Fubiz, a french design blog featuring various inspiring ideas, compiled a list of very cool business card designs (view the list).

Seeing these refreshes me because they remind me to think differently; to really understand the objective of the design project.

Another thing that these design remind me is to always try to incorporate the element of surprise. A pleasant surprise makes a design stand out because it makes the activity of seeing the business card more than just absorbing information. It becomes a unique experience.

I’m dissatisfied with every record the Beatles ever fucking made. There ain’t one of them I wouldn’t remake… including all the Beatles records and all my individual ones……But you play me those tracks today and I want to remake every damn one of them. There’s not a single one… I heard ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on the radio last night. It’s abysmal, you know. The track is just terrible. I mean, it’s great, but it wasn’t made right, know what I mean? But that’s the artistic trip, isn’t it? That’s why you keep going.
- John Lennon, Playboy Interview, 1980

I’ve been working on a web site for a photographer friend of mine.

She would like to show her photos in a nice slideshow with fading effects and thumbnails.

To minimize the maintenance effort, I need a simple web app that would do most of the work for her so she won’t need to touch the code at all. Ideally, she’d just dump a bunch of pictures to a folder, and voila! the slideshow is populated with the new pictures.

The Smooth gallery 2.0 by JonDesign looks promising.

I’ll give it a try and report back.

A t-shirt design based on a painting titled “Miss Sarajevo” that was inspired by U2’s song by that same title.

That song is about the act of defiant in the midst of ugly adversity. Not letting ugly situations/conditions caused by evil-minded people kill the beauty in our soul.

We need to fight to let that beauty shines through darkness.

A portion of the lyric that is displayed on the t-shirt:

Dici che il fiume
Trova la via al mare
E come il fiume
Giungerai a me
Oltre i confini
E le terre assetate
Dici che come il fiume
Come il fiume…
L’amore giungerà
L’amore…
E non so più pregare
E nell’amore non so più sperare
E quell’amore non so più aspettare
–from “Miss Sarajevo” by U2

This t-shirt is customizable (color and material) and available for men also. You can purchase this t-shirt at my online print/poster store.

Here’s another t-shirt design based on a painting that I did.

As always, you can customize the t-shirt by picking different materials and/or colors.

The product shown here is available for $31.45 at my zazzle store

Research from Jakob Nielsen about reading behavior of web user.

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

I knew this all along, from usability, eye tracking and my own behavior, but seeing the number is very eye-opening.

An idea for a method to test out the scannability of the content on your page is to ask a person who’s not familiar with your site to read what he sees on the page out loud as fast as he can within 5 seconds. Most web users only stay for 2-3 seconds, but we need to add the extra 2 seconds to accommodate the time needed to do the reading.

Link to article:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

A series of 3 connected paintings that depict the struggle of a young lady to overcome a destructive lifestyle controlled by addictions.

Each panel is 24″ x 30″. All done in acrylic on canvas.

These paintings were completed on 05/03/2008.

They will be auctioned off at a fundraising fashion/art show in Downtown LA this Thursday 05/08/2008. For more info about this event, click here.

The prints for these paintings are available on my online print/t-shirt store.

I got the following from a friend of mine who’s one of the lead engineers at Netflix. If you’re interested, or know anyone who is, you can either go to the link below or contact me. Good luck.

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Company: Netflix
Job Title: Sr. Web UI Engineer
Description: At Netflix I have an immediate opening on my team. This is an exciting opportunity to ply your amazing web development/engineering talents to one of the most recognized brands on the Web! In this position you would join an absolutely amazing team of Web UI engineers at an exciting time in Netflix history.

We are currently refactoring the entire Web UI layer. As a team member you would be responsible for specific areas of the site and participate in moving our site to latest Web standards (think unobtrusive javascript, layered semantic markup, hijax, etc.), working to improve client performance and working to realize new interaction approaches to our interface.

The job details are posted here