PKB

I learned about the Mozilla student club at Jordan University through Issa Mahasneh’s group on Spread Firefox, the online home of our Firefox marketing community.

Hey Issa: this is a really well-done design. Great combination of an overall visual metaphor (a student’s desk), professionally-executed graphic design, and balance overall between your copy and imagery. Thank you for sharing this!

* For those of you who are students or interested in general in helping out with grassroots marketing projects, check out Spread Firefox and The Mozilla Blog to participate or just keep up with our adventures bringing Firefox to the world.

Sonyon: weird, melancholy, awesome Korean toys.

“We were trying to imagine a boy in the future,” says founder Kim Bo-min, “and all the things that boy would hold in his imagination.”

“People who dream would most enjoy the brand,” adds Lee Joo-eun, Kim’s business partner.

“You could say Sonyon is analogous to Peter Pan.” But without the Disney-fied sheen of eternal happiness; Sonyon is still, after all, Korean. “When you walk around Seoul, you experience both happiness and sadness in the things you come across. Likewise, Sonyon lives somewhere between a happy place and a sad one.”

Via Theme Magazine.

I found Luke Chueh’s portfolio site over the weekend while I was switching my blog theme over to fSpring. Along the way I briefly dabbled with the GlossyBlue theme by n.Design but there were too many colors to sort out, and I suck at making gradients. (I do have to say that Kuler was really useful last night for testing color combos.)

I was trying to find an icon I could use as a sort of spirit animal for this blog. (”Spirit animal” being a high-falutin’ way of saying “cute mascot with portentous undertones.”) Anyway, a few searches later I found Luke’s site.

I really like this style. There’s a bunch of other people in L.A. and Tokyo working this vein. I don’t really know what it’s called, but “ugly cute” works for me. Check out Kozyndan, Mori Chack and Yoshitomo Nara for more.

Here’s the icon I was going to use, built off Luke’s Monkey King painting. I’ll find a home for him yet.

I’m a case study for vendor lock-in and switching costs.

I still use Yahoo! Mail - six years and counting - even though I’ve got at least three Gmail accounts. (I use Gmail just for newsgroup posting. There’s also this nagging feeling I get about being logged into the mother ship while searching, but that’s another story.) I tried the Yahoo! Mail beta a bunch of times, but always came back to the old school version because it felt way faster on my G4.

I also still use Bloglines, even though all the cool kids moved over to Google Reader an eternity ago. I’m just used to it, and it gets the job of plowing through feeds done.

But I have to admit loving the shiny.

Thanks to some fine design hacking by Jon Hicks, part of the original Firefox visual identity team, I am enjoying a much prettier Bloglines tonight. (Ironically I found the Bloglines skin at a post Jon wrote about skinning Google Reader.)

To wit:

Before

After. Yeah baby.

So thanks Jon. You made a design geek very happy.