Ok, this week has been hectic, and I have had very little time to write anything of substance. So today you get a list post! I know you love it don’t you.

But as you can see from the screen cap I took from Google Reader below I read a heck of a lot of stuff. So what site’s keep my eyes and mind coming back for more?

5 – Core77

At it’s essence Core77 is a damn well written design blog. The sheer amount of cool design stuff posted on the sites blog blows my mind. It’s a tossed salad of cool design for today, from yesterday and some future stuff too. They even throw in “series” into the mis to by doing a whole series of posts on a certain topic (like a week of posts about Bombay’s design industry).

So here’s a taste of what I’ve really dug on Core77 of late:

one – Package Designs from the Past
two – A shrinking, more designy SUV for urban professionals
three – Emerging Markets as a Source of Disruptive Innovation: 5 Case Studies
four – Postcards from Asia: Bombay: The Busride Design Studio
five – Short film: The best of American design, circa 1958

4 – Torontoist / BlogTO

While this is technically two different sites I read both simultaneously. So I could tell you which I like better or which I read more. Since I read 99.9% of the sites I do via RSS both Torontoist and BlogTO are in a group called Toronto and they’ve just blurred together for me. These two sites keep me informed and hip to what’s going on in my favourite city in the world. From daily news roundups of the city’s news, to events going on in the City, restaurant reviews and metric ass-ton of other Toronto-centric content.

Like what? Like this:

one – The End of the Big Bop
two – Historicist: An Illustrated Business Quartet
three – The Best New Cheap Eats in Toronto, 2009
four – The Fantabulous Contraptions of Matthias Wandel
five – Reel Toronto: Fever Pitch

3 – The Unoffical Apple Weblog (TUAW)

It’s no secret I’m an Apple lover. Have been since my Dad helped me buy my first Mac (Power Macintosh 6400, oh yeah yo never forget your first.). I used to read MacWorld magazine back in the day. Now a days I could read my Mac and iPhone news (and a surprising amount of rumours) from about a gazillion different sources. But TUAW consistently delivers with news, reviews, tutorials and tons of other snipits I find interesting and useful (read: geeky).

Here’s some Apple Geekery to tease you with:

one – Found Footage: Sir Patrick Stewart adores his iPhone
two – Logitech gives away free wireless mouse and keyboard (it’s an app)
three – BookBook: A classy way to protect and hide your MacBook
four – How to present like Steve Jobs
five – Scratching the surface: DJ’ing with your Mac

2 – Lifehacker

Lifehacker is to geeks to what the swiss army knife was to aaMacGyver. The site is a the epientre for Do It Yourself geekery and creative (and fun!!) ways to repurpose things to do things it wasn’t planned to do. From computers, to cooking, to building, electronics and survival Lifehacker always has something to deliver (it was one of their posts that motivated me to make an emergency kit for the car – more on that soon)

MacGyver. The site is a the epientre for Do It Yourself geekery and creative (and fun!!) ways to repurpose things to do things it wasn’t planned to do. From computers, to cooking, to building, electronics and survival Lifehacker always has something to deliver (it was one of their posts that motivated me to make an emergency kit for the car – more on that soon)

Lately I’ve dug these:

one – Remove a Stripped Screw with a Rubber Band
two – Learn to Make Delicious Hash from Your Leftovers
three – Learn Proper Sushi Etiquette to Make a Good Impression
four – Find the Best Spots in New Cities with These Tools
five – BetterTouchTool Customizes Your Mac’s Multitouch Gestures

1- Boing Boing

There’s no real description for Boing Boing. Take the above 4 sites, mix them all together with some great writing and you have Boing Boing… they write about everything and are usually on the cutting edge of what’s going on on the net and in the world. It’s thanks to them that I go to discover the David after his Dentists visit (the funniest thing I’ve seen ever) and got explanations and insight on foreign politics, culture and tons of other stuff. Heck their navigation bar reads : Tech, Gadgets, Science, Biz, Ent, Art/Design, Culture, Action, News, Weird, OffWorld and BBVideo… that quite the mix.

