Fun / Interesting

It’s OK for vegans to eat oysters. I really respect this pragmatic approach to ethics. Plus, oysters are damned delicious.

Harmony drawing tool. Great way to spend a few minutes when you need to get the creative juices flowing.

Vodka is often disregarded as “neutral” or “flavorless” but I’ve found that vodkas vary more than I once thought. This is one of the few treatises I’ve found on the subject.

Art

A neat street art series by “Ludo” called Nature’s Revenge.

The Impossible Cool. Simple, classic, black-and-white photos of famous actors, authors, and so on.

Gorilla Artfare is a great art blog, backed by a very creative (closed-doored) community.

InterfaceLIFT lets you view wallpapers for a given screen resolution. I really wish other sites where I get wallpaper, such as Deviantart, would do this.

Notcot is an interesting art / design blog. Their thumbnail-centric format is something that would sound like an awful idea if you described to me, but they pull it off.

Technology

Remember the Milk. A comprehensive to-do list organizational tool. It’s $25/year, but their iPhone app is really nice. I appreciate touches like being able to choose what the app badge represents (total due items, or items due today).

Feature checklists suck. Glad someone took the time to properly bash them so I don’t have to.

I always have trouble finding good starting point themes for blog designs. I think I’ll try out Thematic for my next WordPress project.

A presentation about Netflix’s corporate policies and culture. As surprising as it is inspiring. For example, they did away with vacation day policies, and just let people just take days off at will.

[image credit]

The portfolio of Christian Hecker has sci-fi concept hardware and environments.

As does the portfolio of Dr. CM Wong.

I’ve been listening to Frisky Radio at work a lot. It’s electronic dance music with an emphasis on progressive house and tech house.

I like these hyperrealistic sculptures. The hyperrealism movement as a whole is fascinating to me.

Interesting vintage products for your home. Check out the “unusual objects” section.

Web Design

Acorn is a great Mac image editor, with free and $50 versions. I feel like I’m late to the game on this one, but I only recently gave up on the frustrating Mac ports of GIMP.

Turn your Macbook’s track pad into a pen tablet with Inklet.

The origin of the HTML img tag, as proposed in 1993.

I always have at least one free font site bookmarked for these link dumps.

Programming

I haven’t used LÖVE, a framework for making 2d games in Lua, but their simple and well-documented API makes it sound really appealing.

Speaking of game development frameworks, Unity recently released a free version of their very comprehensive and mature 3d game development platform.

Nodejs lets you write a web server in JavaScript with event-based IO. I have a few projects in mind that might be good guinea pigs for this framework.

A liberal regex for matching URLs. The URL syntax is too complex for most half-assed patterns to be sufficient.

Checking if a JavaScript object is an Array is actually not simple. Here is an analysis and useful solution.

Here is some advice on hiring programmers. I’ve felt since the beginning of my career that the typical interview process is deeply flawed, but am only recently getting an idea of what I’d rather do instead.

Useful

My preferred weather site. Can the cluttered and unhelpful weather.com just give up their domain name to them?

There is a lot of software to record audio playing on your computer. So far I think Audio Hijack Pro works the best for me.

If you have anything on your computer that should be encrypted, but isn’t, set up TrueCrypt right away.

Fun

The oddly-named VVVVVV is a nice puzzle/platform game that reminds me of other independent concept platformers like Braid.

Captain Forever is a simple but engaging game that lets you salvage parts and upgrade your ship in real time as you play against bigger and more complex adversaries.

A comprehensive analysis of the choose-your-own-adventure style of interactive fiction, along with novels you can read along with a visualization of your progress through the decision tree.

Inform is a surprisingly interesting development environment for Zork-like interactive fiction.

More

Unskippable is a funny MST3K-like series humorously commenting on video game introductions.

An interesting article about the problems with making the world of graduate education more practical.

TweetNoteBook is silly, but I want one.

Ever dreamed of making galaxies collide in the comfort of your own home?

A good overview of the American craft vodka scene.

Cracked continues to be an interesting source of information.

Christian Hecker. Glorious sci-fi and landscapes at wallpaper-worthy resolutions.

Mike McCain. More spaceships? Yes.

Guild Wars 2. I’ve loved their box art since the first one.

Useful Apps

Ninite lets you check off the apps you want to make one custom installer for everything you need on a new computer.

Support Details. Much easier than explaining to grandma how to check her screen resolution.

Web Design Resources

Visual Event. The fact that this is a bookmarklet rather than a plug-in makes it that much cooler.

Optimize your site for the iPhone. Not rushing to do this on this site with the number of iPhone visits I get, though.

Vintage Fonts. Can never get enough fonts, right?

Fun

Top 50 iPhone games from Edge. It is still hard to find good iPhone game recommendations, so this compilation was timely and well done.

Secret Menus. Everyone knows about the In-N-Out Burger secret menu, but there are some other delicious possibilities out there.

Red Dust. Hard to believe these are actual photographs of a dust storm.

Interesting

Businesses that sound appealing to get into but are overrated. Traffic-driven web sites is an important one to note.

Irrational fears even rational people have. It is great that Cracked can be as insightful as they are hilarious.

Design in the Wild

Tortured Orchard. “A spirited rebellion of flavors.” Someone in marketing figured out that off-center web designers really like to marinade things.

The Party Pitcher. Come on, that’s what it’s for.

Strange

Smell like Neil Gaiman, or Cthulu, or something.

Mustaches, drum solos, and rights of passage.

I’m really picky about sneakers.  These make a bold statement without being goofy, which is hard to find.

I’ve gotten the feeling that The Sims 3 is only fun when you don’t play it the way it was meant to be played.  If the hilarity issued by this article is any indication, I may be right.

