Crowdsourcing a new BlogBridge icon

Well, it's been about 5 years with the same (lovely) BlogBridge application icon and as we are redesigning the web site and releasing a major new release of the product, we thought, hey, it's time to update the icon to something, ahem, a little more modern.

In case you forgot (or never knew),here's what the BlogBridge app icon looks like today:

I guess, nice, but boring, yes?

So what I am looking for is a beautiful new, 3D rendered, and meaningful application icon. Something that will look really cool in my dock (but equally on a Windows or Linux desktop.)

So far I've considered using:

• 99designs.com
• crowdspring.com
• vworker.com (used to be rent-a-coder)
• guru.com
• freelancer.com

So far I am liking 99designs.com the best. But if you have suggestions, please send them to me!

Fibonacci series and Photography

You can't be a self-respecting computer or science geek and not have heard about the Fibonacci series. You know, 1-1-2-3-5-8… etc. How about Fibonacci's Ratio? How about the Golden Mean or the Divine Proportion? Not sure, right?

Fibonacci, and its role in art, design and photography is a little less well known. As I continue to study photography and art I came across this excellent article about that very topic:

"Hopefully, this article has shed some light on a somewhat mysterious subject in the world of photography. Fibonacci's Ratio is a powerful tool for composing your photographs, and it should'€™t be dismissed as a minor difference from the rule of thirds.

While the grids look similar, using Phi can sometimes mean the difference between a photo that just clicks, and one that does'€™t quite feel right. I'€™m certainly not saying that the rule of thirds doesn'€™t have a place in photography, but Phi is a far superior and much more intelligent and historically proven method for composing a scene." (from Divine Composition With Fibonacci's Ratio)

Designed As Designer

If you are interested in design and especially design and architecture of software, and you have a philosophical bent, you will enjoy this essay… I can't even attempt to summarize it's content, and even the abstract from the paper itself is quite inscrutable:

"Conceptual integrity arises not (simply) from one mind or from a small number of agreeing resonant minds, but from sometimes hidden co-authors and the thing designed itself." (From Designed As Designer)

What can I tell you. The author is the Richard Gabriel, a luminary of the computer world. Here's the article: Designed as Designer.

Sharing Web Site Designs

Recently I wanted to get feedback on one of several ideas for the design of the new BlogBridge web site. I had selected 6 product web sites that had a nice look and wanted to somehow visually compare them. Here are two free tools I used:

• Papparazzi! is a free Mac utility that does one thing and does it well. It makes a screen shot from a URL of a web site, importantly, including the whole page not just the part that is visible without scrolling.
• Pintrest is a free web site that facilitates sharing of images of things. Kind of like a delicious for images … or something. It's kind of hard to describe which is why I had not used it before. But this was a perfect use of it.

With those two free tools, I was able to create this web page allowing the quick and easy comparison of the possible designs of the new BlogBridge web site.

Oh and if you care to, please weigh in on the design you like the best :)

Nice bibliography for game designers

I got some of this list from Lee Sheldon's course syllabus. I have not read all these books but I want to:

• Designing Virtual Worlds. Richard Bartle.


• Character Development and Storytelling for Games. Lee Sheldon.


• Developing Online Games. Mulligan and Petrovsky.


• Massively Multiplayer Game Development. Thor Alexander et al.


• Synthetic Worlds. Edward Castronova.


• Community Building on the Web. Amy Jo Kim


• My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Julian Dibbell


• A Theory of Fun. Raph Koster


• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.


• The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. Jesse Schell

[DESIGN] Typography Cheat Sheet

If you are into fonts and typography, you might enjoy this Infographic that will help you choose.

How (not) to design a ballot

My head is full of democracy and elections these days. How come, you ask? Well for the last year or so I've been working for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, on elections technology. This month's focus is generating ballots for two elections happening in November. So more than usual, I am dreaming in black and white forms. Anyway...

I came across a couple of instructive blog posts about the new non-lever voting that New York unveiled this month. Predictably, when dealing with humans, some people don't like them. You can't please them all, right? But really the objections raised here are quite legitimate.

If this important yet rather esoteric topic interests you, here are three good links:

• New York Ballot Design Could Cause Confusion


• Design for Democracy


• Infographic: Ballot Design Still Sucks

An interesting video about design of Windows 7's default desktop colors

If you're interested in design and illustration, you might like this video of how Microsoft went about designing the default desktop for Windows 7. Also some interesting commentary about the challenge of designing an Operating System for an astronomical number of different PC configurations.