sugarenia.com

• Because it’s free.
• Because you can participate in such an active way, by lending your voice and time.
• Because it’s not just another bookmarking community, thank god.
• Because it features podcasts and free audio books in .mp3 and .ogg files.
• Because it doesn’t support only english, but any language you select to participate in.

LibriVox is one of the most useful and fresh ideas I’ve seen recently. It’s a public domain project in which everyone can participate, either by downloading the ready free audio books or by lending your voice and submitting your reading of your favourite book. It’s nice, it’s straightforward and it is actually useful.

Some of my personal favourites : Pride and Prejustice by Jane Austen, Aesop Fables, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

A small but dedicated and ever-expanding collection of books, LibriVox is the next step in public domain literature & poetry.

librivox, audio books

We Greeks have a funny way to deal with copyrights. We just ignore them.

It’s true, and sad. What’s more pathetic is the fact that obvious copyright violations are performed even by professionals. God knows how many times I’ve seen external work used without previous consent in various websites, advertising posters, even book covers. And it makes me wonder : how much were these people paid to perform this kind of “work”?

A relevant example : months ago, I happened to pass by a bookstore, where I saw something familiar : a book, using as a cover a well known picture in Internet artistic cycles, which was hideously “painted-over” to simulate a wine stain over the girl’s dress.

I contacted the artist, just out of curiosity, and I found out (not surprisingly) that of course, he had not given permission for using this picture. I don’t know what came of this story, obviously nothing happened. I find it outrageous though that some designer probably got paid for this kind of job. Well done, mate.

Copyrights policy is not something to be taken over lightly. Just because you found it at Google or an online gallery, it doesn’t mean that you can use it anywhere without asking for permission. Most professional artists I know will willingly give their permission for using their work for non-profit projects. Take your chances.

Not to forget : the first greek blog e-zine is no different. For their cover, they used this well known picture by Jenni Tapanila. Ask for permission, people, then use, for God’s sake.

Greece is a strange country. It has all the manpower and know-how it needs to push its Internet and Web services further, but it also has a portion of absurd Web “professionals” that take away all the credibility we could earn. It is sad.

copyright, copyright violation, greece

Have you ever heard of I/O brush? Well, here it is :

It looks like an ordinary brush, right? Well, not actually. It’s a special tool, developed by K. Ryokai at MIT University, that allows the user to sample colours, textures and effects from the real world, and transfer them to screen.

When I first read this description, I found it hard to understand the metaphor. How can you “transfer” a real texture to the screen? And then I downloaded and saw - flabbergasted - the explanatory video. I suggest you download it and view it too, it’s guaranteed satisfaction and instant “Ooooooh. Now that’s what it is!”.

More info can also be found at the two articles that the makers of the I/O brush published, “Designing the World as Your Palette” and “I/O Brush: Drawing with Everyday Objects as Ink“.

Truth is, I don’t know exactly how practical this could be. But it’s one of the most innovative gadgets I’ve seen in a long while. Full credits to its creators!

I/O brush, MIT

DontClick.it got me by surprise. As it boldly claims in its first page, clicking on the link to launch the actual application will be the last click you’ll do while browsing the site. So I gave it a try… and I scorned at the thought of “drastic change of interface conceptual model”.

And then came the interface…everything is done using mouse gestures. You can browse and browse and browse without needing a simple click, just hover over your preferred link. The system scans for clicks and when you accidentally click, it asks you if you did it on purpose or accidentally and collects user input.

It’s very simple and intuitive, give it a try. You’ll need Flash 6 installed and a pretty powerful computer to fully experience it. It’s cool, it’s flashy, and it may be the next look we’ll have at interface design.

And remember! No clicks were hurt during the conduct of this experiment.

accessibility, alternative interface, mouse click, usability

Have you noticed Yahoo! login pages lately? They offer a pretty quick, pretty simple, and generally pretty brief lesson in design. Observe the following examples :

Apart from the (rather catchy) taglines, Yahoo! uses vibrant, every-day photos to catch your eye, and matches them with eyedropper-found colours to complete the simple, yet elegant header. This is the best way to complement a photo and transform it to something useful and attractive : use the eyedropper to sample colours from the photo, then simply create palettes for font and background colours and choose the one that suits your need.

This technique is widely used in both contemporary design and web design world, always yielding some amazing results. In general, it’s a bulletproof way to create simplistic and matching colour themes for every site, having a photo as axis. Examples of this as well as more insight can be found at Before & After Magazine website (a must-subscribe e-zine for every designer), as well as in Web Page Design for Designers (it features an excellent - eventhough old - editorial here).

web design, design, header design, colour palettes, colour schemes