If you already have our RSS feed – don’t worry our feed has not changed. If you are new to the site be aware that the feed url is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/designdemo not uidemo. We did this to preserve our feed readers – sorry for any confusion with the name.

If you are a fan of DesignDemo just change your bookmark to uidemo.com. If you are new to the site – welcome, and I hope you enjoy all of the new content. Thanks, Max.

Screenshot of Typekit

Tonight I decided to give the new font service Typekit a try on my website. The service uses your browsers inherent ability to link fonts, and has worked out licensing with a number of font houses so you can link these fonts with no fear of legal action. The quote from Typekit below basically says it all.

While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. Almost all fonts are protected by copyright — even those available for free — and very few of them allow for linking via CSS or redistribution on the web. This is understandable; font files represent countless hours of finely detailed labor. Appropriately, type designers are concerned that they’ll lose control of all that hard work.

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

I found Typekit easy to implement – you only need to add two lines of javascript to your head tag, and then choose your fonts.

All in all, I’m starting to love the Typekit services. I would recommend it to all web designers that what to play around with some new fonts beyond our normal “web safe group”. It’s fun, free, and it’s easy.

BTW, I’ll be changing the fonts on my website the next few days to test out the service. More feedback to come.

Screenshot of the the USA Today jobs growth forecast visualization

USA Today created a nice visualization of jobs growth between 2010 – 2013. It’s interesting to see the varience in different states, cities and job sectors.

Economic consulting firm Moody’s Economy.com has forecasted U.S. job growth by geographic region and by industry. This interactive was updated Nov. 3, 2009. We will update it each month.

This graphic shows actual job growth through third-quarter 2009 and Moody’s Economy.com’s forecasted job growth for fourth-quarter 2009 through third-quarter 2013. It covers every state, the District of Columbia and 384 metro areas, broken down by fourteen industry sectors. The data are seasonally adjusted.

Visit the USA Today Job’s Forcast Website

This is a sample page created by noted typographer Erik Spiekermann using WOFF versions of FF Meta and FF Meta Serif displayed in Firefox 3.6 beta.

In my opinion the web open font format could be one of the biggest additions to web design in many years. Imagine being able to design for the web with hundreds of new fonts. Mozilla and several type foundries are already onboard. For now we’ll just have to wait and see how many other browsers adopt this wonderful new standard.

Efforts to bring advanced typography to the Web have reached an important milestone. Type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, who had been working to developing the .webfont format, combined forces with Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew, who had been working independently on a similar format. The result of the collaboration is called Web Open Font Format (WOFF), and it has the backing of a wide array of type designers and type foundries. Mozilla will also include support for it in Firefox 3.6.

WOFF combines the work of Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font’s origin and licensing. The format doesn’t include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors—this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C.

From: Ars Technica and EmilyChang

This is one of the best creative quotes I’ve ever read, and directly relates to my own creative process.

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photos, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

- Jim Jarmusch

If you love great design do yourself a favor and visit the Luxirare website.

“Luxirare is a weekly webzine dedicated to clothing and cuisine. At Luxirare, the typical notion of a seasonal fashion show or seasonal “menu” does not exist. Styles and recipes are presented as individual pieces that do not follow a strict theme but rather a flow of ideas. The Luxirare principle is to use the unique mobility of the internet to develop an enticing, unorthodox presentation”.

Visit the Luxirare website

A post by Emily Chang.

“I’ve heard about QR codes for years and Googled for them long ago before they were readily available for consumers, but for some reason tonight, they popped into my mind again and I decided to look them up. I was excited to see that you can make your own QR code easily online. In simple terms, a QR code is a graphic 2D barcode that stores information, such as addresses, URLs, business card info, or anything else.”

Visit her full post.

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.

Visit the How Different Groups Spend Their Day Website

What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.

Visit the jQuery Tools Website

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

How does it work? Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Their Philosophy? In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.

Visit the Personas Website