A couple more stock sites that don’t make me want to cry.

It’s hard to find an API that you can get excited about.  Mixpanel (a web analytics service) actually sounds like it’d be enjoyable to integrate.

Shockingly reasonable advice.  Though people seem to disagree on a lot of these, the emphasis here is on emerging norms.

My current favorite web programming editor.

I love dark web design.  Here is an article that talks about how to do it well.

Nambu is my desktop Twitter client de jour.

This timeline of evolution on Earth, starting at the beginning, is fascinating.

A wonderful tool for designers that determines the font used in an uploaded image.

This pattern creator is neat, but I’m curious about their use of Creative Commons. Can (or should) you really apply a Creative Commons license to the output of this kind of tool? To me it seems akin to if Adobe said that they have a license for anything you create with Photoshop.

For a long time, e-commerce sites were prohibitively annoying to set up. Weebly’s new features are one of the reasons that this is no longer the case.

Speaking of CMSs, I like the idea of hosted CMSs designed for a particular type of site. Enjin is a gaming CMS that understands what their audience wants and focuses on doing that really well.

3D items made to your specification? I’m pretty sure everyone has wanted this service to exist at one point or another.

I admit to being a fan of interactive fiction. And Zork is free now, so hooray!

I enjoy careful timing in re-purposed comics and blob rodents.

A decent button maker. I like looking at these.  The idea has been around forever, but they’re still improving as internet technologies evolve.

An excellent wine label.  Buying wine by the label actually isn’t an awful idea.   I always feel like people who care about making an excellent product also care more about making it look presentable.

I like this music video.  Sometimes creativity comes from limitations.

Can you guess how big this is by its shape?  A visual metaphor can communicate something other than function yet still be effective and fun.

Art

Mmm, political street art, featuring Hobo Lincoln.

Amazing art from Yap Kun Rong at CGPortfolio.

Tools and Resources

I’m thinking about using Gravity’s Tags app to organize my music.  It seems like a generally useful tool.

I love data.  Here is a SQL database of IP addresses to location mappings.

Whatever

I love it when someone takes something simple and does it exactly right.   Even if it is a pretty pointless product like Fail Stickers. (yes,  I bought some)

I went through every single one of these.  I have no regrets.  It is here that I found the best image ever.

Omegle drops you in a chat with a stranger.  I have been enjoying gathering anonymous opinions about items on the Taco Bell menu.

Fin

Here is a stock site just for silhouettes.  Quality, free, focused stock sites are hard to find.

SFXR is small app for quickly making old-school video game sound effects.  The joy here is that they have predefined parameters for types of effects, such as “jump”, and you can choose a randomly generated sound within those parameters, then randomly mutate or manually tweak it.  Much faster than creating sounds from scratch.

When dealing with 256 pixels, pixel-art becomes a much more useful skill.  Hence this nifty tool for creating favicons.

You may have seen Flickr’s tool for searching by color.  It is amazingly fun, but the real reason to toss it in the toolbox is because so many of Flickr’s images are Creative Commons licensed nowadays, oftentimes making them valid as stock or blog dressing.

Art

Concept Ships is a blog dedicated solely to concept art of space ships.  I love this stuff.

Along those lines, here is a site with lots more concept art.  It’s easy to get lost wandering around this site.  They really need an RSS feed with featured artists though, or something along those lines at least.

Random

Per usual.

Simmons and Burke have a lousy website but it is worth digging through for some of their massive collages of images found online.

Blip.fm is like Twitter for music.  I have to admit that this one is aimed right at me.

Boxer has gotten DOS emulation for games, something that always sucked, simple enough to actually use without wasting away a few long nights.

ColorZilla Firefox extension is a color picker for the browser.  I only use a couple plug-ins, but this is one of them.

Seven popular fonts for designers and a nice description for each.

Some beautiful art by Tony Ariawan.

Cal Henderson at Djangocon gives a very amusing talk, which eventually leads to some actual discussion of Django.

Some (nsfw?) stupidity that still amuses me every time I see it.  I’ve said it before: cultural connotations don’t go away if you just ignore them.  A designer legitimately has to avoid this kind of situation.

And here is the silly stuff that I finish with.

Some links to good stock texture sites.  High resolution textures can really spice up your site if used right.

Listen up: these guys have shown you how to make an online store.  That is how it’s done.

I recommend reading the entirety of The Pragmatic Programmer, but if you don’t have the time, at least read the list of tips.

The last.fm people do quality control right.

Here is how you market your tequila.

Some JavaScript graphing and charting tools.  As with many things, there are innumerable options, but only a handful of truly good ones.

The (potentially nsfw nudity) works of Jasper Goodall.  Does your boss hate art, I wonder…?  Seriously though, this stuff is solid.

shinywhitebox seems to be the best (reasonably priced, starting at $20 USD) Mac screen capture program I can find.  Here is something I made with the demo version: shinywhitebox test.

And now the goofy (and possibly stale) stuff, like the Adventures of Wassup Holmes, information on how babby formed, and finding out the hard way that she has a boyfriend.

Lastly, a reminder not to give in to regret.

The subway doesn’t really work this way, but this surrealist comic is fantastic.

This video featuring the personifications of famous fonts has been making its rounds on social news sites lately, but it is too good to leave out.

Destee Nation Shirt Company has an enticing slogan: “Real shirts from real places.”  Great products, and totally feeds my need to have unique stuff.

This seems like a reasonably good design blog: dropping it the old RSS reader to see how it sits.  Let me know if you know of other good ones.

And lastly our token ridiculousness: an anamotronic monkey head attached to a Roomba.