31Three

Creative services for the design-challenged developer



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XHTML 2 is dead. Seems like HTML 5 is the clear direction to go.

Xero is hiring interaction designers to join their team in New Zealand. Xero is an online accounting platform that recently won 2 Webby Awards, including People’s Voice.

New Yorker Cover Art Is Painted With an iPhone – NYTimes.com

Left Right Left Right Left – Free Coldplay album

The World Bank is looking for a Web Producer.

Classmates.com Employees Don’t Have Heart To Tell CEO About Facebook – The Onion

Cameron offers some advice for staying gainfully employed ~ Authentic Boredom

Xero is no longer supporting IE6, and helping others do the same.

Timeline: New version control system for Photoshop.

1960’s Polaroid Pictures of Signs in Washington – a set on Flickr

Cameron Moll gets interviewed by a highschool class. Downloading now.

Campaign Monitor just posted a report showing the popularity of different Email clients. Huge amount of data. Fascinating stuff.

Newism just posted my Campaign Monitor design process article on their blog. Thanks for including me guys!

Xero just posted a small interview with me on their site.

Veer Marketplace. iStock should be feeling a tad nervous.

Make Safari 4 behave like Safari 3.

Safari 4 Public Beta out now.

I nice little micro-site focused on the font “Din”.

Sidebar separators for the Finder.

iBoo. Very fun iPod speakers from Speakal.

A post from John Nack that sums up almost everything I want to see in Photoshop. Layer filtering, Layer sorting, Symbols, Linked files, and Type Styles.

Facebook is looking to hire a Product Designer. I interviewed for a similar position last year and was really impressed with the team and the working environment. Definitely a career move worth considering.

Adobe has started a blog dedicated to refining their often criticized application installer experience. Good on em.

Staction is a “People Management” app that looks so cool that I’m tempted to hire a few people just so I can use it.

Authentic Jobs annual New Year’s promotion is back. Use the coupon code “THREE09” to receive $125 off of a full-time listing or “FRLANZ09” for $25 a freelance listing. Offer ends Jan 31st.

I don’t consider myself a big social networker, but the new Virb just might change that.

Do we really need more design galleries? Maybe. StylesInspiration looks to be a pretty solid site.

Picasa for Mac – Free download from Google

Brandon Kelly just released a very handy extension named Editor that automatically adds edit links to your Expression Engine entries. Works perfectly.

It can be tough to forecast your income & expenses when working as a freelancer… Pocketsmith looks like it might just have the perfect solution. Can’t wait to try it out.

“Get ready for the new year with some Calendar Tape ($10). This handy adhesive lets you create the current month in vertical awesomeness.” [Via]

Nathan Smith interviews me about my roots, freelancing, and faith. Godbit.com

A previous client of mine – myfamily.com – is looking for a jQuery Developer. Check out the job description at AuthenticJobs.com.

My latest design project just went live this morning. Say hello to the new Campaign Monitor. Congratulations to Dave and the CM crew!

Now through 11/30/08 get 25% off automatically when you purchase VMware Fusion online and use the coupon code “FusionRocks”.

ActionMethod is a lovely designed project management app that was just launched by Behance. I think I just might give this a go.

Amazon now has a Universal Wishlist. Just in time for Christmas.

Campaign Monitor just announced today on a teaser site that they’re merging their 2 products – Campaign Monitor and MailBuild – into a single platform launching at the end of the month.

Adobe Labs – Adobe InContext Editing. Looks interesting.

Mike Precious just posted about his redesign of Candy Bouquet. Nice work Mike!

Veer has just become the newest AuthenticJobs.com partner. Congratulations Cameron (and Veer)!

Beginner’s guide from a seasoned CSS designer. An oldie but a goodie.

Best Photoshop trick I’ve learned to date. Scroll down to the “rubber-band selection” section. Seriously, you really need to know this.

Airport art? Or asking for it? – Network World

Wall Street On Demand must be up to something big, They’re looking for an Interface Designer, .Net Developers, Junior Web Developers and plain old regular Web Developers.

