Podcast Primer & Recommendation Round-Up

What is a podcast? For those of you new to the idea, podcasts are a form of internet radio or even television that cover almost every mainstream subject and niche subject you can think of. They might be professionally produced like podcasts from The New York Times or they can be from enthusiasts like me (see my very own Sketcheebook Podcast).

How to listen? The most popular way to listen to podcasts is to use the iTunes software. The name "podcast" is misleading since you can access them without having any iPod related hardware or software.

For more information, read the [[podcast|Wikipedia article about podcasts]].

Recommended Podcasts

Here are podcasts that I really listen to. Instead of just telling you what they're about, I'll highlight the latest episode at the time of writing this and give you .

Audio Podcasts

Daily Giz Wiz is a hilarious daily gadgets podcast featuring fun, wacky and sometimes even useful gadgets. The gadgets are really often just a premise and setup for tons of jokes. Each episode features several funny jingles and themes; for example, Gadget Warehouse Fridays pulls out dead gadgets from the past. The hosts are Dick DeBartolo of [[Mad Magazine]] and Leo Laporte, formerly of [[TechTV]]. The latest episode was a Turn the Table Tuesday episode which breaks the formula of Dick (the Giz Wiz himself) presenting the gadgets. My favorite thing is when they have the Mad Minute, presenting Mad Magazine type humor. Recommended if your interested in: Technology, Computers, Gadgets, Jingles

This Week in Tech. Tech news with Leo Laporte and a panel of top industry folk.

The Quick and Dirty Tips Network provides just what you'd expect with that name. The original is Grammar Girl

Munchcast. Hilarious podcast about foods we all know and love.

NPR. Concerts, tech news, financial advice and various other podcasts delivered straight from NPR radio.

Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American. Science news and discussion from the venerable magazine.

Rookie Designer. Graphic design postcast. Pretty well rounded.

Tech Talk Radio. Australia's take on the technology world.

Tech Weekly. Tech news from The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom.

The InDesigner. Video tutorials about InDesign.

WebbAlert. A daily tech news roundup.

Battlestar Galactica Podcast

Buzz Out Loud. Tech news and opinions.

JobDig Career Advice. Tips for being a great part of the workforce.

GQ Radio

InDesign Secrets

HBO Comedy Stand Up Comedy

12 Social Websites for Artists & Designers

[[Social network service|Social networks]] aren't just great for connecting people with their friends and family. They're great ways to find content. Myspace has been a great platform for connecting bands with their fans and fans with musicians. The power of social networks is being harnessed to help artists and designers come together in new ways. Community is one of the major features of a social network. People go to where the people they want to contact are. So if you want to meet designers, these niche sites might just be great tools for it.

If you've used any of these sites or know of any that I didn't mention, please post your comments!

Design Float

Not unlike the more generalized social rating site Digg, Design Float aims to help the design community share websites of interest with each other. It's especially useful if you're looking for specific topics such as photography. Digg has a more generalized audience.

The Outer Post

The Outer Post is a nice and friendly site where you can create art portfolios featured in your profile. In most other ways its like a lot of other social networking sites. The community is uniquely artists and that changes the landscape of how you can really use the thing.

VIRB

VIRB takes your interests and turns them into a more visual experience. The keyword and list oriented profiles of myspace and facebook are contrasted by VIRB's focus on sharing your generated content. So basically, you post up your photos, link up your blog, post your videos. There is a ton of art, design and photography featured to look at. The best thing about it for me is that it aggregates your rss feeds into your profile if you don't want to have to do everything a million times like on other sites.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt has been around for a while. The community is large and the site is fully featured. It's a great place to just look at art and what people are doing. There's just so many people posting there that you can see tons of stuff. The site puts the artwork in the forefront. The profiles really showcase the art and you can just look at someones profile or go to the art with very few clicks. Some of the other sites take a bit more work to actually see a full sized image: clicking through to searchs, profiles, albums and then finally artwork. While the size of the community can make for problems of its own, I think its still a leader in this space.

Graphic Design Network

The name might imply it or maybe not, but this site has a strict focus on building a community of designers and web developers. It's based on the Ning social network development platform and is built its user base around the existing Estitica Design Forum community.

Amateur Illustrator

Amateur Illustrator takes a the simple and effective approach of putting up art galleries and forums letting you immediately access great content. Like Digg, they've moved away from the importance of the profile. You can still see the artist's information and look at their forum posts and galleries. They let the art speak for the artist. It makes sense.

Sabet TV

Sabet, "a community of hyper-talented folks", gives a feed approach similar to Facebook showing users recent activity and a flash slideshow of works. They also have videos and galleries. There is a lot of content types here meshed together

Pixel Art

Hey why not. It's a community of pixel artists. It's funny that now any type of community platform is now considered social networking. It's strange how terminology suddenly defines something. The best of these new "social networks" are the ones who are less concerned with what they are and more keyed into what they're trying to do. This site does just that. They love pixel art and want to bring together its creators. They showcase the sites best content and make it interesting even to people who didn't know this stuff is cool.

Urbanseeder

While it's in beta right now, it's worth a mention. Urbanseeder is truly social networking. It allows you to connect with people you've met in a sandboxed environment. It's a pretty creative concept, you'll have to look at it and

myartspace

What makes this site interesting is that it connects artists with curators, collectors and others involved in the arts. They also have a blog of interviews with artists on various levels.

Artlog

Artlog aggregates art news, an event and exhibit log, news, museum information and a social layer into what turns out to be a promising product. The focus on the real world of art brings it above the self-love of user-generated profiles. Although they have those too, of course

Digg.com/Design

Users like yourself can rate stories using Digg's interface. The ones which are rated highest end up more visible. It's a simple concept integrated with social features such as profiles and comments. The ease of participation makes it a pretty good place to start.

Not Enough Technology Coverage

The average cable station has less than one minute of science and technology coverage in five hours of coverage according to this report. I listen to probably 50% or more science and tech coverage in the form of audio and video podcasts. It's probably true that the people with the most interest in tech will be able to seek out this information on their own, but general news sources really need inform people of at least some of the goings on of the industry. With so much repetition on 24 hour news stations, you would think they would be scrambling for content

Flashers

Glyphobet's Why your Flash website sucks article presents a few reasons why a Flash presentation may not be the best idea for your content. Flash has its place, but keep it there. Especially now with the rise of [[AJAX]].

I have now installed the Wikipedia-link plugin which allows me to link to [[Wikipedia]] using [[brackets]]. You can also do this in the comments!

Typefaces Designers Must Have

There's a list of Designer Must Haves as commented on by Tara MacKay over at Notes on Design.

The best fonts list includes some of my favorite typefaces. I love using Adobe [[Caslon]] Pro—it must be Pro and you have to make use of the OpenType features. Italic Swash is my favorite. Adobe [[Garamond]] Pro and Minion Pro too. They just have a ton of variants and options. I think you can milk any font created by [[Adrian Frutiger]]. They're versatile. I don't get tired of them. ([[Avenir]], [[Univers]] and [[Frutiger]] of course. [[Myriad (typeface)|Myriad]] is the [[san serif]] alternative for the versatile [[serif]] fonts I went on and on about a sentence or two ago. Sorry fourth wall. [[Helvetica]] is overused, I'm over it. That's just for my designs, you use it if you want. The modern push is toward the san serifs, so I like to try to make serifs seem modern. I don't know if there's any success in it.