Tony Stephens / Simian Design

Loader is a very fun visual musical app.  It reminds me a bit of the old Fantasia bit of meeting the Sound Track.

It’s a flash app where you have 8 instruments where you can control the volume and the time delay (how quickly the notes repeat) and then you ‘paint’ the palate.  A tremendous amount of fun.

It does come with presets, but I didn’t see a way to add your own presets nor did I see a way to save your creations.  I’d also like a playback capability.

But man is it fun.   I love visual feedback to music like this.  Visual feedback of any kind.  Tufte has a great example he gives in his presentations.  Fantasia had a clip on it as well.  This is along those lines.

Well, Adobe has released Photoshop CS3. And with CS3 (which seems to be a pretty good upgrade) it has updated all the Adobe icons.

Check out some of what Jason has written about this new icon set. It’s not good. Dave also weighs in on these new icons.

Dave has it best put together I’ve found with this following quote:

They fail because there is no shape variation. Every icon is contained within an identical square. Nothing breaks the silhouette, the only shape variation occurs inside the square, in the form of the letters. But using a common typeface, stroke weight, and posture across every icon means the various letters have more in common with each other than they differ, and at a glance they all blend together. Since this is the sole shape differentiator, it’s a big, big problem.

I also found this gem of a comment from John Nack’s site.

My nightmare realized. Mystery meat two-letter icons with often slight variations in color. My workspace will be indecipherable.

Fimoculous has a colleciton of 2006 Lists.  Best Videos.  Best Books.  Best Book Covers.  Best Albums.  Best Ads.  Best Logos.  Worst Trailers.  Top ‘LOST’ Loose Ends.
I love lists like this.  Tons of great stuff to find and browse in here.

Cameron Moll has collected a number of different articles, graphics, links and thoughts regarding designing for a grid. It’s an excellent resource.
Some highlights are:

• Dave Glass’ YUI Grid Builder
• Grid background graphic
• Yet another grid graphic
• Optimal width for 1024
• Fixed vs. fluid

Dylan Meconis, creator of Battlestar Galacticsimpsons, is way talented.  He’s turned a bunch of the cast from Battlestar Galacata into Simpsons characters.   I love this one of Tygh myself.  And the President and  Adama is pretty good as well.

DoCopenhagen has a great list of the top 50 music videos of 2006.

Some are obvious.  Some are not.  Lots of fun watching.

Some of my favorites so far:

1. OK Go - Here it Goes Again.  Sure it’s getting close to overplaying, but the treadmills are just genius.  Always amusing.
2. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy.  Just gorgeous to watch.  Mesmerizing.
3. Malajube - Montreal -40°C.  A fun little pop song.  Sure it’s not in English, but it’s a great video.
4. Field Music - in context. I LOVE this video.  It’s a good song, a great video.  I want this room.
5. Gnarls Barkley - Gone Daddy Gone.  Another fun video.  Great cover.

There are more worth watching.  I’m not a big fan of the Teddybears video, but really like their song.  There are a ton others I’ve never heard of, and are still working through them.

Really, this is brilliant. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’m not telling you about this stunning invention.

I want one.  I want to build one.  I want to use one so badly.

CSSTYPE is a great online tool that lets you preview rendered type.  This sounds pretty lame in of itself.

But it’s the execution that makes it great.

The font options are you base online choices.  (Arial, Verdana, etc).  Colors, backgrounds all pretty straightforward.

What I do like is the Sizing and Line height options.  They’re set to  ems, which lets you accurately see what you’re putting into your CSS.  And the rendered options online has all options: Normal, bold, italic, bold italic, uppercase and lowercase.

Play with it, and you’ll see like I did that this is a very useful tool to preview some of your font choices.

Firebug Lite is a brilliant tool to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

This used to be just a Firefox plugin.  Now it’s a brilliant javascript include away from being in any browser.

If you develop for the web, this is the tool for you.  You simply must try it out.

The R.A. Maguire Cover Gallery is a fantastic idea. You can buy 8.5×11 reproductions of these masterpieces.

The site is split into three main sections, the covers, photos and originals. You can also see the originals next to the final product as well.

My favorite section might be the originals, though there are some fun ones in the covers. Photos don’t do as much for me, other than maybe just admiring the women. But I like to try and guess what the title might be for some of the art. (no fair looking at the other galleries that give this away.)

I love these old book designs. I’m not so much a pulp mystery type of reader, more of a pulp sci-fi reader, but these covers do a good job of making the book interesting.