It includes some very attractive designs for sports drinks, hair products and food products.

RKS have designed an attractive phone that uses Google's opensource android software.

I wasn't aware of android until I saw this phone on mocoloco. It appears that google is helping bundle numerous technologies, such as SGL, openGL, and a BSD based C library, into a common framework for smaller appliances.

The phone world is a large dollar proprietary system where even a small part of the market seems to produce a large pay off for phone makers and service providers.

Opensource works best in a commodity environment when the problem domain is very well known; ultimately that reduces the barrier of entry for new developers.

The altruism is nice, and I am sure the developers working on it are enjoying themselves, but until proprietary systems like the Blackberry and iPhone cease to innovate in that technology space, such that the device commoditises entirely, I don't see this going much anywhere.

Good on RKS for making a very attractive phone from it though.

Via the qbrix; great moments in corporate logo design. Probably intentional, but very funny none-the-less.

From A-Style. Reminds me of the Arlington Pediatric Center's logo.

Designfeedr argues for ditching color and exploring black and white in design. From the article:

Working in black-and-white is essentially a limitation, you have one less tool at your disposal after all. You'll have to get by without using color to set the mood or focal point. Once you get the hang of working without color though you'll start to see that the limitation you imposed on yourself actually has some very strong benefits.

Black and White in webdesign ends up being difficult as the difference between #000 and #FFF on a back lit screen are strong and without gray injected into the mix it can be tough for the eyes. However, done well and it can be a stunning design. For instance: Subtraction, Non-format, Scrollie, Designate Online and Back to Help. Mike and Maaike also have a black and white design, but it is an awful website. Why would I want to enter their site when I am already on it? The inside is difficult to navigate as well. Poor design.

For webdesign, rather than black and white, it is interesting to focus on a minimal palette. This site for instance uses pale blue, brown and shades of gray; plus copious amounts of white space in order to relax the eye and present information. Minimalsites.com has plenty more in that style of minimalism.

Paper chairs by Junya Ishigami. Via rolu design. I really like this image.

Business Week has an article on aspects of Apple's design process. The pixel perfect mockups cannot be under-estimated as to how tight a product it makes, especially when QA can combine tests around the pixel perfect placements (the company I am with has product, user experience, engineering, etc departments). The rest of the points made don't particularly catch me as that great.

Engineering is always under resource pressure - and often technical pressure - to give product and user experience exactly what they want. It is products goal to come up with the OMG Ponies feature or product and than negotiate with engineering on technical, resource and skills as to what can be produced within the business timelines.

Product/UE is Engineering's customers and I consider it Engineering's place to say yes to Product/UE rather than no unless it is technically impossible, then it only becomes a resource and marketing issue.

The problem is that attitude can lead to some cowboyish outcomes, but then software is the current tech world's gun-slingers, so I am comfortable with that. I personally like betting on our guys to come through.

One of the other things we do is give the developers working on a feature direct access to UE rather than having to go through the spec explicitly so that the UE designers vision can be maximized within that feature. One of the benefits of that method is that developer can mention other technical possibilities within that feature that the UE designer was not aware of. Good work has come out of that.