Snapping vector shapes to pixels in Photoshop. How have I missed this?

Small update to the portfolio today. Process to come.

GridMaker – A very very handy tool for creating grids in photoshop.

My good friend (and former employee) Brian Potstra just launched a new site. Congrats Brian!

Martha is looking for a Sr. UI Developer. It’s a good thing.

A map of countries that don’t use the metric system.

As much as I love to hate Bell, their new site looks pretty sweet.

Check out Kiva’s Google Maps view of how Authentic Jobs is making an impact through microloans. A good use of the Google’s API for a great cause.

If 31Three sold motorhomes, the site would probably look something like this.

Campaign Monitor has posted a position at Authentic Jobs looking for a full-time Web Interface Designer. I’ve had the opportunity to work with these guys for the past couple of months, and only have good things to say. Definitely worth checking out.

The Globe and Mail are looking for a web designer… looks like it could be an interesting gig. View the post at Authentic Jobs

Lovely work from 10am.

Terminal method to disable shadows in os x screen window captures.

Thanks for the interview Geof! Man I need haircut.

A New Day for Jason Santa Maria. Very very nice redesign rethinking.

Authentic Jobs has been donating 1% of their revenue to help entrepreneures throughout the world through Kiva. When the loans get paid back, they are re-invested back into more loans. Check out the Authentic Jobs overview page at Kiva... very inspiring.

The Mysterious Save for Web Color Shift Solved. Thanks Jonathan

Mobile Web Design now available for as little as $10. If you haven’t picked it up yet, now would be a good time to do so.

Ryan Ireland just launched ExpressionEngine Screencasts. If you’ve been looking for a good introductory to EE, this is it.

“If Mom were on the payroll, she’d earn $126,593”. Seems a bit low to me. Happy Mothers Day.

MyFamily.com is looking for a Sr. Interaction Designer. I had an excellent experience working with these guys… definitely a gig worth checking out.

Cash Flow Management for small business – Pulse

Authentic Jobs Affiliates – “Partner with Authentic Jobs in helping employers find top-notch web professionals.”

Authentic Jobs API – “Team up with Authentic Jobs in helping employers and job seekers find each other on the interwebs.”

A good local friend of mine just launched his new site. Nice work Mike!

Minimize flickering css background images in ie6. (So I’m 4 years behind… this is still a great tip)

Hello Human Icons – My good friend Derek Nelson is feverishly working on a new set of icons… can’t wait to see the full set.

Beautiful Minds. Stephen is autistic. He did not speak his first words “pencil” and “paper” until he was 5. Yet, when he was 11 he drew a perfect aerial view of London after only one helicopter ride. ( Thanks Drew )

10 steps to a multi-protocol iChat. This is the best step by step guide I’ve seen for getting msn to work with iChat.

The internet undersea world.

Time stops at Grand Central

Microsoft offers $44.6 Billion for Yahoo. Just don’t screw with flickr.

Archer – A previously unreleased font that Martha has had her hands on for years now. “It’s a good thing”

Weightshift gets a lovely makeover. Gotham and Clarendon, what’s not to love?

FontShop News, January 2008. I’m really liking ARS Maquette, It almost looks like they threw Gotham, Helvetica and Avenir in a blender.

A very surreal photoset on Flickr

35% Off type by Dino dos Santos at TypeTrust. Esta is a purdy one.

Check out this absolutely gorgeous flickr group by James White

Stacks In Da Place is an app that works perfectly with the previously mentioned overlay icons.

Unbelieveable

Fixing Leopard’s Stacks with overlay icons.

Mobile Web Design (in print) now available ~ Authentic Boredom.

Holy Datavisualization – Via Brand Spanking New

Smashing Magazine is celebrating their first anniversary by giving away over 40 top notch design books.

I sooooo have to try this out.

Look familiar? Thanks for the heads up Chris.

