noisylime

Alphabet 26 combines the “best” upper and lowercase letters into an alphabet using only 26 symbols.

The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower…A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant.”

[via Signal vs. Noise]

Google Maps has just rolled out an exciting new traffic feature, that provides traffic data for major interstates and freeways.

If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing.

Glad they've made it so technical. Gray, then, means info unavailable? The Traffic data comes courtesy of a new Traffic button next to the Map, Satellite, and Hybrid buttons on the top row of the map. Of course, it's not that traffic info is new to the internet – hell, even Google Maps Mobile has had traffic details since last August – but if Google Maps is your go-to internet map, it's great to see traffic info baked-in. Thanks Sugar Daddy! — Adam Pash

[via Lifehacker]

The CSS Tinderbox is an effort to support open source web design by providing very basic, yet solid, CSS/XHTML design templates that web designers and web developers can use as the foundation for their own projects.
CSS Tinderbox Templates Version 1.0
Not Reinventing The Wheel

By all means, the CSS Tinderbox isn’t breaking new ground in CSS-based web design. Much of the elements used to create these templates come from well known sources and/or standards already found around the inter-web.

http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/

In the mood for a nice long tutorial on color theory fundamentals for digital photography? I thought so, and I've got just the thing — a good comprehensive piece by Chris Rutter from the graphics.com site. (posted by Jennifer Apple)
[via The Photoshop Blog]

A showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts.

[via del.icio.us/popular]

Ever want a low-tac sticker to plaster on a idiots car, here you go.

http://iparklikeanidiot.com/

Last week we pushed a major change to the Campfire transcript browser. The change was made for a variety of reasons – some of which I’ll detail below – but mostly in response to the flaws in our original “wouldn’t it be cool if…” design. We confused enthusiasm with priority.

Here’s what the transcript browser looked like before last week’s change.

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Tingelets is a new service for web designers and developers. It provides a set of helpful bookmarklets to add a tinge of color to tags, CSS classes or ids on the site you are currently visiting, giving you the possibility to compare web layouts in a large number of different browsers on the fly. If you’re creating websites, check it out, it’s free!

read more | digg story

Wordpress and theme upgrades generally mean one thing to designers & developers — major adaptation headaches. Here is the simple way to futureproof your CSS mods and avoid those upgrade headaches forever.

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I wish I’d thought of this idea for portraits. I’ll have to give this a try.

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