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What I want from a restaurant website - The Oatmeal

Why is it that so many restaurant web sites are just bad. The main goal for a restaurant site should be putting an address and a menu into the hands of a potential customer as painlessly as possible. Large PDFs, excessive Flash animation, etc. don't accomplish that, especially considering how many people are likely to be browsing your site on a mobile device today. URL:  theoatmeal.com

Social media meets GPS navigation

I've been playing around with this app lately on my Droid. Think "4 Square" meets "TomTom." Given that texting while driving is becoming increasingly illegal–in addition to just being a bad idea–I'm not sure how well Waze will catch on, but it's an interesting app. You can look for traffic alerts, speed trap advisories, and even communicate with other drivers on the map. Hopefully the social networking will be handled from the shotgun seat.

Amplifyd from www.waze.com
waze logo

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.
100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!

Read more at www.waze.com
 

Awesomely creative music event posters

Poster design is an artform unto itself.

More really cool resume designs

Excellent typographical poster design

Amplifyd from familytreedesign.net
Country Music Association: 2010 CMA Music Festival Poster
See more at familytreedesign.net
 

Clever animal themed logo designs.

What’s your color IQ?

The lower your score, the better your color IQ. I got a 15. URL:  www.xritephoto.com

Twitter tracks the entire country’s mood.

Amplifyd from www.fastcodesign.com
A video shows how each state's mood waxes and wanes through the day.

Every tweet, no matter how trivial, reveals the writer's mood, through word choice--It can be as obvious as "happy" or as subtle as "diamond."

Now imagine if you could take that knowledge, scale it up to the entire Twitter-verse, and use it to gauge the entire country's mood? That's exactly what Alan Mislove, a computer scientist, at Northeastern University, did, using 300 million tweets in real time. Check it out in action, over time--you can actually see moods rising at the end of the work day, and that same pattern gets repeated across time zones:

Though it seems impossibly hard, the methodology was actually quite straightforward. Mislove and his team started with a scale, previously devised by psychologists via polling, which assigns mood scores to 600 English words.

Mislove then used that scale to analyze 300 million tweets that originated in America, from 2006-2009. And he was then able to create a collective mood score for each state. (The reason the map above is so lumpy is that the area of each state corresponds to the number of tweets originating there.)

The only real barrier to tech like this from becoming leaps more subtle and profound is the word-scoring method. With a better, finer grained way to parse words and messages, you could easily imagine a tool that reveals emotional responses to events--and even uses that data to make market predictions. (And Twitter buzz actually turns out to be an uncanny predictor for how well a movie will do at the box office.)

[Via New Scientist]

Cliff Kuang

Cliff is the editor of Co Design, and writes regularly for Fast Company, WIRED, and GOOD. ... Read more

Twitter

Read more at www.fastcodesign.com
 

Great online typography tools

Amplifyd from resources.savedelete.com
Resources

15 Best And Useful Typography Tools For Web Designers

by Vikas on July 23rd, 2010     6 Comments »

Typography is the best way to represent your work and make an attractive website. A large number of website are running on internet with awesome typography designs. A few days ago we have been provides 25 awesome example of typography design for inspiration.

If you want to design any typography and test your capability in design you can use typography tools, these tools can help to designers to made any type of typography used with different color, font etc.

Typography tools are made to help beginners and also well trained web designers. Typography tools provide a facility to design different type of typography and built up your idea. So, have a look on 15 best and useful typography tools for web designers.

1) Readability

2) Font Family

3) Typeit

4) My Font Book

5) Font Tester

6) Type Chart

7) CSS Type

8 ) Type Tester

9) Web Font Specimen

10) Copy Paste Character

11) Character Reference

12) Font Shop

13) Fontifier

14) Typography Keyboard Layout

15) Font Struct

See more at resources.savedelete.com
 

10 helpful sites you may not have known about.

Amplifyd from www.toptenz.net

10 Helpful Websites You Have Never Heard Of

It’s easy to get lost on the internet among the millions of useless websites and the couple dozen or so good ones. Unfortunately, some of the few good ones go way under the radar, and you’ve never even heard of them, let alone visit them. Ranging from practical and educational to just plain fun, these are sites you’ll want to bookmark.

