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I have to admit, that this crowdsourced color explorer is one of the coolest ideas I've seen in, oh, the last few weeks.

On the Dolores blog, Brendan explains how Mechanical Turk was used to present a set of random colors to participants in an exercise designed to observe how people name colors. The project was inspired by the World Color Survey.

The result was the color explorer, aka "The Amazing Color Label Wheel!" The explorer allows you to enter color words to filter the visualization. The data set has been released so you can do more visualizations on your own.

http://assets.doloreslabs.com/jobs/colors/explorer/

You remember Webmonkey, that web design resource many of us grew up with when we were cutting our teeth on HTML. Wired redesigned and re-launched with a few new articles, and some of the old tutes and cheat sheets seem to have been updated. The entire code library appears to be a wiki, so it's open for editing.

We'll keep our eyes open to see if anyone kicks in some quality material.

http://www.webmonkey.com/

Tom Peters does a brain dump of the main ideas he's discussed about design in the past 15 years. In his list, he drops some thoughts that simply reflect the era of the present and past 15 years, and in others he provides nuggets of wisdom. Here's a sampling.

• Everybody's doin' it
• Small things are often (usually?) more important than big things.
  "It" is about the way every individual conducts himself or herself. (E.g., the hotel housekeeper, restaurant busboy.)
• Aesthetics and usability are equally important—with perhaps a slight edge to usability. ("'It won a prize' is the ultimate criticism."—Don Norman
• "It" must be on every (literally) agenda; in project reviews of every type "it" must hold its own with, say, the budget discussion.

I only wish "it" was formatted in HTML bullets (unordered links) so it was more readable. :)

http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?note=010419.php