Each year about this time something happens. My mailbox is a little fuller and the mail lady has to carry a bit more in her arms. Some of this is accounted for by the online purchasing of goods, some due to the increased junk mail touting HUGE after Thanksgiving sales, but the additional mail I look forward to comes in small colorful envelopes. It might be just me, but I enjoy Christmas cards. I’ve been fortunate, I guess, to have incredibly talented family and friends that deliver these amazing little cards year after year.

The past few weeks I’ve started to notice something new. It’s not the paintings of Santa Claus and Rudolph splashed on the side of every department store window, or the lights that were hung days and weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Don’t get me wrong, those are eventful and this is by far my favorite time of year.

What I’m referring to is the up and coming “mini-brand”. There seem to be an awful lot of these little guys showing up, names like WaMu, BevMo, PacSun and AmEx. This isn’t a new phenomena, brands like Orchard Supply Hardware, Kentucky Fried Chicken Kitchen Fresh Chicken and Bank of America have learned to shorten their names (OSH, KFC and BofA) for years. What’s odd about this new breed of mini-brands is how absurd they seem, its as if someone at the board meeting said “Oh crap, we don’t have a name that we can abbreviate, lets just takeout some letters and try to get it down to 4-5 obscure characters.”

Over the last few days I have linked to several iPhone apps and websites related to apps. This is an enjoyable time of exploration and discovery in the app business. People are looking at Apple’s decision to allow 3rd party apps to come through Safari as an opportunity instead of simply criticizing it (although  many  have). We are starting to see some interesting things percolate to the top: apps for News, RSS, Chat, Socializing, Movies, etc. It reminds me a lot of the very first weeks after widgets became mainstream in OS X.

For many this week will come and go, but among Apple users and fans this week will have us glued to our screens waiting to see what Steve Jobs has up his sleeve. There are many speculations about what might be “announced” at this year’s WWDC. In the past Apple has used this week to release new hardware, updates to the iPod and OS upgrades. This year will be slightly different, there isn’t much in the pipeline as far as hardware (minus a much needed display update) and the current iPod is still fairly new especially if you lump in the iPhone into that category. That leaves us with Leopard… much has been talking about regarding the “secret features” of Leopard that Jobs will unveil tomorrow. While I’m sure the “secret features” will be nice thats not what I’m most excited about. I’m excited about what could potentially be the largest changes to the UI in the history of Apple, if not in its history then at least in its recent history (after the original release of OS X).

People pleasing seems to be an epidemic in today’s world. We live in a society that gives tolerance the highest honor in the personality trait category. Unfortunately the industry of design and user experience is not exempt from this issue. It is multi-faceted, affecting how the client treats the designer, how the client deals within it internally, and how the designer responds to all of it.

I’ve been working in the industry of design for roughly 12 years now. During some of my early experiences in doing it as a professional I was let in on a dirty little secret… the client doesn’t always like what you present. I can hear graphic design students everywhere as they shudder at the thought. It’s true, you might think what your presenting is the best work in the world and 9 times out of 10 there is going to be some criticism and feedback from the client.

I’ve been thinking a lot about edge cases recently. Not so much along the lines of “we don’t need to worry about that because its an ‘edge case’” but instead the small details that pop up when you least expect them.

So today on chat a friend of mine ping’d me with this: “Have you seen the new redesigned wired.com?” Oh, man I got to see this, I thought. “Oh, wow” was the first thought in my head, and not the kind of “oh wow” you would think, it was more like “oh crap what did they do!” The new wired site is hideous (only my opinion, I’m sure there will be some that love it), its a lot of things that could have gone right, gone wrong.

Certain designers (most actually) have what I call a “signature-style.” Many times you can look at their designs without knowing who did it and guess the author. For illustration purposes I can think of three incredible designers that have very distinct styles. You could bring out an example of their work that is completely new and I could probably cite it as theirs.

My first example is Michael Schwab. Schwab is a distinguished illustrator that has created amazing work for over 20 years. Once you have seen a piece of work by Michael Schwab it becomes fairly easy to identify it when you encounter it again. He is recognized for depicting complex messages using a style of simplicity. He calls our attention to his subjects by his incredible use of positive and negative space. If you don’t have a poster by Schwab I encourage you to pick one up.

Several months ago I decided I would finally enter the world of weblogs. I’ve had a list of ideas going for sometime and it was finally time to take the plunge and develop them. Like many others I looked at the usual suspects: Moveable Type, Wordpress, Expression Engine, etc. One thing that started to influence my choice was Ruby on Rails. In the last 9 months or so I’ve had lots of opportunity to work inside of the MVC model so it eventually became a criteria that the solution rely on rails. At the time I knew of only two players within the rails world, Typo and Mephisto. Many were making the move to Mephisto and the plugin architecture was growing with the community, I thought it was a no brainer. Then Garrett Dimon wrote his post titled ”A Closer Look at SimpleLog”. It completely changed my perspective, I was faced with a choice between a blogging solution that clearly had more features and a solution that at the time looked like a stripped down but very elegant tool. I tried a version a friend had installed and over the next few days really wrestled with making the choice, I wanted the tool that would ideally help me to write more often and flesh out my ideas faster. In the end user experience won me over and I installed Simplelog as my blogging solution.

I have a son, that in June will be 3 years old. About 5 months ago we decided it was time to introduce him to every boy’s (and girl’s) favorite past time… LEGOs. He took right to them, building, tearing down, building, tearing down, well you get the idea. After awhile I started to get sucked in and before I knew it I was a 6 year old again in LEGO world, or what we called back then a “LEGO maniac”. While working with my son, building airplanes, helicopters, cars, I started to realize something… the object you build is good until you find that next piece and then it becomes better, well that is until you find another piece that could even make it better than the last.