It’s been about a month since I last posted & I apologize for the hiatus! To explain, I began a wonderful new role at Mozilla Firefox, as team lead on the creative team under the awesome art direction of John Slater (freaking talented awesome boss). Just as I was getting my bearings though, I went to SXSWi to present on a topic dear to my heart, open source design. It’s been a crazy few weeks, but I’m back in full force!

It’s Monday, so this roundup is devoted to all things and people in design, UX, UI, & editorial!

• Brilliant! Method & Craft recently launched & here is just one of their most recent treats, Unique Vector Shapes In Illustrator by TX-based designer Gerren Lamson
• Friend & Forrst founder, Kyle Bragger, shares The State of Forrst & you might want to sign up for Around.io (#justsayin!)
• After a round of bbq, I ran into @hemeon, designer founder of @fflick & one of my *many* high school crushes (awkward, definitely). He’s turned out to be a good egg (in spite of his high school football days) and this is a great interview from a founding designer that covers his passion, but also a bunch of struggles that took him away from the web & back again towards success on it or maybe in spite of it.
• As if I couldn’t be more addicted to him in real life, Yaron Schoen @yarcom, writes on the Virtual Designer
• And, then there is “Read & Trust,” easy to get addicted to, but bereft of creatives of the female type (‘ehem, cough. ehem)

Wildcard: Ian Adleman, design director of nymag.com, moves on to become design director @ the New York Times, I urge you to follow him. You can be certain that there is greatness ahead from apps to the web experience (did you see nymag’s Fashion Week?! coverage). Ian is nothing if not a splash of color (yellow & blue) & a dash of brilliance. @khoi may have moved on from the post himself, but he’s also up to interesting things these days.

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• I love you, I love you not. TEDtalk about a user interface product for desktops that Google bought years later & it sort of died.
• Great lessons in online business, Jason Fried on “How to Turn Disaster Into Gold”
• Newcomer, The Startup Foundry (by Paul Hontz), files a great story under “Bootstrapped/Funded” about, “Forrst: Raising Money, Goals, & Monetization”
• Audience development en fuego! 2 million users in 4.5 months for Instagram, an app that only works on iPhone and has no web signup.
• HTML5 Valentine’s Easter egg from Google IO  http://flic.kr/p/9ibaC4 (live: http://google.com/events/io/2011)
  

Wildcard: The team at nymag.com continues to dazzle & delight during NY’s Fashion Week. Simply stated, this is how great design across mediums is done! The Cut on the Runway made app of the week! (it’s drool-worthy). Follow @cutblog @nymag & embarrassingly talented @ianadelman

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• After spending the afternoon over @typekit‘s SF office, I’m feeling font-friendly! Fonts In Use (via the fabulous Victoria Pater or @typeis4lovers)
• As amazing as ever. Top 6 “Help” Design Patterns for the iPhone (via Inspire UX & Catriona Cornett)
• Grid-locked or -loved? 978.gs Perhaps a little bit of both!
• Type study: An all CSS button by Dan Cederholm of Simplebits
• Paravel Inc. pays tribute to The many faces of Leonardo Dicaprio (do not forget to scroll all the way down & participate in “Leo Libs” awesome illustration @raygunray)

Wildcard: The team @weightshift clearly have a sense of humor & a love for 80s pop culture with this 404 page

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Not sure about the name, but it’s lovely. jQuery Deconstructed, a series designed to visually and interactively deconstruct the internal code of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype, and MooTools
• Aptly named, however, Treesaver, a JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts using standards-compliant HTML and CSS is amazing  (demo here) /via @darcy_clarke (via @nickla)
• T-shirts, tags, placards, & beyond! Go behind the scenes of Facebook’s f8 Conference design collateral with Ben Barry to drill into the creative & collaborative details of the job
• A quirky site for Type-lovers and Tumblrs alike, Seinquote
• “Users will tell you when they are unhappy, but not so often when they are happy” via Judging User Happiness by Adii of WooThemes

Wildcard: Now that the BBC is scaling back & AOL has NOMd HuffPost & TechCrunch, the timing couldn’t be better for Paul Hontz who just launched The Startup Foundry & stirring the proverbial pot & possibly now between internet scandals @kennymeyers just may become web famous himself for this article.

