How O'Reilly went animal
“Edie Freedman was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles — sed and awk? — that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.” While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. ‘That’s sed and awk!’ She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.”
When good design goes bad
“Ah, well. We’ll start over. It’s better to have something we’re both proud off than to try and salvage the work done so far. Sometimes you have to go all the way through the design process before you realize that you’ve built the wrong thing, but it’s ok, it’s a learning experience, it’s not the end of the world to take a deep breath and go back to step 1.”
Leaked Google video discusses Google Reader changes
“Calling tags ’labels’ is called ’kind of a historic accident and needlessly confusing’…Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.”

Seventies design collection
“Here you will find about 280 pictures, big or small, from the 1970’s era. You can click on any thumbnail to zoom in. This will open a new window. Click on any of the categories below, to show or hide their thumbnails: Cars, Fashion, Film and TV, Furniture, Houses, Interiors, Art, Info.” [via MUG]
Styling file inputs with CSS and the DOM
“File inputs are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.”
A Brief Message
“A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.”
Knockoffs fly in fashion world
“A debate is raging in the American fashion industry over such designs. Copying, which has always existed in fashion, has become so pervasive in the Internet era it is now the No. 1 priority of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which is lobbying Congress to extend copyright protection to clothing.”
Non-news news: Face-to-face meetings are still needed to foster genuine "real" friendships!
“This is thought to be partly because very large numbers of friends are difficult to keep track of. Social networking sites have artificially expanded the ability to maintain contacts to an enormous degree. But Dr Reader’s ongoing study of more than 200 social networking site users shows that even they have only around five “close friends”, and these are almost always made through face-to-face meetings.”