David Correll Studio, Brooklyn, NY

Congrats go out to my good friend Clint Fisher on the launch of Aenon Fire, a labor of love long in the making. Clint has been working on this for a long time, and has come out of it with a fantastic initial launch. Go check it out — and watch out for my cameo in Psychedelic Renaissance.

Way to go, Clint!

Well, another year has passed, and I once again was unable to attend SXSWi. Find yourself in the same situation? Fear not! All is not lost!

The best part of not attending SXSWi is the week (sometimes weeks) after, when all my favorite bloggers, web designers and developers post PDFs of the slides from their presentations. Forget the “SXSW was great!” wrap-ups, and hunt down the good stuff. Get the content without the hangover!

There are a few stand-outs from this year — get ’em while they’re hot!

Web Typography Sucks
Okay, so I do wish I could have seen this presentation. Richard Rutter of Clearleft and Mark Boulton, (one of my favorite online author on the subject of typography), offer up this gem. Lots of examples and how-to’s on design essentials. Snag the PDF with notes.

Oh Yeeaahh!
Grid-master Khoi Vin serves up another excellent study in designing on the grid. First thing that grabbed me here? Start with the ads. The above link it to his post about it, which is well worth the read, or jump straight to the PDF here.

While you’re there, check out his T.G.I. Interwebr’s Grill.

Twitter, to which I have recently sold my soul, was apparently all the rage this year. My friend Jeremy, who was lucky enough to go, had some pretty interesting stories to tell about watching parties shift based on someone’s Twitter update. The always worth reading Chrisistopher Fahey had some pretty interesting observations on the phenomenon.

I’m sure there are more out there, but this should keep you busy for a while – it certainly has for me. With people like Richard Rutter, Mark Boulton, Khoi Vin and Christopher Fahey, how can you go wrong?

Well, after many, many late nights and a lot of stress, my day job launched Bright Pages, a Yellow Pages search engine. We have been working on this for a long time, and I’m pretty proud of it. It’s not perfect (what is?), but overall, it ended up pretty nice. I’ll get some screen-shots up in the portfolio soon, but in the meantime, check out the site.

Hats off to CNN International and design firm Kemistry for the new CNNi on-air branding. The rebranding eschews the industry standard set by the likes of CNN MSNBC of flashy graphics and fitting as much information on the screen as possible, by opting for clean design and typography. Black and white are the key colors, applied with large type and accentents of yellow. They have also abandoned the scrolling ticker that has become standard, despite being proven to lower viewer’s comprehension of the news. According to mediabistro: TVNewser, U.S. viewers can see the new design on Your World Today.

Forget the “Under Construction” GIFs of the past — Clint Fisher Art has a new take: a live re-design. He started the redesign “about 3 am on the 3rd,” and continues, tweaking the design on the live site. Clint got me in the nasty habit of “living on the edge,” working on files live on the server (don’t try this at home, kiddies — and always have a local backup). According to his post about the re-design, that was a large reason for the live re-design. Personally, I think it is a great exploration of the design process. Clint and I have talked many times about how CSS makes sketching on a site much easier, and this seems like a logical extension from those discussions.

My very talented friend and html/css mentor Clint Fisher just launched the site for his new design studio, Aenonfiredesign. He has put a ton of work into it, and come out of the trenches with a very well-done site. He is featuring design work, news and music reviews, and a running “narrative” of his excellent photography. Check it out and say hi!

The Wire Is my favorite magazine in the whole world. It is the most amazing resource for experimental, avant-garde, and generally obscure and obsessively creative music. I read it religiously.

For the past four years, it has been designed by the incredibly talented UK duo Non-Format. The format has been a sans-serif, Swiss-inspired base layout, accented by some of the most stunning experimental typography for all major features in the magazine — and cover layouts that are nothing short of spectacular.

I was sad to read this morning that the next issue will be their last as art directors. Their design for The Wire has not only made the magazine an even better read, but it has been a source of inspiration for me. It has been a long time since I’ve seen experimental typography this good, and backed up with structure and standard typography so well. The design is clean, simple and strong, and reflects the content well.

If you’re not familiar with their work for The Wire, stop by their site. They have a lot of images from the magazine on the site, along with the rest of their work.