I love nothing more than a good old fashioned logo contest like the one being held by DataPortablity. Even though I went down for the count in the Ruby logo contest, despite clearly having the logo with the mojo :P , I’m giving the DataPortability contest a shot.

The reason they’re having the contest is because RedHat sent them a cease and desist letter over their current logo’s similarity to RedHat’s Fedora Infinity logo. Cease and desist letters are no fun, and not usually worth fighting, so the logo contest is a great solution. My Whackapol game earned me a cease and desist from Bob’s Space Racers the makers of Whack-a-mole, I guess if you had one good idea in the last 37 years you have to protect it right? (not that I’m bitter or anything). It was a good lesson though, since then all my own logos have been researched and copyright protected/trade-marked.

Here are the entries, the fourth one is the awesomest :D

The contest runs until the 11th so you still have time to enter!

YAML, Blueprint, Tripoli, YahooUI - not the latest competition to Rails, Django, CakePHP, or Wicket but a set of CSS frameworks to jumpstart page layout.

I had been using YahooUI (and sometimes the DreamBeaver templates) but YAML’s Builder and Blueprint’s Generator look like good ways to get started.

Or you can always pay someone else to do it.

A plethora of choices.

The blog gets a refresh. This is a preview of the new vixiom.com which has been under redesign for about a year now :P

The blog has almost become my main site, I get all my new leads through it (or word of mouth). In my not too distant youth I used to think you needed your website to be teh awesomest to generate work. Now my sphere of influence doesn’t even include any of the site of the day sites.

I’m moving closer (or back) to minimalism anyways, Peter Saville (he of Joy Division, New Order fame) has always been my favorite designer.

I like the way a lot of sites have been going, now that 980px wide is the new normal there’s a lot of minimal maximalism going on (simple and clean but with a lot of content) see the latimes.com redesign, Pownce, and Google’s wikipedia clone. Hopefully the pastel web 2.0 days are behind us.

Beige is the new lime green.

Found a great site that’s a companion to the book ‘Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design’ by Jenifer Tidwell. Split into sections like ‘Getting Around’, ‘ Organizing the Page’ with images and descriptions of interface solutions it’s good place to pick up UI ideas you may not of thought about.

If the book is as good as the site it will be money well spent.

More from Jenifer… here’s a beautiful example of what a site map should look like.