Adobe Photoshop CS4 will include a new feature: content aware scaling. I am geeking out.

Ah, design is becoming so democratic! Free market! Even your grandma can do it!

Objectified – (uhb-jek-tuh-fahyd) n., the new documentary film on industrial design by Gary Hustwit, the filmmaker behind Helvetica.

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read Hustwit’s post about the film.

The New York Times reports on Serious Sans, the not-so-funny sibling to Comic Sans. The typeface is obviously different, but surprisingly shares some of the feel of its counterpart, just without the extreme goofiness.

The third volume of Penguin’s Great Ideas series is set to hit shelves in the coming weeks, and the whole set of cover designs is on Flickr. Volume III was designed largely by David Pearson, who also did Volume I and Volume II, as well as a number of other projects for Penguin (including the beautiful Great Loves series).

When developing a web design, it is important to code not only your ideal font, but additional fonts for users who might only have more basic font packages. Unfortunately, a lot of designers call for one main font that fits perfectly, but then list alternatives that, at best, look ugly or, at worst, completely break the design. Better CSS font stacks is a collection of complementary fonts, appropriately categorized by paragraph or title.

Books Received is a periodically updated feature on Design Observer of some books they like. Some design books, as you might have guessed.

Staff picks:

Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections
Tod Lippy, Esopus
Alix Lambert, Crime
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Mel Bochner, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews
Indi Young, Mental Models
Luke Wroblewski, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

Bonus!: ESOPUS Magazine has a stream of the mix CDs that came with the first seven issues. Artists range from A to Z, and the themes for each mix are fantastic. (e.g., CD #2 is “Musician-couples wrote a song inspired by the Craig’s List “Missed Connection” personal ad of their choice.”)

What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About the Web is a short article by Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 on, you guessed it, how newspapers fail online. As a test case, Karp uses The Washington Post and a recent storm in Washington D.C.:

This is the WASHINGTON Post, right? So where’s the news about Washington? We just got pounded by a nasty storm — but it’s not homepage worthy.

Despite his initial difficulty in finding information on his first go, he did later find it in the Metro section, but not before heading to Google and getting it there. A few readers lambasted Karp in the comments for being a “stupid user”, but Karp makes a good point in a rejoinder post.

Here’s the problem — my failure to find the information I wanted is not MY problem, because I went to Google and found it. I succeeded. The failure is the site’s problem, because I abandoned it and went instead to a site that would help me succeed without having to be smarter.

Basically, the solution to Karp’s difficulty finding information on the Post website is logging in (or digging deeper through the website). He logs in, customizes his homepage, and bam! local news is the first thing he sees. But who cares about how smart users navigate? If any users are leaving your website to find information that is ON YOUR WEBSITE, something is wrong.

Karp addresses his criticisms to the newspaper industry, but it is hard to not to generalize them to any type of website. The web is a new beast, and users are expecting more-and-more to find information nonlinearly (or, you know…hyperlinearly). Having navigation that forces users to traverse the website as if it were comprised of sequential pages is wrong. This isn’t print.

So what is the solution? It differs on a case-by-case basis, of course, but the bottom-line is that newspapers (specifically) need to bring more focus to their web-only content, while still allowing easy access to the traditional news that is their bread and butter. Basically, as Karp says, good content is no longer enough. Websites also need to make that content accessible to users at all levels.

I’ll sign off by saying Karp has a lot of good ideas in the above links, but they are drowned beneath nitpicking and cat-calling. Kidiot.

Cinematypography – a project mixing film and typeface names, including the illustrious V for Verdana, the sci-fi classic Back to the Futura, and award-winning No Country for Old English Men.

Get Helvetica Off Our Money

HistoryShots creates high-quality information graphics on a number of historical topics. From the Race to the Moon to the Geneology of Pop & Rock Music, you could also say that HistoryShots creates the artwork for my next apartment. All of it. (Well, maybe some Edward Tufte prints just to spice things up.)

The Web Standards Project has released the newest version of their Acid tests, “a line of tests designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in Web browsers.” Basically, there are 100 things a browser needs to do, and it gains a point for each thing it manages to do. It is not the end-all-be-all in how successful a browser is, but it does a striking job of illuminating just how terrible some browsers are.

Notably, every version of Internet Explorer does horrendously; nothing surprising considering IE 8 will be the first version to seriously adhere to web standards. However, most current browsers fail the test, but there are a number of shining beacons being built.

First and foremost is Safari, the default Mac browser. The current stable release doesn’t fair so well (39/100), but the current nightly (developer release) manages an astounding 90/100. It’s not perfect yet, but it is far beyond the 67/100 of Firefox 3 Beta 4 and 61/100 of Opera 9.5.

