My sister-in-law is currently in the process of starting her own business, a fabulous home decor store, in Ottawa. Among the kazillion things she's trying to piece together for the opening is her store's brand identity. She got a great name and she's designed a really unique and striking wordmark …

Over the past few months, iFilm, a site with free streaming videos, has been undergoing incremental changes. Although it's still a bit garish, the design has received some nice esthetic as well as important structural changes that make it easier to use as well as slightly more attractive. iFilm's …

As I suspect is the case for many people of my generation, I rarely subscribe to print publications. I most frequently do my periodical reading via a Salon subscription, CBC News, The Globe & Mail, Google News Canada, Digg, and a whole slew of weblogs I have in my RSS reader. I also grab free …

My sister, who is a pastry chef, recently passed a link onto me of some fantastic artistic food photography. Pierre Javalle and Akiko Ida, two photography students at Arts Décoratif in Paris have made a gallery featuring their photos of tiny little figurines on pastries and other food items …

At the end of my quiet little street is a small, unassuming store called The Sacred Seed. Despite its claims to be an "exotic seed and houseplant shop specializing in medicinal, rare, and otherwise intriguing plants" it carries a wide range of cannabis seeds including varieties such as Island …

I've got a big old picture frame I've been meaning to fill with something interesting for quite some time. I really liked the poster (look on the right) that Jay Ryan, from The Bird Machine, designed with Coudal Partners a few years ago. So, I was looking around The Bird Machine site and …

I've just finished reading Dan Cederholm's latest book Bulletproof Web Design. The book essentially teaches techniques for using clean HTML and CSS to build robust websites — designs that survive user manipulation, that elegantly degrade with missing technologies or features, and which are always …

Over the past couple of months, I've been working with Kevin Rose on his enormously successful new venture Digg.com — a news aggregation website with a twist. Digg is sort of social bookmarking mixed with peer reviewing, so someone submits a link to a technology story they thought was cool and, if …

Congrats to silverorange alumnus and all-round talented designer Geoff Gibson for winning the latest snowboard design contest put on by GNU snowboards. The horror-themed contest had some great entries, so Geoff's design was in good company. I think he wins a new snowboard that he can strap to his …