You may not be familiar with MetaLab, but you’ve probably seen their work, as the Canadian design firm has designed for Google, Disney, TED, NBC, CBS and many more. Fluid, the company’s Tumblr theme, has become one of the most popular themes on the platform, for example.
The company initially started out doing web development and design consultancy, but, over time, has diversified into digital… → Read More
99designs, the polarizing crowdsourced design marketplace, announced its first acquisition tonight, as the Accel-backed startup scooped up its European rival, 12designer, for an undisclosed amount. In the near-term, 12designer will continue to operate as a standalone site.
Since raising $35 million from Accel, 99designs has been focused on international growth, said Patrick Llewellyn, the… → Read More
Today, our personal data is scattered across a growing number of apps, social networks, and online services, making it tough to forge any kind of coherent online identity or personal brand. The Portland-based Vizify emerged out of TechStars last year with a simple goal: Help people make a good first impression online by transforming that fragmented data into a unified, visual profile.
In… → Read More
Here’s something that you’ll either want to buy immediately — or that will just strike you as a giant waste of paper. There’s no in between. Though I will venture a guess that Sergey Brin was going to get to this after he finishes with his Google Spectacles. From Crap Is Good, we’ve learned that two London artist/designers, Ben West and Felix Heyes, have created a visual dictionary, courtesy of… → Read More
Nobody likes to admit it, but if you’re a working professional, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with sweat stains. The commute to work, the stress of meeting a deadline, the faulty air conditioning in the boardroom, cotton weaves — all of these things and many more have been known to conspire against you, the working professional. Luckily, Ministry of Supply feels your stinky, stinky pain. → Read More
Gogobot, the social travel site that recently passed the 1 million registered user mark, just launched an interesting redesign this week that turn the site’s homepage into more of an interactive magazine experience with a focus on photos instead of the site’s previous text-heavy design. As Gogobot’s founder Travis Katz told me earlier this week, the Gogobot team noticed that its users didn’t just… → Read More
Cloud-based computer-aided design (CAD) collaboration tool Sunglass, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May, is today officially announcing its public launch and is unveiling a new API for direct integration with major CAD design tools, like SolidWorks, SketchUp, Processing, and Rhino. The CAD ecosystem now also integrates with cloud storage players, like Box and Dropbox, which combined… → Read More
Interactive design and strategy firm ZURB today announced that it has acquired Pattern Tap, “a place where designers can find inspiration and study patterns of user interaction.” ZURB, which has released many of its internally developed apps for designers over the last few years (including Twitter Bootstrap competitor Foundation), plans to integrate Pattern Tab into ZURBexpo, its content-focused… → Read More
Earlier this year, ColourLovers founders Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams and Darius A Monsef IV (a.k.a. Bubs) launched Creative Market in private beta to give its community of color and template-creating designers a place to sell their digital content. And, today, they’re announcing that they’ve closed a second round of funding to support the impending launch of Creative Market. (Which Monsef says… → Read More
Google just added a small but interesting new feature to its Google Analytics product. You can now see how much of your site your visitors are really seeing, based on the new browser-size analysis the company just added to Google Analytics. With Analytics, Google already knows what screen sizes your site’s visitors are using, so it is now combining this information with its previously released … → Read More
Design shopping site Fab.com is debuting the next major release of its platform today, Fab 3.0, which is going live on the U.S.-based Fab.com first. The revamp focuses heavily on improved “social shopping” features, and will soon arrive in Fab’s mobile applications before rolling out to Fab’s European properties later this year.
The update offers over 100 enhancements, both big and small, but… → Read More
Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company’s efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far – or at least that’s what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google’s new native Google+ app for iPhone is… → Read More
Minted, the company that is best known for its online marketplace for stationery with prints by individual graphic designers, has launched a new vertical: Art prints.
The art business on Minted is curated in the same way as stationery. Minted holds design competitions to which any graphic designer or artist can submit work, and the submissions are voted on by their peers — the community of… → Read More
Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succombs to her habit throughout the day. She can’t help it; she’s compulsively hooked.
Yin is an Instagram addict. The photo… → Read More
I used Path twice. None of the people that I know are using Path. I even checked with an early adopter of social media recently and one of Path’s earliest users. She told me that she doesn’t see a lot of people using it. Generally, this is not a good indication. Maybe there are millions of secret Path users (or users in another geography that I don’t know about) but it seems that Path just… → Read More
Interaction design and strategy firm ZURB has turned more and more of its internal apps into products for other designers over the last few years. Among these products is Verify, a handy little tool that allows design firms to quickly collect and analyze user feedback on screenshots and mockups. With Verify, for example, a startup could test multiple versions of its homepage or logo and see which… → Read More
Screens with a 1024×768 resolution are a bit like Windows XP: they have long been surpassed by better options but still remained the most often used screens on the web. That is, until now. According to the latest data from StatCounter, 1366×768 screens just surpassed 1024×768 as the most popular screen resolution used by the visitors to StatCounter’s global network of sites. Three years ago… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple, the company behind Base CRM.