Safari is likely to stay ahead of the pack for awhile, as Firefox will never pass without major architectural changes and Opera is unlikely to pass until version 10 is released. But again, though Acid3 is the test for web standards compatibility, there is obviously much more to browsing than the simple rendering of the page. Speed and security are two entirely reasonable aspects for a browser maker to focus on over standards.

Take the Acid3 test yourself, and see how your browser inevitably crashes and burns.

The end of The Wire – SADLY, sadly, sadly, The Wire has come to an end. Jason Kottke wraps it up with a collection of recaps and reviews. Despite the show’s criticisms (and this final season toeing the line between ridiculous and absurd), I would readily argue these 5 seasons have been the best 5 seasons in television history (not counting MacGyver or Wings, of course). And also, *SPOILER ALERT*.

Can Scientists Dance? – A bevy of students, postdocs, and professors perform interpretive dances for their Ph.D. dissertations. Like Simone Recchi performing Dynamical and chemical evolution of blue compact dwarf galaxies a la Daft Punk’s “Around the World”.

Quote, Unquote – There has been a bit of discussion (read: ire) over the widespread use of “dumb quotes” (straight) over “smart quotes” (curved). Straight apostrophes denote inches and degrees and minutes and seconds, while curved apostrophes are used in conjunctions and quoting. There are a number of reasons to purposely use one or the other, but anything else is just laziness. Thankfully, Wordpress has me covered.

10 trends that will define logo design in 2008 – I guess it’s already time for another makeover.

Slide Show – “Are you ready for PowerPoint karaoke?” No.

How do you build a public library in the age of Google? – Slate.com photo essay on the changing architecture and role of public libraries. As digital content becomes more and more pervasive, there’s less need for a stuffy old library filled with nothing but books. Public libraries in major cities around the country are responding to this not only with new offerings (coffee shops, movie rentals, more computers) but with new architecture as well.

The 2008 Tournament of Books

In which we would seed the year’s most celebrated works of fiction in a March Madness-type bracket and pit those novels against each other in a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence.” In honor of our favorite character in contemporary literature, David Sedaris’s brother, aka “The Rooster,” we decided to present the winning author with a live chicken.

Floating cigarette – The secret behind a good magic trick is making it remain amazing, even if you know how it is done.

Bottom line, all web apps suck – Not to bite the hand that feeds me…Matt Haughey brings up some good points, and strikes up a good conversation (see the comments). And I love Wordpress, but even it falls prey to some of Haughey’s complaints.

How camera lenses are made – A piece from the Discovery Channel’s “How It’s Made”. Not the best bit the show’s ever had, but who knew it took six weeks to make one lens? Shenanigans.

Sitepoint CSS Reference – I am such a dork.

USB 3G modems don’t fit with MacBook Air – One of the smallest USB 3G modems out now won’t fit in the custom MacBook Air USB port. Not much of a surprise, but who cares? Air users shouldn’t have to attach plastic tumors to get cellular broadband.

MacBook Air Craft – That’s one solution…

For Sale: Pink Upholstered Vagina Chair – Man, I love Craigslist sometimes. Who’s up for a trip to California?

Books that make you dumb – Take the top ten most popular books at every college, compare it to the average SAT/ACT scores for those colleges, and bango presto! A descending list of books that make you dumb. The Bible is pretty average, but The Holy Bible could use some Princeton Review courses.

To end: Kate Beaton’s History Project – Twenty comics about different historical figures or cultural themes. Like the Professor Brothers, but static. Educated humor has never been so hilarious.

I have only one question for you: You gonna light that pipe?

Design Observer has a slideshow of Tom Manning’s spam cartoons, short strips inspired by (and consisting of) the text from spam mail. Turning spam subject lines into comic strips is nothing new, but Manning’s art is the only I know that uses the whole shebang. The work is some beautiful stuff.

Joseph Sullivan of The Book Design Review has released his 2007 list of favorite book covers. There is still time in 2007 for new releases, but even if one or two more greatly designed books are released, the list remains a nice bit of eye-candy. For even more book cover design, see Fwis.com’s frequently updated Covers

I will admit that xkcd can sometimes be…a bit much, and the latest strip is definitely one of those times, but may I present to you 1337: Part 3, in which we learn of how super-hacker Elaine “helped start a movement among teen girls, a culture of self-taught female programmers and musicians, coding by day and rocking out by night — Riot Prrl.”

Italian Spiderman – “Shut your mouth, pussycat, and find me a macchiato, pronto.”

