Brightwash

Boosh and Chelsea – two favorites together! I must have missed this during my relocation.

Warhound – Winston’s owner reviews Inglorious Basterds. I saw this last weekend and enjoyed it very much, it was tense and funny. Bonjourno!

Lake Disappointment – Seriously?? I want a vacation home here.

Has Drupal peaked? – I hope not, but Claudio makes some very valid points. I’m not all up in Drupal daily anymore, but I still think Drupal is a good choice if you:

• have a large site
• are in need of complex menu hierarchy
• have a consistent design
• are in need of expandability
• have many users or editors
• and many other uses I am sure!

As a designer, I find it to be overkill for a blog or a small site.

Losing my Religion – “More meta than meat.” Chris Messina writes about design issues in open source.

When it comes to open source and design, design — and human factors, more generally — cannot play second fiddle to engineering. But far too often it seems that that’s the case.

And it shouldn’t be.

More often there should be a design dictator that enters into a situation, takes stock of the set of problems that people (read: end users) are facing, and then addresses them through observation, skill, intuition, and drive. You can evaluate their output with surveys, heuristics, and user studies, but without their vision, execution, and insane devotion to see through making it happen, you’ll never see shit get done right.

Fever – An alternate google reader for nerds. Looks very smart. I hope to try this out.

LOL Grey Gardens – Courtesy of Jezebel. Pictures of the house when Little Edie sold it (bonus captions!)

Muxtape – is back! For now it is only for artists, and they’ve created this awesome 3 x endless grid of squares. Love layout limitations, people do much more interesting things when they have few options!

Susan Year Itch – Susan’s renamed movie blog. I helped make this!

Paul Gilbert – this is a guitarist Mike likes. He insisted his site was bad/crazy in a good way and it is. A tangled awesome web of pages. Real funny – see Sentences.

Last week I found this really great online portfolio publisher called Cargo Collective. They provide hosting, an admin interface and just the right amount of options.

The layout choices offered are minimal, well structured and put the focus squarely on the work and they also allow you to edit the CSS! What is great about this is it can work for a variety of people – designers, photographers, writers, fashion designers, etc. If you have a domain name you can point it to your cargo site. Cargo is currently in beta, so you have to e-mail and request an account, but I think it’s pretty open (they got back to me same day.)

Cargo evolved out of the system that runs the SpaceCollective community. We found it remarkably successful and efficient in creating visual content on the web, placing a strong emphasis on design, layout, image quality and typography. Our goal is to dramatically increase the accessibility and exposure of creative individuals on the Internet, while aspiring to build a networked context that will contribute to the culture as a whole.

Some links: Cargo Spotlight, Cookie, But it Does Float, Nate Says Hello
& MY new Cargo site.

This new newsreader from MSN (wtf, innovation?) is a major visual upgrade on all other feed readers out there. Drawback is I think it only gathers real news, not the stuff I read.