Designed with both the typophile and card player in mind, Helveticards are the beautiful, usable alternative to the traditional deck of cards that both Vignelli and Brunson would be happy to deal.

For just $10 US you can buy a pack here.

Printed on premium quality, high gloss, white core playing card stock. Packaged in hard plastic case.

Designed by Ryan Myers

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” ~ Steve Jobs

Solution: rebuild the spotlight index. Downside: I turned it off. What’s going on behind the scenes is actually fairly trivial, and it’s possible to simply do everything via the command line in terminal.

The metadata utilities needs to run as root (sudo). To see what your drive is up to, enter:
sudo mdutil -s /

This will show the status on the root volume.

To turn indexing on for a volume, you enter:
sudo mdutil -i on /

Now you have to force Spotlight to rebuild its index by simply erasing the master copy of the metadata stores on the volume like this:
sudo mdutil -E /

However, while I did all this, Spotlight was still not building the indexed for me. Here’s how I solved it.

I wanted to check the date/timestamp on the Spotlight directory using:
sudo ls -la /.Spotlight*

While most of the files had the timestamp of when I tried to delete the index, not all the files had the current date and time. Additionally, the file sizes were not growing, a good sign the index was not being rebuilt.

Then, I did the following commands to make sure indexing was on, the spotlight metastore was really gone, and that I wanted it rebuilt. Enter each command seperatly:
sudo mdutil -i on /
rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -E /

The moment I did the last command, this time the system came to life. The directory /.Spotlight-V100 was created, and the files inside it were growing quickly. Spotlight on the toolbar showed a progress bar, indicating the system would be done indexing in an estimated time.

Please follow these instructions at your own risk. The following step where enough to correct my problems and  I am using mac os x, 10.6.8

Reference Post: Walt-O-Matic

I have mashed up an exclusive by Jolie O’Dell and a few of my first experiences with Heello after its unofficial launch day.

Everett is hitting the streets with his own microblogging competitor that includes embed photo-sharing capabilities right out of the gate. Rumors of video-sharing and check-ins are in the works. I spoke with Ryan LeFevre, Software/Systems Engineer, on Heello today to see if he would share some future project details. He said, “we have a lot of new features to build on top of these core features.”

In addition to updates, which are called pings, the service also allows for following (“listening” to) other people and sending and receiving replies. You can also “echo,” or repost, a ping from fellow users. I found the usability to be a direct correlation to twitter but it has a number of tweaks and bugs that need to be worked out.

“If Twitter can compete with its developers without fair notice, then why can’t we?” he quipped.

To see the service in action, check out the live stream of public activity.

On a more serious note, Everett said that the timing of his launch was more an event of ironic serendipity than a planned stab at Twitter. “Twitter rolling out their photo option to everyone yesterday was a complete coincidence,” said Everett, “but I’m glad the timing happened that way.”

The founder also noted that Twitpic itself won’t be fading into obscurity any time soon. “Twitpic will continue to still live on; we’ve got a huge base of loyal users and we still want to continue to provide them with the best service possible,” he said.

Originally, Heello began as a completely different product that revolved around “email and making it suck less,” said Everett. “But not too long ago, we decided… social is fun, and we have experience at it.”

So does the young founder think Heello has the makings of a real Twitter competitor?

“I think anyone has a fair shot at competing with anyone,” Everett said.

I believe Everett has learned the good and bad from Twitpic and has put those ideas into Heello’s DNA. Steve Corona, CTO of @heello and @twitpic, noted, “we’ve taken all of our knowledge from building twitpic to make heello extremely scalable and fault tolerant.”

In the near future, Everett and team are planning to launch video support, checkins, SMS integration, mobile applications, and something new that doesn’t relate to any of Twitter’s features: Channels. This is only the beginning.

“Channels will let users be grouped together, and users can then ‘listen’ to a channel to see all their pings,” said Everett. For example, you could set up a channel for dog lovers, people in a particular neighborhood, etc.

“We’re just trying to evolve on what microblogging is now and fill in the gaps for the users. People love to share what they are doing with photos, videos and where they are, we want to make that experience seamless and easy.”

If your an early adopter, find me on here. I was lucky enough to lock down my first name as my account name. Company names, fake accounts and those few short names are disappearing fast. Good to be in on the ground floor.

Original, un-edited post: http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/heello/

Set new windows and tabs open in empty page. I’ve never set a homepage for my browser. It doesn’t only speed up Safari launch time, it also speed up the new windows and tabs launch time.

• Access it under preferences: general.

Set database storage to none. By disabling storage, you increase your browser security and know which website requires database. It doesn’t do much to the performance, but I think it’s better to know which website use your storage.

• Access it under preferences: security: show databases.

Disable the webpage preview caches. If you use Top Site feature, you should know that Safari will create a screenshot of the site you’ve visited and store it in a folder. Over time, it’ll take a large space of your hard disk. Safari will search for the existing cache whenever it wants to display top site preview. The most important issue is the time it requires to search for the each screenshot – imagine your folders has over 300 screenshots.

• Quit Safari if it’s running.
• Run terminal and enter touch desktop/Webpage\ Previews
• Navigate to ~user/library/caches/com.apple.safari
• Delete the Webpage Previews folder and move the new Webpage Previews (check your desktop) into com.apple.safari folder.

The reason why I choose this approach is to let you understand how the whole blocking works. We create a new empty file in order to block Safari from writing a new image into the folder. To restore the feature, delete the empty file and Safari should create new folder the next time it launches.

