JJ and I are proud to announce our first official desktop wallpaper. I jokingly made this for JJ yesterday and we figured why not just offer it up. It’s inspired by a ridiculous term we’ve been joking about for months…

Dynamism: Keep web sites “fresh” by periodically adding new material and features, and by updating information regularly. A dynamic site will draw more repeat visitors and garner good press coverage.

Enjoy! 1440×900,  1920×1200

Note: If you are looking for more sizes, just let me know and maybe I will just add them to the list.

I bring you The Vader Project – an art exhibit at The Andy Warhol Museum (naturally) in Pittsburgh where artists and designer’s reimagine Darth Vader’s helmet

Awesome time lapsed map of tweets from the New York Times. It shows the location and frequency of commonly used words during the Superbowl. This map produces amazing visuals and is impressive to see how far Twitter has come.

Charlene Li wrote up a quick post about this find and pretty much summed up everything I was thinking:

In many ways, I think this simple mashup shows the power of Twitter — it’s when you see the aggregate whole of Twitter that you begin to understand the potential for it to serve as a channel for what people are paying attention to. Take a look at the “talking about ads” stream to understand which ads resonated where — media buyers, get your orders ready!

Twitter is a microblogging service that…oh, forget it.

Point is that though Twitter approached mainstream status as a communication medium in 2008, but still doesn’t replace the “online homebase” that one’s blog site can be, especially when served up using a self-hosted version of WordPress.  The Mashable post presents legitmate trends that we may being to see in blog designs, from simple features such as Twitter rolls (similar to Blogrolls) to complex features such as Tweetbacks (integrated Twitter responses to a blog post within the posts comment listings). 

But most of all, the Mashable post speaks to the continuing trend that our blogs exist as the best aggregators of all of a blog owner’s online activity, from Twitter to Flickr and beyond.  2009 also saw the rise of aggregating services such as Friendfeed and storytlr, but these services lack the customization and branding that one can include in a self hosted property such as a blog.  A blog where the posts exists as the primary, featured content with our short 140 character bursts, Flickr photos, Seesmic videos, and more revolving around like planets orbiting the sun.

I know what you are thinking… looks like screenshots of iphone apps. Actually most of these are sites designed for advanced phone browsers with a couple of apps sprinkled in here and there. Plus grabbing screenshots from my iPhone is 10 times easier than taking them from my browser. It’s all those site with smart redirects… those clever developers =)

Anyway here’s the list (from left to right, top to bottom):

• Evernote iPhone app (home screen)
• Evernote Iphone app (tips drawer) – I <3 this interaction
• Facebook mobile (similar to the iPhone app)
• ESPN.com (scores & schedules, looks to be iPhone specific)
• Brightkite iPhone app
• Google Reader mobile
• Flickr mobile (new for advanced mobile browsers)
• Leaflets, the original iPhone apps
• YouTube mobile

Want more? I started a collection over at Flickr of all my mobile inspiration. Feel free to follow along.

Anyway, this experience started me thinking… what’s obvious to me, may not be for someone else. So with that in mind, I’m starting a weekly series to show off stuff that inspires me. Even though I’m hoping to highlight more than just web sites, in this first series it is a good place to start. So without further ado, here are 5 sites I visited (more than once) this week for design inspiration.

PatternTap – Makes finding inspiration for specific elements a breeze with their collections.

Colorlouvers – A site full of color… browse by trends, palettes, and even by what other sites are already using.

FFFFOUND! – The randomness of what I may find is inspiration enough.

Design*Sponge – When design websites, I don’t always look at other websites. Design*Sponge is great home eye candy.

paper crave – I don’t just do web sites… I’ve been designing holiday cards at work and paper crave shows off a variety of inspirational print pieces.

Event Details:
PodCamp + WordCamp Hawaii
When: October 24-25, 2008
Where: Hawaii Convention Center (Honolulu, Hawaii)
PodCamp + WordCamp website | Full WordCamp Schedule

And for those of you that aren’t lucky enough to be in Hawaii this weekend, you can follow along at the Official PodCamp/WordCamp Hawaii live stream.

So here’s how I added the 3 column superfooter onto Red Pill.  All it takes us some clever CSS that blends up ID and CLASS selectors.

Here’s how I did it.

First, define a ID selector for the area in which the 3 columns will go

div #superfooter-columns {
        margin: 0 auto;
        width: 730px;
        font-size: 1.1em;   
        width: 730px;
        clear:both;
        text-align:left;
        z-index:1;
    }

Then, add a class that will be used on each column

#superfooter-columns .footercol {
    float:left;
    overflow:hidden;
    position:relative;
}

Then, add some css for each column – A, B, and C

#superfooter-columns #footercol_a {
    margin: 0;
    width:229px;
    padding: 10px 2.5px 30px 10px;
}

#superfooter-columns #footercol_b {
    margin: 0;
    width:229px;
    padding: 10px 2.5px 30px 10px;
}

#superfooter-columns #footercol_c {
    margin: 0;
    width:229px;
    padding: 10px 2.5px 30px 10px;
}

Adjust the widths and padding appropriately for your site layout.  Once you have that basic skeleton in place you can start filling the divs in your XHTML with the content you want.  I’ll talk about the features I stuck into the superfooter in tomorrow’s post

Twitter got a little face lift yesterday and its not that bad. I love the look of the larger type for your “following”, “followers”, “updates” count and that your latest tweet is place under the update field. They do use a lot of my design pet peeves… but that’s pretty much the extent of my complaints.

Pet peeve #1: Rounded corners… really?!? I’ve abused corners in some of my designs too, but I just don’t really understand the obsession. I know it’s very web 2.0, but the design stands up without them. I took a look in IE and it does… I almost prefer it. Maybe it’s because I’m missing the squareness of a tweet. It was sort of iconic. (Side note: It’s damn cool they are the CSS3 border-radius property for those silly corners)

Pet peeve #2: Finger tabs… or at least that’s what I’ve been calling them since my boy Shalin added them to the redesigned My eBay. In the new Twitter design, the finger tabs (right) replaced the horizontal ones that used to be above the timeline. I didn’t like the horizontal tabs either and really don’t know what the best solution would be, but those finger tabs just irk me. Maybe it’s because they look like fingers or maybe it’s because they want look like side navigation but act like tabs… something is just confusing about the whole look of them.

Pet peeve #3 Georgia Italics… that’s just gross and should never be done.

So other than that… it’s good step forward. Congrats, I know how hard it must be to please our large, vocal community. Want to see what everyone else is saying? Check out some of the reviews.