10. Zeer

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If there was a website that could save your life, it’d be Zeer. Zeer displays the nutritional labels for every kind of packaged food you can buy, and then lets you comment / rate your favorite, or perhaps least favorite, items. Trying to get into better shape or become healthier? Maybe you’re a vegetarian and you want to know if that tasty snack you saw had any beef in it. You thought you saw some beef-like texture for sure. Or maybe you want to know if that new Doritos flavor is any good. All your questions and more can be answered here.
http://www.zeer.com/

9. Bartleby

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Wikipedia’s overrated and about to become outdated. Bartleby provides you with unlimited access to various books and other information free of charge. The categories are reference, verse, fiction, and nonfiction. It’s very easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, whether it be Aesop’s fables or Shakespeare or even The Bible. The site also has a built-in encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, and quotation dictionary as well.
http://www.bartleby.com/

8. 5min

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Forget Ehow, Wikihow, or any other how-to website out there. 5min is your “one-stop shop for instructional videos and DIY projects.” It’s always easier to learn watching someone do it rather than reading about it. It’ll only take 5 minutes of your time and its videos range from “Tto Zurich, Switzerland” to “Yoga to Cure Constipation?” Or you can become a teacher, create an account, and upload your own videos.
http://www.5min.com/

7. Tryphone

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You can test drive a car, why shouldn’t you be able to test drive a phone? Don’t rely on CNET reviews and friend’s suggestions to buy your next phone, try it for yourself. Use their fully interactive online virtual headsets and try out the buttons, applications, services, content, and more. Every phone’s in crystal clear quality and literally, what you see is what you get. There are also user reviews, phone specifications, and other information on the site as well. Never feel uncertainty again when buying your next phone.
http://tryphone.com

6. Newsmap

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Google News is an amazing source of news. Constantly updated, reliable, and lots and lots of it. But maybe that last one’s not such a good thing. You’re busy but you still want to be informed, but it’s just so hard to discern what’s important and what’s not with Google News. That’s where Newsmap comes in. Newsmap is a graphical representation of Google News that makes it easy for you to find the news you actually care about. It relies on something called a “treemap algorithm” for this. Basically, more popular and important stories appear larger, while the lesser stories are smaller. Stories are also arranged by theme and represented by different colors. See for yourself.
http://newsmap.jp/

5. DailyLit

0608 dailylit

Despite popular belief, many people do actually enjoy reading books, but they just can’t find any time to set aside for this underrated hobby. The DailyLit fixes that easily. First, you choose the book you want to read. The older books are free, while the more modern classics might need a purchase. Then you choose the time and day you want to read it. Maybe you want to read it every day at 8 P.M. And that’s it. DailyLit will send you short installments of the book via RSS or e-mail and you can read it on a mobile device like an iPhone or on your computer. Before you know it, you’ll have finished the book, and it’ll have taken you less than 5 minutes a day.
http://dailylit.com/

4.  Tripit

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Traveling is a hassle. You have to keep track of all your transportation, reservations, and if you like to play it safe, your receipts. Well Tripit collects all those pesky little details and makes it into an easy-to-use master itinerary. Not only that, Tripit throws in maps, some local attraction suggestions, a few weather reports, and much more. You can access this itinerary online or from a mobile device like a cell phone, so keeping track of it couldn’t be easier. Don’t plan a trip again without Tripit.
http://www.tripit.com/

3. Power

powercom 560x354

There’s no doubt that social networking has become something much, much more than just catching up with old friends who want nothing more to do with you. But there are just so many websites, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and everyone uses different ones. How can you possibly keep up with everyone? Power solves this problem and more. Power allows you to log in once, just once, and with that one click, you’re synced with a long list of social networking sites. All the status updates, messages, and posts in a single place. You can even use MSN messenger in the site itself.
http://www.power.com/

2. Boxee

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Think of the copious amounts of videos that exist all across the vast World Wide Web today. This is where Boxee comes in and helps us maintain whatever sanity we will have while embarking on this impossible quest of entertainment. Boxee gathers the videos from a plethora of websites like Hulu, Youtube, and even Cnn.com, and feeds it to you in a very aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use interface. You can even organize the videos, images, and music on your own computer with Boxee. The best part of Boxee? The community. Boxee suggests media to you mainly via your friends—you form friend groups with other Boxee users and you can see what they’re watching or even suggest your own videos to them.
http://www.boxee.tv/

1. Wikibooks

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You’ve heard of Wikipedia, but do you know Wikibooks? It’s in the same easy-to-use interface, but a totally different concept. Wikibooks is a community that was made to create a free online library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Just one click can get you a plethora of information you never thought even existed or let you become an expert in a subject you’ve always wanted to know. As of right now, there are over 36,843 pages of information in a multitude of textbooks. You can teach by adding your own knowledge to the content, or be taught by just visiting. Maybe the English language isn’t your forte (how are you reading this?).
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

by Johnny Dunn

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