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Currently in Development

New TechniqueI’ve spent some time lately fooling around with my digital camera, and thinking about how its immediacy and next-to-nothing output cost (after the original cash investment) have impacted how I perceive my surroundings. That’s lead to some new techniques in Photoshop, a new approach to the imagery that fuels my visual vocabulary. I’ve got a handful of new pieces in development, but right now, here’s a sampling.

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New York Times Redesign

NYTimes.comThe New York Times doesn’t so much overhaul its site as it does periodically tweak it. So it’s notable when they launch a newly-tweaked design, as they did this morning. It’s very similar to what came before it, but it refines a lot of the horesy typography that accompanied last year’s revision and revamps the article-level templates. Still the best newspaper on and off the Web.

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Drive, He Said

Lexus RX 300It’s definitely a driving life here in Los Angeles, and as a result, I spend a lot of time sitting in my rental car, staring at the backsides of other people’s automobiles. I’ve almost never been the sort to notice one car over another, but in the past few days I’ve been struck by how many Lexus RX 300s there are out on the Southern Californian roads. And also by how attractive — in a suburban kind of way — they are too. If I had to haul a kid to and from soccer practice, or even drive a date to the Olive Garden, well I guess I’d want to do so in an RX 300.

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ActiveBuddy

ActiveBuddyThe thing about the Internet is that sometimes things sitting right below your nose day-in and day-out just reach out and slap you across the face. Take instant messaging, for example — I’m a habitual user of AOL Instant Messenger. I’m rarely ever online and not logged onto that service, which is to say that I depend on it heavily to communicate with a lot of the people in my professional and personal lives. And yet, I never really thought through all of the potential that the instant messaging medium offers.

The engineers over at ActiveBuddy have. They’ve developed an amazing product that allows anyone with an IM client to retrieve information from a bot (send an instant message to the screen name “SmarterCousin” on AIM to see for yourself). You can get the usual portal stuff: news, weather, sports, stocks, movie listings etc. That alone is kind of impressive, though also weirdly reminiscent of command-line interfacing with remote servers through a dumb terminal. What’s really cool though is to think about combining this with some really kick-ass AI. Wow…

Thanks to Eddie at The OFP for the tip.

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Amateur Economists’ Hour

DiagramI’ve been doodling this diagram for a few days. It’s a visualization of what’s happening with the Internet consulting industry, of which I happen to be a part. My aim was to try to understand the nature of the shift in our once-flush space, and maybe try and see a little further ahead at a possible resolution.

Okay, I know it looks like a big funnel or a diagram of a ventilation system of some sort, and it’s also incredibly unscientific. You’ll need the Flash plug-in to view it.

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