Burdseed

My kids love our Roomba. Who knew it had an artistic side?

Roomba Art by Tobias Baumgartner, Marcus Brandenburger, Tom Kamphans, Alexander Kroeller, and Christiane Schmidt

Now, if it could only code HTML5…

Great photo of the wall sculpture by British artist
Henry Moore at the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam.

Photo by Reinier de Jong

I’m very fond of exposed brick and studied in Rotterdam; hence, it’s appeal.

Every few months, I clean out the digital attic
and purge old, tired content sources.

I read quite a bit daily (usually at the crack of dawn and late at night), so curating my digital sources keeps me from going insane. I’ve added a few new online sources of information, including some sources of personal design and blogging inspiration, plus a few new sources of industry and professional information.

Here are a few new additions to the blogroll.

From the business side:

Bryce 
Bijan Sabet
Bill Gurley
Anthony Tjan
Venture Hacks

From the design side:

Design Milk
Ministry of Type
Cooperdotcom
Weburbanist

I’ll probably add a few more in the coming days.

Today’s post of the day is actually a series of posts from earlier in the week about the design of news sites.

Photo by Robert Scoble

Andy Rutledge, a designer, published an analysis of the layout of New York Times web site, along with some hypothetical changes, and used it as an example of the design challenges faced by today’s news sites. This sparked a bunch of conversation on Twitter, including from current and former designers at the times. Om summarizes the discussion nicely.

Although Rutledge missed a bit with his comments about the Times and with some of the elements of his redesign, the essence of his message is correct: many news sites desperately need to be redesigned for the modern web. This problem is not limited to news, but extends to many first-generation web portals and sites in areas such as sports, entertainment, and finance. It’s also true for many of the early web 2.0 sites. Use of the web is changing and is increasingly being driven by social, devices, video, and living room or mobile use cases. Less is more in most cases.