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Our monkey-lovin’ friends at MailChimp expand to four-footed branding, launching “Longrep.ly” for when you care more than 140 characters
• Darren Hoyt on one of the best posts this week, “Designing Readability” (Readability.com here)
• If you haven’t already found this treasure, Under Consideration Quipsologies chronicles the most curious, creative, & notable!
• Tiny Speck’s Glitch released a wonderful treasure-filled wiki with over 1,200 articles written by & for the community
• Possibly the best article on Kickstarter to date, learn more about successful fundraising through Kickstarter, “KickStartup” by @craigmod

Wildcard: One of our readers, Sacha Greif, shared an app with us, Locomotive CMS, an open source CMS for Rails & another reader, Marc Gayle of Jamaica, provides some interesting (possibly controversial, but very supportive) insight into How Dropbox is Printing Money”

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Video: The UX Driven Startup: Crafting an Experience Vision (via @juliangutman)
• jQuery 1.5 is released!
• Video: @fchimero “The Shape of Design” (watch for the book or support it on Kickstarter)
• David Kadavy (@kadavy) is writing a book, Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty, and on that journey goes into great depth with humor and candor here on “Why You Hate Comic Sans” (definitely read the comments)
• Speaking of design & engineers, have you ever wanted to get involved with Open Source Software on the design side? Why not this year? Here’s some evergreen intel from Mozilla’s John Slater

Wildcard: Our talented friend & maker of internet magic, Yaron Schoen (@yarcom), finally helps us pronounce his name, but uses new papa to “Henry” @trentwalton‘s Lettering.js, HTML5, & CSS3 and releases pronounce.yaronschoen.com (nerd-powered fun!)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Join this discussion! Over on Quora, What are the Most Influential Design Blogs?
• Lovely stuff! Ty Wilkins is making the web a little more gorgeous with this and Dan Kuhlken & Nathan Goldman with this
• How’s work for you? “If I want to get hired to do something, I should already be doing it”
• An Open Letter in Support of Dan Philibin (I’d love to see more support for young designers like this)
• This week’s HTML 5 Tech Talk video from Facebook’s HQ

Wildcard: Adopt a Genius on Kickstarter

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• State of the Union is so last night. JESS3 presents, The State of Wikipedia. Warning: it’s gorgegous, visualization at it’s finest!
• Busy day? Freelancing & marketing yourself or an app? You’ll enjoy @tmonhollon‘s Daily Dozen. I want to be that organized (please!)
• Seeking to be inspired by the little things that matter? House of Buttons
• Etsy’s data delights! From Etsy’s Code as Craft blog, “Mining Facebook for Gifts on Etsy”
• Are you speaking at a conference this year? Read Evan Hamilton’s, “How I Prepared for My First Big Speaking Gig at FailCon” (Evan is the community manager at UserVoice, #inspringpeople)

Wildcard: Threadless lovers are about to get an apptastic surprise!

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Internet 2010 in Numbers (via Pingdom)
• You’ll love this, “The Nerd Handbook” (via Rands in Repose)
• Whether you know Simon Collison “Colly” or not, read Trent Walton’s update on his contribution to the New Adventures in Web Design Newspaper & get your own copy
• What Design Can Do (via AIGA)
• Core Peer Groups: How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, & Raised $5 Million in Less Than 4 Weeks

Wildcard: Be You, Not Them

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Wow, so true, “You’re Always Replaceable” by Greg Hoy or @hoyboy (via Cognition)
• How Facebook Ships Code (via FrameThink)
• Developing with Twitter’s APIs? How I wrote a Twitter Timeline Search App in 2 Days & for good measure “O-Auth for PHP Twitter Apps, Part 1″
• Yes, Schmidt happens, but in other Google news, more web fonts added for your design & developing habits!
• Lettering.js was built to solve a problem, curious about it? Controlling Web Typography (via Trent Walton of Paravel Inc.)

Wildcard: Among the best collections of retro photo inspiration I’ve ever come across, ElectroSpark’s Photostream

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Forrester’s 2011 Customer Experience Predictions
• 10 Designers Share the Process of Creating Their Amazing Design Work (via @ibrandstudio)
• Possibly the *best ever* Flickr pool for designers, Interface Insults
• Just great writing here, The Web is a Customer Service Medium
• Designing with video players? Meet a big timesaver, Clamp.js

Wildcard: Noah Stokes, Es Bueno blog, writes, “34″ 34 Things I’ve Learned in 34 Years

