Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 5 June 2014

Great con­tent found by Pariah and shared to the design and cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties on social media.

  • 30 Best Cursive Fonts
    Cursive fonts add a beau­ti­ful touch to any piece of typog­ra­phy works. Here is a list of top 30 cur­sive fonts you will sure­ly love. Check this out!
  • What Does ‘Always Listening’ Mean to Your UX?
    In essence, they were two ends of the same spec­trum, demon­strat­ing how com­put­ers inter­act with us instead of us inter­act­ing with them, with com­put­ers being the active ini­tia­tor, instead of the pas­sive respon­der to our instructions.
  • Publishing Consultants Want to Foster Competition Among Retailers by Making Consumers Miserable

    But then I see arti­cles like this one in Publishers Weekly, about com­pet­ing with Amazon on print and dig­i­tal fronts, and I start to wonder.

    Most of the arti­cle is all right, talk­ing about the size of Amazon’s influ­ence in the indus­try and what var­i­ous busi­ness­es are doing to try to com­pete. As far as the size goes, I have to admit the fig­ures they came up with are impres­sive. If those fig­ures can be believed, Amazon is respon­si­ble for 41% of all book pur­chas­es, whether on-line or in a store, 65% of all online book units, and 67% of e‑book units.”

  • Letterpress Printing at P98a

    Last week Erik Spiekermann pub­lished a video about his let­ter­press shop at P98a in Berlin. Even though the audi­ence at large main­ly knows him as a suc­cess­ful and acclaimed “dig­i­tal” design­er (290K fol­low­ers on Twitter, any­one?), cre­ator of some very pop­u­lar dig­i­tal type­faces, let­ter­press has been a con­stant fac­tor in his career. During his stud­ies at Berlin’s Free University Erik fund­ed him­self by run­ning a let­ter­press print­ing press in the base­ment of his house (which famous­ly burned down in the sev­en­ties), and last year you could find him hard at work at the TYPO Berlin 2013 Printing Workshop in the foy­er of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

  • 4 Google Analytics cus­tom vari­ables every pub­lish­er should use

    Adding a few basic cus­tom vari­ables to a Google Analytics set­up can give pub­lish­ers so many more insights. Custom vari­ables, which Google defines as “name-value pair tags that you can insert in your track­ing code in order to refine Google Analytics track­ing,” are one of the most under­uti­lized seg­men­ta­tion tools. (If you’re not famil­iar with the con­cept, I rec­om­mend read­ing Justin Cutroni’s com­pre­hen­sive post on mas­ter­ing cus­tom variables.)

  • Transform WordPress into a WYSIWYG with MotoPress
    MotoPress is an excit­ing plu­g­in that actu­al­ly replaces the default WordPress edi­tor, pro­vid­ing all of the same func­tion­al­i­ty, and then some. 

    Check out the awe­some demo.

  • Secure the Social Media Accounts of Your Business

    Everyone on this site loves to have good long talks about what you can do to make your social media account more suc­cess­ful, and that’s great. But it also makes you a tar­get. Hackers love steal­ing pop­u­lar social media accounts as unpop­u­lar ones are no good to them, read on and I’ll help you keep that pop­u­lar social media account under your control!

  • Apple’s Next Reality Distorter: Jimmy Iovine

    Mr. Iovine’s irre­press­ible spir­it — and his will­ing­ness to sim­ply declare some­thing to be real­i­ty regard­less of the com­plex­i­ty of the facts — bears a marked resem­blance to the “real­i­ty dis­tor­tion field” that Mr. Jobs so famous­ly emanat­ed.” – The New York Times’ Bits blog

  • For Brands, Apps Are A Big Bust

    Apps are one of the biggest exam­ples, he says. “You can see how a mar­ket­ing exec would look at the stats and say, ’85% of the time con­sumers spend on smart­phones is with apps, so we need an app – fast.’ But the real­i­ty is that three-quarters of that time is spent on gam­ing, Facebook, YouTube or social mes­sag­ing.” No won­der almost 40% of brand apps have nev­er even been reviewed by a user, and only 6% remain active on a fea­tured list, he says.