I was stuck for a couple of extra hours at the airport in Dulles and I noticed this amazing visualization of the Internet from AT&T Labs and a company called "Lumeta". Yes, I know these have been done before, but rarely with any sense of aesthetics in mind. Alas, some extensive searching revealed no aditional information on this monstrosity (it is rather large). It is one of those things you'd really like to get a copy of, but for some reason, a company smart enough to map the Internet is not smart enough to put an URL on the poster to follow up on their creation. Something this cool deserved a "How We Did It" type of explanation somewhere. Oh well. If you are in Dulles or Reagan airports, be sure to check it out. It color codes major nodes and networks, and that faint gray "haze" is actually thousands of labels for major servers in the network. A great marriage of science and design.

And apologies for the quality of the picture. It was taken with my phone.

Our team of designers and engineers has been steadily working on a re-launch of our portal in October that really pushes AOL into some new places. And this is just the beginning! Here is a link to the info on TechCrunch. More details coming soon but the new page has features such as RSS, mail, and soc|net aggregation, customizable navigation, and some other surprises. Stay tuned.

You've worked hard, sacrificed nights and weekends, your site is out there for users to click around in, the beer from the launch party is now flat. And yet, there is an outstanding list of design bugs that goes around the corner. Columns are uneven, colors "off" from spec, fonts the wrong size, links going to the wrong places if working at all. Hmmmm... Obviously, something is wrong. Everyone is saying the site is live and celebrating, but it looks... unprofessional and not representative of the team's best work.

I'll state the obvious that this is not where anyone wants to be in this business. So, how to deliver quality each and every time? This post looks at each major role in the creation process and posits the questions that need to be asked individually to keep professional-level design a strategic priority.

So what am I getting at here? Basically, we all need to shake it up sometimes and get different stimulus going to remain creative and fresh. Fight brain rust, you know? Try some of the following methods to see things from a new and different perspective and supercharge your innate sense of creativity.

Click "read more" to, um, read more.

This is kind of funny... and surprisingly useful as a reminder of some techniques that were getting a bit rusty for me. Not much more introduction is needed. Here it is. Thanks to Stephen Lenz for the forward...

Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.

I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.

I love this little video expressing the value of twitter as "real life". It's simple communication around a not-so-simple topic for many. Clicking more at the end of this video will take you into a primer on "social networking". Hey, not that most people reading these words need this type of thing, but the simple cut and paste paper approach is really engaging as tutorial. And sometimes we just need a reminder that not everyone lives and breathes this stuff like we do. Thanks for Geno Yoham for passing it on.

I just reviewed the screenshots on USAToday and I look forward to checking it out next week. Always lots to learn when a major site does a re-do (117 million unique visitors can't be wrong, right?). That said, going through the gallery of screens available at this link, I am a bit...underwhelmed. Not sure what I was expecting, but the world's ugliest website (and, famously, one of the most successful) apparently did not really want to do a redesign as much as add a bunch of new features. That's cool, but the design itself is still wanting and really doesn't communicate "redesign" in my view. Again, excited to click around and get a sense of the new site. Always dangerous to throw rocks in this business as we ourselves have to put out redesigns that occasionally get trounced.

Obviously, their team needs to get ready for tons of complaints and hate mail, even regarding the improvements. That's just the way it is when you try to improve life for your users. The familiar is sometimes more powerful than a superior solution. You just have to have the courage to get through the initial freak out of the faithful. On the other side of the hill is probably (and hopefully) a larger audience. As we work on the next generations of AOL Programming, this factor always rings true in our work and our results.

Good luck guys!

Jonathan Meyers, the Program Manager for AOL News, passed on this great tip that we have posted an open competition cash-reward for an Elections experience. You can see it in the screen shot above at the bottom. All of the basic requirements are listing on the page.

For the uninitiated, TopCoder Studio is "the meeting place for clients who need creative work done and creative people looking to compete for that work." Nice to see an AOL project posted in an open marketplace like this.

My current picks from the major food groups of media: MUSIC, GAMING, PUBLISHING, and MOVIES. If there's anything good on TV I may include that as well. Since websites get covered here all the time, I'm just going to skip over those.