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Healthmonth creator Buster Benson, “I’m a technium-futuro-optimist”
• Writing Outside Your Niche (via @KenjiCrosland)
• Get your Tumblr on, Startup Quotes
• “Welcome to Quora, Do Yourself a Favor & Slow Down”
• One of the best sets of visualizations on Content Strategy I’ve seen

Wildcard: A comparison of some of today’s hottest startups and how they looked then, and how they look today

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Pure typographic pleasure, The Greatest Wedding Invite You’ve Seen
• The Oatmeal on landing page design, “How to Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less”
• The Noun Project collects, organizes, & adds highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visible language. All images are free.
• Some great insights into gamefication and your product’s design
• Accessibility lovers <3 Notforest, a simple tool for your browser that strips away distractions (via Steve Claridge or @steveify)

Wildcard: Product extraordinaire Kyle Bragger strikes again! From Concept to Launch in 24 Hours & Why There’s No Reason You Can’t Do This Too (via @kylebragger)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Edinburgh-based web developer, David Cole, writes a terrific article in a round-up style on responsive web design & resources (via @mayfielddigital)
• One of my favorite reads this week, Good Help Content Improves the User Experience (via the monkeys at @mailchimp)
• If you enjoy TED talks, you’ll find this behind-the-scenes video really interesting
• Is the Button Dead? Rise of the Gesture
• This one will suck you in if you love type, Type Union

Wildcard: A recent favorite from The Daily Dropcap

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• A must-read: What I Learned in Selling My Company for $100 Million
• Simply awesome & free: Eloquent JavaScript
• Simple Geo’s team continues to kick out great content, including the latest, “SVG: The Best Way to Graph Quantitative Data”
• A great chapter of nerdy interview site, UsesThis.com, Chris Wanstrath, ceo/co-founder of GitHub
• Perennial mentor & sharer of lessons learned, Carbonmade’s Spencer Fry on Building the Trunk, First: Why you should focus on the core of your product.

Wildcard: The most useful tool I’ve found this week: wordmark.it

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

It’s Monday, so this roundup is devoted to all things and people in web design (ux, photo, illustration, art, graphics, CSS, jQuery, tutorials, project/product management design, and more).

• Nike releases a beautiful site, taking web design to extraordinary places: nikebetterworld.com (designed by @IanCoyle)
• Since we’re on the topic of design, here’s a gem by Kyle Neath, a designer at GitHub, on URL Design
• A “must read.” Reset Revisted by Eric Meyer
• Yves Béhar, the founder of the forward-thinking San Francisco firm Fuseproject on Designing With Grand Ambitions
• Jason Putorti of Elegant.ly posts on who is looking for startup-minded designers around the world

Wildcard: Forrst founder & friend, @kylebragger launched a new product facto.me and happily reports, “@factoME Epic 2 days! In 50 hrs since launch 3,000 users added 13,000 facts + posted over 10k replies. 28,000 ppl have viewed 236k pages!” Well done Kyle!

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Looking for a way to use the W3′s CSS Template Layout Module? jQuery implementation of the CSS Template here (via @jbrewer)
• User submitted stories of coding, as told in the first person. The latest installment of Pique Web with Sean Coates & Paul Reinheimer
• If you’re contemplating the freelance life, here’s a great post that might help you prepare, “8 Months In” by coder Emily Lewis. On the other hand, if you’re contemplating moving from freelance back to full-time, “Learning to Tame Your Office Anxiety” might be helpful (via NY Times)
• Twitter’s own, Twitter for Business, recently got a revamp, what do you think?
• As 52WeeksofUX gets closer to the finish line, they’re pushing out some great posts, Building a Shared Understanding, by Bill Scott of Netflix

Wildcard: View source. A great find that will remind you of design/dev 10 years ago, “The SpaceJam website, untouched since 1996, is like an Internet time capsule”

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• NORAD’s Santa Tracker leads with awesomeness today!
• A fun find on Forrst, “The Design Process” by Jesse Thomas (@JESS3)
• User Experience for Developers by Pek Pongapaet (via uxmag.com)
• Best & Worst Identities of 2010, Part 1: The Worst (via brandnew.com)
• Startups & VCs Should Avoid Pier Funding (via @msuster)
• Chris Shifflet’s Christmas Conundrum puzzlers

Holiday fun: The applicake team made a Holiday “Hippopotamus” Video for you & if you want a double dose of Ruby programmer silliness there’s also a bit of Cake. (via Ela Madej)

