Color Oracle. test out what UI designs look like with simulated color blindness.

Web Typography Sucks | Slides and notes from SxSW 2007. this was a pretty interesting presentation on typography and layout for the web.

IT Conversations: Jesse James Garrett. podcast from adaptive path’s co-founder about driving software (and hardware) design through an experience strategy. really good talk.

YouTube - Podtech MS Research clip. very cool, though you need a camera right above your keybord which doesn’t work for me.

World’s Best Designed Newspapers: The 28th Edition. I think the one from Spain looks awesome. time for another blog redesign!

another new look

So it seems the last time I updated the look of awardtour was 13 months ago when I put forth the first “green” theme. Yesterday I finally put up an update that I’ve been tinkering with for months. I realize it doesn’t look that different but for me it looks plenty different. I had the majority of this theme done a month or two ago but just couldn’t get the text to look the way I wanted on the dark green sidebar and so I put it aside.

Then, last week, I saw some blog that used Helvetica Neue as it’s main font and I thought it looked so damn nice. Large bold Helvetica Neue looks so damn nice on the Mac and looks pretty nice on Windows. I was done the changes on sunday but was informed Auriol that it didn’t look right in IE6 (though Boris informed me it everything lined up in IE7). It took me an hour or two of going through of going through a diff of my old css file against the new one until I found the culprit (the modified search bar). I still had to do a stupid css hack to make the sidebar line up properly in both browsers.

I also removed the upcoming section from the sidebar because (a) I don’t go to a lot of concerts anymore and (b) the sidebar is kinda long. I’m also hoping to clean up the archives and, after unsuccesfully trying to search for something on my blog, I’m pretty much convinced that I’m going to redirect search to google.

So, what do you think?

Mac Rumors: More Multitouch from Jeff Han. a new demo video. pretty cool stuff. via 3rdparty

bubbl.us - brainstorming with style. web-based mental mapping app. really like the how repositioning, drag-and-drop, and zooming are implemented.

Humanized. a pretty slick looking Quicksilver-like app for windows. such a better way to use the capslock key.

kuler. a very fancy color pallette picker by adobe.

Joel on Software - Vista UI Stupidity. And it turns out this “feature” had a development team of 24 people.

ConceptShare. video tour of a web-based collaboration tool. pretty nice demo. really good mix of ajax and flash. seemed a little limited in scope but well executed.

YouTube - BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype. via kottke. though this looks really cool. i think it would have nothing on a good desktop search app.