Klout

If you'd like to see how much headway you are making with your social media and Internet strategy, try Klout. This service pries open your Facebook and Twitter accounts (among many other services), assesses your followers and their level of influence, then ranks your own level of influence. Hopefully you will prove to be a colossus astride the digital world. On the other hand, if you are at the more modest end of the influence spectrum, think of all the growth that lies ahead...

The Wonder of Very Tiny Things

Much potential aesthetic pleasure is lost because many objects of beauty are too small for our underpowered eyes to clearly see. But when we use lenses, stains and modern scanning devices, we can see ornate biological forms, pristine crystal structures and intriguing chemical reactions. Nikon celebrates the convergence of beauty and knowledge in a fascinating online gallery. 

Ludicrous Stock Photos

Anyone in the design or advertising trade has spent (way too much) time looking through stock photo libraries. While some of these images are works of creative brilliance, the majority are mind searingly dull and issue from the department of the extremely obvious and literal. Huffington Post celebrates the unintentionally surreal/idiotic nature of some stock photo memes, such as people holding tiny houses and people in bed listening to bluetooth devices. The sooner someone invents a software genie that can select the perfect picture via algorithm, the better.

Michelangelo in HD

Controversially restored a few years back, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel masterpiece is now online in amazing interactive detail. Visitors to the site can pan, zoom, swoop and generally marvel at one of the West's triumphs. Best viewed on a very large screen for maximum 'wow' factor. 

Audio Books for All

Apple Computers don't do many things for free (or even allow you to access free things), but the podcasts category on their itunes store is an honorable exception. Within the podcasts are a subset of audio books recorded by an organisation called Librivox. This non commercial project uses volunteer readers to voice classic books in the public domain. As you would expect, the quality of recordings is variable. Hundreds of books have been recorded, and all comers are welcome to contribute. Audio books are also downloadable directly from their website. Overall, a very worthwhile project.

Web Designers rise up

Web designers vent in .net magazine about the inadequacies of industry standard web authoring tools, particularly those released by Adobe. They assert that the programs are mired in old technology, and do not reflect the contemporary web of css, html 5, resizeable sites and mobile devices. Their dream product would be able to accurately preview how design elements would display in a browser, and offer WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) control over design elements, plus access to code.

A Muse yourself

Adobe has long striven to cater to code-phobic designers, via GoLive and later Macromedia acquisition Dreamweaver. Their latest offering (Muse) is the most intutive yet and aimed squarely at print designers with minimal web authoring skills. Muse looks and feels a touch like InDesign and offers similar object-oriented functionality. The program is currently in beta and is available as a free download until early next year.

Muse has its detractors in the web design community. Coders concur that the code it automatically produces is ugly and full of redundancy. They dislike the way Muse renders non-standard typefaces, the lack of dynamic page resizing, and argue that print designers should learn their web skills the way they did — via hard work and experimentation. 

Get on the Grid

If you can't quite figure out why one website just looks good and is a pleasure to read, and another similar one is hard on the eye, then the underlying structure (or lack thereof) may be to blame. Plenty of interesting material on the topic of web design grids here. 

Drive-by Fonts

The last couple of years have seen a quiet revolution for web designers. Once limited to the small number of typefaces that 'everyone' had installed on their machines, designers have been completely liberated from that restriction by web-served typefaces. Now it no longer matters what the user has installed -- the website renders typefaces from a remote server. If you'd like to see what your website (or someone else's) would look like using the new web font services, try this neat little demonstration from type purveyor FontFont. Instead of bland patches of Arial or Verdana, imagine your site decked out with typefaces designed for the screen.