In 1919, Walter Gropius founded in Germany the Bauhaus, a school for engineering and design, and gave birth to one of the most important and influential design movements in history: Modernism. Gropius’ big idea was that designers and engineers should collaborate… → Read More
The “Ship or die”, “Done is better than perfect”, “Just ship” mantras have lately become a part of many startup conversations. The problem with these mantras is that they glorify the act of shipping while ignoring the fact that shipping is only the means to create value but not the ultimate goal of a startup. Unfortunately, repeating these mantras might have a dangerous effect. The “ship it… → Read More
As web watchers, entrepreneurs, and investors search for the next big thing, they’d be wise to focus on innovations that can be easily adopted by technology novices. A recent string of companies, including Groupon and Pinterest, have found success outside the early-adopter digerati by building products simple enough to be used by just about anyone.
Designing with tech novices in mind can mean… → Read More
One year after the infamous Fab.com “reset” from a social network for gay men to a powerhouse design shopping site, CEO Jason Goldberg is taking a look back on the company’s progress. Staying true to the startup’s “one thing” as he calls it (design, obviously), the company has grown to more than 2.5 million members, up from 1.5 million at the end of last year. That’s 67% growth in the first two… → Read More
An interesting patent application from Apple has just been made public, and it looks like one that may actually get some use (and seems like a “legitimate” patent, to boot). It has to do with a new mechanism for keyboard keys, one that loses much of the depth necessary in mechanical or scissor-switch mechanisms, yet purportedly doesn’t sacrifice the tactile feel we all crave from a keyboard. → Read More
In a move that demonstrates how cleanly Microsoft intends to cut itself off from the last 20 years of its most widely-used and widely-recognized products, they have given the Windows logo its most significant redesign in 20 years. Ever since Windows 3.1, the slightly curved, red-green-blue-yellow panes have greeted millions on startup, or at least peeked out from the corner of the screen.
No… → Read More
Lost Crates, a subscription service that previously focused on boutique stationery goods (as if there was a demand for such a thing!), is today announcing its relaunch and expansion into several new verticals. The company is one of many in the crowded subscription services market where startups send you stuff by mail, often for low monthly fees. With Lost Crates, however, there’s more of… → Read More
Clear, the heavily-anticipated touch-based to-do list app, is launching in the iTunes App Store tonight. And by heavily anticipated, I mean this app was getting tech blog coverage based on demos, previews and teaser videos.
Why the big draw for what’s typically been a rather ho-hum app category, the lowly to-do list? Clear is pure eye candy, for starters. But it’s also representative of a… → Read More
The Occupy movement, or rallying cry, or whatever you want to call it, is by its nature decentralized. By refusing to come together under one banner other than the word “Occupy,” they’ve both diluted their message and allowed it to spread more quickly. You don’t need an Occupy license to occupy a bank’s lobby in Kansas City, but at the same time there’s a natural question of whether one occupation… → Read More
Remember that feeling you got back when Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, and he did the “slide to unlock” gesture for the first time? I remember the way he said it – “You like that? Want to see it again?”
Since then I haven’t seen a lock screen interface that has made me feel that same “how obvious, how elegant!” feeling – until today at the NVIDIA press conference, and later at the… → Read More
We don’t design and hardware quite as much as we used to, but I’m making an exception for these. A good while back, I wrote about a pair of headphones I thought was the most understated and attractive I’d ever seen. They were the TMA-1s from Danish design house AIAIAI, and while I never got to get my hands on them, I’m going to make it my business to try their new pair out. → Read More
Oregon Manifest, a nonprofit located in Portland, has been running a competition over the last few months in which students and pro teams work to create a next-generation city bike. This isn’t about speed (like the McLaren Venge) or concept design (like the Vienna Bike), but rather about creating a bike that provides the maximum amount of utility for someone looking to ditch their… → Read More
Have you ever had a song stuck in your head to the point where you just need everyone else in a six-block radius to hear it? Apparently that’s a common affliction in my neighborhood. Last time it was Paul Simon at 4 in the morning. But at least they were only playing it on a boombox, not a 4000-watt sound tank.
Berlin-based artist Nik Nowak has created an actual track-based vehicle, as in a… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