Wildcard: How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup (via Vinicius Vacanti)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• An open internet affects all of us, & this is a great way to understand how, why, and what your role in it is, Net Neutrality, a visual lesson on theopeninter.net
• Nifty tool for devs, Social Graph API, how are your sites connected?
• SimpleGeo, “The Holidays Are for Hacking”
• Sharing for sheer fun, The Isle of Tune and because the web is saturated with Santa apps today!
• Balancing functionality & usability, as a developer, Simple Interfaces and Micro MVCs (via Matthew Weier O’Phinney)

Wildcard: You’re a comic sans criminal

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Designing & building apps is always harder than you think, “How to Clone Delicious in 48 Hours” a designer/developer’s checklist by @torrez
• Speaking of designing & building apps, Kyle Bragger (@kylebragger) rebuilds, relaunches, & writes about developing Forrst.  Kyle’s post on v3 covers new features, design enhancements, an original PHP framework he is open-sourcing & new team members!
• Facebook launches a new registration tool that’s also designer-friendly, “Making Registration Simple & Social in Just a Few Steps” (via Facebook’s developer blog)
• Last year Meagan Fisher (aka @owltastic) closed out 24ways.org with a highly sensible, technical “Make Your Mockup in Markup,” this year she gets personal with “Put Yourself in a Corner”
• What CMS will you use in 2011? @jbrewer shares some fun results of a friendly CMS poll

Holiday fun: Typekit wishes us all a happy holiday with snow in type! & blogs about it, “A Web Standards Holiday Card From Typekit”

Wildcard: Regarding Net Neutrality, The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• We’re nearing the end of the series! Words are the soul of UX, by Relly Annet-Baker (via 52 Weeks of UX)
• Designers you will love this photo-driven treat, “Let it Dough!”
• The delicious dilemma, import your #delicious bookmarks to @github with @hmason‘s awesome gitmarks project (via the wonderful Jonathan Vingiano or @jgv)
• Giving Better Design Feedback (love the lede image)
• Typekit wraps up it’s series on type rendering on the web (If you haven’t used Typekit yet, make it a resolution to do so in 2011)

Holiday design fun: Wherever you are, you can make a snowflake, and it’s true no two are alike! (Designers are just too clever these days!)

Wildcard: Having just returned from a company party, this infographic on , “Not Getting Fired at Your Company Party” seems appropriate to share!

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

If you build a web app and grow a core and vibrant user base, at some point you might find yourself building inside a burning house.*

$hi% happens, and it can happen during the most innocuous upgrades and maintenance, and working with your designers to design for downtime (ahead of time) can be tremendously helpful and set you apart from your competitors. You can have uptime somewhere on the web, you just need to design for its delivery.

Photo By 111 Emergency

Downtime Happens to the Best & Brightest of Us

By now, I’m sure you’ve experienced downtime somewhere on the interwebs, this seems to be the season for some of my most dependable and favorite web apps (not just Twitter) to be dealing with suffering some pretty disruptive downtime.

Just this past week, beloved Tumblr suffered more than 24 hours of an outage, and while there were a lot of sympathetic tweets “hang in there guys” there were also a lot of gripes. There’s a better way to handle downtime by designing ahead of time.

David Karp, ceo of Tumblr, addressed one of his company’s biggest problems—rapid growth:

Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than 500M pageviews each month. But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible.

We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today’s.

Startups would be foolish to over-staff or build out in bulk too early, but smart developers (especially those on your sys ops team) can predict what it will take to ensure a stable future 3-6 months in advance and their designer counterparts can help create canned experiences for crisis, but also great experiences for messaging around growth and upgrades. Planning once you have capacity issues is both harder and expensive. It’s also a time when you expose your vulnerabilities to competitors, disgruntled hackers, and more, stress out your team, and disappoint your users.

Twitter’s troubles represent an edge case. Most startups aren’t going to break Cassandra, but if they’re lucky a lot of startups are going to outgrow their founding database and search structures, hardware, and hosting solutions. Some apps, like Forrst and Carbonmade rebuild (to be better, faster, stronger, and smarter) and migrate entirely.

5 Ideas for Proactive Designers to Soften the Pain of Downtime

Screen capture from help desk software provider Zendesk’s recent migration

#1. Create Accurate & Time Stamped Messaging

Users get truly frustrated when they don’t know why a site is down, what is wrong, or when things will be back up and running again. From the outside there’s no real way to know if something is a quick update or a full-on meltdown.

