing here.”

“Scrnshots.com is a community for designers to share screenshots of interesting and beautiful design.” (Thanks Jon!)

“World Comics is a non-profit organization in Finland and India that promotes the use of local comics as a means for social change. Grassroots Comics: A Development Communication Tool (PDF) is a free, downloadable manual for other non-governmental organizations about developing comics with community activists for use in their campaigns. See examples of grassroots comics in India and Africa, as well as videos and posters from grassroots comics workshops.”

“This video wasn’t long enough, so we made it double-spaced.”

“Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. It provides a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at, one that anyone who’s ever designed a magazine will recognize.”

Felix Sockwell: “Today the iPhone/ nytimes app releases. I’ve drawn GUI before but this one was special. For my news of choice and another chance to work with renowned web wizard Khoi Vinh and designer Caryn Tutino.”

The “new-improved, re-designed, wordier, picture-ier Daily Heller” now in blog format.

“Getty and Flickr have just entered into an exclusive partnership to sell Flickr images.

Here’s how it’ll work:

1. Getty editors will scour Flickr for images they deem saleable
2. They’ll contact photographers whose images are selected to see if they want to make them available for licensing by Getty Images
3. Assuming the photographer says yes, the images become available through Getty’s Flickr collection, and accessible to all their existing customers in the image licensing space

It remains to be seen how many images Getty will select, what deal they’ll offer photographers, and how they’ll select images. But people have been wondering what impact Flickr would have on the stock photography space for years, and this is a pretty interesting deal!”

From Douglas Wilson: “Polaroids taken of mostly hand-painted signs over the past four years all across the United States.”

“A key characteristic of the SparkMaker add-in for Microsoft Office is the typographical creation of sparklines by means of specifically crafted TrueType Fonts (TTF), the Bissantz SparkFonts.

The crux of SparkMaker is that each value of the input data is represented by one character which is formatted with an appropriate SparkFont. The SparkFonts embody bars, line segments, pies and other fractions of statistical diagrams. The concatenation of formatted characters results in a “textual image” of the sparkline. This way, you can work with the sparkline just like with normal text. For example, you can put it into table cells or insert it directly into your writings. Another quality is that the sparklines can continuously be scaled with the surrounding text, and printouts are razor-sharp.”

“The first 200 Studio Lettering buyers will receive a free 64-page hardbound book! Add a refreshing dash of hand lettered flavor to your design with the Studio Lettering fonts, a collection of three charming script faces and a useful ornament font. These genuinely ’smart’ fonts feature sophisticated OpenType engineering, robust character sets and extensive language support!”

Note from Ben Kiel, a former XPLANE intern currently clicking away at House:

Each of the fonts has thirteen different character sets based on the different ways cultures write (or on the different ways a lettering artist would write in a country). Easiest example is Europeans crossing the downstroke on a seven.

Thanks Ben!