“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!

Matt Jones and Tom Coates, a presentation from the 2008 Web2.0Expo: “Today we’re going to… examine what we find a pretty fascinating emerging area — where ubiquitous technology is increasingly impacting our lives, which we call ‘personal informatics.’”

XPLANE founder Dave Gray is giving a couple workshops in London this month. You can get more info at his blog, Communication Nation.

London is calling my name again.

Next week I’ll be in London for two events, July 9th and 10th.

On July 9th, from 4pm-9pm, I will be leading a workshop called Thinking visually to tackle business challenges: A creative and innovative approach to problem solving.

Statistical surveys have shown that design and visualisation have a verifiable impact on business performance. Visual articulation is important when solving a problem that involves strategic goals and initiatives. At its core, it helps bridge the problem or opportunity with the solution. That is why helping decision makers to think and express themselves visually gives organisations a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Joining me will be a couple of XPLANE clients, who will share case studies of how they employed visual thinking in their organisations…

On July 10th I will be leading an interactive session and discussion at VizThink London. That event goes from 5:30-9:00pm.

“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.”