This set of selections is totally subjective, not endorsed by AOL, slightly skewed toward design, and, ultimately, pointless in nature.

warner bros.

In AOL Programming we have a document that should be used at kickoff meetings to align multi-disciplinary teams to the mission at hand. It is our take on the classic agency document called a creative brief. Briefs serve the purpose of aligning team members around core strategic principles without inhibiting their creativity in finding a solution.

Click "read more" for my take on the Creative Brief.

Oh, how many times have we wished that the value of the design profession was immediately understood by the world? Perhaps talented designers would have been engaged to craft an alternative to the "butterfly" ballots that confused voters in Florida in 2000. Perhaps our grandparents would have a better understanding of the work we do.

Well, now I have an opportunity to help. A few days ago, I was elected to the board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). This professional association for design is committed to demonstrating the value of design to the public (amongst other important goals).

We have a responsibility to help society understand the power of design to make life easier, more understandable, and simply more delightful.

I look forward to representing AOL with those I encounter through my involvement with this leading trade association and to helping the world understand the value of design.

What would you like to see from the AIGA? Share your thoughts here and I'll be happy to bring them to the table to help give the important work we do every day more visibility.

Sitting at a desk near Libe Goad, EIC of Gamedaily, is hell these days. She's not only played GTA4, she's played it several times. I get to hear the boasts, the snideness and, yes, even the cat calls as I wait until 4/29. Like the common man I am.

I've been a big fan of the GTA series ever since I got to demo #3 in front of a couple dozen IBM executives. They wanted to know what kids were playing these days. Let's just say they weren't pleased. But I left the meeting convinced that GTA3 was not only a game, but a statement. The repulsive violence turned off a lot of people in the room (I think I might have gone a little too far with the baseball bat). But Taxi Driver disgusted a generation, and it's now considered one of the most influential films ever made.

Just like Taxi Driver, the GTA series is not all about the excessive gore, or the sex. That's a component of the game (the one they use to sell copies). The series also allows you to make decisions in a wide open world, with an engaging story all around you. You can do good things if you want to, and they have benefits. You can do bad things if you want to, and they have benefits. While you're limited by the story's linearity you still have an illusion of anything-goes. That's one of the toughest tasks for game developers to pull off.

Love it or hate it, in the final analysis GTA will be seen as a cornerstone of modern gaming, and (with boffo sales) a window into who we are.

At the SxSW conference, I enjoyed hearing Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert share best practices for design critiques. Here are some key takeaways:

1) Introduce your varied concepts without interruption

2) Introduce the team discussion by asking "What works? What doesn't?"

> Keep the conversation moving, as the team may get hung up on details. At this early stage however, it's best to capture overall feelings instead of tiny details.

> Make sure each design is discussed adequately. Sometimes the team will say "that's the one!" and not chat about the other designs, but much can be learned from what is/isn't working in the other designs to help the refinement stage.

> Stay "problem-focused" as the team will likely share solutions instead since it's easier for them to articulate those. A typical "solution" is to take one thing from the first concept, another from the second and yet another from the third. Recognize that if you say "yeah, we can do/change that" during the review, it may screw up the design when you actually try it out. Say that a potential solution is something you'd like to explore, but you'll keep the actual problem in the forefront and will solve that in the refinement stage.

Click "read more" for more tips.

It's hard to find a website with a concept more simple, or addicting, than fffound.com.

Have an image that you absolutely love? Post it on fffound.com for others to see. See an image on someone else's profile that you like? Add it to your favorites and the site will direct you to similar images. That's it. This site is based around a single, focused idea: building a community site around imagery. If you like one image from a user, most likely you will like other images that that person has collected.

I keep returning to this site as a place for both inspiration and escape. I've used it for everything from research for artwork for my apartment to scouting out new design talent. But mostly I just find myself aimlessly clicking around and getting lost in the experience. Fffound.com owes it's success to two things: it's simplicity of design and the creativity of its users. Let's hope that both stay strong as the site grows.