Be clear, transparent, and on top of managing user inquiries. Leaving up a single message for the full outage can cause confusion and frustration. Alternate your messaging, as you understand the problem, and design with a time stamp.

#2. Leverage External Communication Assets

Work with your users to prepare them for your downtime. By letting your customers know that there’s scheduled maintenance, you minimize their frustration, but you also give them a chance to create and deploy customer service solutions on their end (e.g. they can create custom maintenance messages, make announcements, manage staffing, etc.).

Also, leverage “must have” external & internal assets:

Screen capture from Zendesk’s status page

• Create & maintain a Twitter “Ops” account (you don’t necessarily need or necessarily want to market your downtime in your company’s main Twitter stream, but you can certainly use your company’s main Twitter stream to refer people to the Ops account for ongoing information)
• Create a trust or status page that tracks your uptime (this is a best practice for SaaS and you can do this with Stashboard as well or like Form Spring does host your uptime elsewhere). If you’ve created an ecosystem around an API, this will be useful for your counterpart developers and their users.
• Guide your users to your support presence(s) where they can indulge in self-help or at least get a sense of the steps you’re taking to fix the problem (this might be a blog, a hosted Zendesk or help desk, a Get Satisfaction forum, or a Twitter account)
• Make sure your customers can email, phone, or comment to you, even if it’s in the comments section of a personal blog or a sympathetic pre-recorded voice message on a line, conversation provides clarity, connection, and reassurance
• Use video well and wisely. Imagine how awesome it would have been if David Karp had created a quick video talking to his users that he put up on YouTube, addressing the issues and providing transparency and being personable at a really sucktastic moment.**

#2. Engineers, Designers, & Customer Support Coworking

As a part of your “designing for downtime” (scheduled and unscheduled) strategy, you should have a plan in place that both customer support and development/design teams have collaborated on. Customer support team members are usually able to pull edge cases out of your user base that no one would have even thought about, they will also be super helpful and proactive during any unusual outages. Basically, reach out to your customers v. waiting around for them to reach out distressed to you.

Development and design teams are strongest when they work with their customer support counterparts (e.g. when your site depends on an external app like Twitter’s API, you can plan for messaging specific to what isn’t working and why, as well as what is working, and be careful to not place blame, but create transparency, reduce tension, and recover well).

#4. Schedule Some Sleep & Slack

During a crisis, do your best to give your team members rest, good food, and moderate caffeine, your best people are working hard, but hard under stress, and more mistakes can be made during an extended adrenaline-driven push.

Photo by NetDiva

When you have scheduled downtime, no matter how tight your plan is, something will pop up when you least expect. If possible, aim for a “no new work” week prior to major events like migrations, and make sure your local pubs enact a #noserve till’ uptime policy.

#5. Users Notice Your Downtime, Not Your Uptime

Uptime is critical to your success. Downtime is like a ticking clock and the longer it runs on the more negative content your users can generate, business gets lost, and relationships and trust break down. You’re not the only pretty girl out there on the market.

Photo By Bart Hiddink,  zoutedrop

Turns Out, Uptime is Customer Service & Uptime Can Be Messaging During Downtime

Customers don’t always get to see or hear from the development team (depending on their unique levels of user-friendliness this is generally a good thing!), but uptime is their responsibility and it is customer service regardless of whether downtime is planned or unplanned.

Having a plan to be “up” somewhere during scheduled and unscheduled downtime is your responsibility when it comes to loving your users.

*The burning house metaphor is credited to Zendesk’s Tim Sturge. Until meeting and working with Tim and the rest of the Zendesk team, I never understood how important sys ops and design can actually work together on creative solutions. I owe him a tremendous “thanks” for all he has taught me. Tim and Zendesk’s other talented engineers blog here.

**David Karp and Tumblr’s team are among the most talented and devoted to the Tumblr community. If you ever get the chance to meet him, he’s so much more than content!

