Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

It’s a small world

The Size Of Our World is a great visual comparison of Earth, the other bodies in our solar system and some stars within our galaxy. While the site is far from polished, this simple page does a great job displaying the enormous scale of the larger planets and stars compared to our rock and each other. Link via BoingBoing.

Posted in Featured, General & Tagged: science

Veerle’s CSS List

Veerle provides an amazing list of CSS resources. Link found via the ever-useful SimpleBits.

Posted in CSS, Design & UI, Quick Links & Tagged: CSS, web design, Web Development

The ugliness that is World Cup design

Erik Spiekermann, (author of Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works) takes to task the designer’s and executives involved in branding this year’s World Cup, criticizing the mascot and logo and in general beautifully stating the problems with design by committee: “It’s like designing a joke, and you can’t design a joke. I think the original design assignment must have been all over the place. With all the things that had to be avoided and then all the things they wanted included, it was impossible to come up with something good.”

Mr. Spiekermann provides some interesting illumination concerning Germany’s internal view of its external image, and how it likely played a huge part in many of the choices.

Instead of harnessing this tremendous opportunity to shine on the world stage, Deutschland stumbled into mediocrity. Thus we are presented with a boring lion and a silly logo.

Posted in Design, Design & UI & Tagged: Design, logos, soccer

MagicTracer Upgrade

Sywan, one of the two folks working on MagicTracer just dropped me a note that they have a new version out. It looks like a great tool, made even better with this 1.5 release. Coincidentally, Sarah and I were talking the other day about the availability of software that will take a raster image and automagically convert it to vector/paths for Illustrator. Sadly it isn’t available on OS X, so neither of us will be able to use it. Sigh.

It still looks neat though.

Posted in Design, Design & UI & Tagged: Design, illustrator, vector

Typography for Headlines

Typography for Headlines | Smiley Cat Web Design

Posted in Design, Design & UI, Quick Links & Tagged: typography

Shopify

Shopify - “A shop in minutes, a business for life.”

Posted in Quick Links, Web Development & Tagged: commerce, web application

Remote Buddy

Remote Buddy “gives you control over the rest of your [Mac] via the remote control and also improves the available functionality in those apps that already supported the remote control by themselves.”

Posted in Featured, OS X & Tagged: macbook pro, OS X