Somehow, even with all the publicity surrounding how frequently employers use Facebook to check on employees, some people still post Halloween party pictures after requesting off from work for a family emergency. (Cool wand.)

Oobject.com is like a “Billboard charts for gadgets”, with top whatever (10, 15, 20, 22, etc.) lists of a variety of different gadgets. Sometimes mundane (mobile media devices), sometimes stunning (*cough* ray guns), but always fun (time machines).

If you find yourself alone in the woods with nothing but an onion, some Gatorade, and a dead iPod, don’t worry. Household Hacker has you covered in this week’s episode: How to charge an iPod using electrolytes. Then again, maybe you’re more interested in creating a speaker for under $1 out of a paper plate, aluminum foil, and a penny.

See For Yourself is an online gallery of perceptual illusions provided by Duke University’s Purves Lab. The site is so well done that, honestly, it makes me want to do research there.

What fills the Web Design Hall of Fame? Google? Amazon? MySpace? Undress Me Robot? Each website would pass for inclusion on some basis, but inevitably fail on another. While print and other media have a solid canon of wholly successful designs, the web seems to be lacking. Armin Vit over at Speak Up asks us, “Landmark web sites, where art thou?” His short discussion does not offer any answers, instead simply spotlighting the dearth and turning to the masses for salvation.

Perhaps it’s the short lifespan of the web that hasn’t allowed any specific web site to become a de facto choice for design immortality; but Seven was released in 1995, becoming an instant classic, so age is not quite an issue. Or maybe it’s the perennially ephemeral nature of the web, where web sites can change every year, month or week if desired, rendering the sense of commitment less ominous than that of printed or branded matter. It could also be the giant amount of crap that one has to wade through on the internet, but not much more than the amount of bad logos, brochures or signs found day in and day out. Or maybe I’m just thinking about this the wrong way.

So Vit is hard-pressed to find a cause for the web’s lack of such great heights. Here he knocks down possible sources of this dearth, and later he knocks down certain sites’ inclusion in the Hall of Fame. (Google may be a great search engine, but default blue links and bevel and drop shadow logo? For shame!) For any hypothesis on the cause of the web’s impotency, we’ll have to turn to Khoi Vinh’s argument that the web lacks great designers who both think and do. My question to Vinh is this: why is this true only for web design? It is tempting to restrict your vision to only web design, but I find it extremely hard to believe that great print designers are not also graduating to managerial positions.

Then again, maybe Vit is thinking about this the wrong way. At the very least, his logic seems a bit inconsistent when dismissing the age of the web as a non-factor. Certainly, a genuinely classic design could be recognized as such within days or weeks of its creation (as in Seven), so it is not that the web has not been around long enough for people to recognize a web design’s success. However, Seven was released almost a century after the inception of motion pictures, and its opening does not utilize any techniques significantly different than what was available in the previous decades. The world wide web (not the Internet), on the other hand, is like a baby. At most just a bit over a decade old, web technologies are still in early development. Hell, even half of what you find on the web today was impossible five or ten years ago.

While age of the medium is hardly necessary for a design to be considered a masterpiece, it is very influential when considering what the medium can do. Are we yet at a point where web designers can create a site as beautiful as the best Flash website, but as usable and functional as Google? Cascading style sheets bring us very close, Javascript and PHP (and the like) even closer, but I would argue that we are not quite there yet. It will be a couple more years until designers have fully stretched the boundaries of today’s emerging tools.

But should we even try to apply conventional graphical design to web design? Joshua Porter prevails upon us to recognize the web as a different beast, and act accordingly. However, as Jeff Croft points out in the comments, Porter is concerned entirely with interaction design. Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay are all very usable, but they lack any stunning aesthetics (though Amazon’s recent redesign has brought the site closer to Vit’s Pinnaclism). Assumedly, Porter would also see the conventional dictionary as a design success, with its extreme ease of use, but can we really lump it together with Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map?

Vit would reply with a resounding NO. How a user accesses and interacts with data are important aspects of design, but how that data is displayed is just as important:

When it comes to web design it’s rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired, recognized or lauded in the same vein as anything resembling the likes of Saul Bass’ AT&T logo, or Susan Kare’s icons for the original Mac OS.

I think web designers are still grappling with how to handle both data and aesthetics. Dynamic websites and visually appealing websites are both relatively new phenomena, each still coming into their own. This all goes back to Mark Boulton’s point that separating content and presentation has led to cookie-cutter websites [1]. When dealing with small website of just a few pages stunning, unique examples definitely already exist, and I think Vit will be satisfied once designers are able to take that beauty and create something that is both expansive (handling large amounts of variable content) and exquisite.

[1] Don’t you hate when you incriminate yourself?