Disable web icons storage. When you visit a website, Safari will store the tiny icon in the url into its own storage. If it’s getting larger, it’ll slow down Safari performance because it need to search the database every time it visits a website. There is an easier way if you don’t mind installing app.1

• Quit Safari if it’s running.
• Navigate to ~/user/library/safari and delete the WebPageIcons.db Don’t worry, it’s totally safe. This is the storage I mentioned, deleting it won’t cause any issues to Safari.
• Run terminal and enter this defaults write com.apple.Safari WebIconDatabaseEnabled -bool NO

Speed up the initial layout by decreasing the initial time layout delay to 0.25. Safari by default has a delay of 1 second before loading page (The time it takes to load and render the webpage before presenting it in your browser). By decreasing the delay, you make sure it displays faster but not loads faster. Because it depends on your internet connection and website to ensure the page loads under 1 second to see different.

• Enter this to terminal defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25

Bask in your new found speed and improved load times.

Original Post: http://sayzlim.net/

Humongo Nation Vehicle Graphics - Humongo Nation is a rolling celebration of creativity and a demonstration of social media in action.

2011 Calendar of Famous People I Like - A 2011 (or any year, really) calendar featuring portraits of famous people. It’s one large poster that you can hang on your wall year round.

Draw On! is a community program started by The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT, in 2006 with the help of the Museum’s high school groups, Art Lab.

I’m drawing every synthesizer I’ve ever owned. Some I’ve since sold and some I still have. My goal is to draw each synth as accurately and with as much detail as possible.

Matt was commissioned to do these guitar-related drawings in a similar style to the above synth drawings.

The artist formerly known as Pop Heroes. Teleflux is an electro pop producer.

Wanna be friends with Matt?
Pick your favorite online community and let the stalking begin: Twitter - Flickr - Dribbble - Svpply

Do not forget to visit Society6 for Matt’s collection of gallery quality Giclée, or fine art prints.

The Mac App Store, launched in January 2011, is Apple’s attempt to apply the app store concept it had popularized through the iOS ecosystem to desktop applications.

If Apple indeed starts offering the Mac OS X Lion through the Mac App store, it’ll make strides in popularizing the store among users. The store holds Apple’s software but also third-party apps, with Apple receiving a 30% cut from each purchase.

Apple will likely reveal its distribution plans for Lion at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif., set to take place June 6 through 10. Apple has promised that this year’s conference will showcase the “future” of the Mac operating system, and will be an event developers will not want to miss.

Evidence that Lion will be available in the Mac App Store can already be found in the pre-release builds Apple has issued to developers. Betas are downloaded from the Mac App Store by entering a redemption code provided by Apple.

This move by Apple is one of many in the right direction for Apple users and stockholders. The app store  is all about convenience when downloading your favorite software. It is much easier than buying boxed software online or in a store.

via Mashable & Apple Insider

Please share this with your friends, co-workers and fellow designers. To view the infographic in its original size, click on the image below.

To read the full interviews of all the featured graphic designers, please visit their website at blog.smartpress.com.

Company officials said they are still trying to determine whether users’ credit card numbers were taken. Sony said it learned of the breach on April 19 and immediately shut down the network.

Many customers are angry and concerned about their information being stolen, but one user said he is just taking this as another example of why we all need to be cautious with our personal information.

Erik Shultz is not a compulsive gamer, but he enjoys the social aspect of Sony’s Playstation Network and interacting with millions of others.

But he said he is not as upset as some people that the network is down after a huge security breach.

“It’s like how do you get upset about something that you’re not paying a premium price to use, and then there was a lot of negative comments about well I’ll go buy an Xbox. Well that seems counter-intuitive,” he said.

Shultz believes this is another reason people need to get more savvy about releasing personal information, and maybe gamers need to start using new methods to play.

“You can also play devil’s advocate and go ok well if I don’t want to give them my credit card then I can’t use that service. That’s not true either. You can go to any store and pick up an iTunes gift card, and you can do the same thing with a Playstation Network card,” said Shultz.

For Sony, which has built its brand around online gaming, this is a blow to its reputation and bottom line if people start to second guess the safety of online payment channels.

But Shultz said having hackers put the current systems to the test can result in even better service for us all.

“It’s one more way for them to find out that the system is as good as they thought it was… or vice versa.”

It took six days before Sony notified customers of the breach, but officials said their company wasn’t aware of the full impact until this week.

If you’re a Sony Playstation Network customer, monitor your credit card activity closely and contact your credit card provider immediately if you see anything suspicious.

Bill is a dedicated advocate of clean, user friendly design with a sharp attention to detail. His true passion is for both branding and web design. There is not a design project that he or his team cannot handle. He understands the difference in design aesthetic going from print to web and brings true creativity and high level knowledge into all of his work.

Communication and Management skills are also at the forefront of Bill’s skill sets. Although being a great designer has helped him get where he is today, building his business has also given him the addition tools to become a power player on any team. Bill is very involved within the design community locally and nationally. This helps him keep up with current print / web technologies and trends. It also allows him to be both a mentor and student among his peers. This community relationship helps strengthen his skills constantly. He will soon be an author on an international design blog composed of a select group of designers from around the globe.

I have recently had the pleasure of working with Bill on a local branding project. His level of knowledge and professionalism in both design and project management has always been above par. I have also reached out to him and his company for web development questions. Bill and his team was able to provided a skillful level of assistance and expertise when working with me. I would highly recommend him and his team to anyone in need of their skill sets. I look forward to working with him again in the near future.

Remember, Bill is for hire. Please contact me at hello[at]focuslablllc.com. You can also find Bill on Twitter and LinkedIn