I should also note that their writers are by far some of the best writers of our time, who somehow manage to find some of the worlds coolest stuff with apparent ease… I could wax poetic about them for a few hundred words, but instead I’ll share 5 nuggets:

one – Canadian MP demands answers on secret copyright treaty
two – Incredible miniature photography
three – Superman – The 1948 Serial
four – Canada’s National Film Board online archive: a success story
five – Interview with bOING bOING’s founders

Pffft… short post.

A few weeks back I posted a video of some footage I shot of a sunrise coming up on on my office building. The footage was actually part of a short I made for work. Last week it was rolled out to the rest of the company and it was quite well received and had exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

So before you click play on the video below, I should explain that CSG and MultiVu are pieces of software. (click the window below)

(iPhone friendly video)

So now that you’ve seen it, I’d like to point out that this was entirely done in-house, every actor and voice-over was performed by an employee. Not professionals, but for what they lacked in experience they made up in their passion.

I’d also like to thank Altaf, my colleague and partner in mischief at work, who jumped in feet first into this project and a big thanks to my boss-lady, Pat, who not only supported our zanyness, but trusted me so much she sewed our costumes and agreed to an early morning shoot at her brother’s house.

Aright, second day… here we go. Today is work related. Firstly I made a realization on a project that would be too abstract and more boring than most of my posts to explain here.

But the second thing that made my day was was handing off a wedding invite sample I made for some friends.

I don’t do too many classical or traditional designs, it’s never really been my cup of tea. So this project has been interesting because it puts me into a theme I don’t know too much about. Hockey… specifically the Toronto Maple Leafs… that was their theme and I was only too happy to try make it look cool.

So I tried to make the whole thing look like a hockey ticket set… with a ticket sleeve (top image) a ticket (above – the actual invite), the RSVP (bellow image) and the info sheet (last image). It turned out pretty good I think.

The hard part was all the photographic work… since modern tickets have a very clean look I had some pretty specific types of imagery I was trying to achieve. Especially the image of Maddy and Donovan themselves, the composition was exactly what I wanted (this was actually the 3rd photo of about 30 I took a few weeks earlier) but the sky was not cooperating by giving me the lighting I wanted (see the original here).

Donny and Maddy sounded like they were quite pleased. That made my day.

I’m not sure if the world appreciates the craft of hand binding books as much as I do, but this beautiful stop motion piece called “The Complex of All These” is just awesome. I’ve included it below, enjoy. (Thanks to Quipsologie)

Forms are some of my least favourite things to build. By forms, I mean the online enter name here- check off this box here ones… actually now that I’ve said that, I’m not a fan of building the paper ones either. Online forms are tedious, and while they have some crazy usefulness but man… they suck to make. But like everything in Development world, sometimes you have simple forms and sometimes you have crazy complex forms that are part of a heavily dynamic application.

Now, this morning I found myself having to make a simple form. I was about to breakout the PHP and MySQL, which really at the end of the day seem like overkill. Turns out it was. Enter Google Docs.

Quite by accident this morning I stumbled onto a little nugget of goodness. Turns out Google Docs has a form builder in its online offline suite. It’s not meant to create complex apps or anything, but it’s more than perfect for a simple stuff like an RSVP or a survey. It offers all of the mainstays of form creation – text boxes, check boxes, drop down lists and even the cool sliding scales.

It’s also crazy simple to make these forms in usual Google style… quick and not bad looking. Best part though? It dumps the results straight into a Spreadsheet, which can then be shared amongst other users and it time-stamps the data entries too. I can’t even tell you how wonderful that last bit is, it actually brings a tear to my eye.

I could wax poetic about these forms for like 1000-2000 words, but let me just summarize this thing really quick.

Things I really dig:

- simple to make
- looks not bad
- can be embedded into web pages and blogs
- data goes straight into a spreadsheet
- spreadsheet is shareable   
- has required field functionality
- editable confirmation message

Things I wish were there:

- Error checking (example: if you have an email field, check to see if it’s an email address)
- IP Address stamping (really good for logs)
- Permit us to to edit the CSS ourselves (change the look and feel of the form)

So go out and try it yourselves, it’s simple and fast. Check out the sample I made below.