Dan Hill's Monocle design notes →

Deciding to filter, reflect and craft rather than immerse the user in a constant flow of data in lieu of information.

Instructions for building a grid system template in iWork's Pages '09 →

Relic

View high resolution

Inspire

View high resolution

More grid fun over at brianmcbreen.com.

View high resolution

matthewlyons:

Stromberg Carlson (General Dynamics) Ad (via bustbright)

I seem to get restless every couple of months with my site design, so he’s the latest ( creatively named “grid”). You can see the historic designs on Flickr.

View high resolution

I love this clever laptop case, the BookBook.

Mark 2

View high resolution

Photo from The Airstream Life featured in Dwell. Landscape architect Andreas Stravropoulos of XS LAND uses a mobile studio for client work.

Photo of East Village rooftop from Topping Themselves, in Metropolis magazine, June 2009 issue.

View high resolution

This notice from Twitter about their new Retweet feature gave me a chuckle based on the RT it highlighted.

New Blog Theme & Website Design

Just putting the finishing touches on the new design for the parent site, brianmcbreen.com, and this corresponding Tumblr blog theme (based on the original Swiss Theme by pixelspread).

On the parent site, I integrated tags and the most recent blog post via RSS, albeit with some compromises due to iWeb (which I use mostly for convenience). I did discover this clever way of using grids in the background for precise design, a practice I had longed for in iWeb.

In the blog theme, I made several changes to the CSS and added support for tags and comments through Disqus. I’m sure I’ll do some fine tuning to the layout and as always come across some minor bugs, but for now I’m happy enough to let it live for a little bit. It seems I get restless with the design every few months as those who visit the site often can attest.

What do you think?

First the LA Times, then CNN.com, now the local Ventura County Star redesigns their website. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

ragbag:

arial & helvetica -or- helvetica & arial

on friday, i hosted a screening of helvetica for some buddies of mine that didn’t know that there were other typefaces besides times new roman. it turns out, there ARE other typefaces and one of them is helvetica (and another of them is papyrus.)

the documentary does not explore the relationship between helvetica and microsoft’s derivative, arial. so to help ignite the post-viewing dialogue, i made this supplement illustrating the key differences in letterforms. however, in place of any spirited debate, my buddies decided instead to take turns delivering roundhouses to my jaw, saying “a documentary about a font is as interesting as it sounds.” i could not agree more.