I love how the designers of this IBM micro-site interpreted their subjects (along the bottom) into stark and simple iconography while staying true to a consistent visual language. Very often we're tasked with taking cliches and making them fresh and invigorated. I think this team has done that well here across these 14 concepts.

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.

No, that's not the name of the latest band featured to be featured on Spinner this week.

Just yesterday, I was sent a link to an amazing photograph of President Barack Obama's inaugural address. I've come to find out that the photo has practically gone viral, with over 2 million views in the first 5 days it was posted, so I'm potentially not the first person to share this with you.

I had a rather strong reaction to the image itself, the story if its creation, as well as the interactive element, and the combination inspired me to go out on a declarative limb: This is THE image that depicts everything historical about Barack Obama's election. A grand statement, I know, but read on and I'll attempt to explain.



New York photographer David Bergman blogged about covering Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20th, 2009. "I covered my first inauguration and what an inauguration it was," he writes. "Before Tuesday, I had photographed five presidents and covered big events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and concerts like Live 8 and Live Earth. But this one was the biggest. It deserved a big photo."

When he says big, he means big.

Over the holidays, I started following several prolific design tweeters (via Twitter). Here are some inspiring links a couple of them shared that I thought you'd enjoy as much as I did.

Beautiful web typography
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/20-websites-with-beautiful-typography


Logo design inspiration
http://www.logospire.com

I've been thinking about how our online experience increasingly correlates to some dimensions of our human experience.

Semantic

The search engines, and predominantly Google, "organized the world's information" through smart robots that find and sort and rank content continuously and tirelessly, according to smart and ever-smarter algorithms. The world reorganized itself around search engines as the fastest and easiest method for finding relevant content.

Social

The searchers soon found that a supplemental index of relevance, the social graph, could be laid over this index of knowledge and, uniquely to every individual person, allow all to additionally consider whatever their friends considered relevant. With personal relationships as a keystone to the psychology of trust, the social graph became a new critical dimension to the relevance of available content.

Geospatial

In the years to come, algorithmic and social relevance of content will be supplemented by another human dimension: geography. Already we enjoy many geo-relevant applications (e.g. google maps), but in the future all content should be filterable with reference to a user's expressed location (I am here), a user's intention location (I will be or want to say that I am here), and the assigned or determined location value of a piece of content.

--

Applications will be able to cross-reference algorithmic, social, and geospatial relevance. In fact they already can and do. But I suggest that in less than two years this will be ubiquitous. Our product designs and innovations should correspondingly begin embracing and bulilding upon this concept.

What other dimensions of relevance can we add to our searching and finding? How closely does this in fact map to the dimensions of human experience?

Meaning, People, World.... what else? Time, perhaps, could next be more comprehensively organized, as all of history becomes indexed...

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.

Our interactive design team came together for several hours of inspiration and sketching over the past couple days. It was great to get our NY and VA offices together via video to take a big picture break. Several designers led the inspiration discussions (which I'll blog about later this week) and our UI Directors led our sketching exercise. They planned an interactive group exercise for us, freeing our ideas by eliminating the limitations of the computer while focusing on broad strokes without the noise and clutter of details.

Our exercise reminded me of this Core77 video of a design director at Converse sketching a summer sneaker concept in under five minutes -- it's pretty cool:



Core77 also recently launched this interesting sketching site. Check it out for more inspiration on varied techniques and conversations. How does sketching improve your creative process? What tools do you swear by?

Here's a little laugh to get your weekend started. Who knew fonts could be so funny?


Thanks to Ryan McCullah for sending the link.

At the recent Voices that Matter conference, I had the privilege of having dinner with Bill Cullifer, the Executive Director of WOW (World Organization of Webmasters). I hadn't check in with that group in a while (they've been around since 1996), so I was excited to hear about a lot of the great stuff the are doing to help educate Web professionals, including conferences, and "Iron Chef" student competition, and certification. Bill invited me to be interviewed for the WOW Technology Minute, and we talked about Web Typography.

Check it out on the WOW Technology Minute Web site.

For those of us that think visually and like to click on pictures (ok, that's most of us btw), PicLens is a pretty amazing app that brings the Web to life as a visual medium. Just download the extension and PicLens turns image and video feeds from top sources into an interactive "wall of media" that animates smoothly across your screen. So smoothly, in fact, that you may actually get motion sickness playing with it (like I did).

Like most interactive things it really has to be experienced to be appreciated. If you have ever felt that image or video search should be more compelling than this one is certainly for you. I recommend everyone on my team try it out. Though if you haven't wanted a more visual, interactive Internet than this plug-in will probably go into the "cool things" bookmark graveyard you never go back to visit. I do believe the new "Shop Amazon" feature is a stretch though.

Speaking as the General Manager of PIXCETERA, this one is a tough act to follow I must admit.

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.

At a Digital Media conference I attended yesterday, the CMO of comScore shared the following fact:

Of the general mobile phone market with web browsing capabilities, only 14% actually browse the web on their phones. However 90% of iPhone users browse the web.

Wow.

Mobile phone companies have been pushing their web browsing phones into the marketplace for years, yet not until Apple created a better experience -- a better design -- could usage increase this tremendously.

We saw a similar result when we launched an updated navigational system in our StyleList site several months ago. Our traffic rose ten-fold the very day it launched.

As we evolve our web sites, let us take note. Success is not always about getting new features into the marketplace. Sometimes the greatest success can come from inventing new solutions to radically transform current features into even greater effortless and delightful experience.

Our Men's Fitness Center launched recently. Check it out to learn about calming foods and tips for getting your abs in shape. Perfect timing for the summer. Kudos to the design team for developing a strong creative in short order, tackling both the visual design and all of the CSS.

This week I'll be at the Voices That matter Conference in Nashville, TN speaking on the topic of Web typography, but I wanted to give everybody at AOL a little preview of the center-piece of my presentation: Web Safe Fonts.

Web typography is pretty much synonymous with limitations. Limited controls, limited styles, but, most importantly, limited font-family choices. The first of these limitations will require changes in the browsers, however, there are a surprisingly large number of fonts to choose from, but only if you are willing to work with a more fluid typography. Most designers are familiar with the 11 "Core Web Fonts" that are industry standards. Primarily, we will use Arial (or Helvetica), Times New Roman (or just Times), and Georgia has become popular in the last few years. You will occasionally see Verdana and Trebuchet MS tried, but these are not the most elegant looking of fonts. We use these fonts because we know that they are pre-installed on most computers. Yet most computers will also have many other fonts pre-installed on them, either by the operating system or by specific applications.

I have created a list of "Web Safe Fonts" showing fonts pre-installed on Windows and Mac as well as fonts installed by iLife on the Mac (which is standard on all Macs) and Microsoft Office for both Mac and PC. Although not all of these fonts will be of general use, it does balloon the list of reliable fonts from 11 to around 200. To make selection easier, I have also indicated which OS the font is pre-installed for, ranked each font on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for fonts almost certain to be installed and 5 for fonts unlikely to be installed), and the source of the font.

Let me know what you think of the list, and if you spot any fonts that should be or should not be in it. The site is in "Beta" while I work on vetting the list and adding functionality (like the ability to sort the list), so any constructive criticism would be most appreciated.

View the Web Safe Fonts >>