I do very much enjoy grabbing cool images that I find during my travels on the webs and throwing them up on my desktop as wallpaper. For web workers and Internet fiends, it would probably be shocking to know how often you are actually staring at the often “negative space” of your desktop while hunting around for files, firing up/powering down your computer, and so on.

Recently I stumbled across a great and easy way to find cool desktop backgrounds that perfectly fit the size of your monitor:

1) Go to Google Image Search

2) Click Advanced Image Search

3) Search for something cool in the “Find Results” fields at top
I love cool shots of cities, particularly my homeland of New York, so I put in New York City as an example

4) Use My Desktop Size
Now, this is where things get kickass. Look underneath Find Results for the row that says Exact Size. In the right column, you’ll see fields for width and height. To the right of that you’ll see a link called “Use my desktop size.” Click that and your desktop dimensions are auto-inserted (mine is 1440×900).

5) Click Google Search
And presto! You have a bunch of amazing shots that are available to put up as desktop wallpaper and spruce up the visuals on your online day a little bit

6) Desktop Wallpaper
Have no idea what desktop wallpaper means? Click on the image you like after completing Step 5. Then click “view full image” (this doesn’t always work so you may need to select another image if this happens). Right click on the full size image and choose “set as desktop wallpaper” (note that Google Chrome doesn’t offer this feature). Then minimize all of your browser windows and applications and behold the artistic wonders.

I’m very happy and excited about the results. The homepage has a much more online magazine-like look, but still maintains a “reverse chronological” feel that is to me true to the blogging tradition.

I’m also using categories for the first time. Looking back at the three year history of OMC (oh man, it’s been three years already!), I realized that while most things I write about are very much tied to Internet and online media topics, I do stray far afield every now again (particularly when I get into a Posterous mode). So I’ve split things into three main categories:

OMC – All the online media cultery you can handle. Some good recent posts include Digital Curation and the Future of the Internet and an interview with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.

Memes & Oddball – This is kind of a grab bag of stories that include Internet memes that aren’t strictly about media and tech (like a riff on the Kanye West meme with rap star Xzibit) but is also “oddball” in the sense that it includes stories that don’t really sync up with anything else (like a quick link over to Ain’t It Cool News with regard to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds).

Television – Finally, I can’t help getting obsessive-y about TV every now and again. I try to tie it to the webs where I can (like with showcasing Slate’s amazing TV Club coverage of Mad Men), but sometimes I simply must point to some element of classic television lore).

This is not necessarily 100% locked yet. I’m going to let it go for a while and see how things play. For example, I may change the name of the “OMC” category as it’s kind of a placeholder for “most of the stories on the site.” And since I made the switch pretty much everything has been OMC. Which is a good and appropriate thing I guess.

Most of all, I’m trying to continue to write about things that turn me on about the Internet, social media, content aggregation, blogging, and entrepreneurship.

Thanks so much to all of you who have stopped by and commented over the years, and here’s to at least three more!

Collaborating on design work is notoriously difficult. Deciding what the perfect shade of blue is, how rounded those rounded corners should be, and whether or not to make the logo bigger is all difficult enough when a discussion is happening between people in the same room. Add a virtual environment to the mix, and making clear and actionable design change notes can be nearly impossible.

This is where new web app redmark can help. Currently in limited private beta, the service aims for, and largely achieves, the difficult feat of making and tracking design notes a snap. Check out the nifty demo here.

The first thing to notice is the strikingly slick and clean interface: There are blessedly few tools and features, and the tools and features that are at the user’s disposal are easy to understand and use.

Playing around with the demo is fun, and it’s easy to see how redmark has created a valuable way to share notes about online documents, making for a powerful collaborative tool. The process of adding notes and attaching those notes to specific elements of the design document is made simple by way of a drag-and-drop interface. This mimics how people make notes on hard copies in “real life,” using circles and arrows to give designers direction quickly and efficiently.

(read the rest of this piece at Web Worker Daily) ]]> http://onlinemediacultist.com/2009/03/31/collaborate-on-design-revisions-with-redmark/feed/ 0 http://onlinemediacultist.com/2008/09/09/mashable-redesigns-and-its-good/ http://onlinemediacultist.com/2008/09/09/mashable-redesigns-and-its-good/#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:14:55 +0000 Eric Berlin http://onlinemediacultist.com/2008/09/09/mashable-redesigns-and-its-good/ I’ve been, er, a little bit critical of the design of two of the largest tech blogs out there over the last few months. First I teed off on Mashable for its overuse of ads (Mashable has a lot of ads). Then I went the other way on TechCrunch late last month, singling out its recent redesign for being too stark and antiseptic-looking (TechCrunch redesigns: over undesigned?).

Well, Mashable has just launched a major redesign, and I’m happy to report that it’s looking pretty good. While I’m fairly certain that they didn’t directly take heed of my advice, I did note in April that Mashable would do well to copy TechCrunch’s use of a three-column style that did a good job of showcasing stories on a wide column on the left while housing ads and widgets and other info on the right. That’s not far off from what Mashable has now done, and the site is quite a bit more readable and eyeball-friendly for it.

Now Mashable is also following the trend of showcasing lots of white space, but it doesn’t feel as hospital-y as TechCrunch’s new design, I’d argue, mostly on the strength of the blue nav bar that runs across the top of the site. That coupled with the soft blue color of the logo, nav bar, and story headers takes the edge of a potential Stark City.

Duncan Riley also notes that Mashable is employing an “after the jump” style, meaning the default homepage “teases” stories and forces you to click a “more” link to see the full piece and comments. This style has become increasingly important in driving up page views to “drilldown” pages. And Mashable founder Pete Cashmore writes that the new design is meant to greatly improve load times, and goes into detail about other new features and wrinkles.

Lots and lots of white space, super minimalist. Now, I get wanting to strip down design to get a really clean look, and Mark Hendrickson notes that the idea was to move toward a less bloated looking and faster loading site.

I get all of that. I’m not a huge design nut myself – my focus is predominantly on content, particularly when I’m reading a blog, and overwhelmingly when I’m reading a tech blog.

Still, I can’t help being a little critical here. TechCrunch proudly sits on top of the tech blog heap, so it can handle a little criticism from the likes of me!

So… there’s way too much white space going on here. The minimal line divisions on the page are “web 2.0″-looking to the hilt (which kind of hit its peak sometime in early to mid-2007, I’d say), minimal to the point of barely being visible. The result is much less bloat, but particularly above the fold the site looks downright stark and antiseptic.

If I’m rocking the site on my blackberry, that’s perfect. But on the web, can we get just a little bit of color and design going, maybe? Even on a tech blog, I’m sure we all can handle it.