Saturday Night Links

Well folks, it was a busy week with the design refresh and all. (Is it fair to call it a realignment?) I've been cleaning up some stuff and what not and I think everything is just about done. Today was also my big opportunity to finally catch up on a ton of reading that I've been hoarding. With that said, I've got lots of good links to direct you all to (with some notes by me of course), so enjoy.

Design

My interest in design keeps increasing, I'm just amazed that it wasn't until just about a year ago that I had really contemplated these things. Design plays such a huge role in every aspect our of lives and for a majority of mine I hadn't given it a second thought. Kind of makes me feel like an idiot when I state it that way.

• What do you think about the design of pizza flyers? Yeah they're ugly, but as Jonathan Baldwin eloquently states, "The fact is, pizza flyers set up precisely the right expectations about the product and the service: cheap, cheerful and quick. The choice of visual language any graphic designer makes should be appropriate both to the message and to the intended audience."
• Design in Flight has a good interview with Khoi Vinh. He's the blogger and design behind Sutbtraction as well as the recent Onion redesign.
• Simplicity is a big word at the moment. Jason Fried explains 37signals' simple approach in BusinessWeek. Mark Wallace of Wallace Church explains simplicity in brand design specifically discussing a recent Lean Cuisine redesign (sounds fascinating, huh?). Plus, as a bonus, if you're not reading John Maeda's Simplicity blog, get on it.

Business/Advertising

• Copy Goes Here is a short film by Coudal Partners that anyone in the advertising industry can appreciate (or at least I can . . . ).
• HOWdesign has a great list of 10 things clients really want from doing good work to keeping promises. It seems obvious, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Generation Y

I'm not quite sure why all these articles on generation y (roughly 10-24-year-olds) showed up this week, but they're almost always a good topic. These aren't revolutionary, but they do provide some interesting insights into a generation that has been shaped by digital technology. As a side note, I was recently having a conversation about the possibility of a link between the increasing casualness of communication amongst youth and how it relates to their generally casual feelings towards sex. It's definitely an interesting idea and probably something worthy of a more serious entry.

• USA Today talks about generation y's feelings towards work. Gen Y'ers generally feel as though they deserve to run the company after a week in the office. They are willing to switch jobs on a dime and they have a tendency to question authority (which is both good and bad).
• A Guardian article all about their relationship to technology. You can't send a Gen Y'er to their room because that's where everything they need/want is.

Web Stuff

• Thanks to Joshua Porter I finally understand what AttentionTrust is. I'm working on a big entry about it, but essentially it's a way for you to record everywhere you go on the web and what you do there with the express intent of eventually being able to sell that information to advertisers so they could better understand/target you. A service like Root.net would help you do just that.
• While I'm on the attention subject, Dirk Knemeyer's article for the new UX matters titled "Data -- The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle" is a great look at just what value this type of attention data has.
• Aggregation seems to keep coming up lately and two new sites all about aggregating various bits of digital data popped up this week. MonitorThis gives you an OPML file with RSS feeds from across search engines with any search term you'd like.
• SuprGlu allows you to aggregate various digital identities in one place, it's a kind of DLA, very related to what I wrote about last week.
• This may be coolest of all: Tape It Off The Internet promises to be, "A global TV guide, Torrent tracking, your favourites and recommendations plus an innovative social layer to hang it off." Imagine TiVo/Netflix functionality using BitTorrent. Sounds amazing, let's see if it actually happens . . .

Funny

Even I can't take myself seriously all the time.

• How about some great domain names? Like Mole Station Native Nursery's "molestationnursery.com" or Pen Island's "penisland.com".
• Last, but not least, be sure to check out some 2001 forum posts from Mac aficionado upset about the boring new product release of the iPod: "Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where's the Newton?!"

That's it folks, have a good evening.