Mobile Web Design ~ A Book by Cameron Moll

An enjoyable interview with typographer František Štorm. I love this snippet where he describes what he does when in a creative lull. “When I try to think of what to do and no idea comes, I know I’d better go chop some wood or cut grass to clean my mind. Then if still nothing comes, I go to a local pub to drink a few beers and consult the farmers. When I once tried to explain to them what typography is, they laughed: ‘are you stupid?’… ‘I am,’ I answered.” I only wish I could be half as stupid.

viaLetter – Spell it out

50% Off DSType at TypeTrust.

Apple is currently looking for a web developer, desktop software engineer, and a javascript developer. Via Authentic Jobs.

Blueprint A CSS Framework. This is looking very very promising… take a minute and check out the tutorial. Via Mark Boulton

80 Beautiful Typefaces – Smashing Magazine

60 More Places to Get Design Inspiration – Online and Off – From Freelance Switch

This has got to be the most blatant rip-off I’ve had in a while. According to the quote, I apparently work for CSG now. (Thanks for the heads up Andrew. )

Grid-it! Notepads

400+ Business card designs. I particularly like this one and that one.

OmniGraffle Wireframe Palette

I’ve heard the buzz about OpenID for awhile now but didn’t really get what the fuss was about. Until today. Basecamp now has support for OpenID and with it comes a new feature called Open Bar. If you have multiple Basecamp accounts, and you use your OpenID to log into each account, you’ll see a thin black bar at the top of the screen with quick links to each of your accounts.

ExpressionEngine 1.6 is now out. What’s new? Multi-site Manager, Custom Category Fields, Pages Module, as well as a hundred or so other small updates. Get it while it’s hot.

Adobe GoLive – Not dead yet

A few beautiful illustrations from Etsy: Believe in your dreams, Magnoia Tree and Bird and The Bird and the Sea. Also… an interesting (Apple inspired?) time machine navigation technique. [via poppytalk]

7 free fonts. I particularly like Faceplate and FF Clan.

Franz Ferdinand, Snow Patrol, The Kooks and Four Tet are amongst the artists contributing to a collection of children’s songs curated by Belle and Sebastian, to raise funds for children’s charity, Save the Children. How did I just learn about this today? Colours Are Brighter

Pixelmator. I don’t see this replacing Photoshop for me any time soon, but it’s nice to see a something new in the land of image editing.

Man builds a living out of LEGO – Check out the gallery (first link in the article) to see some insane LEGO skillz.

Poppy Talk. Mining for the beautiful, the decayed, and the handmade.

For the sake of designers everywhere, I sure hope this catches on.

Along with the new redesign, I also added a couple new projects to the work section. Swirl was a project that I did around a year ago, and Lightspoke was one that I did just last month.

Macrabbit just released version 2.5 of it’s popular cssedit application. Now with Tabs, Selector Builder, and X-ray.

Text editor + Transmit + CSS editor + Terminal + Books + More = Whoah.

White Series is a very nice icon set from Tom Nulens

Smashing Magazine puts together a massive collection of links relating to grid-based design.

Cash Forecaster is a great way for a freelancer to figure out when they can take a holiday.

Sorry for any RSS feed mess I may have caused. I’ve grouped together the 2 feeds into a single one.

After the SimpleBits / LogoMaid mess was thankfully cleaned up, a few designers thought it would be fun to pull a little April fools prank on Dan. Thanks for letting me know Scott.

When preparing to write the article for Digital-Web, I quickly realized that I had no idea on how to actually write an article. My dear friend Google dug up this for me… Half an Hour: How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly. It helped tremendously.

My first article over at Digital Web just went live. Thank you Carolyn , for giving me the encouragement to write it.

The “Get a Mac” ads are even funnier in Japanese. Thanks Brian

A time lapse digital painting of Thom Yorke, in Photoshop. The real time of drawing was 4 hours.

My wife (the avid quilter) discovered this fabric designer when we were out west this summer. Check out the very inspiring fabric samples from Amy Butler

“The feeling is a bit eerie. The sound is transferred through the brush tip, into the teeth, and right into the inner ear, so you feel the music.” From a New York Times article about a new children’s toothbrush from Hasbro. Genius or just plain weird?

