Is Graphic Design Art?

Design And Design is the initiative of French designer Marc Praquin.

In Marc’s own words: I realised that it is much easier for us designers to create things than to make a name for ourselves. So I decided to offer our community a simple yet powerful tool, completely free of charge, to free us from the monopoly of mainstream media and, at long last, let us speak for ourselves. This is how the Design and Design project got started.

Design And Design is a community-based platform for designers from around the world to showcase their work. Each day the site features the work of a graphic designer and product/packaging designer. All awarded works are published in the Design And Design.Com Book of the Year.

Featured above are Design And Design’s graphic and product designs of the day (Business card by FerrarioDesign and Baby Boom High Chair by Franco Cagnina/Cagnina Design).

Have fun with this. Check out what google knows.

via swissmiss.

Smashing Magazine reviews 10 blogging engines. Those covered include the more obvious and popular ones (WordPress, Movable Type) as well as community platforms (Drupal, b2evolution) and one that’s suited for e-commerce (Joomla).

In an industry that’s been on the downward spiral since the advent of digital music files and P2P sharing, Radiohead has stood out for its embrace of the Internet and what it has to offer. In Rainbows - which was not only released online but also with a pay-what-you-please price strategy - earned the band an average of £5 per album, more than twice of what they would have received if they were still tied to a record label.

Carrying on down this path, the band organised the In Rainbows Music Video Contest (together with aniboom) for fans/animators to develop a video for a track from In Rainbows. Submissions were voted for online and four winners have been picked. These animators will receive $10,000 to finish their videos but the band hasn’t committed themselves as to which they will release.

This one’s by Tobias Stretch, a favourite that’s been making its rounds on the Internet. I’m looking forward to seeing the completed version of this.

George Orwell’s diaries are being published “live” as a blog 70 years later to the date he wrote them. The entries are mundane as these are culled from his domestic diary. His political writings will begin on September 7 and this should yield more interesting thoughts of his.

Indeed, being a journalist and writer, it would be interesting to know what his thoughts would have been on blogs and blogging, the proliferation of CCTVs and the unfettered executive powers of Governments.

via monoscope and gizmodo.

Cuil is the new search engine that’s touted as the Google killer. Incidentally it’s started by some fellas - renegade engineers they say - from Google. But Cuil? Just in case you’re not familiar with Gaelic, ‘cuil’ is pronounced ‘cool’ and it means knowledge.  So is Cuil and uncool name for a brand? Suspend your judgment and take a look first.

via quipsologies.

This is 23PSI generated by Wordle.

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”

via DesignObserver.

BusinessWeek picks The Best and Worst of Web Design. Some of the ‘Best’ are BibliOdyssey (clean, uncluttered, content-focused), craigslist (functional non-style is a style) and Rumplo (great visual and browsing experience for t-shirts around the world). The ‘Worst’ include Amazon and YouTube (functional, effective but at the expense of aesthetics), and eBay (compromised functionality).

Also featured are The 10 Commandments of Web Design. Don’t even think of breaking them unlike the 10 Moses received. Of these, some bear repeating. Go easy on Flash (#1). Don’t clutter (#3). And of course, content is king (#10).

Now if you want to be a part of the effort to set a World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours, here it is. All you got to do is download Firefox 3 (by 2.16am, 19 June if you’re in my part of the world). So come on, do it now.

Update: More than 8 million downloads took place in the span of 24 hours. That’s the largest ever for Firefox but no official figure yet until the Guiness Book of World Records have done their verification.

See the exact center of the Internet here.