My brother gave me a great book by Ana G. Canizares entitled 500 Solutions for Working at Home. It’s 423 pages of solid inspiration organized by type, including studios design for personal use, architecture, design, art and services. Each case study includes not just beautiful photographs but details, square footage and floor plans. This book is full of clever solutions from humble to lavish. At $15 new / $8 used (at Amazon) your investment could be as little as one and a half cents per studio solution. Of course there is a ton of inspiration online but it can be hard to track down and usually won’t come with this level of detail so this book is pretty good way to augment your search.

If you’ve seen enough Arial, Times and Verdana to last a lifetime I’m happy to report that more progress is being made on improving the typographic experience online. Google has joined the open source type crusade with the launch of Google Font Directory. While still in beta part of Google’s effort includes standardizing the experience of type across browsers which means not only readers will benefit but developers have something to fall in love with as well. For more on this topic also see post: The League of Movable Type.

The recent (and long overdue) restyle of my portfolio BrainstormOverload has been recognized by the good folks over at RefreshStyle.net. Hopefully you recognize it there in the bottom-left corner. Who’s behind this collection of “refreshingly stylish web design” you ask? In a word – Canadians. While those of you living below the Mason-Dixon Line may be challenged by this notion I can assure you that Canadians love design just like you do. But don’t take my word for it – check out 350 Designs (the makers of RefreshStyle) for yourself. It’s fun to see sites for brands you aren’t familiar with. Oh, and if web design isn’t your thing you’re in luck. There is actually a suite of sites including: StationaryStyle.net, DrupalStyle.net and ArchitectureStyle.net. If you don’t love any of those things seek immediate medical attention.

As you are no-doubt well aware the internet currently resembles the imagined offspring of a mad love affair between your attic and your garage. We all know whatever we are looking for is in there somewhere we’re just not sure where. Hence the current explosion of sites like notcot.org and materialicious.com that simply aggregate cool stuff. They don’t editorialize much – if at all. They don’t even provide much context beyond the central organizational theme. As such they are like a dresser – simultaneously no big deal and amazingly useful.

For those of us in creative fields there are many excellent portfolio sites like behance.net and design:related.com that provide lots of organization along with tools, community, rating systems and the works. However, there has been an open niche for a super simple mechanism for simply finding cool stuff when “cool stuff” equals portfolios and “finding” means in a specific city. In another stroke of minimalistic brilliance 37Signals has come to the rescue by launching a new tool called sortfolio.com.

Here you can browse for web designers and companies by city and budget range. There are larger, paid modules followed by smaller, free modules. I am digging the way new modules automatically load as you scroll down the page. Check it out and get yourself listed so the wide world can find you without having to go through all that stuff they’re saving for when Antiques Roadshow comes to town.

The navigation design for the new BrainstormOverload portfolio site has been accepted into the jurried collection at Pattern Tap. There are many sites that agrigate beautiful designs but Pattern Tap takes a more utilitarian approach that is actually quite useful. Well designed user experience components (headers, forms, login functionality, etc.) can be browsed as collections and serve as inspiration to help overcome your own design challenges. It has proven to be a valuable resource so I’m excited to have contributed something in return. Thanks again for Jeff Zerger and Colin Petit for the development on the bsol site.

At last there is a tool that enables cyclists to map their route from point A to point B while preferentially factoring in bike paths and bike lanes – Cyclopath. Now I’ve been to point B quite a few times and know the way but I’ve never gotten there from point C. Cyclopath allows me to map the route, adjust it, get a sense of what I’ll be in for and print directions. You can use any address in the Twin Cities and surrounding region the map covers and even map to points of interest like parks.

Maps can be viewed as street layer or aerial photos and the system indicates distance, allows you to make and save changes to maps, share them and even lets you interpret your route using several filters of special interest to cyclists like “byway type”, rating and even by slope so you can embark on the pleasantly futile task of trying to plan a route that’s down hill both ways.

There are many more features and it seems like a pretty powerful new tool but one with a little bit of a learning curve. Fortunately the folks at Cyclopath have taken this into account as well and are offering a lecture about how to use the system. Not only are the tool and the lecture free they’ll feed you breakfast so stop by as you ride your bike in to work tomorrow (weather should be pretty nice). The lecture is Thursday, November 12 from 8:30 – 9:30 at the UofM. More info available here. Can’t make it to the breakfast? View it live online at 8:40 am.

Who would take on this heroic and altruistic effort you ask? Well that is the beauty of having a large land-grant, research oriented, university in your town. The University of Minnesota’s Institute for New Media Studies did all the heavy lifting. Now all you have to do is enjoy the ride.

The web is now so full of astonishing content the challenge has become locating the most amazing bits that are most relevant bits to you. Several angles are available here. Subject oriented aggregators like NotCot.org, Core77.com, and Materialicious.com for instance can each get you started on fascinating creative explorations. Despite the proclamations by many that the new paradigm will revolve around these “communities of interest” there are those seeking to bring the good ol’ fashion community defined by location into the information age. So to take a different kind of slice through the interwebs check out websota.com and minnesota.com where you’ll find this blog along with many others on a wide range to topics with relevance to you as a Minnesotan. Communities of interest but at times it’s just nice to take a stroll through the neighborhood and see a few familiar faces. Enjoy.

The Twin Cites of Minneapolis and Saint Paul have a wealth of great interactive talent and a great number of terrific agencies working in the interactive space. 117 in fact. According to a new list entitled Best Web Design Minneapolis established by Grandpa-George (which is… you guessed it. An interactive agency). It really is a great resource for keeping your finger on the pulse of the community and will hopefully inspire other cities to follow suit.

I have nothing against the traditional type foundries (I’ll feature some of them soon so everyone gets equal time) but The League of Moveable Type has jumped on the open source movement in an exciting fashion. They have a nice manifesto worth taking a moment to read. Unquestioningly good type can be quite expensive and questionable type can often be had for free so it is exciting to see someone fill a niche in the middle. It’s a smart move because most design project budgets live in that same middle niche – that’s why microstock like istockphoto has found success. For many smaller clients the cost of higher quality resources like photography and type are often out of reach and as a result end up not being addressed or worse used illegally. The idea is that with access to lower cost yet good quality resources clients and designers alike get hooked, build respect for the tools and move up as soon as they can afford to do so.

I do a lot of work in that middle niche. Well meaning clients who want good design that helps their business succeed. What is exciting about The League of Moveable Type is that they are interested in expanding our ability to spec type online instead of being limited to Arial, Times or whatever else the visitor’s computer has. Instead the designer could host the type which would be transmitted with the design (sort of like pdf files do) so I’m interested to see the landscape change in this regard without over-abusing the talented people behind professional, rights managed resources – but change can be tricky.

The desktop publishing revolution that many of us lived through did not kill off high quality design. On the contrary it became more valuable and recognizable in a market place awash in the cheep software generated lost dog flyers of the early days. But look at the situation now. The web is full of really great creativity – generated cottage industry style by talented creatives with something to share who may not have the kind of fancy agency gig that was once required to access the tools needed. Similarly I don’t believe microstock or open source type will kill off the high quality type foundries. Helvetica isn’t going the way of the dinosaurs. Probably quite the contrary but like all revolutions things will change.

Did you catch the piece about the Freelancer’s Union on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer?

Well, you’re the only one because all the super cool designers out there saw it and crushed their server! Can I get a “hell ya!”

When it comes back up go take a look. Membership is free and not like your father’s union (which was probably pretty lame and involved standing around in the cold with signs of shockingly poor typographic quality and getting honked at). The Freelancer’s Union is a web of support for insurance, training, networking and more. The NewsHour segment has been archive here.