Just a quick keyboard shortcut tip for the next time you’re searching through pages of photos at istock. Control+N = Next Page and Control+B = Back.

A great collection of doodlemachine’s illustrations at istock.

I can’t believe how much faster my internet connection is since I changed my DNS settings over to OpenDNS. If your ISP’s loading times are inconsistent, it’s definitely worth a try.

A gallery of incomprehensible intersections. I especially like the diagram on how to make a left turn on Rosanov Street in Moscow.

6 second exposure going down an escalator. Great idea.

I wonder what Shaun has up his sleeve this time.

My good friend Drew Warkentin has just updated his site… make sure to check it out.

Check out the beautiful portfolio of Derek Nelson

5 Free Fonts You Shouldn’t Have Missed

Hilarious article I just spotted on digg.com about the art direction of a children’s toy. Too funny.

I feel bad for all the developers out there that have to build email campaigns on a regular basis… It looks like Microsoft is getting ready to really change the rules with their next release of Outlook.

Mac Heist has bundled up 8 Mac apps for an amazing price of $49. Delicious Library, Boinx PhotoMagico, Shapeshifter, DEVONthink, Disco, Rapid Weaver, iClip, game from Panga… and potentially Newsfire and Textmate if certain targets are met (25% of the proceeds are being donated to charities).

I seriously cannot believe how much the PS3’s are going for on ebay. Amazing.

Simon Rudkin fills in for Simon Collison over at Collylogic.com and presents his Top 10 Expression Engine Tips.

Media Temple has unveiled it’s new Grid-Server today. Looks like a fantastic package.

Authentic Jobs - An astutely savvy blend of talent & opportunity. Nice work Cameron.

Great colour chart for cross-referencing Pantone, CMYK, RGB and HTML colour codes. (Thanks Kevin)

Very clever flash animation.

I was a little skeptical of Leopard’s “spaces” feature at first, but after seeing this video, I’m a believer.

Famous logos redesigned in “web 2.0 format” at Yay Hooray.

Top 71 CSS Menus. Good resource to keep bookmarked.

LogoPond - A Place To Fish For Ideas

I use this.

HTML’s a Tag Too. Bryan demonstrates how to lose a wrapper div by styling the html element. Say it with me… “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Eric Barstad from Shadow Box Creative just posted an interview with me about my favourite html editors. I’m now officially a geek. Thanks Eric. 

This is a great XHTML character entity reference to keep bookmarked.

I’m guilty of being overly inspired from other people’s work from time to time, but I’m thinking that this is crossing the line. They at least could have found a better photo of me ;)

tom.ma | screenblog. A handpicked collection of fine screen designs.

Mosso looks like an almost perfect hosting provider for web developers. I’ll be keeping my eye on them.

Mark Bixby explains why your logo doesn’t matter. Great post.

Handy widget for encoding your email addresses.

I hate to keep posting links to rip off versions of my site… but I need to bring attention to these pirates somehow. Arrrrr.

Sean Sperte Just sent me over a great list of Free Icons. Enjoy.

I love what these guys have done with my logo… why didn’t I think of that?

Add tabs to iChat with Chax

Indev has just released Mailtags 1.2. You can now create iCal todo’s directly from mail!

Man, I really have to start using Illustrator more… here’s some great tutorials.

Plaxo is finally available for the Mac, and they’ve done a very good job at integrating it into the address book.

I’m not sure if this www.swell-services.be site is “live” or not, but it seems to be borrowing my images and design a little too closely. At least I might get some referral hits on the basecamp link!

My favourite ftp client just got a little better. Transmit 3.5 now plays nicely with skEdit!

I’ve just started checking out Last.fm, but so far I am very impressed. Great for finding new music.

Copyscape will “search for copies of your page on the Web”.

Apple’s Aperture has a contender on it’s hands with Adobe’s Lightroom. It’s actually refreshing to see a company “fight back” against Apple.

Every so often an error message will make me smile. It seems Vongo.com thinks Canada is a “geographic failure”.

