I love this menu design. I would hang it as a poster if I ever came into possession of one. (via The Serif)

Psychology Today has a well-written article on the personality of a creative person. (via Big Contrarian)

The article was extremely insightful, an outcome of thirty years of research. It goes hand-in-hand with the research on the creative process Jim Coudal is doing/has done and Hugh MacLeod’s How to be Creative series.

From the article:
“People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.”

“There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.”

There are a few sites I’ve come across lately that I thought were worth linking to even though I found them all via web galleries. In no particular order:

• Hot Meteor—I’m a big fan of the script typeface they used.
• New to York—Very cool illustrations and a very sharp layout.
• Ad Fed Minnesota—A more unique layout and table-of-contents style navigation (like Mezzoblue).
• ShiftSpace—Love the logo, for whatever reason type that’s cut-off horizontally is very appealing to me. Now I don’t know about the overall effectiveness of the logo, but aesthetically speaking I find it quite nice. The way the background image blends with the video on the right is also neat.

From page forty-nine in The Elements of Typographic Style:

“Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised and dissected before it is consumed.”

An iPhone wallpaper I created for I Love Typography (which, by the way, turns one-year-old on Thursday) was featured in the most recent Sunday Type. Thanks, John! (And happy birthday!)

A nifty collection of Letraset artwork on Flickr. (via I Love Typography)

I can’t really put my finger on why, but I really like this logo for Openfolk. The link is to an article on The Ministry of Type where the logo is actually reworked a bit. I’m more a fan of the reworked version than the original.

I like the new website for SXSW. (via Blue Flavor)

Very cool logo by Daniel Eatock for Big Brother 9. I think black, white and red is one of the best color schemes in the history of the world. (via The Serif)

Ian initiated a new feature for WordPress themes that will be rolled out with version 2.7: Child themes. You can think of it as a cascading theme hierarchy.

For example, say you download a theme (parent theme) and then want to add a custom contact page. Instead of adding that custom page template to the main theme folder, you create a “new” theme (child theme) with only that one custom page and then link it to the parent theme. Viola! A complete, custom theme with the original theme left untouched, or in other words, dead simple to upgrade.

Lift Interactive on their new type. (via CSS Drive)

The annual A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Websites is out.

A good post on the artist’s learning process from Sojourn Music.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the scarcity of great artists, comparatively, is that few artists move past the “imitate” and “assimilate” stages.

This is a bit old, but I thought I would post it for good measure and future reference for myself.

From November 2006 to November 2007, UX Magazine invested $50,000 in ten companies chosen solely for their reputable user experience. Overall, they grew 39.3% ($69,195), outperforming the major indexes by 10-20%.

Grain Edit has some nice photos of different designs that were created by Giovanni Pintori for Olivetti while he was there. (He was head of the Development & Advertising Office for twenty-seven years.)

I came across a Saul Bass quote on Wikipedia the other day worth sharing: “Design is thinking made visual.”

See also the Vertigo Theme for Tumblr inspired by the work of Saul Bass.

I really enjoyed this article by Advertising Age about hiring clients. (via Andy Rutledge)

So I know everyone has probably seen Cameron Moll’s letterpress poster, and it’s no longer available, but I have looked at it probably at least twenty different times. It really is amazing.

MagCloud is a new service that is similar to LuLu, but specifically for magazines. It sports a groovy design as well. (via Cameron Moll)

If you haven’t seen Jason Santa Maria’s recent “rethinking” yet, definitely check it out. His latest post is especially pretty, I love how the height of the book stack is equal to the height of the text.

I’m a sucker for type in multiple sizes arranged at different angles. So I was very giddy at the inventiveness (and coolness) of the navigation at JLern Design. (Found via Inspiredology)

Wordle is a neat tool. I could see making some cool posters with it. Here’s mine I created from the article on blogging I wrote last week. (via SimpleBits)

Anthony Zinni of Positive Space Blog has created a site, Creative Interships, that serves as an alternative to the design contests and the no-spec work they represent. Basically it’s a way for students and new “creatives” to get their foot in the door without having to resort to spec work.

The design is appealing also. Check out how the navigation copy creates a diagonal that mirrors the site’s background graphics, very cool.

I like Unco’s logo. That is all. (via The Serif)

D. Keith Robinson wrote a really great article—Enabling Design—on what’s needed from both the client and the designer for a project to be successful. I highly recommend reading it.