Creative Community Bulletin On 28 May 2009 (09:08 to 11:59)

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 28 May 2009 from 09:08 to 11:59:

  • [Video] Bing – Microsoft’s Upcoming Next Generation Search Engine
  • WARNING: Do Not Visit DesignFloat. Malicious Software Warning – if you vis­it DesignFloat at the moment you will have your PC unwit­ting­ly infect­ed with mali­cious soft­ware indi­cat­ing design float has been hacked an a hid­den iframe insert­ed with­in the sites header.
  • Introducing Typekit – Live Font Linking – So here’s the sit­u­a­tion: Every major brows­er is about to sup­port the abil­i­ty to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page dis­play with the typog­ra­phy you expect. For design­ers and devel­op­ers, this is a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward. No longer will you need to trap your con­tent in images or Flash just to express your­self visu­al­ly. Pages will be more usable, acces­si­ble, and index­able. This is a mas­sive upgrade for the web.
  • Is Qi Lu Microsoft’s Search Engine Savior? – BusinessWeek – “There’s a chance—a gen­uine chance—that we can make the search land­scape a whole lot more com­pet­i­tive and healthy.
  • Bing: Microsoft Reveals its New Search Engine [Video] – In addi­tion to a new name, Microsoft is re-positioning itself in the search mar­ket as not nec­es­sar­i­ly a bet­ter place to go for nav­i­ga­tion­al queries (i.e. – where’s the offi­cial site for my city gov­ern­ment?), but rather to help peo­ple make what the com­pa­ny is call­ing “com­plex decisions.”
  • 45 Really Essential Free HTML [Form] Enhancements – Easy user inter­ac­tion and data col­lec­tion is real­ly a key func­tion­al­i­ty on most web­sites and web appli­ca­tions. Providing users high qual­i­ty and intu­itive input forms may be just what is need­ed to make your users take the time to fill in and sub­mit the infor­ma­tion you’re try­ing to col­lect. In this arti­cle I have col­lect­ed a num­ber of real­ly essen­tial enhance­ments to basic html forms. The arti­cle con­tent has been split up into 7 sec­tions to help you find what you need faster. The tools includ­ed in this arti­cle are all free, good qual­i­ty, doc­u­ment­ed and not to hard to set up. Lets get start­ed there’s no time to miss…
  • Color in Web Design: Color Symbolism – Color is an impor­tant ele­ment web design­ers need to think about when cre­at­ing the look of a web­site. Different col­ors have dif­fer­ent mean­ings – cul­tur­al, instinc­tu­al, uni­ver­sal, and more – and can stim­u­late dif­fer­ent peo­ple in dif­fer­ent ways.
  • Music of Design: What do you lis­ten to? | Outlaw Design Blog – Recently I emailed a series of Twitter friends who design and hand­ful of pop­u­lar design­ers to see what sort of music got their cre­ative juices flow­ing. The results were a mix of every musi­cal genre out there. Some like to chill out to mel­low and clas­si­cal music, while oth­ers need some­thing a a bit more ener­gy to get them going
  • 45 Step-by-Step Tutorials on Web Design with Photoshop – While many web design­ers cre­ate mock­ups in Adobe Fireworks and Dreamweaver, no design pro­gram gives you quite so much con­trol as Adobe Photoshop. The lessons col­lect­ed here will show you how to cre­ate gor­geous and func­tion­al com­plete web­sites, blogs, lay­outs, nav menus and head­ers in Photoshop.
  • InDesign Eye Candy, part 3: Punch-Outs, Stickers, and Rips – I’ve seen the stick­er or decal look used in some mag­a­zines. It works best with sim­ple shapes. Be warned, stick­ers are addic­tive. Once you start mak­ing them, it’s hard to stop.
  • InDesign: Vertical Justification and End of Story Marker