• Documentation-Driven Design for APIs by Frances Berriman via 24ways.org
• Using Dribbble’s API with PHP by Zach Dunn & a fun project “who dribbbled” that uses the API for fun!
• The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page
• Sparks fly, in particular Samantha Warren makes a great point on Off the Dribbble: Has Sharing Gone Out of Bounds (read the whole article and conversation if you have time, comment too!)
• Paul Graham on Founder Control

Wildcard: UXmyths tumbld’

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Well done! Today, @adii & the Woo Themes team released WP Bundle & perhaps the most innovative user experience feature is the knowledgebase for FAQs
• Prepare your pockets! ColourLovers iPhone app is out
• What a wonderful gift! The talented Andy Mangold’s Pompadour number set is available for free download
• Time for something lovely, the webkit clock, made from HTML5 canvas, CSS3, JavaScript, Web Fonts, SVG and NO image files. It’s optimized to WebKit rendering engine and you can see it with Safari and Google Chrome
• As we approach end of the year, your resolutions might include speaking more, Dan Cederholm writes On Speaking

Holiday fun: Send your parents some tech support via teachparentstech.org

Wildcard: Friend & illustrator, Kyle Steed, is always discovering and sharing new talent, like Nate Williams, @n8w, illustrator extraordinaire

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Beloved designer Brian Hoff writes,  In a Sea of Designers: My ‘Best’ Advice
• Bookmark for life, supportwebstandards.com
• Web type at last! by editor/typographer John Berry
• Speaking of typography, have you wandered over to For Print Only (FPO)?
• And, since we’re on the topic of type & letters, Fillerati is very amusing & makes having to design with ipsum lorem fun again!

Holiday adventness: A photo & story a day via Photoadvent.org &  Everyone Loves PHP by @scottmac (enable “Scottish” mode to read, alternatively drink whiskey)

Wildcard: Olimpia Zagnoli shares her story (video)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Andy Rutledge on Sales: The Fail Team
• Part designer & part security nerd, @marknca writes a highly useful, nerd-friendly but succinct article Deploying Apple’s IOS
• The story behind Threadless’s new cause site
• How Telephone Directories Transformed America
• Everything a hacker needs to know about getting busted by the feds

Holiday special! PHP Advent Calendar, and it’s 8 posts full of awesomeness! My favorite so far, “Bits & PHPieces” by Joël Perras or @jperras

Wildcard: Two gorgeous recently relaunched portfolio sites: seangaffney.cc & octophant

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Khoi Vinh shares cogent advice, “Students, Don’t Do as I Have Done.”
• New “Uncle Mark” guide is up! (this has become an annual favorite!)
• The Heads of State relaunch their very lovely site!
• An awesome design experience, take a few minutes & wander about this beer beauty
• Thoughts on a Friendly Web Conference

Wildcard: Pictory celebrates with Secrets of Inspiring Women (share with your lady friends)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• My favorite read this week, 40 Things I Learned by Doing Side Projects by Dave Rupert (via Paravel Inc.)
• With all the advent calendars out there, here’s a Tumblr theme to transform your December tumbling into an advent design too!
• Forrst v3 is on deck and coming soon, I know this because uur friend Kyle Bragger blogs, “How I implement a ‘Raw’ code link in Markdown with Redis”
• Firefox tries to lure us back from Chrome, using a live feed of their newest baby foxes
• Speaking of advent calendars, HTML5 Adventure, phpadvent.org, 24ways.org,perladvent.pm.org, adfont-calendar.com, calendar.perfplanet.com

Wildcard:  If you haven’t already experienced Ben the Bodyguard, STOP everything & do it now!

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Bubble or bust? There’s No Angel Bubble, There Are Many Angel Bubbles
• Freelancember! Is awesome enough to be shared with all your freelance friends
• Jason Fried’s TED Talk, “Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work”
• Behave! Google shakes its semantic fist! Being Bad to Your Customers is Now Bad for Business
• Get control & read more! Reeder for Mac is available today & it’s slick!

Wildcard: They say, “…because everyone needs art” 20×200′s beautiful story

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

• Based on some post-Build conference thinking, Frank Chimero shares some wonderful sentiments and one bite-sized brilliant truth, “Design can’t rise above it’s content”
• Familiar and those brand new to jQuery can learn from and contribute to YayQuery
• Interesting, simple, makes sense. John Ferrara on, “Psychic Search” (via UX Magazine @uxmag)
• The team over at Harmony App shared a great secret on optimizing images
• Some of my favorite female creatives were featured on this week’s DesignChat, if you’ve never joined the chat, I encourage you to try it! Here’s a link to the aforementioned ladies on video!

Holiday-focused: Some of your favorite illustrators & deisgners (Kyle Steed, Nicholas Feltron, & more)  have designed gorgeous holiday cards

Wildcard: Consider how storytelling tools are being used! Here is a must-watch video shared by Mark Hurst of GEL & Good Experience, A Life on Facebook .

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)