The Society for Newspaper Design has released it’s 4 best designed papers for the year.

I’ve got a post in the pipeline exploring what digital designers can learn from their info-oriented cousins in the print world. In the meantime enjoy the video above – I’m really loving the Russian bi-weekly Akzia. Nice soundtrack too.

The iPod has put an Apple product in the pockets of half the western world but somehow it’s lost a bit of brand mojo or mystique along the way. I’m not saying I want to go back to the days of $6000 laptops but maybe it’s time for the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” campaign to get retired.

Update: here’s the main ad on Youtube…

Gizmodo have a bit more

The table is bad enough – but DIVs nested inside each cell with duplicate IDs on all the related elements!!??!!

They’re pretty funny buggers the team at Poke, they point to this site of unlikely lads in their post about their win.

The highlight for me of that aforementioned Irish Central Fisheries Board site is this pic of Dylan Condron after a successful weekend spent with mates on the fantastically named River Suck.

If you can’t wait until you go grey for the Unlimited site to load check out a few pics of it on Poke’s site.

The always amazing Universal Everything used Flickr to collect images of people holding up blank piece of paper – then turned them into a tasty motion graphics sequence for Nokia.

That’s pretty much to scale.

Maybe clients like to see them. Makes them comfortable, like someone who speaks your own language in a foreign country. But they just don’t work as internal project management tools. Check out the notes on this image of another typical Gantt chart on Flickr – sums up the whole process nicely I think.

</rant>

What I’m driving at in my own obtuse way is that the best design (and development) is produced by small, nimble, dedicated teams that can communicate directly with each other in a fluid environment. Place a few key and realistic deadlines then work hard, fast and smart towards them. Bloody simple.

Team Size

Keep it small. Some of the worlds best brands, products and web apps have been built by very small teams. This doesn’t mean an agency of 100 people is completely useless (on this account anyway) – some of those same brands and products belong to very large companies like Apple, Amazon & Flickr. If project teams are kept to the bare minimum to produce a result it will almost inevitably be more cohesively realised end product. 7 people +/− 2 should be the sweet spot.

There’s a couple of great post I’ve read lately on design team size by Khoi Vinh of the NY Times and 37 Signals the Basecamp folks. Give them a read, Khoi especially is much more elegant than me on the subject.

Agility

Everyone needs to know what is going on. The trick to making sure this isn’t an overwhelming flow of information is to keep the major goal posts clear and simple – chalked up where everyone can see them everyday – and then allow the small stuff to sort itself in an organic way between team members. For the day-to-day ‘status’ updates something like a distributed Twitter could work very well (drop me a line if you’re interested in this).

What’s makes up that team? Definitely another story.

My guess is there’s not very many Chinese patriots tagging things so far, these are some tags for the Bejing Olympics:

The homepage tells us there are no wrong answers, but I’m sure “kinky sex with oriental she-devils” (in the above example) is not exactly a right answer… some mothers do have ‘em.

Design geek note: It’s a shame browsers don’t handle ligatures. Georgia has a f-i ligature but check out the word film in this brand tag for Kodak

There’s a documented bug in Wordpress 2.5 where the previous_post_link and next_post_link functions stop excluding the categories they’ve been told to.

The bug is not scheduled to be sorted until v2.6 for some weird reason (it’s only a minor change) but in the meantime you can fix it yourself by editing a line in ~/wp-includes/link-template.php

Replace line 557

$posts_in_ex_cats_sql = " AND tt.term_id NOT IN (" . implode($excluded_categories, ',') . ')';

with the following:

$posts_in_ex_cats_sql = " AND tt.taxonomy = 'category' AND tt.term_id NOT IN (" . implode($excluded_categories, ',') . ')';

Just need to be careful of this file when upgrading.

Full credit to filosofo on the wordpress forum for this.

Synthesizing type with what looks like an old analog synth - beats illustrator!

“Meek FM is an interpretation of type as sound. Using new software and the M.E.E.K. typographic synthesizer, the musician/designer develops sounds and typographic visuals in parallel.” — meekfm.org

Visit meekfm.org to find out more.

Not unless you like losing your entire stylesheet… and especially don’t close your ftp client so that it empties it’s temporary cache and renders this tip from macosxhints.com useless.

Bugger!