Why read it? See it!

via PopURLs

Happy post-Thanksgiving! Things have been pretty quiet around the ole blog what with the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving itself, and the trytophan– and shopping-induced post-Thanksgiving weariness that inevitably follows. With all this holiday lethargy around us, how can we possibly be expected to read things (like this blog) without falling asleep? I, for one, have no such expectations.

So, to ease oneself back into the fast-paced information age, today I’m recommending the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online. For instance, this is how they define uses for the Internet:


Isn’t that so much better than some long-winded explanation from an IT professional?

Hmmm, they don’t seem to have blogs on their pictogram anywhere… but they do have educational institutions, so I guess we’re covered.

Of Fawnt and dafont

via Daring Fireball (from a couple of weeks ago)

There was I time when I was crazy for fonts. I would collect and pore over the typeface catalogs from Adobe, Monotype, ITC, and Emigre and dream of the day when I would own every font in the world.

Nowadays, with everyone and their uncle (or aunt) creating fonts I’ve given up on my plans of world font domination. There’s also the fact that owning every commercially-available font would be prohibitively expensive and having zillions of fonts loaded on my computer would cause Adobe apps to take eight hours to open (Microsoft Word could take up to three weeks to launch).

But, for those of you still clinging to your font fetishes, here are a couple of sites to enable your addiction:

Fawnt.com

Fawnt is a font resource for designers, developers, and anyone that appreciates the web's highest quality fonts

dafont.com

Welcome. Here you can download fonts to use in your documents, create titles or logos.

I’ve perused both sites and have resisted the urge to download all the free fonts. I can just look at them and appreciate them. Yeah.

Well, maybe I’ll just try one.

One of our own

DevCom's Vee Mahoney is participating in the SF Open Studios this weekend:

November 3-4, 2007
11 am - 6 pm

Her work is on display in her studio in Building 116 at the Hunters Point Shipyard.

Way to go, Vee!

40% of us feel fine. 1,217 feel weird.

Pam Pfiffner at Creative Pro blogs about her design epiphany while visiting Adobe , where she gets synchronistically clued into a site called weefeelfine.org. Maybe it's the introspection of fall, but I feel compelled to look at the wriggling data points about feelings, or at least poke around to see all the ways the designer is presenting the data.

This beguiling site is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site searches the blogosphere for instances of the words “I feel” or “I am feeling” and tracks the emotion attached to that phrase. The information is saved into a database that parses such information as location, age, and gender. Through a visual interface, site visitors can explore what people are feeling at any moment all over the world. Click on a dot representing a blog post and the “emotional” words in that blog posting appear. For example: “I feel like I don’t know how to have fun anymore.” Click those words and you’ll be taken to that person’s blog for more context.

Paul Rand said…

via Daring Fireball

I’m not familiar with The One Club, but I am familiar with Paul Rand. If you’re not familiar with Paul Rand (and you should be), you can read about him at Wikipedia.

If you’d rather see and hear about Paul Rand, though, you can watch this video created for Paul Rand’s induction into The One Club Hall of Fame.

“The Leopard, she is coming…”

Yes, that is my attempt at bad movie dialogue (à la The Night of the Iguana). But, hopefully you were able to read past the bad screenwriting and realize that it’s Mac OS X Leopard that is coming—on October 26th!

If you’ve already familiarized yourself with Leopard’s 300+ new features and gone through the guided tour, you can check out “Getting your Mac ready for OS X 10.5” at Macworld.com.

Actually, maybe you should make sure your Mac can handle the upgrade.

(The Scholar’s Workstation has Leopard available for pre-order. I’ve already got mine all lined up!)

Freelancin’ (mistakes)

via popurls
My first steps down this whole graphic design-type road were a string of desktop publishing-type jobs supplemented by freelance work. Later, I worked as a production artist-type at Huge Financial Institution of America (a pseudonym) and freelanced. Now, I devote my work week to the UC and when I’m at home—no freelance.

Why not? 1. I don’t want to. 2. I don’t have to. 3. You can’t make me.

I was never entirely happy performing freelance work. I just didn’t have the temperament for it. My Top 5 Biggest Freelance Mistakes from freelancefolder.com pretty much sums up why 4. I suck as a freelancer.