I just signed up with TrustFax. Send and receive up to 70 faxes through Email for $19.95 a year. Sure beats a second line.

image FAMFAMFAM is very generously giving away free icon sets. ( via )

Service Scrubber is an app that lets you tidy up your Apple services menu. I’ve always wondered how to do that.

Get Shiira 1.2 while it’s hot. Is that a Hicks logo I see?

I mentioned Pandora in an earlier post, now there’s a widget that makes this music player a little more convenient.

This might be old news, but I just discovered the free Vienna RSS Reader application today. Definitely worth a look.

pMachine has released Expression Engine 1.4 as well as a new free version dubbed Expression Engine Core. Version 1.4 has a very impressive feature set… check out the changelog.

From the makers of stock.xchng comes stockxpert.com

YouSendIt is a handy web app that lets you send files up to 1GB in size over email. The advantage of this over using ftp is that you don’t have to remember to clean off your server.

CD Finder is a great application for archiving CD’s & DVD’s. One of the smartest things you can do for keeping track of backups is to sequentially number your CD’s (#001 31Three) and store records of them in a program like CD Finder. Being able to search all of my CD’s at once has saved me many many hours.

imageI have been enjoying this interview with Bono (Podcast) that Rolling Stone Magazine have recently published. Not much to do with design, but very inspirational. 

It looks like Google has bought out Urchin and have released their stats program for free. Amazing.

Franklin McMahon’s Podcast for the Creative Professional (iTunes Link) is definitely worth a listen. It’s even allowed me to justify my recent iPod nano purchase.

I’ve just discovered Pandora and I’m already an addict. Simply let it know what bands you like, and it will start serving up similar music based on the same style.

If you like keep a lot of applications in your dock, you might find these dock dividers handy. I added a thin icon to an automator application (all it does is launch text edit) in order to help me divide my programs into groups. Just download the application and make a duplicate for each divider icon you want to insert. I’ve changed the names of icons to ” ” blank spaces so that they don’t bring up text when I hover my cursor over them.

If you’re looking for a affordable noise reducing photoshop plug-in, Neat Image just might do the trick. Cleans up noise from digital cameras as well as jpg compression artifacts.

I just got an email informing me that my old site has been used as a “source of inspiration”. You might want to take a peek through their portfolio to see if any of your work can be found. Thankfully they’ve already taken it down.

MailTags gets updated to 1.1 and offers some cool new keyword functionality. Also fixes problems with 10.4.3.

A self-proclaimed “super lightweight javascript effects library” named moo.fx. Brilliant.

If you have caller id and a mac that supports it, Silica is a neat little app that will show you who it calling right on your screen. It also logs a call history and supports the address book.

FontExplorerX RC3 is out! Get it while it’s hot.

Hover over the “f5” on the top right hand side of this page. Pretty wild effect.

MyMind is an awesome application for making sitemaps like these. Here’s the MyMind working file to get you started.

Rick Ellis spills the beans on some pretty impressive new Expression Engine features coming in version 1.4.

imageFor those of you who can’t get enough of that Brit Pop sound, give Embrace a listen. Chalk full of great songs.

Dashboard Starter makes using dashboard a lot less annoying.

Here’s a cool little tutorial on using AJAX for inline editing with Expression Engine.

TimeLog - Fantastic time tracking application.

MailTags allows you to tag your email (in Apple Mail) and then filter those tags with smart mailboxes. Nice.

Dreamstime has a similar collection to istockphoto but at a 1/3rd of the price.

If you haven’t seen this already, check out colorblender.com. Creates awesome colour palettes which you can download as an .eps!

me Hello, my name is…
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain, a stay at home designer from Grimsby ON, Canada. To get in touch use the contact form.

XHTML 2 is dead. Seems like HTML 5 is the clear direction to go.

Xero is hiring interaction designers to join their team in New Zealand. Xero is an online accounting platform that recently won 2 Webby Awards, including People’s Voice.

New Yorker Cover Art Is Painted With an iPhone – NYTimes.com

Left Right Left Right Left – Free Coldplay album

The World Bank is looking for a Web Producer.

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