Design | featured news

Here we go again. Facebook has made big changes to users' pages, and people are responding in droves with their metaphorical "dislike" buttons. News Feeds were popping with not-so-gentle complaints Wednesday as many of the social-networking behemoth's 750 million users began seeing the overhaul.

Adobe is working to make it easier for designers to build their own Web sites. A new application from Adobe, codenamed Muse, lets designers create and publish functional Web sites in a similar way to how they would mock-up a site in InDesign or Illustrator. Muse offers users a familiar Adobe tool set in a WYSIWYG interface. Muse is not designed...

In 1981, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The starkness of her design, as well as her ethnicity as an Asian American, fueled controversy over her victory. Politicians, art critics and veterans excoriated her, and she was forced to defend her work before Congress. A little more than two decades later, when a jury convened in New York City to decide which of more than 5,000 submissions would become the winning design for the 9/11 Memorial, Lin’s presence on the panel served as a reminder of the difficulties of aligning public art, private grief and main street opinion in the wake of a national tragedy.

It's a movie poster! It's a Google results page! These creative resumes actually landed job interviews for their creators.

Every three months or so, we gather together. In our hands, launch meeting packets still hot off the copy machine. Our editor-in-chief sits at the head of the double-long conference table, and introduces us, the weary and largely bespectacled, to the newest crop of books. Over the years I've found that most editors describe their hopes and dreams for their future covers in the same ways. Please make them look "hip," "sexy," and—oh yes!—"fresh, too"! Our job as jacket designers is to keep reinterpreting these well-worn requests.

In this undated product image provided by Starbucks, the company's new 40-year anniversary logo is seen on a cup at right. Other cups bearing the company's logo from over the years, from left, 1971, 1987, and 1992, are also shown. (AP Photo/Starbucks)Associated Press: Starbucks Corp. is giving its siren a facelift.

People have become more aware about the impact of fonts because of computers, but the power of a typeface is still largely subliminal, he argues. Mr Barnbrook is best known for producing provocatively named, subversive fonts such as Exocet, Bastard, Prozac and Nixon. He also designed the cover of Heathen, David Bowie's 2002 album.

Dubbed CS5, analysts and industry executives said on Friday, it has the makings of a hit, which Adobe needs after its predecessor CS4 received lukewarm reviews. CS4 was released in 2008, during the depth of the recession.

Being a blogger, I often find design elements on the web for my posts or my blog in general. It's becoming a very common experience for bloggers to know a thing or two about web design. I'm guessing it is the web that taught us to be quasi-designers by offering us lots of easy-to-use tools that help us create just about everything we need: photo-editing, widgets, logos, buttons, and yes, fonts as well.